Realm of the Nine Circles: The Grind: A LitRPG Novel

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  His foe, another stone dwarf, recovered quickly as Kalmond drew his warhammer and cloudsplitter. Kalmond’s choice of weapons showed his intention to finish the fight quickly. His opponent had the same goal.

  Kalmond’s first rage swing from cloudsplitter was blocked, but the warhammer struck home on the other dwarf’s head, scoring 2200 points damage and a stagger. Kalmond followed through with cloudsplitter, scoring a critical and another 3000 points, taking the enemy health bar down to nearly a quarter. The player was a level eighteen, but his plate armor was tough, making him nearly even in effective hitpoints with Kalmond.

  The return strikes took nearly ten percent of Kalmond’s health to the tune of 3000 points caused by heavy fire damage. Kalmond parried until his endurance bar filled, then maintained a series of rage attacks, swinging wildly with axe and hammer.

  cloudsplitter scored several more criticals, allowing him to follow through with the war hammer to take down some armor value. Kalmond finished his enemy with an axe blow to the center of the forehead, splitting the skull like a melon. It took two hard yanks to free his axe from the thick dwarf skull.

  The fight took less time than he thought, as the feet skidding to a halt belonged to several adventurers who all shouted their apologies over voice chat for not getting there sooner.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kalmond said, surprised at the new faces all so eager to come to his defense. “Way things are going,” he said, “You’ll have plenty of chances to help me out later.” He stepped away from the corpse without bothering to loot it as an XP bubble announced 200 points.

  “You’re not going to take his stuff?” One of the new allies asked.

  Kalmond turned to the elf and said, “Not this time. It’s all yours. Divvy up his stuff among yourselves. Consider it a down payment.”

  They wasted no time taking Kalmond up on the offer. The dwarf reached the well with no sign of Rock, and he didn’t bother to look. There was no time. The wooden platform delivered Kalmond to the chamber floor in minutes.

  “Hello, Bear Dwarf,” a dillo said, stepping forward from a small crowd of identical creatures huddled around the great forge where the blacksmith instructed them on how to create weapons.

  “Rock?” Kalmond asked. “Rock leader?” His mind told him that was her, but his eyes saw yet another dillo.

  Rock laughed with that rumbling, scraping stone sound and replied, “Yes, Bear Dwarf. How is it that I can tell you apart, but you cannot pick one of us from another?”

  Kalmond thought better of answering directly, knowing how prone the dillo were to taking offense. “Nevermind,” he said instead. “Let’s go. Lead the way.”

  Rock turned without a word and headed across the cavern where several more passages disrupted the wall. “I don’t remember all these passages the last time I was here,” Kalmond remarked as Rock selected one of the identical openings.

  The walls also looked much different. The previous black was replaced by dark gray with streaks of silver-white minerals running through it in strata. The ground was uneven and dusty, with dips and humps of rounded stone beneath the powdery layer.

  “Our home changes,” was all Rock offered by way of explanation. She lead them onward deeper into the tunnels that wound and branched and twisted.

  They walked for a solid half hour before Kalmond nervously asked when they’d reach the entrance to the forgotten Spiven Elf city. The answer came when they rounded a corner and came to the edge of a cliff overlooking a massive pit. Far down below, a set of crooked golden doors lay nearly flat on the cavern floor among the rubble of ornately carved columns and headless statues.

  “It looks like a cave-in,” Kalmond said.

  “This place was buried long ago, long before the first of my people,” Rock said.

  Kalmond forced back a snicker. The Dillo were entirely new to the game, having come from whatever weird dreams the fish brains cooked up in their struggle with Gideon.

  “Sure,” Kalmond replied. “How do we get in?”

  Rock walked up to the edge of the cliff, turned around and dropped to all-fours. She crawled backward until her armored belly rested on the ground and her hands clawed the rock floor as she lowered herself over the edge. Kalmond watched with arched eyebrows, then followed suit.

  “I guess this quest is just for me,” the dwarf grumbled. “Centaurs can’t climb.”

  “What is a centaur?” Rock asked from below.

  Kalmond didn’t bother to try making eye contact for the answer. It was all he could do to keep handholds on the crumbling stone. He definitely did not want to look down. “You’ve lead a sheltered life underground, Rock.”

  “Perhaps,” Rock replied, “My people talk of questing above ground.”

  “That should be interesting,” Kalmond said. “I think—”

  The unmistakable sound of crumbling stone made Kalmond hug the cliff face like a cat on a window screen. Kalmond couldn’t help himself. He looked down.

  The dillo pulled her head and all limbs into her shell and tumbled down, breaking off chunks of cliff along the way. Each time she met a jagged outcrop or any deviation in the wall, she launched a bit further out. The last few terrifying feet of her drop gave her free air. Kalmond gasped at the sight of her shell, seeming small so far below, as it made a thock sound on the cavern floor and teetered to a stop upside down.

  Kalmond willed his muscles to thaw and scrambled down the cliff face heedless of his own handholds. “Rock! Rock!” he screamed along the way. “Talk to me! Are you OK?”

  Just before he reached the bottom, he heard the familiar chuckle. At first, he thought it was more tumbling stone. “Yes, Bear Dwarf. It takes more than a fall to hurt a dillo.”

  Kalmond made a half turn and pushed himself out from the wall to jump down the last twenty feet. The jump took 200 hit points, but it was worth the damage to end that climb.

  “I can see that,” Kalmond replied as he removed some boar meat from his inventory. He munched it down to the bone to regain his health and felt much better.

  The dwarf let out a long belch, scratched his beard and surveyed the scene. Standing on the cavern floor let him see just how large the crooked doors were. They appeared to be cast from solid gold that lit the area around them in a vaguely golden light. Kalmond followed the straight lines of the inside door edges through the random piles of rubble obscuring the carved surface here and there. One of the doors overlapped the other so that, where it met the floor, there seemed to be a gap. When the dwarf stepped forward, he found a space wide enough for him to slip through.

  Rock appeared over his shoulder. “My people say this place is haunted and cursed,” she said.

  “Now you tell me,” Kalmond grumbled. With fists to armored hips, he leaned to the left and looked past the gap into the forgotten Spiven city.

  Chapter 24

  As Kalmond carefully slipped around the edge of the door and squeezed between its fallen counterpart, the air grew colder until his breath hung around his beard in clouds. By the time he reached the other side, he was shivering.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting,” Kalmond mumbled on his encounter with a hall mostly clogged with collapsed stone. A narrow path snaked among the rubble and into the darkness.

  The dwarf cast his detection spell and gratefully, found nothing. Rock followed wordlessly behind as he made his way down the narrow path. He had to turn sideways at times to squeeze through. When the path finally gave way to an open chamber, he was covered in dust.

  It took him a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light. When they finally did, the sight of the cavern produced a long, low “Ahhh…” that emptied his lungs of air.

  The dwarf and his dillo companion stood on a dusty floor of solid gold that appeared poured molten into place during its construction. As Kalmond took tentative steps forward, his feet cleared a light coating of dust and allowed the gold floor to reflect dim light on his beard.

  Though the walls were skewed and
leaning, massive ornate carvings of Spiven Dwarves seemed to reach out to him from the walls. Up ahead, long-dimmed braziers crafted from solid spiven metal straps flanked the hallway. As he approached, the smell of smoke tickled his nostrils.

  “What the—” Kalmond began but the next words were sucked from his mouth by a sudden conflagration in the braziers ahead.

  Twin columns of flame burst upward from the fire baskets, sending black smoke billowing against the ceiling. As the smoke cooled and settled into the entry chamber, the fire died down to reveal a pile of glowing coals that turned the golden passage to an angry red.

  “Uh oh,” Kalmond said. If the statues carved from the walls seemed to reach out for him, it was because they now did.

  “Run!” Kalmond bellowed as a twenty-foot tall Spiven elf made from stone brought its sword down on the spot where Kalmond stood seconds before.

  The stone weapon broke into boulders that tumbled at his heels. A twinge of guilt tugged at Kalmond’s back as he ran for his life, not bothering to look back to check on Rock.

  As he ran blindly forward, another statue unmarried itself from the wall and stepped forward. Its sandaled foot rose high, then came down over Kalmond’s head as it tried to stamp him out like an insect pest. He had to dodge right to avoid it and ended up bouncing off the planted foot that lifted its heel. The living statue pivoted with surprising agility as Kalmond ran past.

  Seconds later, an earthquake of a footfall shook pebbles and dust from the ceiling behind the terrified dwarf. Kalmond activated his telekinesis spell and cast it with both hands on a teetering support column to his right. He was surprised when the column, nearly as tall as the pursuing giant statue, rocked and fell. Kalmond put on a burst of speed with the last of his endurance to avoid being crushed.

  A stutter in the quaking footsteps behind him told him that the ploy worked. Kalmond shot a look over his shoulder to find the pursuing giant tripping over the fallen column. The living statue began to fall, and Kalmond did some quick geometric calculations to prove the theorem that he was about to be crushed.

  The world around him slowed as panic took hold. He ran faster than he thought possible, but the already dim light faded as the shadow of the falling statue loomed above. Something grabbed his right shoulder and pulled impossibly hard, snapping his neck to the left. Whatever took hold of him let go suddenly after guiding him in a sharp right-hand turn that lined him up with the chamber wall that did not yield.

  The dwarf tried to stop running at the last second, only to make his body slam full-face against the wall. The impact transferred through the plate mail armor to rattle his skeleton as he bounced back a single pace, then collapsed on the ground as the statue crashed.

  Rock stood above him chuckling, arms folded across her shell. Kalmond blinked back stars and tried to keep falling dust out of his eyes. He coughed twice and wheezed a half-hearted objection to being laughed at.

  The dillo reached down and dragged Kalmond to his feet with her strong, scaly, three-fingered hands.

  “How did you get ahead of me?” Kalmond asked.

  “Dillo run fast when scared,” Rock said.

  “I thought you weren’t scared of anything,” Kalmond said.

  “Not scared of many things, but big thunder stone elf one,” Rock said, laughing still.

  Kalmond bellowed his mirth and slapped Rock on her armored shoulder. “Let’s go, Rock. More fun awaits.”

  Kalmond dusted off his plate mail and drew cloudsplitter to make himself feel better. The solid spiven steel haft lent its reassurance in the still-rumbling cavern. The first stone guardian tripped and fell over the first. Both heads of the statues rose nearly to the ceiling with angry, accusative expressions on their faces. Behind them, their bodies completely blocked the way out.

  “I guess there’s only one way forward now,” Kalmond said.

  The entry chamber narrowed at the far end, where doric columns carved from reddish stone supported massive black slabs of metallic-looking material that formed the roof of the chamber ahead. As they passed beneath, a hissing, fizzing sound filled the air from above.

  Casting their faces upward expecting some new threat instead revealed that the perfect black of the ceiling began to sparkle with tiny lights. “Stars,” Kalmond said breathlessly as strange constellations emerged. Soon, their scraping footsteps softened as green grass sprouted beneath their feet and a cool breeze brought the scent of flowers.

  “It is the above world,” Rock said, looking around as they stopped walking.

  The passage behind them disappeared, and the path ahead opened wide without a hint of stone walls.

  “No,” Kalmond said. “We are still underground. This is something different. Be careful.”

  “Which way?” Rock asked.

  “I thought you were supposed to be my guide,” Kalmond grumbled.

  “I guide you to city,” Rock replied, shrugging. “Not through it.”

  “So legalistic,” Kalmond said, shrugging his shoulders. He moved on, picking some direction he thought of as forward now that the chamber turned into rolling grassland that spread out to a black horizon in every direction.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” Kalmond remarked absently. Then he gritted his teeth. Whenever he thought something like that…

  One of the lumps of grass a few paces in front of him moved. Kalmond stepped back a few paces and nearly tripped over another moving lump.

  “Damn it!” Kalmond bellowed, drawing his warhammer with his free hand.

  A deep tearing sound broke the peaceful scene as a skeletal form rapidly pushed up from the earth. Kalmond charged forward as more tearing sounds reached his ears from every direction. Undead spiven elves rose up from the ground to surround them.

  Rock wasted no time. She squared up on the first undead spiven elf and cleaved it nearly in two down the middle with her scimitar, then punched a hole in the chest of another that came up right behind it.

  Kalmond saw this as he swung first with his warhammer, crushing the brittle skull of the first elf for 200 XP worth of kill. Bringing cloudsplitter to bear on the elf beside it sent shattered fragments of rib cage flying. Still, the undead elf continued unfazed, scoring a solid hit with a pristine-looking spiven steel sword that took 3477 HP. In one swipe, the skeleton took more than 10% of his health. The things were easy to kill, but they did damage.

  Switching out the warhammer for his water cannon spell, Kalmond danced backward while he blasted back several more skeletons that popped up from the ground like demonic spring flowers. To win against them, he just needed distance. That strategy would be hard to work because more of the elves popped up every few seconds.

  Even Rock backed off when she was nearly surrounded. Kalmond moved towards her and soon they fought shoulder-to-shoulder. Luckily, the elves stopped sprouting from the ground, but the downside was that there were nearly twenty of them.

  The rotting corpses formed a line that advanced with identical swords. Each elf wore the identical studded leather armor of infantry troops. As Kalmond worked with Rock to keep the line from forming a circle around them, he began to realize these were some kind of guard. But what were they guarding? He lost track of the XP bubbles as he and rock split the attacking force between them. When it was all over, more than half his health was gone.

  Kalmond poured a health potion down his throat, wiped his chin and set to looting the bodies. The spiven steel broadswords were each worth more than 200 circs apiece. He left the studded leather armor on the bodies in favor of several gold rings and two crusted gemstones.

  “This place is loot-rich!” Kalmond exclaimed. He hadn’t taken much time to really enjoy stripping the dead of valuables during his extended grinding up the levels. Rock stared at him with her beady black eyes and said nothing. “Don’t get too excited, Rock.”

  “Dillo do not get excited,” Rock replied.

  “Huh,” Kalmond said. “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Dwarf not so smart,”
Rock said, then nudged one of the dead dwarves. “Elves rising from ground. Strange place.”

  Satisfied with the plunder, Kalmond threw his axe over his right shoulder and hung his arm from it. He turned in a slow circle. There was no sign at all that they were underground. The change happened so suddenly, yet so subtly, that he hardly noticed. But how to get out? The place seemed like an entirely different world now.

  “This way,” Rock said, brushing past.

  “What..” Kalmond sTammered. Rock followed flattened path through the grass. “That definitely was not there before.”

  “What does it matter?” Rock asked. “It is a path.”

  Somehow, Kalmond couldn’t argue with that logic. As they trudged along, the dome of stars above slid across the sky like a planetarium projector set to high speed. The sky brightened, and soon they were walking towards a blood-red line on the green horizon. Kalmond checked the main menu screen to take note of the time. Nearly two hours had passed since he entered the city. The dwarf picked up the pace, brushing past Rock, who trundled along ahead eyes forward.

  “If we don’t know where we’re going,” Kalmond said, “I want to get there faster.”

  “We go this way,” Rock replied as the deceptive flatness of the land gave way to a decline.

  It turned out the land they were on was some kind of plateau, and now they climbed down its far slope. In the distance, beneath a sun that had nearly reached its apex, a circle of rough stone arches emerged. As they approached from above, Kalmond counted ten arches assembled from smoothed, head-sized stones of every earth tone imaginable. They looked as if they came from rivers or streams and defied gravity as they stood without mortar.

  “This is the way forward,” Rock said, planting her feet squarely on the soft grass.

  “How do you know that?” Kalmond asked. Rock just shrugged her shoulders.

  Kalmond approached the nearest arch that rose high above his head. As he did, the area of the arch waved like a curtain in the breeze. The view changed, and the arch became a window to a stone chamber. He recognized the place.