Arcadia Unlocked: A LitRPG Novel (Arcadia LitRPG Book 1)

by Alyssa Archer

Chest—black leather vest

  Legs—black leather pants

  Feet—black leather boots

  Rings— Ring of Dodge +1 AGI

  Necklace—Of Protection +1 FORT

  WEAPONS

  +1 AGI/level Dual Wield Heirloom Daggers

  SKILLS

  Stick’em

  Slash

  Slippery Fish

  Shadow Cloak

  Fangstrike

  PROFESSIONS

  Poisoncrafting

  Mixology

  Woodlore

  ACHIEVEMENTS

  Level Ten!

  Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

  Say my name!

  Phew, Level Five already?

  They just don’t want to share the hedge.

  It was this big!

  You’ve arrived!

  Bardic Credit: 10

  Chapter 13

  When the woman giving birth takes a break from screaming, I get on my hands and knees and duck my head into the farmhouse long enough to say a quick goodbye. Farmer Browne rushes out of what I presume is the bedroom to shake my hand.

  “She’s in good hands now, thanks to you.”

  “No problem.” They’d made it well worth my while with two level bumps.

  “Won’t you stay and greet the baby? It’s not often our village welcomes a new life, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “It is known. Our kind, those in Arcadia, have been blessed with fewer and fewer natural born children. It’s why the Queen opened the portal, so that our people could mix with yours. But every once in a while ...” He casts a glance over his shoulder in the general direction of where his wife and Elfie were. “Won’t you stay for this event?”

  “I’m sorry.” I shake my head. “I’ve got things I’m supposed to be doing, places I’m supposed to be.”

  I say my final goodbyes and strike out from the farmhouse to get back to the road. I take a moment to consult my map to make sure I’m heading the right direction and then I’m back to running up the road.

  I reflect on the Farmer’s words as I run. His comments about the lowered fertility rates were intriguing. Why was the queen being so controlling? Was she acting like some kind of master geneticist, playing around with the future of her people through careful breeding? If fertility rates were so low, why restrict intermingling with human kind with such high prices for tickets to Arcadia proper?

  I keep running. No answers find me. After a while I pass the camp where Billy’s rival gang members hang out. When I check on one of their tags, it shows up grayed out—no more experience to be had by taking these guys out. That’s actually kind of reassuring. I’ve made progress. I mean, I know that from my character pane, but it’s nice to see it reflected in the game world too.

  I cut into the forest to draw nearer to the “X” on my map and after a minute I come upon a tall tower garrison in the middle of the forest. There are plenty of guards milling about, and they thankfully give each other plenty of space, so I can take them down one by one all quiet like. I shadow cloak up on them and with a few slashes, stick’ems, and the occasional fangstrike, these guys go down like a shot of fine tequila.

  +112

  +109

  +89

  +97

  +106 ...

  Their drop rate is abysmal. I’ve killed twelve of these guys and still no key for the prisoner’s cage. At least they generate experience. There are probably eighteen guards on a respawn circuit here, and only one of them respawns with the key I’m betting.

  I’m just lucky enough that it’s actually my eighteenth kill that drops the blasted key. I pick it up and go instantly dark with shadow cloak.

  I can see into the tower now. I can time it perfectly with the rotation of the guards. It’s a straight shot to the entry, no guards in the way. I can unlock the cage, let the prisoner go, and likely say hello to level thirteen.

  Just then luvs2heal comes screaming out of the woods, with several large bugbears on her ass.

  “LEEEROY JENKINZ! I’m coming in hot! HEEEELLLLLPPPP ME, LEEROY!” I shake my head. Goddamn it, luvs2heal. She must have her friends tagged to show up on her map. She’s got five or six beasties in tow and the seven guards that have respawned around camp from my earliest kills sit up and take notice.

  I come out of the shadows to help luvs2heal with the bugbears. They’re huge creatures, part owl, part bear, and all of a sudden—my flurry of slashes may have had something to do with it—they’re all interested in me. Good. I’ve drawn aggro off luvs2heal. But damn, these fuckers fight back and it hurts!

  They’ve got me surrounded and I can only hit one at a time while the rest of them whale on me. My health points bar starts dwindling rapidly.

  +207

  I have nothing even resembling a healing spell or potion. I can slippery fish my way out of here, but they’ll just be on me again in a few seconds. I guess I’m going to die. Fuck, luvs2heal. Maybe I can take a few down before I go, though. I keep sticking ’em for all I’m worth.

  +220

  All of a sudden I’m embalmed in a glaze of holy golden light. It’s like super armor. The bugbears hit, but their paws skitter off the shield, doing no damage to me.

  “Aw, hell yeah!” I shout. luvs2heal to the rescue with her shield. I feel my health points regenerating at a rapid rate, too. Good healer.

  +228

  I get even busier with my sticking and slashing and fangstriking. Every once in a while the shield expires and luvs2heal casts it again. By now we’ve attracted a few of the guards to the fray. I take down the last bugbear and get to work on the guards.

  +230

  I’m getting close now. Four down. Three to go. And then the shield expires. And stays expired. “Healer?” I shout out.

  “I’m out of spell power,” luvs2heal says. “Sorry!”

  One of the remaining guards gets a crit on me.

  Warning: You have taken 30 points damage. 12/70 remaining.

  The other two pound me for eight points each and that’s it. I’m dead. Goddamn it.

  You have died. Respawn at the mushroom circle or journey to your body? Warning, respawn will abandon your backpack at the site of your body and open it to looters.

  “Journey.”

  My spirit appears in a mushroom ring. I check my map and see that I’m a good ten-minute jog from my body, so it’s sayonara to my stuff. luvs2heal is surely toast and someone else will come up to do that quest, find my stuff and take it all. Goodbye, beautiful daggers. Goodbye key I need to complete my quest. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.

  I start the long trek back to the garrison. I don’t even bother to run. This is such a massive setback. I’m going to have to go all the way back to town to gear up, then come all the way back here, then kill all those fucking guards again, get the key, and then I’ll be back to where I was, minus my beautiful daggers. Goddamn it.

  When I get back to camp, the guards have all respawned, and are milling about. I gauge my distance from spirit to body, wait for the guards to be looking the other way, get close enough for my body to resurrect, and shadow cloak just as fast as I can. No need for a guard to notice me and send me back to the mushroom circle again.

  I skirt around a few more guards and make my way into the shadows of the woods. I take off in the general direction of the road with a few trees between me and the guards to further shield me.

  I let the shadow cloak fall off me and take inventory. I still have my home stone. Not that it does me any good since I haven’t activated it yet. Otherwise my pack is empty and my clothes, other than the white linen cloth wrap that passes for underwear in VR, are gone. Damn it.

  “Psst! Leeroy!” luvs2heal’s whisper shout catches my attention. luvs2heal. The reason I’m missing all my gear. I almost don’t even want to acknowledge her presence. I pretty much never want to see her again. “Hey!” she says and I can’t help myself; I cast a glance in her direction. She’s sitting down with her back against a tree, and arrayed o
n the ground around her are my clothes, my boots, and the contents of my pack.

  “Did you want this stuff back?”

  I am an unmoderated idiot.

  “Um, yes please.” I take back everything I said. luvs2heal is the best.

  I walk over to her and start putting all my armor back on. “Oh, black leather, how I’ve missed you,” I say. She laughs and doesn’t even try to avert her eyes for my modesty’s sake. “Thank you for grabbing all of this. I thought I was royally screwed.”

  “Well, it was the least I could do since I brought all that on you. I didn’t realize you were stealthed in the middle of more baddies, or I would have just let those bugbears take me out.”

  “It’s all good,” I say. Because it is.

  “Okay, well, I’m off to go turn this quest chain in and find Turtle.”

  “I was wondering why he wasn’t with you.”

  “Oh, he was.” luvs2heal looks sheepishly at the ground. “He kind of died right before I came running to you. So. Yeah. I should find him.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going to go finish up what I was doing.”

  “Oh, do you need help?”

  That shielding was mighty nice, but at this point, since I have the key back, it will be easier for me to go it alone, where I’ll be able to make use of my stealthiness. “Thanks, but I’m all right on my own,” I tell her.

  From there, it’s a simple matter of shadow cloaking back through the wandering guards, sneaking past the two posted at the entrance to the tower, and making my way to the prisoner’s cell. I take a moment and marvel at the inside of the tower. It’s made of stone and goes straight up for at least three stories. There’s a spiral staircase running along the wall that loops up to a few different balconies that span the circle of the tower. I don’t see a cage on the ground floor, so I head over to the staircase and start on up. There are a few guards on the way. I try to sneak past the first one, but the staircase doesn’t allow me quite the distance I need to walk by undetected, so I end up taking him down in a quick scuffle.

  I shadow cloak again and the next time I come up to a guard, I go on the offensive and take him down before he senses my approach. I’m at the second landing and—Bingo!—there’s my cage.

  The man inside—who I’m assuming is Matthias—looks like he hasn’t eaten for days. He’s thin and pasty, weak looking. Seems like I got here just in time. I sidle up to the cage and produce the key I acquired earlier.

  “Ready to get out of there, buddy?” I ask.

  “Nah, I’m good,” he says.

  That gives me pause and I withdraw the key from the lock. “Really?”

  “No! Please let me out,” he says. “Bad joke.”

  “All right, then. You had me confused there for a minute.” I undo the lock and swing the door to the cage open.

  Matthias takes a deep breath and then walks through the door.

  Need A Little Help Here Quest Complete!

  Congratulations! You have received

  2 silver, 20 copper pieces and 10,000 experience points

  While a quest completion is nice, it isn’t usually accompanied by a heady rush like this one is. Then the next message pops up in my vision and I understand.

  Congratulations! You have reached Level Thirteen!

  Warning: You have five minutes to distribute two talent points.

  Yes! I take a quick minute to update my stats.

  LEVEL 13 CHARACTER STATS

  NAME Leeroy Jenkinz, CLASS Rogue, RACE Human EXPERIENCE (EXP)—43,242/43,200

  Next level achieved at 69,900 experience points.

  CORE ATTRIBUTES

  11 + 14 (modifiers) AGILITY (AGI) = +25% to dodge and critical hit

  1 SPELLPOWER (SP) = 10 spell points

  8 + 1 FORTITUDE (FORT) = 90 health points

  9 POWER (PWR) = +90 damage

  ARMOR/ENHANCEMENTS

  Chest—black leather vest

  Legs—black leather pants

  Feet—black leather boots

  Rings— Ring of Dodge +1 AGI

  Necklace—Of Protection +1 FORT

  WEAPONS

  +1 AGI/level Dual Wield Heirloom Daggers

  SKILLS

  Stick’em

  Slash

  Slippery Fish

  Shadow Cloak

  Fangstrike

  PROFESSIONS

  Poisoncrafting

  Mixology

  Woodlore

  ACHIEVEMENTS

  Level Ten!

  Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

  Say my name!

  Phew, Level Five already?

  They just don’t want to share the hedge.

  It was this big!

  You’ve arrived!

  Bardic Credit: 10

  Chapter 14

  “Listen,” Matthias says to me before he heads down the tower’s spiral staircase. “There’s a wizard at the top of the tower. He’s the one who put me here. He’s got something of mine. If you want to, you can go and get my daggers from him. I’m sure they’re not the only nice thing on his person, if you know what I mean.”

  Quest offered: Magic Be Gone

  Retrieve Matthias’ daggers from the wizard at the top of the tower and return them to him.

  Reward: Experience and 3 silver, 40 copper pieces.

  Do you accept?

  Awesome! Bonus quests make me happy. No running back and forth. Plus it’s a quick experience grab, which will bring me that much closer to Catriona. “I’ll see what I can do about finding your daggers,” I say. Then, when the quest message doesn’t clear from my vision I add, “I accept."

  Matthias seems to be recovering his health rapidly now that he’s out of the cage. “Good luck to you, friend,” he says. “If you’re successful, you’ll be able to track me down through Billy.” We shake hands before both of us shadow cloak and go our separate ways. Matthias goes down the curving ramp of a staircase and I go up.

  I’m getting more and more nervous with each step. Or is that excitement? I get to kill a wizard. I’ve fought in wizard battles before, but only in goggles and gloves. This should be something else.

  The wizard is indeed at the top level. He’s standing at a table with his back to me, seems to be poring over a book. He’s a tall, thin man, with long, dark hair flowing down to the middle of his back. He wears blue velvet robes with arcane symbols embroidered in silver thread all over them.

  He seems so deep in concentration I’m sure I can get the drop on him. I pull up my character pane to review my combat skills, make sure I’m making the most of them. Still stuck with stick’em and slash to generate rage, and fangstrike to unleash it. Shadow cloak in, slippery fish out when I need to. It’s really at the higher levels that I get access to some truly kickass maneuvers, so it’s likely that I’m doing the best I’m able to for now. Idly, I wonder when the next series of levels will drop for this game.

  Okay. Let’s do this. I slip my daggers out of their sheaths and walk softly up to the wizard. Slash does more damage than stick’em, so I use that as my opening salvo. I get two more hits in before the wizard is able to react. He instantly sheaths himself in some kind of magical barrier; I can’t break through it. But I know that it has a cooldown, so I keep trying.

  One of my rage points fades out just as the barrier breaks down, so I dash in and get a few more slashes in. The wizard is chanting furiously at me, and I can see his face now. Goatee, heavy eyebrows, dark eyes. He’s a mean looking bastard. I max out my rage points and come in for fangstrike just as he hurls a blazing ball of fire at me. It burns like hell. I feel crispy and raw all over. I leap back and slap at my face and hair.

  Warning: You have taken a critical hit. 60/90 health points remaining.

  Damn! He can hit me for a third of my health points all at once? I come at him in a rush. I better get him down before he has a chance to do that again. I am a flurry of blades. I pull up his health bar to see how I’m doing. Amazingly, we’re on par. I’ve hit him for
as much as he’s hit me for, we’re both down to about 65% health. The only problem is, he has four health points for every one of mine. I have to do four times as much damage to kill him as he would need to do to take care of me.

  The madman starts chanting again. I leap up and kick him as hard as I can in the abdomen. It doesn’t do any damage, but he does double over and his chanting ceases. He’ll have to start over now; I’ve bought myself some time. I notice the poison on my blades is working; he’s got some dots under his health bar showing consistent, repeated damage. I keep slicing, aiming to stack some more poison dots on him.

  He blurts out some words I don’t understand and my insides quake. There’s a big poof of smoke around me and my body convulses in excruciating pain. What did he do? I feel compelled to get away from him and my body takes a giant leap in the opposite direction. I say, “What?” but it sounds like “croak.” I can’t turn my head. I keep hopping. What the actual hell?

  Then I remember. Wizards can turn people into frogs. Witches too. He freaking frogged me. I hop like mad in a zigzaggy pattern. If he can’t hit me, he can’t hurt me.

  I’m on the other side of the landing when the excruciating pain hits me again and I get my man-shape back. I throw shadow cloak on and start moving as fast as I can to get back to the wizard. I need to be able to kick the shit out of him whenever he opens his mouth.

  Slash, stick’em, slash, stick’em, fangstrike!

  Damn, that feels good.

  Warning: you have only one application of venom available for fangstrike. Replenish the poison to continue accessing this skill.

  Well, shit. I keep after the wizard with my flurry of blades, moving as fast as I can. The poison is taking its toll. I watch his mouth so that I can kick him whenever he opens it. The last few moments of the battle go quickly. His health points start tanking rapidly as that poison gets stronger and stronger.