Outpost: A LitRPG Adventure (Monsters, Maces and Magic Book 1)

by Terry W. Ervin II

  The goblin never saw Ron’s spear. The hurled weapon’s point drove deep into the goblin’s rib cage. Mortally wounded, the vile creature dropped to its knees and then collapsed onto its back, an artery that normally fed the heart instead drained into the chest cavity, filling the pierced lung.

  The sounds of battle around the other two wagons were dying down. Glenn didn’t see any fighting, and hoped maybe they’d send help. Instead a ten-foot hulking brute, with tusks jutting up from its lower jaw and hefting a battered flanged mace, one sized for such a brute to wield, lifted and tossed aside an intervening covered wagon and bellowed a challenge.

  Glenn gulped. The monster’s bellow rattled his teeth, and it tossed a covered wagon aside like it was a toddler’s plastic toy. Everyone behind it had to be dead. So much for help.

  The gnome healer looked down at himself and concluded running wasn’t an option. He looked back up at the beast. The single shoulder strap wife beater consisted of a bearskin patchwork that hung down to mid-thigh. Glenn was pretty sure boxer shorts weren’t part of the attire. That didn’t bode well for its hygiene, based upon the brute’s cracked and flaking, leather-like skin.

  Glenn wasn’t sure if it was suicide or sacrifice, bravery or resignation that fueled his choice. Glancing up over his shoulder he said, “Marigold, you can outrun it. I’ll give you a head start.” With that, Glenn shouted his own battle cry and charged forward with shield held before and cudgel cocked back and ready.

  “Teamwork!” Ron yelled. “Together we engage the ogre, or perish separately.”

  The hulkish brute crouched in anticipation, hefting its iron mace, and offering a broken-toothed grin, one accented by yellowing tusks.

  A good whack in the shin, Glenn thought, just above the knee. Preparing to fake right and dodge back to the left, he saw the brute had left itself open for a shot. Glenn later learned that it was Kim’s spear that caught the ogre in the throat.

  While the beast yanked out the spear, Glenn struck. It felt like he’d struck the trunk of a stout oak tree. But he’d hit hard enough to cause the ogre to grunt and take a swipe with his mace.

  Glenn interposed his shield and tried to dodge out of range. The effort earned him a glancing blow, most of it absorbed by his shield. After flying through the air a dozen feet, he landed hard and rolled, making his now dislocated shoulder announce its presence even more. He cried out in pain.

  Gnome out of the way, the ogre charged the others.

  Lying on his back, Glenn triggered his healing and watched the combat. Warmth flooded his arm and shoulder, relieving the pain. He struggled to his feet, anxious to help his party members, his friends.

  Derek slashed two-handed with his long sword, biting into the ogre’s hip. It ignored him and slapped away Ron’s spear thrust. The beast had one focus: Kim. The puny human who’d hurt his throat, making it painful to swallow, impossible to bellow.

  Stephi hurled a softball-sized stone at the ogre, striking to little effect.

  Glenn was steady on his feet, reaching down for his shield. Where was Kirby? Still hiding up in the tree? If a rock couldn’t hurt the brute, the thief’s little darts would be useless.

  “Come on, you stupid animal,” Kim taunted and backed away, under the tree. Was the maneuver intended to limit the ogre’s ability to swing its weapon? Maybe to use the trunk for cover?

  Rather than run, she threw her dagger into the ogre’s face, sticking it in a ruddy cheek. Enraged, the ogre swung. Kim dodged, but the beast guessed right. The huge mace slammed down on her shoulder, driving her to the ground like a wrecking ball crashing down upon a wooden shed.

  The instant before the ogre completed its deathblow, Gurk leapt upon its back and grabbed a patch of scalp hair for balance. One second too late, the half-goblin drove the sharp point of his cutlass deep into the ogre’s ear.

  The ogre stood erect, dropping his weapon. With one hand he slapped ineffectually at the assailant who was in the process of jumping to the ground. With the other he reached for his wounded ear. A gurgling bellow erupted from his throat as the towering brute staggered a step forward, then back. Ron hurled his spear tip into the ogre’s ribcage while Derek slashed deeply into the tendons located behind the ogre’s knee.

  The brute was down. Derek finished it with a draw cut across its throat.

  Glenn raced forward, the urgency of being a healer and seeing Kim down on the ground overwhelming him now that the ogre was dead. He ignored Kirby’s statement saying he would watch for more enemies. Stephi knelt over Kim, tears filling her eyes. Glenn shouldered her aside.

  Kim lay, eyes closed, blood seeping from her mouth. Her shoulders and back twisted at impossible angles, as were her hips and legs. A victim of a head-on car crash with a dump truck would’ve looked better.

  Ron, having finished his short chant, lifted his hands from Kim’s forehead. “My Minor Cure failed to work.” His flat voice held no emotion. “She is dead.”

  Chapter 4

  Guilt accosted Glenn’s conscience. A part of him was relieved that Kim died before he reached her. Her life had probably ended halfway through the ogre’s crushing blow. Healing his own wounds and injuries, alleviating the pain through apparent magic, was one thing. Would he have been able to draw Kim’s wounds upon himself? Inflict unmeasurable agony, hoping he’d be able to heal it? Or would he have lain in agony, twisted and broken without pain meds, waiting until sunrise before his spell power was renewed?

  The rule book said healers could not absorb or transfer to their body more damage than they could physically survive, after all currently available healing spells, used in the most advantageous manner, could be applied. But that meant he might’ve healed just enough to keep his lungs and heart beating. Taking on her mangled condition would’ve been like willingly mashing his hand with a hammer over and over and over again, enduring that pain all over every inch of his body.

  The thought left him in a cold sweat.

  “Jax, what do you think?”

  Glenn’s thoughts snapped back to the moment. After gathering the dead bodies of the merchants and their men-at-arms protection and placing them on one of the wagons, Kirby had gone about checking the dead goblins and ogre for treasure and stacked their weapons, saying they could be traded for a little coin. That they were going to need it.

  Glenn agreed, in theory, if the situation was real and was lasting. From what he remembered playing years ago, having no money was a very bad thing. Other than rare charity, there wasn’t any welfare or food stamps or subsidized housing—unless this fantasy game world was different from any he’d ever heard of.

  The world’s brutality wasn’t in question. Kim dead, all the humans around them, dead within a span of ten minutes.

  “Jax?” Ron asked.

  Glenn looked up at the others gathered around Kim’s dead body. He’d pulled out his heirloom item, the everlast candle. The bronze cylinder that held it was almost the size of a small can of soup. When he’d unscrewed the cap, a small flame automatically appeared on the wick. It burned without consuming any of the wax. Sitting on the ground next to the body, the small flame managed to illuminate several spots of blood that had already seeped through the canvas tarp they’d wrapped her in.

  Glenn repeated the question Stephi asked a few moments before. “Is she really dead?”

  The gnome shrugged when no one answered. “Maybe dying here—wherever here is—releases you? Maybe we’re really back in the basement of Grimes Hall, and never left, or part of each of us didn’t.” He leaned toward Ron’s theory that they’d been somehow transported to a parallel universe of sorts, one with inherently different rules, varying laws of biology, chemistry and physics. It beat mass hypnosis, simultaneous psychotic breaks, and inclusive, or even individual, virtual reality simulation.

  Whatever the cause, something was different. Glenn hadn’t had the chance to find a mirror, but simply his perspective of everything around him, that he had to do a lot of looking up, left little doubt
about his short stature. He pictured the intricately painted figurine he’d held just before everything changed. Kirby’s merged likeness to the goblins they’d killed? Stephi, her elven features and almost cartoonish porn star build, matched what she’d written on her character sheet. From the brief glimpse he’d caught, their figurines were spot on to the people around him. He didn’t need a mirror.

  The gnome looked straight up to the sky and sighed. The stars didn’t even match up. “I don’t know. None of us knows.” He knelt down and placed a hand on the canvas, underneath which Kim’s head lay. “But she saved my life when two goblins almost had me, and when I tried to take on that ogre.”

  Stephi knelt down next to Glenn and rested a hand on his shoulder. “That was beyond brave.”

  “No,” Glenn said. “Kim was beyond brave.” He looked up and met Ron’s gaze. “We can figure out why we’re here later.” For a fraction of a second, the dark-skinned quarter-elf’s eyes shifted to Derek, who turned from that look and stared at the ground.

  Glenn grimaced, looking at Derek. Ron had expended his two Minor Cure Spells, but Derek still had several shallow wounds. Ron suggested that he use a Minor Healing Draw Spell before sunrise, so that if he lacked the ability to cure all the hit points of damage transferred, he’d have new spell points to expend shortly thereafter.

  The gnome healer put his hand on his knee and leveraged himself to standing. That stood him pretty much eye level with Stephi, who was still kneeling. Being a gnome was going to suck.

  That thought, combined with meeting her face so close, her intense beauty, distracted him for a moment. He shook his head once. “Lysine, for me there isn’t an option. You said there’s such a thing as a Revive the Dead Spell. Let’s get one.”

  “We don’t got nearly enough gold coins for that,” Kirby inserted, obviously listening from a distance.

  “Then we’ll get them,” Glenn replied.

  “Running under the assumption that the reality of this parallel universe is reflected in the Monsters, Maces and Magic rule books, Byeol’s soul will remain next to her body for three days,” Ron said. “Depending on her alignment, it will depart sometime during that third day. White at sunrise, Gray and sunset and Black at midnight.”

  “No way she chose Black,” Stephi said.

  “And she’ll need to save versus her constitution,” Kirby warned, only to be ignored.

  The camp was so quiet. Everyone had perished in the fight, except them. What the few goblins that fled hadn’t killed, the ogre did. Ron and Derek had verified that. Smashed and slashed bodies. Something Glenn didn’t care to view, up close or at a distance.

  “First priority is to secure the services of a cleric,” Ron said, “to cast a Tether Spell, so that her soul doesn’t depart.”

  “We don’t even have enough coin for that,” Kirby said. “We need a high-rank cleric to give us enough time.”

  “Time for what?” Glenn asked.

  “An adventure,” Kirby said, excitement crackling in his voice. “That’s the only way we’ll get enough coins to buy a Revive the Dead Spell.”

  Stephi gracefully stood. “Can’t we just ask a good, or White, cleric to do it?”

  “Monsters, Maces and Magic doesn’t have a lot of charity in it.”

  Ron and Derek nodded agreement to Kirby’s statement. Glenn did too, after recalling his gaming from years ago. And from the creepy vibe he’d gotten from the GM, sending people to a charitable world didn’t fit.

  “So,” Ron said, “what might be our next step? How might we obtain sufficient gold for a Tether Spell?” He glanced into the darkness where Kirby stood. “One cast by a cleric powerful enough such that the spell duration allows adequate time to secure a Revive the Dead Spell.”

  “Well,” Kirby said. “We pile the weapons into one of the wagons, along with the bodies of the merchants. They’ll be proof that we didn’t kill the merchants and their men, and turn over their wares to the local authorities. Might be a sheriff, or mayor, or baron or king that runs Three Hills City. That’s the closest place, at least from what the GM said before we got sucked over here…where we are now.

  “Then we sell the weapons, which won’t give us enough for a good Tether Spell—if there’s a decent rank cleric there. If not we race our butts to wherever we can find out there might be a tough enough cleric.”

  “Maybe we should pack up and begin racing our butts now,” Stephi said. “Just in case.”

  With a tone of curiosity in his voice, Ron asked, “Young Gurk, how will we obtain enough gold to get the spell to buy us time for an adventure?”

  “Steal it,” Kirby said.

  “Steal it?” Stephi asked. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like it could get us into serious trouble.”

  The three men around the body nodded in agreement.

  “And we’re not taking the stuff in the barrels and crates from the wagons as our own because…” Stephi said, pausing to press her fingers against her forehead in thought. “We might be mistaken for brigands who killed the people, like the goblins and ogre did? And local lords and leaders tend to kill brigands for stealing?”

  Ron asked, “Gurk, might you have an alternative plan?”

  “Ummm, not a good one.”

  “Might you be willing to share it with us?”

  “I could,” he said, his voice cracking.

  After a few seconds of silence Ron grew short on patience. “We are all ears.”

  “Marigold could be an expensive prostitute.”

  The same time Ron mouthed the word, “Oh,” Stephi asked, “So, what do we plan on stealing?”

  Chapter 5

  After readying the horses and loading the wagons, including the bodies of the merchants and men-at-arms and covering them with a tarp, the five survivors of the raid road through the night.

  Ron and Derek had each taken a skill level in Horse Riding and Handling, so each drove one of the wagons. Glenn had taken a skill slot in Reading and Precious Stone Appraisal. He’d figured both would be handy. The first in towns and cities and if they found any tomes or scrolls while adventuring. The second, because he remembered treasure often came in gemstones and jewelry.

  Somehow, Kirby and Stephi had been able to fall asleep. Not so with Glenn. He sat next to Ron, trying to pick up a few pointers to handling the horses in case he had to drive, if for no other reason than to allow one of the drivers to catch some shuteye. How that would work in the game world he’d entered, there was no telling.

  They stopped a little after sunrise next to a stream that emerged from a coppice of trees and crossed the road. It was wide and shallow, and somewhat higher than normal due to apparent spring rains. Still, the wagons probably wouldn’t have any trouble crossing. Older wagon tracks demonstrated this.

  While Ron hopped down to go make sure, Glenn climbed down as well to help Derek with the horses.

  A blue jay flew out of the covered wagon and perched on the top a moment before Stephi climbed out, looked around and stretched. Glenn tried to avert his gaze but somehow couldn’t. She’d slept on the floor of the wagon with a sack stuffed with grass and leaves for a pillow, and yet no bedhead. Her hair, although a little disheveled, retained its natural wavy curl. Maybe it was because she kept it in a ponytail. Nevertheless, it wasn’t her hair that really caught his attention. The cream-colored linen blouse that strained against its contents as the tall elf stretched drew his eyes.

  Her hands dropped to her hips. “Want to get closer for a better view?”

  Glenn stammered. “I—I…was trying to figure out how you could sleep on a sack filled with leaves for a pillow without getting bedhead. Your hair looks almost perfect.”

  “Nice try,” she replied. “That wasn’t where your eyes were looking.” She thrust out her chest. “Satisfied?”

  Glenn’s gazed dropped to the ground. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Kirby came up behind Glenn, startling the gnome. “Dude,” he said. “Sunrise already?”
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  In the sunlight, Kirby’s half-goblin features were clearer. Hooked nose, pock-marked cheeks, wiry build. Several of his teeth were more points than they should be.

  “Don’t tell me,” Stephi interrupted, walking toward the pair standing next to the uncovered wagon. Glenn gazed up at her. Although it wasn’t accurate, he felt half her size. He even had to look up to Kirby. He’d always been on the taller than average size, being about five-eleven.

  “I’ll have to…do my business in the woods?” Stephi asked.

  Kirby grinned. “More privacy than the meadow.”

  To head off any trouble, Glenn interjected, “Even in towns and cities, it’ll probably be equivalent to an outhouse, or a chamber pot.”

  She turned on Glenn. “Chamber pot?”

  “Like a Port-a-pot except it’s only a clay pot with a lid.”

  Her lip curled up in disgust. She pointed at Glenn. “After last night, something tells me something bad might be in the woods. You’re going to stand guard—without watching me.”

  “Maybe you’d like it better—” Kirby started, but she cut him off.

  “No way you’re coming near me, you little pervert.”

  Kirby’s jaw clenched. He turned and walked away, but not before Glenn saw tears forming in his eyes.

  She pointed down at Glenn again. “I don’t wanna hear it.” She turned and strode toward the trees. “Come on, before my bladder bursts.”

  A few minutes later, Glenn, standing several feet from the thicket of trees heard, “Don’t tell me, I have to use leaves?”

  The gnome was about to reply yes, but saw Ron approaching holding a handful of leaves. He proffered them to Glenn while looking away from where Stephi was doing her business. “I’m giving Jax some leaves that are both safe and durable.”

  “Safe and durable?”

  “Safe, as in they will cause neither irritation nor a rash. Durable as in your fingers will not punch through. Superior to the cheap toilet paper procured for the university restrooms.”