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

by Gregg Horlock

Gendark ignored my friend’s sarcasm. “When you find the gem, don’t destroy it. Bring it back here and give it to me.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I was stupid. “Sell it, of course. I’m a trader, not a philanthropist. I believe in the laws of supply and demand. Right now there’s a big demand around here of not turning into a creature at night. The only thing I don’t have is a supply.”

  I thought about it. There was no way we could go on without a respawn rune, but it didn’t make sense to find the gem and give it to the trader. Helder’s Bane was the curse, and we had to end it.

  I looked him in the eyes. “You’ve got a deal,” I said.

  Gendark gave me a big smile. “Then come inside and see what I’ve got.”

  Gendark turned and went into his shack. As I went to follow him, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Rex.

  “We can’t let him exploit these people,” he said.

  “Relax. We’re not actually going to give him the gem. As long as he thinks we are going to, he’ll trade with us.”

  “That’s disingenuous.”

  “That’s life. Or that’s Pana Reborn, at least. Now come on. Leave your morals outside the door for the time being.”

  Looking through Gendark’s wares was a disappointment, but we found what we needed. As well as plenty of potions and swords, he had two respawn runes for sale. The problem was that they cost much more GD than we could afford, even if we added our animal pelts to the trade.

  “Any chance of a discount?” said Jack.

  Gendark shook his head. “I’ve risked my arse just letting you in here. What do you want from me, the world on a platter?”

  We left the trader’s shack without a rune. I knew that if we spent time hunting and collecting pelts, then eventually we’d have enough to trade for a rune. The problem was that we didn’t have the time for that. Star Horizon were already miles ahead of us.

  “Hang on,” said Rex. “I’ve got it. Give me all our GD and pelts.”

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Just trust me.”

  I handed the items to the barbarian. With that, he disappeared in the direction of the shack with a book sign outside it. While we waited, Jack turned to me.

  “Have you heard from Francis?” he said.

  I shook my head. “I left him a message before we set out, but he didn’t return it.”

  “I’m worried about him.”

  I sighed. “Me too.”

  Ten minutes later, Rex came back. Not only did he return without our items, but his armor was gone, and he was dressed in nothing but a loincloth. It wasn't a pretty sight.

  “Have you changed class?” asked Jack. “I didn’t see stripper listed as an option.”

  Rex had a book in his hand. He held it up for me to see. “And people say barbarians have no charisma. Well, I managed to get the bookseller to trade. This is a book on crafting. If I read it, it’ll level up my crafting skill.”

  “Great, you can make us a table. It’ll go nicely in our alcove,” said Jack. “Why don’t you make a rug, too? I hear they really tie the room together.”

  Rex smiled. “And I also bought this.”

  He held up a sheet of paper. It was colored blue, and it had a series of white lines scribbled over it.

  “This is a blueprint for a respawn rune,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Back at the shelter, Rex spent an hour pouring through his crafting book. After that, he sat with the respawn blueprint in front of him. For some reason, he seemed shy about working while we watched, and he wouldn’t start until we left him in peace.

  I spent my time making traps to replace the ones we’d used in the last night wave. I placed them in strategic positions around the shelter. They had worked as a method of defence once, but I knew that I’d have to keep replacing them.

  Finally, Rex was finished. He strode over to us and then stopped. He held something above his head, and his face beamed with pride.

  “Voila. One respawn rune.”

  “Rex Alpha, the crafting barbarian,” said Jack.

  “Rex Alpha, the guy who saved our skins,” answered Rex. Then, realizing what he had said, he added: “And don’t say the ‘Alpha’ part of my name. It’s stupid.”

  We set the rune on the wall of our shelter. Jack had spent his time digging it out. He didn’t have the mining skill, so he had only carved a little more space for his efforts, but it was something. The rune was a deep blue, and it had black markings on it. As soon as Rex pressed it against the dirt wall of our shelter, the rune made a chiming sound.

  Base Gained – Level 1

  I couldn’t help but smile. With the rune in place, we finally had an insurance policy. I still didn’t want to die in Artemis, since it would set us back 8 hours, but at least now we’d respawn in our base.

  “We can’t just call it base,” said Jack, leaning against a wall. A spray of dirt fell onto his shoulder. “We need a name for it.”

  I thought about it. “How about the Terence Pierce Home for Shipwrecked Artemis Scouts?”

  Rex shook his head. “Father has entire hospital wings named after him. He doesn’t need anything else to stoke his ego.”

  “I was joking. But I do have a name,” I said.

  “Go on,” said Jack.”

  I cleared my throat. “Okay. How about we name it Gossard?”

  Jack laughed. “You just can’t get enough of that place, can you?”

  “It’s a home away from home,” I answered.

  With Gossard officially designated as our Artemis base, we unlocked a rune slot. With each level our base attained, we would unlock more slots. Runes could be inserted into these, and they would offer us all kinds of effects. I knew from my forum reading that some runes granted health regeneration while you were in base. Others restored mana. The different kinds of runes were endless. First, though, we needed someone who could make them.

  “According to the crafting book,” said Rex, “I can make a base rune. In essence, it’s just a worthless piece of stone. We’d need someone with magic skills to enchant them.”

  We spent the next hour customizing Gossard. In some ways it was like getting a new toy, and we were all excited about the possibilities of what we could do to it. Rex crafted a canopy for us to lay over the top, which would help us stay hidden, as well as protect us from rain. Whilst he worked, Jack and I dug out as much of the walls as we could, adding an extra few meters of space. So far it was still smaller than a Dostooth village shack, but we were getting somewhere.

  We were getting ready to set out again, when I noticed more tracks around Gossard. With my tracking skill, I knew that these footprints were fresh. They were made by an animal rather than a person. Again, the tracks were spread in such a way that it looked like something had circled around our base for hours.

  “We better see what it is,” I said. “If it’s dangerous, I want to deal with it. Eventually we’re going to have to start leaving items in Gossard. I don’t want some wild animal getting in and destroying everything.”

  “Remember when dad got a puppy?” said Jack. “We couldn’t leave it alone for an hour without it chewing everything in sight.”

  I remembered our dog, Bowser. Dad had brought it home a month after Cal joined our family. Cal had problems settling in, and he seemed too shy to talk to us. Dad had bought Bowser to give him a friend to care for, and to try and make him feel more at home. The two of them had been best friends. Then, five years later, Bowser had run into the road outside our house, straight into the path of a school bus.

  We followed the tracks around our base. Since they ran in a circle, it was hard to keep track of them, but as I looked at the ground carefully, I began to make out the path. The footprints led away from Gossard and then went just west. Then they seemed to follow the stream for a while, before stopping at a small cave cut into a giant boulder.

  The mouth of the ca
ve was dark. I peered in, wondering if I’d see a pair of feral eyes staring back at me. I was ready to go in, when Rex joined me at my side.

  “I better go first,” he said. “I have the animal-tamer skill, remember?”

  “We don’t know what’s in there. You can’t tame everything.”

  “Well if it’s dangerous, then I should still go first. I have more hit points than the two of you.”

  “Finally, you’re thinking like a barbarian,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not a barbarian. Just smart.”

  Jack and I watched as Rex approached the cave. He seemed to hesitate at the entrance and then, taking a breath, stepped into the darkness. I stood and listened. I heard a shriek come from inside the cave. I wondered what kind of animal had taken sanctuary in there, and why it had chosen to run laps around Gossard. Then I heard Rex talk, only he wasn’t using words. He was using his Animal Tamer skill and responding to the creature in kind. Jack sniggered at the different howls and shrieks Rex made from within the cave.

  Ten minutes later, the barbarian stepped out of the darkness and into the light, but he wasn’t alone. At his side, trotting along the ground, was a Burr. It was small, and it looked either young, or under-developed. When it saw me, it hissed and raised its tail. I realized that it was the young Burr that I had trapped two nights earlier.

  The creature stretched out its tail. Its whole body shook, as if it was filled with nervous energy. I knew what was coming next. Its tail would glow, and then a fireball would shoot at me. I went to move out of the way, when I realized that nothing was happening. The Burr was clearly trying to incinerate me, but nothing would come.

  “It’s defective,” said Jack. “Do you still have the receipt?”

  “It fell in the stream,” I said. “But I thought it was dead. I’m sure I got exp for killing it.”

  “Well clearly not,” said Rex. “It’s scared, that much I know.”

  “The stream must have extinguished its tail,” I said.

  Looking at the Burr, I felt sorry for it. It didn’t matter than just two nights ago it had tried to turn me into fried scout; it was my fault anyway. I was the one who had trapped it, after all. And then I shook the thought away. This was an NPC. It was lines of code spewed out by the Pana Reborn servers. It was ludicrous to feel empathy for it.

  All the same, I couldn’t help the pang of guilt I felt. Damn those programmers. Why’d they have to make everything here so lifelike?

  “What do we do with it?” I said.

  Rex stared at me as if the answer was obvious. “I’m keeping him,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty

  With the creature trailing alongside Rex, we headed back to Gossard. The Burr gave the stream a wide berth, having already experienced the pain of water. Back at base we made a nest for Rex’s eagle egg. He was building quite a stable of creatures. I wondered if our sleep would be interrupted from here on by Rex shrieking and chirping at his menagerie of pets.

  There was a surprise waiting for us when we stepped into our shelter. On the ground, tucked up against a wall, were three gleaming bottles. Red liquid was inside them. I picked one up and smelled it.

  “Healing potions,” I said.

  “They might be poisoned,” answered Jack, looking at the bottles warily.

  “I don’t think so,” said Rex. “There’s a note.”

  A piece of paper was tucked under one of the bottles. I picked it up and read it aloud.

  “Donated by a subscriber,” I read.

  I’d asked aloud for subscribers to send things to me a couple of times, but I hadn’t thought anything would actually happen. I brought up the Pana forum interface and found a section dedicated to gifts from subscribers. It seemed that now we had a base, items could be sent there by people watching our feed.

  Not only that, but I found a different forum thread where people in the real world were talking about us. It seemed that people were placing bets on us. Some of them staked money on the premise that we wouldn’t survive the next night wave.

  “You better look at this,” I told Rex and Jack.

  After a few minutes, the gambler and barbarian stopped reading.

  “Interesting,” said Rex.

  “I just put a bet on us surviving the wave,” said Jack. “Might as well make some money while we’re here.”

  “Anything you win should be transferred to your in-game inventory,” said Rex. “We need the money.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “I was saving up for a motorcycle.”

  “You still need to pass your test. But if we find Helder’s Bane,” I said, “I’ll buy you anything you want.”

  The sky was darkening, and I realized that much of the daylight had been stolen from us. We’d been so wrapped up in base building and finding the Burr that we’d lingered in camp for too long. It was too late to set out for the Grey Plains now, and it was much safer to weather the night wave in Gossard.

  As we waited for night to fall completely, I turned to face Rex. He was sat against the wall of the alcove. The Burr was next to him, with its lion-mane head on his lap.

  “Come on,” I said. “I think it’s time you told us the deal with you and Terence.”

  “I told you, I hate talking about it.”

  “There’s not much else to chat about around here.”

  Rex huffed. “Fine. You want to know why I hate my father? It’s simple. He drove my mother away. He thought that because he’s rich he can do anything he wants, so he slept around. Mother got sick of it and left, and now I only see her once a week. When she went, father lost his patience with me. Told me I take too much after mother, and that I needed to be a man. So, whenever I can, I do something that I know will piss him off. And if he’s watching now, he’ll be angry. Believe me.”

  “Why?” asked Jack.

  “Because I took the herbalism skill. He’ll hate it. He’ll say it’s not the skill a barbarian should take.”

  We lapsed into a silence, and gradually, we began to doze off. I don’t know how long I shut my eyes for, but I was awoken by a howl that pierced through the stillness of the evening. The wave was here.

  This wave was tougher than the last. It seemed that the wave creatures held onto memories from previous nights. We found that they approached Gossard in greater numbers. We stayed sheltered in our alcove as they shrieked all around us, and we waited it out.

  One by one, I heard my traps snap, and a jingling sound played in my ear as I gained experience. Despite the traps catching some of their numbers, the wave creatures wouldn’t be deterred. When the snapping of traps stopped, I knew we’d have to get out and fight. The creatures were prowling too close to us now, and we couldn’t afford to get stuck in the base.

  I found it hard to believe that all the creatures that came at night were from the village. The population of Dostooth simply wasn’t large enough to support such waves. That meant that the wizard, whoever he was, had cursed more than one city in his lifetime. What a swell guy.

  Rex, his pacifism weakening by the hour, unsheathed his sword and swung at everything that moved. Cal used Lucky Day, cheering as he made a successful toss and increased his strength and agility. I held a weapon in my hand. This was Death Bringer Mark 3. It was still a sharpened stick, essentially, but Rex had crafted it for me. With his workmanship, it at least resembled something that could do damage.

  After the traps had done their work, we were left with four wave creatures to deal with. Sticking close together, we parried their blows and struck our own. We fought until sweat dripped from our brows. I tasted my own salty perspiration as I struck out again and again with Death Bringer.

  As the night wore on, I thought that our battle would never end. And then Rex swung his blade for a final time, and the creature in front of him collapsed onto the floor. After that, we were alone.

  Fatigued and sick of fighting, we walked back to the alcove and settled down, each of us hoping that no more creatures would attack. An hour later, t
he sun began to crest over the trees, and I knew that we’d made it through another night.

  Level up to level 4!

  - HP increased to 158

  - Stamina increased to 173

  - 2 attribute points gained

  Awareness increased to level 2!

  Through making and placing traps, I’d also upgraded my trapping skill to level 4. This meant that each trap was easier to make, and they dealt more damage when they snapped.

  I thought back to my first night in Artemis, where I was alone and without any equipment. Now we had a party, a base, and a pet – even if the Burr hated me. We had all levelled our skills. and it felt like we were making progress. Now we just needed to beat Star Horizon to Helder’s Bane.