The Scout of Artemis (LitRPG Series): Press X to Loot Book 1

by Gregg Horlock

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Prologue

  It was Red Rock that got him eventually. I’d seen it in a dream; my brother’s arms flailing, his eyes wide in terror, his mouth opening as he screamed. I’m not saying I was psychic, but at the back of my mind, I’d always known that something would happen to Francis.

  When he reached the top of Red Rock, he stopped. At first, I thought he was just showing off, but then he slipped and let go of the rock with both his hands. My heart felt like it was trying to burst through my chest. My brother fell from twenty feet and dropped to the ground.

  It was over within a few seconds, but it felt like I watched him in slow motion. When he hit the ground, his body made a sickening thud.

  We knew it was over; his football scholarship, his dreams of university.

  Dad was the first to react, throwing his coil of rope to the ground and sprinting over to Francis. I was next, running until I was near my brother. Dark thoughts flooded through me and made me want to retch. I pushed through them until I kneeled next to Francis.

  When I saw that his chest rose and fell as he breathed, I could have shouted in relief.

  “We can’t move him,” I said. “He could have a back injury.”

  If he’d suffered a spinal injury, then we wouldn’t be able to see it and would have to wait for the x-ray at the hospital. I didn’t need medical equipment to confirm a different injury, though.

  I looked down at my brother’s right leg. I saw the sickening white of bone where it had snapped and pierced through his skin in three places. Francis was unconscious and couldn’t see his injuries, and I wished that I couldn’t either. My dad and I exchanged glances, and I could see it written on his face.

  Chapter One

  2 Days Before the Game

  Eighteen years changed a lot of things, but some were constant. I still went into Gossard Forest six days a week. Only now, I didn’t hang at the back while my father led a tour group, muttering to himself about their lack of interest in the history of the area. This time I was at the front.

  Cal was at my side. He was a kid from the south who Dad had fostered four years after Francis’ accident, and who he had adopted 16 months after that.

  “So, you’re saying that the bandits made a base in these woods?” said a woman at the head of the group in front of me.

  This was a corporate booking meant to help a group of office workers bond amongst the tall elms. I doubted that anyone of them had been in a forest before. The woman in front of me seemed to be the manager. She wore a smile that spread wide across her face, but it seemed more cruel than friendly.

  “That’s what he’s been saying for the last thirty minutes,” said Cal, with hands in his pockets and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

  Cal had just turned eighteen, so he could smoke whenever he wanted. That didn’t mean Dad wouldn’t give him grief for it, though. Since his stroke, Dad had become health conscious.

  The woman fixed a sharp look at Cal. I tried to remember her name. Was it Gretta? Yeah, that would have to do.

  “It’s not what I expected, I have to say,” said Gretta, turning her stare to me. “Your leaflet promised abseiling.”

  “It promised a history tour through the forest with abseiling at the end.”

  She huffed. “Well, you must know that nobody cares about the history.”

  Her voice started to irritate me. We got someone like this one in every few tours. I’d thought about ramping up the action, but Dad reminded us that Ledfield Tours hadn’t changed much for generations. If I was the sole Ledfield who broke from tradition and a decades-old company went bust, what would I do?

  “If you don’t care about history, why did you even book on the tour?”

  Gretta rolled her eyes. “There isn’t a Disneyland around here. We get incentive money every month, and we’ve tried just about every place there is.”

  “We’re stopping for lunch now,” I said. “How about after that, I skip some of the talk and we go straight to Yeller Mound?”

  One of the men took a few steps forward. “Don’t you abseil down Red Rock? It’s twice the size of Yeller.”

  I shook my head. Even years later, I hated hearing the name. “Wherever you heard that, it’s out of date. We don’t go near Red Rock anymore.”

  “Why not?” said Gretta.

  I was damned if I was going to tell her as personal a story as that. “We just don’t. Now come on. Park your asses and eat your lunch.”

  While most of the office workers ate, Cal and two other men played cards. The deck was Cal’s, and the edges of the cards were bent and marked, both through years of use, and years of cheating. I watched the three men play poker. Two of them were unaware that the odds were heavily weighted against them.

  I suppressed a smile as Cal performed sleight of hand, turning every hand into a royal flush or something as good. As the office workers’ wallets emptied, they didn’t seem to catch on. Sensing that he had squeezed them dry, Cal stood up, thanked the men for the game, and walked over to me.

  When he stood near me, I leaned toward him. “You’re going to get caught sometime, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m not stupid. I just like riding my luck.”

  Every week, Cal visited a social worker who would give him letters from his mother who had given him up for adoption, and fill in any gaps about his past. His mother wanted to meet up in person, but Cal always refused.

  After years of living with us, Cal was a Ledfield. I thought it, and so did Dad. Francis, on the other hand, was lukewarm toward Cal. But then, he’d been lukewarm about everything since the accident.

  It didn’t matter how we felt, though. The problem was getting that through to Cal. He was my brother, as far as I was concerned, but some things were just too ingrained to get over.

  I looked at the woodland around us. Left as it was, the forest would flourish but the imprint men had left on it
– the signs and the fences – would rust and rot. Every day that I led a tour through here I got the feeling that Ledfield Tours was the same. We were getting left behind, stuck covering the same ground of forest just as we had for 80 years. The company needed updating, but was I the one to do it?

  I watched as one man, his hair slicked back with so much product that it looked wet, threw his sandwich bag on the ground.

  “Going bear hunting?” I said. “Littering’s a sure way to attract a bear. And they’re not cuddly like you see in movies; we’re not talking Winnie or Paddington. The ones in this forest will rip your face off.”

  Gretta stood up. She crossed her arms and fixed me a smug stare. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. A bear would liven things up.”

  Cal turned to face Gretta. “You signed up for a Gossard Forest history walk, so what did you expect?”

  “Something more exciting.”

  “And that’s why we put the abseiling in at the end,” said Cal. “Because we know some people have trouble understand the long words we use when we talk about history.”

  Gretta crossed her arms tighter. “Do you always talk to your customers this way?”

  “When they’re behaving like asses and baiting bears, yes,” I said, fighting to keep my tone calm.

  Gretta huffed. “Screw this,” she said. “if you won’t liven it up, I will.”

  With that, Gretta turned and stormed off. I tried to call out to warn her, but she didn’t listen. I thought about how satisfying it would be to just leave her, but I knew I couldn’t do that.

  As I started to walk toward Gretta, I heard her scream. Then, as I ran in her direction, I heard a different sound. This one was bestial, the roar of a predator stumbling upon a helpless sack of flesh.

  A bear was roaming, and that it must have spotted Gretta. The best-case scenario was that the bear had already eaten and that it was alone. If the beast was hungry, there would be no way of avoiding an attack.

  As I got closer, I saw it. It was eight feet tall and three times my width, with dirty, matted fur that covered hulking muscles. The animal would make easy work of tearing a man apart. Its jaws would snap through a skull like biting an apple.

  Gretta looked at me. She saw me approach, and I’m sure words formed in her head, but they came out only as: “Blaarh, eurgh.”

  I had the strongest urge to tell her that she should have listened to me and not gone off on her own. The look of sheer terror on her face told me that I better help her instead.

  “Bet you wish you’d listened to me, don’t you?”

  Damn. The words just slipped right out and slapped the terrified woman in the face.

  Her skin had turned chalk-white as the bear stretched itself tall. It hadn’t moved for a few seconds now, preferring instead to size up the challenge set before it.

  “Stay put,” I told her, keeping my voice calm but firm.

  She looked at me with wide eyes. In that second, I felt sorry for her. She might not have behaved brilliantly, but she was just an office worker who was miles out of her element. She’d normally be spending her afternoons facing a spreadsheet, not a bear.

  I walked over to her, making sure not to show the bear my back even for a second. The air of Gossard Forest was thick with tension. It was like all the forest critters were watching. They were waiting to see the outcome of the age-old clash of office worker versus bear. I couldn’t let the bear win this one. It would be bad for business.

  I put my left hand out and grabbed hers. She looked at me for a second, then squeezed. “Trust me,” I said.

  With my right hand, I reached into my pocket and grabbed a canister of bear spray. Preparation had always been one of our keywords.

  The bear dropped down onto all fours and started running at us. I let go of Gretta’s hand and aimed the canister. As it closed the distance, I could hear the booms its feet made on the forest floor, and I could hear its raspy breath.

  The plume of spray hit the bear in the face and stopped it. The cloud fogged everything in front of us. The bear roared out, and I knew that its eyes would be stinging.

  “Go back to the others,” I told Gretta. “But don’t run. Walk.”

  Gretta turned around and walked away. I started to back off, making sure to face the bear. As the plume of spray started to clear, I realized something that chilled my blood. The bear wasn’t going anywhere.

  The animal opened its mouth and produced a roar that seemed to shake the trees. It started to run at me, and I knew this was it.

  As the bear came within four feet, a shot of red light burned through the forest air and went by us. It exploded against the trunk of a tree and sent sparks everywhere. The volume of the shot was enough to make the bear decide to call it a day. I breathed a long sigh of relief when the beast turned and fled.

  I looked to my right and saw Cal stood across the forest with the flare gun in his hand. Behind him were a group of worried-looking paper merchants. Gretta had sunk to the floor, and she looked like she had tears in her eyes.

  “That enough excitement for you?” I asked.

  Chapter Two

  “Mr. Ledfield?” said the voice on the phone.

  “That’s me. How can I help?”

  “It’s Devlin from the Gossard Forestry Commission.”

  This was strange. Aside from collecting the annual licensing fee from us, the forestry commission rarely ever made contact. I wondered what they wanted.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ll get to the point,” he said. “Your annual license to run tours through Gossard comes to an end in a week’s time.”

  So, he’d called me to talk about money? If the rate was increasing a little, he could have just told me by phone. Or even put it on the invoice.

  “How much is it going up by this year?” I said, mentally juggling Ledfield Tours’ already-low finances.

  “I was approached last week by Star Horizon,” said Devlin.

  “The national chain?” I said.

  Devlin nodded. “They want to run tours through Gossard.”

  My first thought was, why? Gossard wasn’t exactly a big crowd-puller. If it weren’t for decades of family history, I’d have thought about pulling Ledfield Tours out of Gossard by now.

  “What does that have to do with me?” I said.

  I heard Devlin drum his fingertips on his desk. “Star Horizon wants exclusivity on tours in the forest,” he said. “And they’re prepared to pay ten times your annual fee to get it.”

  The news hit me like a rock sinking through water. Ten times our rate? I had expected Devlin to increase the annual fee, but I hadn’t dreamed he’d ask for this much. I thought about our finances and wondered if there was a way it could be done. No. There simply wasn’t enough cash in the company.

  “What if we can’t match their offer?” I said.

  “Then I’m afraid you wouldn’t be able to guide tours through Gossard anymore.”

  “My family have been doing this since the turn of the century.”

  Devlin shrugged his shoulders. “Things change, Chris.”

  I put the phone down and looked over at my front door, where a letter waited. It looked like any other at first. When I tore open the envelope and read it, a cup of coffee in one hand and a look of incredulity on my face, I couldn’t believe it.

  It was a letter from a lawyer representing a Miss G. Hornthorne. If I was under any doubt who G Hornthorne was, that was dispelled when I finished the letter. It turned out that Ledfield Tours was being sued for ‘reckless endangerment’. The letter said that on a recent tour, lack of safety precautions had put Gretta Hornthorne’s life in danger.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  She had been the one to ignore me. From the first second of the tour she’d put everyone at risk with her behavior; talking through my safety briefing, trying to wander off from the group. And then, when she’d gone off again,

  I’d put my own life at risk to save her. This was the thanks I
got.

  Chapter Three

  I almost didn’t want to tell my father. I knew what would happen, and I knew how distressed he’d get about it. Still, he had a right to know. Ledfield Tours were in trouble. I was sure I could get us out of it, somehow, but I wouldn’t hide anything from my father.

  Sure enough, as soon as I’d told him, he didn’t say anything. I heard him take a deep breath through his oxygen mask, and the sound made me think of a certain villain in a sci-fi movie. Dad had been getting worse since the stroke that had made him retire from running the business. I knew that he didn’t think I was ready to take the business, but there was little option.

  “Have you spoken to your brother?” said Dad.

  He never said Francis’ name anymore. It was always ‘him’, or ‘your brother’. It was as though by saying Francis’ name, Dad would let in all the guilt he felt about his accident. I and countless others had told Dad that it wasn’t his fault, but he wouldn’t listen.