Mundis Mori: A LitRPG Adventure

by Justin Coke

  Refreshed and still damp, he came back just in time to see Teabagz and three Squid Pistol members ride right past him into the forest.

  “Fuck, fuckity fuck,” Hayes said, at first panicked they had seen him, but they didn’t even twitch as they galloped into the forest.

  They were out of sight before he’d moved thirty feet.

  Cursing, he debated going out of stealth and following on his horse. But they’d catch him quickly; the howlers would pop almost instantly and the only thing he’d accomplish was letting them know someone was tailing them.

  He moved as fast as he could, but Teabagz rode back with his crew before he’d made it too far.

  He checked the map; the furthest they could have gone was probably the river that marked the boundary of the forest.

  Exhausted at the thought of searching a square mile or two of forest, he found a safe, trap-less place to log out. Unless he was very unlucky and logged back in with a patrol on top of him, he’d be able to pick up where he left off.

  Chapter Eleven

  He briefed Kid Twist on what he’d seen.

  “Why would he need three people for a short jaunt in his heavily fortified holdings?” Kid Twist said.

  “No idea.”

  “Maybe he’s worried about people like you? But hell, it’s not like dying is real. That’s what Graverobber is for.”

  “I saw what I saw.”

  “What were the names of the other two?”

  “I ... don’t remember. One was a paladin I think.”

  “Next time take notes.”

  Hayes hadn’t mentioned how he’d wandered off to take a shower and decided to accept the reprimand rather than explain why he hadn’t had time to note the names.

  “Sorry.”

  “I like your infiltration work. Honestly I figured you’d get caught and strung up like a ham.”

  “Then why’d you send me?”

  “Experience is the greatest teacher.”

  “So what’s up with Teabagz?”

  “I’m slowly turning him into an adequate PVPer.”

  “We’re trying to get revenge here, not make him better.”

  “It’ll be all the sweeter when we betray him. Trust me, Teabagz in peak form couldn’t beat me with the flu. When we strike, he’ll die.”

  “I’m thinking about just doing the hit and calling it.”

  “Oh no, sweet dumpling. No no.”

  “Why not?”

  “But you know, the pity is when I’m paid, I always follow my job through. You know that.”

  “Are you quoting something?”

  “The Good ... look, clearly there are some holes in your cinematic knowledge. Point being, this isn’t just about you anymore. We’ve put a lot of tedious work in. We’re getting our rocks off—you can’t just come in and tell us to pull out.”

  “No, I mean ... it’s just, like, I have rent to pay. I can’t keep this pace up forever.”

  “You don’t have to be here for it. Or at least you don’t have to have two geared out toons to get your revenge.”

  “If I’m not there ... he won’t know it was me.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but he already forgot who you are. He did that about an hour after he left you in the hole. You’re just one of a dozen people he’s fucked with in the last month.”

  “Someone has to fix that.”

  Kid Twist took a minute to reply.[52]“He’s ripping off some guy, No-Legs. Low-level guy, has a wheat farm. Teabagz talked him into fronting a bunch of wheat for some deal for some fictional three-way cross-faction deal. He’s already sold the wheat at below market.”

  “Okay. Warn him.”

  “We could do that. Deal’s going down in two hours. But ... ”

  Hayes waited for him to finish the sentence.

  “Since he already sold the wheat at below market, and that’s a server-enforceable contract, he has to either produce the wheat or the cash value of the wheat.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Let’s steal the wheat.”

  “What about No-Legs?”

  “He’s getting fucked either way.”

  “I want to get revenge on Teabagz, not become Teabagz.”

  Kid Twist laughed.

  “Excellent answer, grasshopper. We can give the wheat back with a warning, but I don’t know No Legs. He’ll probably talk. As incomprehensible as human empathy is to Teabagz, even he will figure out that we’re ratting on him if we give the wheat back. Mad Hatter’s like the only guy he talks too besides his weird guildies.”

  “Can we hold the wheat in trust until we wrap this up?”

  “Wheat expires, but we could sell it for market rate and hold that for him.”

  Hayes nodded, then realized he was on Marconi.

  “That works.”

  “I hired Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.”

  “Who is that?”

  “They are a team of crack Palladium mercenaries. We’ll take Anonymizer potions[53] and head in with them. They’ve got warlocks stashed all over Squalid territory so we won’t need to infiltrate too far. Quartermain’s the best rogue in the game, and he’ll be on point.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Hang back and fling hellfire at my target. I’ll try to protect you.”

  “Okay.”

  Mundis: Quartermain has invited you to a group.

  He joined; his first ten-man raid! His adrenaline started to spike. Four of them were rogues, two mages, himself, a chevalier, another warlock, and a medicine man. One of the rogues waved at him; Kid Twist on yet another character.

  A summons appeared. He accepted, and he was on the edge of a field, the great mountain of Imperius at twelve o’clock.

  The summons were soon done. The warlock dropped group and disappeared back into the woods. A new warlock, in Londinium, joined the group. Hayes itched to join the action as the rogues fanned out in the cardinal directions around them, while he cowered beneath a Mage’s invisibility shield. Someone gave him an Anonymizer, which he drank. His name faded from above his head.

  “I’m in their Marconi too,” Kid Twist said. “I forgot to give you the info, and it’s too late now but I’ll relay orders. For now just stay with the mage.”

  The mage mounted up and dashed across the field. The rest followed.

  The silence was maddening.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Quartermain is disarming some traps; it all seems very quiet except for the normal patrols. Wheat farms are boring; most people are happy to automate them and collect the check.”

  They soon were peering at a field of harvested wheat, the bundles laying in rows.

  “What now?”

  “We wait.”

  “Hey, I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “How are we going to steal all this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How are we going to steal this much wheat—do we have wagons?”

  “Oh. Yeah, you’re thinking about this in real life terms. Each one of those big things of wheat is one bag slot.”

  “Why the wagons and all that then?”

  “The automated system has to worry about logistics. We are magic.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “You got teleported here and are sitting in a bubble of invisibility.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t get to argue about making sense, is my point. That’s just how the game works.”

  Hayes grunted.

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “For Teabagz to show up.”

  “What?”

  “Teabagz, to show up.”

  “We doing the assassination tonight?”

  “Oh no,” Kid Twist said. “Teabagz is too paranoid to show up here without a good amount of time left on his Graverobber. But Sir Digby has better things to do than sneak into a field and jack a bunch of wheat. They also prefer fun things. Killing Teabagz and making him watch us
steal his wheat will be much more fun than him finding an empty field.”

  “Yeah, that is more fun.”

  “For a man on an insanely petty revenge quest, you sure are practical.”

  Half an hour later, Teabagz came with three other Squid Pistol members. No-Legs trailed behind, looking ragged and clownish compared to the sleek and enormous armor of Teabagz and his companions. Hayes checked their Graverobber timers; they had just refreshed. Not jacking Teabagz’s armor tonight. He also jotted down their names on a legal pad, just in case Kid Twist asked for their names later.

  The rogues circled the field, coming in behind Teabagz. Rogues always preferred to stab people in the back.

  “Get ready to mount up and charge them,” Kid Twist said.

  The mage mounted, and the rest followed, as the rogues launched stunning attacks on the Squid Pistol members. No-Legs was left alone; his gear meant he meant could be left for last.

  Their only healer, double teamed by stun-happy rogues, was useless, and the rest fell quickly under the combined attack of nine players. The rogues dispatched No-Legs as he tried to mount up and run.

  Hayes barely got a shot off before it was all over. Everyone ran to the wheat, stole it, and disappeared as the Londinium warlock summoned them back into safe territory.

  Hayes ran over to Teabagz’s corpse and humped it until the guards, alarmed by the fighting, were almost on him.

  As he clicked yes, Teabagz resurrected beside him and began to cast a spell; what type he couldn’t say, as he was back in Londinium before it landed.

  “Haha! Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “He got up and was going to light me up, but the summons went through.”

  “Nice, nice. You got your first taste of revenge. What do you think?”

  “It was lovely,” Hayes said, and he meant it.

  Chapter Twelve

  He logged into his warlock and checked his mail. He had a letter.

  REIT DISBURSMENT

  Here’s your disbursement for the month. It’s prorated because your money was only in the pool for 22 days of the period.

  20,000 gold was attached to the email.

  Jame’s eyes boggled—that was an 100% annual return on investment. How was inflation only 20%?[54] That was insane.[55]It was enough to buy a nice staff, which he did. His first purple: Herigon’s Spellweaver. It was like shaving for the first time. He got a message.

  Mad Hatter: Marconi. Now! 911!

  Hayes popped on. Mad Hatter and Tick Tock where there.

  “We’ve got a major problem,” Mad Hatter said.

  “What?”

  “Teabagz figured it out.”

  “He knows I’ve hired you?”

  “No, I guess not all of it. But he knows that Kid Twist hired Sir Digby Chicken Fuckwits to get that wheat.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, I was going to ask you that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was Quartermain using two daggers, one that constantly shoots flames, and the other that glows like ice?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Quartermain is a goddamned idiot.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s only one rogue on the whole server that has both of the Omega daggers. He might as well have left a copy of his fucking driver’s license at the crime scene. So that would be my guess.”

  “That still wouldn’t explain how he knew Twist was in on it.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard to find out if you knew Sir Digby was there. Most people don’t take their spy craft as seriously as we do. For them it was an amusing anecdote, a one-off job. Dicking over the infamous Teabagz would get the mouths wagging.”

  “So ... what?”

  “So what is that he’s trying to talk to Twist, which is a problem, because if he ever manages to sneak into the same room as KT, guess what? He’s going to recognize his voice and find out his arena partner is hiring mercenaries to rip him off, and the whole thing goes to shit. I’m blown, he’s blown, the whole thing is blown.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “I wish I’d been consulted on this shit. It’s too petty to risk the whole operation over 50,000 gold.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “I want you to pretend to be Kid Twist or Louie Lasagna or whatever his Palladium alias is and tell Teabagz to fuck off.”

  The thought of talking to Teabagz and not going off on a Liam-Neeson-in-Taken-esque speech made his stomach clinch.

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “Because, dumbass, he knows my voice. He knows Tick Tock too. You’re the only voice he hasn’t heard. You’re the only one who can do it.”

  “We can’t have people sniffing around our aliases,” Tick Tock said. “You never know when someone will start piecing too much together. This isn’t just a server we’re scamming on, this is our home server. If the Cult gets blown here, it’s blown. We’ll have to switch servers and change names. We like it here. And it would cost a small fortune. You have any idea how many characters we’d have to pay for?”

  “If I didn’t hate Teabagz so much I never would have done it,” Mad Hatter said. “But god, this is kind of fun isn’t it?”

  “You have to do it,” Tick Tock said.

  Hayes nodded.

  “I’ll try. I’m just afraid I won’t be able to control myself.”

  “Think about it this way. You’ve spent all this time and money to get revenge. If yelling at him was enough you could have done that for free ages ago. Yelling at him is doing him a favor. Don’t do him favors. Tell him it was just business, he ain’t getting his money back, and if he doesn’t like it he can sue you.”

  “Can he do that?”

  “Fuck no!”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I’m going to email you KT’s Marconi info. You get on there, you go straight to his private lounge and don’t talk to anybody else. If anybody but Teabagz messages you, act like you’re AFK. The rest of CSI doesn’t need to know we’re swapping identities.”

  He plugged in his new info and logged in. He entered Cyclone Lounge and waited.

  He got a message.

  Teabagz: We need to talk.

  He dragged Teabagz into the room.

  “Yeah?” Hayes said.

  “You stole my wheat,” Teabagz said, his stringy voice threatening to crack. Hayes almost laughed.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Give it back.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to piss me off.”

  Hayes could feel the rage building behind his eyes.

  “What if I did?”

  “That would be real stupid. You don’t pick a fight with a player like me unless you like losing.”

  Hayes laughed into the mic. “Fuck off,” Hayes said through the laughter.

  “I’ll burn down every tree you assholes own,” Teabagz said.

  “I know who I picked a fight with. If you think you and the six members of your guild who aren’t bots can take on CSI, bring it.”

  “Fuck you, I’ll get you for this!”

  “Do you realize how pathetic you are?”

  “I need that money!” Teabagz said, fighting back tears. It was music to Hayes’s ears.

  “That’s too bad. For what? Need to buy some friends?”

  “I ... fuck you. Just fuck you.”

  “As much as you rip people off, you can’t take it when it happens to you? Piss off.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! I’m going to rip your balls off,” Teabagz said, until Hayes banned his IP from the Marconi server.

  Hayes stood up and paced the room. Schadenfreude was such a fulfilling emotion.

  Colossus: What was that?

  Louie: Little personal issue. Teabagz came off on the wrong side of a deal.

  Colossus: Is it going to be a problem?

  Louie: He’s a punk.

  Colossus: Come talk to me about it. Why a
re you on Marconi? You aren’t logged in.

  Louie: Teabagz got to me before I could log in. Going to grab something to eat. BRB.

  Hayes left that thread hanging while he ate lunch. He came back and quietly left the Marconi server, hoping Colossus would forget.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Colossus[56] found him the next day. “Go download PseudoMundis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a private Mundis server.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re ready to start training for raids.”

  “Why not just go on a raid?”

  “Cause this is Mundis and you lose all your shit if you wipe. Nobody is going to want you if you aren’t at least certified. More or less guaranteed to fuck everybody over.”

  “Certified?”

  “Each class has minimum performance stats to be ready to raid. You have to meet those specs and clear the raid once to get certified by PseudoMundis. Then you’ll be ready for raids.”

  “I see.”

  “Go to it. When you’re ready let me know your user name and we’ll get you in.”

  “Do I need to go get gear over there?”

  “Everyone is issued the same level of gear to get a solid number on real talent. You just pop in and raid.”

  “Awesome. Will do.”

  An hour later, a virtual drill sergeant was yelling at him. A target dummy stood before him.

  “Your spec is awful. You are awful. Your gear is shit. You are shit. I will teach you to be adequate, which is the most your mother ever dared dream of.”

  The drill sergeant goose-stepped in front of him; Hayes couldn’t tell if it was satire or someone taking themselves way too seriously.[57]“Your job in the raid is to cause pain. That is it. It’s good that pure DPS classes exist, because it provides a home for the simple minded. Your job is to stand in one place, cast Napalm once, Hellfire four times, Napalm, Hellfire four times, Napalm, rinse and repeat until the target is dead. All the rest of your spells are bullshit intended for PVP or to seduce the mathematically challenged into wasting their time on the suboptimal. This is not a PVP camp, this is a PVE camp. Napalm, Hellfire four times, Napalm. Now give me 2000 DPS.”

  He fired the sequence, as ordered. His DPS was 1500.