Succubus 3 (The Good The Bad And The Crazy Stupid Hot): A LitRPG Series

by A. J. Markam

  “What’s he talking about, the sand worms?” I asked the goblin.

  “Yeah.”

  I snorted with laughter.

  “O que é tão engraçado?” the Shadow Knight demanded.

  “What’s so funny?” the goblin translated.

  “I was just bullshitting him. Anybody could have gone out there.” I smirked at the Shadow Knight. “But I enjoyed hearing you scream like a little bitch, retardado.”

  Probably not the smartest move I’ve ever made. But damn it was funny seeing those scowling red eyes of his turn into bug-eyed dots of surprise.

  Then he lost it.

  “Vai-te foder, puta - eu vou te matar!” he raged as he pulled his outsized, four-foot-long sword.

  Of course, Meera, Stig, and Blutus jumped right in next to me, ready to rumble.

  The orc and dead Priest held the Shadow Knight back.

  “Asshole – what the fuck’s your problem?!” the goblin snarled at me.

  “My problem? MY problem?! MY PROBLEM is that you guys have been dicks to me from the second we set foot in this place! Every chance you get, even when I try to be nice and warn you about shit. FOR INSTANCE, you do NOT want to keep going this direction. There are a shit-ton of Ghouls just over the next wall, and you are NOT going to survive if you go in there. We should turn back now and go left if you want to complete the dungeon, which is what I said from the very beginning.”

  “If we go left from here, we’d actually be going right,” the orc said snootily, “which we already did.”

  “Yeah, because you’re the genius who read the fucking forums, right? Looooved that dead end,” I snapped as the orc blushed angrily. “You know exactly which direction I meant.”

  The Priest whispered something to the Shadow Knight that calmed him down. I guess the dead guy was the Dumbass Whisperer or something, because the Knight nodded grimly and sheathed his sword.

  “We’re still going this way,” the priest said. “Do whatever you want.”

  I shook my head in disgust. “You’re going to get slaughtered.”

  “We’re still going this way.”

  I sighed. What was that saying?

  You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.

  Fine. It would be entertaining watching them get splattered repeatedly across the sand… from a safe distance. Like watching inept gladiators in a Roman coliseum face off against 10,000 lions.

  Besides, once they decided to give up and leave, I could get Meera to fly over to the other side and pick up all the treasure – for me and me alone.

  “Alright, I’ll come along,” I said. “Why not.”

  The Shadow Knight chuckled, which I didn’t like. It made me think they were planning something.

  On the other hand, if these idiots could plan anything resembling a competent ambush, I’d be more impressed than pissed.

  “I’m looting the worms first, though,” I announced.

  “Do whatever the fuck you want,” the dead Priest sneered as he turned his back on me.

  “You SEE?!” I yelled at the goblin. “THAT’S my fucking problem.”

  The goblin just rolled his eyes as he ran off to join his companions.

  While I was plucking out worm glands, the others ran into the tiny sphinx at the other end of the courtyard. You would have thought they’d encountered a rabid dragon from the way they carried on.

  They were still jerking off and not accomplishing anything when I finished looting and walked on over. A few swipes of Blutus’s chains and Meera’s sword later, and the Sphinx was toast.

  The Four Assholes just glared at me in hatred and ran on to the next chamber.

  Idiots.

  I plucked off the sphinx’s tail and leisurely strolled into the next courtyard.

  When I got there, they were arguing amongst themselves about the safest way across the rows of 250 graves, which were undisturbed as yet.

  “How did you do it?” the goblin asked me.

  Meera was about to speak up, but I stopped her with my hand again. “I didn’t. We turned back.”

  “Then how do you know there’s treasure?” the orc asked in a know-it-all voice.

  “I read it on the forums,” I taunted him.

  The orc bared his teeth.

  “It seems to me you should be able to fly your angel across and get the treasure,” the goblin said.

  Smart dude.

  “No,” I lied, “I’m too heavy.”

  “So send the imp instead.”

  “Won’t work. As soon as you cross the barrier, every single grave erupts, and you have to kill all the Ghouls before you can open the chest.”

  “But – ” Meera protested.

  “Quiet,” I said, and the collar glowed, shutting her up.

  I wasn’t about to share my secret weapon with these douchebags. If they were going to ignore every single thing I said, I wasn’t going to give them the easy way out. They could work for it like everybody else who didn’t have a flying angel at their disposal.

  “We can do this,” the Priest said confidently. “You guys just run across the graves as fast as you can. One of you will get across and get the treasure, and the rest can fight off the Ghouls. I’ll heal anybody who doesn’t make it across.”

  I snorted.

  The Priest looked back at me hatefully.

  I gave him a thumbs-up. “Great plan. I won’t be doing it, but… great plan.”

  “Fine,” he snarled. “Then you don’t get any of the treasure.”

  I laughed. “If you guys can manage to get to the treasure, it’s all yours.”

  I gave them about ten thousand to one odds at getting across alive.

  The orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight all lined up about 50 feet apart from each other and got into runner’s crouches.

  “Do your best Flo Jo impersonations, guys,” I called out.

  “I think you mean Usain Bolt,” the dead Priest sneered, since Florence Joyner was a woman.

  “No. I meant Flo Jo.”

  It actually wasn’t a dis – Florence Griffith Joyner would have been at the finish line before I could even get off the starting block – but I knew all these macho dipshits would think it was.

  The Priest grumbled some more, then yelled out, “On your marks… get set… GO!”

  The three guys ran for all they were worth. Which wasn’t much. The goblin waddled along, and the orc was big and lumbering. I had to hand it to the Shadow Knight, he was fairly spry.

  Not spry enough, though.

  The first graves they hit, the Ghouls immediately popped up and flailed their arms around.

  Which meant they activated the graves all around them.

  Then those Ghouls popped up and flailed about, activating more graves, and so on and so forth.

  I saw this video back in high school to demonstrate what happens in a nuclear reactor when uranium atoms start a chain reaction.

  To demonstrate, the filmmakers went into a high school gym and laid out 100,000 mousetraps in a giant square with ping pong balls balanced carefully on top of the metal bars. Once the 100,000 mousetraps were ready to go, one of the scientists threw in a single ping pong ball.

  The ball triggered one trap, which launched its ball – but when it flipped in the air, it activated every other trap next to it, which activated their balls, plus flipped those traps’ neighbors. In addition, every time a ping pong ball shot out ten feet, it set off another batch of traps, whose ping pong balls set off even more traps ten feet away.

  In the space of five seconds you went from a single ping pong ball to thousands of sprung traps sending a storm of ping pong balls flying across the gym.

  That’s sort of what the Ghouls erupting from their graves looked like.

  Every place the players touched was Ground Zero for a new blast wave that rippled out, but with Ghouls instead of ping pong balls. It was like watched a fast-forward version of an epidemiology map of the spread of a disease. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh – an
d then suddenly there were 250 Ghouls clawing their way out of the ground, with the orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight right in the thick of it.

  A Ghoul snagged the goblin by the ankle in the first row of graves.

  The orc made it to the second row before five Ghouls pulled him down.

  The Shadow Knight actually made it to the third row, further than I’d thought he would.

  Of course, there were still two more rows of graves beyond that, each with 50 spots per row.

  So now they were in the middle of a complete shitstorm.

  “Holy fuck,” the dead Priest whispered.

  “Yeeeeaaah,” I said cheerfully. “Great plan, dude.”

  The Priest started healing as fast as he could, but there’s no way to stop a tsunami of trash mobs. The undead fuckers took off the group’s hit points ten times faster than the Priest could replace them.

  One by one, the orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight winked out of existence.

  And then the Ghouls turned towards us.

  “SO – got a Plan B?” I asked.

  The Priest tried lobbing some wimpy bolts of light at the Ghouls, but Priests in OtherWorld are made for healing, not combat. Their offensive capabilities are fairly pathetic.

  Basically all his little light-farts did was draw the Ghouls’ attention.

  “Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod!” the Priest screamed as a tidal wave of undead corpses came surging right at us.

  “We’re here, we’re here!” the orc and goblin yelled as they ran in from the graveyard – and then froze in horror as they saw what was coming at us.

  The Shadow Knight ran in just in time to whisper, “Foda-se…”

  “Next time, GO THE DIRECTION I SAY TO GO,” I snarled, then yelled at my group, “LET’S DO THIS!”

  Meera ignited her sword and leapt into battle.

  FWOOSH!

  Stig started teleporting around the front line of Ghouls and throwing fireballs in in their faces.

  “This is scary,” Blutus whined.

  “JUST DO IT!” I yelled as I started ripping off Doomsday spells.

  A split-second later, a giant chain whipped out and bashed the first Ghoul’s face in.

  The orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight started fighting, but quickly got overwhelmed and sent for respawn. The Priest tried to keep up, but he was clearly in over his head.

  My guys were doing ten times better, but they were still getting hammered. I switched from offensive spells to solely healing Stig, Meera, and Blutus with Self-Sacrifice – which rapidly depleted my own hit points. I had to stop every so often and do a Soul Suck just to give myself enough Health to pass on to my crew.

  When I got down to 25% and things were getting desperate, I finally reached out for help.

  “Hey, I need a Heal!” I yelled at the Priest.

  He ignored me purely out of spite.

  The orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight had all been sent for respawn, so he didn’t have anybody to heal – he just switched to his little light-farts while he waited for his buds to come back.

  Stig was in trouble, so I sent him some more Health. Now I was down to 21%.

  “Hey Dead Pope, I need a Heal!” I shouted as I sent some more Health to Blutus, who was getting swamped.

  Now I was at 18%.

  The orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight all rushed back into the courtyard.

  “Can’t,” the Priest said snarkily. “Too busy.”

  “THEY’RE ALL AT 100% HEALTH AND THEY’RE GONNA BE DEAD IN FIVE SECONDS ANYWAY!” I yelled. “I NEED A HEAL NOW, GODDAMMIT!”

  He ignored me and wasted all his time on the Three Stooges, who immediately got sent for respawn.

  “THEY’RE GONE, NOW FUCKING HEAL ME!” I screamed as I Self-Sacrificed for Meera.

  15%.

  The Priest ignored me and began shooting out light-farts again until his buddies rushed back in.

  Seriously, it would have taken him five seconds and I would have been back up to 50, maybe 75%.

  But no, he was vying for the ‘Passive-Aggressive Asshole of the Year’ award.

  I was going to KILL this motherfucker.

  I lost Stig first. I tried to save him, but a Ghoul got lucky, slapped him to the ground, and my imp got trampled underfoot.

  Blutus was next. Two dozen Ghouls broke over him in a giant wave, and seconds later he was gone.

  “HEAAAAL MEEEEEE!” I screamed in fury.

  The Priest looked over and smirked at me with his grey prune face.

  So did the orc, the goblin, and the Shadow Knight, all of whom laughed maliciously.

  “Why don’t you go loot some more bodies?” the Priest shouted, then turned back to healing his other teammates.

  “Come merda, lambe-cus!” the Shadow Knight called out merrily.

  That’s why the Shadow Knight had calmed down before: because the Priest had been whispering something along the lines of Just wait, this asshole will get his.

  And they had ALL been in on it.

  So that’s how it is, huh?

  THEN FUCK YOU, PIG FUCKERS.

  “Meera, pick me up and fly me across!” I yelled.

  I thrust my hand into the sky.

  She swooped over, grabbed my wrist, and lifted me above the Ghoulish horde.

  The shocked expression on the Priest’s face was priceless.

  Meera dropped me on the far end of the courtyard. We were too far away from the Ghouls for them to pay us any attention, so I had as much time as I needed.

  I went around the blind wall and there it was – a rounded-top wooden chest with metal siding and an iron latch. I flipped it open and grinned.

  Dagger of the Pharaohs – Worth:1 gold

  Wand of the Dead – Worth: 1 gold

  Gloves of Anubiat – Worth:1 gold

  Necklace of Ra’nath – Worth:1 gold

  Boots of Osiron – Worth:1 gold

  Five gold worth of treasure (unless I decided to keep the Wand of the Dead), and it was mine all mine. No way in hell I was giving it to any of those douchebags.

  I dumped the loot in my bag and said, “Cool, now take me back to the graveyard.”

  Meera frowned. “You do not wish to rejoin the others in their fight?”

  “Fuck the others. Besides, they’ll be joining us in the graveyard soon enough.”

  She grabbed me under my arms, flew me over the Ghouls (and the now-furious Priest, orc, goblin, and Shadow Knight), back through the courtyard of dead sandworms, and over to the graveyard.

  As soon as she set me down, the goblin respawned right in front of me.

  “You asshole – you said she couldn’t fly you across!” he fumed.

  “I lied. Sue me,” I said, and pressed Blutus’s icon on my action bar. The big bruiser appeared out of a dust devil.

  Then the orc respawned next to the goblin.

  “You fucking asshole!” he raged. “What did you loot back there?!”

  “Nothing for you, Chuckles,” I said as I summoned Stig, who appeared in a puff of black smoke.

  Next came the Shadow Knight, who materialized right next to his two incompetent buddies.

  “Mentindo filho da puta - o que diabos você voltou lá?” he shouted.

  “Don’t understand a single thing you just said, retardado,” I said. “Learn to speak English.”

  The orc started, “He said – ”

  “Yeah, don’t care.”

  Finally the Priest appeared, huffing and puffing as he ran out of the central doorway of the labyrinth. “You – asshole – you lied – to us – ”

  “Ohhhhh, sort of like you lied to me by telling me you’d heal me and then didn’t?”

  “I never told you I would heal you.”

  “Yeah, I always have to sign a new contract with every healer in every single dungeon I enter. Fuck you, man. You want to try stabbing me in the back, don’t bitch about it when it doesn’t work.”

  The orc moved threateningly closer. “What did you loot back there?”

  “You
really wanna know?” I asked casually, then pulled up my bag window. “Let’s see, there’s a dagger that does 115 damage and has +20 Critical Strike, a wand that gives +50 Intellect, boots and gloves that are +60 armor each, plus a necklace with +40 intellect – really nice stuff, guys. Worth a gold apiece.”

  They were practically salivating at this point. I was fairly sure that at Level 10, none of them had any gear half as good as the shit in my bag right now.

  “Hand it over,” the orc demanded.

  “Hand what over?” I asked innocently.

  “All of it.”

  “Finders keepers,” I said.

  “That treasure belongs to all of us,” the Priest said angrily.

  “Actually, I never told you I would give you any treasure,” I said, saccharine-sweet.

  He didn’t like having his own words thrown back in his face.

  “You’re going to give us that fucking treasure, or else,” the Priest snarled.

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else we’ll rip you a new asshole. Literally.”

  “Well, you’d certainly know all about assholes, since you’re the biggest ones I’ve ever met. You know all about being dicks, too, which I assume is from taking them up your asses all the time – ”

  “KILL HIM!” the Priest screamed.

  “HIT ‘EM, GUYS!” I yelled.

  The orc, goblin, and Death Knight leapt towards me –

  And were immediately slammed upside the head by a flaming sword, a heavy chain, and a fireball.

  “Stig, take the goblin! Meera, take the Knight! Blutus, you handle the orc! I’ll take deadhead!”

  The Priest had apparently never dealt with anybody who had Soul Suck as a power, because he looked like I’d given him a wedgie when I blasted him with blue lightning.

  The Ghouls must have done a number on him before he escaped, because he only had 34% Health. Four seconds of Soul Suck and he was a goner.

  Of course, he resurrected right beside me, so I blasted him again.

  Took me ten seconds to kill him this time.

  But killing him repeatedly wasn’t going to do me any good – not as long as the graveyard was five feet away.

  “Blutus!” I yelled. “Wrap all of their guys in chains and then follow me!”

  Metal chains whipped through the air like South American bolas and wrapped around the dumbasses’ bodies, momentarily incapacitating them.