I understood what Popper did. I didn’t like it. But I understood. I didn’t have time to think about that now.
I had 500,000 hobgoblins currently besieging my city on the east, having inexplicably arrived a month early; a massive fleet of warships bombarding the city from the west; a usurper sitting on my throne; and a curse that was probably about to cycle, with no way to stop it. And all I had to help me was a bear who didn’t want to fight anymore.
“Bruce Bruce,” I said. I ducked as yet another explosion rocked the city. This one came from the west, where the wall had appeared to have miraculously been repaired, though it was about to crumble again. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire?’”
“No,” Bruce Bruce said. “But my friend Alice has taught me a traditional saying that I think fits right now. It goes, ‘Bite the pillow. They’re going in dry.’”
Part 3
Unknown Note 5
“What are these for?” I asked. I picked one up. They were small computer chips in gray static bags. Each one was no bigger than my thumbnail. Ricky had a pile of about a hundred of them. The writing on the bag was all in Chinese.
“Be careful,” Ricky said. “They’re not paid for yet.”
We sat in Monobrow Sam’s small, one-bedroom apartment. Juliette and I had just moved in a few doors down into one of the two-bedroom versions.
“Okay, but what are they?” I asked again.
“They’re bypass chips,” Ricky said. “This batch is specially made for Penn power, so if they’re on the DLC grid, you gotta use another chip. I have those also, but I don’t want to get them mixed up. The way it works is easy. You gotta wait for a brownout. You go into the meter, pop out the existing controller chip and pop this one in. It tells the meter they’re using about half the electricity they’ve been using. They’re smart chips, too. It eases it down by about 10% each month until you’re at 50%, so it doesn’t trigger an investigation.” He waved the baggie in the air. “The guy was insistent that you gotta do it during a brownout. You can’t just cut off the power to the house and install it. It has something to do with the way the chips talk to each other. You can’t put too many of them close to each other, too.”
I looked at the tiny chip dubiously. I’d just seen a thing on the news about some guys who’d been busted jacking the grid. One of them caught ten years in prison.
There was a shortage. People couldn’t afford air conditioners anymore. Instead of central heating, people were using wood-burning stoves. I’d been out of a steady paycheck for almost a year. They had the tech for renewable energy. Japan and most of Europe had a system in place for a over a decade now. Even the damn Canadians had jumped on the bandwagon. It wasn’t until it was too late did they even think about trying it over here. I was sure that by the time we Americans fully adapted the solar battery system, we would have already resorted to cannibalism.
They’d already installed an essential grid in our building, but it was a joke. You couldn’t pull more than 15 amps for the whole damn apartment on it. My computer and gaming rig alone pulled more than that. Juliette used the red outlets for the refrigerator and the fan in Molly’s nursery, and that was it.
“How much are they?” Sam asked. He sat next to me, also examining one of the packets.
“I have to pay the guys $25 for each one. They recommend selling them for $200. I figure between the three of us if we each sell one or two a day, it’ll be enough to tide us over. We gotta sell them 100% face-to-face, offline. We can’t say a word about it online. None of this Craigslist bullshit. The DoE is cracking down, and they have sniffers out there, so be careful. We gotta install them ourselves, too. We can’t just give someone a chip, because they’ll fuck it up and then roll on us when they’re caught. But once they’re installed properly, they’re invisible. A tech won’t be able to tell the difference unless he actually goes to the location and manually compares what the house is pulling with the readout. And even then there’s a panic-button on the app that’ll reset it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “There’s an app for the chip?”
Ricky nodded. “It replaces the existing one the Penn chips already have. It’s indistinguishable from the hundreds of other smart home controllers out there. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do all of it. The shit’s easy.”
Sam started counting on his fingers, eyes going wide. “Do you really think we can sell that many?”
“Wait, who are these guys?” I asked. “How’d you meet them?”
Ricky always had some sort of hustle going. I’d first met him a few years back when we’d worked a remodel job together. He wasn’t like the rest of us. He had that hair and that easy smile. I’d taken to calling him “pretty boy.” He always seemed to have more money than he should. A nicer car than he should, and more women than he should. He’d spent some time dating Trudy, Sam’s little sister before she threw him out. After that it was Juliette. It’s how I’d met her.
We didn’t talk about Juliette. It was an unspoken rule between me and Ricky. He didn’t ask about Juliette and Molly, and I didn’t ask him about child support for the beautiful little girl he abandoned.
“You don’t need to worry about them,” Ricky said. “I got it all under control.”
Sam held the chip up to the light. “We’re going to make so much money!”
Popper Note 23
Fucking Ricky, I thought for the thousandth time. Dead for thousands of years, and I still couldn’t get the fucker out of my head.
Gretchen slept on the floor in the defense cockpit, curled up next to Alice. Gretchen had spent the day going back and forth between directing Spritz and talking to Jonah, who I’d dropped into a goddamned war zone hotter than this one. I knew I shouldn’t have let Nale talk me into sending him to Harmony. Though if I’d tossed him to the moon aurics, he’d probably just have turned around and started walking back toward Harmony. Or here. The kid was a damn boy scout.
I felt sick about what I’d done. Not sorry. But sick. It was an impossible choice, but I knew in my heart it was the correct one. Still, Jonah was pissed. Not as pissed as I thought he would be. He was too preoccupied with his own impossible bullshit. He had a plan, though. The dude always had a plan. It’s what I loved about him.
Gretchen was another story. She was way more pissed than Jonah was, even though she agreed with me sending him away. Women, man. I could live another 14,000 years, and I still wouldn’t understand them.
Even Archie the texugo seemed mad at me for sending Jonah away. The sapper moved from trap to trap on the large map, angrily going about his work, sometimes rushing away to go visit the location, mumbling something under his breath about doing all this for nothing.
Spritz was currently upgrading the Sentinel Tower to level three, which Gretchen insisted would make it super powerful. I hoped so. The upgrade took ten precious hours.
Raj: Another portal has opened. More of the demons with the water bowls on their heads!
Poppy: Okay, thanks buddy. See anything this time?
Raj: Raj does not see where it’s coming from! We even searched the hotel again to be sure!
Granger and several other scouts were spread out around the outskirts of Quibou, seeking out the source of the portals. We couldn’t risk sending them in now as the pavilion was filled with several thousand demons from Orochi, mostly kappas and oni so far. The demons had started to patrol the streets. The pattern had been the same. Every two hours, a new portal would open and stay open for about ten minutes. During that time, demons would pour out and form a loose formation in the city. Each time it was about 2,500 troops. It had now happened ten times, leaving about 25,000 enemy fighters ready to attack. At this rate, there’d be about 90,000 demons when the gate opened, not including Akkorokamui, who had yet to show herself.
The portals would continue to open even after the wave started. I feared Sandra the Learnt was probably hidden inside the white jacket compound, which meant she�
��d be impossible to get to until Akkorokamui left and started moving through the spiral.
Still, it bugged me. We’d searched the entirety of that place. We’d found the demon, but we hadn’t seen the polecat. Where else could she be?
If she wasn’t in the stronghold, Raj was in the best position to spot her location. So far he’d come up empty. Nale suggested we find a Psionicist to root her out, which was a dark cleric subclass. They were similar to harbingers but were good at locating magical sources. It was a rare subclass, and it didn’t look like we had one in the city. Gretchen said she had an idea, but it required her to level up her drawing skill for some inexplicable reason. She’d spent the morning drawing pictures of Bruce Bruce, Alice, and some little girl with sad, hollowed-out eyes while she talked to Jonah over chat. She wasn’t a very good artist, but she leveled up the skill a few times. Once she’d hit level four, she moved to sculpting little sheep figurines with some clay we’d found in one of the abandoned bedrooms. She had a whole row of them. She was much better at that than drawing. Finally, she sighed with satisfaction then went to sleep for an hour to reset her regen.
In the meantime, I worked with Colonel Holder to plan our defenses. Ninety-thousand plus invaders was an insane amount. Luckily so far all the creeps were creatures we knew how to kill. Both kappa and oni were strong melee fighters, but they went down easily with traps and towers. After Archie finished tweaking and upgrading the existing traps, he said he had just enough time for two more big ones. One would be an old school, Indiana Jones-style rolling ball. The next one he called “The Ghost Ship,” whatever that meant.
That left the boss monster, Akkorokamui. I reviewed what we knew about her. It wasn’t much. She was a demon mage, and she was powerful enough to kill Rochus, one of the strongest mages in the game. She was a boss demon monster from one of the most difficult areas of the game. She was some sort of octopus thing, and guessing from the last boss, I wagered she would probably turn into a giant, scary-ass monster.
I shuddered, remembering the final battle of the last world event I’d participated in, the one with the emo-tong hive queen. It had taken almost a million players working in concert to take her down. If this ended up being something similar, there was no way we’d survive.
I looked at Gretchen, sleeping on the ground. I had two Portal scrolls left. I wouldn’t be able to discharge myself from the military, but I could still eject her.
Colonel Holder was saying something about a level three Muzzle tower, which we were debating on whether to upgrade to a Backfire tower, which caused magic users’ spells to do the opposite of what they intended or a Gag tower, which appeared to simply last longer. My initial gut said go with the Backfire, but it seemed an intelligent creature like Akkorokamui would figure it out pretty quick. We ended up going with the Gag tower.
Spritz was also building a new type of tower, a Holy Force tower, which would be manned exclusively by light clerics. She would build three of them. She had just enough time to make one of them level three, which we’d upgrade to a font of holy water. Every creep so far appeared to be demon-class, and it would be the same as dousing them with acid.
As I scrolled through the list of available NPCs for the new towers, something odd caught my eye. The number of arrowed players in Libri was three. It should’ve gone down to two when we’d booted Jonah. How long had it been like that?
I clicked to the list, sorting the players. I read it three times, my mind reeling. I was on there, Gretchen was on there, and so was someone else.
Player Gold (Level 12, Arcanist, Human).
This character, Gold, appeared to be in the city of Nijon, which was half a day’s ride out of Castellane. He’d been arrowed the moment he entered the country of Libri. He was currently without orders, but I could demand he come to the city, and he’d be required to. You didn’t have to follow direct orders when you were arrowed. However, if you deliberately didn’t follow the instructions of your superiors, you’d get a criminal brand and were subject to arrest, which was much worse.
Well, shit. It appeared he’d been there for a bit, almost like he was waiting for us to come to him. Well that wasn’t going to happen. We didn’t have time for field trips.
A few moments later, Gretchen sat up, stretching. She was still angry with me and started to stand, gathering her things without saying a word. I showed her the name on the list.
“What do we do?” I asked. “Should we talk to him?”
“Oh man,” Gretchen said, all semblance of anger fading away. “It’s Master Gold. From Icardi.”
“The old dude?”
Jonah and Gretchen had talked about the man several times, but I never remembered actually meeting him. He’d glitched out, and that was what had caused Jonah and Gretchen to wake up in the first place. Jonah mentioned that Waldo seemed to think there was one more human player hanging around Icardi. It must’ve been this guy.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked.
“He must’ve seen all the world event notifications and came to check it out. Or he read Jonah’s book.”
“All the way in Icardi?” I asked. “How could he have gotten it already?”
Gretchen rummaged around in her bag, which she’d retrieved from her corpse in Castle Four, pulling out a leather-bound book. I grabbed it from her, examining it. “Where the hell did you get this?”
She looked sheepish. “I got it the other day when I was in Quibou. It looks like the game distributed it almost immediately.”
“Well shit,” I said, flipping to a random page. “So you think that poor guy woke up in Icardi after we left, didn’t know what the hell was going on, and then found the book?”
“Who knows,” Gretchen said. “It looks like he’s all alone. He’s arrowed, so we can talk to him. Send him a message on the War Events chat.”
Poppy: Hey, Master Gold. We see you. You there, buddy?
Several minutes passed without an answer.
“Is he ignoring us?” I said. “He can’t be asleep, or we wouldn’t see him.”
“Or maybe he’s like Jonah was,” Gretchen said. “He doesn’t know how to use the chat.”
“Shit,” I said. “I think you’re right. You’d think Jonah would put that in the book.”
Gretchen grunted. “He did. Everything is in there. I mean everything.”
“Really?” I asked, looking at the book again. I was going to have to read this damn thing. “Well maybe he hasn’t read it. Maybe he just came because of the notifications. Or maybe he just hasn’t bothered with the mind guild stuff yet. Or maybe he’s another crazy asshole like Daniels.”
Poppy: Buddy. It’s okay. There’s me and one other person here. We’re in Castellane. We don’t have time to go fetch you, but if you make your way to the city, we can meet up. You gotta hurry, though. Some serious shit is about to go down in a little more than two days.
Gretchen: We don’t know if there’s a mind guild in the city of Nijon, where you are right now. But if there is, go there right now and do the tutorial on how to control the menus with your mind. It’ll give you access to the chat feature. If not, start walking this way, but stay out of Quibou. I repeat, do not go to the city of Quibou. When you get close, we’ll send an NPC out to gather you.
“He’s a master jeweler,” Gretchen said. “Can you imagine what sort of mastery abilities he might have? And he’s also an arcanist? Holy cow. He probably has some great spells. I hope he’s a good guy.”
“It seems like he’s a noob to me,” I said. “If he’s not an asshole, maybe we’ll take him under our wing. But for right now he’s more a liability than anything.”
Archie came strolling back into the defense cockpit, carrying a few chunks of metal he’d gotten from the blacksmith. Parts for a trap. He stopped dead at the sight of us standing there, like he’d seen a ghost.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Oy, mate. I thought you two were fighting, but instead it looks like you’re thick
as thieves again. In Formoso, the texugo who have a disagreement settle it by battling each other in the fighting pits. Even the sows.” He scratched the back of his head. “Especially the sows, come to think of it.”
I grunted. “Have you seen that new spear of hers? She’d skewer me like a kebab.”
“Don’t you forget it,” Gretchen said.
Gretchen Note 6
I left the others behind as I approached the door. I downed the sludgy, pink potion Nale had discovered. It was affectionately called a Good Hair Day potion. They were rare and expensive. People usually tracked them down when they were about to make a huge purchase. The potion would last for an hour, and it increased one’s charisma anywhere from three to five. According to the notification, mine had increased by four, putting me at 14.
I’d grabbed a few guards for this expedition. I didn’t expect I’d have to fight anything, but I did want Nale with me. He’d have to wait outside, unfortunately. I pushed open the door and nervously stepped into the dusty room.
Entering the Artisan Guild.
This is a hidden guild hall!
You are a level 3 artisan. Welcome fledgling artisan!
Warning! This is a corrupt guild!
Achievement unlocked! Discover a corrupt guild!
I brought one of my sheep and placed it on the large table in the center of the room. I’d painted it silver, though it wasn’t fired. I’d found the remnants of an old kiln in the room I’d found the clay in, but it had been damaged. An ominous, red stain had cascaded off the side of the kiln like something had been leaning up against it when it had been killed.
This was the place where Jonah had killed Prince Kankan, but there was no sign of the battle now except a wide swath of clean floor where they’d scuffled. My keen hunter’s eyes also found several sets of three-toed footprints in the dust.
As I expected, at least two distinct pairs of bird feet appeared faintly in the dust. Both pairs led to the large fireplace, where Jonah said the first wark-ee had appeared.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 40