Couch Potato Chaos- Gamebound

by Erik Rounds

  Having finished her shopping and having run her GP supply dry, Tasha and Pan made their way to the item shop. Ari was waiting outside and came over once he saw them.

  “Hi, Pan. Tasha, I’ve got our provisions and found a caravan that can take us within twenty miles of the capital. It leaves in about an hour. We can ride in the back of one of their wagons if Denver can help pull. We’ll also need to pay forty GP per head. Denver will need a harness. Can you pick one up?”

  “I picked one up already,” Tasha said, “so we should be good. I kind of spent all the rest of my money on clothes, though…”

  Ari sighed. “It’s fine. I’ll cover you. I’ve still got enough left over.”

  “Thanks, Ari, you’re the best!” She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

  Ari blushed. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  She had nearly an hour before the carriage would be ready to leave, so she listened to a random music station on her phone. Eventually “Chariots of Fire” played, unlocking the Sprint skill.

  Ability Unlocked: Sprint (Level 0)

  Type: Active acrobat ability (unlocks at Level 4)

  When invoked, you can run at 200% of your normal speed for 5 seconds. Higher levels will increase sprint speed and duration.

  Cooldown: 1 minute

  Huh, that skill would have been nice to have yesterday when I was fleeing from the Spider Queen.

  An hour later, they met up with the caravan. It was made up of several dozen carriages riding together, each being pulled by one or more raptors. Once Denver was secured to a harness, Tasha, Ari, and Pan sat in the back of one of the carts, and the caravan departed from the outpost.

  Chapter 13

  Ninja Attack

  Princess Kiwistafel was being hunted. She had been traveling with two companions—a dwarven prince named Hermes and the man she had fallen in love with, a paladin named Sir Slimon. The three of them had been close childhood friends, but both of her companions had been killed by the riders in black. The battle window identified her enemies as Human Ninja x34. There had been well over forty, but her companions had managed to kill quite a few of them before falling.

  She knew her friends would respawn in a few hours at the castle save point, but she also knew that they would never truly be the same. For the time being, she was on her own, being pursued by a large band of shinobi.

  Her raptor, Bessa, was racing away from the oncoming horde at full speed. The sun was setting to her left, and soon it would be too dark to run at this speed. She could see the shadow of Brightwind Keep in the distance, set against the darkening horizon. It was unlikely she would make it before being overtaken.

  She leaned in to Bessa, trying to reduce her frame and buy just a little more speed. She pushed her long green hair out of her face and focused on the terrain before her. The legion of shinobi were still gaining and were barely out of spitting distance.

  Her eyes began to glow a brilliant white. She held her right hand behind her, toward her oncoming enemies and rapidly wove a pattern with her hand.

  “Fraisha á Krâllinísh!” she cried, and showers of liquid fire rained down from the sky upon her pursuers. Unfortunately they moved out of the spell’s area-of-effect range before taking much damage.

  Again her eyes started glowing, and she made another hand pattern. Maybe her explosion array spell would slow them down.

  “Thórbash á Timdâ!” A torrent of lines arced from her fingertips and formed a line of fiery explosions between her and her pursuers. This time, the impact hit many of them. Her battle notification window showed that the number of enemies had decreased by two and was now down to thirty-two. There was no way she could kill the remaining thirty-two human ninjas on her own.

  Less than a minute later, Bessa was struck by one of the enemy’s kunai. The raptor collapsed, causing Princess Kiwistafel to smash into the ground, tumbling over and over until coming to a stop. She’d lost two heart containers. Her vision blurred, but she got back to her feet and hobbled over to Bessa. The raptor lay prone on the ground but was still breathing.

  The shinobi rode in circles around Kiwistafel. Bessa tried to stand back up, but half a dozen kunai struck her, knocking her to the ground. The raptor gave off one last painful cry and died in the princess’s arms.

  The ninjas dismounted and started to close in. The princess wiped away the tears that had started to form and opened her eyes, revealing that they were glowing a brilliant white. She tapped something on her HUD, and her oaken staff appeared in her hand. She still had enough mana for her most powerful spell: a wide area-of-effect wind spell designed to be used against armies.

  The amount of mana that the Tempest spell called for was high, but she managed to bring it down by several mana points by increasing the casting time and complexity. It would take seven seconds to cast and required her to perform a complex dance as part of the casting ritual.

  Her body moved through the dance, flowing in rhythm to the power of her spell. She surrendered her body to dance, her body moving with a clarity of purpose. Her body flowed with a staggering grace that captivated the onlooking shinobi.

  One of the ninjas came to his senses and yelled, “She’s casting a spell! Stop her!” But it was already too late. Her invocation dance ended in a flourish, and the Tempest spell was invoked. “Mâhlûr Pendarshî Kaluhûr.”

  The bulk of her remaining mana vanished from her HUD, only a single point remaining. It wouldn’t be enough to kill all of her enemies, but she hoped she could take out at least some of them.

  The wind rose and spiraled clockwise around her, forming a violent cyclone. Several of the smaller ninjas flew into the air by the sheer force of the wind, and many of the raptors fled or were killed by the storm.

  Kiwi checked her combat window. The enemy count was down to twenty-nine enemy ninjas. Now twenty-eight. Twenty-six.

  Seconds later, the Tempest came to an end. Twenty-six of the enemy ninjas still remained, and she only had enough magic left for a small spell. She’d killed six of them, but it wasn’t enough.

  The ninjas weren’t trying to kill her; if they were, they would have killed her before now. The fact that they were trying to subdue her rather than take her life indicated that this was a kidnapping. Someone wanted her captured, and she couldn’t see any way to escape.

  If only she’d died along with her friends, she would have respawned back in the city. As a different person, perhaps, but at least she would be free. As a hostage she would only be a burden to her kingdom and her people, and that was the last thing that she wanted.

  One of the ninjas approached her. “It’s all over, Princess. You’ve lost. Just give up, and I promise you won’t be hurt.”

  She looked around her at the devastation. Her friends were dead, her raptor killed, and she was in a battlefield surrounded by a legion of her enemies. There was only one escape from this situation. She checked the battle HUD and saw that she still had six heart containers.

  Her eyes again began to glow. The ninjas stepped back and readied their weapons. Princess Kiwistafel held forth her staff and placed her right hand at her own chest. If she couldn’t kill her enemies, she would take her own life and escape them through resurrection. There was a massive level cost for an act of suicide, but it was still preferable to being a hostage.

  “You shall never have me… Tétha Lishkâ!” She cast the only attack spell that she had enough MP to afford.

  A bolt of electricity surged from her fingertips and into her chest, filling her body with electrical energy that arced through her and into the ground. The wound in her chest was a blackened patch of skin. Pain rent at her body as she struggled to draw in breath.

  The blast had hurt her but hadn’t killed her. She had somehow missed her own heart. How had she missed? Even through her blurry vision, she could see her battle HUD clearly. She had gone from six heart containers to half of a single heart container. She was just barely alive.

  She fought through the pain. One more
shot should do it, but she had no more mana to spend. She tried to raise her hand to bludgeon her own head, but her arm wouldn’t respond to her commands.

  She could hear laughing coming from the male shinobi who had spoken to her before.

  “You lost, Princess,” he said. “It’s all over. Tie her up and heal her wounds. Take her staff as well; it should be worth a good amount of GP. And our promise not to hurt you? You’ve just rendered that null and void with your suicide attempt.”

  She felt hands on her, restraining her hands and legs and binding her legs together.

  “We were going to go easy on you, but you just had to resist,” the voice said.

  She had to think of a way to damage herself. In desperation, she bit down hard on her tongue. Through the pain, she watched as the damage indicator went from half a heart to a quarter heart. There was no blood damage.

  One more time. She was about to take another bite, but then she felt a warm glow fill her as her health was restored. One of the ninjas had cast a healing spell, restoring her self-inflicted damage. Someone gagged her and covered her eyes.

  “Goodnight, Princess,” a female voice said in a mocking tone.

  The ninjas lifted her limp form and tied her to the back of one of the surviving raptors. Kiwi looked around as best she could. They had lost over half of their raptors and more than a quarter of their shinobi. Getting back to their patron wouldn’t be easy, but it was clear the first part of their assignment was done.

  A needle pricked into the back of her neck, and she fell into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 14

  Road Trip to Brightwind

  Tasha sat on a small bench inside the covered wagon. Pan and Ari sat across from her. Through the window in the back, she made out a line of nearly a dozen raptor-drawn carriages similar to the one she was in.

  Each of the carriages was drawn by raptors. Tasha hadn’t seen any horses in Etheria yet—it appeared that velociraptors were the primary form of transportation. She couldn’t see Denver from where she was, but knew that her raptor was drawing one of the carriages ahead of her.

  The driver was an elven man in what Tasha considered to be sensible travel clothing. Tasha, Pan, and Ari were the only passengers, though the rest of the space in the carriage was being used to transport goods, so there wasn’t an abundance of leg room. After a few minutes, the gates of the outpost behind them disappeared from view.

  Pan looked at Tasha expectantly, so she shrugged and handed over her phone. Pan started up some game and phased out everything else.

  The dirt road wound through hilly terrain. Every few miles there was a waystone along the side of the road. The stone pillars were engraved with a rune that emitted a dim glow, visible even during the day. These waystones warded off the mobs, and the caravan didn’t spend enough time between them for the random encounters to occur.

  This was how the roads provided protection against monsters. Occasionally the carriage passed groups of travelers resting at these waystones. Sometimes there would be tents or merchant stalls set up as well.

  Tasha decided to spend some time fine-tuning her fireball spell. As a programmer, she quickly grew familiar with the code syntax and the logic involved in spellcraft. The API manual that she had found in the Temple of the Player enabled her to learn the language quickly.

  As a programmer, she was able to quickly acclimate herself to the syntax, and the API reference guide familiarized her with the commands and event handlers that she would need to create simple spells. While she didn’t have any other spellbooks, she was able to augment the fireball spell to create guided and higher-yield versions of the spell.

  Through her studies, Tasha came to understand that one of the advantages of a gunblade was how it could propel a magic spell at high velocity toward a target. This reduced the mana cost of the spell since most spells expended energy toward the target. The gunblade, as well as other forms of magi-guns, reduced that cost and offered swift delivery of spells.

  The only disadvantage to using a gunblade rather than a stave or wand was that gunblades didn’t offer any magic-attack boost. In order to deal more damage, she would have to make a spell that consumed more mana points, and for her those were in short supply.

  There were ways to reduce mana cost, but those involved increasing the complexity or time spent in casting. She could perform an elaborate dance, recite a series of complex words, or make elaborate hand gestures. Tasha couldn’t dance worth a damn, but her many evenings spent reading Tolkien books and watching Star Trek had given her the ability to memorize and recite long strings of nonsensical words.

  She designed a number of different spells, each of which were triggered by a phrase combined with a gesture. It seemed that the harder it was to perform the spell, physically and verbally, the more mana points it reduced from the cost of the spell.

  After some experimentation, she developed a powerful AOE blast that would deal heavy fire damage to anyone in range while knocking people away. The spell would have cost seven mana, but she was able to bring it down to three by giving it a ten-minute cooldown, reducing the projectile’s travel speed, increasing the cast time to five seconds, applying a damage penalty for casting it in any direction but north, and by requiring the recitation of a phrase and certain body movements.

  She chose to use the body movements and syllables used for the Kamehameha attack in Dragonball, one of her favorite animes. During one of the infrequent breaks in their journey, she used the spell interface to record her body movements and voice triggers.

  Those restrictions made the spell incredibly inconvenient to use, but it let her cast a more powerful fireball than she would have been able to afford given her limited mana pool of four points.

  The couch potato wasn’t a caster class, so she was limited to only three active spell slots. There were also API commands that she didn’t have access to due to class and level restrictions. She could design as many spells as she wanted but could only bring three of them with her to battle, and swapping them out mid-battle would be too time consuming.

  Ultimately she settled on two variants of the fireball spell, which would be triggered by her gunblade in addition to the one high-powered fireball spell. One of the variants was slower but more powerful, and the other did less damage but shot out at a higher speed.

  After the first fireball accident back at the temple, she was unwilling to test her work while riding in the carriage. There were infrequent breaks from travel when she could test her creations, but the high-powered fireball spell consumed all but one of her mana points, so she was only able to test it once.

  She also added a Fire Line illusion to the two gunblade-triggered spells. These would serve as an aim assist to attenuate her lackluster aim. Whenever she put her finger on the trigger, a red line would extend from the end of the gunblade in the direction it was pointing. It was an idea she got from a popular Keiichi Sigsawa anime she’d been watching. While in use, it consumed only a minute amount of mana.

  Her Spell Design ability had been steadily increasing in level as she worked on the spells. By the conclusion of the first day, she had managed to achieve level 3 in Spell Design.

  Spell Design (Level 3)

  Type: Passive ability

  Represents your ability to program spells. Spells that you design yourself receive up to an 8% power bonus and 1.4% cost reduction as a function of the spell’s originality. This bonus does not apply to unmodified spells copied from spellbooks.

  As evening approached, the caravan made camp around one of the waystones. Tents were set up just off the road around the waystone. Tasha, Pan, and Ari didn’t have a tent, so they slept under the stars. Tasha enjoyed it, at least until it started to rain. By the time morning came, she had only gotten a few hours of sleep, and the clothing that she’d slept in was drenched. Getting a quality tent would have to be her next priority.

  After learning the fundamentals of illusion magic, an idea for a new spell struck her. It wouldn’t b
e useful in combat but could be of great use for a couch potato like her.

  It was a simple magnification spell—an illusion that showed a magnified version of the small object behind it. It also amplified the sound coming from that object. It took her a while to prevent audio feedback, but by that evening she had a fully working version of the spell. Since it was only an illusion, worked in a single direction, and had no effect on enemy mobs, the cost in mana was nominal. She could keep the spell running almost indefinitely so long as she had something to eat or drink every hour or so to replenish her mana.

  It was time to put her spell to use. She unlocked her phone and loaded up a video for The Princess Bride. Propping her phone upright against a rock, Tasha cast the magnification spell, creating a larger illusion of the phone. The effect of this was that she had turned her phone into a big-screen TV.

  She spent the evening Netflixing with Ari and Pan. They started with The Princess Bride, which in Tasha’s estimation, was the best action comedy ever written. After it was done, a prompt appeared:

  Ability Unlocked: To the Pain

  Type: Passive barbarian ability (unlocks at Level 14)

  Improves aim by 25% when attempting to slice off an opponent’s limb.

  You will not be able to use this ability since you do not meet the level requirements.

  She couldn’t use the ability yet, but made a note of it in her notebook. After The Princess Bride, she played Labyrinth followed by Star Wars: A New Hope. Partway into each movie, a new ability was unlocked, its description appearing on her HUD. She didn’t keep any of them, but if she needed one of these abilities in the future, she could simply watch the associated show beforehand. She added the details of each ability to one of the empty notebooks that she’d acquired in the temple library.