Chronicles of Ethan Complete Series: A LitRPG / GameLit Fantasy Adventure

by John L. Monk

  “Starship Troopers,” Jaddow said behind me. “One of my favorites.”

  Chapter Three

  Just barely, I kept from sending the book flying.

  Whirling in embarrassed anger, I found Jaddow lounging casually in one of the comfy chairs. He had a leg hooked over the arm and looked as if he’d been there all day.

  Now that I wasn’t surrounded by a horde of angry goblins who wanted to kill me, I finally got a good look at him. Long face, intelligent blue eyes, and thick brown hair hacked short, as if with a knife. He wasn’t young and beautiful like the retirees of Heroes’ Landing. Compared to them, he was old—late forties, with ever-so-slightly sagging skin under his eyes. I wondered how that could be in a world where we didn’t age.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I said.

  “Ethan Crane,” Jaddow said, “likes five square meals a day. He loves his vegetable garden, polished cutlery, and good conversations with all the other hobbits in the new world order. He certainly does not like wizards and dragons or things of that sort. Adventures make one late for supper.”

  “What?” I said, feeling like the butt of an inside joke.

  “I was with your wife when Cipher put her to sleep,” he said. “She didn’t think you’d come—said you’d already decided retirement worlds were suicide and planned to die of old age.” He smiled coldly. “Have a seat. You’re making me tired.”

  I hesitated—torn between doing what he said and throwing something at him. Then I sat. He’d seen Melody. Actually talked to her.

  “I never had a vegetable garden,” I said lamely.

  Jaddow rolled his eyes. “You’re in my library, surrounded by … It’s a line from The Hobbit, man.”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “What else did she say?”

  “That you were a teacher. And an amateur historian who specialized in sorting the truth from the digital record. A hopeless task.”

  “That’s something anyone could learn with a simple search. Did she say how I like my coffee? Do you know my favorite color? What side of the bed I sleep on? My favorite old movies?”

  Jaddow’s expression didn’t change. “She said you were thoroughly against the retirement worlds and had shut her down every time she talked about them.”

  “Bullshit,” I said and stood up. “Caught you there. Melody and I agreed together that we’d live out our natural lives. We both agreed. You never talked to her at all. Liar.”

  The world tipped crazily and spun around really, really fast…

  The next thing I knew I was sitting down again. Jaddow hadn’t moved. His eyes glittered frostily, and his jaw had taken a set.

  “So long as you are a guest in my home,” he said calmly, “you will refrain from calling me anything other than sir or Jaddow. Is that clear?”

  I tried to get up but couldn’t move. Every muscle below the neck was locked as if my brain were cut off from the rest of my body. A sense of claustrophobia overcame me as I struggled to get up, to lift a finger, to swallow…

  “Fine. Let me go,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Jaddow held me a few seconds more, then twitched his left eyebrow—and suddenly I was free.

  “I never lie,” he said quietly. “Not ever. And I never cheat. Won’t give this place the satisfaction. Consider it one of my funny quirks. Now, about your wife. Melody wanted to retire, and she didn’t want you to know until she was too sick to hide it any longer. Dementia is curable for the very rich, and an early retirement for the poor, like you two. She planned to break the news before it was too late for you to stop her.”

  My first thought was no, impossible. But my presence here said otherwise. I looked around at all the books. Fantasy books. Melody had mostly liked science fiction, or so I’d once thought. Clearly, there was a lot about her I didn’t know.

  “All those years together,” Jaddow said, “and you’ve just discovered you hardly knew her. The wonderful thing about Mythian is you now have an eternity to learn more.”

  My face flushed and I bit back another insult. “I knew her fine. Where you going with this?”

  “I think on some level, she was looking forward to a break from constantly giving in to you. Personally, I don’t think she wanted you to follow her.”

  I stared at him, mouth agape, then shut it firmly. I couldn’t beat him to a pulp like he deserved. What I could do was get up and leave the room without a backward glance, which is exactly what I did.

  A quick look left and right, and I had my bearings. Didn’t I? Sure I did.

  I proceeded down the hall, turned left, then went through a door and down another hallway. A right turn after that, another set of stairs, through a door I recognized and…

  And wound up back in the library. Jaddow lounged in his comfy chair holding a mug with two tea bags dangling over the side. A similar mug rested on the table. For me, I gathered.

  “Go to hell,” I said and turned around.

  This time, I tried the other way and paused at a T-intersection of corridors. I chose the leftmost. More turns, more hallways, more doors, and a minute later I was once again back in the library.

  “I am the master of this domain,” Jaddow said from his chair. “You can’t leave unless you formally give up.”

  “I thought I told you to go to hell,” I said.

  I left through the only door, then somehow re-entered the library that was supposed to be behind me. I craned back for a look, and sure enough, Jaddow was there. The way ahead showed the same scene—Jaddow, sitting in his chair eyeing me from that direction. The bastard was everywhere.

  With my options so limited—start over from nothing or stay here and deal with him—I strode stiffly into the room and said, “Where’s Cipher?”

  “Everywhere. Nowhere. He’s a cipher, after all.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He’s part of the game. A mysterious personality the designers put in and forgot about. Originally, he was supposed to randomly show up and challenge gamers, provide them with clues, and sometimes lead them astray. Then the project changed directions and his purpose was never fully enabled. But Cipher remained—aware, mobile, and without purpose.”

  Until now, I’d thought of Cipher as a person. Another retiree, like me, like everyone. The idea of a lucid contacting widowers and urging them to join the game … It was too bizarre. Unimaginable, really. Jaddow had to be lying.

  “Call me a liar again,” he said lightly, “and I’ll show you such pain that you’ll be forced to give up.”

  “You can read minds too?”

  He snorted disdainfully. “No. Wouldn’t want to, either. Now, unless you have more questions, we may as well start your training.”

  “Training…?”

  “Cipher wants you in Ward 2, and he gets what he wants.”

  Something had been bothering me for a long time, and I finally voiced it: “Why is he doing this, really? Why does a lucid care so much about my wife that he’d go through all this to reunite us? Why won’t he meet me? Why are you involved?”

  “If you go through that door,” Jaddow said, ignoring me, “and down the hall to the right, then through the first door on the left, you’ll enter a small room with a demon in it. Big horns, bat wings, claws, red skin—you can’t miss it. It has fifty thousand health points. Kill it and come back.”

  When all I did was stand there gaping at him, he said, “Shoo” and I was puffed into the corridor by an invisible force.

  The door slammed shut. I tried the handle but it wouldn’t open.

  “Dammit,” I said.

  For lack of other options, I started down the hallway.

  Chapter Four

  The door in question was unremarkable, no different than any of the others in Jaddow’s increasingly strange “domain.” Yes, I’d caught that. He had complete power here, and had demonstrated it for my benefit: moving the rooms around and screwing with the physics, freezing me in place, shooing me out of the room like that … I was a t
iny insect, and he was the cruel kid with the magnifying glass.

  I opened the door and looked into a smallish room by the keep’s standards, maybe twenty by twenty. Wall runes emitted a soft white light, the better to illuminate the big red demon chained to the far wall. When the creature roared, I jumped back and slammed the door.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  My heart was racing. The demon continued to roar, and I hoped it would stop. The thing was the stuff of nightmares—crazy eyes, huge claws, big bat wings, fangs, horns…

  After my breakneck leveling spree with Rita and Frank, I had a lot of unassigned skill points. One skill I chose was “Greater Shield.” This was an upgrade over Weak Shield that would block 500 points of damage, and I could cast it three times a day. If the thing broke free, hopefully it would protect me long enough to run back to the library for help.

  Watching the demon warily, I considered how best to kill it. Greater Lightning Bolt would cause a flat 300 points of damage. If the demon really had 50,000 health points, it would take an exhaustive number of blasts. The spell had a one-minute cooldown and cost 90 mana to cast. Because I’d stacked so many points in intelligence, I had 1160 mana, and a mana regeneration of around 530 an hour. If I blasted the thing nonstop, it’d take a hundred and sixty-seven shots. At full mana, twelve shots would drain me empty. After that, I could cast five an hour.

  By my calculations, I’d be here at least thirty-one hours. But no … longer, because of all those cooldowns.

  “Impossible,” I said bitterly. “This is ridiculous.”

  Even if I could do this, there were ethical considerations.

  Demons were “bad,” of course. And I got that the claws and fangs and roaring was supposed to make cold-blooded murder okay. But after killing Rita and Frank for points—and then those woggims—I didn’t have the stomach for more bloodshed. Certainly not killing something slowly like that while it roared in pain…

  As if emphasizing the point, the demon roared again.

  “It’s just a game,” I said.

  I edged cautiously into the room. The demon roared some more and slammed mightily against its chains, to no avail.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “Can you talk?”

  It roared.

  “If you can understand me,” I said, “roar three times in a row.”

  It roared one time in a row. I was beginning to think it was completely mindless.

  Jaddow had called me, Rita, and Frank cheaters. Said killing each other and the woggims repeatedly to get points was a cheat, and he’d heaped nothing but derision on us. Yet here he was offering up this thing’s life, ostensibly doing the same thing. Easy points, in theory. Provided I could stomach the long, drawn-out slaughter.

  “I may be a cheater,” I said, “but at least I’m not a hypocrite.”

  The demon roared and I blasted it, blackening its skin where the bolt hit. It yowled in pain and I blasted it again. The skin blackened in another spot, but didn’t split or melt.

  More roaring, more blasting, and soon my squeamishness was replaced by annoyance. The thing was loud, and I grew to dread each also-loud blast because it would elicit another roar. I took to plugging my ears and casting, and that helped some. But then my arms grew tired. I still only had a 2 in strength.

  About ten minutes into the barrage, almost out of mana, I noticed an odd thing. The blackened sections of skin from my earliest casts were turning demon-red again, ever so slowly.

  “Dammit,” I said.

  The thing was healing! Yes, slower than the damage it was taking, but it’d extend the time to perhaps twice as long. This was going to take forever.

  Why the hell would Jaddow set me on this snipe hunt? Surely he knew my capabilities. Was it just another way to belittle me? To show, yet again, who was the tough guy and who was the noob?

  I turned to go back … and then stopped. Greater Lightning Bolt was good, but it wasn’t my most powerful spell.

  Rain of Fire spread exactly 50,000 points of damage over a half-mile radius, the idea being to kill as many small targets as possible. The spell description said it was good against armies of low-level enemies, and not useful at all against single targets. Castable once a week, it’d use a whopping 1000 mana—almost everything I had. But in a tiny space like this, the concentrated force might kill the demon.

  “And me too,” I said glumly.

  Chapter Five

  I had to wait two hours before I had enough for the spell. As a precaution, I took off one of my magic boots, propped the door open, and then stepped into the corridor.

  Feeling ever-so sorcerous, I closed my eyes and sort of visualized the space in front of me, and not the hall I was standing in. Then I silent-cast the words:

  Rain of Fire!

  No heat.

  No explosion.

  No roaring…

  I popped an eye open to look and found the area in front of me discolored with a green overlay that tracked with my eyes. When I focused on the door frame, the hallway looked green. When I looked at the demon, it and the room around it—and the hallway I was in—looked green. I wouldn’t survive this.

  “So long as I win,” I said.

  For the second time, with my gaze locked firmly on the demon, I thought: Rain of Fire!

  I appeared in my room wearing a noob tunic and an empty pouch looped around my neck. Obviously I’d died, but what about the demon? I hadn’t received a game message for the kill…

  I left my room to go see. A turn here, a door there, down another hall, and I slowed at the grisly, smoking mess (me) splattered all over the corridor wall. The spell had been designed for battlefields, but I’d crammed its effects into a twenty-by-twenty room. Like the barrel of a cannon, the force had blasted right through.

  A cautious peek into the room showed the demon had also been killed. Its body hung limply from the manacles—whole, but blackened to a lifeless husk.

  As Aristotle once said: actuality preceded potentiality. By that logic, it would have died first. So I should have gotten points for it.

  Maybe it’s not dead.

  I picked up my staff—still intact, being magic—and went into the room. Feeling like a bully, I poked the clearly dead demon to ensure that it was, in fact, a dead demon. It didn’t roar and it didn’t move, and the end of my staff punched through the blackened crust of its fried skin, spraying the floor with cooked juices.

  With nothing else to do, I swapped my noob outfit with my original gear while trying not to look at my dead, melted face. I then dragged what pieces of my body I could into the room with the demon, shut the door—perfectly intact—and returned to the library.

  “It’s done,” I said.

  Jaddow sat reclining in his chair with a book, looking for all the world as if he hadn’t moved an inch since I last saw him.

  “Yes,” he said, “it certainly is. Tell me, Ethan, why must you solve all your problems by cheating the game?”

  I blinked at him. “Uh … come again?”

  “Defeating a monster by killing yourself is a cheat, and the game penalizes you when you do it.”

  “Ah,” I said, “so that’s why I didn’t get any points.”

  “Yes and no. For some abuses, you receive fewer points, as when you killed your friends. And the woggims. For others, you suffer by not learning how to fight. And as you just learned: you get zero points for suicide. There are other penalties, but that’s for another time.”

  Constantly being called a cheater was getting on my nerves.

  “The game prompted our choice in the Swaze Pit,” I said. “The woggims are the game, right? It was their idea. So killing them wasn’t cheating.”

  “When you ditched your friend in the city,” Jaddow said, “and tried to take out Under Town by yourself, how did you defeat the salamanders?”

  I’d thought Under Town was a closed instance, available only to me, Rita, and that guy we’d met at The Slaughtered Noob. Did Jaddow know what I’d done with the apples?


  He held out his hand, palm up, and materialized an orange. He tossed it into the air and made another appear. He tossed that in the air and materialized another, then another, and then another. Soon he was juggling ten oranges with one hand in a blur of motion. I didn’t question how he could do this. The world’s greatest juggling feats were child’s play to a guy with his very-own closed universe.

  “So using the tools I have is cheating?” I said.

  One by one, the oranges vanished, and Jaddow stood up.

  “It was an exploit,” he said. “I’ll admit it was a clever discovery. But those apples—and my oranges—were meant to be eaten, not used in combat. You’ve gained an unrealistic expectation that you can defeat things you have no business fighting. Like my demon. I designed that creature to be virtually indestructible to you, Ethan Crane, a Rank 26 sorcerer. You used your best single-target spell on it and couldn’t kill it. But instead of admitting defeat, you manipulated the game’s rules and blew yourself up in the most Pyrrhic of victories.”

  “How do I get to Ward 2?” I said, tired of his games.

  “You have to get points. I thought you knew that.”

  “Yes, but how do I get them? How do I get enough? How, dammit?”

  I realized I’d been shouting, and my heart was racing. Through Herculean effort, I unclenched my fists, took a steadying breath, and waited.

  Jaddow folded his arms and regarded me with his most common expression: withering disappointment.

  “You poor fool,” he said, shaking his head. “If you’d shown a tenth of the character needed to succeed in this world—if you’d simply come back and admitted you couldn’t kill that creature without dying—I’d be far more inclined to train you. But that’s off the table now. Instead, I’ll do you one better. You’re going to learn the value of life the hard way. In time, you’ll have everything needed to reach Ward 2, and you’ll be worthy of it when you get there.”