Subterfuge: A Cultivation Academy Series (Bastion Academy Book 3)

by J D Astra

  The recording cut off.

  I set the device on the desk and stared at it, thinking of nothing at all for many long minutes. Then I listened to it again, and again.

  How had she known Dokun? On what battlefield did they meet? Had they been enemies or friends? She said he’d seduced her with his ideas... the future she’d helped bring about. Who was my master?

  I replayed the scene of us in the hall, when Dokun showed us his portal. Woong-ji had been genuinely scared to leave me alone with him—and he’d called me a Yamamotto. Maybe she feared I would join him.

  “Stop that,” Mae whispered. “She wouldn’t have thought that about you.”

  “Maybe not, but she was scared enough to have me sent away after our first meeting, and maybe she was right to. I remember thinking about his ideas, that they weren’t so bad.”

  “And then you saw through his façade.”

  “But only after we’d seen the things we had. I’d been willing to consider his perspective, even after knowing he’d experimented on my mother.” A vile, putrid feeling inked out of my stomach and clawed its way through my being.

  “Why don’t we go see what she left us?” Mae asked.

  I sighed and bobbed my head. We’d had enough sadness for one day.

  Ryni was waiting for me in the hall. “Had a couple of listens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ready to go see your inheritance?”

  I scowled. “Were you listening?”

  “No,” she chuckled, then waved me to walk down the hall with her. “Woong-ji left me a very, very long ‘who gets what in the event of my death’ list. I told her I didn’t want the list, not for at least twenty more years.” She looked down. “I should’ve taken it more seriously.”

  “How could you have known? She didn’t tell anyone what was going on.”

  “Yeah, but I saw it in her eyes. She handed me the list, and she knew she was going to die. I should’ve told her not to go.”

  We stopped at the door to the vault.

  “Put your finger up to the scanner.”

  I did as she commanded, and the door took another sample of my blood. There were several loud clanks of the vault rotating to the store Woong-ji had left me, then the door swung open. The room wasn’t much larger than a broom closet, but it was full to the brim with half-finished projects—one in particular that caught my eye.

  At the back of the room was a suit of armor with coiled up skeleton wings that connected to the back of the breastplate.

  Ryni stepped up to the armor, laying a hand against it. “It’s called Dragonslayer. Woong-ji said you were going to need it.”

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  Looking for more from J.D. Astra, and need it right this minute? Check out: Zero.Hero Book 1. Or keep reading to take a sneak peek.

  THE GREATEST HEROES have already fallen... Now it’s up to Claire and her ragtag crew of Zeroes to save the city.

  Low-ranked hero contractors Claire, Elise, Norah, and Piper dream of making it to the top twenty with the Stewards of Light, but their weird RPG powers have them trapped near the bottom instead. Balancing college, part-time jobs, and family matters leaves the girls without much time to fight crime and grind out the experience they need to climb the ranks.

  When an unusual threat emerges, the gamer girls are left standing in a city turned upside down with no hero to save them. The underclassmen are outclassed, but they're also the only ones who can stop the spread of chaos. Claire and her friends will have to unravel the mess with clever teamwork and determination and find the top-rank heroes in themselves to save the city before it falls into darkness.

  From J.D. Astra, author of the Viridian Gate Online: Firebrand series, comes a new universe of heroes and monsters. If you hunger for anime like One Punch Man and My Hero Academia, with a healthy serving of RPG elements, Zero.Hero Book 1 is for you!

  Prologue

  NOVEMBER 17th, 2012...

  We raced across the dark grassy yard, my school bag slapping against my back and jostling the pieces of the game board inside: Terra’s Heroes.

  I’d gotten it the weekend before. My mom always took me to The Dragon’s Horde after she’d done something she felt guilty for. This time, it was forgetting to get me from school. Not like I’d been upset; I’d just gone to Elise’s house and we played Halo. But the reward for Mom’s forgetfulness was a brand-new RPG. Elise, my best friend since age four when I saved her from being pushed off the slide, was more into the FPS, but she indulged me with my tabletop needs, especially when it was something new and shiny.

  Elise and I were neck-and-neck as we approached the cellar door. We skidded to a stop, planting our hands against the wood. She grinned, her white teeth stark against her dark skin.

  “I think you beat me,” she said, though I was pretty sure our hands touched at the same time.

  Norah, our feisty strawberry-blonde friend, was still running. She seemed determined to beat Piper, the short, buck-toothed girl who was the newest addition to our friend group. She was taking it slow, munching on a cookie, completely unconcerned about being last to the hideout. Norah’s mom did make the best chocolate-chip cookies, though, so I didn’t blame her.

  Norah panted as she put her hand against the cellar door. “You’re the rotten egg, Pipe!”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got the cookies!” she yelled back, holding up the container of freshly baked goods.

  Norah grabbed the lock with one hand and inserted the old, rusted key with the other, then jiggled it around.

  “So cool that your parents are letting us sleep over in the cellar,” Piper mused with a bit of chocolate on her lip.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty much my room anyway. I set it up earlier today just for us!” Norah said as the lock came free. We hauled open the heavy doors and stared down into the darkness. With a flick of the switch, the stairs illuminated. I took the steps down two at a time to the bottom and surveyed the space as Norah and Elise closed the doors behind us.

  There were four sleeping bags lined up on the right wall, canning shelves on the left, and an old box TV next to a round table with four chairs. An overhead chandelier lit the table well, and tie-on pads looped around the back of each seat. There was a plush, round rug under the table that looked like it was from a different planet, but whatever, it was still awesome.

  “It’s perfect,” I whispered.

  “I’m so glad Claire approves, but what does everyone else think?” Norah asked. A fake-innocent grin spread across her face as she batted her eyes.

  My cheeks warmed and I opened my mouth to retort, but Elise jabbed my ribs and gave me a knowing glare. Norah and I didn’t get into it that often, mostly because of Elise’s moderating, but for some reason it always felt like a competition between us. Now there was one more thing that put Norah above me. My place was pretty meh, and there was definitely no private space for us to play games together.

  “It’s great,” Piper said as she sat at the table, placing the cookies directly i
n front of her.

  Elise grinned and pulled out a chair. “Ready to play?”

  The heat in my cheeks disappeared, replaced by excitement as I remembered Terra’s Heroes in my backpack. I put the ruddy bag down on one of the chairs and I pushed past bags of dice, play mats, and full notebooks to pull free the new, cellophane wrapped box. I hadn’t wanted to let the smell of fresh cardboard and paint out until I could share it with my closest friends.

  Norah clicked the tiny space heater to life, then joined us at the game table. I slid my fingernail between the box and the lid, cutting the thin clear wrapping and ripping it off. My fingers traced the art on the front of the box. It was stunning.

  The characters’ backstories were all amazing, too. At the forefront was the character I wanted to play: Raven Gressahla.

  She was a half-demon Skro, with horns that snaked down to her cheeks, decorated in gems, metal cuffs, and the teeth of her defeated enemies. She could see into the minds of others and wielded the truth of all things. She was the spiritual leader of a village destroyed by the war of two neighboring cities. Her people, the Skro, were destined to lead nomadic lives, unwelcome in either kingdom.

  Behind Raven was Groff, the giant Tree Ogre. He was cursed to live a dual life, one of light and the other of darkness, paying for the crimes of all those who came before him. Flanking Raven and Groff were two other females: Xebaria Dark-Dancer and Penelope Denetore.

  Xebaria sported daggers to the teeth, tight black leathers, and a mask that obscured everything but piercing blue eyes and tall, pointed ears. She was a Sky Elf, dubbed as such for the floating islands on which her people made their home. The Sky Elf lore went deep on the internet, and I hadn’t had time for all that...

  Then there was Penelope Denetore, the character I knew Norah would nab. Penelope was decked out in gold and bronze bandoliers, a short skirt exposing orange-tinged legs and a fluffy tail sprouting from her behind. She was a Foxian, and kinda cute, but I thought it was just a cheap ploy to reel in the Manga readers.

  But that wasn’t why I thought Norah was going to pick her. I knew Norah had also done her research on Terra’s Heroes, and I could tell that throwing grenades, whacking enemies with lightning rods, and shooting pistols was going to be right up her alley.

  The cast went on and on, about six other playable characters with their own story arc and potential resolutions, but those were the highlights.

  I pulled the lid back with a fthp fthp fthp as the air slipped past the tight seal. At the top was the manual; crisp and pristine. I grabbed it as the other girls went in after the figurines.

  Terra’s Heroes: The Master’s Guide.

  This was one of the first games that provided a basic guide in the box, and then over six hundred pages of lore and story information online. It allowed us to play together, without a game master, since we’d be using one-part chance and two parts internet.

  We didn’t need a computer to get started tonight, so I pulled open the first page to the table of contents and scanned over it, then moved back to the box for the next goodie. Under the character sheets was the Encounters, Enemies, and Creatures handbook, but I could look at that later.

  “I want to be Xebaria Dark-Dancer!” Piper declared as she slammed her game piece down on the table. It was the black-clad Sky Elf. I wasn’t sure a high DPS, low health class was for her, but she was almost eleven now; it was time for her to make her own choices.

  “I will be Penelope Denetore,” Norah said as she grabbed the Foxian figurine, and I smirked.

  Something, fear maybe, made my hand reach out and snatch up Raven Gressahla and put her out on the table. Elise looked up at me, her mouth slightly open. I couldn’t guess if it was the character she wanted... but I wanted her. She grimaced and grabbed Groff.

  “I’ll be the ugly ogre, I guess,” she said, her voice downtrodden.

  I put the booklet aside. “There are more girls, you know.”

  Elise nodded. “Yeah, I know. But you idiots are always getting in trouble, and you’ll need a character like Groff in your party. He has healing magic and can harden his tree-person skin to be strong as stone, like a tank.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Elise seemed to hate my tabletop fascination, but she’d actually done some research on the game. She knew, the same as I did, that two DPS and a Mentalist hybrid would be doomed without some muscle.

  “Thanks, Elise.” I gave her a fist bump.

  Norah followed, then Piper, adding, “Way to take one for the team.”

  The energy in the room was palpable as Elise smiled, happy to be the martyr this time. We’d all taken turns being “the boy” since so many games didn’t provide enough female characters for an all-girl group to play.

  There was a knock and one of the cellar doors creaked open. “You girls want to watch the meteor shower?” Zack, Norah’s dad, asked. He and Beth were amateur astronomers, and very excited about the rocks falling from the sky. Apparently, there was some big deal on the news about this meteor shower, but who cared about space when Terra’s Heroes just released?

  I mean, sure, there were some worrying reports of one of Jupiter’s moons “disappearing,” but it reappeared five days later and lots of people on channel five thought it was something wrong with the telescope equipment. There were other reports of some weird storm showing up on Mars, but that died down a week ago. Some quack scientist said there was an invisible “event” happening in space, headed towards Earth this very weekend, but there wasn’t any real evidence of that, and I certainly wasn’t going to let it ruin the game.

  “We’ll catch the end of it,” Norah yelled back.

  There was a pause, then, “Alright. Don’t stay up too late.”

  “We won’t!” we all chimed in a singsong tune, then giggled as we looked at one another, knowing full-well we certainly would.

  The door closed and I sat down, pulling the game booklet closer. “Alright, nerds, let’s lay out the board.”

  We got to work setting up the first campaign. There were dungeons and cities and groves, but our main home base would be The Tower of Zewan. There we would train, upgrade our skills, and get quests. We could do all of those things out in the world too, but it was mostly for specialized training, or quests outside of the main campaign.

  The board was placed. Markers set. Characters poised for entry.

  “Tonight,” I started in my gameteller’s voice.

  “This morning,” Elise interjected.

  “This morning,” I started again without missing a beat, “we embark on a journey to defeat the Cursed Arborium. Who dares?”

  “I dare!” Elise declared loudly in a low-pitched, gravelly voice.

  Norah smiled, raising her hand. “I dare!”

  “And me!” Piper finished, and we put our fists together over the table.

  “Let the game begin!” I threw the two ten-sided dice onto the table to determine where we would begin our journey.

  The dice came to a stop on four and eight. Twelve it was, though the dice trembled defiantly as if that was not what they wanted to choose. I grabbed the encounter booklet and looked up twelve in the starting combat spreadsheet: Shapeshifters in the deep. I scanned the highlights, being well versed in guiding our ragtag gang through many RPGs, then set the book aside.

  “Outside of Terrasil, on the road to the next great city of Feldaust to begin a trade barter, our great Company is of high spirits. But danger lurks in the shadows of the tall trees, and creatures with poisonous fangs that stab deeper than any sword wait for us in the darkness.”

  The dice on the table shook harder, then so did the picture on the wood paneled wall, and the antenna on the old TV. There was a rumbling coming from overhead. Was it a plane? We looked up to the cellar door as light, first deep red, then orange, then yellow, pushed through the cracks in the wood.

  The table bounced from leg to leg, and I slapped my hands down to stop the game board from being upset. My stomach tightened as the chair tremble
d and shook my body. The TV wiggled off the stand, its glass face smashing on the carpet-covered concrete floor. Glass jars from the canning shelves shattered, splattering preserved tomatoes across the wall, and the rumble grew to a roar. The light outside the cellar pierced through the cracks and filled our little space with white.

  “What’s happening?” Piper yelled as she reached out for Elise and Norah. Their hands found mine on the table, and my wide-eyed gaze jumped from terrified face to terrified face. It was hard to see them, and my eyes burned from the blinding light.

  “Get under the table!” I screamed over the noise and slid down my chair. I remembered the training from school and followed through the motions with fear as my friends crowded around me at the center of the thick wood table. I wrapped my arms around them, putting our heads together.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered softly, knowing it wasn’t true, as the white and the sound swallowed us up.

  Click here to continue reading Zero.Hero 1.

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