Overpowered: A LitRPG Thriller (Kings and Conquests Book 1)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  “Why didn’t you do it? That’s enough money to pay for college!”

  “Because I knew Jason and Rich would find out. Someone’s been to my house, Jordan. They’ve been in my house. They’re watching me, and I think they’re watching you too.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m scared. I can’t tell my parents because I don’t want them to get tangled up in this.”

  “Nobody’s been to my house except you guys this morning and that Ford car across the street.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention because you thought you were just playing a game. There are a lot of people playing Kings and Conquests who know you’ve got something that could be worth a fortune, and they want it. They want it bad. And they’re not going to be stopped by a bunch of video game geeks.”

  “What about Jason and Rich? I thought they wanted to work with me?”

  “You didn’t really think you were going to carry me off into the night to be your slave girl, did you? That story was for your benefit. It was a test to see if you had any critical thinking skills at all.”

  “I passed, and that makes me a threat.”

  “Now you’re starting to understand.”

  Clarity dawned. “What do you want, Alyssa? I’m not standing here with fantasies of making you my slave girl, and I’m not hoping to get your phone number either. You want something. What is it?”

  “I want you to marry me.”

  Those six words hit Jordan like a downhill bus. He swooned, then quickly recovered. “I’m not following you.”

  “I want you to marry me in Kings and Conquests. If I am your wife and you are my Lord Husband, it unlocks the tools we need to get you to Safekeep. That much I’ve learned on my own, without Jason and Rich’s help. If we find the big treasure, I just want to be a part of it. Give me whatever you think you should, and–”

  Jordan noticed movement over Alyssa’s shoulder. She turned to look and saw a dark figure leaning against the tennis court fence.

  “Who is that?” she whispered.

  “I have a better question, how could they possibly know we were here?” Jordan muttered.

  Alyssa’s face lit with shock. “They followed us?”

  Jordan pulled out his phone, flipped to the SMS interface and pressed a red macro key. He took Alyssa by the arm. “We’ll take your car, because mine sucks. Do you have someone you need to call or text so they know you’re okay?”

  She ran along, her boots clopping on the cement. “My stepmom doesn’t know about any of this. She’ll go ballistic if I tell her.”

  “You don’t have a boyfriend? Girls like you are issued boyfriends right before their first prom, aren’t they?”

  Alyssa whapped Jordan’s shoulder. “Very funny.”

  Jordan looked back and saw the dark figure was following.

  “You’re driving. I’ll handle communications.” Jordan produced his hands-free earbuds and dialed while Alyssa climbed in the driver’s side of her thankfully non-crappy car. Jordan was right. It was a techmobile. And it had GPS, which was likely to come in handy. They clicked their seat belts.

  “Don’t you have something you want to ask me?” she said.

  Jordan looked back and then continued typing on his phone. “Yeah, will you marry me?”

  “That’s it? Some proposal!”

  “Just drive.”

  “Yes, my Lord Husband.”

  The tires chirped as Alyssa’s sedan sped out of the parking lot towards Jordan’s house.

  Chapter Thirty

  Over the course of the four months prior to the release of KNC and the two months following, Orbit’s Gamer had spent lavishly to obtain top billing on Lion’s Share TV. It was understandable. Without the popular community’s audience, the upstart streaming service had no chance of competing with the equivalent offering on Videowall. Their new host wasn’t shy about courting controversy either. Their new host called himself “The Saint,” and his four-in-one and six-in-one round-table style three-hour free-for-alls were starting to get considerable traction in the alternative gamer television category.

  The fact they had the biggest event in gaming to cover didn’t hurt either. On this broadcast, the Saint had gathered several formerly high-level Kings and Conquests players along with none other than Jay Zhang, leader of the enigmatic “Party Crashers” guild, which had gained rapid notoriety as the home of the first team to defeat the Lower Stonehill dungeon boss and get all the way back out without losing any characters.

  Evil was afoot in the Realm, and the Saint had put together a formidable team of pundits to unravel it all. The screen was arranged with small windows for each talking head, all surrounding Brian “The Saint” Sean in the center. Brian’s studio was decorated with all kinds of high-quality gear, including a magnificent 16-inch-tall statue of his max-level swordsman character from the second most popular massively multiplayer game.

  “That’s what I’m saying, Brian,” Kevin Corallo, Senior Gaming Editor for PatchNet said. “While it’s true we don’t have access to the actual numbers, we also aren’t buying the Fairly Unusual official stats either, because we can see they are running on a 24 hour delay, and that gives the company time to manipulate them. What we can say with relative certainty is high level players are being systematically targeted for elimination. Sometimes by NPCs. Sometimes by other players. Dinging level nine seems to be the trigger.”

  “That seems a little far-fetched,” Sean replied.

  “All you have to do is watch the rankings,” Kevin said.

  “He’s right, Brian,” Julie List added. She was the public face of the Auction Keepers site, which used a complex API and mobile device interface to present real-time up-to-the-second values for lootable and tradeable items in the game world. Auction Keepers rocketed into stardom among KNC sites due to its comprehensive listings and spectacularly well engineered mobile interface. “This is like one of those old science fiction TV scripts where the moment someone becomes too powerful or too knowledgeable, the secret society comes along and takes them out.”

  “You can’t possibly believe there is some kind of hidden faction in this game that kills characters because they reach a certain pre-determined level? Wouldn’t that be working at cross-purposes with Fairly Unusual? Doesn’t the company want people to reach higher levels so they’ll keep playing and keep paying that outrageously high subscription fee?”

  “Everyone read Wyland’s interviews in the gaming press between Supercon and release,” Jay replied. “The guy practically came out and said the game would kick your ass no matter how good you were at leveling.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily follow there are FUG-sanctioned hit squads,” Brian offered.

  “No, but you also can’t argue with the math,” Kevin said.

  “Okay, what does this have to do with the hidden quest?”

  “Everything,” said Andy Bix. He was host of the Insufficient Light Videocast. “The current theory is that this quest, which you can only discover if you get to the magic level, gets you the weapon you need to defeat the NPCs that come to kill you because you’ve reached the magic level.”

  “You lost me,” Brian said.

  “It’s a sword,” Julie began.

  “Isn’t it always a sword?” Brian asked.

  “Well, yeah, but this is an important sword. When any character reaches level seven, the courier vendor at the chapel in Dayshire starts talking to himself. If you stick around long enough you’ll hear him having a conversation with nobody in which he mentions a swordsmith who lives in a nearby town. The problem for certain factions is these two villages are controlled by opposing factions, so the likelihood of surviving the trip from point A to point B are pretty low.”

  “But you pulled it off?”

  “Jay did. His character has rather formidable stealth abilities, so he was able to sneak in to the second village. He found the location of the swordsmith’s workshop. It was abandoned, but he recovered an obje
ct we’re referring to as ‘The Untitled Book’ from a nearby vendor. Our working theory is the swordsmith was killed and the sword itself stolen by whatever forces ultimately destroyed it. The book has no pages and of course, no title, but if you have thaumaturgic sensitivity, you can detect a faint aura of magic from the cover, which means the pages were either inscribed with magic ink or the book itself either granted some kind of power to its owner or had an innate magic of its own.”

  “What power?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Jay replied. “Well, to be more accurate, we didn’t know until that casino massacre. When my guildmates went in there, they were able to find several items that apparently survived the fire. One of them was a page from the Untitled Book.”

  “How could a page from a book survive a fire that’s been burning for days?” Julie asked rhetorically.

  “Exactly,” Jay said. “On one side is a map to the Jagged Rift just outside of Dayshire. On the opposite side is a time table, an almanac entry indicating when dusk occurs, and a marked map pointing to the boss room in the Shifting Irons dungeon, which is a level ten instance.”

  “You have to be level ten to get in?” Brian asked.

  “Not necessarily. We’ve had a couple of people spin up a group of level sixes and sevens to get in there. It’s hard, but not impossible. I managed to sneak in to the boss room. Fortunately, I was able to see how there might be a connection between the almanac entries and that particular room.”

  “Without aggroing the boss?”

  “I didn’t get very far into the chamber. The boss is at the far end of the room, so there are opportunities to explore without getting too close,” Jay said. “I looked out one of the windows in that room and it all clicked. There are five balistrarias in the chamber that face west. No windows face east. Shifting Irons Keep is at the east end of a cluster of lakes between it and the second village. Our working theory is that if you defeat the boss, get to that fifth balistraria and happen to be looking out that window at exactly the right moment just before dusk, the sunlight will reflect off the exact lake where the hilt of the sword was lost.”

  “That’s phase one of the quest,” Julie added. “Phase Two happens in the Jagged Rift. It’s filled with level ten ghosts, some of which are ‘Enraged Ghosts.’ You can tell the difference because the enraged variety all wear necklaces with jeweled amulets. Jay found a strange jewel in the Blighted Forest after defeating a lower level version of the same monster. He took it back to that vendor in the second village and heard the story of how the swordsmith tried to escape his pursuers, but was eventually soul-trapped in a jewel just like the ones those ghosts drop. During the chase, all of his equipment including, presumably, the rest of the Untitled Book sank in the Mephisto River.”

  “And none of this is official?” Brian asked.

  “This quest procs. It doesn’t show up with a marked starting point like all the other so-called ‘official’ quests do,” Kevin said. “The more you follow this thing, the more you discover, and every discovery leads to the next step.”

  “So it’s basically like a string of related Easter eggs?”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Julie said. “I took my character down to Mephisto River myself to see if I could find the swordsmith’s wreckage. The feeling I got when I found it was enough to hook me into this quest line forever. I didn’t find the book, or anything likely to lead me to the swordsmith, but I was able to recover a map to a totally unremarkable location on a hill overlooking both the Dayshire Chapel and the Jagged Rift. It’s high enough you can see about 90% of the canyon and at the exact opposite end you can see the Chapel. I searched that location for days and didn’t find anything else, but then I realized something.”

  “It was a dead end,” Brian concluded.

  “No. But there are a lot of people who might think it is. The more I ran around up there the more I realized it is a unique spot in that part of the game world. There’s no monsters. No structures. No road. Nothing to loot, gather, inspect or even draw your attention. It is the most unremarkable place I’ve seen in all of Kings and Conquests, and that got me thinking along the lines of ‘too unremarkable.’"

  “The place is supposed to bore the shit out of you so you notice what you’re up there to notice,” Kevin added. “If you look at the Jagged Rift long enough you just might notice it doesn’t look all that much like a geographical feature. It looks like an impact crater.”

  Silence fell over the Saint’s show for a few moments.

  “The sword exploded.” Brian said.

  “Bingo. So now the theory is if we go down there and kill enough of those ghosts or enraged ghosts, we might be able to recover the pieces of the weapon,” Julie concluded.

  “Then what?”

  “We have to reassemble it,” Jay said.

  “Or re-forge it,” Kevin added.

  “There’s only one problem,” Jay continued. “Anyone who gets close to figuring all this stuff out earns a visit from a rather scary guest. I only avoided it because I made a point of leveling misdirection. Once I came within about 200 feet of the Jagged Rift having touched all the nodes for this quest I got an in-game message that said something about ‘it is much darker here than it should be.’ I activated my ultimate misdirection ability and hid. The fake version of myself I left out in the open was then torn to pieces by a level seventy demon.”

  “Level seventy!?” Brian exclaimed.

  “Yep,” Julie said. “The quest line comes to a fairly abrupt end if you aren’t prepared. Now that we are, all we have to do is find a way to get past that demon, and we might be able to re-forge a weapon that will practically guarantee a level 75 player character world first.”

  Robb Doncem clicked off his phone’s Lion’s Share streaming app and began typing a text message.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Alyssa cut the lights before her car quietly pulled up in front of Jordan’s tiny rented house. The front door was standing open and all the lights were off. A breeze swirled through the front yard, causing the trees to shiver.

  “This looks like a place we shouldn’t be,” Jordan said. “Those two guys probably made off with everything I own.”

  “What about your friends? The other people who were there this afternoon?”

  “I only left an hour ago. They would have at least locked up,” Jordan replied. “Stay here. I’ll go get my stuff and come right back.”

  “Not a chance. I’m not sitting out here by myself,” Alyssa said as she retrieved her jacket from the back seat.

  Jordan stopped at the front door. His house felt cold and empty, even though all the furniture was right where he left it. The SMS alert tone went off on his phone. It was from Robb.

  “You can’t stay at your house,” it read. Alyssa looked over Jordan’s shoulder at the message. The scent of her hair was almost enough to make Jordan lose his balance in more ways than one.

  The phone dinged again. “We locked everything in the safe before we bugged out.”

  “Bugged out?” Alyssa asked out loud.

  “Either they were running from something and didn’t have time to lock up, or someone got here after they left and rifled the place.” Jordan made his way into the LAN room and found pretty much everything had been thrown on the floor. All of the equipment he had been provided with was gone. Only the power strips and cables remained.

  “Someone was here,” Alyssa said. “Someone stole all your stuff.”

  “They’re looking for my authenticator,” Jordan said. “We have to get out of here before they come back.” He slipped into the next room and retrieved a flashlight. Alyssa remained in the LAN room and picked up the unsigned contract from earlier in the day. It had been strewn across the floor right along with nearly everything else that had been left on the big table. Further proof Rich and Jason weren’t at all interested in a gentleman’s agreement. Alyssa felt a chill at what their real plans might have been for Jordan and her. She heard the sound of th
e safe opening in the next room.

  Then the front door slammed shut. She turned and gasped. A man wearing dark clothing was standing in the entry way. He was holding a 9mm pistol. He wasn’t pointing it at anyone yet, but the message he was sending couldn’t have been more clear. Alyssa didn’t recognize him.

  “You shouldn’t have come back here,” he said in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “Where is Highwayman’s authenticator?”

  Alyssa swallowed. Her mouth was suddenly so dry. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying. Either tell me where it is or I’ll make sure you regret it.”

  Jordan wasn’t making a sound. Alyssa wondered where he was. Why didn’t he do something?

  “I’ll give you ten seconds,” the man said.

  “What good is it going to do for you?” She was trying to buy time, even though she wasn’t entirely sure if her strategy was going to do her any good either. She considered her stun gun, but then realized she was facing the same dilemma as the metaphorical knife-wielder when challenged to a gunfight.

  “Hand it over or you’re dead.”

  Alyssa saw movement in the room behind the gunman.

  “Drop the gun.” It was Jordan, and he was aiming the Crossbow of the Disgraced Prince right at the man’s head.

  “Or what?” the man growled.

  “Have you ever seen what a crossbow can do to a man at this range?” Jordan waited another couple of seconds. “Drop the gun!” he barked.

  The man let his weapon fall. The gun landed with a muffled thud on the rug. He raised his hands in an uncooperative manner. Jordan nodded and Alyssa carefully retrieved the pistol. She held it the way inexperienced people who don’t really like guns much hold guns: Two hands, pointing at the belligerent’s shoes, heels off the ground, heart rate of 140.

  Jordan carefully advanced and opened the coat closet under the staircase. “Get in.” The man reluctantly walked into the cramped little chamber, ducking as he did. Jordan closed the door and turned the brass lock. He nodded to Alyssa. “Get that one.” He took the chair from Alyssa and rammed the back of it under the doorknob. He ran to the other room and retrieved his laptop and overnight bags, grabbed Alyssa by the arm and ran out the front door.