Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Perfect.” I bent down and began to rifle through the man’s pockets.

  “I.. won’t tell you... anything!” He tried to spit on me as I worked, but only succeeded in spraying a little more blood on my already-sticky armor.

  “It’s the Vulkan Keep dungeons for you, foreigner. We’ll find a way to get you squawking,” the guard closest to me said.

  I found something small and metal in one of his pockets, and took it out. Then frowned. It was a brooch, some kind of token made of gold… but it was in the shape of the Ryuko corporate logo, sans text. I tried bringing up an item description, but all I got was a blank screen.

  “What the hell is this?” I demanded.

  The man spat at me again.

  When you work in security, there’s one thing you never learn to tolerate: spitting. Brawling? Whatever. Cursing? I’d heard it all. Spitting was my hard limit, so when this guy hawked a third time, I stabbed him in the leg with the pin of the brooch. His eyes flew open, and he spat all over himself instead of me.

  “My dragon’s claw only needs to stick in about a quarter of an inch to kill you,” I said, grabbing him by the hair. “Start talking. Who hired you? And what is this?”

  “Kill me,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll die before I talk. Whatever you people do to me, my soul will be safe from the Caul. I’ll be reborn by the will of the Architect, and will live forever!”

  “What the fuck are you babbling on about?” Suri looked down. “C’mon, Hector. Let’s just have the guards take this joker.”

  “By your leave, Kingswoman.” The guardsman close to us saluted and took a pair of manacles off his belt.

  I nodded, and let go of the man’s head to stand up. But as I was backing off, he gave me a piercing, defiant look, lunged up against Karalti’s claw, and slashed his artery wide open on the razor-sharp edge.

  Chapter 15

  Karalti yelped out in surprise, moving her foot away, but it was too late. The pressurized spray of blood burst from his slit carotid and painted her entire belly scarlet. A guard pushed me aside, applying a healing item to his neck, but not in time. The Mercenary Leader burbled and frothed as his eyes rolled back. There was no healing that wound.

  Suri grimaced. “Guess he wasn’t so mercenary after all.”

  “Fuck!” Cursing, I bent down and retrieved the brooch. “Motherfucker!”

  “Is this connected to the Slayer?” The guard looked back up at us, shaken. He was still trying to stop the bleeding by leaning on the saturated bandage he’d pressed down.

  I glanced aside at Suri. “Not to my knowledge. These men were Ilian.”

  “We’ll search the bodies and report to the Volod’s Castellan.” Another burly guard wandered up. His voice was deep and gravelly, with a thick Eastern European accent. “You are exempted from questioning, because you carry the King’s Mark… but try not to cause more trouble. There was magic used here. We must close the street.”

  I swallowed and nodded, looking back at the scattered carnage down along the hill. The bodies were still there. Normally, bodies quickly dissolved and turned into loot sacks that could be gathered, but these bodies had not. I suspected that was because we were in a city.

  “C’mon,” Suri said to me. “Let’s go meet with Andrik. You can give him that report on what you found out about the Slayer. It might buy us an extension on the investigation. We need more than two days.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” I pocketed the Ryuko logo brooch, and as I did, I brushed against the honeybee pendant on its chain.

  There was a chirp from behind us, and I turned to see Cutthroat standing there like a giant black canary. The hookwing had a man’s severed arm hanging from her jaws. When Suri stared at her, Cutthroat trotted up to us and began to plunge and rear her head, her bladed winglets fluttering against her ribs.

  “Is she…?” I watched in mild disbelief, reaching out to Karalti as she came up alongside me. “Is she flirting with you?”

  Suri eyed her. “Is that what you’re doing? Gonna sexy dance at me?”

  “Purrr! Purrr!” Cutthroat wagged her head up and down. The hand at the end of the arm flapped in time with her dance.

  “There is no way this is gonna work. We have incompatible genitals, Cutthroat.”Suri chuckled as the hookwing deposited the arm at her feet, and motioned back with her head and hands before stepping in to scratch the hookwing around the edge of her jaw and ear. Cutthroat’s feathers lifted, turning her into a giant black puffball.

  “Well, there’s my quote of the day,” I remarked.

  Karalti hopped from foot to foot with excitement. “I should do that for you with a burek!”

  “No. No mating dance. For one thing, you are way underage. For another, I will refuse to be known across the realm as Hector Dragonfucker.” I groaned, and then something occurred to me. “But that reminds me. You’re big enough to carry me at a walk now. We can’t fly, but… what do you say to letting me ride you? Platonically.”

  “Yeah!” Karalti bobbed her head eagerly. “No more stinky hookwing! What’s ‘platonic’?”

  “You know...” I said, watching as Suri caught Cutthroat’s reins with the other hand. “She’s yours, if you want her.”

  “What?” Suri turned to look back at me.

  I grinned, and gestured at the dinosaur as she began to pant. “That big old bitch has hated me and everyone else who’s ever gone near her, but she’s decided that you’re The One. You’re her waifu. Regardless of the reality, she now fully believes your genitals are compatible. You might as well make your twu love official.”

  For a moment, I could tell that Suri was trying to figure out if this was some kind of trap. But then she reached out and absently scritched Cutthroat on the neck.

  “What d’ya want for her?” Suri asked.

  “Party up with me and work together like an adult doing adulty things,” I replied. “And if it doesn’t suit you, leave.”

  Suri gave a testy little sigh. She looked me up and down, and shrugged a shoulder.

  “Two rules,” she replied. “You don’t try anything that could get your hands cut off. And I can leave the party when I want, wherever I want, no questions asked. No nagging, no bullshit. Alright?”

  “Fine with me.”

  She nodded, and pulled herself into the saddle. I took that as a yes.

  ***

  My Ride skill was high enough that I didn’t need a saddle to stay on Karalti while she was on the ground, but I couldn’t sit astride her like a horse. Her back was a completely different shape than Cutthroat’s: narrower, straighter and harder, with a pronounced spinal ridge that ran from the base of her neck and then grew up into hard, bony plates on her rump. At her current size, neither feature was particularly friendly to male anatomy.

  “I feel so strong now!” she enthused, jostling me from side to side as she trotted up through the University District. “But you need to eat less bread. You’re fat.”

  I nearly retorted with the incredibly mature ‘your mom is fat’, but in light of recent historical events, it was in pretty poor taste. “I’ll eat all the burek I like, Tidbit. Now hang on, I have to distribute some points.”

  I’d been waiting to hit Level 10 for a while now. Several new combat abilities opened up, plus you had the option to take a second Advanced Path – if you wanted to. More importantly, you got a once-off opportunity to redistribute your Ability Points. This was great, because I’d learned a lot about my Dark Lancer class in the last five levels and gotten a sense of what skills and stats I wanted to focus on. I didn’t have enough time or concentration to sit and redistribute everything properly right now, so I spent my Ability Points on upgrading Umbra Blast and Blood Sprint, my strongest offensive abilities. I would redistribute them later; I had a strategy for my ‘final build’, but would lock it in when I had more time.

  “Hey, Hector?” Karalti’s voice intruded into my thoughts. “Aren’t I too big to be a Tidbit now?”

  “I don’t care how big you
get. When you’re some big shot queen matriarch with a half-dozen boy dragons doing your manicures and feeding you grapes off a plate-”

  “Eww!” Karalti broke out in helpless laughter.

  “- Old Man Hector is going to tell your boyfriends how he was there wiping half-digested cat poop off your little chin.” I drew out the amulet Kanzo had dropped the night before, getting a good look at it. It was just like Rin’s, which struck me as odd. Maybe I was just a filthy capitalist accustomed to the excess of corporate CEOs, but I didn’t understand why a craftmaster would wear the exact same iron pendant as his students. For a crafting system that had defined ranks, it seemed odd that the ranks weren’t indicated by different pendants, or at least different crafting materials for the same design.

  “That poop thing only happened once!”

  “Believe me, Karalti. Once was enough for me to remember that smell forever.”

  “Hate to tell you, but your dragon’s giggling.” Suri had gotten Cutthroat’s saddle and tack with the animal herself. The Berserker wasn’t a particularly good rider, but she was able to hold her seat, and Cutthroat - while still sullen to have anyone on her back - was far better behaved with Suri than she ever was with me, but she still had to wear her muzzle.

  “Yeah, she’s overcome by my razor wit,” I replied. “What do you make of this?”

  “What is it?” Suri took the pendant as I reached out and handed it over.

  “This fell off the guy I was beating on last night. His apprentice claims it’s his maker’s mark.”

  “I recognize it,” Suri said, looking over it. “The Volod has some carriages with this symbol on it. Belongs to one of the Royal Craftsmen. Nice bit of work.”

  That lined up with what Rin had told me, at least. “Yeah. He and all his apprentices wear the same necklace. My menu has logged it as a piece of evidence we need to complete the Slayer of Taltos questline. Maybe we could find a mage who could track Kanzo with it?”

  “Maybe.” With the reins resting in one hand, Suri began to manipulate the strange little pendant with the fingers of the other. “Huh.”

  “What?” I glanced over, just as the pendant bent forward, and the ‘stinger’ of the bee popped out from the end of its abdomen.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s tricky.” She hooked her fingernail into the gap in the bee’s back, pulling a tiny switch forward so that the pendant straightened and the illusion of an insect braced around a solid iron rod was back in place.

  “You are some kind of wizard, aren’t you? First you seduce my hookwing, and now you’re giving my bee an erection.”

  Suri chuckled, flicking the pendant in half again. “Make that fuckin’ party request already, won’t you?”

  Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that. I brought up my HUD and queried ‘Form Party’ while Suri held the pendant up and squinted to examine it. I sent the request, and a few seconds later, she joined. My eyes bugged a bit when I saw her level, class, and abilities.

  “Holy fucking shit.” I gaped, bringing up her sheet. “You have forty strength? At Level 17?”

  “Yup.”

  “Forty. Four zero.”

  “Yup.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Karalti doesn’t have fifty strength points, and she’s a fucking dragon. How long have you been playing in Archemi?”

  “Playing? You off your meds again, mate?” she replied laconically. “But you know what? I think this necklace you found is a key. Have a close look at the stinger.”

  She held the pendant back to me. I leaned over and snatched it by the chain, frowning. The stinger of the bee wasn’t actually sharpened: it was a thin triangular strut that fit into the iron rod that formed the pendant’s spine, just long enough that it nested inside the bottom part of it. The little thing was polished smooth, and etched with hair-thin designs around an oddly symmetrical pattern of tiny holes.

  “See those little dots on it?” Suri asked, keeping an eye on the road. “Reminds me of a hexagonal laser-patterned matrix. My bet is that our master craftsman has some kind of mage lock rigged up that can read the Words of Power that are transcoded into those dots.”

  I stared at her in blank disbelief for a couple of seconds.

  “What?” She glared back.

  “Okay, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re some kind of min-maxed barbarian chick born in medieval Dakhdir. But know what a hexagonal laser-pattern matrix is?” I asked.

  “Sure I do,” she replied. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Okay. Can you actually describe a laser?”

  “It’s… It’s…” The woman’s eyes glazed over briefly. “Some magitech artificer thing, I don’t bloody know. I’m not a wizard.”

  I puzzled over that in the awkward pause that followed, and then it occurred to me. Whatever was up with Suri, I could probably talk to her using the language of Archemi’s mythos. “You know, I think I know what’s going on here. You’re Starborn, right?”

  “That’s what people keep saying.” She looked away uncomfortably.

  “You probably know because of one of your, uhh, ‘past lives’. You know how we Starborn types remember bits and pieces of those?”

  “Probably. Which is why I don’t give a shit. This life’s been more than enough to keep me busy.”

  “Right. Okay then.” I sighed. “So, what do you want to do? Go to the palace, or go back to Rin’s shop and see if there’s something this key fits? The more evidence we can take back to the Volod, the better.”

  “I reckon we could go check out Rin’s place. We’re not in any rush. There’s forty-six hours left on the clock.” Suri ran her tongue over her teeth, and reined Cutthroat to a slow walk. We were at the top of the hill, about to cross the grand bridge that led to the gatehouse in front of Vulkan Keep. “You have a point about the pogrom thing. Andrik’s alright, but he’s a racist cunt. Took a while to even come around to me, which is odd because of how keen he’s been.”

  “Keen?”

  “Keen, as in he’s got the hots for me.”

  I shook my head and blinked a couple of times. “What?”

  Suri gave a testy little sigh. “He wants to sleep with me, idiot.”

  I framed my lips around a silent ‘Oh’ and nodded.

  “Anyway. Even if we bring him the Slayer’s head in a bag, he’s gonna want to take it out on all non-humans... but if we bring him evidence that this guy is acting alone, it makes it easier to argue that it’s only one or two Mercurions involved.”

  “That was what I was thinking.” I nodded, and tapped Karalti on the neck. “Time to turn around and head back to Rin’s.”

  Karalti made a noise of disgust. “I’m hungry. I wish we could just fly there.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Won’t be long now. But you know what this means, right?”

  “Wat?”

  “We have to start flight training. And you’ll be carrying a hell of a lot more than forty pounds.”

  “UGH.”

  ***

  It was mid-afternoon by the time we reached Rin’s workshop. It was shuttered, and the door was locked. The lock didn’t look anything like the little pendant key.

  “Bugger.” Suri examined it for a minute or so, twitched her lips, and then took a small rolled-up pouch from thin air. “Spot for me. I think I can open this.”

  “What? You think we should just like… break in?” I raised my eyebrows. “I’m not okay with that. Rin’s not a bad person.”

  “You said she interfered in an arrest,” Suri replied. “I’m not okay with that. Until proven otherwise, she’s an accomplice to a serial killer. Accomplices have every reason to seem like good people. I’d rather search the house without her hovering around.”

  She had a point there. Resigned, I took up position to watch the alley. “How does a Berserker learn how to pick locks?”

  “Sometimes you have to ‘zerk with finesse,” she replied primly.

  “Finzerking? Bersiness?” I wrinkled my nose.

 
There was clicking and scraping from behind me, then a muffled ‘click’. I turned in anticipation, only to see Suri get to her feet, fists balled.

  “ARRRRGH!” She smashed the door in with one booted foot, nearly taking it off its hinges. I jumped about a foot in the air. Cutthroat hissed. Even Karalti flinched.

  “What was that about finesse?” I asked, following Suri inside as she stalked ahead.

  “Damn thing’s Master quality. Broke my last couple of lockpicks,” she muttered.

  “Well, I guess 40 Strength makes anything finessable,” I said, strolling in after her.

  “Wait! Hector!” Karalti made a honking sound of confusion and distress behind us. “I can’t- I’m stuck!”

  I turned to see my dragon’s head and shoulders wedged into the doorjamb to either side. She was looking at me with pitiful desperation, her horns flat against her head.

  “Aww shit. Hang on.” I went back to her as she shoved against the confines of the door. It was solid stone, and it wasn’t budging. Her wings were too wide for her to fit. “Whoa there, girl…”

  My little Tidbit, who had only been a bit larger than a cat last week, was now the same size as my war-bred hookwing. There was no way she was getting in here. As I walked over to her, she strained her head toward me, huffing blisteringly hot air across my face and neck.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said, trying to soothe her. “It’s okay, girl. But you’re going to have to stay outside.”

  “Stay outside!? What if something happens to you inside!?” She butted in against the stone, then swiveled her head around on her long neck. “I can’t -Hey! There’s another way in over there!”

  I followed her line of sight. It was true: there was a pair of carriage doors at the other end of the workshop. But that still didn’t mean she was going to be able to follow me around the way that she had three levels ago.

  I reached up, and cupped her jaws to either side. “It’s too small in here for you, Karalti,” I said firmly. “You’re growing, and getting stronger means getting bigger. We knew this was going to happen someday, and that day is now here. Go wait outside.”

  To my surprise, she hissed at me, jaws open wide, and tried to push through – but it was no use. She couldn’t even get proper leverage in the narrow alleyway. Karalti sat down on her haunches right inside the doorway, throwing her head from side to side like a toddler having a tantrum. “I don’t want to be left out!”