by S. R. Witt
DRAGON WEB ONLINE: DOMINION
A LITRPG ADVENTURE
S R WITT
CONTENTS
What Came Before
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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
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Rise Up!
Don’t leave without your story!
About the Author
Other Books By S R Witt
Parting Shot
What Came Before
Corrections from Book 1
Awesome Books from Awesome Authors
Harmon Cooper’s The Feedback Loop
Spencer Pierson’s Glimmer of Destiny
WHAT CAME BEFORE
Dragon Web Online: Dominion follows hot on the heels of the first book in this series, Inception. If you need a quick refresher on what happened in that book, check out What Came Before, at the end of this book for a summary!
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CHAPTER ONE
The merchant’s home looked like it had dropped out of a Disney fairytale. It was a quaint cottage, complete with a smoking chimney and an even white blanket of pristine snow covering its roof. The shuttered windows leaked a warm and welcoming light onto snowdrifts surrounding the home, which would’ve been great if Bastion and I were here to pay a social call.
But, because we’d come to rob the rich bastard, that golden glow pissed me off. It not only reminded me of just how cold it was out here on the windswept hilltop we’d picked for our stakeout location but showed me my target was still up and about. Probably stuffing his fat virtual belly with virtually smoked virtual ham and slaking his virtual thirst with flagons of virtual mead while I froze my virtual ass off in the virtual cold.
Why couldn’t he just go to sleep and let me get on with my job?
And it was a job. The Prove Your Loyalty quest nagged me every morning when I logged into Dragon Web Online. “What have you done to prove your loyalty to the Society of Shadows today?”
The message first popped up three days after I’d robbed Frosthold’s pawn shop and killed my first, and only, in-Game friend. The message stayed plastered to the lower right-hand corner of my vision, blinking red, until I’d visited the Grandfather and paid the Society of Shadows ten percent of my take from that robbery. That earned me a day’s reprieve and a very narrow sliver of green in the quest’s progress bar.
Apparently, proving my loyalty was going to be an extensive and arduous affair.
Great.
Two days later, the red prompt had re-appeared, and it brought a fancy exclamation point prompt along with it. Checking the quest log revealed an update to my area map and the following task.
PROVE YOUR LOYALTY, CONTINUED
The Society of Shadows has uncovered a merchant who is selling information about our operations to the Church of Hoald.
Travel to the merchant’s home, rob him blind, and leave this sealed envelope on his pillow.
He’ll get the message.
WARNING: The merchant must not be harmed while you’re engaged in this quest. You’re there to send a message, not start a massacre.
REWARD: 1,000 XP, 50 silver pieces
DIFFICULTY: Novice
And that’s how Bastion and I ended up on the top of a hill, waiting for a merchant to doze off so we could take his stuff and scare him into line.
We crouched in the cold and watched the house, praying for the lights to go out. We’d been up there for most of an hour, and we were both getting irritable and impatient.
Bastion shifted next to me, and I was glad we were far from the merchant’s home. My brother wore enough armor to protect a battleship, which meant every time he moved it sounded like someone throwing the silverware drawer onto a marble floor. He caught my annoyed glance and gave me an exaggerated, extra noisy shrug in return. “Not all of us can hide when the shit hits the fan. I need my armor for when things get messy.”
“Things won’t get messy. This is a burglary, not a home invasion. Try and be quiet. We don’t want to attract the guards.”
Not that I thought there was much chance of that. Frosthold was growing quickly, and construction had become a haphazard affair. There wasn’t room inside the city walls for any more homes, which meant the new merchants arriving every day were forced to claim real estate outside the territory patrolled by Frosthold’s guards.
Bad luck for my target, good luck for me. Until the city could expand its walls, and its protection, to encompass these new homes, they were ripe for the picking.
“How’d you find out about this place?” Bastion asked for the third time that evening. “It’s not like you get out and do much exploring.”
Bastion didn’t know where I’d gotten this information or what we were really there to accomplish. I did my best to keep the Shadows separated from my brother. Bastion was eager to become a knight-in-shining-armor paladin, and I didn’t think he’d approve of my slumming with a gang of thieves and ruffians.
I kept the story simple. It’s the complicated lies that trip you up. “Heard about this place from some guards I was tailing.”
My brother thought about that for a second. “Why were you tailing guards?”
Ever since I’d become a thief, Bastion hadn’t let up with the questions. He was grudgingly pleased I’d earned enough money to take care of our real-world rent and other expenses for the month with my first r
obbery. But not knowing how I’d earned all that cash drove him nuts.
The Grandfather of Shadows, my boss and sometimes mentor, had never forbidden me from discussing the organization of thieves with anyone else, but they wouldn’t have their headquarters hidden underground if they wanted their existence to be public knowledge.
There was also the little matter of the Thieves’ Bounty to worry about. My brother probably wouldn’t turn me in to Frosthold’s guard, but if he thought he could turn over a bunch of NPC thieves and collect a fat stack of gold coins in return?
He was my brother, but I didn’t have any illusions about how fast Bastion would turn on my allies if it would earn him a quick buck.
It was safer, by far, to keep my secrets and lie to my brother. And it was getting easier all the time.
“Practice. I like to trail the guards to build up my sneaking skills and learn their routines. Stuff like that is useful for thieves.”
Fortunately, the light in the windows went out before Bastion could pepper me with any further questions. He nudged me with his elbow and pointed at the dark windows on the side of the house facing us. “Looks like our guy went to sleep.”
I held up a hand to keep him from rushing down the hill and kicking in the front door. “Give it a bit. We want him to have time to actually go to sleep before we start rifling through his house.”
Bastion nodded. “Good point. No sense attracting any unnecessary attention.”
Though Bastion was just a fighter, his ambition was far grander. He wanted to become a paladin. That meant keeping his nose clean, more or less. He seemed fine with robbing the place, but killing random folks was a step too far. At least, that seemed to be how my brother’s code of ethics worked. Maybe he knew something I didn’t, but it seemed pretty hypocritical. Then again, my only exposure to a priest in the lands of Invernoth ended with my being blackmailed. Maybe they were more into the letter of the law than the spirit.
Whatever. I’d figure out my brother’s quibbles with random violence later.
It was time to move.
Bastion followed me down the hill, doing his best imitation of a low-speed car accident. Every clank and clang made my jaw clench. A tension headache had taken root behind my eyes by the time we reached the bottom of the hill.
SUCCESS! You have increased your mastery of the Spot skill. (Rank 2)
Paler shadows emerged from the deep darkness among the trees beyond the merchant’s home. They scrambled through the snow-covered forest, red eyes too low to the ground to be humans and too high to be animals. There were at least ten of them, though it was hard to get an accurate count through the underbrush.
My fingers found Bastion’s shoulder and pulled him back to put the house between the creatures and us. “We’ve got a problem. There are monsters moving toward the house.”
Bastion snorted. “Let’s kill them. Maybe we can get a reward instead of robbing this place.”
Pinching my fingers to the bridge of my nose didn’t push my headache back. When I found the programmer who thought we needed that much realism in-Game, he was getting a punch in the snout. “Stop. Think about it. We’re still in the newbie zone. The only monsters we should run into out here are rabbits and a few overgrown rats. Something’s wrong.”
“Then we should check it out. Maybe it’s a special event.” Bastion rubbed his chin, and his hand strayed to the hilt of his sword. “There could be unique loot.”
That was the Bastion I was used to. Cocky and so full of himself he couldn’t see the danger staring him right in the eye. “What if we die?”
Death in most games wasn’t a big deal. You’d go down, have to sit out the excitement for a few minutes, and then you’d respawn somewhere safe and sound.
But Bastion and I were playing Dragon Web Online for money. We converted our loot to cold, hard cash, which we used to pay for our mother’s medical bills and keep our shitty apartment’s lights on. We’d paid a hefty fee up front to start together, but if we died before we got to level 5, we’d lose our characters and end up being assigned to random new hometowns. All we’d done so far, all the work we’d put in, would be gone. We’d have to start all over, and we wouldn’t have each other to rely on.
I wasn’t ready for that.
But Bastion was never one for caution. “We have to take some risks. If we want to build a reputation in Frosthold, we need to do something people will notice.”
My tongue was in motion before my brain could stop it. “You mean you need to earn your hero stripes if the church is ever going to make you a paladin?”
His armor-plated finger jabbed me in the sternum hard enough to leave a bruise. Leather armor just wasn’t much protection in Invernoth. “Why does that bother you so much? I didn’t make you change characters when you ended up as a thief, did I? Even though you were supposed to be a damned cleric.”
I’d gone and kicked his sore spot. It didn’t bother Bastion that I was a thief, it bothered him that I hadn’t followed his plan to the letter. Reminding him of my inadvertent rebellion didn’t help matters. “That’s not what I’m saying. But there are a lot of monsters—”
Bastion hefted his sword. “And I’m going to go over there and kill them. You can hide over here like a baby if you want.”
He marched toward certain doom, sword at the ready.
More than anything, I wanted to hightail it back to town and get help. The monsters weren’t supposed to be here. My gut insisted something bad was about to happen.
And my brother and I were going to be right in the middle of it.
CHAPTER TWO
Blue fire dripped from Bastion’s longsword as he stomped through the snowdrifts on the east side of the house. Writhing shadows flickered away from the weapon’s uncertain light to dance across the snow.
“Come and get it,” he shouted at the monsters.
“So much for being quiet,” I groused. I clambered up the side of the merchant’s home to get a better vantage point for the battle to come. The brick walls offered so many footholds it wasn’t a challenge to climb, even for a newb like me.
From the roof, I got a better look at our enemies and wished I hadn’t. They stood three feet tall with gangly arms that hung down to the snow and crooked legs that bowed out at the knees. Their eyes glowed a demonic red, and their weapons glistened like oiled coal under the starlight. What the hell were they?
After staring at the approaching creatures for a few seconds, I was rewarded with a system message.
SUCCESS! You have learned the rudiments of the Lore: Nightspawn skill. (Rank 1)
Name tags and health bars as red as their eyes appeared over the creatures’ heads.
Goblins. And more of them than I’d first thought. Fifteen. Maybe twenty of the deformed humanoids poured out of the trees and raced toward Bastion with weapons waving in the air.
A frontal assault on that many foes was suicidal, but Bastion’s overconfidence carried him straight into the fray. If he had any chance of survival, it was his brute stubbornness to live and my bow.
Given that I had no ranks in archery, I hoped my brother was feeling very stubborn that day.
My shortbow was all that remained of my dead friend, Lyra. She’d taught me how to craft my own arrows and what little I knew of archery. She’d paid the price for that virtual kindness with her life.
During our time together, she’d learned I was a thief. Rather than risk her going to the authorities to claim the Bounty and end my run in DWO, I’d killed Lyra.
