Unlucky Dead: A LitRPG Adventure (Liorel Online Book 1)

by M B Reid

  By the time he’d stomped his way up-stream to meet me most of his anger had dissipated.

  “You couldn’t have warned me?” He asked, giving me a playful punch on the shoulder.

  “You made it didn’t you?” I shrugged.

  “Okay, stupid question. Should we just chill out here in this nice bright sun, at least until we dry off, or should we go into the spooky woods?” Logan asked.

  I’d been examining the woods while I waited for him, and spooky did indeed sum them up. The trees were tall and spindly, with a scarce splattering of brown leaves. The branches had grey bark that almost looked like scales. They simultaneously looked dead - as if they were rotting from their core - and dormant, like a deciduous tree during winter.

  “My clothes aren’t making me cold. There’s no reason not to check it out, right?” I was a little impatient after spending the last five minutes or so waiting for Logan to catch up.

  “Besides, we’re in a beginner area of the game. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Fine. Just let me grab my stuff.” His own version of Jira had dropped his backpack next to me before winking out of existence. Logan fished out his wand and then paused.

  “You know what’s weird? I’m starting to feel hungry.” He said.

  I hadn’t realised it until that moment, but I was starting to feel hungry as well. Which made zero sense, since I didn’t have functional organs. I fished the loaf of bread out of my backpack.

  “Yeah, so am I. I guess we need to eat here.” I took a massive bite out of the bread. It was pretty tasteless, but had a satisfying crunch to the outside, and just the right level of firmness on the inside. In fact, it seemed to be the perfect loaf of bread - as far as the texture was concerned anyway. Flavour-wise it was bland, but what could I expect from a loaf of plain bread that had been rattling around in my backpack for god knows how long.

  “I could kill for a cheeseburger right now” Logan muttered as he nibbled at the edge of his loaf.

  I’d known Logan for several years now, and I couldn’t recall a single time where he had eaten ‘normal’ food. He was the king of takeout. I wasn’t entirely sure if that was all he ate, or just what he did when he had visitors, but I was fairly confident he couldn’t cook for himself.

  “Come on, lets at least explore the spooky woods. We’ve got to achieve something productive before we log out.” I dropped the remainder of my bread back into my pack, and slung it over my shoulders. I grabbed my axe and held it aloft.

  “You ready to do this?”

  Logan nodded and returned his bread to his pack. A moment later he was ready to follow, his wand in hand.

  I led the way towards the trees. There was enough distance between each of the old trunks that we could wind our way between them without trouble. There was no underbrush in sight. Instead, the ground beneath the trees was a mix of barren dirt and mulched leaves. I was not outdoorsy, but I’d done some hiking in my youth, and stands of trees like this were never so clean in real life. There was always something growing underneath the trees that you’d have to smash your way through to get by. This emptiness unnerved me.

  Logan seemed oblivious to the wrongness of this place. As far as I knew he’d never set foot outside of a city in real life. He was the kind of guy who would genuinely believe that vegetables came from the supermarket.

  “So what do you think we’re looking for?” He asked

  “Dunno. Something that would interest an adventurer. Treasure maybe?” That thought appealed to me. I’d always been a fan of pirates, and they always marked their treasure on a map with a cross. Maybe, just maybe, we were about to become rich.

  “That’d be cool. Though I dunno if money is really going to help much if the townsfolk hate us.” He mumbled. Clearly Logan wasn’t as happy with the choice of being undead as I’d thought he was. Not being able to interact with NPCs without hiding every inch of our bodies was a pretty massive penalty. I could only hope that the undead perks were good enough to balance it out. Not having to breath seemed to be the only good thing, and even that had led to a rather unpleasant situation. Still, I guess it was better than drowning.

  I spotted something up ahead - a small stone structure. The stone slabs were almost the same colour as the dead trunks of the trees. From this distance I couldn’t quite tell what it was meant to be. It was too small for a house, at least one inhabited by humans, and was built with a severe angle of the roof on one side. At a guess, the top of the roof would probably come to about my forehead. I pointed it out to Logan.

  “Well, that looks like we’ve found our goal.” He was almost jumping with glee, and took off at a jog towards it.

  Logan wasn’t exactly a patient man.

  I jogged along a few feet behind him for a while, keeping my eyes peeled for any threats. The forest seemed just as lifeless as when we’d entered it though, so as we drew closer I poured on a burst of speed to overtake him. I reached the stone building first, and rapped my knuckles on it to claim my victory in our little race. Logan didn’t even acknowledge the motion.

  “It’s almost like a covering for a well, just bigger” I heard him mutter as he walked around to one side of it. I looped around the opposite way.

  We converged on the far side, where a grey door was set in place. It looked to be made from the trees that surrounded us. Runes were etched into the edges of the door, framing the otherwise bare wood. We were on the tall side of the structure, and the roof angled down sharply behind the door. That meant one of two things - this was a tiny shack of excellent construction but dubious dimensions, or the door guarded a set of stairs leading downward. My money was on the latter.

  “Do those runes mean anything to you?” I asked Logan, hoping his necromancer skill tree might have come with some sort of decipher-ancient-runes ability.

  “Not in the slightest.” He said cheerily, then tried to push the door inward.

  The bottom of the door scraped against the granite floor as it swung inside, revealing a staircase of stone leading down into the darkness. The door blocked off everything to the left of the door frame inside the building, and on the right was a pile of torches on the ground.

  I looked at Logan for a moment. He pulled back his hood and grinned.

  “Looks like we’re going underground.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Logan had a flint amongst his starting goods. It took us a lot longer than either of us would like to admit, but we finally got it to spark enough to ignite a couple of the torches.

  “So… you first?” He asked, eyeing my axe.

  I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea, but I had to admit it made some amount of sense. His wand was a ranged weapon. That alone was enough to make me the tank of our duo.

  I’d never played as a tank before. My go-to class was a rogue, I was all about that sneaking and backstabbing. For a moment I wished I’d chosen my normal class for Liorel, but the polymorph skills had sounded too good to pass up. Besides, since it was just going to be the two of us for a while, it made sense to have someone playing a tank role.

  Crap.

  “Fine. But you better follow.”

  I stepped forward with false bravado, hoping I wasn’t about to get decapitated by some unseen trap. This had all been a little too easy. These woods were scarcely a stones throw from Whiteridge, and there hadn’t been traps or guardian monsters at all. Then again, maybe I was over thinking things. We were still in our first few hours of the game, and we had spawned just out there. Maybe non-undead players would have picked up a starting quest in Whiteridge to clear this little crypt, or whatever it was.

  My torch cast a flickering light several feet in front of me as I descended the stairs. The walls were made from slabs of stone, the steps were the same. It all looked pristine. For all I knew this could have been built by local dwarves just last week, there wasn’t even any dust.

  After a minute of walking the stairs flattened out into a narrow hallway. It would be just wide enough fo
r us to skip forward hand in hand, but Logan was conspicuously keeping a few feet behind me. Up ahead, right at the edge of my torches light, the walls on either side seemed to fall away. That must mean we were heading into a larger room of some sort. I gripped my axe a little tighter in my right hand as I mentally reviewed my skills in case we were walking into an ambush.

  With the darkness everywhere, my invisibility skill wouldn’t be of much use. Walking around with a burning torch kind of gave away your position. Bull horns sounded interesting, but I’d have to try it out to see how useful it really was. I decided swinging my axe would be my opening play. I offered a silent prayer that Logan would have something a little flashier to fight with, then I approached the end of the hallway.

  The room was smaller than I expected. If this were a house on earth, it’d be a sort of foyer. If a foyer was dark, made of stone, and housed little lizard people.

  There were three of them. All had scales of the same dark grey as the trees above, and they were all fast asleep. Only one of them stirred as the light played across the room. I froze. The creature rolled a little more onto its side, exposing its back to me, and continued to sleep. When none of them moved, I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding and examined the rest of the room in one quick glance. There were small bones strewn around. From afar, my best guess was they were the remains of rats. There was another doorway opposite us, but I couldn’t see anything through the darkness beyond.

  I turned my attention back to the creatures. They were small - they’d barely be tall enough to reach my waist if they were standing. Their features were slender - perhaps not malnourished but certainly not muscular. They wore little loincloths made from leather, and were sleeping on a small pile of leaves.

  Logan came up beside me, resting one hand on my shoulder.

  “Where there are babies, there will be one pissed off mother” he whispered and I glanced nervously at the door opposite us. He was right, they did look like small children.

  “Lets try sneak past them” I was already walking forward as I murmured to him. I made it a dozen footsteps before I kicked one of the tiny bones, making a grating sound as it scuffed across the stone floor. Some rogue I would have been.

  The creature that had stirred when we’d entered the room snapped awake. It sat up, and looked at us with bleary eyes for a moment and then opened its mouth wide. For a moment I expected it to start crying.

  “Mother fuckin’ intruders!” It screamed with a childs voice.

  I was not expecting that.

  I paused, and tried to look non-threatening with a flaming torch in one hand and an axe in the other.

  “Woah, we don’t -”

  “Kill the intruders!” It screeched, cutting me off. Before I could properly wrap my head around what was happening the creature was sprinting towards me. It had pulled a knife from somewhere, and I couldn’t do anything except stare at the blade as the lizard-child-psychopath ran at me.

  A bolt of purple light sizzled past me and hit the creature in the centre of its chest. It took two stumbling steps, looked like it was going to face plant, and then continued its charge toward us. Before I even thought to swing my axe, the childlike creature jabbed at my stomach and pranced away. The red bar of health in the corner of my vision dropped by ten percent.

  “Die fucker!” The creature shrilled as it began to circle me.

  It’s companions had finally woken up and were now approaching us as well. They too had produced knives from god-knows-where. If the other two could hit as hard as the first one, we might be in some trouble. It was time to stop staring with surprise, and actually do something!

  I hoisted the axe in front of me and charged at the creature that had stabbed me. The axe whistled through the air where the creature had been a moment before, but it had already shifted aside. It lashed out with its dagger again and I lost another ten percent of my health.

  More purple bolts of energy zipped around the room as Logan started focusing his attacks on the other two. He seemed to be slowing them down, so I ignored them and focused solely on my personal nemesis. I took another swing and he dodged again, but this time he was too slow to counterattack me.

  I swung and missed. This time when he stepped aside I lashed out with my other hand, smacking him in the face with the burning torch. His sneer vanished as flames licked at his scaled face, and he let out a high-pitched whine. I silenced his scream with a solid swing of my axe, cleaving his skull in two. An exclamation mark icon appeared above his corpse as it sank to the floor. I studied it for a moment, and a prompt appeared.

  You scored a critical hit!

  Double damage dealt.

  Hell yes, turns out a head-shot was worth the extra effort. I turned back to the ongoing fight.

  Logan had knocked one to the ground, but the other was almost on top of him. I decided now was the perfect time to try out one of my abilities, and activated Bull Horn. My skull itched for a moment, and then I felt a sudden weight on my forehead. It was like I was balancing a carton of milk on my head.

  The creature stabbing at Logan suddenly consumed all of my attention. I got tunnel vision, and the only thing I could think about was the creatures exposed spine. I lowered my head and charged full speed toward my target. The ground whisked by under my feet as I sprinted faster than I’d ever moved before. I saw my foe stab Logan for a second time, and then I reached them. I drove my horns straight into the lizard beasts back, burying them in the back of his ribcage. As I flipped my head back to stand up straight the creature tumbled lifelessly to the floor.

  The third creature had regained its footing, and was rapidly closing in on us. Logan fired another bolt of purple energy from his wand, but the shot went wide. The lizard creature jumped into the air with its dagger outstretched. I swung my axe and scored a glancing blow against its shoulder. Not enough to do much damage, but enough to send it tumbling off course. The beast staggered as it landed, switching its dagger from one hand to the other.

  “You killed them!” It shrieked as it lunged for me once more.

  This time I didn’t even get to swing my axe. A ball of crackling purple energy whizzed past me and engulfed the kobold. It seemed to freeze in place for a moment, as if dazed by the onslaught of power.

  Another bolt of purple energy sizzled through the air and struck the creature in the forehead. Its head snapped backwards and it fell still.

  What. The. Fuck.

  Logan burst out laughing and I realised I’d said the words aloud.

  “Those were some rude-ass children” he laughed, waving his torch around the room. I had one eye trained on the far doorway, but nothing seemed to come through.

  “Jira? What were those things?” I asked, and the little fairy popped into view. Down here her dust didn’t glow. She seemed to be expelling dust instead. Her response was as cheerful as ever though.

  “Sorry, what things? Oh, are you hurt?”

  “Those little lizard creatures we killed. What were they?”

  The fairy inspected the room, flitting to the very edges of the firelight to examine the corpses.

  “I believe they’re kobolds. A small tribe apparently. Would you like to know more?”

  “Wait, if they were kobolds how could we understand them?”

  “Many races speak common, the language we’re using now. Few humans speak other languages, so common is the language of trade. As I understand it, most kobolds around here trade with the city. Anything else?” Jira rattled off her facts like machine-gun fire. She sure was an efficient guide.

  I shook my head, and Jira popped out of existence once more. Kobolds were a staple of most fantasy settings. I felt like I should have recognised them straight off the bat, but I’d been thrown off by their childlike appearance. It was an interesting, if a little unnerving, twist on an otherwise boring race.

  “Shall we continue?” I asked and pointed my axe at the empty doorway.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The rest of t
he dungeon was uninhabited. It was a wholly unnatural construction of three rooms, each connected by a short passageway. The kobolds we’d found sleeping in the first room had been the only sign of life anywhere. A thick layer of dust coated everything in the third room, implying to me that the kobolds hadn’t visited it in a very long time.

  The second room was the most interesting. It seemed to be where the kobolds had kept their treasure - at least as far as one could refer to rusted tools and scraps of cloth as treasure. The only thing we found worth keeping were the candles scattered around the room. Logan had pocketed a few, but I didn’t want to waste my inventory space. Especially not when I had a perfectly good torch.

  We were taking a break to snack on some more bread - fighting angry kobolds was an excellent way to generate hunger - when we heard the voice. We both fell silent as we strained to hear it again. After a few tense moments we did, a masculine voice coming from outside the dungeon. It was too far away for us to discern what might have been said, but it definitely sounded louder than before.

  “What do we do?” I whispered to Logan.

  “I dunno. Maybe the village did form a mob?” He grinned

  He could be right, but I doubted it. And not just because it had been his suggestion. Surely if there were a mob with pitchforks closing in on us they’d make more noise.

  “I’ll go check it out”

  Logan made no move to follow as I stood up. It was probably for the better, at least I’d be able to use my Chameleon Cloak ability to turn invisible as I got closer. I left my pack with Logan but took my axe. After all, I didn’t want to be entirely defenceless if I got caught.

  The voice filtered down into the dungeon again as I crept past the dead kobolds. It was accompanied by another voice now, a feminine voice, and neither of them were happy. The words were still muffled and indistinct until I started to ascend the staircase.