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

by Rachel Ford

  King Delling stood behind a wall of black mages and city guardsmen. The mages seemed not to have diminished much in numbers, but the guard had dropped by about a third. Only a quarter of the workmen survived.

  At first, Jack couldn’t even locate Grimlik and Grem’tha, and he feared the worst – he feared that sometime during the battle, when he’d been otherwise occupied, the poor little duo had fallen.

  But then he caught a glimpse of movement overhead, and saw two pale gray forms hanging upside down on the ceiling, scuttling along. Now one and then the other would cast something down on the demon below. Sometimes, their spears and boulders would hit, and sometimes they’d fly wide.

  Then, Jack took stock of his own weapons. He had no arrows left, and only one magicka potion. He still had a few healing potions remaining, mostly because he’d leaned so heavily on healing spells. But now that he had to rely on magicka for attacks too, and he wasn’t sure the tradeoff made sense anymore. Maybe, he figured, he should start using his healing potions, and reserve the magicka for frost spells.

  Then his eye fell on his potions. He’d whipped up quite a few of them along the way. Some offered minor damage – twenty hit point loss here, or thirty there. But some carried powerful punches:

  Vitality Poison: drain 2 hit points per second for 60 consecutive seconds. Drain 5 magicka points per second for 30 consecutive seconds.

  Death’s Kiss: causes drain of thirty hit points per second for five seconds unless an antidote is applied.

  Knave’s Bain: causes ten hit point drain per second while weapon is equipped. Duration: 30 seconds

  Fool’s Foibles: Heightened chance of stumbling and being thrown off balance in combat. Block and combat skills reduced by 50%

  Jack scrolled through them with a wicked grin spreading over his face. These – these – would really even the playing field.

  Of course, he needed some ranged weaponry first. So, closing his inventory, he decided to switch up his strategy. Instead of firing as soon as he collected a projectile, he ran from body to body, amassing arrows. He didn’t look for anything else. He didn’t care if they carried loot or enchanted rings or anything else. He could search for that later.

  He got together about two dozen. Then, he went back to his inventory, and chose his poisons. He picked Knave’s Bain, and Death’s Kiss, and a few Vitality Poisons. He administered these to a few of the arrows. Then, he chucked all his lower level poisons onto the remnants of his quiver.

  Normally, he would have been more frugal with his goods. He would have held on to them for a rainy day – a rainy day that probably would never come. But that was how he played: like a dragon, hoarding his goods.

  But right now, he had an arch demon shooting fire out of his eyeballs, and a very limited number of projectiles left. The rainy day had finally come.

  Jack waited until Kalbidor launched his power strike, and his lightning attack. Then, he took aim. He struck with the Knave’s Bain arrow first. He had a feeling that the demon would not unequip his weapon – not just after he’d used his spells. That would mean holding off on any kind of attack for thirty seconds, and he guessed that wouldn’t happen.

  He was right. Kalbidor went on wielding his hammer – and Jack’s spell drained a whopping ten hit points per second for the full thirty seconds: three hundred health, in total. And that was just from the one arrow. The Vitality Poison lopped off another hundred and twenty health, and a sweet one hundred and fifty magicka into the bargain. Death’s Kiss siphoned off a hundred and fifty HP within five seconds.

  And then the smaller attacks started to stack up. In addition to the piercing damage of the arrow, Jack lopped off twenty-five hit points here, fifty there, and so on. All of a sudden, Kalbidor’s health meter didn’t seem quite so invincible. The consistent drain put his hit points into perspective. They were looking at two, perhaps two and a half, thousand, not a million. Which, in the scheme of things, seemed pretty doable.

  Not that the demon let up at any point during this. He kept unleashing unholy havoc on anyone and everyone he could. He delivered his power strike when he could, and sent down lightning and fire on the hapless crowd. Screams of agony and the stink of seared dwarf hide filled the room.

  But Kalbidor’s health meter dropped steadily. He reached a third of his hit points.

  Jack kept shooting, and the black mages kept firing. Karag hurled stones the demon’s way, and the guardsmen came at him with spears and axes.

  Kalbidor’s health meter dropped to a quarter, and a cinematic rolled. The demon staggered again, this time falling to hands and knees. He hovered there for a long moment, gasping and wheezing.

  Then, like before, he stood and raised his arms heavenward. He called on the same dark power in the same dark language. Lighting and fire ripped through the room. Great blocks of stone fell from the ceiling overhead, and the walls shook and trembled and collapsed in places.

  Kalbidor’s hammer glowed a hellish red, and he raised it high over his head. Then he struck, with a blow so terrible his hammer shattered. The impact took down the rest of the ceiling, and collapsed half the walls. Everyone – dwarf, giant, human and goblin alike – went flying. Rocks battered their prone forms, and fire snaked around the room.

  Kalbidor laughed, a deep, terrible laugh. He raised his hands, and they glowed with flame. He started to chant, and the fire he’d unleashed swayed and flew about the room – like dancers, moving to a fiddler’s music.

  Jack’s vision darkened, and then he blinked up at a ruined ceiling. His health meter flashed. His hit points had dropped into the critical range. First things first, of course, was a healing potion.

  Then he pushed up to his feet and surveyed the chamber. Thick, heavy smoke and dust filled the room. Fire danced about of its own volition, singeing and searing everyone it came into contact with. Dwarves screamed and fled before it – the few that remained, anyway. Most seemed to have been crushed under rubble.

  Kalbidor stood above the chaos, eyes glowing red as he went on chanting.

  It looked like a scene straight out of hell – as if Jack had died, and found himself before the devil himself.

  A shiver raced up his back, but he forced himself to focus. The arch demon had five, maybe six or seven hundred hit points left. That was it.

  He had three poisoned arrows left, which would take care of about a hundred and fifty of those hit points. He decided to fire them all before scouting out new ones.

  A mistake, as it happened, because it drew Kalbidor’s full ire directly to him. The demon laughed maniacally, and twisted and flailed his hands. Wild flames converged on Jack, while lightning rained down on him. Dust vortexes and fire blurred his vision and seared his skin. His health plummeted.

  He tried to move, to get out of the path of the magical fury. But it followed him, and inside of thirty short seconds, Jack was dead again.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Jack respawned right before the last cinematic had rolled. He watched Kalbidor shatter his hammer again, and summon the fire demons. He watched the palace collapse around him, and so many of the dwarves disappear from sight.

  This time, he noticed Karag on the far side of the chamber, pulling himself out of the dust; and Grimlik and Grem’tha picking themselves out of the rubble.

  Then he blinked back up at the remnants of the palace as before, and healed himself. But this time, he didn’t follow that up with a suicide volley. He needed a new strategy.

  He decided he’d stick to what he knew worked: he’d collect arrows, poison them, and then strike.

  Which is what he did, maintaining a wide berth of Kalbidor as he went. He tried to stay out of the demon’s line of sight, and it seemed to work: he went on chanting and stomping and wreaking general death and destruction.

  And Jack went on harvesting supplies. The fire vortexes found him a few times, and here he learned something useful. He first tried to ward them off with a blade, but this proved completely ineffectual. His sword flew
through empty air – and his sword arm plunged straight into the flame. Hissing at the fire damage, he jumped back, and concentrated on tapping the flames out on his arm.

  The fire vortex didn’t sit by politely, though, and wait for its opponent to recover. It moved in for the kill. And, reflexively, Jack raised his palms with a frost attack.

  The fire withered, sputtered, and extinguished in front of him. Frost, then, could defeat fire.

  Which knowledge he promptly put to use as he went on scouting, putting out any vortex that got too close for comfort.

  Finally, he had his arrows. So he picked his poisons, chugged a magicka potion and a healing potion, saved the game, and sighted in.

  The first arrow he covered with a magicka draining poison. Now that Kalbidor was relying solely on spells, a magicka drain would be a more effective short-term solution than a health drain since it would effectively disarm the arch demon.

  Second, he shot an arrow equipped with a Potion of Vertical Challenge, which conferred a thirty percent chance of tripping with each step for half a minute. It would do nothing beyond the base piercing damage as far as hit points went, but sending Kalbidor sprawling would mean interrupting any counterattacks and buying Jack extra time.

  Then, after targeting his enemy’s magic and movement, he picked a series of shots that delivered maximum hit point damage – some all at once, some in a slow, steady bleed.

  Kalbidor reacted as before, spinning at the first shot and fixing Jack in his hell gaze.

  But this time, he had more than three shots. This time, he kept on firing while Kalbidor summoned the fire vortexes and dust storms. Thunder rumbled overhead, and lightning started to split the air.

  Kalbidor took a step forward – and fell, flat on his face. The fire returned to its normal, random patrol pattern. Lightning went on striking. That spell had already been cast.

  Jack kept an eye on his health meter as the electrical charges hit him; but as long as he stayed within a safe range, he went on firing at the downed arch demon. He dumped arrow after arrow into him as he lay there – three, then four, and finally five.

  Kalbidor started to push himself upward. His health meter hung at a few hundred points.

  Jack fired like mad, screaming for backup. He didn’t know who could hear him. He didn’t know if anyone was even left to come to his aid. He couldn’t see through the heavy smog of smoke and dust. All he knew was that he was very, very close to finishing this.

  Kalbidor’s eyes started to blaze with fire as he reached his feet. The vortexes converged on him again, siphoning away his HP. Jack drained a healing potion, but ignored the vortexes even as they chewed through his health.

  He loosed another arrow, and another, but his heart sank. He wouldn’t have time to kill Kalbidor – not before he died. Even if he could withstand the fire vision, he only had one more health potion left. He wouldn’t be able to withstand the vortexes plus whatever else the demon had up his sleeve.

  He was going to die.

  Still, he nocked another poisoned arrow and let it fly.

  Then, with no warning at all, Kalbidor’s head exploded in a grim, ready spray of blood. Chunks of brain matter splattered to the ground at the same time Jack’s arrow reached the now headless demon.

  Jack stared, slack jawed, as his objectives updated.

  Objective complete: help defend Ivaldi’s Hall against the coming demon invasion

  Objective complete: save King Delling

  Objective complete: defeat Kalbidor and the demon horde

  All of which was welcome news, but completely inexplicable – until the dust settled, and Kalbidor’s body collapsed.

  There, directly behind the dead demon, stood Karag, holding a tremendous, red-stained boulder, and grinning ear to ear.

  Karag had delivered the killing blow – a terrible, crushing strike that had obliterated Kalbidor’s head.

  A cinematic followed, showing the last vestiges of the demon horde fleeing back toward the fortress, and Iaxiabor. Worryingly, Kalbidor’s wicked dragon flew off in the opposite direction, for what purpose and to what end Jack couldn’t guess.

  But the cut scene went back to the ruin and chaos of Ivaldi’s Hall – of the dwarves, pulling themselves out of the rubble, and discovering the dead.

  Jack saw Delling cry bitter tears over the corpses of his children and heirs, all cut down by the terrible invasion force.

  He saw Moinn, stunned and unspeaking, seeming too shocked by what he’d lived through to offer any of his usual commentary.

  He saw Arath, scouring the dead for treasures, and pocketing gleaming baubles and brilliant gemstones. He watched the goblins find each other through the rubble, and weep with joy, while Karag worked to free those trapped under debris.

  Then the view panned out of the palace, and into the city. The dead were everywhere – women and children, old men and young, fighters and civilians alike. Smoke and grief hung heavy in the air, thick and gray and devastating.

  Homes and shops had been reduced to rubble. Families huddled in the wreckage of their former living spaces. Neighbors pulled neighbors out of rubble. Grieving parents sobbed over the bodies of slain children, and children wept for lost parents. Husbands mourned wives, and wives mourned husbands.

  And perhaps worst of all, some begged for answers, begging anyone who might have seen their missing loved one to tell them.

  A weeping mother pleaded for news from strangers. “My son, my son – please, he was here when I saw him last. You didn’t see him, did you? A little boy, just a babe, really.”

  “Please, help me get through,” a distraught husband begged passersby. “My wife was at home. We lived down this road. I have to get home, to see if she’s alright.”

  On and on, the terrible scene went, as Jack’s viewpoint took over ruined streets and down flattened residential districts.

  Then the scene returned to the wall, and Varr, Captain of the Guard. He was giving orders and directing troops.

  “That’s it: we need to shore up that breach.”

  “You there, you’re on the rescue team. Join the men in the lower district: they got hit the worst.”

  “Vilgi, I want you on food distribution. We’re going to need to open the city storehouses. Make sure no one panics or tries to cut the line. There’ll be plenty for everyone. We just need to stay calm.”

  Jack felt something like a measure of hope as he watched, and the grimness of the cinematic shifted. Light broke through the smog.

  The viewpoint panned back over the city, showing the sobbing mother reunited with her babe – a little dusty, a little scared, but none the worse for his troubles.

  The husband, too, got through to his home, where his wife waited – scared and trapped, but unharmed.

  The game resumed exactly where it had left off, giving Jack a new objective:

  Speak to King Delling

  And though he resumed in the ruined council chamber, Delling had gone. So had the black mages, and the remaining workmen, and all of the City Guard. Indeed, the only people left were Jack and his party.

  “A grim fight,” Karag said. “These people will need many long years to recover from this, and good leadership. Leadership that, I fear, they do not have.”

  “A good fight,” Arath said. “No one stands against our might, Jack, old bean.”

  “Terrible fight,” Grimlik hissed. “Terrible, terrible.”

  “Nightmares, we will have. So many nightmares,” Grem’tha agreed.

  Jack glanced around, looking for clues as to where he might find Delling. Then, he spotted the in-game marker – a translucent arrow that hovered in his view, directing him to a point that seemed nearby. “Come on,” he said. “We need to go talk to the king.”

  “We should see what the fallen have on them,” Karag suggested. “Who knows when we might have a chance to resupply again.”

  Arath nodded. “Not like these guys are going to need it anymore.”

  Which was a good poin
t. For all his eagerness to be done, Jack had expended almost everything he owned. So he scoured the room for loot – things he could sell, and things he could use.

  There was plenty to choose from, and in the end he had to be quite picky – because he promptly ran up against his carrying limits. He didn’t waste as much time agonizing over what to keep and what to drop, though. He made split second decisions and followed his gut.

  And promptly regretted it after he left the ruined chamber. I’m probably going to wish I held onto some of that armor, he thought. And I probably could have dropped a few potions to make room for some more rings.

  In this manner, he followed his objective marker. It led him down the hall – now, clear of bodies – and into a chamber a few rooms over.

  Delling sat there, looking very grim and old. His once red hair had gone entirely gray, his long beard had turned silver. “Adventurer Jack,” he said.

  “Your Majesty.” Jack bowed gravely, not because he liked Delling. But, the guy had just lost his entire family. “I’m sorry about your children.”

  Delling nodded. “I am a man without sons, without daughters. There is no greater evil than that. Better that Kalbidor tore me limb from limb than that. I might have endured it with gladness in my heart, rather than this. Childless: I am an old man, with no children, Jack.”

  “Well, uh…” He didn’t want to be indelicate, of course. The man had just suffered incredible losses. But it needed to be said. “There’s still Migli.”

  The news didn’t cheer the king. On the contrary, his expression sagged a little more. “Yes. There is still Migli.”

  A long and awkward silence settled on them. Jack tried to think of something to say. In the end, he settled on a polite farewell.

  But Delling spoke before he had the chance. “There is still Migli,” he said again. “My last child. My…” He hesitated at the word. “My heir.”

  Jack nodded. “I guess he is.”