Chronicles of Ethan Complete Series: A LitRPG / GameLit Fantasy Adventure

by John L. Monk

  She asked me to bind myself to the tree as if it were a binding stone. When I agreed, she led me clockwise around the tree nine times, and it was done.

  Smitten as I was, small details of her home registered as we’d sit for hours talking. The table and chairs grew from the living wood and were covered in soft, smooth bark. Light was provided by the glowing purple mist. Food and drink arrived from time to time, though I didn’t see servants or very much else, because I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  She asked me questions.

  Tell me more about your childhood.

  That was easy. No brothers and sisters, parenting-by-the numbers. Nothing traumatic like corporal punishment or deprivation or abuse.

  Did you have any pets? What were their names?

  A fish named Tom—because I couldn’t have a dog, and Mom wouldn’t pay for the allergy cure.

  Did you have a bicycle?

  Yes! A red one!

  Did you ride bikes with your friends?

  All the time!

  Tell me about bikes.

  We’d zoom through the empty streets pretending we were in those things flying through the air. Flitters, they were called. They’d only been around about twenty years, and … and … something about them. Something bad? Couldn’t put my finger on it…

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Myrialla said in an audible voice that cracked like a whip, startling me from my thoughts.

  Our talk drifted far and wide, but never again about flitters or anything uncomfortable. After each session—which left me oddly drained, despite having done nothing but sit and talk—I’d sink into the tree’s warm closeness and wait for the next day’s rays to awaken the world. Then we’d talk again, or walk around outside hand-in-hand, or lie in each other’s arms, merging our souls through touch, scent, and taste…

  Verbalization had all but ceased. When we communicated, it was more by mood and feel. On a lark, I switched back to the inconvenience of speech to tell her how lovely she was.

  “Just today?” she said teasingly.

  “Always,” I said. “Evermore.”

  “Fall into me, Ethan. You’re still resisting.”

  As her words swept over me, I felt like a kid who’d climbed from a swimming pool for a shivering stomp to the diving board. There, giggling and happy and ready to please, I took my next plunge.

  Which isn’t to say all my moments were so incredibly happy. At night, when I sank beneath the tree, a drowsy sort of comfort would overtake me, threatening me with slumber. It was in these low moments—while Myrialla’s attention was farthest away—that a niggling doubt would buoy my consciousness over the abyss, and something like rational thought returned.

  Where am I?

  By now, I’d all but forgotten where I was.

  Why am I here?

  In these quiet times, I sensed others around me. All of them men. Thousands—tens of thousands—sleeping eternally in the loam among the roots of her mighty arbor. If they sensed me, I couldn’t tell. There was an oldness about them, as if they’d been there since … well, for a very long time. Eons, maybe.

  Once, I tried reaching out to them—a sort of pushing forth of my mind in the way I sometimes spoke to Myrialla. And wonder of all, a reaction! A faint shifting in that otherwise motionless space … then no more. Still, it was the first time since coming here that I’d connected with another mind, however tenuous.

  As I readied to try again, Myrialla’s voice entered my mind:

  Why do you trouble my forever-guests, Ethan? They are weary, like you, but not so restless. Forget those others, for I am all. Fall into me … fall … fall…

  Well, that did it. I dropped hard into delirium with no end.

  Falling.

  Falling.

  Days, months, and years could have passed. Timelessly I fell—a being of sensation without body, place, or consequence.

  And yet…

  Forget those others, for I am all.

  What others? The ones beneath the tree? Maybe them. But it sparked a thought. Or rather, it revealed a hollow in my psyche where a thought should have been. A curious cavity.

  Like a tongue probing a missing tooth, I puzzled over what she meant. If there were others, shouldn’t I feel jealous? Surely I received the greater share of her love, the way it filled me to bursting. That said, it wasn’t like we were married. Then I definitely would have been jealous, as a matter of policy. My wife—

  FORGET ALL OTHERS, FOR I AM ALL!

  Myrialla’s will pounded me like a tsunami hitting a sandcastle, banishing all errant thoughts. Happiness, love, and contentedness were all that mattered. How had I gotten so lucky? So blessed? My spirit soared with pride that she’d chosen me.

  And yet…

  Deep down inside, I felt the tiniest twinge. The term eensie-weensie comes to mind. Like a cricket in the wall, the twinge chirruped and scratched each time I approached the precipice of glorious oblivion. Then, as Myrialla’s will slowly receded, as it always did—

  At night!

  —and the compulsion to fall dormant replaced my need to reach ever-higher heights of ecstasy—

  Opportunity!

  —I’d once again send out my will to those other guests—

  Prisoners!

  —lying in the roots and loam—

  Dirt!

  —and my mind again brushed one of the nearby guest-prisoners—

  Close enough!

  —I didn’t prod him with my mind this time. No, I did something strangely familiar, and faintly naughty.

  I cast a spell:

  Discern!

  As the spell completed, the magical jolt of euphoria that always happened replaced the morphine drip of Myrialla’s closeness. Data flashed across my visual field and filled my game log:

  NAME: Miguel Costa

  CLASS: Wizard 8

  LEVEL: 8

  FLAGS: None

  BASE DAMAGE: N/A

  HEALTH POINTS: 55

  LANGUAGES: Hero

  PERKS: Summon Grapefruit

  Unlike my attack spells, Discern had no cooldown. As the euphoria faded, Myrialla’s oppressiveness began to return, and with it sudden terror. Desperately, I focused on the nearest prisoner:

  Discern!

  More game stats flooded my vision, and Myrialla’s grip slackened enough for rational thought.

  Melody … Rita…

  Shame and guilt clashed with the horror of my predicament, spurring me to further action.

  With a 1-second cooldown and a mere 75 mana per-cast, I could discern as many times as I wanted. Which I did.

  NAME: Samuel Martin

  CLASS: Warrior 6 / Cavalier 159

  …

  NAME: Robert Atwood

  CLASS: Priest 48

  …

  NAME: Anthony Nguyen

  CLASS: Thief 21 / Wizard 14

  …

  There were so many trapped players here that I’d run out of mana long before discerning the tiniest percentage of them. But that never happened, because the dryad woke up.

  Her physical voice sounded sharply in my ear. “Ethan? What are you doing? Stop that right now! Leave my guests alone!”

  I felt her will creeping around the edges of my fading magic, threatening to pull me into a swoon. With no time to think, I cast a different spell—this time on her.

  Reveal Weakness!

  I’d used that spell on the giant in the swamp and a few times since. Usually, a creature’s weakness was somewhat predictable: trolls/fire, skeletons/blunt weapons, that sort of thing. But Myrialla’s weakness was different than what I’d come to expect:

  PRIMARY WEAKNESS: 1 Health Point against male players.

  The shock of discovery mingled with the euphoria to set me free, and I opened my eyes for the first time in ages.

  Glowing purple mist cast everything in an otherworldly light. I found myself trapped waist-deep in loam, with thick roots wrapped around me. There were others trapped in the roots
farther away: unmoving, eyes closed, faces locked in achingly wide smiles.

  Run, you idiot!

  Panic spurred me to action. As I struggled to dig myself out, the vice-like roots encircling my arms and legs clamped down painfully, jolting me further awake. Inspired by that pain, I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek.

  “Ethan, stop!” Myrialla commanded, voice cracking like a thunderbolt.

  As the purple mist fought with the pain for supremacy, I twisted my arm around and grabbed a root. Then, after a quick, fierce struggle with the temptation to lie back down and never get up again, I cast one of my lowest-level spells:

  Zap!

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  When Myrialla died, I received 1,707,480,975 experience points. My player level vaulted from 74 to 435 in a flash of light and pain reminiscent of opening a skill book.

  Next, a game notification:

  MAJOR PERK AWARD: Summon Black Treasure Chest!

  For surviving Myrialla, the Dryad (designed by the team as a virtual death trap one drunken evening, then dropped in Ward 1 as a joke) you have earned this very rare one-time perk. Simply wish for a “black treasure chest” (super rare) and claim your prize. Afterward, the perk disappears. Myrialla, sadly, is gone forever … Or is she?

  Despite my being a lifeless collection of qubits deep within a quantum computer, the immediate events after fleeing the tree were a strange mix of both fuzzy and incredibly detailed. I remember crawling from a tangle of clutching roots whose gnarled twists and knobby projections appeared grotesquely feminine. When I looked up, my former prison seemed far less treelike and more like the fused assemblage of thousands of smaller trunks, now cracked and split, their spell-fried leaves littering the clearing.

  “You,” someone said off to my left. “You did this! You killed her!”

  “Murderer!” someone else shouted from behind me. I squinted and saw he was a level 40 warrior/priest in full battle gear. His eyes were full of hate.

  All around the clearing, men were clawing their way from the ground like a scene from a horror movie—staggering around, covered in dirt, wearing what they’d been captured in. I had all my stuff, too. A relief, because I certainly didn’t want to go back and look for it.

  The one who’d called me a murderer was still yelling at me, telegraphing to everyone in earshot how I’d killed Myrialla, his “one true love.”

  Inevitably, someone tried to attack me.

  “GLB!” I shouted before he could tackle me, blasting him with a Greater Lightning Bolt.

  When the warrior charged me next, I got him too. He was bigger, so I used Greater Acid Orb. The acid had him screaming, and I hoped it would dissuade others from trying anything. One or two I could handle, but not if they ganged up on me.

  I kept moving, and the field with the tree continued to fill. The ground was practically boiling with movement as thousands struggled to free themselves. The first question they all asked was, “Who killed her?” When that happened, someone invariably pointed at me. How they all seemed to know I’d done it was a mystery.

  I needed to get out of there.

  Greater Sprint!

  The spell took me, the world blurred past, and I reached the safety of the trees without being killed.

  A quick check of my character sheet showed that despite having no injuries, my health pool was depleted. When I saw my lives, I staggered in shock. Gone were my previous 91. That number had fallen to 17.

  “Impossible,” I said, dropping to my knees.

  Myrialla had drained them out of me. And come to think of it … yes, I’d been bound to the tree the same way I’d bound myself to various binding stones across Ward 1.

  After resurrecting, she’d force me to change into my old clothes. She’d then order me to discard my latest noob tunic at the edge of her clearing atop a steadily growing pile.

  A death trap if there ever was one.

  How long?

  A check of my clock showed I’d been prisoner a staggering three months.

  “Goddammit,” I said.

  My thoughts turned to Melody. There’d been people looking for her. Jaddow said so. It’s why I was here in this forest, after all. To get levels. Well, I had the levels now. In spades. But did I still have time to reach her?

  Rita…

  The purple mist didn’t work on women. Why hadn’t she rescued me?

  A mystery for later. At the moment, I only had 29 … no, 30 health points. Almost anything could kill me. There was also that Greenie Red psycho, and his claim to know the moment I rose a level. His truth orb, when he said it, had been golden. With luck, his spell would also tell him how high I was now, and that’d scare him.

  I dug into my gem pouch and pulled out my rarest gem: a shining black diamond as big as the end of my thumb. Next, I yanked out a lock of my hair and burned it in some sticks I lit with a Flame Bullet.

  While the hair burned, I said, “Buzilag, I summon thee!”

  The diamond disappeared, and the sky cracked with a thunderbolt ten feet away. The smoke cleared to reveal a shadowy being with black wings floating in the air. Seconds later, it faded from view. A quick check of my character sheet showed it was still there, though. Under the section labeled “Active Effects” was an entry reading, “Buzilag (Guardian).”

  Picking my way through the woods, I cursed my impatience. If I’d applied my new class points to the diabolist class, I could have summoned demons far more powerful than Buzilag. Some of them even used diamonds. Others used gems I’d never heard of: lumenite, sirelium, aurulium, mythereum…

  Odd names. Not once had I seen any of those gems in my magic bag.

  I also had a lot of free stat points. As a safeguard, I applied 50 to vitality, increasing my health pool by 500—a precaution, in case Buzilag couldn’t rescue me in time.

  You nearly died.

  True.

  You gave up eternal happiness.

  Not true.

  Unlike those other prisoners, I would have been utterly destroyed in about a month. And yet … in a way, I’d sort of been destroyed anyway. Or rather, something inside me had.

  For the rest of my life, whether I found Melody or the world’s largest piece of cake, I’d never be as happy as my time spent with Myrialla. Never mind that she’d been absolute poison. There was now a need in my heart that hadn’t been there before and could never be satiated.

  A dark and hopeless part of me wondered, Maybe you should have stayed.

  It hadn’t been my wife’s memory that pulled me out of that tree, or at least not completely. Mostly it was pride. I wouldn’t let myself turn into one of those others. Also, somewhere at the end there, I’d thought of Rita.

  “God, I need a drink,” I said.

  And I did. Badly.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The demon didn’t have to protect me even once during my woodland trek, but I’d already spent the diamond and saw no reason to banish it until I reached the city. After all, Greenie Red was still out there.

  Six hours later, standing outside the gates with my health fully restored, I sighed in relief.

  NEW LOCATION: Heroes’ Landing

  LOCATION FLAGS: SANCTUARY

  “Begone,” I said, and the demon’s presence faded with a hissing laugh.

  Unlike the last time I was there, the people in the city square stopped and regarded me with puzzlement. Before going into The Slaughtered Noob, I approached one of the more obvious gawkers—a man who was dressed to the nines in rich-looking fantasy garb.

  “What are you looking at?” I said.

  “That thing there,” he said, pointing over my head.

  “What thing?”

  I angled for a look but didn’t see anything.

  “That writing,” he said. “Hard To Get. Is that a title? I’ve never seen one before. That’s leet-street, man! Fifty thousand if you tell me where you got it. Oh, also uh … what level are you? Hope not too high…”

  I almost asked another qu
estion, then thought better of it and stepped past him. Bernard would know.

  “Hey, come back,” the man said. “All right, a hundred thousand!”

  I pushed through the doors and …

  And found myself back outside. The guy was still there, staring at me with a confused look on his face. Before he upped his offer, I opened the doors to the inn and looked inside.

  It was just as I remembered it: Bernard at the bar polishing a mug, noobs sitting at various tables chatting. But when I tried going in…

  Once again, I appeared outside. Thankfully, the annoying man was already walking away.

  “What the hell?” I whispered, inspecting the troublesome doors.

  There was something different about them. Next to the sign reading “No Minions!” was a newer one:

  You’re not a noob anymore, Ethan. Take yourself to the Mediocre Marauder if you’re in need of free accommodations. Oh, and congratulations on beating the dryad! Well done! Watch your six…

  “Watch my…?”

  As I stared at the note, a gust of wind whipped up and scattered it to dust. A magical note, then. For my eyes only.

  As I walked, the people on the street kept staring at my title, which I eventually found in my sheet. The words were spelled with hot pink letters in a gaudy font: “Hard To Get!” Next to it, in parentheses, was “Myrialla, the Dryad” and the date and time I’d killed her.

  I made it disappear using a setting that hadn’t been there before.

  Unbelievable.

  Despite that she was an evil collector of hopeless players, sucking them dry for all eternity, I felt like I’d murdered someone I loved and been rewarded for it. But I didn’t love her.

  “Watch where you’re going!” a woman said when I nearly collided with her.

  “Sorry.”

  Thirty minutes later, following my inner map, I arrived at a standalone building in a section of the city I’d never been to before. There was a glowing blue candle in the window, just like at The Slaughtered Noob.

  From the outside, the place seemed more upscale, sporting solid stone blocks and vaulted windows with brightly-painted shutters on each of the three stories. Where the Noob had a steep tar-and-timber roof, the Mediocre Marauder had slate shingles and an actual gutter to catch the infrequent Mythian rain.