The Quest (Dark Paladin Book #2) LitRPG Series

by Vasily Mahanenko

  Yaropolk! Helen called me Yaropolk also! Not the name I was given at birth!

  The doctor stormed into the room:

  “You have to leave at once! He’s getting worse!”

  It was my pulse that alarmed the doctor: it had risen to 200 beats per minute. The physician supposed that the conversation was what had stressed me and made Helen leave, leaving me alone. But he was wrong about the reason. It was not from talking. I remembered everything that had happened to me after I died on Earth. And I realized that I was within the Game. Because in my past life there was no Yaropolk, and no Monstrichello. There were Sergey Lemeshev and lance-corporal Fagov. But the Doll could not know that. The Game took great care to erase all the player’s memories of the past! Had I not been an explorer, I would have forgotten about my past as well.

  “Welcome back!” A projection of a homely guy wearing a plaid shirt appeared in front of me. Steve, my semi-transparent assistant, waved his hand in a friendly greeting.

  “Hello, Steve!” Together with the visual image of the assistant I regained the skill of silently talking to him. “What’s up?”

  “Finally you are back!” The emotions caused my subconscious to call me “ you”. “Yari, we need to return at once! The longer you stay in the mental trap, the harder it will be to get out!”

  “Got it. How do I do that?” It seemed superfluous to talk about anything else at this time.

  “First you need to destroy your mental anchor, then kill yourself.” Steve was straightforward to the point of being brutal. “That’s the only way to have your brain get back to the Game from the mental trap. You will die within your mind. It will not send you to respawn. If you tarry, you will stay in the mental trap until the treasury owner comes and gets you. Or until you die of exhaustion, but that’s unlikely. The crystal will keep supplying you with Energy for another hundred years or so.”

  “That sucks. What so you mean by destroying the anchor?” I asked skeptically.

  “Now you are surrounded by things that caused strong emotions in the past. Think about it: your family, Devir’s attack, the Doll, the absence of your arm. But the thing that holds you here most is your family…” Steve let the sentence trail off. It was clear, anyway.

  To say that I was in shock would be a huge understatement. Everything around me looked so real that I was confused – where was the true world and what was just a figment of my imagination. In addition, my blood-thirsty subconscious, which was more like a paranoiac maniac than an informed friend, added its own share of confusion.

  “Now, that hurt.” I got an immediate response from my apparently suicidal subconscious.

  “Shut up. Stuff it and turn off your delicate emotions for now!” I barked in response. “Let’s suppose you are right. I have two questions. Question number one, how do you know all this?”

  “I read it somewhere. In one of the books we downloaded at Bernard’s. I would like to note that the probability is quite high that you saw the books that your suzerain wanted to show you. He could foresee that you would need Leguria, and also that you would be caught in the mental trap. There are too many coincidences for that to be accidental.”

  I pursed my lips and reluctantly admitted:

  “That’s plausible… But that means Bernard can tell the future?” I asked with surprise, and then responded to myself: “Within the Game that would be cheating. It’s impossible to predict the future, or the player would become invincible. If anyone were allowed to do such a thing it would have to be an NPC.”

  “Don’t forget, Bernard is not a common being.” Steve continued, unabashed. "He has, within one body, two entities. Who can guarantee that the second being could not make predictions? Echo is not a player; it’s generated by the Game itself.”

  “Second question, smarty-pants,” I cut off my invisible friend. “I can’t move. How can I kill my family, Helen and myself? Come on: go for it! At this point I am ready to believe that I can do it by the power thought or by the force of me staring at them!”

  “It’s much simpler. I analyzed the possible scenarios and concluded that you need you use the Doll as a weapon.” Steve’s solution, once again, was anything but trivial.

  As if she felt that I needed her, Helen looked back in the door as soon as the doctor left the room. Steve disappeared as if I had imagined him. I was looking at Helen and felt like an idiot. Now I had to tell the girl I loved that I wanted her to kill my family, then myself and in the end, herself as well.

  “Helen, I need to talk to you. Everything you see here is not real. It’s a trap! In order to escape it, we need to die. Don’t be scared, I have thought it all through. You will turn off my life support system…”

  “You must be crazy! No!” Helen shied away from the bed, terrified. Her eyes grew wide with amazement: “You are still in shock, to say such nonsense! This will pass! Don’t you even dare to think of death. You can’t imagine what we have gone through as we did not even know if you were alive or not! Mom aged twenty years in this time, she has had a heart attack, and you, ungrateful bastard, are asking be to do what?! Is that how you care about me and your family? I spent a day and a night at your bedside, not daring to sleep after your surgery, listening to you breathing!”

  I swallowed nervously. Helen broke into tears again, covering her face with her hands and making me feel like a right bastard indeed. They were waiting for me, they were trying to nurse me back to health and here I am demanding to be killed? Who am I after this?

  The answer came instantly. I am Paladin Yaropolk! A 43rd level player with maximum allegiance to Darkness. And there is nothing but the Game! What I see in front of me is my property, and the whole purpose of its existence is to fulfill my orders and wishes!

  “Helen, as your owner, I order you to call in my mother. I will ask her a question, and if she does not answer, or if she answers “Yaropolk” you will kill her and then my sister. After this you will lock the door, barricade it against the doctors and turn off the life support system. You will stop breathing at the same moment as I. When I die you will die as well. You are my Doll and you cannot resist a direct order. Do it!”

  “Yes, master.” The tears dried up in the girl’s eyes instantly; now there was a robot in front of me. An obedient one, devoid of emotions and ready to fulfill its master’s every whim. If the trap had extracted Helen from my mind as my ideal it could not fail to give it also the appropriate characteristics of the Doll.

  Helen returned quickly to my mother.

  “Dear, Nellie said you called me?”

  “Mom, could you call me by name?” I asked and held my breath. More than anything in the world I wanted to hear the diminutive I had remembered since childhood. “Sergey-sunny-day”.

  My mother blinked several times, like a bird, and babbled:

  “Sonny, what is this? Did you forget?”

  “Mom, just tell me what my name is!”

  Scared, the woman plopped down on a chair nearby and whispered:

  “Yaropolk. sonny ‒ Yaropolk.”

  I closed my eyes in order to distance myself from my surroundings, and nodded to Helen. I heard the crunch of bones and the sound of a body falling. Then the body was dragged aside. I supposed that Helen had just broken my mother’s neck. The door opened and Helen called Sveta. A brief cry, and the same sequence of sounds. It was all over. I tried not to think about anything, pushing all thoughts away from me. Otherwise I would have gone crazy knowing that I just ordered my loved ones killed as I was right there.

  The lock clicked and some furniture was moved to the door. I heard steps approaching; then finally the life support system went silent. I started choking – without pain or fear, as the painkillers and sedatives still worked. I almost drowned in the darkness when I heard the sound of another body falling. Thanks to the Game, it seemed as though we were done with that!

  “Welcome back!” Steve did not conceal his joy as I returned into the grey fog. “That’s a clever trap. I am sure the owner ha
s already been notified about the breach of the treasury.”

  “Later, everything will wait. Where are the rest?” I did not feel cold any more, and the fog seemed quite ordinary as well.

  “I came back at the same time as you.” Steve shrugged his shoulders. “I expect they are nearby somewhere, trapped in their own visions. Shall we extract them?”

  “It’s been barely two minutes.” I checked the system time. “We can’t leave them here. Let’s find them.”

  I dropped to my knees and crawled around in a widening spiral, feeling the space around me. Even though I had defeated the trap, the fog showed no signs of dissipating. As I started the fifth circle, the search seemed pointless, but then my hand ran into something hard, and the familiar cold pierced my body. One rasping breath, and darkness swallowed my mind again.

  This time I came to a lot more easily. Nothing hurt, and a brief look showed me that I was intact and battle-worthy. A bare plain stretched around me. Red plants were waving in a slight wind while leaden clouds churned in the sky, driven by a hurricane force wind. There was not a tree, not a stone, nor even a tiny hill all the way to the horizon. Only two beings decorated the blighted landscape. A beautiful femorc, and Alard kneeling before her. His head hung down despondently, and his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Who is this, Alard?” My appearance frightened the femorc, and she stepped to the side so that the orc was now standing between us. He turned his head and looked at me listlessly.

  “A Paladin,” Alard concluded, then immediately lost any interest in me and turned away. “Don’t worry, Alune. A Paladin would not tarnish himself with unwarranted evil. There is no honor in that.”

  So the orc remembered this, even though he did not remember who I was. I kept my memory in someone else’s mental trap, which was a definite plus. I could see Steve, the game panel and properties of the object I was looking at. Why was she an object? Because the femorc’s description had a huge red note: “Alune, the Doll of the player Alard”.

  I had expected that my arrival would influence the orc’s behavior. Since there was no honor in appearing weak to a stranger. But apparently, the emotional anchor was stronger than the concepts of honor drilled into him since childhood.

  “Alard, I came for you.” I was blunt. There was no point in procrastinating.

  “For me?” the orc asked remotely, without taking his eyes off his “other half”. “But you can see, brother, I am not done.”

  “I’ll wait,” I nodded without any understanding of what he was talking about. “But don’t take too long.”

  “This I cannot promise.” Despair was growing thicker in the orc’s voice. “I am not a worthy Paladin; I cannot!”

  “Alard, listen to me: listen carefully.” The orc was already on edge. I could not guess what it was that he was unable to do, but I needed to help him immediately. The same way Steve helped me. “We are now in a mental trap of the treasury at Lecleur estate, and what you see around you is nothing but an illusion created by your fantasy. If you don’t believe my words, take a look at this video. Give me an invite. This is when we met; and this is us entering what turned out to be a trap. We are partners, and now you are going through one of the hardest moments in your life.”

  Thankfully, the orc did not resist, and extended me an invite for exchanging data. He closed his eyes, absorbed in looking through the materials prepared by Steve. First of all I needed to make sure Alard got his memory back; then we’d figure out how to get him out of here. A minute passed, then another. And another. The orc still would not open his eyes; tears kept rolling down his red face.

  “Brother Yaropolk, I remember you,” Alard’s voice was barely audible, but at least I could hear reason in it. “I will not be able to do this again.”

  “Do what?”

  “The orcs of Zagransh are a harsh people. There is no honor in being weak. When the Game grants player a Doll, he must send it into eternity. On his own. Not reject it, but kill it as his most shameful weakness. I remember this plain. This is where I sent to eternity my Alune. My life. And you know, brother, I don’t believe it when my people welcomed it as the cleansing. I do not! Light should protect the weak…not kill them! There cannot be honor in that! But I did it. That was my duty before my father, my family and my chief. So then why are they forcing me again? I … I cannot. If I don’t do it, no one will know. Right, brother? You won’t tell, right?”

  Alard was staring at me expectantly. Alune put her hand on his shoulder and was staring too. The tears kept pouring silently onto the orc’s red chest; I knew now that those were the rare tears of someone who was one of the bravest people. That’s where they got their desperate courage. If you are capable of rejecting the happiness that was presented to you, you would easily give up your life in battle. Honor is above all.

  “No, Alard. I will not tell, but Alune still has to die.” That was honest; since I represented Darkness, I was bound to be the harbinger of dark news. The orc screwed his eyes angrily at me on hearing those words. “In order to escape the mental trap you need to die together with Alune. She is your emotional anchor here. Once she dies you will be free. All that I can do for you is serve as a weapon. At this moment it does not matter at all if there is honor in that or no. My Doll killed me because I ordered her; and by my order she died together with me.”

  Considering rightfully that it’s better to show once than explain a hundred times, I showed Alard the last moments of my trap’s existence. The orc viewed the video and stood still, thinking over what he saw. Alune pulled on his shoulder:

  “There is no greater happiness than dying in my beloved’s arms. Just hold me tight, Alard. And look into my eyes till the very end, until I see eternity. I know that you will go with me and we’ll see each other again the instant we part.”

  The orc rose heavily and took Alune into a strong embrace. She put her arms around his neck. They stood there, motionless, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “You may do it, brother. Just do it quickly.”

  I activated the spikes and came to the motionless couple. My own code of honor was against hitting from the back, so I stood to the side. A sharp blow with all my strength, and Alard’s body slumped, supported by the strong femorc.

  She turned towards me, and the grimace of displeasure distorted her pretty face.

  “Moron, couldn’t you kill us both at once? You spoiled such a scene! So now what, in order to die in his arms I am supposed to hold him?”

  My jaw dropped, it was so unexpected. And that was Alard’s ideal? To hell with that! On the other hand, thinking about Logir… maybe they were all like that. As they say, don’t judge and you won’t be judged.

  So as not to upset the femorc further, I swung my fist again. This time there were no mistakes. I critically looked at the couple in their post-mortem embrace. I could say that I had fulfilled their last wish.

  Now I had to get out of here myself. The scrolls would be ideal for that. A loud pop, and I came to in Alard’s arms.

  “Thank you brother! You saved my life!” I heard the orc’s voice. "There is no honor in crying about the past. We need to live in the present for the future. Let me embrace you. It’s impossible to see anything here. How did you find me?”

  Time was too precious to waste it in explanations, so I just promised to tell him all about it later. I was certain that the castle security had notified Iven of an unauthorized entry into the treasury, and the only thing that kept him from dragging us out by the scruff of our necks was the fact that he had been summoned by Bernard. It was unclear how long my suzerain would delay the Paladin, so we needed to hurry. I told the orc what he was supposed to do and started feeling through the area trying to find the druid on one side while Alard was working on the other.

  I was the lucky one again. This third time my mind took me to a small room that looked more like a hermit’s cell. Dolgunata was sitting on a straw cot facing me and looking at a photograph. A collar lay next to her. And ev
en though tears seemed to be a necessary attribute for the emotional anchors – it had been true both for Alard and myself‒ I still had not expected to see Dolgunata crying. I was all the more confused and surprised. I just never knew what to do with crying girls. And here it was not some damsel crying: it was Dolgunata, Archibald’s strong and independent student. I would have to say the trap was excellent: it did not miss its marks.

  Doubtful what would be the best way to show myself so as not to encounter open aggression, I coughed quietly a couple of times.

  “I know that I am within a mental trap and in order to get out I need to destroy the anchor and then die myself.” Dolgunata had lived up to what was expected of her. I felt relieved now that everything was simpler than I had feared. “The problem is that there is nobody here to kill me.”

  “Have you considered suicide?” I was approaching slowly in tiny steps, led by my curiosity about the photo. But Nata quickly turned it face down.

  “I have, but it’s prohibited for me.” The druid was almost defiant now. “I can only kill myself if I am in lethal danger. Here nothing threatens me directly, so I have to stay alive.”

  “It’s a strange prohibition. Do you sometimes doubt Archibald’s sanity?” I kept staring at the back of the photo The mental trap dragged our strongest emotional anchors to the surface. What memories did the druid have so that it was visualized only as a photograph and a collar? She did not even have her Doll here. And I had hoped to see first-hand just how perverted her imagination was regarding men or women. But maybe her kink was that she was not aroused by living beings? Now my mind was definitely wandering in the wrong direction. The druid’s personal predilections were her own business. I even shook my head, chasing away any surmises of the role of that collar in Dolgunata’s life.

  “Never!” Nata replied emphatically, and smiled. “My teacher is brilliant and there are few who can compare to him.”