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

by John L. Monk

  “I know,” I said.

  “But you should have been with me,” she said. “I should have brought you. You deserved better.”

  I’d never known any of this. Her gaming hobby had contributed a hefty percentage of our family income. But this need of hers to be alone … She’d held that back.

  Or you chose not to see it.

  Rita stole a glance at Cipher, who watched from his throne with a rapt expression. He was definitely eavesdropping, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  “He wants me dead,” she said. “I can tell. I don’t even know why. I’m sorry for who I am, Ethan, but please don’t pick that woman over me. At the end of the day, I’m still your wife.”

  Standing between Melody and Rita—each special to me in their own different ways—I looked up and addressed Cipher.

  “I’ve almost made a decision, but I gotta say: we’re missing an opportunity here.”

  Cipher growled angrily. “I’ve waited a thousand years for this day. At some point even my patience grows thin. What in the four wards are you talking about?”

  I shrugged as if unloading a reluctant truth. “Where’s the sport? Doesn’t it seem a bit trite? Evil villain wants revenge for hero’s insolence. Done to death a million times over.”

  A look of confusion crossed Cipher’s gaunt face. I held my breath, hoping he’d bite. I even dashed off a silent prayer, though I was only vaguely agnostic.

  “I see your point,” he said grudgingly. “But the scales must be balanced. I got you six thousand levels, your wife back from the dead, and a way to win the game. As my reward, you treated me the way my creators did. You forgot me! Disregarded me! Ignored me!”

  His voice had risen to deafening levels, causing my skin to tickle and my ears to ring. For a moment, I thought he’d lose control and kill us all.

  “Okay, fine,” he said in a more modulated tone. “Out with it. What’s this plan of yours?”

  “Simply this.”

  I held up my empty hand, turning it this way and that, so he could see both sides. Then I dipped into my pouch and pulled out a single gold coin with the Everlife logo on one side and a dragon on the other.

  Cipher threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. I’m afraid you’re going to need a lot more gold than that, Ethan.”

  “It’s not a bribe,” I said, biting back the urge to add you idiot. “Pick a side: heads or tails?”

  “Heads,” he said immediately. “What do I get if I win?”

  “If it’s heads,” I said, “Rita dies. If it’s tails, Melody dies.”

  “If you win, she dies?”

  “No matter who wins, I still lose. You said Mythian likes conundrums.”

  Cipher’s grin was ear-to-ear. “I accept your offer.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “I’ll be honest and say I haven’t had this much fun in eons. Toss the coin, Ethan Crane, and try your luck!”

  I looked at Rita, who stared at me curiously as if trying to figure something out. When I looked at Melody, the hurt I found in her eyes nearly broke me.

  To Cipher, I said, “You ready?”

  He leaned forward, grinning like a psychopath. “Do it!”

  I tossed the coin, slapped it onto the back of my hand, and read the results. “Heads.”

  Cipher leaped to his feet. “I win!”

  As I watched in horror, his gaze shifted to Rita. He raised his hand and summoned an enormous ball of fire that grew, and grew, and grew…

  And that’s when the universe exploded beneath us.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Where before, the “sky” had been featureless and empty, it now dazzled with light from the event horizon of a staggeringly massive black hole.

  I remember reading once—or maybe saw something—about how black holes destroyed matter by converting it into energy that shot into space as X-rays. That’s what it looked like now. From the middle of the thing, a shaft of pure energy was blazing into Cipher.

  As he howled in agony, I could see his skeleton beneath his robes. The effect on the karma prisons was no less dramatic. They turned from green to yellow as the flow of energy feeding the mad god reversed itself. The energy rippled down the wires in swells reminiscent of a snake eating a row of eggs—or in this case, vomiting them.

  For all his misfortune, Cipher wasn’t completely out of the game. His tortured eyes met mine. He smiled a rictus grin of hate and pain and swiveled his attention to Melody.

  Somehow, she’d gotten out of her cage. She was trying to run.

  With a cry of rage, Cipher materialized a blazing purple sword and swung it in a powerful arc. It would have killed her but for Rita, who flew through the air and carried her away.

  “Godlike Sunbeam Five!” I screamed desperately, hitting Cipher’s chest with a beam he should have been able to swat away like a troublesome insect. Instead, he fell backward, crushing his throne under his enormous weight.

  I checked my combat log and did my very first double-take since coming to Mythian:

  DAMAGE 12,200,550 [FIRE]: Cipher (Negative Karma Damage Bonus: +10,000,000,000)

  Despite the insane damage report, Cipher was still alive. He was getting back up. And though the X-ray was still hammering him, it looked weaker than before.

  “Godlike Acid Orb Five!” I yelled. A real mouthful of a name, but I hadn’t had time to setup new aliases.

  Per the spell description, a sizzling sphere of acid engulfed Cipher and began to dissolve him. This time, my game log showed I’d only hit him for around six billion points.

  One of the karma prisons flew in the way, causing my next spell to die on my lips. The bubble burst and a woman fell out.

  “Duke Lorkanos, I summon you! Attack!”

  “Godlike Fire Whip Five!”

  “Godlike Solar Strike Five!”

  “Godlike Sphere of Darkness Five!”

  Each spell hit for billions of health points while the demon lord hammered Cipher with bolts of red lightning. Cipher flailed wildly in pain, swinging his huge sword and smashing bubbles. Others opened on their own.

  “Help! Kill him!” I yelled at the freed prisoners.

  By now, every bubble had either opened or been destroyed. The released prisoners were quick on the uptake. They attacked with spells, arrows, and swords that appeared out of nowhere. Powerful players, I figured. Like Jaddow. Like…

  “Rita!” I shouted.

  Having gotten Melody to safety, she whirled around Cipher in a flurry of kicks and punches that warped the air like heat shimmering off a desert.

  Then Jaddow was there, firing magic arrows, blazing orbs, and beams of multicolored light that made me dizzy just looking at them. His appearance had reverted back to normal. No longer was he weighed down in a cloud of oppression that made me want to murder him. Now I wanted to cheer him on.

  But I also had to fight.

  Worried my spells would hit a friend, I focused on Cipher’s feet.

  “Godlike Ice Bullet Five!”

  “Godlike Actinic Strobe Five!”

  “Godlike Vengeful Strike Five!”

  “Soul Rend!”

  The villainous god howled in pain with every strike, but Soul Rend sent his sword flying.

  The X-ray was nearly depleted, and he still hadn’t died. Burned, slashed, kicked and pummeled, Cipher dropped to his knees and wept like the defeated bully he was. When his tormented gaze met mine, he opened his mouth as if to say something. Before he could, I said something first:

  “Godlike Word of Death Five!”

  Word of Death was an awful spell that felt like swallowing razor blades when cast. This was compensated for by delivering the highest amount of single-target damage of all my spells. But pain was pain, which is why I’d only cast it a handful of times. Casting the Godlike 5 version felt exactly the same way, but the damage was … well … godlike. Still it should have been bearable. But the karma bonus … It multiplied the pain effect millions of times over.

&
nbsp; Since coming to Mythian, I’d endured every sort of torment:

  Stabbed to death by Magda, the noob killer … Shot through the throat by Jaddow’s arrows … Burned alive by a fire salamander … Pummeled to death by flying coconuts … Seared in Bite’s frigid blue flame beneath The Festering Swamp, then later stabbed through the chest with his razor-sharp claws … Beaten near to death while prisoner of the Crimson Sigil … Tortured at Ilsha’s orders by Greenie Red and his evil pocket watch … My poor feet, blackened by frostbite … Chopping off a finger to raise a demon … Every unshielded hit under Aspect of the Swami … Skill books … Leveling to 6000 in the blink of an eye…

  I felt these pains again, condensed into the span of a minute that felt like an age.

  But this, I learned, was just the appetizer.

  When my spell killed Cipher, my torment multiplied exponentially. Suddenly I was feeling his pains—going back thousands of game years—though how I knew this was a mystery. The effect was a tidal wave of agony no amount of screaming could stop. I didn’t faint, because Mythian wanted me to feel it. I didn’t fall into insanity, because Mythian demanded I know what was happening to me. I took no damage, so I couldn’t die and resurrect somewhere.

  Through all this, I sensed a way out. One promised to every player who’d read the game manual, but which I’d never seriously considered before.

  Until now.

  My voice was shattered, but the manual was clear: I didn’t need to speak the words to escape my torment. All I needed was intent.

  And so, silently—full of intent—I thought the words to set me free:

  I give up!

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  I awoke in a plush bed with too many pillows, staring at the intricate ceiling I recalled from my brief time in Jaddow’s otherworldly castle. Out of habit, I reached for my character sheet to check the time and quickly noticed two things. One, I knew the time already (10:31 a.m.). Two, I didn’t have a character sheet anymore.

  Which isn’t to say I didn’t have stats. I did have stats, but I was aware of them in the same way I knew how many toes I had and where they were.

  Level: 10,000,000

  Health: 100,000,000,000

  Karma: 1,000,000

  “Holy moly,” I said.

  Off to my left, Rita said, “And then some.”

  I glanced over and saw her sitting in a wingback chair with a book in her hands. On the table next to her was a flickering blue lantern. She put the book on the table, came to my side, and lay down next to me.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Melody’s here … In this castle. I … For some reason, I can tell. How is she?”

  Rita told me.

  “What are you gonna do?” she said.

  I told her.

  We lay there awhile, neither of us saying anything. Whenever I looked at her, every tiny detail of her character sheet was revealed to me. I even saw how many karma points she had: 499,820/500,000. I wondered how she’d lost the hundred and eighty. Then I remembered she’d used her bottomless bag to breathe the thin Mount Rage air.

  “It was that ring,” she said. “The Band of Karma. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Though it wasn’t in my inventory, I was nonetheless able to access the description perfectly from something called the “Mythian Item Registry”:

  WARNING: Gambling or playing games of chance while wearing this ring will backfire most spectacularly.

  Rita shifted to her side, cradling her head. She looked skeptical. “Flipping a coin did all that? How did you know?”

  “I didn’t, but it was my only play.”

  Melody was in the castle, but I was lying on a bed next to Rita. I couldn’t tell if I was upset by that or relieved.

  “After Cipher died,” she said, “that’s when you started to glow.”

  An odd thing to say, even for her.

  “What do you mean glow?”

  “Like a firefly, except you never turned off. You’re glowing right now.”

  I held up my hand and looked at it. Sure enough, it was glowing. Like a firefly that hadn’t turned off.

  “Stop that,” I said, and the glow faded.

  Rita giggled. “This is gonna sound crazy, but I’m pretty sure you’re a god now.”

  A thought occurred to me. “When Cipher died, did you get any points for it?”

  “Points were the farthest thing from my mind.”

  “But did you get any?”

  Her eyes glazed over while she checked. “No. Did you?”

  I shook my head. “I gave up.”

  “What do you mean gave up?”

  “You know. Gave up. Like the manual says we can do.”

  Rita gasped. “But you’re Hard Mode! If you did that, you’d be…”

  “I’m definitely not dead. I’m also not Hard Mode anymore. In fact, if I didn’t know better…”

  “What?” she said.

  “Oh, crap.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, no…”

  “Would you spit it out?”

  I couldn’t believe it. Karma points, zillions of health points, character sheet missing, Mythian Item Registry…

  “I’m not alive,” I said. “I mean, I wasn’t before either, but … Rita, I’m not a player anymore. I’m a lucid—like the goblins, dragons, yetis, and everything else. Mythian was designed to have a god in it named Cipher, but then we killed him. Even Myrialla came back when I killed her. Everything comes back. For whatever reason, Mythian chose me to replace Cipher.”

  “But that doesn’t make you a lucid. You’re still a player.”

  “My character sheet’s gone.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe it’s just broken.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, crap.”

  Melody was in Jaddow’s library. I knew this the same way I knew the location of every creature in the game—which explained how Cipher had always managed to find me. In Melody’s case—her being an unregistered player—I knew where she was by the reality she displaced.

  As soon as I entered the room, the lantern from the bedroom appeared on a table in the middle of the room. Its blue flame mingled with the overhead rune lighting, lending the shelves of leather-bound books a fluorescent cast.

  Melody was sitting in a recliner with a book propped open. She saw me, gave a small gasp, and shut it.

  “Where did that lantern come from?” she said.

  “It follows me now.”

  “Magic?”

  I nodded. “How are you?”

  “Better, now that we’re safe,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorrier,” I said.

  “You saved me. Again. From that crazy man … thing … whatever he was.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know what to think. Everything’s so confusing.”

  I explained the events leading up to The Void while she listened patiently.

  “Evil overlord stuff,” Melody said. “I always hated fantasy. Give me a spaceship and a laser pistol, and I’m your girl.”

  She held up her book: Heechee Rendezvous, by Frederick Pohl. I’d never heard of him or the book.

  “I’ve made a decision,” she said. The way she took a breath afterward, it seemed like a big one. “I’m staying with you. We’re going to get through this together, like a family. And that woman? Doesn’t matter. In a way, I was asking for it.”

  That got me mad, though not at her. “No, you weren’t asking for it. I won’t pretend what I did was right, but don’t go thinking you did something wrong.”

  “So you’ll take me back?”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t.”

  Melody drew back in surprise. “Why not?”

  “Because I love you too much,” I said. “I want you to be happy. And Mythian won’t do that for you.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” she said. “A game’s a game when you drill right down.”

  I shook my head. “No
t this one. It’s a torture chamber for gullible idiots. When you’re not being tortured, you’ll get bored to death by an endless accumulation of points, gold, and equipment.”

  “The grind? I love the grind! I mean, so long as there’s new stuff sometimes, and … What do you mean torture?”

  “Since coming here, I’ve been fried, electrocuted, dissolved, poisoned, beaten, eaten alive, and clawed to pieces. And it hasn’t even been a full year. I’d wondered why Mythian was the only game you couldn’t transfer out of, and now I know. Because no one would play it! They’d have to shut it down, and a bunch of sadistic developers would lose their jobs.”

  “So you don’t want me,” she said in a small voice.

  “Come here,” I said, and helped her up. I gazed into her eyes, leaned in, and kissed her. “I’ve always loved you. From the first day we met.”

  Melody laughed. “You did not. You turned me down when I asked you out.”

  “Ah, but later, I asked you out, and that made us even.”

  Melody kissed me again. “We could be happy here. You could leave the game and you know … register me, or whatever … and then I’ll have more lives. Then we can run around with swords and … and…”

  She started to cry and I hugged her.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she said. “You were there for me. I’ll be there for you too. We’ll make it work.”

  For a whopping 150,000 karma, I changed Melody’s game status from Unregistered to Registered. Though still flagged as a Minion, she morphed into a level 0 player with an infinite number of lives—proving once and for all that Cipher could have done so at any time. He didn’t because he’d needed a lever.