I read the notification twice. Gretchen had done it. She’d discovered where Sandra the Learnt was. I opened up the chat.
His Royal Majesty Jonah: Good Job!
Gretchen: Thanks. Bruce Bruce actually cracked the case. The cartographer’s mount was still here at her family’s warren. The grandmother knew nothing, but Bruce Bruce recognized the ostrich mount and started talking to her. She told Bruce Bruce everything she’d seen.
Poppy: Castellane? Are you fucking kidding me? Castle Riot? How the hell are we going to get there? We can’t run the riot with only three people.
Gretchen: I’m headed back now. We’ll talk about it tonight.
His Royal Majesty Jonah: Popper, what’s the word with the alchemists?
Poppy: They’re not answering the door to their shop. I came by earlier, and they didn’t answer, so I went through the healer tincture district in the open market asking around about abbot fruit, but nobody has it. Alice and I went down to the docks to talk to some of the traders, but nothing. I’m getting the impression it’s not a very popular or useful fruit. I’m on my way back to the emo-tong now to see if these assholes are awake. Give me two minutes…Wait, what the fuck?
Gretchen: What is it? What’s wrong?
Poppy: They’re gone.
Gretchen: What do you mean gone?
Poppy: I mean they’re fucking gone. Daddy went out to get a pack of cigarettes gone. That creepy-ass black building with the dead chickens and everything has disappeared. The entire storefront has gone *poof.*
His Royal Majesty Jonah: What the hell? What does that mean?
Gretchen: Jonah, look at the royal factions menu and see if anything changed with the emo-tong.
I looked, popping open my menu and clicking over to the search menu and typing “Royal Factions” which was the only way it would allow me to get to the menu. I pulled it up, and it listed the thirteen kingdoms:
The Dominion
The Flounder Empire (merged)
The Hive. Status: Neutral
The Riot. Status: War
Xin Empire. Status: Destroyed
Freeman Realm. Status: War
Moon Kingdom. Status: Peace Treaty
Ravida. Status: Ally Agreement
Star Children. Status: Peace Treaty
The Collective. Status: Neutral
The Iron Mallets. Status: Ally Agreement
Reino do Texugo. Status: Ally Agreement
Orochi Dynasty. Status: Uncontacted
Shit, I thought. I missed something.
His Royal Majesty Jonah: It looks like the Hive moved from “Peace Treaty” to “Neutral.” But I don’t know when that happened. I didn’t get a notification that I saw.
What I didn’t say was I probably did get a notification, but I’d missed it. I now received so many notifications that they’d become almost invisible to me as they scrolled by. After I’d become king, the whole left side of my screen was like a constant news ticker. I had it set to gray almost everything out except anything that had to do with my immediate party members and crucial notifications. I made a mental note to go in there and make some adjustments.
Gretchen: Weird. Something must have happened.
Poppy: Well they were here a couple hours ago. They probably heard about the chasm trolls and decided to bug out, err no pun intended.
His Royal Majesty Jonah: Is it all the emo-tong in the city, or just the alchemists?
Poppy: Hang on. I’m rounding the corner… Nope, it’s all of them. That weird food shop for emo-tong is gone also. It looks like the entire race pulled out of the city. It’s kind of bizarre. They took the whole building with them, leaving just an empty spot.
That was something for another time. As long they weren’t planning on invading us also, I didn’t really care what the emo-tong were up to. I clicked on the Notifications menu item and made sure any future faction-related notifications would persist in my view until I clicked them away.
His Royal Majesty Jonah: Okay, everybody back to the castle. We’re going to have to do this the hard way.
An hour later, we all met back on the drawbridge. I brought Jenny from the stables, and all six of us: me and Jenny, Popper and Alice, and Gretchen and Bruce Bruce waited as Keta prepared the Portal scroll. I noted she was making a bigger show of it now than she had earlier in the day.
I unfurled my map on the ground.
“Keta,” I said. “Show us where this abbot fruit stuff grows.”
“It is here. It grows on vines that populate the hills here. It is a prevalent fruit in this area, so you should have little difficulty. The only danger comes from small, wild cats, but they are mostly in wooded areas. You will be in the hills. It is of a minor concern, and I see no need for you to be escorted.”
“Where is that?” Popper asked, peering at the map.
“I still get an error message when I try to read it,” Gretchen said.
Gretchen and Popper could look at my map when it was opened, and they could see the outlines and rivers and natural objects. They were unable to read the words written on it. When they tried, they received error notifications similar to what I got when I looked at the Portal scroll.
I bit my lip. “Northern Thailand. It’s a small country called Ban Kao here in the game.”
“I think maybe just me and Popper should go,” Gretchen said. “We don’t know what’s out there, and Popper and I can regenerate if something bad goes down. You can’t.”
“There is little danger here,” Keta said, sounding irritated. “My portal will be open for 10 minutes. You can be in and out.”
“If there’s little danger, then I don’t see why all three of us need to go,” Gretchen said.
“Wait, when did you become level 35?” Popper asked me, looking at me sideways. “What the hell? I’m still stuck on level 19, and the noob here is speeding through like a goddamned power leveler. Didn’t you just hit 34?”
“I…” I began, my mind racing for an excuse that wouldn’t be a blatant lie.
“Raj has saved the day!” Raj cried, racing up onto the drawbridge. I hadn’t even realized the polecat was gone. He wasn’t supposed to be wandering. He held a bag triumphantly in the air. “Raj has found an abbot fruit! He has found you many abbot fruits!” He dropped the bag in front of us, and several small, blue fruits, each about the size of a plum rolled out of the bag.
Popper picked one up and sniffed it. He made a sour face. “All this trouble for one of these? How the hell is this supposed to cure nipple infections?”
“Good job, Raj!” Gretchen said, ruffling the top of the polecat’s head. The boy smiled, showing his gleaming, gap-toothed grin.
“Raj is a good member of the party. Raj wants to go on more adventures and solve more quests! I will get sand from new beaches in new lands! Raj’s favorite thing is to protect people!”
“Where did you find these?” I asked, picking one up to examine it. It had a hard exterior, like a kiwi, but smaller.
“Raj heard you say to look at clerics and druids and alchemists. But this is a fruit. A fruit is a food. Why not look at the food market? Raj go to the market. It is easy to find! Raj paid for the fruit with his own money, like a real man!”
“You are a real man, buddy,” Popper said. “Now we don’t have to go through that portal and get eaten by cats.”
“We still need to make it into a salve, and then we need to actually get to the queen,” Gretchen said dubiously.
I nodded. Keta huffed and gathered up her things, slinking away back into the castle without saying anything else. Gretchen smirked at her as the mage retreated.
“Larus says the light clerics can turn it to the salve for us. It’ll only take them a few moments, and then we’ll be on our way,” I said.
“I was thinking,” Gretchen said, “this is the first real danger we’ve faced since the end of the tournament. Popper and I should go, and you should stay. This is a unique quest. We don’t know what we’re facing. It’ll probably b
e awful down there in the cave. We will likely die. It’s not safe for you.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Popper beat me to it.
“Fuck that. Jonah is on nipple-rubbing duty. We’ll make Larissa and a couple white jackets come with us to protect him, and we’ll skedaddle if we have to. But Jonah got us into this mess, and he promised to get us out. We can’t keep babying him. He’s practically indestructible when he’s got his creepy snake swords.” Popper looked at me sideways. “Besides, I think he’s been going out on his own and killing things without us looking.”
“We don’t have time to waste,” I said, changing the subject as I rolled my map back up and slid it into my pack. “Let’s head to the light clerics and then to the crevice. Maybe somewhere along the way you can tell me what a chasm troll is.”
The street with all the guild halls was only a short walk from the castle, but it felt good to finally be out and about on Jenny’s back. A single drake rider circled overhead, and a phalanx of white jacket soldiers shadowed us on all sides, close enough to jump in if we got into trouble, but far enough away to not get in my way. I didn’t like being shadowed by the soldiers, but I had no way to stop it. The only time they didn’t follow me around was when I went somewhere with Keta. I guess they assumed the half-auric was a powerful enough mage to protect me from just about anything.
Even though Raj had once again saved the day, I admonished the little polecat for wandering off and told him to stay at the castle. He’d done his part for the day. I told him to be ready to flee in case we had to quickly abandon the city.
The people of Harmony stared wide-eyed as we passed. A few opened their mouths to call out, but after a sidelong glance at the massive circle of guards following us, they decided to keep their mouths shut.
I still wasn’t used to being king. It had happened so fast. The tournament. Dying. Meeting and talking to Waldo. Waking up in the king’s bedroom. Gretchen and Popper had been so happy to see me. They’d both been terrified I’d never come back. Popper had cried so much a small forest had sprouted up around him. Raj had grabbed my legs and wouldn’t let go until Gretchen physically peeled him off.
After that it was a whirlwind of learning how to manage the kingdom and the city of Harmony using the multiple menus. Half the buttons didn’t work, and after a quick consultation with Waldo, the AI warned me to use the menus as little as possible. Before, I’d had the ability to crash the game just around myself and my immediate area. Now, if I did something that caused a crash within the kingdom management menu, it was possible the whole game could go down. If that happened, it probably meant all 50,000 of us on The Hibiscus would die as the colony ship bounced off the atmosphere of Arcadia.
But how could I not use the menus? I had to defend Harmony. We had three world events clashing with one another all at once. We had two armies marching on us. The Blasted Doom world event which comprised of the undead fleet that currently sailed on Harmony. The Deunification world event, which was the reason for the hobgoblin army marching on us, and the third, the kidnapping of Sandra the Learnt. We had to deal with all three before we could even think about starting to work on Waldo’s plan to wake up the crew members.
Maybe I can use my $250,000 to bribe my way to victory, I thought bitterly. After I won the tournament, I’d been instructed to find Sonia the game guide at a place called “The Hall of Kings” to get my additional prizes. I’d received the castle and a boatload of experience for killing the king, along with the king’s armor. Because of my class, the only part of the king’s battle armor I could actually wear was the ridiculous helmet. I found Sonia, the ethereal game guide, first thing the next day after I regenerated. The Hall of Kings was located at the bottom floor of a building that I believed to be the Seattle Art Museum in the real world.
The room was filled with statues and biographies of all the kings of the world, not just the Dominion. I’d spent some time examining King Nisava of the Flounder Empire. The statue of the angry-looking human stared back at me with dark, penetrating eyes. There was also a statue of King Bartholomew. The statue was, oddly, covered in blood that appeared to be fresh. I assumed that was some sort of weird tradition involving the recent death of a king.
I asked for my prizes, and Sonia smiled and congratulated me. She handed me the Dominion crown, a gold and white, unenchanted circlet that was too small for my head, and she told me I had won the contest, which apparently would have been a big deal had the game not been shut down. The grand prize? A quarter of a million real-life dollars.
$250,000. Had I been back on earth, that would’ve seemed like all the money in the world. Now it was less than useless. Sonia also informed me the president of Bart Hughes Games wanted to personally lev me to Seattle where I would receive my reward during a press event that would also serve as a coronation.
Popper thought it was hilarious. Or at least he pretended he thought it was funny. Later it became clear he was pissed he and Gretchen hadn’t received anything from winning the tournament. They’d both died, so they didn’t get the experience Alice and I had received from killing the king. Popper hadn’t even gained experience for killing Keta with his Self-Destruct spell. Technically they won the quest, even though they were dead, but the quest didn’t have any prizes except the ones I’d received.
So we were left with a castle, two armies marching on us, a quest to find the missing cartographer, and no way to handle any of it.
We all trained our fighting skills at least an hour a day. It was Gretchen’s idea, and I immediately approved.
I watched Alice huff as she walked, little Popper riding on the back. Popper practiced standing on the back of the hippocorn as she walked. He and the mount spent their daily training hour out in the yard practicing new tricks.
Popper was only level 19, but when I examined the properties of Alice, I could see she had enough experience in reserve to level up to 24. Pets couldn’t be a higher level than their masters. As a result, she’d still accrue experience, but she wouldn’t actually get to the next level until Popper did. As a result, she was currently stuck at level 19 also.
Gretchen was now level 26. She was growing faster than any of us, and the only reason I was higher than her was because of my success with the tournament and blind luck in some of our earlier adventures. Gretchen was indeed the best player of the three of us. She spent her free time practicing with her spear and her bow. In addition, she would go to the northern edge of the city where the crews were expanding the wall and would spend her day killing snakeheads that tried to sneak up on the arrowed workers.
I spent my training time practicing with my urumi blades in different environments. If we were outside or in an open area, and I had warning, I had little doubt I could easily defeat most every regular monster in this game. But I worried about getting trapped in close quarters with the blades, and I spent my days down in the empty dungeons of Castle Harmony whipping my blades about and around tight corners, killing rats and massive cockroaches, much to the dismay of my three blades, who loudly voiced their displeasure every time I killed a rodent or bug.
My weapons weren’t meant for this type of fighting, and it was awkward to make it work, but I knew with my skill being this high, it was still my best bet.
Other than the oryx creatures I had killed earlier today, I hadn’t had a real fight since the tournament. The only reason I’d leveled up a few times at all was because of a few minor city-building quests that had popped up regarding the walls. I still hadn’t gotten around to fishing, despite living on the edge of the ocean. My fly pole from Icardi sat unused in my pack. I promised myself once everything calmed and was resolved, I’d pull it out and see what sort of fish a level 65 master fly fisher could catch.
The light cleric guild was an oddity. The white, yellow, blue, and green-colored building was shaped like a massive temple. Multiple onion-shaped domes circled the tall structure, reminding me of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Each multi-colored dome represented
the relationship of a particular god or goddess to the others, all surrounding a central dome, which represented Dak, the great mother to the new gods and daughter of the primordials. But as Gretchen explained, the light cleric guild was not a church, but more of a seminary. It was a place for all the different light clerics to learn their basic skills. They would then go off to the main church of their religion for more specialized training. As a result, this guild hadn’t been turned by Smallthunder’s scheme to convert all the churches in the world to churches of Tharon.
“Okay, be extra careful,” Gretchen said. “They’re going to try to pile some quests on us. We only have two spaces left.”
Indeed, our ten quest spots—not including compulsory and world quests—had been filling up regularly with city-building quests I had no control over. Gretchen and Popper received them, but they didn’t receive any experience at all unless they actually participated in the action required. Normally party members shared at least a nominal amount of experience from completing quests, but that wasn’t the case when it came to either city or kingdom quests. Most of the quests were things like, The White Jacket Lookout Tower in Georgetown Needs a New Roof. Get it Fixed. I would dispatch crews, and it would get taken care of in a couple hours, but it was still a pain. It was a constant source of Popper bitching at me.
The light clerics had sent multiple envoys to the castle in the past few weeks to beseech me to lead a campaign to start winning back temples for their various deities. This was something else I needed to do, but I also didn’t want to have to fight another battle on another front. Smallthunder was still a wildcard in all of this, and I didn’t want to start poking at him when he was likely the most powerful person in the game. We’d all decided that we’d wait until my curse was finally done—only 601 more days—before we even thought about dealing with him.
I was of the mind that if we could pull this whole train-the-crew scheme off without involving him at all, that would be great. I doubted it would be possible.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 4