Dead Man Gaming: A LitRPG Series

by A. J. Markam

  “Naw, I come in here for the pretty surroundings while I take a dump. Of course I mine it and sell it. Then I trade out on the currency exchanges.”

  “So you’re making a living off of this?” Slothfart asked, impressed.

  “Yup.”

  “How much, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I do, but I’ll tell you anyway,” the rat said in a voice that suggested he didn’t mind it at all. In fact, he sounded inordinately proud. “Four large a week.”

  “Four thousand dollars?!”

  “Yup.”

  “But that’s over a thousand pounds of this stuff a week,” Jen said.

  “Look at you – good at math and a great rack.”

  Jen raised one hand, and frost crystals started forming on her fingers. “One more crack like that and you’re going to find yourself inside a crystal instead of mining them.”

  “Okay, okay – jeez,” the rat muttered. “Try to give a broad a compliment…”

  “So, what – you just mine all day?”

  The rat shrugged. “Yeah, I grind – but I hate cubicles and the nine to five. And I don’t got a friggin’ boss down here.”

  “I think we’re in the wrong business,” Richard said to everyone else in the group.

  “I know I am,” Slothfart said, then joked, “I guess you escaped the rat race, huh?”

  “That was funny the first 200 times I heard it, Avocado Head.”

  Before Slothfart could say anything, Jen jumped back in. “I would’ve thought the game would try to discourage you from mining here, especially with all the quests going on nearby.”

  “Hell no – nobody spends a long time in these caverns, because there’s nothing crazy valuable here. Everybody’s trying to mine platinum and mithril.” The Tunneller shook his head. “Too hard. Not enough of it, the veins are too far apart, and what little there is, people are fighting over it like dogs. Roseacite’s super easy. The only problem is getting it to market. But I got a team of pack mules to haul it back to Sillomar. Gonna hire a team of workers soon, then two teams and more mules, and then I’ll retire to a beach in Vosteroth while they do all the work.”

  “Vosteroth?” I whispered.

  “Beautiful coastline in the game,” Jen explained.

  “Hey, is that adamantine?” Slothfart asked, pointing at the rat’s pick.

  “…yeah – so?” the rat asked as he hid it behind his body. “I ain’t sellin’ it.”

  “Don’t worry, dude, I don’t want your pick. I’m not into mining.”

  “Yes,” Russell said. “He’s a tailor.”

  That got the Tunneller laughing. “A tailor?! Oh my God – seriously?!”

  The rat, Russell, and Richard all started laughing.

  Slothfart grabbed the handle of his scimitar. “I changed my mind – maybe I do want to get into mining,” the orc growled.

  The Tunneller stepped back into a defensive crouch.

  “Chill, Seth,” Jen said, then looked at the rat. “We’re just passing through. We’ll leave you to your mining.”

  “You do that. Go on, get out!”

  “Wow,” Jen said as we walked through the cavern and exited into a tunnel. “I can see why he spends all his time underground – nobody else wants to be around him.”

  At the time I didn’t think too much of it. The Tunneller was just another player, one who had found a really strange niche in this giant world that he could exploit for his own purposes. This was a job for him – but like he said, it was a better job than working in a cubicle 9 to 5.

  And it wouldn’t get you six years in jail.

  I forgot about him as soon as we left the cavern, and I didn’t think about him again until later, when I suddenly had need of his talents.

  47

  The mine was just the first in a long line of quests we took over the next several days. Things went quickly. We all leveled up four times, and I even got a fifth by doing a little extra grinding while everybody else logged out at night.

  There was a dungeon at the end of it all, which was grueling, but we cleared it with only a few deaths (and resurrections in the mining camp’s tiny graveyard). The dungeon had an underground demon lord who made his home in a vein of magma that cut through the mine, and he was conspiring to bring over a legion of minions from the underworld. The whole thing was pretty spectacular, especially some of the fights next to glowing rivers of lava – but it was incredibly hot. Let’s just say we were all glad to have a Frost Mage with us.

  The demons tended to jump into the lava to avoid our attacks like water monsters might jump in a lake. One of the best uses of Jen’s power was when she froze the slow-moving stream of lava and trapped a ton of demons, allowing me, Russell, and Slothfart to run across the crystallized rock and lop off their heads.

  I fought just as well as the others, and became a valuable part of the team. I routinely helped bring down the mini-bosses, and did my best to help with the final demon lord at the end.

  After it was all over, we picked up another couple of quests from people at the mining camp – a cook who needed help hunting bear for the camp stew, which led to a trapper who paid us to accompany him up-river, which led to a confrontation with a tribe of what I can only refer to fishlike pygmies. That was a pretty wild one.

  Along the way, I picked up even more skills. There was Lightning Shiv, which was the ability to stab people 10 times in one second, knocking off a large number of their hit points. I could do it in either Stealth mode or full visibility. Then there was Cutthroat, the ability to sneak up behind an enemy in Stealth and slit their throat. Gruesome, but definitely effective. My knife-throwing skills became deadlier and more damaging, and I got increased agility to climb and jump.

  Not only that, but I leveled up rapidly in Lock Picking and Enchanting. Every night when the others would go to bed, I would typically spend five or six hours practicing on the lockbox. At the end of two weeks, I had leveled up to 500 in both. I even had to go back to Sillomar and buy a new cube with even more advanced magical locks – which wasn’t a problem, because I had done pretty well for myself financially on all the quests.

  The others unlocked new abilities as they leveled up, too. Jen got a few new ice attacks. She also received the ability to detect if magic was being used anywhere. She could look at a structure, or an object, or even the ground, and see magic in glowing, color-coded lights. Dark blue was water, light blue was frost, orange was fire, yellow was light magic, white was air, copper-colored was earth, and black was dark magic. There were certain patterns and structures made of magic that she learned to discern, too – protections, barriers, that sort of thing – but all of them were woven out of the fundamental types of magic. The way she described it sounded kind of cool: like her regular vision would get overlaid with these glowing lines and spheres of color. She could even see through things – for instance, she could look down at the ground and see lines of mystic energy pulsing fifty feet below her. She could gaze out at Sillomar at night and see a thousand points of glowing color, from mages to priests to shamans to all the spells they were casting.

  But her most impressive new ability was teleportation. After ten seconds of casting, she could create a portal that could take her anywhere in the world as long as she had been there before or could physically see it. It was a long cool-down – 30 minutes between jumps – so she could only use it once in battle. In fact, that was how we defeated the pygmy tribe – we were all outnumbered and about to die, and she teleported directly behind them and wiped them out with the frost Ray.

  “When are you going to be able to teleport all of us somewhere?” Slothfart asked.

  “At Level 25 I can teleport a bunch of stuff, like supplies. At 30 I can teleport one other person, and at 35 I can do a group of six.”

  “Good – work on that, because I’m tired of – ”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know – you’re tired of walking. You’re almost at level 20 – suck it up.”

  True to S
lothfart’s word, the first thing we did when we hit Level 20 was go to the nearest stable in Sillomar and train to ride. By that point, I was just ten thousand experience points away from the others, so I grinded the night before so that we could all get our mounts together.

  All the riding trainer had for sale were horses. Apparently you could buy other mounts within the game, but they didn’t really come with any extra benefits until you got up to level 40. That was the point when you could buy a flying mount and even incorporate things like fire-breathing or certain types of air strikes.

  And the best thing about the mounts? You actually got a magical spell so you could summon or get rid of them in a puff of smoke. Which meant you didn’t have to lead them around by a rope when you didn’t need them, or tie them up outside of bars, or deal with plops of horse shit. You only had to feed and water them whenever they got low on hit points – and if they were low and it wasn’t convenient, you just sent them away for a while until it was convenient. Didn’t even have to store them in a magical bag. Need a horse? Just press the icon. It was the closest thing to an ATM possible, except the spell dispensed horses, not money, and accepted deposits when you didn’t need it anymore.

  Of course, it all cost a crapload of money – but it was worth it. With the new horses, we could cover distances twice as fast. We began ranging even farther away from Sillomar, picking up quests in towns that were as far away as 20 or 30 miles.

  Everybody else in the group started saying that they wanted to venture out to another region, that they were getting tired of Sillomar, but I kept begging, “Please, just one more week? One more week and I should be good.”

  I figured that was long enough to know whether or not Arkova could come through with the money to buy my way into the Shadow Bank. And to level up enough where my plan might work.

  “This is a democracy,” Slothfart said, “and I say we hold a vote. All in favor of leaving this territory – ”

  “Aye,” said everybody but me.

  Damn it.

  “Sorry, dude,” Slothfart said. “That’s democracy. Sucks balls sometimes, I know.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Then I’ll have to stay here. I can meet up with you guys later, but – ”

  That seemed to genuinely shock him. “Dude, you can’t secede from the union! We fought a war about that! ”

  “Actually, the United States of America fought a war. Our group has not… as yet,” Richard pointed out.

  “Doesn’t matter – you gotta do what democracy says!”

  “I’m sorry guys, but I have to stay.”

  “Why?”

  Because I have to start scouting out the Shadow Bank, and see if I can sneak in after the orcs and figure out which storerooms they rent.

  Oh yeah – AND I have to come up with a plan.

  Instead I told them what I always told them: “Baby mama.”

  “Baby mama drama,” Russell said, pleased with his rhyme.

  I shook my head in resignation. I hated lying to them, but it was turning into a useful fiction. An all-purpose excuse, if you will.

  Jen sighed heavily. “Why can’t she leave Sillomar?”

  “Her boyfriend basically does his thing here.” Well, if her boyfriends are Russian gangsters disguised as orcs…

  “We can’t stay here forever.”

  “I don’t want to. And I don’t have to. I just need a little longer.”

  “How much longer?”

  “A week. Two at most,” I said thinking of the deadline for the entire program Arkova had talked about. The point at which the project got taken away from her.

  “All right… I guess I can stick around,” she acquiesced. “For a week. After that we’ve got to reevaluate.”

  “Man, this sucks,” Slothfart grumbled. “Hawaii’s not supposed to be able to tell all the other states what to do.”

  “Hawaii?” I asked.

  Richard seemed to share my bewilderment. “He doesn’t look like he’s of Polynesian dissent. And he’s the least suntanned person I’ve ever seen.”

  “Hawaii – newest state in the union?” Slothfart asked. “Jimmy, newest guy in the group? DUH.”

  “That was a bit of a stretch,” Richard said mildly.

  “Not for a pothead,” Russell said.

  “Whatever’s going on with your ex, wrap it up soon,” Jen advised me, “or we really will have to leave you behind. And I, for one, would prefer not to do that.”

  Me either.

  In addition to my questing adventures with the group, things were going over really well with Jen, too. We never got intimate, if you know what I mean – but we made out several times over the course of the week. It was a little hard when there were five of us hanging around the campfire, so those nights we basically just talked a lot – but I loved talking to her. She was funny, smart, sweet, and sassy. She didn’t take shit off of anybody, and she was really, really interesting. She was into scuba diving in real life, and wanted to take up hang gliding. Getting laid off from her job had put the kibosh on that, so she had dived into the game while she was looking for the job.

  Lucky for me.

  Things moved slowly – and I actually liked that. If she had just been some girl back in the real world, I would have tried to rush her into bed at every opportunity. But because we really couldn’t do much more than talk half the time, I really got to know her. And the more I got to know her, the more I cared for her. And the more I cared for her, the more I really wanted out from underneath the FBI’s thumb.

  When all this was over, I was thinking about taking a nice long trip to San Francisco.

  48

  There was one thing that was a pain in my ass, though.

  Arkova never stopped her nightly checkups on me – even when I was out in the wilderness, sleeping around a campfire with my friends. (Technically I guess I was staying up late after they had logged off, since I never had to sleep.)

  She would come to me on her manticore and pace back and forth frantically. “You can’t be wasting your time out here! If we’re going to do something as insane as robbing the Shadow Bank – ”

  “Then I need to level up. I can’t go in there as a Level 20. It’ll be suicide.”

  “It’s suicide already!”

  “What’s a couple more weeks?”

  “We lose the case in a week and a half,” she said. “You have to do the plan by then. We have no other choice.”

  “Did you get your asshole boss’s okay for five million gold?”

  She grimaced. “No, not yet.”

  “Then why are you even bothering me with this?” I asked angrily.

  “If that doesn’t go through, we need a plan B!”

  “There is no plan B!” I yelled. “Don’t you get it? I burned any normal chance of getting in. That’s my fault, and I’m sorry – but if you’re going to send me back to prison, then send me back to prison and quit yanking my chain about it. Give me the tools I need to succeed, or get it over with and send me back!”

  She glared at me. “You’re sure you can pull it off if I get you the money?”

  “No, I’m not sure of anything,” I said as I went back to practicing on my lockbox. “But I think it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

  “This is insane. I can’t believe I’m even going along with this.”

  I’d realized something about my FBI handler: she was way more invested in pulling this off than I was. Once I’d accepted that I was probably going back to prison, I got a sort of peace about it. I was willing to put my life and freedom on the line, but I couldn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat. I needed the FBI to back me up so I could do the damn job. They wanted me to break into Fort Knox, but they wanted me to do it with a handsaw and some bubblegum – which wasn’t going to happen.

  I think Arkova knew that. And she was feeling guilty about not being able to deliver on her end.

  “Look,” I said, “if you come up with some great new idea about how to break into the orcs’ gang without
doing what I’m suggesting, I’m all ears.”

  She didn’t have anything else to say.

  “Well then – quit bugging me until you can get the five million gold,” I snapped.

  She stopped bothering me after that.

  At least for a couple of nights.

  49

  Amidst all the amazing stuff that happened in the game, there was one awful thing that happened.

  I had been begging Arkova to let me go talk to my family face-to-face for a while. After two weeks of phone calls and lying to them about another made-up romance in Vegas (I noticed I was using imaginary girlfriends a lot to cover for my activities), my FBI handler finally relented.

  “If you screw me on this – ”

  “Then I’m going to prison for life, and you’re going to arrest my brother, too. Don’t worry, I’m not going to screw you.”

  She gave me a lift to my mom’s house but dropped me off a quarter mile away. I had enough money to get a taxi back, and that was about it. I would’ve taken Uber, but with Uber you needed a credit card, and I didn’t have one, and Arkova wasn’t about to loan me hers – so it was going to be a cab instead.

  I though briefly about getting a gun from an old acquaintance and showing up at Rod’s door, but that story wouldn’t end happily.

  One day, though. One day I’d get my revenge, whatever form it took.

  Anyway, I showed up at my mom’s house at 9 o’clock at night.

  I knocked on the door, and my brother answered.

  Mr. ‘Lying To The Family About His Sports Book’ Hypocrite.

  Immediately his face became a mask of anger and resentment. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Nice to see you too, Danny. I told you – Vegas.”

  “Bullshit. Your probation officer wouldn’t let you stay three weeks in Vegas. You probably broke parole the first time you stepped outside of California.”

  From behind him in the house, I heard my grandmother cry out in Russian, “Is that Jimmy? Jimmy, is that you?”