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

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  Kalmond cursed and grumbled again. He stood watching the timing of the swings, then jumped high. He latched on to the rope and swung out, but the next rope swung farther away. With each swing, the two ropes got further apart. The longer he hung on, the more he slipped further down the rope until he fell off, taking thirty points off his health.

  Gritting his teeth, he climbed up the pillar again. He waited this time until the first two ropes began to swing towards each other as they moved away from him. He jumped, grabbing the first rope perfectly, then the second. But then the third rope was out of sync. It moved further away with every swing. Kalmond let go, realizing this try was also a failure. Hitting the ground took another thirty points, but he didn’t bother to take a health potion. The need to conserve came along with the creeping feeling that there was worse to come.

  This time, he walked the whole line of ropes, trying to figure out the pattern that would let him jump from rope-to-rope without falling. He didn’t see that pattern until he walked out for a wide view. The problem was that, once it saw it, from that perspective, how would he see it from the column.

  “Of course…Rock!” Kalmond called.

  “Yes?” Rock asked. He jumped at her voice as he didn’t realize she was inches away.

  “You see how the ropes are now?” Kalmond asked. She nodded her head. “Tell me when they get like that again.”

  Kalmond climbed up the column and waited. He waited more as time dragged on. “Now?” he shouted. Rock said nothing.

  He stood tapping his foot. He grumbled and growled until rock hollered “Now!”

  Kalmond leaped. He caught the first rope, then the second. Towards the end, the ropes swung further apart, but he finally made it. His hands started slipping before the final rope got close enough to the platform for him to let go. He landed comfortably in the middle of the stone.

  “OK, now it’s your tu—” when he turned back, he saw that Rock was already well on her way to join him.

  When she landed on the platform, Kalmond asked. “You saw the pattern from the platform?”

  “Yes,” Rock replied.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  Kalmond’s blood boiled and he restrained himself from pushing her off the platform. “Let’s go,” he said instead.

  “Where?” Rock asked. The shelf where they stood lead to a solid wall.

  Kalmond was about to say something born of frustration and anger when scraping stone drew his eye to another rock shelf slid out from the wall above and behind him. Another shelf slid out higher above the first, then a third, forming a staircase that spiraled up around the inside of the dome.

  “Oh, no,” Kalmond groaned as the stair steps began sliding in and out in a cascading pattern. “I’ll have to jump before the stairs retract.” Rock stood silently beside him, and the dwarf could read no expression in those tiny, glassy black eyes. “Tell me you see the pattern,” Kalmond said.

  “I see the pattern,” Rock replied.

  “Well?” Kalmond said, folding his arms and tapping his foot. Rock blinked. Kalmond sighed. “Rock, whenever you are ready, please lead the way so I can follow you.”

  “Yes,” Rock said, paused a second, then jumped.

  Kalmond jumped behind, landing on the stair Rock just left. When he went to jump again, the stair retraced and he fell. The fall was great enough for him to think about how bad it would hurt when he landed and then understand just how good he was at estimating injury.

  He lay there on the ground counting stars for several seconds after watching more than 7500 hit points go away. Coupled with previous falling damage, he was down to one-quarter health. He reluctantly took one of his precious health potions, then made his way back to the pillar for the tedious swing back to the platform. The good news was that he managed to get the hang of the rope patterns. The bad news was that learning the challenge so well took precious time and he’d never have to use the knowledge again. He willed himself to not check the time.

  With Kalmond safely back on the first stair, Rock turned to Kalmond and said, “You need to land on same stair to get timing right.”

  “That will be hard,” Kalmond said.

  “Yes,” Rock replied. “If we go fast, it will work.” Rock jumped suddenly, and Kalmond followed, barely making the landing and jumping again just before the stair retracted.

  By the time they reached the last stair, Kalmond had almost fallen at least six times. The higher they went, the more certain he was that the fall would be fatal. As they moved closer to the bright light at the center of the dome, it grew harder to see. Luckily, the last stair was wide enough to see in the near-blinding light. He and Rock stood comfortably together, crouching down slightly under the low ceiling.

  The source of that blinding light was the only place to go.The dwarf reached up into the hole, and his hands passed into water. Startled, he drew back a dripping hand that smelled of the sea.

  “Salt water?” Kalmond mumbled, then inched forward under the hole. The light there was too bright to stand, so he closed his eyes and stood slowly.

  His helmet passed into water, sending salty rivulets over his eyelids and into his beard as he rose higher. With eyes still closed, he felt around for the edge of the circle, where he found a ledge. As he pulled himself up, the water closed in on his head, then his shoulders.The water pressed hard on his head, then chest, giving him the frightening knowledge that the water was deep.

  Kalmond pulled himself up onto his hands and knees. With his eyes still closed, he had to guess that he was in some kind of cistern, as the floor was hard stone and not sediment. He stood with difficulty, then jumped and tried to swim, but the weight of his armor held him down. He almost opened his mouth to curse, but thought better of it. Wasting a breath on profanity might mean the difference between drowning and not drowning.

  Hoping for the best, Kalmond reached out with both hands and began to walk. His lungs burned, and his head began to pound before he made contact with a stone wall. The dwarf found handholds in the rock and began to climb.

  By the time his head broke the surface, he’d almost forgotten how to breathe. Kalmond hung on to the wall for a few trembling seconds and opened his eyes to a field of dancing white stars. He filled his lungs with a wheezing draft of air, then let it back out to breathe greedily again.

  With strength barely restored to his arms, managed to sit up on the edge of what he guessed correctly to be a large stone cistern built on the floor of a massive room.The dwarf hauled himself up dripping onto a wide stone wall, then let himself drop over the other side, still panting for breath.

  He clanged to the floor flat on his armored back and stared up at the ceiling. A pillar nearby held a large metal basket on a rusty metal pole away from the wall at an angle. Inside the metal basket, a ball of red flame crackled and spat, casting off dark red embers. Kalmond struggled to a knee, then labored to stand with trembling knees in what resembled a spawning cathedral. But it was larger and more ornate than any he’d ever seen.

  “Rock!” Kalmond exclaimed. Jolting upright, he darted back over to the well and jumped up to lean over the edge. He shouted into the water for her.

  “Your companion will not rise from the baptismal font,” a deep, silky voice said from somewhere in the chamber.

  Kalmond drew cloudsplitter and whirled, but the voice seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. Now that he knew what to call the pool of water, he circled the font, taking note of the chamber.

  Stone pillars thicker than the Dwarf’s body rose up and curved towards each other towards the high ceiling to form vaults. Four such vaults stood at a diminishing distance facing the font. The voice seemed to come from the reddish shadows that danced around several more baskets of red fire.

  “Show yourself,” Kalmond called out, and the demand echoed back to him from the shadows.

  The voice chuckled like a gurgling mountain stream. “Do not be so eager to look upon
me dwarf, for it may mean your end.”

  “What do you want?” Kalmond said, trying to make his voice sound tough and strong.

  “I want to defeat you in battle, of course,” the voice replied, seeming to shift from pillar to pillar.

  Kalmond kept moving around the font as he activated his detection spell and cast a search pattern around the chamber. The spell showed a large blue glow deep into the chamber to his right. “I just want the ore,” Kalmond said, squaring up on the glow. “Stand aside, and I won’t have to kill you.”

  “You cannot kill,” the voice said, “what is already dead.”

  The skeletal spiven elf stepped out from the pillar and strode forward. Bright red sparks of light stabbed out from the black and withered flesh of its face. It drew a two-handed sword of gleaming spiven steel and held it forward as its footfalls described a deadly straight line towards the dwarf.

  The Elf King towered over Kalmond from twenty feet away. Its sword danced with the same red flames as the baskets.

  “We’ll see about that,” Kalmond said, trying to convince himself more than his opponent.

  He put cloudsplitter away in favor of dual-wield water cannon spell that he immediately cast. Even after committing most of his manna to the spell, the Spiven Elf King merely leaned forward against the blast and kept coming. The ball of water broke across his sword like mild surf against pier pylons. The attack revealed the elf to be a level twenty-five.

  “Shit,” Kalmond said. “I’m in trouble.”

  The spiven King lunged forward. At twice Kalmond’s height, he was slow, allowing the dwarf to dodge left. He brought cloudsplitter out again in his strong hand and put the axe of Boris Ilyich in the other.

  Cloudsplitter scored a critical to the tune of 4100 points damage to the King’s right thigh. Before Kalmond could follow up with the other axe, the King balled up his fist and swung down at the dwarf’s head to make a solid connection. The hit took 3700 points away and stunned Kalmond. He barely recovered enough to jump away from the red flaming sword that scraped its tip against his breastplate, leaving a trail of fire but doing no damage.That was far too close. Kalmond jumped behind one of the massive pillars to take cover.

  “Ha!” boomed the King. “Coward dwarf hides from me!”

  “Smart dwarf takes cover,” Kalmond shouted, then darted to another pillar as the King moved around to get at him.

  “Stand and fight!” The King jumped around in frustration after Kalmond, who made his way random between pillars and archways.

  “Consider yourself lucky!” Kalmond shouted from behind carved stone. “I could have killed you instantly, but I’m giving you a chance to live!” He peeked around his hiding spot just in time to see the King lunge directly at him, thrusting that massive sword at his head.

  “Eeep!” Kalmond yelped in spite of himself and danced aside as the flaming blade knocked fist-sized chunks from the stone.

  He ran clear across the ceremonial space to put some distance between himself and the raging king. He still had no idea how to fight a foe that large. A direct approach would surely get him killed. Then he spotted the baptismal font full of water and thought about his telekinesis spell.

  The King charged Kalmond’s hiding spot. It was getting smarter. It feinted right and grabbed at the dwarf, who dodged left only to find the giant flaming sword heading his way. Kalmond realized his mistake nearly too late. The sword caught him on the left side of the small of his back as he tried to run away.

  The force spun him around backward. He didn’t know how much health it took, but it had to be a lot because his berserker near-death rage kicked in. He had ten seconds, and he used them well. Instead of running for cover as he so desperately wanted to, he drew his two axes and pressed an attack.

  Cloudsplitter scored a stunning critical to the King’s right knee for 8300 points damage. Boris’s trusty axe followed through, slashing at the wounded leg above the knee for another 5900 points. The king screamed and for the first time retreated from the raging dwarf who flailed away with both axes. Kalmond finished with an overhand swipe with cloudsplitter to the King’s calf as the giant elf turned away.

  With that, the berserker rage was over, and Kalmond was back to normal and nearly dead. He was barely able to take cover again before the King recovered from the shock of suddenly facing a real fight. He was just a bit closer to the font. Kalmond wasn’t sure how or even if his plan would work. He was sure though that he needed to get much closer to the font.

  “Fuck it,” Kalmond said, taking what turned out to be his last rejuvenation potion. He followed that with a health potion and two mana potions. Then he ran.

  Time seemed to slow down as Kalmond darted out from his hiding spot. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the King already advancing, sword high over his head and coming down in a perfect line towards him. Kalmond put all his focus into running towards the font. His jaw clenched, and his lips drew back from his teeth, and the speed of his flight split his ginger beard in two and made it trail behind his neck in two flaming streamers.

  Two strides away from the font, he felt the heat on his back as he reached up with both hands and grabbed hold of rock. He vaulted up over the edge of the pool, using his two strong arms to translate his forward momentum into height. He sailed up over the rim of the pool and nearly to the other side before splashing down into the water.

  He sank quickly, and as he did, he raised both hands bringing the telekinesis spell into play. He concentrated hard on all the water around him and closed his eyes. In the very next instant, he rose up with a column of water up and out of the pool. He opened his eyes again to find himself above the font viewing the shocked King through a veil of blue-green.

  Kalmond smiled and focused the last of his magical energy through his arms, directing the entire volume of water at the spiven King. The dwarf braced for impact as the strangest wave hurtled towards the King, who could only raise his flaming sword feebly before him.

  The wall of water broke across the great sword with a furious hiss that turned a good amount of water to steam, leaving Kalmond in a scalding pocket as he slammed into the King’s chest. Down they both went. Kalmond found himself in an awkward embrace with his enemy as they both fell. The dwarf clutched wildly at the dead elf’s tattered armor knowing he had less than seconds to position himself so that he wouldn’t be crushed.

  Kalmond ended up jumping from the King’s shoulder just before crashing down on the now wet floor. The Dwarf scrambled to his feet; both axes held high as the spiven King pushed himself back on his hands and managed to come to a half-seated position. His flaming sword lay beside him sending up tendrils of steam as it cooled.

  “Now you die!” Kalmond screamed wildly as he activated his rage attack and came down for what he hoped were finishing blows.

  Kalmond was completely unprepared for what happened next. The Great Spiven King scrambled away, pushing himself away with his hands. He threw his head back and bellowed with laughter. Kalmond was already committed to the attack, but the shock of the King’s reaction broke his concentration.

  “Stop!” the king chortled. “Oh my! I was not expecting that! Well done, dwarf! So well done!”

  Kalmond stood beside the King’s sword that was nearly his height. He blinked away the salt water that streamed down from his helmet into his eyes. Both axes hung limply at his side and clanged on the floor. “What the fu—” he began.

  “Would you permit me…” the King said, standing and gesturing to his sword.

  Kalmond just stood in stunned silence as the King bent down, careful to keep eye contact with Kalmond. He wrapped a massive hand around the sword and lifted it slowly.

  Kalmond jumped back and growled, lifting his axes again, which just made the King break out again in laughter that made black snot drip from his nose. “Oh, excuse me,” the King said, wiping the goop from his face with the back of his free hand. He sheathed his great sword and said, “I’ve not laughed so hard in centuries,
nor have I faced a more resourceful opponent!”

  “That was…” Kalmond said, shaking his head as the situation slowly dawned on him. “A joke?”

  “Of course!” the King shouted, smiling to reveal shockingly-intact rows of sharp, white teeth. “A joke and also a test.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kalmond said.

  “Then come, my new dwarf friend, and I will show you,” replied the King.

  Kalmond followed as the King turned on his heel and led Kalmond through the great space to a set of massive gold doors encrusted with the biggest, brightest jewels the thief had ever seen. As those great portals swung open, Kalmond stood to stare as a little runnel of slobber issued from from the corner of his mouth.

  “Ah,” said the King. “My humor goes only so far, esteemed thief. My jewels will stay just where they are.”

  Kalmond snapped-to blinking rapidly. “You can’t blame a thief for dreaming, can you, your majesty?”

  The King sighed and chuckled, then turned away. Kalmond’s followed, only to be stunned once again. The King took a few paces forward, then lifted his arms and swept them around as he turned in circles. “Behold,” he said. “Naefinas, the great Spiven City!”

  The chamber was large enough to have its own atmosphere. Only by craning his neck and staring straight up could Kalmond see pale stone stalactites far above among fluffy white clouds. They stood on a broad avenue paved in solid gold that ran in a straight line to a vanishing point with buildings carved from gleaming white stone on either side.

  “This is…” Kalmond said. “Amazing.”

  “The dwarf has a gift for understatement,” the King replied.

  Kalmond received a jolt when he suddenly remembered Rock. “Where is my dillo friend?” the dwarf asked.

  “She is quite safe back in her home.”

  “Why have you brought me here?” Kalmond asked, getting back down to business.