Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure

by Peter Meredith

  2—

  “You owe me,” the man said, stepping towards a cabinet. He opened a drawer and produced a small handheld crossbow. The barbed tip of the bolt glistened with what looked like black ink. It wasn’t ink, of course, it was poison.

  “Oh, you got to be kidding me,” Roan groaned. “What’s with this city?”

  The man smiled, showing yellow teeth. “It’s not the city and it’s not the game. It’s the people. People are wicked, wicked, wicked. You are wicked. I know it. I can sense it. And there’s only one cure for your wickedness. Do you know what that is?”

  “Wait, let me guess. It’s…” In mid-sentence he attacked and despite his lack of weaponry and his maimed hands, he wasn’t nearly as helpless as he appeared to be. His training as an FBI agent had included many classes on hand to hand combat—though in this case he used elbows, knees and feet.

  Moving with shocking speed, Roan took a flying leap at the man which ended with a snapping front kick. It was a heavy blow and not only did it stagger the man, it marred his aim, sending the poisoned bolt thudding into the wall. As his enemy tried to straighten from the first kick, Roan followed it up with a second, lashing out at his knee.

  The lower part of Roan’s shin struck the interior of the man’s knee and buckled it. His enemy tried to throw out a haymaker against Roan’s 15 armor class and missed. Roan closed quickly and shot out an elbow that smashed teeth from their sockets. Reeling, the man saw that he was overmatched and tried to grapple with Roan, diving towards Roan’s midsection hoping to tackle him.

  Roan didn’t need his hands to stop such an obvious ploy. A knee to the jaw dropped the man in his tracks. Normally, this would have stopped the fight since the man had been rendered senseless by the blow, but the fire of Roan’s rage was too great. It consumed him and he found himself wearing an evil grin as he stomped the man to death(XP +90).

  Only when the man was a corpse, lying in a pool of blood did Roan stop. A tiny touch of regret tried to creep into his consciousness, however the evil in him was too powerful. “The bitch had it coming to him,” he growled as he bent and frisked the body.

  Along with his ten gold pieces, he found only a surprisingly large set of keys. Standing, he looked around. His eyes fell on the hand crossbow which had fallen to the side. He picked it up, cocked it and fetched the bolt from the wall. The poison had been partially swiped away, but the bolt itself was still good.

  He then went about the apartment, searching every nook and cranny. For the most part, he discovered mundane items: clothes, food, more of the small bolts to the crossbow and thirty pieces of gold. He even found a cache of potions, two of which were actual healing potions. Two were fakes and two were unknowns.

  After sipping one of the healing potions until his wrists were back to normal, he tossed the two fake potions down the drain and kept the other three. Next, he began searching the place with a closer eye hoping for hidden treasure. What he discovered was so harrowing that it cooled the evil that had grown within him.

  The apartment wasn’t an ordinary apartment, it was a murder house.

  Roan found a secret door that led to a bricked-in room. The bricks seemed to absorb light and sound but they gave off a horrid stench that combined vomit, feces, blood and somehow, fear. He backed out of the room and seriously considered simply shutting the door and leaving the apartment. If he wasn’t being chased by half the city, he probably would have.

  Instead he found a candle, lit it and went back in. The candle put out a wavering circle of light and with it he discovered a torturer’s rack that was rusty with dried blood. Next to the rack was a table that held horrifying implements all of which were designed to inflict pain and draw out death for as long as possible. At the sight, his stomach turned sour and only years of field work kept him from vomiting onto the blood-stained floor.

  Beyond the torture room was another room which was a shrine of sorts dedicated to the killer’s victims, of which there had been hundreds. He had taken something from each. There were rings, necklaces and broaches. There were body parts and locks of hair. There were weapons.

  Seven swords hung on the wall, one of which was a rapier. He took it and a dagger. When he inspected their blades, he was shocked to discover that the dagger was magical. It glowed slightly when he pulled it from its sheath. In its light he saw an oil lantern and when he lit it, he jumped as a pale figure emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room.

  “You don’t belong here,” the man hissed.

  “Wait…it’s you,” Roan spluttered, recognizing the man. It was the same man who had tried to trap him in the house, the same man he had beaten to death five minutes before. Now, there wasn’t a mark on him. “How did you get healed when you were dead?”

  “I have powers over life and death,” was his answer.

  Roan heard the lie clearly. The only power this man had over life and death was his ability to re-spawn. This was a real human from the real world. Roan should have been surprised, but sadly, he wasn’t.

  “You don’t have any powers,” Roan said. “You’re just a man like me. And no, I won’t leave the stuff alone. Finders keepers.” He hooked the rapier and the dagger to his belt before grabbing the rings and picking through them, tossing aside the ones made of tin and copper.

  “Those are mine!” the man cried, stepping towards Roan, but stopping as Roan produced the hand crossbow. “You don’t understand,” he hissed at Roan. “This is how you gain power. You take the souls of the weak and you incorporate them into your own.”

  “And does that work on the other side as well?” Roan asked. There was a sparkle in the man’s eyes that told Roan everything he needed to know. The man was a murderer in two worlds. Roan had to quell the fury growing in him. Killing him here meant nothing. He would just keep respawning over and over. The only way to stop him was to find him on the other side.

  “I suppose I could leave it alone,” Roan said, tossing a ring back onto a shelf. “But it will cost you. How much is all of this worth to you? In dollars, I mean.”

  The man looked around at his horrible treasures and shrugged as if they were suddenly meaningless to him. “Fifty dollars,” he said. Roan shook his head and the man tried again, “One hundred.” Roan shook his head a second time and the man snarled, “Five hundred, but that’s it.”

  “I think I could do five hundred. I’m going to need an email address or phone number to contact you.” Only a complete fool would give out their phone number to a stranger, so it was no surprise when the man gave Roan an email address. Email addresses couldn’t be tracked to an exact computer, however they can be tracked to the server from which they originated. Normally people used their home network.

  With a suspicious look, the man spelled out a lengthy email address which Roan committed to memory. “Expect a message from me in the next few minutes,” Roan said.

  The man made no move to clock out. “Are you going to point that somewhere else so I can leave?” With the hand crossbow pointed at him, they were technically in combat. Roan shook his head. He wanted to kill the man a second time; it felt like both the right thing and the wrong thing to do at the same time, as if it would satisfy both the good and evil within him.

  “You’re a piece of crap is what you are,” the man said. In response Roan raised the crossbow, but before he could pull the trigger, the man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed onto the floor(XP +35). Although the man had quit the game in the middle of battle and Roan had received experience, he was disappointed and his bloodlust was hardly sated.

  He gave the corpse a sharp kick which helped a little. “You deserve so much more and I’m going to give it to you.”

  After blowing out the lantern, Roan clocked out. The moment he “woke” in his shanty of a motel room, he put the battery in his phone and called Wendell P Wolston. “Oh my goodness,” he said, half asleep. “Where have you…”

  “Shut up,” Roan snapped, still feeling the evil in his bones. “I n
eed you to catch a bad guy for me and if you accidentally have to shoot his balls off, do it.”

  Chapter 17

  K Street Territory, Oberast

  Wendell was high-strung and prone to fits of what Roan, in his present foul mood, considered womanly hysteria. Still, he was a competent agent.

  “Just to see if I got this straight, you want me to create a fake email address, write this person a vague-sounding message, wait for his reply, track the IP address associated with the reply and then move in and bust him. Bust him on what charge, though?”

  “He’s a serial killer. He practically admitted it to me on the other side. Now, try to make the messages sound somewhat immature so that you can drag the conversation out a bit. I want him taken tonight. Is that clear?”

  In the midst of a huge yawn, Wendell said that it was clear and hung up. Roan glanced at the clock and saw that it was just after three in the morning. He was too tired to do anything but drain his bladder and clock back into the murder house.

  The moment he did, he heard the sound of someone banging on the front door of the apartment. It could only be the thugs going from apartment to apartment, searching for Roan. If he didn’t answer, they would bust down the door and see the bloody body of the man Roan had killed. They would then search the apartment for him and since they were rogues, there was a good chance that they would spy the secret door just as Roan had. If he answered the door, pretending to be the occupant, they would still search the apartment and find the body.

  His only hope was to fool the searchers.

  Racing into the main part of the apartment he went to the kitchen window, opened it and then ran back to hidden room, shutting the door behind him. Seconds later, the banging turned into a thudding as the thugs began to beat down the door. The door was unlike the others in the building; the serial killer had reinforced it, both to deaden the screams coming from his place and to keep unwanted visitors out when he was busy torturing his latest victim.

  It took nearly a minute before the door finally gave in. Roan, listening at the door, counted the sound of four different boots tromping around the apartment.

  “There’s a body!” one cried.

  Another, this one closer to Roan, intoned, “Back room clear.”

  “The window’s open in the kitchen. He probably went out through it.”

  “Let’s not be too hasty. Did you check the closets and under the bed?” The question was answered with a grunt. “Damn! Okay, Jarone, go tell the boss that he went out a south facing window. Everyone else, let’s see if there’s anything in here worth taking. Don’t just stand there Jarone, we’ll cut you in. Don’t worry.”

  With his rapier in one hand and the crossbow in the other, Roan listened at the secret door as the men did a quick search of the apartment. They stomped the floor, tore apart the bed, and threw around the soft furniture in the front room.

  They were soon cursing about not finding anything and not long after they left, much to Roan’s relief. He stood by the door for another few minutes, but when he heard nothing he turned away from it. There was another way out. When he had returned, the serial killer had appeared out of nowhere, which meant there was a secret door somewhere in the two hidden rooms.

  “He had come from over here,” Roan whispered, glancing towards the corner of the hideous “treasure” room. The flickering light of a candle showed him nothing, however soft tapping revealed a hollow spot along the paneling. When he pressed on it, a very slim door, barely a foot and a half wide opened(XP +25). Beyond it was a passage that was even narrower than the door.

  Roan followed it for twenty feet before coming to the rear side of another secret door. He wouldn’t have recognized it as such if it hadn’t been for the doorknob poking out into the slim confines of the secret passage. Above the doorknob was a small handle like one would find on the front of a drawer. Tentatively, Roan pulled back on the handle and was surprised and disgusted to find a peephole that allowed him to look into the bedroom of a young boy.

  He shut the peephole and then wiped his hands on his cloak. The passage continued, and he was sure it would eventually lead to a way out, only Roan was loathe to go any further, knowing that he would find more of the little doors and peepholes. The serial killer had created more than just a murder house; the entire building was his sick playground.

  With a deep breath, Roan willed himself to go on, slipping through the walls like a ghost. The passage would sometimes drop down four or five feet and turn horizontal so that he had to crawl along. In places he found ladders that went up to higher floors. He ignored these and kept going, finding more doors and peepholes. He stopped looking into them; it was too depressing.

  Finally, he found a ladder that led down into a sub-basement that was little more than a dark cavern with a sludgy river of excrement running through it. Roan lifted the candle and saw marks in the dirt where bodies had been dragged. “He dumps his victims in there. Lovely.”

  The candlelight showed him that there was a footpath next to the awful river. Roan followed it until he came to another ladder set against a rock wall. As he was almost overcome by the stench, he hoped it was the way out and, thankfully it led to the foyer of another building.

  After checking the peephole and seeing the foyer empty, he stepped out. Immediately, he smelled smoke. Going to the doors that led out, he cracked them and was surprised at the brightness of the night. The fires he had set had grown and spread, turning the night into a surreal and grey twilight.

  Two blocks down from the apartment building was the warehouse he had escaped from. Flames, hotter than any dragon breath had engulfed the buildings on either side of it and it was likely that the entire block would be leveled. There was real danger and yet hundreds of people stood staring up at the fires with slack jaws and glassy eyes. Not one was doing a single thing to help their neighbors or put out the fires.

  Among them, appearing equally dull-witted, were many of the K Street Killers. They too were useless in the emergency. Roan’s plan of causing mayhem had worked and doubtless, he could have started picking off the loners and the stragglers. He didn’t, however. According to his own count, he had all the thumbs he would need just around the corner. Nine thugs had fallen to their deaths when he had cut the footbridge and it was a good bet that the bodies were still there.

  Before he could think about the disturbing notion of hacking off thumbs, he decided to clock back and check on Wendell’s progress with the serial killer.

  “We tracked the IP address from the emails to the home of a guy named George Shepp,” Wendell explained. “He’s a framing contractor from Joliet, Illinois and get this, he’s been questioned in the disappearance of two different girls. One in 2014 and one last year.”

  “A contractor. That makes sense. How long until we have him in custody?”

  Wendell didn’t reply right away and Roan was about to snap when he finally said, “That’s kind of a problem. I don’t know what time it is in Daggerland, but here it’s in the middle of the night. I’m having trouble getting a judge to issue an arrest warrant based on a conversation in a virtual world, especially when we don’t have evidence of an actual crime having been committed.”

  Roan had been sitting on the side of his bed but now he jumped up and began pacing. Inside him, the hate he felt for George Shepp was a living thing. The hate made him want to jump in a car, race to Illinois and kick the real George Shepp to death.

  “Tell the judge I have a confession. I asked him if he had ever tortured and murdered someone in the real world and he said yes.” This was technically a lie, but not by much.

  “You were playing a game,” Wendell said, quietly. “He was in character.”

  The hate flared within Roan and he seethed, “They don’t have sadist as a character, Wendell! Get me a damned warrant and in the meantime get the money from him. Set up a PayPal account or something. When you get it, tell the judge.

  It’s a real world connection.”

  R
oan hung up and tossed his phone onto the bed. It wasn’t until he returned from the bathroom that he remembered to take the battery out of it. Before he did, he thought about calling Amanda. She would be asleep. Picturing her sleeping calmed his nerves and dampened the hate within him. It actually put him in a good mood. He then clocked back into Daggerland and the hate returned full force as did the evil that simmered just below the surface.

  2—

  In the fifteen minutes he’d been gone, the only thing that had changed was that part of the warehouse had collapsed, sending an avalanche of superheated concrete and other debris across a street and into another row of warehouses. There had been people on top of those buildings, watching the fire as if it were live theater. Now those same people were desperately searching for a way down.

  “Idiots,” Roan snarled and turned away. He had his own problems to worry about. There were thumbs to harvest. The word harvest was both appropriate and sickening at the same time, and it said something about Roan’s state of mind that he found it more appropriate than sickening.

  It didn’t matter to him which way his mind went, just as long as he was able to get the thumbs and be done with the quest. The night had been long and he was tired, but not so tired that he would just go tromping around the corner like a tourist. There was a five-thousand gold piece bounty on his head. It was a lot of money just to take out one low-level thief.

  Roan took a long way around the block, coming uncomfortably close to the raging fire. It was a good excuse to draw his cloak around him and to use the smoke as cover. Creeping through it, he found himself down the street from where he had cut the footbridge. The broken and mangled bodies were still there. They had been stripped of their belongings, but so far as he could tell they still had their thumbs.

  He only gave them the briefest of glances. His main concern was to find out if there were assassins lurking, either in the crowd or in the buildings that towered over the crime scene. For long minutes, he studied everyone in the crowd and then scanned the windows of the buildings. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell without walking out there and taking the thumbs.