EverRealm: A LitRPG Novel (Level Dead Book 1)

by Jake Bible

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  With the bag of precious canisters clenched in his teeth, he seized the baboons by their scruffs. The beasts screeched with indignation as they plunged together over the bulwarks, and down into the elemental fury. They didn’t linger long at the surface. He dove, dragging the hysterical apes with him, down into the deep. Bullets hacked at the water all around them, lancing past their swimming forms like pale spears. He took both of their chains in one hand, and used his free arm to thresh the water. Glancing back over his shoulder, he was amused to see how out of place baboons looked beneath the sea.

  He first encountered the hideous apes on the Burmese coast, just six days ago. They were tethered to the pole of a palm wine merchant’s tent, where they grubbed about in the dirt, grunting like hogs, and flashing their fangs at anyone who so much as glanced in their direction. He could hardly stop laughing at them. From the moment he’d first gazed upon those awful faces, he knew that those baboons were coming back to the submarine. They were special gifts for his employer, a man with an insatiable interest in deadly exotics, and in the terror that such monsters inspired in weaker men.

  One of the baboons pulled its way up the chain, and sank its fangs into his forearm. He gave both animals a smart shaking for their trouble. They would suffer this small inconvenience before beginning their pampered lives in their new owner’s compound, deep in the heart of Mongolia. Wrenching the pair of knuckleheads along by their chains, he scissor-kicked in the direction of the submarine.

  A staccato of dull impacts filled his ears. Another phalanx of white spears stabbed downward from the heavens. One struck him dead in the chest. The impact slammed the breath from his lungs in an eruption of silvery blobs that wobbled toward the burning surface. A frigid jettison of water blasting wildly against throbbing chest brought him back to his senses, and he realized that a can of moon juice had saved his life. One canister had taken the brunt of the bullet, and its steel skin had been punctured. He could feel it knocking around inside the sack, spinning and tumbling, as it released its pressurized contents into the sea.

  The sub looked so far away, and there was no chance for another breath of air. The surface world was a ceiling of moiling flames. When he’d first hatched the idea of raiding the patrol boat with a couple of chained monsters at his sides, it had seemed like a pretty wild gimmick. However, bringing them along had perhaps been a poor decision. They were only slowing him down. One of the baboons began to spasm in unnatural ways. Its eyes rolled skyward, and its fangs snapped at the salty torrent of fluid rushing into its lungs. A burst of bubbles escaped his nostrils. It was kind of funny to watch a baboon drown.

  Then, it came to him. Like the spirit of some fallen friend, it slid out of the gloom to quell even the baboons with a portentous moment of wonderment beneath the waves. Here, met different creatures who never in the whole of their lives should’ve chanced to look upon the other. Its laughing eyes, its toothy smile, it appeared barely able to contain its amusement over some darkly private joke.

  With his free hand, he snatched hold of the little handle on the side of the creature’s vest, because at once, he’d fallen in love with it. He would have this creature as well, or he’d drown with baboons clenched in one hand, and this thing in the other. There was some remarkable intelligence behind that dark eye that peered askew into his own, almost as though this creature knew of deeper shared connections than his human mind was able to grasp. Oh, but it was true, because as though his new friend had performed the same trick a hundred times, it knew just where to take him. With a powerful thrust of its flukes, they were off, rocketing toward the submarine.

  Titan Wars: Rise Of The Kaiju is available from Amazon here.