Realm of the Nine Circles: A LitRPG Novel

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  “This is all very interesting,” Dante replied. “But I have to go to sleep. Good night.”

  He signed off quickly, making sure the system saved his progress. Dante was sure Corey would give him a raft of shit for essentially rage-quitting, but he’d heard enough. If Thornbark was telling the truth, Dante would find out. He set his spawn point for Corey’s shop before he left. By 1am he was in bed, fitfully tossing and turning and waiting for the elusive blanket of sleep.

  Chapter 6

  Dante swore a violent oath at the alarm clock and knocked it to the floor in his attempt to silence it. It keened away on the carpet like a dying robot. Dante moaned and yanked its power cord from the wall. He stood on shaky feet, knowing that if he lingered much past 6:35am, he would fall back asleep.

  “Ah, crap,” he moaned, forcing his eyes open. “Why did I stay up so damn late?”

  A splash of cold water brought him back to life enough to notice the black circles under his eyes. He cursed again and turned to the shower, not bothering with the hot water at all. Not caring what his neighbors on the other side of the thin apartment wall thought, Dante took his cold shower accompanied by a constant stream of cursing. He scrubbed himself down quickly under the icy water. When his feet hit the tile again, the ceramic surface felt warmer than the water.

  “Whoo-hoo!” Dante exclaimed. “I’m up!”

  Angry pounding on the opposite wall let him know that the neighbor he’d never seen also knew he was awake and that he wasn’t pleased about it.

  “Sorry!” Dante yelled as he brushed his teeth, dripping and shivering.

  He toweled off, ran an electric razor in some random patterns across his face, slathered on some deodorant, then dressed himself in whatever articles of clothing from his bedroom floor managed to pass the sniff test. Dante was on the road with a lukewarm cup of instant coffee in his hand by quarter-to-seven. Traffic was just picking up, and Dante weaved through it like a NASCAR driver in slow motion. He planned to get to work early, grab some free breakfast from the Plexcorp Campus cafeteria and track down some folks who could tell him what was going on with the game.

  Security measures on campus were unusually tight that morning. In addition to the x-ray scanners, employees had to endure two levels of personal searches. Dante had a wand waved around his crotch twice that morning. The second security goon searched the inside of the innermost backpack pocket and pulled out lint. Dante shook his head and drew hard stares from the head of security himself. Spotting Dennis Stroener in the lobby, with his bristle-top blond haircut and his cold, raptor eyes, was disconcerting to say the least.

  “What’s going on?” Dante asked the security guard at the second checkpoint.

  The guard shrugged. “Beats me, they don’t tell us squat.” He nodded for Dante to pass through, then promptly moved on to the next employee in line. Dante hadn’t taken three steps before the screech of the metal detector pierced the air.

  “Dude, I can’t take them all off. I’ve got rings in more than my nose. You’re not seeing the other ones. Oh, hey D!” A girl with black, spiky hair waved over the shoulder of another goon. “Can you tell these guys I’m legit?”

  “She’s good,” Dante called, smirking. He waited for her to finish her ordeal, blushing when the wand squeaked as the guard slowly ran it over her body. She wasn’t kidding, she really did have a— Nope, Dante thought, wincing. Not gonna go there.

  “Hey, Holly,” he said. “Do you know what that’s all about?”

  Her face fell. “Oh, man, I was hoping you could tell me! It’s totally bananas around here this morning. First Gideon, now—”

  “Gideon?” He interrupted her, confused.

  “You didn’t hear? Gideon’s been coming in at night and adding new code. Priyah texted me last night, she’s so mad she nearly quit!”

  “Priyah… from game engineering?”

  “Yeah. We hit ladies night every so often, keep each other in the loop, y’know?”

  Dante nodded, frowning. “So what’s the Big Man up to?”

  “That’s just it, no one knows. Priyah said the system tweaks don’t even make sense. They’re doing something because they’re pulling extra juice, but she can’t tell what.” Holly dropped her voice to a whisper. “One time, she tried to remove the new data and nearly crashed the whole game.”

  “Huh.” Dante shoved his hands in his pockets and darted a look around. None of the Plexcorp employees milling about and talking paid them any attention but he grabbed her arm and steered her towards the ground floor cafeteria. “Might explain the glitches last night.”

  “Glitches?” Holly’s eyes shot open. “Oh man, if Gideon’s broken something and we get the blame for it, that’s it. I’ll go work for Westbridge before I put up with that shit.”

  Dante laughed. “No you wouldn’t, you make that threat all the time. Their tech is years behind Plexcorp’s. You’d go crazy. Plus, no free breakfast.”

  Holly’s mouth twisted into a grin. “You got me there. So what’s up in the game? You still playing that barbarian guy? What was his name again, Kavocado?”

  Dante threw a mock punch at her shoulder and she returned the volley with a real one, hard enough to make him wince. “It’s Kalmond. I know you know that. Look, things got weird last night. Virgil was real laggy and people were saying Mylos keeps showing up, offering some quest and killing heaps of toons. That’s not the half of it, either. The NPC’s are acting up, responding like, I don’t know, people.”

  Holly pursed her full lips and looked at Dante through narrowed eyes. “You know what I do, right?”

  “Yeah, cloud engineer, so…”

  “Yeah, well, I got promoted. Sort of.” They reached the employee cafeteria and lined up, Holly grabbing a couple of granola bars off the counter as she pulled out her purse to look for her swipe card.

  “You didn’t tell me?” Dante said with a grin. “Looks like you’re buying the coffee.” Everything in the employee cafeteria was free.

  “Yeah, right. No pay rise, man, it’s just a stand in job while Derek’s away. Anyway, part of the systems maintenance I’ve been doing— can I get a large double strength latte with two shots of caramel, please?—involves monitoring the resource availability.”

  Dante blinked at the sudden change in topic, then stuttered his order at the barista. “Uh… just a coffee, thanks. A latte. Uh, yeah, three sugars and a shot of hazelnut.”

  “Jesus, Dante, you’ll get diabetes.” Holly let out a peal of laughter at his face and picked up her coffee. “Look, three days ago, there was a twelve percent increase in the power draw. I mean it’s not catastrophic, but twelve percent isn’t nothing, either.”

  “Yeah, I hate my pancreas. But I don’t get it. The power draw, that is. And where is Derek? He never takes time off.” Dante grabbed his coffee as they headed to a quiet corner away from the hiss of the coffee machines.

  “Don’t know. One day, they said Derek was out and gave me his job duties. Here’s the thing, though…” She leaned in close enough that he could smell the powder on her face. “I looked into it. We committed our redundant high-tension power lines to production, now we’re begging the power company to run new lines. I was told to do whatever it takes. I mean, I didn’t want to screw this up, if something goes wrong, I’ll never get the chance for a real promotion and these guys pay well and all, but—”

  “Holly,” Dante interrupted with an exasperated look.

  “Oh, right. Well, there’s been a power spike every nine days, three times in a row. All twelve percent. That’s total increase of forty percent more power our systems are pulling. Why? Is it this new stuff Gideon’s adding on? What’s it doing? That implies thousands of new servers, but I have no provision orders. I just have a power consumption issue as if someone is bringing thousands of machines online.”

  They both fell silent, Dante mulling over Holly’s words while she waited for him to answer. “Maybe he’s done something to the AI.”

  “Like
what? Given them all cyber-steroids?”

  “Yeah? I mean, what if he’s increased their intelligence. That would kind of explain the NPC’s having more authentic reactions, and I guess more tech means more power, right?” He chewed his lip, unwilling to tell her about the sensory input device they’d been experimenting with. Though the departments ostensibly worked together, there was still a veil of secrecy around new projects like this one.

  Holly’s phone buzzed. “Gotta go, Kavocado. Tell me if you figure it out?”

  He gave her a weak smile as she darted off towards the elevators. What could Gideon be working on? Wild speculation consumed him as he made his way to the lobby elevators. It took a few rounds of opening doors to get a car going down. He piled in with other workers—all pocket-protector types who worked on any one of the twenty floors below grade. The main Plexcorp building was nearly as deep as it was tall. The simulated bell rang at B6, and Dante stepped off, casting a glance at his fellow employees. For a moment he saw them as coal miners headed down to the depths with mattocks and buckets.

  Today, the black walls and slate gray floors struck Dante as sinister. He understood this was an easy impression to have. Who picked this color scheme, anyway? he thought as he increased his pace to the lab. He’d burned the time he intended to spend digging into the game mystery talking to Holly. She’d left him with tantalizing clues. He debated going down a few more levels to track down some leads with the AI developers, but a quick glance at his watch made him curse. He’d barely make it in on time as it was.

  Dante reached the sealed metal doors of the unlabeled lab. It took him two passes of his smart chip card across the reader pad before the light above the doorframe turned green. The portal slid open with a slight motor whine and the light rumble of hidden casters. Martin and Najeel didn’t even look up.

  As he neared the rounded forms of their shoulders bent over the central work table, two things occurred to him. First, they weren’t arguing. Second, they were dressed in the same clothes as they were the day before. They hadn’t left the lab. Dante approached carefully.

  If they noticed him, they didn’t bother to acknowledge his presence. The two men communicated with nods, shakes of their head and eye-blinks. A strange, gold-colored device lay dead-center on the work table. It sprouted ribbon cables, test leads, and hair-thin fiber optic strands that glowed with red, blue and violet light. Three laptops crammed onto the worktable accepted connections from the device via intermediate boxes that Dante recognized as interface modules.

  Whatever the thing was, it produced immense amounts of data. Dante cocked his head and focused on the screens. He recognized the binary data patterns streaming across the consoles by the occasional status messages that flew by just fast enough for him to glean. Could it be? Dante shook his head, then surveyed the screens again to make sure. He wasn’t certain how long he stood there making his mind accept that the device on the table was a fully-functional, miniaturized immersion VR harness. The two senior engineers fed it simulated input and monitored the results. Dante wet his dry lips and whistled as goose flesh crawled up his arms and prickled his face.

  Najeel gave a start and looked up at Dante with the rarest of expressions: a smile. Martin leaned back and stretched his shoulders with an audible crackling of his spine. Finally able to see their faces, Dante took in the dark circles under bloodshot eyes.

  “Wow!” Dante exclaimed, surprise shouldering his concern aside. “You guys look like shit.”

  As collegial and informal as their relationship was, the unguarded comment seemed to cross a line. Martin glared at him for a moment, a dark cloud passing over his face. Dante swooped in for the save, speaking quickly.

  “You’ve been working all night, haven’t you? Do you two even realize it’s morning?”

  The men looked surprised. Najeel placed his hand on his belly and blinked slowly.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Dante continued. “Gentlemen, may I please suggest you take a break and have breakfast?” Standing on courtesy and formality backed Martin down from a near-certain harsh retort.

  “We can’t leave this thing now,” Martin said. “We’re just beginning to understand it.”

  “The device is amazing. It is a work of art,” Najeel said, seeming to continue Martin’s train of thought.

  “I can see that. I can also see that you two are exhausted. You need food, something to spike your insulin. A break will make you work better.”

  Najeel continued rubbing his belly as if to confirm how empty it was. Martin rolled his stiff shoulders and gave a nod. The two men Untitled1disconnected the leads and fibers from the device and left it on the table.

  “When we get back,” Martin said, “we’ll do a live test. Look over our data and get ready for that.”

  Dante grinned so hard his face hurt. He salivated at the thought. He was barely conscious of Martin and Najeel leaving the room. As he walked a slow circle around the device, it was all he could focus on. This was the thing that would transport the user into the game completely; No outside stimuli, no real world artifacts. Total immersion. Before Dante knew what he was doing, he picked up the harness.

  Two tiny LED status lights blinked green. When he squinted, he could see the lights were labeled “TX” and “RX”—transmit and receive. As he brought his eyes closer to the device, it chimed.

  “Thought patterns recognized,” Virgil’s voice came from the harness. “Welcome, Dante. Which character would you like to play?”

  Dante startled and almost dropped the priceless, prototype.

  “Duh,” Dante muttered. “Kalmond, of course.”

  “Loading character,” Virgil said.

  “Holy shit!” Dante exclaimed. He did not expect Virgil to pick up his voice and interpret his command. The harness was obviously connected to the game.

  Before he knew what he was doing, Dante slipped the harness over his forehead.

  Chapter 7

  The cathedral chamber gelled to view from a blinding field of white. As color filled the stone-walled room, giving it depth and texture, Kalmond the dwarf pivoted on his heel. He had a heel in this world. Weight pressed into it from the mass of his elven armor that sounded with heavy metallic clanking and the creak of leather. The smell of wet horse came to him as he moved closer to the central arch down the entry hall. He raised a hand, felt the muscles bunching and pulling, saw fine hairs on the backs of his stubby fingers. The armor pinched his elbow—bloody elves, couldn’t make clothes to fit a dwarf if they tried. The hand, commanded by no more thought than moving his human body, touched his face. It trailed down the long, coarse whiskers that fell from his chin, stroking the beard as a grin spread wide over his face. Even that was strange. His bulbous nose squashed the skin around it and when he moved his eyebrows, bristly hairs scraped his skin. This was far better than the prototype.

  Shaking of his reverie, the mighty dwarf strode forward. The humid chamber air stirred long, black hair that fell across his eyes. He had eyes. Kalmond stopped again and for a moment had to remind himself that he was Dante, a human person playing a game. The experience was so real Dante forgot who he was for a moment. This new person in a new world struggled to understand an experience that was both real and once-removed.

  A rustle of cloth and the scrape of leather against stone turned Kalmond’s head. Virgil approached from an archway to his left without his usual greeting. The space behind Virgil was impossibly black, as if a perfect void birthed the ancient wizard.

  “Virgil?” Kalmond asked. Even with a tentative tone, Kalmond’s voice came to him as the shifting of earth rumbling with mass and scraping with gravel. The shock of it stopped Kalmond in his tracks. He’d never heard his own true voice before.

  “What does the player desire this day?” Virgil replied, his voice sounding grave rather than jovial as usual.

  Kalmond’s mind raced as he forced himself to consider his next move. He still had one more day to complete his quest. The Sorceress K
eerna had promised to track him down tomorrow by game-world dawn should the slime mold colony heart not be delivered. On the other hand, the immersion harness provided a completely new experience and Dante knew the temptation to get lost in its intricacies would impair his focus. He decided to tread lightly.

  “Do you have any new quests for me?”

  Virgil paused, then reached a liver-spotted, pale hand into his robes, where he produced a scroll. When he unfurled it, Kalmond jumped back as large blocks of text appeared inches from his face. Involuntarily, he waved a thick-fingered hand at the letters as if they were flies. Words came into focus as Virgil read.

  “The Realm is restless. There are many adventures to be had. In the Third Circle, the villagers of the Thogos River Valley are plagued by giant grasshoppers. Also in the Third Circle, wayfarers fall prey to bands of marauders. There is a bounty for the head of the marauder king. In the—”

  “Give me an easy quest, Virgil,” Kalmond interrupted.

  Virgil cast a strange look in his direction. The Wizard’s eyelids formed hoods for a moment, giving him a cast of sadness. The screen version of this character never used such an expression. Kalmond did not find it unnerving, but Dante certainly did. The sensation jarred him enough to realize that he could not feel his own human body at all.

  While playing in the VR world, he had been aware of activity in the lab. Najeel and Martin could ask questions and the sounds seemed part of the game world, as if the two places intersected. Now, there was only the Realm of the Nine Circles. A smile spread across the dwarf’s leathery face as he marvelled at the completeness of this world that was both familiar and new.

  The floating text quickly faded, replaced by a new quest list. Kalmond reached out with a pointed finger and flicked one of the list headings. The contact made a ‘tock’ sound as if he’d flicked wood. He stopped the spinning list at random with another poke of his finger. He marveled at the texture of hard, painted wood under his finger. The game world felt new, and this was just the opening scene.