Shattered Lands: A LitRPG Series

by Darren Pillsbury

  Daniel walked up next to Simik.

  To his astonishment, there were tears gleaming in the old dwarf’s eyes as he stared at the statues.

  “These are the greatest heroes in all my people’s history,” the dwarf said softly. “Mlitik the Conquerer. Hortoc the Great. Grema the Empress. Jinri the Scribe. Ten thousand years stand before us… sculpted by the greatest artist our people have ever known, Bronok of Vist, over six hundred years ago. These statues were thought lost to the mists of time. No one knew where they were – and yet here they are. I am probably the first dwarf to gaze upon them in 300 years. And I would not have seen them if I had not come on this quest.”

  Daniel stood there, overcome with emotion to see Simik so moved.

  The dwarf blinked back his tears and returned to his usual gruff voice. “I will have to return for them, obviously. I shall raise an army of dwarves, and we will bring them back so that our people – all our people – can see them. And when they do, they will remember what we once were… and what we can be once again.”

  “I’ll help you,” Daniel said, then added, “…if you want.”

  The dwarf looked up – and for the second time ever, he smiled.

  “We might make an honorary dwarf of you yet, boy.” Then he harrumphed and returned to his usual dour self. “What in Ygart’s name are you wearing?”

  Daniel lifted his arm and glanced at the armor. “You like it?”

  “It’s… shiny, I’ll give you that,” the dwarf growled.

  “It’s incredibly light and super strong.”

  The dwarf inspected the armor, then harrumphed grudgingly. “Impressive.”

  “Mira found a bow where arrows appear magically every time you pull back the string.”

  “An elven creation,” the dwarf said. “It appears we’ve all found a treasure we greatly desired.”

  “I guess so.”

  The dwarf looked back at the statues and sighed. “No matter how useless your mage friend is, he actually did a bit of good in the end. We should probably go find him and the droth.”

  Daniel smiled. “Sounds good.”

  “Tell the two idiots bathing in gold to take what they want. We leave in five minutes.”

  Right on cue came the sound of thousands of coins clinking and jingling nearby.

  Daniel turned to see what Drogar and Vlisil were up to. “Jeez, they must be doing something really… big…”

  The words died on his lips.

  The barbarian and the goblin were both standing a hundred feet away, picking through diamonds and rubies.

  They weren’t the source of the sound.

  But it still kept growing, until it sounded like a landslide of coins.

  Daniel’s gaze shifted to Mira. She was staring up in the air, her face frozen in horror.

  Daniel and Simik both turned to see what she was looking at.

  One of the largest heaps of gold in the room was moving.

  The top of it was slowly rising up, as though lifted on a platform… and underneath the pile, a reptilian eye stared out from the cascade of gold.

  A dragon.

  63

  Eric

  Eric stood there in shock for a second, then asked the only question he could think of.

  “How did you get up here?!”

  Lotan looked terrified, but he answered all the same. “There are underground tunnels from the dwarves’ cavern. I heard a bunch of screaming in the water and swam here, but everything was dead. Then I just followed the light up here to you… what’s wrong with your eyes?”

  My eyes?

  Eric looked over at the shiny surface of the obsidian alter. He summoned the spell light just over his face and saw in the reflection that his eyes were entirely black.

  Like I’m possessed…

  Not only that, but his face was scrawled with black words as well.

  But they were moving.

  He couldn’t feel them, but they looked like black worms writhing slowly across his skin.

  Then a message appeared:

  Primal Summoning Mode engaged

  All acts of summoning and possession take 25% less mana

  “And why do you have stuff tattooed all over your face?” Lotan asked in a tremulous voice, then shrank away in disgust. “Ugh, they’re alive!”

  Eric turned around and used the most soothing voice he could. “It’s alright… you don’t have anything to be afraid of…”

  Lotan took a step backwards. “You look like something to be afraid of!”

  Eric smiled. “It’s just a side effect of the power I got. Don’t worry, I’m still me.”

  The fish-man trembled. “That’s kind of what I’m afraid of.”

  Eric’s smile faded. “You can’t tell the others about this, you understand?”

  Lotan frowned. “How are you going to hide it? It’s all over your face!”

  That’s true…

  And then the voices whispered in his ear.

  You can hide your true nature from others, Master…

  You always have…

  Though the words unsettled him – You always have – Eric closed his eyes and concentrated.

  His face felt like cold raindrops were sliding down his skin. When he opened his eyes and looked in the obsidian, the ink was gone. His eyes were back to normal, too.

  Primal Summoning Mode ended

  “There… no one ever needs to know but you and me.”

  Lotan looked from Eric to the book on the altar, then at the glowing orb at the end of his staff – and suddenly comprehension dawned in his pale grey eyes.

  “You were lying to us all along! You planned this – you came here just to get that thing, and you lied to us the whole way! You lied to me, to Drogar – to Daniel – ”

  Eric filled with anger when he heard the barbarian mentioned.

  But when Lotan said his best friend’s name, there was fear along with the rage.

  “NO,” Eric said firmly as he took a step forward. “No, this was a quest – we all did it together.”

  Lotan cringed and took a step backwards. “Don’t hurt me!”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Eric said, though his tone was more threatening than soothing.

  Suddenly a text appeared in his field of vision:

  You have a message from Daniel.

  Guilt tugged at him, and he opened it.

  Where are you?

  Eric scowled and swiped it offscreen, then turned back to Lotan.

  Where was I?

  Oh yeah…

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated, then added as an afterthought, “…as long as you never tell anyone.”

  The fish-man shook his head frantically. “It’s just like Simik said! You’re a liar – and you’re evil!”

  “SHUT UP!” Eric roared.

  That set the fish-man off. He turned and stumbled down the hill on his webbed feet as fast as he could.

  “DON’T!” Eric bellowed. “DON’T MAKE ME DO THIS!”

  But Lotan kept running and falling, flapping and flailing down the steps.

  Eric sighed in disgust. “Fine – you brought this on yourself. Vexicra nomadik!”

  Black smoke shot out of his fingertips and swirled through the air, piercing the droth’s back.

  Lotan didn’t stop running, though. He just shook his head as though he was fighting off dizziness, put his hand to his face – and then kept running.

  Eric’s eyebrows arched in surprise as a message popped up.

  Failure of possession spell!

  Droths have race-based -90% chance of possession

  Remaining 10% chance of possession: target’s alignment with ‘Good’ exceeds 80%

  That was interesting.

  As a race, droths were apparently difficult to possess – and the remaining probability was overwhelmed by Lotan’s being a goody-goody two-shoes.

  Alright, then – let’s see what happens when I bring the BIG guns out.

  Eric t
hrust out his hand and screamed, “Omnix kaleptek!”

  It was the most powerful spectral spirit he could summon – the very last in the Demonomicon, and one he had just gained control of in the last five minutes.

  Black smoke swept down with hurricane force and bodily knocked Lotan to the ground.

  The droth crouched there on all fours, retching and heaving… and then, after about ten seconds, he stumbled to his feet and kept going.

  Eric stood there in absolute shock.

  Failure of possession spell!

  Droths have race-based -90% chance of possession

  Remaining 10% chance of possession: target’s alignment with ‘Good’ exceeds 80%

  “What good is this book if I can’t possess a freaking FISH?!” he raged.

  FINE! I’ll just have to take him by brute force.

  At least THAT won’t be too hard.

  Eric smirked as the gangly droth continued his stumbling, bumbling way down the hill.

  Who does he think he is? He’s NOTHING outside of the water. I don’t even need a demon to catch him.

  “Lotan,” Eric called, taking the first step to follow him –

  And then the droth surprised him.

  Rather than continue down the steps, Lotan ran up the slanted side of some ruins that jutted out over a cliff into nothingness –

  And jumped out into the air.

  Eric’s heart leapt up into his throat. “LOTAN, NO!”

  He thought that the fish-man was trying to commit suicide.

  Turns out that wasn’t the case.

  The droth curled into a perfect dive and disappeared from view. Seconds later, there was a SPLASH! followed by silence.

  Eric realized his mistake as he ran to the nearest cliff.

  The glow of the crystal marked Lotan’s progress underwater. He was swimming almost as fast as a motorboat.

  The droth had been right – he really was something once he got in a body of water.

  “Oh shit…” Eric muttered. Then he screamed, “Paloptek caltonum!”

  Black smoke shot out of his entire body and dove straight toward the water.

  As soon as it hit the surface, something monstrous rose up out of the depths.

  The demon looked like a tiny aquatic life form Eric remembered from biology class called a water flea. But this thing was gigantic – 50 feet tall and wide, and nearly twice as long. It resembled a crustacean in that it was plated and segmented, with dozens of bulbous eyes on its cliff-like forehead. Dozens more twenty-foot-long appendages sprouted from its ‘face.’ All in all, it looked like an insectoid version of Cthulhu’s head without the elder god’s body.

  The monster propelled itself by a massive tail that churned the water into froth, and sent the dead bodies of sea serpents whipping back and forth in the waves like strands of spaghetti in a boiling pot of water.

  As the leviathan raced after Lotan, Eric sent his light after the arthropod so he could watch its progress. He could easily see Lotan’s crystal, but the gigantic demon would have been swallowed up by the darkness without the spell light.

  Eric held his breath as the underwater glow approached the edge of the cave.

  The aquatic monster was gaining, though, a massive ocean liner chasing a bioluminescent spark in the water.

  It was a race: either Lotan would get to the tunnels first, or the monster would get to Lotan.

  It was two hundred feet behind Lotan, who was eighty feet from the wall.

  A hundred feet behind Lotan, now forty feet from the wall.

  Twenty feet behind Lotan –

  The glow suddenly disappeared.

  The demon rammed full-speed into the rocky wall with a horrendous CRACK that reverberated throughout the cave, then dissipated into a massive cloud of smoke.

  “DAMN IT!” Eric screamed.

  Now the droth was going to get back to the others, and tell them everything –

  Unless…

  Whatever tunnels Lotan had used had been wide enough to let him pass. So a couple of feet in diameter at the very least, maybe even larger.

  Far too big for the leviathan to go through…

  …but not something else.

  Eric brought the spell light back to the island. Below him, the corpses of the sea serpents bobbed up and down on the choppy waves.

  He smiled wickedly.

  “Vexicra nomadik,”he chanted over and over again. “Vexicra nomadik. Vexicra nomadik. Vexicra nomadik…”

  Smoke shot down like tear gas canisters to the dead things below… and then the bodies began to writhe, flaps of flesh hanging off them in massive chunks.

  “Go after him,” Eric murmured.

  The undead serpents shot through the water, faster than Lotan had ever been.

  “…and kill him,” Eric whispered as they disappeared into the underwater caves.

  64

  Daniel

  “HIDE!” Simik roared as he dashed for cover.

  Daniel knew he should follow the dwarf, but in his terror he was unable to look away.

  It’s one thing to see a dragon in a two-dimensional movie, or even a three-dimensional video game with pixelation and jagged edges.

  It is quite another to see a primeval beast that your brain insists – even knows – is real, standing right there in front of you.

  It was impossible to see all of the creature in the torchlight, but what Daniel saw was terrifying.

  The dragon’s head rose up on its sinuous neck, gold coins spilling off it like water. Its thick plated scales were black, a striking contrast with its pale yellow underbelly. Half a dozen pointed horns sprouted from crests on the back of its head. Thousands of coins and rubies and diamonds glittered on its body, wedged between its scales like tiny parasites.

  As it rose from the mountain of gold, two massive, bat-like wings unfolded on its back, releasing another flood of coins – but the space between the room’s stone columns proved too narrow for the wings to unfurl all the way.

  One gigantic, tree-trunk-sized leg heaved out of the pile and slammed down on the stone floor, exposing toes as long as a man’s arm and claws like daggers.

  And then it looked down at Daniel.

  The part of his brain that dealt with survival – the dark corner triggered by the sight of great white sharks, tigers, and all primordial predators – kicked into high gear.

  His heart thudded in his chest –

  Every blood vessel flooded with adrenaline –

  And he ran.

  Four stories above him, the dragon opened its mouth and roared – a Godzilla-like scream, both high-pitched and bass rumble all at once.

  “HOLY CRAHP!” Daniel heard the barbarian bellow as he scrambled across the coins.

  Daniel barely made it behind one of the columns as the first blaze of fire spewed all around him.

  He’d always thought of dragon fire as a blast of flames and nothing more – superheated gas glowing orange and yellow.

  This was more like napalm.

  The fire hit the piles of gold and clung to it, burning like gasoline on the metal.

  Daniel was shielded by the massive column at his back – but he could see the sides of the stone pillar were drenched with liquid fire.

  Twang, twang, twang, twang!

  Over to his left, Mira was shooting her magically appearing arrows.

  “Mira!” he screamed. “Are you insane?! Take cover!”

  “There’s a counter on it!” she yelled back. “It can’t attack again for five – four – three – two – ”

  She dove behind the nearest stone column an instant before another burst of liquid fire rained down, turning the gold into a glittering landscape in hell.

  There was one upside, though: there was plenty of light to see by now.

  The stone columns had stopped burning, all the fire-liquid having evaporated. Daniel looked around just far enough to see the dragon.

  It was exactly as she’d said: there was a translucent colored bar hover
ing over the beast’s head.

  The bar was slowly building back up. It was yellow for the next few seconds, then it shaded into orange – apparently signifying that it could attack again, though it was nowhere near full power yet.

  The most disturbing thing, though, was the other stats that hovered above it.

  Tirelian Dragon

  Level 300 Terrestrial Monster

  Hit points: 1,000,000

  Attacks: Fire, biting, slashing, blunt force

  Damage dealt: 100 – 5000 hit points

  Strength: 500

  Intelligence: 10

  Dexterity: 10

  Endurance: 1000

  Willpower: 50

  Damage taken from arrows!

  999,677 / 1,000,000 hit points remaining

  Mira’s arrows had taken a small toll, but the dragon’s hit points were already regenerating at a furious clip.

  The thing was damn near indestructible.

  Though he couldn’t see Simik, Daniel could hear the dwarf’s voice ring out from behind one of the columns:

  “THERE’S NO WAY WE CAN BEAT THIS THING – RUN!”

  “NO, MAHN – WE CAN DO THIS!” the barbarian roared.

  “You’re the tank – be my guest!” Mira yelled as she stepped out from behind her column and fired another four arrows, then hid again as liquid fire rained down.

  “Fine!” Drogar shouted. “Get ready – ”

  “No, don’t do it!” the goblin shrieked.

  “You fool!” Simik yelled.

  But the barbarian was stubborn. “One – two – three!”

  He stepped out from behind the pillar –

  And a fireball exploded on the column right next to his head.

  The dragon had been nowhere near full capacity – hence the single fireball and not a steady stream of death – but it was enough.