God Mode: A LitRPG Adventure (Mythrune Online Book 1)

by Derek Alan Siddoway

  “Z!” Another arrow impaled Leesha, dipping her HP to half. She coughed and sagged back to the ground. The group was less than twenty yards away now and closing in fast.

  I sped through my options. I could try to carry her, but in my already-fatigued state I knew we’d never outpace the Sylvads. I could stand and fight, but then I was basically asking everyone in sight to check out my God Mode hack. I had no chance of defeating that many players. I saw only one real option: If I wanted to live to fight another day, I had to run.

  So I did.

  “I’ll find you!” Even as I yelled the words over my shoulder, I felt like a coward. The crowd surrounded Leesha, blocking her from my sight. Most of the players had stopped, but a few pointed my way, apparently thinking I still had a token. I turned several corners, dodging wagons, carts, and NPCs in an effort to lose them. I kept going until I could barely walk — my fatigue leveling out but not recovering — until I felt safe.

  I collapsed in the dust, muscles aching, lungs burning, and an undeniable sense of guilt building inside me.

  I’d fed Leesha to the wolves. Some team player I was.

  52

  A New Low

  I dragged myself into a nearby shed, grateful for the random aesthetic building that served no other purpose in the game than to hide my sorry ass. My pursuers had either given up or lost me, but I wasn’t about to fall victim to some random player hoping he could shank me and get a token.

  I told myself again that I’d made the right move by ditching Leesha. Not only was I still free to rescue her, but I’d prevented anyone from discovering my God Mode hack. It was what she’d want too…I thought.

  No matter how I sliced it, I still felt like a grade A jackass, even if it was the right call. Being a team-sport athlete, I’d had one message drilled in my head since the first time I’d ever played: you never let your teammates down.

  Strategic or not, it felt like I’d done just that.

  I clenched and unclenched my saucer-sized hands with each breath, and as exhaustion waned, my mind started to clear.

  Worst-case scenario, they’d kill her. I didn’t know how PvP deaths worked when you were in a party, though. Would she respawn back at the Horuk outpost, or would I have to find her and revive her? The latter could pose a serious problem if the Sylvads hauled her off somewhere first and hadn’t just strung her up right there in the street. I wondered if the MythRune moderators would allow a vigilante hanging. Could a player even be killed by a hangman’s noose?

  I checked my wandering mind and forced myself to focus. There was an easier way to figure all this out. I flipped open my Party Menu. By now, I’d expected Leesha to be dead. Since I wasn’t in combat, I could message her. But when I opened up the chat, it showed she was alive, but still in combat, meaning I couldn’t message her. The combat mode must have been activated when one of the Sylvad players attacked her. But why hadn’t they finished her off already?

  Leesha’s pain sensitivity could be changed whenever she wanted, so there was no point in torturing her. Plus, if the Sylvads did that, Leesha would have had grounds to report it to a mod. An offense that serious would probably lead to a banning, even if it was just a temporary one.

  And then my mind flashed back to one of the first conversations I’d had with Leesha.

  “Aww! You sweet summer child,” she had told me. “There are worse things than dying in this game, you know. These guys told me if they caught me, they’d chain me to a tree or lock me in a trunk until the tournament was over.”

  After learning how bad Leesha had screwed the party over, it didn’t seem out of the question that they’d actually follow through with their promise. I began to wonder if leaving her maybe hadn’t been the best move.

  I stood up and peeked outside the shed. There was still smoke rising in narrow columns throughout the town, but the melee seemed to have died down. I wondered if the town guards had finally garnered the numbers to bring order or if the players had come to their senses. If history was any indication, it didn’t seem likely that a mod would have intervened, but either way, it had mellowed out quite a bit.

  I felt confident I could travel the streets safely, but just to be sure, I unequipped my helmet and cuirass. The blue mohawk made me stand out, but nobody who’d been chasing me before knew I had it. Going shirtless felt weird, even if I had a totally jacked Urok, but it further helped the disguise. Now, I just looked like some bone-headed berserker. I hoped no one would remember my player name, or bother to look it up when I was just another Urok in the crowd.

  But what next? How was I going to find the Sylvads in a town the size of Crystal Fen? There were hundreds and hundreds of players socializing, running around on quests —

  Quests! Dart!

  While we’d been playing cops and robbers, Nugash was getting all the info he needed to continue the raids, and Dart was progressing his quest chain, potentially moving out of reach. I pushed my guilt for Leesha aside and thought about returning to the trading post. Even if I couldn’t catch Dart, I could at least help us stay caught up to him until I could track Leesha down. I pulled up my quest log, only to find a blinking notification. When the window appeared before me, my heart sank.

  Quest Failed: Hands of Gold

  Nugash was able to visit the Livermoor Trading Post and escape with information to coordinate new attacks for the Blue Hand Raiders against the Lucas Sevenday Company. You may still be able to find evidence of the alliance between the Blue Hands and the Livermoor Guild, but for now, the Blue Hand Raiders are in perfect position to continue their attacks.

  “What?” I said aloud as I read and reread the update several times over. “What?!”

  Several NPCs walking past jumped at my outburst and steered around me, but I hardly noticed.

  Suddenly, the situation that had seemed almost salvageable now felt impossible. Not only was Leesha gone, but the quest that could have led me to a token was at a dead end. I had zero leads to gather evidence of the agreement between the raiders and the Livermoor Merchant Guild. Who knew where the hell Dart was, and even if I somehow could pick up the pieces from the failed quest, there was no guarantee his quest chain would continue to keep us on a parallel course.

  No leads. No allies. No token. No means of getting revenge. No salvation for Brandon. With just over six days left until the tournament began, things were pretty damn bleak.

  I screamed, pouring out all of my rage and frustration. In-game, it came across as a violent Urok roar. I balled my hands, planted my left foot, and smashed my fist through the clapboard wall of the shed. My punch went straight through. Hardly registering the pain in my throbbing right hand, I threw another punch with my left.

  And it hurt. With each punch, I felt my knuckles crack and bleed, but it felt like a punishment I deserved. After all this work, after everything I’d sacrificed — after everything Brandon sacrificed — it was all for nothing.

  Slivers of HP loss filtered through the edge of my vision until I finally stopped, hands broken and bloodied, throbbing with each beat of my virtual heart.

  +1 Unarmed Combat Skill Point

  I scoffed at the notification. That was the last thing I wanted to see. I pushed it aside.

  My shoulders heaved with each labored breath, and I suddenly felt an immense exhaustion. My throat grew tight, and I was filled with the urge to cry. Pools of tears welled in my eyes.

  Why in the hell do they allow us to cry in this stupid game? I thought, clearing my throat and unsuccessfully blinking back my tears.

  “You’ve never been great at hiding, you know that?” a voice called behind me.

  I tensed and, without thinking, grabbed one of the pickaxes leaning against the splintered shed wall and spun. The tool flipped end over end through the air with enough force to split a Leprechaun in two. If this was one of the token hunters, I wasn’t about to let them get the drop on me.

  I pivoted from the throw just in time to see the speaker dodge to the side and snatch
the spinning pickaxe out of the air.

  “Temper, temper. If you don’t chill out, the whole town is going to know you’re here.”

  I blinked in confusion. The character was an all-too-familiar Skrael. Tattoos adorned his face — or at least what could be seen from the bridge of the nose up. The collar of his navy-colored cape hid the lower half of his face. Beneath the cape, the Skrael wore a patched jumpsuit sporting an obnoxious number of useless zippers running in all directions.

  His gloved hand that wasn’t gripping the pickaxe held a long staff topped with a sun ornament. The wide brim of the Skrael’s pointy dark-blue hat shaded his pale features from the afternoon sun. The hat band had a skull emblem sewn into it.

  The newcomer’s whole attire gave the impression of a weird wizard scarecrow. I could name every piece of gear he wore, down to the Mystic’s Moccasins of the Pale Moon on his feet. I knew this character better than I knew my current Urok character, almost as well as I knew my real-world self.

  My mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. “How…?”

  “Come on,” the Skrael said. “You’re smart. You can figure it out.” He tossed the pickaxe to the ground.

  The character I was looking at was my very own. One of two avatars I’d created during the beta period of MythRune. It took me a minute to figure out how someone could be logged into my character while I was already in-game with another. And then the pieces started falling into place. The Skrael mage had been created under my brother’s account. I’d leveled the character up when he was too sick to play so we would be around the same level when he felt well enough to log in. Which could only mean…

  “Brandon?”

  53

  Plan B

  “I’m going to kill you,” I said, taking a step forward and reaching for my axe.

  Brandon backed away, wagging a gloved finger at me.

  “Ah, ah, ah. You’re forgetting what level I am, broseph.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “And you know I hate when you call me broseph.”

  “Sorry, broseph.”

  “You need to log out! You’re not well enough to be playing.”

  Brandon’s smile turned into an annoyed frown. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize you were the one with heart problems.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Neither am I. I’ll be the judge of whether or not I’m well enough to play.”

  “Log off. Right now!”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Do you want to hurt yourself?”

  “Dude, I’m already dying.”

  That made something inside me twist and buckle. Brandon had no way of knowing what I’d just gone through, but him here, telling me he was dying made it all worse.

  “And what if being in here triggers a reaction?” I said, stepping up to him and looking down from my six-and-a-half-foot beefy Urok frame. His eyes were angry and defiant, which only made me madder. “What if the stress jacks with your heart and you die in-game?”

  “At least I’ll be doing something I love.”

  I would have punched him if I hadn’t been worried it would give him a heart attack in real life. “Log off.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not going to say it again.”

  “Say it all you want. I’m not logging off.”

  “Brandon, listen to me —”

  “No, you listen to me. Do you know how it feels to be stuck in bed for weeks and months on end? To be so helpless that you can’t even save your own life? I’d much rather spend the time we have together with my brother. And let’s face it: you may not want to admit it, but our odds of success here are…well, let’s just say they’re pretty low. It’s a stupid plan.”

  “It’s not stupid!”

  “Face it, Z. It’s a stupid plan. But I went along with it because it made you feel better. Because it gave you hope.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “So what are you saying? You just want to give up?”

  “Dude, I’ve had a long time to come to grips with this,” Brandon said, his voice cracking. “I went along with this whole plan because I knew it made you feel better — like you weren’t helpless. The least you can do is let me have some hand in saving my own life. Don’t feel like you have to save the world all the time.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Yeah? Then why aren’t you in school? I want you to make something of your life, not just be my caretaker, man. I don’t want to bring you down. But no, you couldn’t just take care of me. You had to devote your whole life to me, ruining your own life in the process.”

  Damn MythRune, now there were tears in both of our eyes.

  “I do it because I care about you,” I said, feeling ridiculous as I wiped my gigantic Urok paws across my face in an effort to stop the tears.

  Brandon stepped forward and put an arm on my elbow. We must have made quite the sight, an enormous Urok and a Skrael half the size, crying like babies.

  “The burden doesn’t always have to fall on you. You’d think as a football player you’d realize that one person can only accomplish so much by himself.”

  I looked down at the ground. “I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “You can’t stop life from happening,” Brandon said. “Bad stuff is going to happen. That’s how it is. But if I’m going to die, at least let me spend the small amount of time I have left with my big brother.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d been so caught up in finding a way to save him that I’d never really thought about Brandon’s side of things. I’d lived so long in fear of him dying, I’d made it my responsibility to shield him from everything else, not realizing how unhappy it had been making him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a somber tone.

  “Don’t be sorry, for me or you. I just wanna help. And if I can save my life in the process, it’s a bonus. If not, I’ll have at least done everything I could.”

  “Right.”

  “And besides,” Brandon added in a more lighthearted tone, “weren’t you just freaking out because of how hopeless everything seemed? I think you could use help from a more ‘experienced’ player.”

  While MythRune didn’t allow beta characters to participate in the tournament, they were allowed to carry over their models for pretty much any other reason. There were limitations on what they could do — for example, they couldn’t party up with tournament players or earn tokens, but for what I needed, Brandon could probably serve just fine.

  “How did you get here so quickly?” I asked.

  Brandon sighed. “I knew you were going to Crystal Fen. I hopped on my staff and booked it over here. I’ve been wondering how they were going to import beta players — turns out they just sorted us out in higher level starting zones on the new map. Luckily, all of my skills and gear were intact.

  “From that point, it wasn’t too hard to find you guys — I was actually eavesdropping on you off and on since you left the caravan, so I figured out what your quest involved. I would have been there to help you out with those player killers, but I was doing some surveillance on the Livermoor Merchant Guild trading post when it all went down. Guess what? There’s a secret exit. It comes out of a long underground tunnel. Dart’s using it to come and go without people knowing. I think he might have a hideout in their basement or something.”

  Typical Brandon. He’d been in the game less than two days and had already figured everything out. My mind struggled to process everything I was hearing. “How…?”

  Brandon touched the sun emblem on the head of his staff against his pointed hat. “You’re forgetting what a Skrael runecaster is capable of. I put a tracking hex on Dart and watched him the whole time on my map. He thinks he’s hot shit, but he’s such a lower level than me that it didn’t even notify him. The hex duration is only thirty minutes, but it was enough for me to follow him to his private entrance.”

  I tried to quell my rising excitement. These extreme hi
ghs and lows had to have been wreaking havoc on me IRL. We still had a chance to catch that rat bastard, but first… “We have one other problem,” I said. “The Sylvads — the Full Metal Druids or whatever — still have Leesha.”

  “Easy,” Brandon said. “I can travel really fast through the air. My staff is like a witch’s broom, remember? Where did she respawn? I’ll pick her up.”

  “No,” I said. “Leesha isn’t dead.” I explained the communication situation. “As far as I can tell, she’s stuck in a PvP combat state, or they have some spell on her or gave her something that knocked her out. I have no idea what they’ve done with her.”

  Brandon grinned.

  “What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that? This isn’t funny.”

  “It’s just…nice to see you actually being interested in someone,” Brandon said, still grinning. “I don’t think you’ve had a girlfriend since high school.”

  “She’s not…are you…I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”

  “It’s no big deal.” Brandon shrugged, still smiling. “It’s nice to see — really! So you want to save her first, then?”

  “I — never mind,” I said, not wanting to go down that road any farther than Brandon was already pushing us. “We need her if we want to actually have a chance at getting into Mythgard after we get a token. Rumor has it the place is under siege, and she’s the only other player I trust to help get us through.”

  “Uh-huh, right,” Brandon said, but he was finally being serious. “How do you expect to find her, then?”

  That was a problem. I tried to think of a way I could use my Combat Assessment to potentially find the Full Metal Druids. The downside was it required me to be at least within seeing distance of them. If that were the case, I would have already noticed it was them. I was about to suggest that Brandon start flying in a grid over the town and surrounding area, when another thought came to me.