Dagger of Doom: A LitRPG Adventure (Beta Tester Book 5)

by Rachel Ford

  He cleared an entire counter before the ranger elbowed his way in. “Come on Jack, steal fair now.”

  “Back off, Arath. You owe me, after the stunt in the Red Fox.” They grunted and tussled for a minute, using their hips and elbows and legs to block each other as they grabbed for goods that belonged to neither.

  It wasn’t until one of the glass bottles went flying off the counter and landed with a crash of glass and the slosh of liquid, that Jack took stock of his behavior. And he didn’t have long to reflect. He heard a woman’s voice from the floor above calling, “Jake? You alright down there, my love?”

  “Sugar,” he said.

  At the same time, Arath said, “Nuts.”

  “We need to go,” Karag decided.

  Jack threw a desperate glance around the room. He’d come here for a map – the one thing, in all his perfidy, he hadn’t yet acquired.

  There, on a far shelf, he saw papers and scrolls all stacked up in a large pile – charts and maps and he knew not what. That’s where he’d find what he needed, he decided. So he raced for the papers. Arath, meanwhile, ran for the door.

  Jack reached the shelf a few seconds later. He could hear footsteps overhead, and a slow, creaking walk. But not slow enough. He wouldn’t have time to figure out which of these maps he needed. Not before the old woman upstairs spotted him.

  So he resorted to old habits and scooped the entire stack into his bag. And no sooner than he had done so did the game alert him,

  You are overburdened. You’re unable to move until you discard items.

  He ran through a litany of sweet nonsense – fudge! and sugar! and so on – as his mind raced. He needed to get out before he was spotted. He couldn’t move until he dropped items. And he didn’t want to lose anything. He started to glance through his inventory, but then stopped. He needed to pause the game and bring up his full inventory interface, instead of relying on the quick glance feature which allowed him to browse in real time.

  So he did. And, seeing his full carry stats, he realized with a degree of mortification that he had – somehow – picked up fifteen pounds too many. That made no sense at all. He’d horded arms full of gold and potions without issue. All he’d done since was add a stack of paper to his inventory. There was no way the papers he’d grabbed could weigh fifteen pounds.

  Except, he saw, that’s exactly what they did – eighteen pounds, in point of fact. He’d had three pounds of carry capacity left before his latest theft – which had not only filled his inventory, but overburdened him. And all for the simple reason that every sheet of paper weighed half a pound. He’d grabbed three dozen, ergo eighteen pounds of inventory filled.

  These were videogame mechanics Jack did not find charming. He enjoyed being able to walk away from building collapses, and survive massive damage, and all the rest. But unable to walk because he picked up a stack of papers? Not so much.

  Still, he set to work sorting his misbegotten goods. Which proved a more difficult task than he imagined. Some of the pages were easy enough to discard: he had no use for a poster from a commemorative gala celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the founding of Fox’s Crossing, for instance. Nor did he need a faux bestiary of underworld animals, depicting various types of politicians – the viper, the snake, and so on. He might have found it amusing, or even creative, if he hadn’t been trying to purge his overburdened inventory to make a quick escape.

  But he was, so he dropped the bestiary, and the gala poster, and half a dozen other papers that had neither meaning to him, nor any real value. Then, he hesitated. Not all of the rest of the papers would be useful to him, but they all carried hefty price tags. He had maps and charts valued at a hundred or two gold pieces each. But the commemorative posters, the long-expired royal invitations, and so on that made up the rest of his haul was where the money really sat. He had a card with the king’s seal worth eight hundred gold, and a wanted poster from a hundred years ago, apparently signed by the fugitive in question, worth over a thousand.

  Jack still needed to purge eleven pounds of inventory items. But everything he had he either needed – his area map, for instance – or he wanted to keep, because it was worth a small fortune.

  He sifted through the pages, making up his mind to discard one then another, only to stop at the last moment. So he turned his attention to the rest of his inventory, to the spells and baubles he’d picked up.

  He had his standard gear – the blade, bow and wizarding staff he’d acquired earlier in the game. He had his potions – for healing and magicka restoration, some poisons and so on. He still had a decent inventory of foodstuffs, which he couldn’t purge – not only because he needed to sate his hunger, but also because food would provide a quick health boost when consumed.

  So he turned to the baubles he’d just picked up. He had dozens of them. And each one weighed half a pound.

  This shouldn’t have been a surprise to him. He’d been playing the game long enough to acquaint himself with the eccentricities of the inventory system. Jordan had even told him the weirdness was no accident – it had been designed to reduce player hording.

  Still, his brain had a hard time reconciling this with the absolute absurdity of a tiny gold band weighing half a pound. So he poured through every bauble in his inventory, checking their values and weights. In the end, he decided to purge anything that was worth less than a hundred gold per pound – which, in specific terms, meant any ring worth less than fifty gold.

  This freed up another four and a half pounds – but left him six and a half pounds over capacity. So Jack raised his bar to anything worth less than a hundred and fifty gold per pound. He cleared out another half dozen rings, all worth between fifty and seventy-five gold each. Then he went back to his maps and scrolls, and found a few that didn’t meet the new criteria. In the end, he was still two pounds over his carry capacity.

  He cycled back to the baubles. He dropped an enchanted pewter ring that granted the wearer the ability to breathe underwater. He figured he wouldn’t need that any time soon, and it was only valued at seventy-five gold – the low end of his acceptable range. And he dropped a teardrop necklace worth ninety-nine gold pieces; an orcish military ring worth eighty gold; and an amulet with unknown magical properties worth one hundred and ten gold. He had a few items worth less than the amulet. But in order to use it, he would need to use a scroll of discovery – the cost of which would more than make up a difference of a few coins.

  Then – finally – he left his inventory interface. The game resumed. The woman overhead kept on walking, slowly and steadily. Jack didn’t waste another moment. He leaped over the downed goods and raced to the door – a free, and much wealthier, man.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jack’s newly acquired map showed him the way to Kalbidor’s fortress. What it didn’t show, though, was the way to Ivaldi’s Hall. And since Iaxiabor had returned and unleashed the curse, Ivaldi’s Hall had to be their first stop.

  The map did contain a marker, deep in the mountains, for the dwarven kingdom. But it had no roads listed. Arath didn’t seem surprised by that. Delling, he said, was a “reclusive old bastard, as bad as any dwarf. Worse than most, I reckon. He’s got the way sealed tighter than a trout’s hinder.”

  Imagery that Jack didn’t need to consider, but a good point all the same. “If only we still had Migli. He could show us the way.”

  Karag nodded. “I say we make for the mountains, Jack. Fortune favors the bold. It may be that we will discover some way once we’re there.”

  He couldn’t argue with that. He had no better solution – and if one of his companions was advising him to take action on the promise of fortune favoring them, well, Jack figured the game had something in store.

  So they left Fox’s Crossing in the general hubbub following the prison collapse. No one stopped them or tried to stop them. No one even gave them a second glance.

  Then they set out along the same road they’d taken before – the same boring
stretch of endless plains. Jack walked, and walked, and walked some more. Night fell. He laid down for a nap, but it didn’t last long. Within an hour, they were on the road again, Arath complaining the entire way about being mistreated and driven like a slave. Eventually, day dawned. They went on walking.

  They might have gone on until Jack collapsed with exhaustion, had not the game suddenly paused. Jack’s heartrate spiked, and he spun around quickly. He half feared the worst – that Avery and Roberts had figured out his ruse, called his bluff.

  But the avatar of William Xi materialized. “Hey Jack.” The other man glanced around. “You…making any progress?”

  He didn’t understand the implication. Not at first. But then he remembered that the last time he and William had conversed, he’d been in the middle of nowhere – in barren plains country – as well. “Yeah, I’m on my way to the dwarf kingdom. From Fox’s Crossing.”

  “Ah.” William nodded. “Ivaldi’s Hall. Beautiful level.”

  Jack wasn’t particularly interested in the level design, though. So he tried to steer the question back to more pressing topics…like his life. “So, I’m assuming something must up?”

  He nodded. “Kind of. I just wanted to give you a head’s up – they picked up some of the breadcrumbs I left for them. And they seem to be buying ‘em, hook, line and sinker. If you’ll pardon the mixing of metaphors.”

  Jack nodded. He didn’t give a damn about metaphors. The other man could dangle his participles, mix his metaphors, misplace his modifiers, run on in his sentences, or otherwise transgress rhetorical or grammatical norms. He could commit any, or every, offense against the English language. Jack really didn’t care. William had just saved his life. He told him something of the sort, though it came out in a jumbled mess of thanks and wild, relieved laughter.

  William accepted the thanks with caveats. He reminded Jack that he shouldn’t count his chickens before his eggs hatched. He urged him not to put his cart before his horse. And he informed him that his work wasn’t done. “I didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, so I left a few other trails to throw them off the scent.”

  Then he took his leave. Jack walked on for a while, too revved up to sleep. But by late afternoon, his hectic pace finally forced him to try for another rest. So they made camp a little ways from the roadside. Arath got a fire going and roasted a lump of meat over it. He didn’t offer anyone any. Karag gnawed at a hunk of dried meat.

  Jack just laid down to rest. He felt too tired to eat – too tired to do anything but sleep. It wasn’t even a physical exhaustion, though there was plenty of that too. He’d barely slept, stealing just a few hours here and there. But he felt weary in his soul, as if all the cares of these last days had finally caught up to him. Maybe it was knowing that he was safe, that the ruse had worked. Maybe it was not knowing when he’d see Jordan again – or if he’d ever see her. Maybe he’d just reached some breaking point.

  He didn’t know. He just knew that he needed sleep. So Jack shut his eyes, and let darkness take him.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he first stirred to wakefulness. But he could see nothing around him. Arath’s fire must have gone out some time during the night, and now all the world lay in pitch blackness. Neither moon nor stars shone through the thick clouds overhead. His eyelids felt heavy, and the weight of sleepiness hadn’t left him yet. But he felt – something. Something else, something stronger than exhaustion, something darker than the vague worries he’d travelled with these last days.

  The wind rustled somewhere behind him, and a stab of adrenaline coursed through his veins. He couldn’t say why. He hadn’t heard anything beyond the breeze. But he felt – knew, almost, on an instinctual level – that something was wrong.

  He lay perfectly still, straining his ears. He didn’t know what he was listening for. Part of him thought he should be on his feet, casting light spells. But another part of his brain urged caution. He’d read once that you could feel the hairs on your head standing on end before a lightning strike; and that was exactly how he felt right now.

  He moved his hand slowly for his blade – very slowly, and very quietly. He turned his thoughts to fire energy until he could feel it coursing through him, just strong enough to be called up in an instant if he needed it – but not strong enough to materialize and give him away. Not yet.

  And then a noise, loud and brutish, split the night. Jack scrambled to his feet, bringing up the spell in his left hand and drawing his blade with the right. Light materialized on his fingertips. He took two long, quick steps backward while his eyes adjusted, and he tried to figure out what was going on.

  By time he’d started the second stride, he heard a new sound: a horrible, crushing and crunching and sloshing sound. And at the same time, he made sense of the sudden shapes that had sprang out of the darkness. He even understood the source of the noises – all of them.

  The first sound he’d heard was Karag. The giant was still screaming savagely, turning a ferocious gaze around their makeshift camp. The second sound could also be attributed to him, albeit for very different reasons. The crunching, crushing and sloshing was the sound of a human, or humanoid, being…well, splatted like a fly. A big red pile of goo lay about two feet from where Jack had been sleeping. If he’d had any doubts as to what the goo signified, the stray hand here and foot there put them all to rest. Someone, or something, had been creeping through the camp in the middle of the night.

  Headed for me. Shit! Jack mirrored the giant, spinning around in a circle to survey the camp. He expected to find a whole host of attackers. That’s usually how it went: where one led, others followed.

  But he saw nothing but empty road and desolate plains in every direction – and Arath, half-blind with sleep as he scrambled for cover in stumbling, desperate strides.

  Karag stopped screaming. Jack felt his breathing slow, though he hadn’t even realized he’d been panting.

  He returned his gaze to the humanoid sludge, shivered, and turned to the giant. “What…happened?”

  “That miserable rat William the Wanderer: I knew he’d be back.”

  Jack glanced back at the sludge. “Is that…was that William?”

  Karag nodded. “You better believe it.”

  He shivered again but stayed on track. “Did he attack you?”

  “Me? No, he was going for you. Had his knife drawn. Looked like he was going to cut your throat while you slept, so I…” Here, he mimed a squashing motion. “Took him out.”

  “You…you squashed him?” a shaky voice asked.

  Jack’s nerves were still a little shot, and at the unexpected sound he conjured a fireball again and spun around. But it was just Arath, looking pale and disconcerted.

  “I did,” Karag confirmed. “Like a bug. Something you might want to keep in mind, actually, next time you decide to rob me.”

  “What do you think he was doing?” Jack asked.

  “I told you: going to cut your throat.”

  “Right, but why?”

  Karag shrugged. “He worked for Kalbidor before. Maybe he figured he’d get a payout for killing you.”

  “He probably would have,” Arath nodded. “A good one. We’ve been a persistent boil on the arse of evil’s plans lately. I’m sure they’d pay well to whoever lanced us.”

  Jack stared at him, slack-jawed. “Dude. What the heck?”

  Arath stared back. “What?”

  “What the heather was that?”

  “What?”

  “Arse boils? Really?”

  Arath went on staring, like he had no idea what Jack was talking about. “Yeah, and?”

  “Couldn’t you have gone with some other kind of imagery? I don’t know, a thorn in the side or a pain on the butt?”

  “You don’t think an arse boil would be painful?” The ranger snorted, as if Jack was being absurd.

  “That’s not the point,” Jack persisted.

  “He’s saying don’t call him a boil on the a
rse of evil,” Karag said. “Obviously.”

  Arath stared at them both, then laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Anyway…” Jack said. “Moving on…if he was on the take –”

  “What do you prefer? A pebble in the shoe of evil? A feather in the pillow of evil?”

  Jack sighed and Karag rolled his eyes. “Feathers belong in pillows.”

  Arath considered, then nodded. “I’ll give you that one, tall boy. Okay, how about this: a harlot in the bed of evil. Wait, no: that could be ambiguous too, depending on circumstance.”

  Jack decided just to ignore the other man. He was grinning ear to ear, obviously impressed by his own sense of humor. Someone has to be, I guess. “Do you think he was alone?”

  Arath went on prattling about flies in soup and thorns in underpants. Karag considered the point at hand, then shook his head. “I don’t. Remember, young Andrew said he and the demons went their separate ways after they fought. My guess is, he was out here looking for hapless travelers when he saw us.”

  “A mosquito in the bedroom of evil?” Arath piped up.

  Jack nodded – in response to Karag, rather than the ranger. “He might not have even known who we were.”

  “It’s possible, but I doubt it. I suspect our names are well known to Kalbidor.”

  “Boil,” Arath said, “meet arse.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Despite Arath’s interruptions, Jack got the full story out of Karag. He’d been sleeping when he sensed William. He’d woken to find the Wanderer – well, wandering where he had no business being, knife in hand.

  The giant had watched him through half-closed lids, checking Arath first and then spotting Jack. “My race does not need much light to see by, even at night,” he explained. “It is one of the reasons why the assassins of the Obsidian Isles are so feared…there are few environments which we cannot infiltrate.”