Hector finished typing. Turning around, he walked toward me and released his breath. As the redness drained from his face, he smiled at me again. “For the next level, Iron Jack.”
“The next level of what?” I asked, and then my heart skipped a beat. “I never - I never told you my in-game name.”
“Everyone knows Iron Jack,” he said, shaking his head. “And let’s just say the next level is a more immersive form of gameplay.” A bright light started shining from the metal tube behind him as it began to shake and whistle as the humming transformed into a harsher grind.
“We need to go,” I said, turning to run. My mind was racing, thinking about all the ways he could murder me right now.
Hector grabbed my hand, and when I turned around to look at him, the person I saw wasn’t the same as before. In fact, it didn’t look like a person at all. His skin was green and studded with scales. His eyes were narrowed, replaced by slits filled with golden light. He looked like a Dragonkin. He looked like a creature from the game.
Oh yeah, and he had transformed into a stupidly hot chick. His square, overweight body had been transformed into a small, petite frame, complete with the kind of curves you’d run a car off of if you weren’t careful and a pair of perky breasts that would have drawn my attention even if they weren’t green. Hector looked like an even hotter version of Gamora, like Captain Kirk was working his way through some seriously filthy thoughts about her on the brig right this second.
“We are, Iron Jack,” Hector said, her voice a hiss and now overtly feminine, her forked tongue flicking out from between full, emerald lips. “We are most definitely going.”
Then, with a loud boom, the light overtook both of us.
3
The light overtook me, making me forget where, and even who I was for a moment. It was as hot as balls, like a swift dip into a steam room right out of nowhere. It washed over me like warm pudding, thick and disgusting, the sort of texture you really did not want to wade through. Thankfully, it seemed to disappear as quickly as it came. Unfortunately, it took all my energy with it.
As the bright flash faded into a discolored burst of multi-hued spots in my line of sight, I began to feel woozy. It was as if someone had punched me square in the gut and then kicked me in the throat for good measure. I would have fallen if I’d had the energy to do even that. Instead, I just stood there, feeling as drained as I ever had before in my life. And that was coming from a guy who almost ran half a marathon one time.
I tried to breathe, but it was way harder than it should have been. My chest felt like someone had stacked bricks atop it. All I could see were the bright blotchy sunspots in my vision, though I could tell behind them lay a bright and probably sunny sky.
That didn’t make any sense though. It had been night when I’d stupidly followed Hector into the abandoned building he promised and swore held the secrets to the future of Neon Cross.
Even thinking about what I’d done made me feel ridiculously stupid. I should have never put myself in this situation. I should have never been in a hotel bar in the middle of the night in the first place for god’s sake. I should have been at home. I should have been with my family, not with some stranger who happened to know my in-game name and probably other things about me too.
A flash of anger ran through me as I replayed the fight with Amanda over in my mind. Whether I had deserved it or not, she shouldn’t have acted like that. Tossing me out like so much garbage on Sunday morning wasn’t cool.
Sure, she might have had a point. Maybe I had been too into the game. Maybe I should have gone to get the diapers when I was asked to get the diapers. Maybe I should have even taken the initiative to get diapers before I was asked to get diapers, but I hadn’t. I hadn't done that, and now I probably wouldn't ever get a chance. Still, was it really serious enough to get all riled up over? Then again, I knew that wasn’t quite the point. With chicks, it never was. No, I was certain the diapers were never really the issue. I just wished I knew what was because I seriously doubted her throwing me out had been for my own good, no matter what she might have claimed.
Those questions faded away as the spots obscuring my vision did. I found I was no longer standing inside the building. The blast of whatever the huge metal cylinder was seemed to have knocked me out of the building. It was strange. I hadn’t felt any movement at all, and what about the sunny sky? Had I really been unconscious all night long and – if so – how was I standing now?
I blinked hard, taking in the scenery. I found myself at the center of a huge valley. Green grass stretched out on all sides of me, rolling upward to meet the hills sounding. The sky was a mixture of clouds and sun…no, not sun, suns.
Blinking again, I realized I was looking at two suns. That wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. This must be an effect of the explosion that probably happened back in the factory. It had probably knocked my ass out and gave me double vision.
“You look awful,” a voice said from beside me. “Though, I guess that’s to be expected.” When I didn’t respond, it continued, “Are you even listening to me?”
Instinctively, I turned toward it. The voice – which was somehow equal parts sing song and nasal – belonged to a shapely green humanoid. She had scales all over her skin and golden glowing eyes that bore into me like she knew what I looked like underneath my clothes and she was trying not to snicker about it.
That’s when I remembered the last thing I saw before what had to be the explosion, the last thing I heard.
“Hector?” I asked, looking at the woman as shock cascaded over me.
“That’s me.” She smiled coyly, showcasing sharp fanged teeth and a forked tongue. “Well, actually, my name is Hectoristical Adromedus, but I mean – let’s not get too pedantic here. You can call me Hecate.”
“You’re a woman,” I balked, looking her up and down and trying not to linger too much on the fact that the slit in her shirt reached so far down, her breasts were in danger of bursting out at any given minute.
“Kind of you to notice.” She grinned. “I figured if I used anything close to my actual shape with you back in the bar, we’d never get anywhere.”
That was a reasonable assumption.
My heart sped up as this woman-shaped lizard thing spoke to me with all the eloquence and personality the drunk dude at the bar had before.
“What-what are you, dude?’ I asked, feeling my forehead with the back of my hand the way my mom used to when she thought I had a fever. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had a cold or the flu. Maybe I was still at home, snoring loudly on the couch and pissing my sister and her son off with the sheer loudness of it.
“Well, I’m obviously not a dude, first off. I’m still alive though, and that means I’ve got one up on you, Iron Jack,” she said, shaking her head at me, causing her long emerald locks to whip around her face.
She pointed a long, lithe green finger toward me, and I followed the path it started. Looking down at my chest, I found that I was translucent. My entire freaking body was a see-through mess of blue and gray energy. I was a thing. I was a…I was a ghost.
“Wait,” I scowled, unable to tear my eyes (which were also probably made of spooky ghost energy) away from myself. “Are you saying I’m dead?”
My voice cracked at the end as I thought about the possibility of never going home again, of never seeing John grow out of shitty diapers and into shitty career choices, of never making it right with my sister. God, my nephew would think I left him just like his dad…just like my dad left me and sis. Or worse, he would think I was a stupid loser who got himself killed because he wanted to see exclusive content of a video game.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Hecate balked. “You’re acting like this is the first time it’s happened.”
My eyes narrowed. “The first time I died? Are you saying it’s not? Are you saying that reincarnation is real or something?”
She sighed and leaned against the trunk of a nearby tree, her scales glistening against t
he light of the double suns.
“Are you seriously telling me you don’t know what’s going on here yet?” Her voice was tired and without patience, sort of like Amanda’s on the fourth or fifth time she told me to get dressed for church. “Two suns, amphibian centurions, trees that respond to command.” She thrust a scaled elbow into the trunk. “Hey, sweet thing, how’s about an apple?”
She turned her palm up to the air, and an apple fell into it as if on cue.
“What?” I mused, crinkling the spot where my eyebrows would be if I hadn’t – you know – been a ghost. “That’s just like on Kingdom of He–”
Hecate’s mouth spread into an inviting, oblong grin of sharpened teeth.
Blinking, I looked around again. The two suns, the valley surrounded by rolling hills of green and there, off in the distance, the hint of the top of a castle that stretched out into the clouds themselves.
This was it. This was Kingdom of Heaven. I was standing inside of it. I was awake, apparently dead, and inside my all-time favorite video game.
I checked my forehead again. Maybe I had missed the fever before.
“This isn’t real,” I said, looking over at Hecate. Her sharpened teeth tore into the apple, devouring it quickly. My heart skipped a beat. Something about watching a green-skinned woman eat an apple like that was equal parts scary and titillating.
“Don’t be one of those,” she said, tossing the remains of the apple into the air. Quickly, a branch from the tree contorted to catch it.
That was pretty handy.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to be one of those people who are all like ‘This isn’t real,' ‘This can’t be happening,' ‘I knew I shouldn’t have used so much meth in college.'” She shook her head again. “Half the reason we picked your scrawny ass is because of how quickly you took to the game. What’s it been, six months? And already you’re taking ass and kicking names.” She glared at me, her golden glow eyes squinting. “Is that the other way around? That’s the other way around, isn’t it?” When I nodded, she continued. “In any event, you love this place. You have since the first moment your virtual self stepped into it. I would have thought you’d have jumped at the chance for the rest of you to follow.”
“The rest of me?” I asked, looking down at my Jacob Marley ass then back up at Hecate. “I’m a goddamned ghost.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not here,” she answered. “You’ve died a million times in Kingdom of Heaven. You always respawned. What’s the big difference now?”
I threw my hands out toward her, watching echoes of energy pour from them like waves in a pool. “The difference is, that was a game.”
She walked toward me, all slinky like a green Jessica Rabbit, settling into the spot where my energy echoed had just faded away. “What if I told you it wasn’t? What if I told you Kingdom of Heaven had never been a game? At least not to us. What if I told you that when you were playing what you thought was a game really and truly affected an entire world and entire races of people?”
“I’d say you were pretty fucked,” I said, thinking back to all the half-assed quests I took and all the things I killed just to stack up on experience points.
“That’s a pretty accurate observation,” Hecate said, smirking at me, a forked tongue peeking out between her teeth. “You know the whole spill of this place. Kingdom of Heaven exists in a world full of portals, a crossroad between the various afterlives of the universe. There are portals to Heaven, portals to Hell, and portals back to Earth. What you’re standing in now, this is basically Purgatory. At least, it would be if you were Catholic.”
“Just because I didn’t go to church last Christmas doesn’t mean I’m not Catholic anymore,” I said uneasily.
“Doesn’t it though?” Hecate smiled. “In any event, this place is constantly in limbo. Demons, angels, and all the souls of everything that’s ever existed on earth are fighting for control over it.”
“I know the plot of the game,” I said in a huff. I mean, I wasn’t some noob. I was Iron Jack, for Christ’s sake.
“Good, because I don’t feel like holding your hand through this,” she snapped, staring at me with playful eyes. “And I don’t feel like telling you everything is going to be okay either because you’ve been here enough to know it probably won’t be.”
She was right. This game was dark and to steal a phrase from Game of Thrones, full of horrors. If I was where she said I was, I stood about as good a chance of surviving as a snowflake in a sandstorm.
“The good news is, you know your way around here. You know that where you’re standing right now is–”
“The Valley of Rebirth,” I finished. “It’s a respawn spot. It’s where you go after you get killed in the game. You come back as a ghost, and you have to–” I looked down at myself again. “Oh, it makes sense now.” I was a ghost. That kind of sucked.
“Damned right it does,” she answered. “But not everything is the way you see it onscreen, Iron Jack. A lot of that is scrubbed cleaner than it is in real life. When you’re standing here, the pain is real, and there’s a hell of a lot more of it to go around.”
“Why?” I asked, my mind racing. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Because things are changing,” she said. “There’s a huge power vacuum that never existed before. The Skull Throne is up for grabs, and if the wrong people get it, it’ll mean bad stuff for us and for all the people playing the game on Earth.”
“On Earth?” I asked, unsure of how a video game could hurt someone … other than the way it had hurt me.
“Portals, Iron Jack,” she said simply, winking at me in a way that sent ridiculous sparks up my back. “Portals that can and – if we don’t put a benevolent ruler squarely on that bone throne- will open up to your world.” She nodded at me. “And to your family. Now I realize you’ve got a lot to process, and I’m sure you’d like to take a minute to really let what I just told you marinate in that ghostly head of yours. But screw that. There isn’t time for you to have a passive-aggressive snit fit, okay? You’re a warrior. You need to be a warrior here. That’s the only way we’re going to be safe and, Jack, it’s the only way I’m going to take you back to your family.”
I thought about everything she said. I wanted to get mad. After all, I had been kidnapped basically, but what good would it do? I was here, and I wasn’t getting out of it by being a snot nosed little bitch about it. Besides, even though I was scared to death I was never going to see my sister and nephew again, I had to admit, this was kind of cool. Plus the idea of looking like a pansy ass in front of the hot green chick wasn’t at the top of my wish list.
“Okay,” I answered flatly. “First things first then. You know what I have to do after I die here.”
“Sure do,” she said and started off into the woods before me, all slinky again. “Let’s go find that beautiful corpse of yours.”
4
“I can’t believe this,” I muttered, following Hecate as she marched (and I floated) through the Forest of Indecision toward the lake where my corpse had no doubt already washed up.
If I had one complaint about Kingdom of Heaven – other than the fact I now seemed to be stuck inside of it – would be with the respawning elements. It all just seemed like too much work. Every time I bit the big one, my spirit would show up miles and miles away from the damned Lake of Rebirth, and I’d have to float my ass all the way over there to reunite with it.
It seemed insane to me. I mean, this was valuable play time I could have used to complete a quest or find an artifact or, at the very least, beat on some NPCs and grind out some more experience.
But no, I had to waste it floating through the lands, half here and half in the astral plane, on my way to a body which had already been found lacking. At least normally, I would be able to slip through all the intervening terrain with ease. It was an annoyance but not as severe of a time-waster as it was today.
Eh, what was a guy to do? The rules of the game were the rules
of the game, and I knew they weren’t going to change it just because I didn’t like it. I guess that sentiment was even truer now that I found myself actually existing inside this place.
“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Hecate said, looking back at me as her axe chopped through thickets of branches in front of us, her hips swiveling every bit as much as her arms. While I could simply float through in my current state, she wasn’t so lucky, and that’s what was slowing us down so much. “I know you can’t believe this. You’d said it a hundred times. If I happen to get confused about your current state of believability as it pertains to the issues at hand, I’ll ask you. Otherwise, would it kill you to give an ogre girl some peace and quiet?”
“You know,” I sneered. “For somebody who looks like Shrek’s hot sister, you don’t have any manners.” I shook my see-through head. “Besides, it’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one smack dab in the middle of a foreign land.”
“Yes, I was,” Hecate answered, slashing a branch and watching it fall to the ground. “Do you not remember yesterday? I spent the entire day in a foreign land stuck in disgusting form, and let me tell you, Earth beer is very lacking.”
“That’s not the same thing, and you know it,” I snapped. “Earth is safe. It’s simple. There’s not near as much stuff to navigate your way through.”
“Safe and simple?” she balked, a wry tone filling her voice. “You give every person on your stupid plane over the age of like twelve a two-thousand-pound killing-machine that flies down the road at a hundred miles per hour.” She glared at me. “And don’t get me started on ‘gluten free’ stuff. Whatever that is. I say, if you don’t like the gluten, eat around it.”
“That’s not how that works,” I replied, shaking my head as Hecate slid her axe back into the strap across her back. “That’s not how any of that works, and what are you doing? Why are you putting your axe away?”
The Skull Throne: A LitRPG novel (Kingdom of Heaven Book 1) Page 3
