Wounded Legion: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 2)

by Xavier P. Hunter

  He could see the looks exchanged among his platoon mates. There was avarice in those eyes. They wanted to see whether everyone else was thinking the same thing: could they pull it off? It was one thing living mission to mission, taking picks off the public boards, and doing mercenary work. They’d even gone completely freelance and designed their own raids a few times. This could give them a steady income source if someone was willing to do the work to manage it all.

  “You willing to step up and handle all that?” June asked. “I mean, this is a game, after all. Running a whole faction is a lot like work.”

  “That’s been my problem,” Reggie said, looking over to Chase, who’d been the one to point it out to him. “I don’t have a job to go back to in the real world. Frank’s done his time. He’s earned a retirement. But I’m too young to be lying in a hospital bed, comatose and playing a video game. Or if I am, at least I ought to put in the effort to maximize the time I spend here. Chase is right. I was decorating our little parcel of the galaxy when there is still a ton of unclaimed space out there.”

  Lin raised a hand and waggled it for attention. “Um. Hello? Quarter million credits just for the license. We could each buy a backup juggernaut for that.”

  “And do what with them?” Chase asked. “Run without insurance for the adrenaline rush? Slum around the easy missions? Our rides are each worth over a quarter mil by now. Easy. We can still trick them out on the side, keep specialty backups for scouting or defensive missions, shit like that, but we don’t have a lot more to spend on our main juggernauts.”

  “Tune. Tweak. Try,” Frank said. “I don’t mind puttering in the garage. The crafting isn’t half so boring as the kiddies make it out to be. Spoiled buggers probably never had to work on a carbureted engine on the side of a dusty road halfway from LA to Vegas. Puts a different perspective on tedium. Had to hitchhike a hundred miles just to pick up a piston ring and hitch a hundred back to install it. Took me a day and a half, on account of the—”

  “Are you in or out?” Lin demanded. “Because if we’re not all in this, I’m not in it either.”

  June turned to Lin with her head tilted. “Wait. You sounded like you didn’t want to form a faction.”

  Lin flopped her head back onto the arm of the couch. “Ugh. I don’t want to run a faction, be an officer in a faction, or especially not be a recruiter for a faction. But I’ll chip in if it means Reggie does all the work.”

  “Wait,” Reggie said. “I didn’t say I had to be the leader. I’m all for making this process democratic.”

  “And no one else wants the job,” Lin replied.

  Chase shrugged. “I’d love to, honestly, but with Silent Shuriken eating up my daylight hours, I’ll only be logged in at night. Reggie can work his ass off at this in ways I only wish I could.”

  “Join the army and get yourself shot all to hell,” Frank suggested gruffly.

  Reggie noticed that in the background, round 9 of the boxing match was well underway, but Frank hadn’t bailed on them.

  “Let’s make this official,” June said. “Everyone who’s willing to chip in 50,000 credits and put Reggie in charge, say ‘aye.’”

  “Aye,” the four of them said in unison.

  Reggie was touched. He felt a warm flutter in his heart. It reminded him of a desolate birthday out in the desert, when his tank crew had kept a bottle of scotch hidden for him as a surprise. Sitting there, watching a desert sunset from the engine deck of his Abrams, drinking with his three closest friends had been one of his best memories.

  “Aye,” Reggie echoed quietly.

  “Any idea what we should name ourselves?” June asked.

  Reggie nodded. He’d thought it up the instant Chase had suggested the faction idea. “Yeah. The Wounded Legion.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Reggie felt the eyes of his new followers fixed on him as his finger hovered in front of a UI button hanging in midair labeled “Create Faction.” There was a price tag of 250,000 credits, and the other four founding members had already transferred 50,000 each.

  “Just get on with it,” Frank griped, stealing the moment and reminding Reggie that this wasn’t a mortgage or enlistment paperwork.

  “I’ll reimburse you guys once we get our income straightened out,” Reggie promised.

  “Just do it,” Lin said. “I want to start designing us a logo, and I can’t access the faction interface until you press that damn button.”

  Reggie tapped the point in space. Due to Armored Souls being its own entity with its own laws of physics, he felt a cold, smooth surface when his finger touched. Then, the button vanished.

  [Faction Created - Wounded Legion]

  [Faction Leader Updated - King]

  Reggie’s clothes changed to a generic military uniform, like a tin can dictator stripped of all his unearned medals. Everything was charcoal gray except for black boots, a black belt, and a pair of yellow-stitched epaulets that wouldn’t pass for gold even squinting.

  “Hey, I thought we were going to be The Wounded Legion,” Frank said. “Doesn’t roll off the tongue without the the.”

  “Game doesn’t like leading articles,” Chase said. “It makes alphabetizing easier, and you don’t get multiple factions like Wounded Legion, The Wounded Legion, A Wounded Legion.”

  Reggie opened the main faction menu and invited his four platoon mates. Each of them accepted immediately, tapping the air at buttons only they could see.

  [Faction Member Joined - Chase]

  [Faction Member Joined - Doughboy]

  [Faction Member Joined - June]

  [Faction Member Joined - Dragonlady]

  Reggie took a deep breath and surveyed his new team. “Welcome aboard.”

  “We definitely need uniforms or something,” Lin said, studying her gray outfit.

  “We all look like airmen,” Frank grumbled. “Not even pilots, just run-of-the-mill wheel chock jockeys.”

  Reggie smirked. “We can get new unis but don’t badmouth the Air Force around me. I’m a fan of close air support.”

  Frank snorted. “Back in my day, that meant ducking and hoping the bastards could aim the napalm.”

  “You are so fucking old,” Chase said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Forget the outfits,” June said, taking custody of the television remote and switching to a tactical map instead of the entertainment options. “The galaxy is ours for the taking.”

  “Aside from the other twelve hundred factions out there, you mean,” Chase said offhandedly.

  “By plan or by accident, Reggie bought this rough little rock on the edge of nowhere,” June said. “We’re out among the dregs of independent colonies and outlaw hideouts. The big factions are all clustered around the galactic core, slugging it out over planets with megacorp headquarters and populations in the billions. This far out, most of it’s unowned. The smaller factions haven’t come close to mopping it all up yet.”

  The Wounded Legion headquarters popped up on the map with the press of a button. Reggie hardly considered their location except for calculating travel times to their various mission. But they sure were half past nowhere.

  “So, big guy,” Chase said, clapping Reggie on the back. “Where’s our first conquest?”

  Reggie stared at the map. It was all so overwhelming. Armored Souls’ galaxy contained half a million star systems. Their base was a tiny blip, a single point in a vast universe no matter how far he zoomed in. June left him with the remote and some time to consider the limitless options.

  “So… any suggestions on where we should start?” he asked after half an hour of zooming and scrolling.

  Chase was only too happy to oblige. “First thing a new faction needs is resources. Credits are great, but long term, we’re going to want to produce at least some of our own supplies. Last thing you want is to get on the bad side of someone who’s a major supplier of shit you need. Lot of the big boys run a single juggernaut manufacturer for all their pilots. Take Omnus for insta
nce. Their pilots all drive Gottpanzer chassis because they control the Gottpanzer headquarters. No one can cut them off from replacement components or new juggernauts.”

  Reggie scratched the back of his neck. “So, we should look for a juggernaut supplier? Like a small one or something?”

  Chase cuffed him upside the head. “And rain half the factions down on us? First off, we’d get fragged the instant our drop ship touched down. Second, we’d never hold it. No, we want to start small. Take something like a mining colony, and get some ore to sell. Make ourselves members of the community by being a resource extractor.”

  Frank grunted. “Knew a guy once. Coal miner out of Battleship, West Virginia. Name like that and he ended up wearing out boots on the front lines. Anyway, fella had lungs like a leather bellows. Said if you didn’t, you couldn’t breathe the air near the mines. He’d walk right behind diesel trucks, exhaust right in his face; never seemed to bother him. Why I remember a time—”

  “How far is the nearest mining outpost?” Reggie asked before Frank reminisced them all the way back to the Civil War.

  Lin took custody of the remote and ran a quick search. A short listing of planets came up, sorted by proximity. Each had mineral deposits and infrastructure in place to process them. None was more than a ten-minute ride in a drop ship.

  [Cooley IV - Hematite 12,000T/Day]

  [Krale - Magnetite 8,000T/Day - Sphalterite 6,000T/Day]

  [Obion III - Tetrahedrite 32,000T/Day]

  [Schet IX - Gold 0.5T/Day - Cassiterite 3,000T/Day]

  [Ajebanni VI - Aluminum 35,000T/Day]

  “Just based on outputs, I’d vote for Schet,” Chase said after a brief perusal. “It’s low volume, but gold is worth a ton more than those other minerals. Though tetrahedrite breaks down into copper, which is used in a lot of low-voltage conductors.”

  “What’s cassiterite?” Frank asked with a suspicious squint.

  “Tin ore,” Chase informed them. Reggie was just as glad it had been Frank to ask since he was no geologist either. “Not worth a hell of a lot, but it’s something. The gold’s not used as currency anywhere in this game—not like Silent Shuriken—but it’s more valuable in microelectronics and advanced medicine.”

  Lin blew a rude noise. “Who cares about medicine? We die; we respawn.”

  “Civilians,” Chase said. “It’s an economic thing. Doesn’t matter to us player characters, but the NPCs need it.”

  “So… Schet?” Reggie asked around, looking from one Wounded Legionnaire to the next.

  There were no objections.

  “All right. Let’s scrounge up intel on Schet IX and plan a raid.”

  Chase cleared his throat. “One last detail.”

  “What?” Lin asked, exasperated.

  “We need manpower. Just the preliminary defensive rating tells me we’re as likely to wipe taking this place out as we are capturing it.”

  Reggie scowled. It was happening already. “We need more men.”

  “Or women,” June added.

  “I can advertise on tomorrow’s stream,” Lin said. “I’m playing Jog Fit. Should be getting plenty of eyeballs.”

  A hollow pit settled in where a non-digital version of Reggie would have had a stomach. Floodgates were opening, and he had to be ready to stand against the current as new recruits poured in.

  Frank was apparently thinking along those same lines. “Not sure I like the sound of that. Bringing in fellas on account of they wanted to watch some jiggly young thing bounce around on camera? There’s a reason they don’t park army recruiters outside the girly bars. Low character. Even if you catch a few good ones in the mix, it’s a bad bet.”

  “I’ll post to the general recruitment forums,” June said. “We’ll see which yields better candidates.”

  Reggie nodded, trying to maintain an air of command even as he felt out of control already.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Reggie walked the line of new recruits who’d responded to June and Lin’s calls to action. Boot camp seemed like a million years ago when he’d been on the other side of the grim, angry gentleman assigned to turn raw civilians into soldiers.

  These, at least, were already pilots in Armored Souls. They stood at something akin to attention without complaint. For the time being, they played along with Reggie’s pageantry.

  “Welcome to Wounded Legion,” Reggie said, projecting his voice as if he were addressing a hundred troops and not five. “Our mandate is simple: we are set to expand our influence, ensure the safety and security of our territory, and prosper both individually and as a faction. Working together, we will out-plan, out-prepare, and out-fight enemies that may appear stronger than us. We will defeat them by being the best-prepared faction in Armored Souls. Now, let’s get to know you a little.”

  First in line was “Nordbrook, Gunner 5.” He was the owner and operator of a Vulture medium juggernaut and was fresh out of a starter faction. “Hey. I’m Tim. Been playing a couple weeks. Before Armored Souls I mostly played war sims. Back in meatspace, I’ve got two kids and a wife who’s sleeping next to me playing Tango Dash.”

  Reggie gave a curt nod, accepting the introduction. “Nice to have you along. You prefer Tim or Nordbrook?”

  “Either one’s fine,” Tim replied.

  Next was “Harper, Scout 9.” He straightened up as Reggie stopped in front of him. “Tommy Harper. Played Armored Souls since beta, but my ex had me off with her playing Adventureland: Jungle Explorer every night for three months solid. Soon as we broke up, I came back, did a little merc work. Been waiting for the right faction to come along.”

  Reggie looked over at Chase, who shrugged apologetically. Last thing he needed was to lose Chase to Silent Shuriken the way Harper had gone off after his girlfriend into a campy jungle explorer game.

  The young woman who stood beside Harper was short, with straight black hair and a jutting jaw that blared defiance. Her name badge read “Hime, Pilot 8.” She didn’t wait for Reggie to stop. “I’m Hime. Don’t see why I should tell any real-world info. Has no bearing on the game. If that’s a problem, then—”

  “It’s not,” Reggie assured her. Already, though, the suspicious, confrontational attitude grated on him. If he’d been a drill sergeant, he’d never have put up with it. But this wasn’t a real army, and he couldn’t afford to ruffle feathers on day one.

  “Then fine. I left Purple Moose because of a leadership shakeup and inappropriate behavior by one of the officers. I catch a whiff of that around here, I’m out, and I’m filing a complaint with the admins.”

  “You have any trouble here, you tell me,” Reggie said. “I’ll handle anything that comes up. Chase can be a little raw, but he’s only got hands for Lin.”

  “Hey,” Chase and Lin protested in unison.

  Hime gave a small nod of acknowledgment before Reggie moved on.

  The last two were “Ellie, Commando 11” and “Rich, Gunner 4.” They were a brother and sister who kept in touch through the game. Ellie was, obviously, the more experienced of the two, but Rich seemed like a good guy. Kept his commentary brief when he introduced himself. That was enough for the time being.

  “All right everyone, here’s your first mission,” Reggie announced. “There is a mining colony on Schet IX. We’re adding it to our holdings.”

  Ellie held up a hand. “We’re in the only other holding, right?”

  Reggie pursed his lips. He was trying to make it seem like a professional organization, but having the recruits point out that they were basically starting from a concrete slab and building a skyscraper wasn’t helping. “Yes. We’re right at the beginning of our expansion phase. You five will be forming Bravo Platoon. You will be recon and flanking support. Detailed tactical briefings are being uploaded to your juggernauts. Study them in transit. Anyone have any questions?”

  Harper cleared his throat. “Do we get paid?”

  “Mission details are also in the briefing,” Reggie said. Hopefully, without a chance to read
through them ahead of time, none of the recruits would back out on the mission. Between the license fee and the cost of upgrading the hangar for space to store five more juggernauts, Reggie was tapped out on funds. “Including the mission rewards.”

  He promised himself he’d make it up to them.

  “All right then,” Reggie said, clapping his hands sharply. “Let’s ride!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  [Primary Objective: Force the Surrender of Schet IX to Wounded Legion]

  Reggie smirked as the notification popped up in his display the instant Vortex set foot on the planet.

  [Secondary Objective: Leave All Mining Assets Intact]

  He had made sure of that one. Of the 2,000Cr reward for completing the mission, half was tied up in ensuring the viability of the planet as an income generator. Wounded Legion didn’t have the credit reserves to be making major repairs up front.

  [Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 0/???]

  That was almost pro forma. There was no point in leaving such an objective out. The Player-Generated Mission system didn’t require every objective to come with credit rewards, and players couldn’t set XP payouts whatsoever. All marking the enemy force for elimination did was give a running count of their progress to everyone involved in the mission.

  The tactical map came up, and Reggie watched as the rest of the legion came off the drop ship behind him. Quickly, June’s Artemis and Harper’s Chipmunk pulled ahead, veering north and east respectively to flank the mining outpost.

  “Alpha Platoon, proceed to Foxtrot-five-five. Keep behind the hills, and don’t let them make visual contact,” Reggie radioed out to his troops. “Bravo Platoon, follow the river to Juliet-nine-zero and keep the ravine wall between you and the outpost on the way.”

  “Question,” Nordbrook replied, voice scratchy over the speakers in the cockpit of Vortex. “What’s Juliet?”

  “NATO alphabet,” Reggie explained, wondering if he might need some training missions and a basic operational overview for these civvies. “None of the words are easily mistaken for another, and you go by the first letter.”