Dark: Fearless Pioneer (Dark LitRPG book 1)

by Arthur Stone

  Personal victory! Skeleton Guard killed. Common mob. Level 22. Location sensation level: 10%. Personal sensation level: 60%. 1056 progress points received. In this fight, the following stats played a significant role: Acrobatics, Physical Evasion, Speed, Reaction, Luck.

  Progress points distributed.

  Acrobatics: 41

  Physical Evasion: 82

  Speed: 70

  Reaction: 46

  Luck: 817

  Note: This is your first victory in the game. You receive a bonus +1 to any skill.

  Note: This is your first victory against an opponent more than twenty levels stronger than you. You receive a bonus +3 levels, distributable among one to three skills of your choice.

  What? Dark carefully raised his head and looked around, as if the system message was a bug or a trick. The skeleton was nowhere to be soon. Not that Dark was about to become careless, but he was quite happy at the solitude.

  He stood to get a better look at the area. How long this mess had taken, he couldn’t tell, but it looked like dawn was approaching. Low clouds formed a tattered blanket, and a faint beam of light upward from a point at the horizon betrayed where the sun would make its entrance.

  At last he could get a look at the place he had bound himself to. It was indeed right on the edge of a cliff which was quite steep in places. The doubly convex shape of the site was a little under thirty paces across at its widest point and about a hundred paces long. Dark found it strange that the skeleton had taken so long to find him at first—there was really nowhere to hide up here.

  What had happened to the skeleton anyway? It must have gotten too carried away in the chase. Missing its first swing, it pursued Dark to the edge, swung again, and went over the edge, either from momentum or from pure zeal.

  Right off the cliff.

  Dark had never noticed a fear of heights before, but this place made him uncomfortable. Just inches away from his current position, a wall of rock plummeted downward, cut into blocks of assorted shapes and sizes by a bizarre network of cracks. Two hundred yards below, the plains continued, overgrown with those familiar stunted bushes and darkened with mysterious clearings. A few miles away, the plains at last encountered a winding river. On the other side, a forest stretched beyond, as far as the eye could see. Amongst the trees, Dark could make out yet more clearings, with what seemed to be outcrops of rock. Perhaps more local incarnations of Stonehenge, but they were too far away for Dark to be sure.

  To his left, the wasteland inhabited by the miserable shrublings ran into a tight horseshoe bend in the river, and on the land inside the bend, some sort of ruins sat atop a patch of lush grass and other vegetation. It was two miles or so out, but he could see the straight lines of streets or large buildings. Something made him feel that the area was abandoned, but he couldn’t be quite sure.

  Dark sat down on a flat stone and studied the lay of the land more intently, committing all he could to memory, straining to find landmarks and patterns that would help him navigate the monotony. A suspiciously straight line among the bushes here, an overly symmetrical hill there, and several other incomprehensible objects.

  Half an hour later, Dark realized there was nothing more he could learn from here. The view was excellent, of course, but his eyes simply could not see anything more.

  * * *

  Damn this cliff! Damn the skeleton that drove me here! Damn this crumbly rock!

  How could a wall this strong last the centuries if it broke at the slightest load? Some areas of the cliff were fragile. A mammoth might be able to climb one part and have its weight supported, but two feet further down, a cat would have trouble.

  Ten seconds back, Dark had hit that area like a very heavy cat. Now, he hung from two fingers which he had miraculously managed to shove into a tiny hole as he slipped. There was no room for any more fingers. Nor could he shift right or left.

  Nor could he hold this position for long. Yes, Dark was well trained. He could hold himself up with two fingers for a long time—in the real world. Here, those achievements meant nothing.

  The cliff intervened in his plight.

  Without warning, the rock he clutched with his fingers gave way, and he plummeted a hundred yards, pulling down the worthless handhold as he went.

  He would wake up at the top of the cliff once more,

  and have to climb down once more.

  For the fourth time.

  Chapter 11

  Bad Bind

  Total stat levels: 5

  Character level: 0

  Mastery level: 0

  For the first time in many lives, his feet felt something other than hard stone. He was down. Sure, it had taken seven tries, but he was down at the bottom.

  That was a worthy achievement for a person who had never possessed any interest in climbing and who had no equipment.

  The system made sure to demonstrate that his success did not go without notice.

  Note: Special skill unlocked: Rock Climbing. Every 10 levels of Rock Climbing you unlock will give you +1 Carrying Capacity and +1 Tolerance. Congratulations, this is the first special skill you have unlocked! You get a bonus +1 to any skill.

  Dark was a rock climber, at least in this world.

  So now what should he do? Look for the remains of that skeleton? The monster had fallen from two hundred yards up, and with all the bushes and stones around, finding it might take hours. Dark doubted the rusty sword would be worth it. He would rather set a new respawn point somewhere. After all, death would now mean respawning up on high, and climbing down would mean lost time at the very least. Probably a lot of pain, too.

  Dark hated falling. Perhaps he really was afraid of heights.

  He selected a nice looking rock and attempted to bind a new respawn point.

  Nope.

  Error: You cannot create a respawn point here.

  Dark tried a few more times before admitting defeat. Perhaps the game simply didn’t like that this point was located so close to the old one, at least if vertical distance was discounted. Or maybe these rocks just weren’t cool enough. There was nothing fancy about them.

  He moved away from the cliff, through the bushes. Thirty steps later, he no longer had any rocks to try as respawn points. They just didn’t roll that far after a drop straight down. And though this place was significantly remote, nothing in it was remotely significant.

  Dark was afraid that any other suitable sites he found among the bushes would be guarded by skeletons, so he headed back towards the cliff at a tangent. A loud noise from behind him reinforced his decision. It sounded quite a bit like the stomping of a sizable beast.

  Soon he located a boulder with a bizarre shape to it. In fact, it looked like a crude sculpture. From the proper angle, it resembled a male reproductive organ, complete with the standard accompaniments. And as erect as the Washington Monument.

  Dark was hardly surprised when the game allowed him to choose this replica of a human spawn point as his own respawn point. But that wasn’t all the system had to tell him.

  Hint: You are tired and thirsty. Your Stamina is falling. If it reaches 0, your ability to fight and move will be severely reduced and you will begin losing health. Make sure your character always has enough food, drink, and sleep.

  The rock pointed east, and though it was still morning, the sun had cooked Dark as he was climbing down the face of the cliff. He wanted a drink badly and only knew of one water source in the area.

  Chapter 12

  The River

  Total stat levels: 5

  Character level: 0

  Mastery level: 0

  Something rustled ahead of him. Dark dropped to the ground and narrowed his eyes. The bush branches here were sparsely covered with gray and green foliage, yet among them, he saw something like a rooster’s tail flash.

  Just a bird, something like a pheasant. He doubted that the game creators had decided to fashion a vicious monster from a noisy, harmless creature like this. But Dark wasn’t about
to risk anything. He waited a few minutes before moving. Clouds were beginning to obscure the sky, so he had to hurry. He might lose the sun’s position as a guide and risk getting lost in the undergrowth. The bushes were too fragile to climb, and trees were very rare. The cliff was growing harder to see in the distance behind him, and nothing else in the area was tall enough.

  Suddenly the bushes parted, and Dark encountered a tiny winding stream. He peered at his reflection, seeing himself for the first time. Except he looked close to how he always did. True, his face was a bit haggard, his eyes had an unhealthy insomniac’s shine, and his hairstyle would be considered unacceptably messy even by surfers, but that made sense with his recent experience. So they had given him an appearance that matched his real-world face. Though his skin was darker, as if he had spent the past two weeks sunbathing.

  The water was very cold. If the game’s simulation was correct, he guessed its source was nearby. Indeed, he found a spring a hundred paces upstream. Drinking from that was much better than consuming the contents of a muddy river.

  Wow. That really helped.

  Dark had heard of experiments with worlds where the intellectual resources of the users themselves were used to replicate the environment, but he had no idea the result would be so realistic. So, the machine built the patterns, the outlines, the forms, and people painted it with colors and details and flaws based on things they had seen before. He could tell he was in a game, but only due to the resurrections, system messages, and so on. What a difference this was from the Mortal Arena, a small stadium meant to hold lonely fighters or small groups.

  For this world to possess this level of detail, he guessed hundreds of players were online.

  Perhaps even millions.

  * * *

  Dark reached the river by heading downstream. Despite the winding, the route was easier than always straining to figure out the sun’s position behind the cloud cover.

  Crouching between a pair of more bushes, he studied the open area before him.

  It was a mid-sized river, quite ordinary for a flat area like this. Even when it ran wide, it was no more than a hundred yards across, and its current was slow. Many of the shallow areas ran green with algae or hid completely under duckweed. The other side was lined with a tall clay bank and a wall of majestic pine trees. Some had fallen into the water, creating dams and quiet creeks running off into the forest. Among the thickets of reeds and cattails, several species of ducks swam, frogs croaked, a heron on one leg considered the scene, swallows whipped by—somehow catching a drink as they did—and tiny fish sped in circles.

  It was a calm, pleasant scene. Except for one item: just downstream, the backbone of some gigantic creature protruded from the middle of the river. A dead crocodile, perhaps? If so, it was big enough to outweigh two loaded train cars.

  And if it was dead, perhaps whatever had killed it was still around.

  Dark had to continue with extreme caution.

  Actually, he was stuck here.

  Whether he would have to stay here for a long time or not, he didn’t know. But he had not encountered a player this whole time. Either this location was of no interest to them, which made sense, or...

  Dark remembered rumors about X, mingled with advertisements he had seen in the mirror. For some reason, the memories came to him just now. Memories of hearing that this game world smashed all previous size records. That players had not yet explored even ten percent of its total area at launch. Still no one knew what lay beyond its inhabited lands. Not even the developers knew everything that was out here. This place offered potentially unlimited lands to explore. The AI could even expand its boundaries at any moment without asking anyone for permission. What if Dark was currently positioned in an area no player would set foot in for years?

  There were plusses to that. It would be much harder for Kim’s people to find him.

  On the other hand...

  He had to do something to try to get out of the virtual world. Dark wasn’t exactly clean in the eyes of the law, so he wanted to avoid the police. But where could he go after being not just kidnapped but tortured most of the way to insanity and death?

  He had to contact tech support, or other players, so he could communicate with the outside world.

  Chapter 13

  Self-Discovery

  Total stat levels: 5

  Character level: 0

  Mastery level: 0

  Rummaging through the chat system yielded nothing of promise. However, the system logs held some gems. All of the technical logs. Perhaps they could not be erased, or perhaps the kidnappers hadn’t bothered.

  Dark learned that he had refused to come up with a name at the beginning of this “game.” He had also set his own respawn point. He didn’t remember any of this, of course, but that wasn’t surprising when the kidnappers had him under control on the outside and had access to possibilities that were unavailable to ordinary players.

  Besides messages directly related to Dark, he saw occasional alerts to all X players, or at least to all players at his location. Usually these referred to killing various super bosses, setting records, and other achievements. The nicknames of the participants in these events were listed in the messages.

  He selected one of the simplest nicks and punched it into his chat window. “Hi. Could you chat with me for a minute? It’s something very important.” He tried to press Send, but the button refused him.

  You have zero communication crystals active. You cannot initiate communications with players in other locations.

  Ugh.

  He tried some of the others. Same result. Either Dark really was out in the unexplored wilderness, or he was in a place where these great heroes never trod.

  So he started punching names in at random, selecting names he believed would be taken. Sometimes he saw “Player does not exist,” and other times he cursed the same message about his lack of crystals.

  Dark imagined his chances of opening a chat successfully from here were approximately zero.

  He had to reach an area that was more popular with players.

  How could he find a place like that?

  He did notice a section in his Settings called Your Maps. A black sheet of paper within filled his whole field of view when it was selected. Dark played around with it, making it transparent and zooming in and out. One point glimmered, so he focused in on it, and found that it showed his location: the river bed, the rounded island upstream, and even a depiction of a monster’s skeleton. A grayish ribbon with blurred edges melted through the black, running from the left bank of the river to the cliff, up to the circle of stones, and a little bit beyond it.

  So the map showed the areas where Dark had been. The closer he had been to a place, the more clearly it was shown—right down to the bushes. But what he had seen from the drop of the cliff was only partially displayed, in blots, and most of the areas did not have enough shown to get a feel for where anything was there.

  He spent a few more minutes zooming out and panning around to find another place the map should remember. It resembled a medieval castle, and within one room in one of its towers, he saw the cross-shaped table.

  Where the Spider had tortured him.

  It appeared that Dark had traveled a good deal of the world to get there. His route to that castle was about fifty times longer than the route he had taken in this bush kingdom. Strangely enough, he noticed another place just as brightly illuminated. The map recorded that he had spent time there even though he had no recollection of it whatsoever.

  He ground his teeth. It was infuriating to realize how long he had been a puppet under their control. These beasts would answer for this. For everything.

  Now that he had figured out the map, Dark managed to calculate the distance between him and the Spider’s lair. 3,938 kilometers. How many miles that was, he didn’t have the strength to calculate. But it was definitely enough. Probably more than enough.

  Although he wouldn’t mind adding as many mil
es on as possible. That lone skeleton had nearly killed him in the real world with all of those game world deaths.

  But better to encounter a hundred such skeletons than one Spider.

  Yet it made more sense to move towards the monster’s den. After all, he doubted that all of these freaks existed as hermits. The occasional visits of the mage, and the fact that the torturer had somewhere to go in the interims, made him guess that there was civilization outside of those walls.

  So let’s say I make it there, naked and barefoot. Who would ever listen to a ragged little level zero like me? How would he even begin? His memory of his own name had been blocked out, after all. If he arrived there weak and confused, he risked falling into Kim’s hands once again. Would anything stop Kim from having his people cripple Dark’s synth again once his game character was back under Kim’s control?

  Perhaps he could even do that now, without even needing to know where Dark had gone.

  That was a depressing thought, and Dark hurried to drive it from his mind. If it was true, there was nothing he could do about it, so there was no point to thinking about it. His enemies wouldn’t even look for him, just take control of him at some random moment in the near future.

  They hadn’t done that yet, though, so hopefully they couldn’t.

  Perhaps he was safe in this secluded area. But he couldn’t hide forever. And moments after reaching his freedom, he had been killed more than one hundred times by the sword of the first enemy he had happened to encounter.

  Not that “enemy” was even the right word. It had just been a rattling chunk of code. No matter what they said about AIs, not even the most advanced was equal to humans. And managing one single creature among many millions would never receive the full mental support of the game’s AI. So Dark had basically died a hundred times to a pocket calculator. And he had only won thanks to that opponent’s sheer skeletal stupidity. The monster had charged after him without the slightest consideration for the laws of physics. After him it had rushed over the stones, and after him it had flown off the cliff.