The Feedback Loop (3-Book Box Set): (Scifi LitRPG Series)

by Harmon Cooper

  “But industrial grade bolt cutters will work?” Zedic shakes his head.

  I snap the bolt cutters in the air. “Are you kidding me? These babies have gotten me out of more than one sticky situation in The Loop. They’re from Dirty Dave.”

  The name doesn’t register with him.

  “Long story short – he’s the best weapons dealer this side of Raytheon Shack. He can find anything, and can make anything he can’t find. I shake the bolt cutters at him. They’re made of a blackened metal with ivory grips with an engraving above each grip that reads: Corvus Oculum Corvi Non Eruit.

  “I can get the chains off – guaranteed – and our blacksmith friend ... ”

  “Blacksmith friend?” she asks. “What’s he like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Big and into metal, but not in the classical music sense, in the malleable and fusible material sense,” I tell her.

  “Oh, I was hoping he’d be smaller.”

  I glance at Zedic and he taps the invisible watch on his arm. “Yes, smaller ... ” I say as I snap the first chain. Mirror is as bizarre as her original rider, the Basileus of Steam himself. “Anyway, he’ll be able to get the actual shackles off.”

  “Fine, fine, but hurry, before I change my mind.”

  I free her left leg and quickly cut through the remaining chains. The dragon lifts her long neck into the air, opens her jaws like she’s about to spit some glittery lava and yawns instead.

  “Tired?” I ask.

  “A little, but I suppose I can nap later.”

  “So … ” I don’t realize how awkward my next question sounds until after I’ve uttered it. “Can I ride you? I mean we, I mean… “

  “Hop on,” she says, rolling her eyes. “But I’m telling you – no Yippee Yay, Cow Patty stuff, got it? This ain’t a rodeo and there for sure aren’t any Texans in the vicinity.”

  “You know about Texas?”

  “Of course I do. You sound like a Yankee, both of y’all. My previous riding companion was from Austin.”

  “Ray Steampunk was from Austin?”

  “Yes. He built a castle in West Austin near a rusty old bridge overlooking some lake. He showed me pictures.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “Well, are you going to climb aboard or what?” Mirror asks.

  I shoot Zedic a look – if he’s ever ridden a dragon, now would be the time to tell me. He gives me the ‘you go first nod’ and I oblige.

  “Alrighty.” I do a pretend stretch just to make Frances laugh (she doesn’t as far as I can tell) and follow this up with a running start towards Mirror’s leg. I’m just about to make the leap of faith when the dragon drops her snout right in front of me.

  “So, you’re an old leaping dragon-mounter from way back, are you? This ain’t like the cowboy movies, Big Hoss.”

  “There a problem with that?” I ask, seeing my own reflection in her scales. Her serpent tongue lightly flicks across her lips, startling me.

  “Most people climb up my nose and settle behind the horns on the back of my head.”

  “I’m a bit of a dragon-riding virgin here, and by a bit, I mean totally.”

  Mirror extends her neck until her chin is flat on the ground. “Climb this way,” she says, “I don’t mind.”

  I take a few steps back and start up the haughty dragon’s muzzle. The surface of her skin isn’t as smooth as it seemed like it would be. The mirrors are slightly rigid; the only way to tell this is to actually touch her. I settle behind one of the horns and wave Zedic up.

  “Your turn, pal!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  As soon as Zedic is in position behind me, Mirror glances up at the high ceiling, tilts her neck and spits silver fire at the corner, which melts away as it’d been hosed with AUS.

  “Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?” I shout.

  “I was still shackled,” she says, “and if I had made a hole in the ceiling, I’d be doused with rain. I don’t like rain… really don’t like rain.”

  “Ummm … why?”

  She looks at me like I’m someone off the short aerosbus. “Whaddya mean why? Because it’s too darn wet, that’s why.”

  She leaps into the air, and in my peripheral vision I see the blindingly stroboscopic glitter that is her wings in motion. I equip my tortoiseshell Ray Ban Wayfarers, item 402. These are the James Bond edition; one of the stems disconnects to become a lock pick and the other stem contains a hypospray loaded with LSD-lax, an incapacitating agent that induces a hallucinatory fecal hemorrhage attack.

  “This is the heat! This is amazing!” Zedic shouts as we exit the hole that Mirror’s melted in the Orcs’ Lair. I take a big breath of the outside air as the world below us rapidly shrinks and my inner ear makes its displeasure known to me. Mirror does a big loop over the water, screeches.

  “Happy?” I scream at the top of my lungs.

  She stops, flaps her wings, hovers for a moment. “Your friends seem to be winning but … I’m hungry.”

  “I thought you were a vegetarian!” I say as she folds her wings and stoops like an A-40 on a North Korean armored column.

  The ground rushes up to swat me like a fly, and just before Mirror completes her controlled descent into terrain the screen freezes and an option appears: Join the battle? With a shaky finger I select ‘yes’. The trumpet sounds and we appear on the side of Chrono, Rocket and Veenure. I don’t have time to process how strange it was to plummet towards the ground on the back of a dragon and then be given the option to join a battle.

  “A dragon?” Rocket exclaims. “Badass! I’m taking screenshots!”

  “Get off,” Mirror says.

  Zedic and I are about fifteen feet above the others. I hop off just as Mirror flutters up a few feet, and I hit the ground like an anvil, which takes five percent of my life bar.

  Veenure says, “What was the belly flop for?”

  “What?” I ask as I sit up with a grin on my face. Zedic lands lightly on his feet, right next to me.

  Frances Euphoria: Zedic, gold medal; Quantum, lead medal. Now finish this battle.

  By the time the word ‘battle’ appears in my field of vision, Mirror is already in the air and over on the enemies side, defying game rules by eating all the opposing forces like she’s slamming half-price Orc McNuggets. As the sixth goes down her gullet, the last two break and run. She turns her neck, reaches up with a hind foot and holds one nostril closed while she shoots a stream of silver fire out of the other. Both fleeing orcs dissolve.

  Even with ultra-dark Ray Bans, Mirror is painful to look at; she’s magnesium flare, arc-welding, laser-in-the-cockpit-at-night brilliant. A quick glance around confirms that it ain’t just me. Rocket, Veenure and Chrono all have a hand over their eyes and are squinting between their fingers. Zedic has taken the cue from Q – Ozzy Osbourne circles with white rims shield his eyes.

  The trumpet sounds; EXP is given and Rocket increases a level.

  “A mirrored dragon!” Chrono says as soon as we can move again.

  Mirror sits on her haunches now, licking her lips. She uncurls a rolling, earth trembling belch, and a booted orc foot escapes her lips and lands at my feet. “S’cuse me”, she says, and looks at me with big puppy eyes.

  “It’s fine,” I tell her, “I still think you’re gracious.”

  “Thanks,” she says.

  Chrono can’t seem to get over the fact that she’s mirrored. “Is there … is there any way I can analyze one of your scales?”

  Mirror growls, “Is there any way I can have a bite of your ass?”

  “Easy there, Big Glittery Lizard.”

  “I told you, he’s not my type,” she says haughtily.

  “What’s she talking about?” Chrono asks under his breath.

  “No idea. My guess is she had a bad time with a blacksmith who was big like you.”

  Veenure says, “You have your dragon now.”

  “
No, we have our dragon now.”

  “Excuse me?” Mirror stands.

  “Easy, baby,” I say, which seems to sooth her some. “You don’t belong to anyone. You’re a free agent.”

  “Really?” she asks.

  “Yes, and you can make your own decisions. Go wherever you’d like; my only request is that you let us ride you in between continents if we feel the need to travel.”

  Mirror looks at one of her nail, gnaws at the tip and examines the results. “I suppose I could help your guild. Knights of Non Compos Mentis? Do you think grammatically incorrect Latin is clever?”

  “Most Americans do,” I say.

  “I’m not American,” Chrono says.

  “Really?”

  “Brazilian.”

  “Your English is good,” I say.

  “I don’t actually speak English,” he explains. “I’m speaking to you in Portuguese; Proxima Worlds translate in real time, so players speak and hear in their native tongue.”

  Mirror yawns. “Boring. No one cares about the real world these days, or human languages for that matter. Listen, I’ll be willing to help you out, but not too much, okay? I like my nights off.”

  “Okay…” I say. “Is there a way for us to call you?”

  A leather necklace with a plum-sized mirror hanging from it appears in front of me.” I take it, catching my reflection in the mirror’s surface. I add the item to my inventory list; hello 574.

  “Shine it at the sky,” she says. “I’ll be there in a flash, as long as it’s in an open area. Don’t call me in towns or from inside a dungeon or anything. Bad idea.” She flaps her wings. “I guess I’ll see you later, if you’re lucky. Bye, Chrono.”

  Mirror sticks her snout up at him, leaves.

  “Well, that wasn’t what I expected,” I say as soon as she’s gone.

  “What’s with her and blacksmiths?” Rocket asks.

  “You’ll have to ask her, but I’d advise against doing that.”

  Veenure asks, “What now? Should we head to Polynya?”

  “Let’s reconvene tomorrow, or later today,” I tell her. “I need to login to another Proxima World to see about something.”

  “Your NPC buddies?” she removes her hood and her eyes lock on me, flash a little.

  “How’d you know?” I ask.

  “How many times did you try to summon them up and got zero-zilch-zip? Let’s call it a lucky guess. Anyhow, we could really have used those two today; the one with mind magic is especially helpful.

  “Dolly,” I say. “Anyway, we may need some backup on the new continent and I need to find out why I can’t summon them.”

  “Well, good luck. I’ll be in Aramis with Chrono if you need me.”

  ~*~

  From one Proxima World to the next. No sense in waking up to respawn – I access Tritania’s main menu and select the coordinates for The Loop. My body dematerializes in a flash and The Loop’s spawn menu appears. Naturally, I select the Mondegreen Hotel.

  Mondegreen Hotel unavailable at this time.

  WTF? I move from the hotel to Three King’s Park. I can catch a taxi from there.

  My body appears in The Loop to the crack of Back to the Future lightning. My eyes hardly have time to adjust to what I’m looking at – a gigantic yellow orb sits over the city proper, slowly sucking in anything and everything.

  “Oh shit!” I say as a bench flies past me. “Frances! Frances are you monitoring this still?” My hands come around my mouth and I shout, “FRANCES!” at the sky.

  Frances Euphoria: What is it?

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  Trashcans and a flailing Riotous fiend spin past me, rocketing towards the giant, light-filled sphere.

  Frances Euphoria: WHAT IS THAT?

  “No idea.” I say, swallowing hard.

  Frances Euphoria: What do you want me to do?

  A portal opens up in front of me and a six pack of Reapers spill out. Two more portals open and twelve more Johnny Blaze wannabes join them. The last to drop out of the sky is Reaper-and-a-Half Rollins.

  “Quantum Hughes. At last we meet again.” The Reaper’s oversized front man flexes and poses to the not-entirely-convincing-nor-particularly-enthusiastic oohs and aahs of his back-up band of boy sopranos and baton-twirling training bra brigadettes. He cracks his knuckles, rolls his shoulders, flexes his pecs, and narrows his eyes at me in patented menacing stare #5.

  “Frances! Send EVERYBODY! If Reynolds, O’Brian, and Solon are still there, slap a visor on them and send them too! You too! No dive suit, just an NV Visor.”

  Frances Euphoria: Roger!

  ~*~

  “Not so tough without your friends, are you?” Rollins says. Skeletor’s beefcake brother-in-law spits on the ground between us and bares his teeth in what I’m sure he thinks is an intimidating grimace.

  “You know, I was hoping to run into you and your butt-boy backup band at some point. You see, I got this new play pretty that’s got your name on.”

  No turn-based battles in the City of Sin.

  First I hit item 554, good ol’ Hackie. Then I scroll to my Reaper Hack, item 571, and give Brunhilde the Reaper Bitch standing to one side of him a damn good goosing, which forces her to log out. I can only hope that she enjoys the Granny Weatherwax animation and the very realistic sensation of an ass whoopin’ that feeds back through her NV Visor as Doc’s Golden Goose chases down her real-world location.

  They open fire. I dodge left, activate my AA bar and fluidly bullet-time into the air. Even so, they’ve put out enough flying metal to get some hits on my lower legs. I return fire and evaporate two more beefy tweens with the involuntary logout.

  “WHAT IS THAT THING!?” Rollins shouts and I’m just about to give him a clean shot right in the kisser when something hits me from behind. I stumble forward, roll, and return fire on my recovery. One zotzed, a dozen to go. Three more portals have opened up behind me; filling the picnic area of Three Kings Park with enough Reapers to screw in a light bulb.

  I golden goose Rollin’s turd burglars as fast as I can, but portals keep opening and more and more of these skull-faced numbnuts drop in like I’m giving away bootleg full-fat Cheetos and ice cold beer.

  Even so, I’m not doing too badly. There’s so damn many of them that’re all so eager to put the zap on good ol’ Quantum that they’re shooting each other almost as fast as I am. I’m doing that shoot and scoot thing when a sledgehammer the size of Nebraska smacks me in the back, knocks my life bar down by 25% and sends me flying ass over teakettle into one of the Park’s dead trees that hasn’t been uprooted and vacuumed up into the big yellow sucky thing in the sky yet.

  “PREPARE TO MEET YOUR DEATH!” he booms, all bloated muscle and oversized hack weapons pointed directly at me.

  Thank you advanced abilities.

  I’m out of the way just as he fires both of his weapons. I try to bring the Goosinator to bear before he can zap me down another 25%, but he gets me good and blows me through a rusty park bench.

  As I push myself to my knees, clawed white hands snag my clothes and yank me from behind.

  A gaggle of bleached people attempt to swarm me, and a whole slew of their compadres burst from the wooded area on the edge of the park and do that creepy run on all fours thing right at me, like they’re the mutant albino pack o’ starving werewolves and I’m the three-legged deer slathered in Carl’s Jr. fructose-free chipotle barbeque sauce.

  A flash of light and Blain Cooper sans chaingun steps out of the nothing. I grin.

  “Rocket!”

  No response from my usual in-game monitor; he uses his Reaper Hack like a firehose at Rollins and crew, who have suddenly lost interest in offensive operations and are scattering like roaches when the bathroom light comes on.

  Another flash and Zedic steps out, looking badder than Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. His hair is Jheri-curled and he’s in a gray suit with creases sharp enough to cut Gorilla Glass. A Reaper Hack forms on his left
arm and another hack forms on his right. He starts a-blasting, forcing four Reapers to logout in a matter of seconds.

  One of the bleachies bites into the back of my arm. Hackie handles the rest. A spike shoots out of my elbow and impales the bleached man’s shoulder.

  “Don’t kill him!” I shout as I push myself to my feet.

  PLEASE!?

  “No!” I whip my arm away and unspike Mr. Bitey.

  Another flash of light and Frances Euphoria appears on the battlefield, her red hair trailing behind her, killer goose-hacks on both arms.

  “I need to find Dolly and Aiden!” I tell them.

  “We’ll handle things here,” she says as she fires both weapons and forces a pair of Rollins’ posse into logginus interuptus.

  Rollins shouted orders have an increasingly hysterical tone; his circle of circle-jerking jerk-offs are logging out en masse. Once again, I’ve ruined his big moment – and I’m about to ruin it even more.

  “One last thing!”

  Rollins turns and I zap him right in the face with the Reaper Hack.

  “Your location is mine,” I say as his body dissipates. “And payback is a bitch.”

  Incoming from the Reaper’s side of the field forces me to cut my Macho Man act short.

  The four of us take cover behind the plinth of the remains of Bernini’s David, which is gone from the knees up now. It was the only real work of art in the city other than the Picasso in Dolly’s bedroom …

  Dolly’s bedroom!

  I turn to Frances. “I’m going to Chinatown. You stay here and finish off the Reapers. Don’t shoot at the bleached people,” I remind Zedic and Rocket.

  “Got it!” Rocket says.

  “You guys see that giant sphere growing on the horizon?”

  “Couldn’t miss it!” Zedic fires at a Reaper. “Got one! Doc really hooked us up with this new tech.”

  “If it gets much larger or does anything to indicate it’s about to blow, logout. Do not try and find me.”

  Frances presses forward and kisses me. “Good luck,” she says. I turn to find Rocket staring at me with big bug eyes. “Not a word,” I tell him.