Contents
Title
Copyright
By Blaise Corvin
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Book End
Author's Note
SOO Introduction
SOO1 Chapter 1
SOO1 Chapter 2
SOO1 Chapter 3
Goodbye
Delvers LLC: Adventure Capital
Delvers LLC Book Three
By Blaise Corvin
Delvers LLC: Adventure Capital
Copyright ©2017 by Blaise Corvin
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Also by Blaise Corvin
Delvers LLC
Welcome to Ludus
Obligations Incurred
Adventure Capital
Secret of the Old Ones
Luck Stat Strategy
Dedication
My dedication for this book is fairly simple.
I would like to thank my Patreon supporters. They are all unfailingly supportive, and this book would not have been as good without their input.
Patreon serves as both a motivation and a muse for me. My Patreon page is where my hard-core readers can check out my new content as I produce it (before it’s published), and see all the art I commission, too.
The community there is very special to me.
-BC
Foreword
Hello readers! This book is the third of a series that I would classify as light LitRPG (Portal) Fantasy adventure. LitRPG is a subgenre of GameLit, a new genre of literature that includes game mechanics.
You might be curious what LitRPG is. The acronym literally means Literary (or Literature) RPG (Role Playing Game). These types of stories have been extremely popular in Russia and other countries. They’re just now making an impact in the West!
LitRPG is usually a funky mix of Fantasy and Sci Fi. The types of stories can vary, but what most LitRPG novels have in common is some clear method of progression (like leveling up) as well as a setting that most gamers can immediately relate to.
I really had a lot of fun writing this book. If you’d like to visit my web serial website, the URL is http://blaise-corvin.com/
I also have a writer’s note in the back of the book with a whole mess of links as well as a few reading suggestions. If you’re on Facebook and would like to join a LitRPG group, the best one to join is LitRPG Society (run by yours truly). :)
If you want to connect with me, I have multiple links to connect with me at the end of this book. You can always just search for my name on Facebook, too.
I hope you enjoy your time on Ludus again with Henry and Jason!
Empty Streets
Henry drifted, floating on a sea of nothingness.
Blackness. An absence of light. An absence of thought. Colored lights swirled around, making music, talking to him. It was peaceful but deep. The deepness was terrifying. He didn't want to fall, but he didn't know which was up. Nothing was clear, he didn’t know who he was at first, but the lights continued to speak to him. Then everything changed.
Henry found himself walking down the streets of Seattle. His thoughts moved slowly; his surroundings seemed to be covered in a gray haze. People moved around in slow motion, none of them noticing as he passed among them like a ghost.
He aimlessly wandered for a while, realizing he was in Chinatown, the International District. Henry shrugged, not caring where his steps carried him. He noticed wisps, dark tendrils trailing his body as he moved, but he didn’t care about that either.
After he hit 4th Avenue, Henry continued towards the water, picking streets to follow at random. The world was quiet, eerily silent until he heard an intensely whispered, “Henry!” He turned.
Tony moved towards him, looking confused. He wore a frown and seemed strangely out of place. The kid didn’t have any black stuff coming off him. Henry was curious about that for half a second until he dismissed it. It wasn’t important. Nothing was important.
“Henry, is that your name?” the kid asked, his voice halting. Henry wondered why he was upset. What was there to be upset about? What had he been thinking about? He didn’t remember.
After another few steps, Tony began following him, and Henry quickly forgot he was there. The other people he saw didn’t look real, but he was fascinated all the same. He could tell they had lives and loved ones. They were connected to the world around them. Henry didn’t feel connected to anything. He walked past an alley, and a homeless person who otherwise saw everything looked right through him.
He’d wound his way through the city streets, heading to no place in particular. Tony followed behind him, muttering to himself. After a while, the boy took hold of Henry’s sleeve. He was wearing cargo shorts and a graphic T-shirt. Henry thought that was strange for a moment, but the thought passed through his mind like a hummingbird with places to be. It wasn’t important.
Before too long, Henry found himself by the water. He hadn’t been trying to get to the waterfront, but he liked it there. The wisps coming off his back were getting longer. They never touched Aodh, Tony, but they writhed around, brushing pretty much everything else, like hungry tentacles.
On the nameless Seattle dock, Henry eyed the ocean. He saw his reflection and took a step back. The man in the water was tired and wounded, wearing strange, metal armor, and bleeding from his eyes. Henry rubbed his goatee and tried thinking. It was very difficult to form thoughts - they kept escaping like bubbles rising from a swamp.
Eventually, he shrugged. The man in the water was scary, but there was something interesting about him. He took a couple of steps forward and fell into the ocean. The teen holding his shirt followed him, muttering all the way.
***
A swirl of images bombarded him. It was hard to make sense of any of it. Most of the time, he didn’t particularly care, but he felt odd spikes of emotion that made it hard just to exist. Panic, fear, anxiety, he felt flashes of terror as if he was experiencing them for another person. It was quite curious.
He caught a brief memory of someone thanking him. His mother? The thought held weight to it, grounding his flitting mind for a moment. He looked around and saw stars, or at least pinpricks of light that moved. Henry strangely felt outside of time, not anchored in a way he’d never realized he had been before.
The past. Time. The concepts held no power in this place.
Suddenly, the stars swirled, and the sky collapsed. There was a rush of sound, both pleasant and unpleasant, all compressed into an instant. When the light came back, Henry found himself standing in a field near a copse of t
rees, crude drawings carved into the bark. Aodh was on the ground, snoring softly.
Henry noticed a couple of people in the distance walking towards him and waited for them to arrive. As the moments passed, he felt his emotions and his sense of self returning. However, the black streamers from his back he’d seen before were still there.
Henry blinked. What the fuck is going on?
He glanced up again; his mind was returning and actually really looked at the top approaching people. He blinked again.
One was his orb, or at least as it appeared to him. A tall white man in slacks, a shirt, tie, and sporting a dapper sweater. The other person was short and female. Actually, aggressively female. Her curves weren’t that amazing, but the way she walked was like femininity incarnate. She had dragonfly wings and wore...a chainmail bikini.
The winged woman had a bluish tint to her skin, and a couple of small horns protruded from the rear of her jaw. Her hair seemed almost partially made of feathers, and streamed behind her in a deep blue wave. He legs hinged like a regular woman, but she stepped with an airy grace that even Areva women didn’t match.
Henry thought she was painfully hot, and he watched her approach as his thoughts continued to gel together. Eventually, he glanced from the woman and the man approaching, down to the sleeping teen on the ground, and back up. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Henry sighed. “He’s the one who gets a sexy orb to talk to?”
He frowned and crossed his arms, waiting for the pair to arrive. After a while, Henry realized he’d been waiting longer than he should have been. His orb’s manifestations almost seemed to be walking on a treadmill going the other direction. He squinted and realized the approaching pair were actually moving away from him.
The sky seemed to dim the further away they got, and the black streamers coming off his back whipped around faster. Henry took that as a bad sign. He thought briefly about touching one, but had a feeling that would be a Bad Idea, in capital letters.
Henry briefly wondered if he should go and meet them, but then felt that would also be a Bad Idea. Something inside him made it clear he needed to stay by Tony. He thought about how annoying the whole situation was, and how he wished the two would hurry up and get to him.
Suddenly, the day brightened a bit and it seemed his orb and the chainmail bikini hottie were closer. Now that’s odd, he thought. Henry watched them closely as they slowly started drifting back again and narrowed his eyes.
“This is bullshit. Get over here!” he shouted, willing it to be so. The two sped towards him like they were walking on a motorized walkway at an airport. It seemed only another few seconds passed until they were standing before him.
The woman snapped her fingers and Aodh woke up. The kid immediately stood and looked around. “Where are we? Wait, I recognize this place.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Henry flatly. “Where the hell are we?”
“Well, that is a bit of a delicate subject, neighbor,” said Henry’s orb.
“Listen, motherfucker. I told you not to call me that.”
“But it calms you, and you need to be calm. It’s completely alright; this is a wonderful day. Do you like this area? I certainly do.” As the orb’s manifestation spoke, the petite, winged vixen began to fret over Aodh.
Henry gritted his teeth before asking calmly, “I have no idea what is going on. My memory seems not to be working right either. Where are we, and what is all this?” He gestured at the black trailing from his back, idly waving like paper fluttering in a breeze.
“Oh, that’s what you want to know?” asked the blue-haired woman. She turned and asked the tall orb, “Should we tell him?”
“Yes, I believe we should,” the man in the sweater replied. “Henry, this is very difficult to tell you, but I’m glad we’re friends and we’re together.”
Henry rolled his eyes. “Out with it.”
The man in the tie sighed. “Well, neighbor, we’re dead, but you especially.”
“Well, sorta,” amended the winged woman.
Henry turned to regard Tony and the kid was looking right back at him with wild eyes. The teen spoke for both of them when he asked, “What in the hell is going on?”
Deadlights
The winged woman pursed her lips and placed her hands on her hips. The motion did interesting things to her chainmail covered...assets. Henry felt like his thoughts were still kind of slow. How in the world was he being distracted by tits while existing in such a weird situation? Seriously, what was happening? His thoughts actually even felt a little different than usual. “Where are we?” he asked.
Henry’s orb answered, “This is a memory of Aodh’s, and part of his mind space. Orb controllers like myself generally don’t work together like this, but the situation is...highly irregular.” The tall man seemed apologetic.
“You know this place?” Henry asked Tony.
Aodh thought for a moment; his expression was one of confusion. “Actually, yeah. I used to come here when I was a kid to play adventurer, usually when I was hiding from Vitaliya. Who are these people?” The young man pointed at the two strangers.
Henry sighed. “The tall man is how my orb appears when it needs to talk to me. I’m assuming the woman is your orb.”
"Just so!” replied the woman. “I cannot interact as well as this one,” she said gesturing at the other orb. “Most of my resources are focused on my process.”
“Wait, you’re my orb? Why do you look like…” Aodh frowned before pointing. “You’re Gellab Gettafs Smith, the legendary adventurer! Wait, you look exactly how I imagined you when I read all those old books!”
“Call me Gelly, sweetie.” The woman smiled.
“Well, that explains the bullshit armor. Puberty imagination,” muttered Henry.
“What?” The young man turned to the beautiful winged woman again and asked, “What is going on? Can you help us out, madam? It’s an honor to meet a famous Adom adventurer like you.”
“You’re talking to your imagination, kid,” growled Henry. “These things are just our orbs, but I bet we can get some answers out of them. But before we figure out what the fuck is going on or what the fuck this is,” he snapped, pointing at the black streamers coming off his back, “let’s ask something simple. You, Tony’s orb, what the hell does the kid’s orb actually do?”
The female orb, Gelly, replied, “Oh, so short tempered!” She turned to the other orb, “How is he still alive? With that personality, he should definitely be dead by now.” The tall, male orb shrugged and the scantily clad woman frowned at Henry. “I’m a theoretical probability orb, one of the rarest orbs ever created. I am the latest version.”
“What does that mean?” asked Aodh. “I’ve tried everything, but I can’t do any magic or anything else.”
“My function is actually quite complex,” said the blue-skinned woman. “I take the safety and wishes of my host into account, and based on the strength of his feelings, I allocate power towards nudging possibilities or mutable events. I make an advantageous outcome more probable.”
“Wait, wha—” began Aodh.
Henry held a hand up. “She’s a fucking luck orb,” he said. “That makes no sense, though! Tony hasn’t been lucky! I mean, he’s here with me, whatever this is. I sort of remember some danger. The memories are slowly coming back but they’re still fuzzy.”
“Ah, that is not true, Aodh is not unlucky,” the woman answered. “He found a high-quality bronze dagger lying in the dirt when he was wishing for an attractive weapon like everyone else had.” Aodh blushed. The woman continued, “He has managed to keep distance from his cousin, and he also managed to avoid three near-certain brushes with death during your battle before arriving here.”
“Wait, I would have died without your help?” asked Aodh, his voice breaking.
“Undoubtedly. Through my assistance, you are already incredibly powerful, even at your low rank.” The woman smiled. “I was happy to help.”
“Okay, that’s
all well and good but—” Henry’s words were cut off suddenly when the entire world transitioned to night. His vision and thought processes felt scrambled as the darkness surrounding him got deeper.
For a time, he just existed. None of his senses worked. His thoughts moved differently too. The Asian man’s mind felt like it was pushed up against a rough wall. There was pressure forcing him forward, but he had nowhere to go. It hurt, but the pain wasn’t physical. Even if his mind had been working correctly, he would have been hard-pressed to describe the feeling.
The core of the sensation was losing himself. He felt like he was dying. Actually, worse than dying. It felt like something deep inside of him, his very being, was being worn away. It felt like he was losing his soul.
Henry’s mind moved glacially slow, but he focused every bit of his will on a single thought: Fuck this.
The stubborn man pushed forward, pounding against the obstacle before him. It hurt, it hurt terribly. It felt like the very fabric of his existence was being ripped to shreds, and he was desperately trying to find a gap to escape. He didn’t stop, didn’t give in.
Eventually, he found something. Something different. He felt a small breach in the barrier holding him back. A weakness. Henry pushed with everything he had, all his memories, his personality, his thoughts, and desires. He pushed with every bit of himself that he could, and without warning, the overwhelming darkness around him shattered, motes of light exploding outwards, disappearing into the distance.
He was floating in space, the dark place he had been before he transitioned to Tony’s old memory. Pinpricks of light slowly moved in random patterns. Flashes of memories came and went. An enormous pressure settled on Henry’s spirit, but with the same dogged determination he had grasped onto before, he pushed back.
He kept pushing until the pressure abated, and he suddenly felt a deep sense of peace that tickled parts of his mind. Parts of himself that he’d never even felt before. He tried to close his eyes, but realized he couldn’t. He wasn’t seeing with his eyes. The thought was bizarre, but the feeling of the strange place made the fact unimportant.
Delvers LLC: Adventure Capital Page 1
