Underpowered Howard: A LitRPG Adventure

by John L. Monk

  The Mirror of Captivation was the embodiment of everything that had ruined Mythian as a game and a lifestyle. It punished you for cleverness, for tenacity. I rejected this. Mythian didn’t deserve to beat me. It hadn’t earned that right.

  For the second time since my capture, I called the minotaur and let it kill me on purpose. I did it nine more times and stored away the corpses. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I dumped them out and summoned my wraiths. Then I ordered them to kill me—bending the class over backwards, snapping it half and then breaking it again.

  Take that, Mythian.

  After Returning, I tested my karma and got twenty-two heads out of a hundred. That suicide had screwed up my luck by one percent. I did the lengthy process again and twenty-two dropped to twenty-one. One more time and it dropped to twenty.

  Many hours later, now into the single digits, the ceiling opened up like it had when I’d first arrived.

  Jane stared down at me from her side of the looking glass. Gone was her former demeanor of smug superiority. Her face was now bruised and bloody, and her eyes darted crazily as if fearing an attack at any moment.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled.

  “Well, hello there, Plain Jane,” I said with a smirk. “How’s the weather outside?”

  Jane's eyes raged. “I got hit with a goddamned whale, that’s what!”

  “Temper, temper,” I said. “What if Bernard heard you blaspheming like that? Oh, that’s right, you can’t go into the city. Thought I didn’t know about that, eh?”

  She was about to say something but I cut her off.

  “Hold on—I gotta mess with that unbeatable minotaur of yours.”

  While Jane shouted questions at me, I ran around the maze shouting, “Aradune is stinky,” knowing full well the paladin wouldn’t understand me even if I said it in her ear.

  “What are you saying?” she yelled for maybe the fifth time.

  “That I can see up your nostrils and it’s grossing me out!”

  She was about to say something mean again when her eyes widened and she shook her head, no.

  “How does this keep happening?” she said. “Dammit… Armor of Go—”

  Just like that, the sky closed back up, replaced with the featureless stone blocks of the tunnel.

  Back a ways, I heard the minotaur roaring. Couldn’t have been closer than two hundred feet. To keep it at bay, I put my head down and slipped through the now very familiar maze and lost it.

  Sitting against a wall, I did my karma trick and got five heads out of a hundred. In all my time experimenting with exploits, I’d never fallen so low. Sort of spooky. What if I hit zero?

  I wondered what was going on out there. I knew so little about paladins. It sounded like she’d tried saying Armor of God. Had she been quick enough? Just how many health points did she have, and what was the cooldown on a spell that could block a whale flung from thousands of miles away?

  “To hit me,” I said impishly.

  So long as she carried that looking glass, she’d be a co-target of all the bad karma I’d been generating. Even high levels had to deal with cooldowns. She could heal the damage if she survived, but she still had a mana pool—or rather a zeal pool. The one thing everyone knew was they used zeal, like priests.

  “What’s this?” I said,

  The walls of my maze prison were beginning to fade. A few seconds later, I was sitting outside in a wide field.

  “Look at this mess,” I said, staring with disbelieving eyes at the enormous pieces of blue whale broken and splattered everywhere. Hard to say how many whales there were, but it seemed like at least five. The ground was slick with gore, and I could barely make out the remains of what had once been a lovely country cottage in the distance.

  I couldn’t help grinning. Freedom had never looked so beautiful.

  “Return!” I cast.

  The last thing I needed was to die and respawn in the Mirror, my last official binding location.

  I ran toward the smashed cottage searching for the Mirror as I went, and that’s when I saw Jane. By that I mean her legs, poking out from beneath an enormous chunk of blubbery whale flesh.

  I still had my sword. Useless in a fight, but I could carve up dead animals like nobody’s business. With an eye on the sky, I chopped into the dead whale and pulled the pieces away. A few minutes later and I’d cleared enough to drag her body out.

  “Where the hell is it?” I said, searching her.

  Upon touching her bottomless bag, I immediately knew its contents. She had a lot of junk in there. Some powerful, some curious (a collection of garden gnomes?), and even something sort of scandalous. But no Mirror.

  “Dammit,” I said, looking around. Then I saw it about ten feet away, lying face-up in the slimy grass.

  Anything that slowed her down was a good thing, so I took her bag as well as the Mirror.

  A breeze whipped up, filling my nose with the putrid smell of gore and briny spume. Far off on the horizon, a black dot was growing steadily larger in the sky. Could it be Jane, rezzed and flying back from a nearby stone to do her worst?

  No… It was too big.

  “Shit,” I said and took to the air.

  As I did so, the already heavy wind whipped into a mighty gale, and the distant whale altered course. I checked my map, found Heroes’ Landing, and flew that way. Several minutes later, the storm-flung whale smashed me out of the sky, killing me instantly.

  I triggered Return, cast Return again, looted my body, and resumed flying. Thirty miles and four deaths later, I smiled in relief when the following entries appeared in my game log:

  LOCATION CHANGED: Heroes’ Landing

  LOCATION FLAGS: SANCTUARY

  Chapter Eleven

  “Underpowered Howard!” Parker called mockingly when I entered his shabby private eye office. He squinted at me. “Though not underpowered anymore, eh? Level 84. Gotta be a new record.”

  I took a seat without asking. “I’m gonna need your help again.”

  Parker leaned back. He placed his feet on the desk, one over the other. “Where’s the Chest of Persistence?”

  I shook my head. “Different job this time. Think you’re up to it?”

  “Absolutely. But maybe tell me what it is first so I’m not in the dark.”

  “I need a non-default spell for necromancers.”

  “Which one?”

  “Summon Lich.”

  Parker smiled. “Timeless Tourney. Now, pay up. Hundred grand, plus expenses, plus interest for that breath I took between sentences.”

  “I tried the Tourney and failed,” I said. “Can’t try again for five years. Where else can I get it?”

  “How’d you lose?”

  I almost made something up, then settled on the truth.

  “I didn’t lose. I ran into a paladin. A real hard-ass named Jane. Ever heard of her?”

  “I’ve heard of everyone. Especially her. You’re right: She is a hard-ass. Or so they say. Relentless, too. And pretty. Appropriately so, in my opinion.”

  Appropriately. Meaning she’d struck that fine balance between goddess-like comeliness and normal human attractiveness. I silently agreed, but it was hardly worth mentioning. Besides, I was upset with her, and thinking about how pretty she was didn’t seem useful right now.

  “What do you know about her?” I said.

  “Stays close to Heroes’ Landing. Kills outlaws … chases necros and warlocks around… The usual. Powerful, too. Almost fifteen hundred, or so they say.”

  He smiled at the end of that, unwilling to admit he was higher level. Truth was, nobody knew how high Parker was.

  “She tailgated me through the Tourney,” I said. “Right to the end. Then she trapped me in this.”

  I took the Mirror from Jane’s bag and tossed it on the desk.

  Parker’s eyes grew round with surprise and his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. “Mirror of Captivation? Yikes. Heard about ’em, never seen one though. Nasty stuff.
But why?”

  “Someone’s trying to stop me. Jane’s god, specifically.”

  “Bernard? From what?”

  “From going through with my plan.”

  “You have a plan?” he said.

  I nodded. “A secret plan.”

  “A secret plan? This I gotta hear.”

  Smiling, I explained my general intent to alert Everlife about the Domination. But nothing about griefing millions of players to build an undead army. For obvious reasons.

  When I finished, Parker said, “That’s gotta be the flimsiest secret plan I’ve ever heard of. So all this because of a glitched-out Domination?”

  I started to nod, then caught myself.

  “It’s not because I lost,” I said. “It’s all those people dying forever. Deleted. They deserved the promise of Everlife. Mythian’s the greatest fantasy game ever made, but it should have been so much more. Less sadistic, for one. Things like this mirror… And forcing people to quit? It’s not right.”

  “You want them to fix everything?” Parker said.

  “Yeah, I do. The karma system’s bullshit. Why give us the tools and then ding us when we’re creative?”

  “Uh-huh. And if you tell them and they don’t care? Then what?”

  His words hung in the air like a bell that couldn’t be un-rung.

  “Well, they’re human, aren’t they?” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. “Look… People join Mythian every day, so they have to maintain it. At least a little bit. I mean, we’re still here, aren’t we? They probably get monthly reports saying everything’s fine. They’re just too busy to look more deeply. New stuff to develop, other game worlds…”

  “Squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Parker said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re the wheel.”

  I nodded. “Damned right.”

  “But first you need the lich spell.”

  “Yep. So can you help me?”

  Parker considered me for a good twenty seconds, fingers laced in thought, doing his detective shtick. I’d always found it amusing before, but not today. Not after being killed four times by flying whales.

  “There’s a diviner I know about,” he said, “living in Brighton. She’s squirrelly, but I can talk to her for you. No promises.”

  “How much?” I said.

  “I wasn’t kidding about expenses. My rate’s a thousand gold a day for something like this. I’m also gonna need an offering. Like I said, she’s squirrelly. Doesn’t care about gold. Something like this would do.”

  He picked up the Mirror of Captivation.

  “Take it,” I said. “I was gonna throw it in a lake.”

  “Perfect. Great. Yippie. I’ll start right now. Shouldn’t be but a week or so, flying. Where can I find you when I get back?”

  “The Slaughtered Noob,” I said.

  “Need anything while I’m there?”

  I shook my head. “Just the info.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then,” he said. “Oh, and I’ll need that money up front. I got a tab at the Ribald Troubadour I need to pay or they won’t let me back in.”

  I got up, paid him 7 thousand gold, thanked him for his help, and then left.

  Yes, I could have afforded my own apartment, but there were three of Bernard’s inns in town, and the Slaughtered Noob could only be accessed by players level 100 and lower. Unless Bernard’s paladins were different, high-levels like Jane were forced to use the Proficient Pilgrim or player-owned inns.

  With her out of the way, I still had to deal with Bernard, but he was easy. Even if he was a backstabbing traitor.

  “I’m not a backstabbing traitor!” Bernard thundered from across the common room floor, startling several newly arrived noobs and killing all conversation.

  No, I hadn’t called him that. He’d read my mind in the same manner Crunk did with his little wooden sign at Crunk’s Junk. A fun detail in a magical world to entertain and delight. Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t in an entertaining mood.

  “Noobs,” I said to the room. “Get out. Now.”

  At first, they sat at the tables staring at me. Then Bernard said, “All right folks, inn’s closed for a bit while we … um. While I—”

  “Everyone, out!” I shouted.

  Well, that did it. As one, and with only a modicum of grumbling, they got up and filed through the front doors, leaving me alone with the innkeeper.

  “Howard, if this is about Jane, let me assure you, I—”

  “Save it,” I said and took a seat previously occupied by a skinny woman with bags under her eyes and greasy black hair. “Couple of ales?”

  “What? Oh—why, sure. Just a minute.”

  Bernard disappeared behind the bar and returned with two mugs and his bottomless flagon. He poured for us both and seemed surprised when I raised mine in a toast. As we clinked mugs, I said: “To you staying the hell out of my business.”

  “What? Hey, now, no need for that sort of attitude. I know you’re upset, but—”

  “She stuck me in a mirror! So I’d Give Up! Because of you! You broke your imperative. We’ve been friends for ages and you never turned on me before, nor anyone else I know of.”

  Unstated was the fact that, but for my karma exploit, I’d still be stuck there for at least a year, waiting on my Give Up timer to reset. But I didn’t want this to descend into shouting and profanity.

  Bernard opened his mouth to say something and then closed it. Then he said, “My job is to protect you. That is my chief imperative. If you destroy the world… Well, you’re part of the world, aren’t you?”

  I’d tried reaching through his “destroy the world” stuff that first day and didn’t expect a different result this time. Still, I tried again.

  “Bernard, listen to me carefully. It may seem like this will destroy the world”—I held up the amulet—“but I assure you it won’t. I’m trying to save the world, not destroy it. If my plan to save the world fails, I can undo everything with a snap of my fingers. Just like this.”

  To illustrate, I snapped my fingers.

  Bernard regarded me with eyes so sad I felt momentarily taken aback. In a voice that wasn’t boisterous or jolly or anything like the one I’d known for hundreds of years now, he said, “It isn’t a matter of having the ability. When the time comes to set things aright, you won’t be able to stop it.”

  “Huh?” I said. “Stop what? What are you talking about?”

  With a worried glance at the ceiling, Bernard got up.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Never you worry. I am but a humble innkeeper, and this is just a game. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my customers have waited long enough.”

  As he made his way to the bar, the front doors eased open on their own, and a trickle of bewildered noobs began filing in.

  “He’s just a lucid,” I said, climbing the stairs to my old room from a week ago—still mine despite the passage of a week.

  My Chest of Persistence was sitting on the bureau where I’d left it. The bed had been made, and something new had been added to the room. Bernard’s bottomless flagon and a mug rested on a small table next to the window. Leaning against the flagon was a note. I picked it up.

  You’re not a noob, Howard, even if you’re only level 84. No need for you to appear in the bar. Feel free to enjoy your evenings up here where no one can bother you. I’m even loaning you one of my flagons. Cheers.

  “Screw you too,” I said.

  Curious about the flagon, I picked it up.

  Bernard’s Flagon of Endless Ale (Novice)

  Flags: No Steal, Location: The Slaughtered Noob, V-100

  Description: If you’re reading this, you have been graced with a high honor, indeed. Feeling sad? Easy to fix. Step one: Empty this flagon into your frown hole and drink until you pass out. Step two: When you wake up, repeat step one.

  That flag—V-100—meant it was best enjoyed by people with a vitality score of 100 or less. Mine was 831, after gear bonuses, so the ge
sture was wasted on me. I wasn’t much of a drinker, nor a user of the various drugs found in Mythian. Well, other than coffee.

  Now that I was out of that mirror and protected by Sanctuary, I wanted to begin rebuilding my karma—a slow and arduous process. But first I needed to get one thing out of the way.

  “What to do with you?” I said, gazing somewhat guiltily at Jane's bottomless bag. Despite her being a paladin and a kidnapper to boot, rooting through her bag felt like an invasion of privacy.

  Here’s some of the more normal things it held: high-level weapons and armor, camping gear, blankets, several bottles of wine, and a number of romance and fantasy novels. There were also photo albums filled with pictures of flowers, small animals, and Jane surrounded by friends. I almost didn’t recognize her because she was smiling in every one of them.

  Shaking my head, I said, “A paladin with friends? No one would believe it.”

  I pulled a camera out of the bag. In all my time in Mythian, I’d never seen anything like it. Suitably ancient-looking, with a screen full of settings like you’d find a hundred years ago. I shouldn’t have been surprised. There were movie theaters in Heroes’ Landing. And any books for sale in the real world could be found here the same day they were published. Heck, Parker had a rune-powered drip coffee machine.

  “Well, lookie here,” I said, pulling out a reddish-black statue of a man with a powerful physique. Its face had a strong jawline, and its eyes gazed at me with a smoldering intensity. Stamped on the little stand beneath its feet was the name “Rocko.”

  Demon Lover #8

  Cost per usage: 5,000,000 experience points

  Description: Do you like mimosas in the morning? Getting sprayed with fine mist? Midnight strolls on the beach, holding hands, getting kissed? Well, look no further! Escape the tedium of dating and get right to the mating. “Rocko” may have half a brain, but he’s got eight and a half of something else, lemme tell ya…

  I’d seen plenty of idols like this in my travels. I’d even tried one before, albeit of the female variety. The experience had been suitably world-shaking. The way they worked is you rubbed the idol, said its name, and it would grow to full size and come to life. You’d then become seized with lust so powerful it took your breath away, and you’d be gifted with enough stamina to last the whole night through.