Corpse Run: A LitRPG Adventure (The Crucible Shard Book 3)

by Skyler Grant

  Gina considered me for a long moment and smiled. The Djinni pressed a kiss to my lips, a long-hungered contact. I remembered her then, just flickers, but they were good memories.

  Gina pulled away after a moment and said, “Way to man up. Stay alive.” A puff of turquoise smoke and she was gone.

  Yvera was still pacing. The flames wreathing her were showing flickers of white in their intensity.

  To my surprise Ashley leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Maria was right. Sometimes you’re an idiot, Liam. I’m going to carry the supplies inside. Anything we leave out here is going to be destroyed.”

  I was finding life very confusing again. Why did everyone keep telling me what a smart thing being evil was, and then seem so pleased when I stumbled my way into doing something decent?

  I decided to join her. By the time we were done it was like daylight outside, so intense was the light of the new star in the sky.

  “Regretting unleashing Armageddon yet?” Ashley asked me.

  I was. This was my doing. If I’d let Ashley have her way none of this would be happening.

  “It will be fine. We’re going to live through this and the people in the city will be fine. Mela seems nice.”

  Ashley grunted at that. It seemed my credit for a good deed wore off fast.

  “Just a precursor of things to come. We’re going to have so much fun. Inside, you two,” Yvera said. “I’ll activate the wards after you.”

  We made our way inside and I held my hand up to the doors. A pulse of energy and they swung shut. Torches were everywhere and they flared brighter as Yvera restored the wards, a wall of flame sealing off the door.

  I led Ashley past the supplies we’d set in the hallway and into the workshop beyond. It was a vast space almost like a warehouse, most of it devoted to tables holding gears, springs, and tools.

  Creatures half-assembled were everywhere. A minotaur with a massive axe slumped near the door with panels on its back open revealing the intricate work within. Mela and Walt were off in one corner, an assemblage of copper tubing and crystals pumping blood between them.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Was yours better?” Ashley asked. “Atlantia was in such terrible pain during mine. We both nearly died. I think I wanted to a little, it hurt so much.”

  “When I became Yvera’s Chosen it was like I had the flu. I was all hot and dizzy. It didn’t help I was fighting a dragon and a murderous library at the time. I passed out.”

  Ashley turned her attention to the workshop. “She needs stools. Or chairs. Why is there no place to sit? We could be here for a while.”

  I pointed at the bed in the corner. “It’s soft.”

  Ashley made a face at me. “I am not sitting on your sex bed.”

  We made do with what we could find. Ashley eventually wound up astride a half-finished bull, a fact she found tremendously funny, while I stretched out in an unattached massive hand.

  “I wonder how long the apocalypse takes,” Ashley said.

  “Probably not long. The big risk is going to be the impact when it comes down. We’ll get some tremors and a shock wave, but then it will be business as usual.”

  “If this place doesn’t just crack open.”

  That was the concern. I hoped this place was as sturdy as Yvera thought. Perhaps Mela had been happy here, living life with her machines. It was hopeful in a way how obsessed with vengeance she was for that meant the prison that had so long held her was likely sound.

  Ten minutes later the spaceship hit. Even so far away we felt it. A violent tremor shook the room and I was knocked out of the hand. I think I hit the ceiling at one point, I’m sure I got impaled by several tools. The world became a blur of shaking and pain.

  When the shaking finally concluded I groaned and sat up. I knew that as beaten up as I was, Walt and Ashley would be in worse shape, so I looked around to find them.

  Ashley was close to where I had left her, except now she was impaled on one of the bull’s horns. It’s strange how familiar an experience it becomes, picking your friends up from grievous bodily injury. I hefted a shoulder beneath her, her leather armor slippery with blood as I heaved to lift that broken body from the horn. Once she was clear I released my healing spell. Her eyes flickered open and she screamed as a body nearly dead knitted itself back together.

  “Thanks,” Ashley said. “Fuck that bull was a bad idea.”

  Walt was doing better. He looked to be unharmed and exactly as we had left him in the midst of a god blood transfusion.

  “Yvera?” I said, to no response.

  “It’s a prison, she probably can’t hear you from the inside. I sure hope your key works to get out,” Ashley said.

  So did I. It would be embarrassing to survive Armageddon only to spend the rest of eternity locked away.

  “Keep an eye on them,” I told Ashley. “I’ll go try the door.”

  Fortunately, there was nothing to fear. I extended my hand and the doors began to rumble open. As soon as they were no longer sealed the flames died down and I got my first look at the world outside.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Morning was just dawning outside, the sun on the horizon. The deserts were dramatically transformed. Like how Yvera had earlier turned a small portion to glass, now the sands were entirely glass. It crunched underfoot as I walked.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Yvera flamed into being beside me. “She did quite a number. And she put all this into motion in minutes after being released. This is why you make friends and allies that excel, they push you. This is incredible work.”

  At least someone was pleased by the overwhelming destruction.

  I made my way back indoors. Mela had disappeared and Walt was drinking some water.

  “You all buffed up now?” I asked

  “She has an incredible mind,” Walt said. “I’m smart, but she doesn’t just look at something. She disassembles it with her eyes and looks for how it can be put together better. I’ve engineers in my head, but she is even more so.”

  I’m glad one of us was having fun being a Chosen. I just seemed to be sleeping around an absurd amount, and I was fairly sure Ashley now had a sociopath swirling around inside her head.

  “The desert got blasted to glass outside,” I said.

  “Good thing we have the carpet. Camels or horses wouldn’t do that well in that case. What is the plan?” Ashley asked.

  It was a good question. We’d been so focused on this next stage that we hadn’t even considered our next steps.

  “Let’s get back to the city. I want to see what happened there and if the palace is still standing. It’s also where the Vainglory left us,” I said.

  Ashley winced. “Think they are okay? If they were near the city when this happened, this might have blown them right out of the sky.”

  It was a fair worry, but knowing Cobalt and her crew I somehow wasn’t concerned.

  “If anybody is going to survive this disaster it would be the Vainglory,” I said.

  We spent some time taking the carpet back outside and loading it up with supplies.

  “Is Mela going to want to keep anything from this place? She lived here a long time,” I said.

  “She has Gizmo and otherwise she isn’t very sentimental,” Walt said. “Most of her works she simply tore down and built again.”

  Good to know. If she wanted anything, I supposed she was also capable of coming back for it on her own. Our little carpet only had so much space.

  Soon we were aboard the carpet and setting course over the glass.

  “Didn’t we hear that this used to be a jungle?” Ashley asked. “Weird to think of how many changes it has gone through.”

  “This glass will crumble in time. Become pebbles and sand again,” Walt said. “Perhaps someday things will even grow and come full circle.”

  That was philosophical for him. Maybe the new influence would make him more than just brainier.

  Just as it took us days to get here
from the palace originally, it would take us days to get back. We split ourselves into shifts. This time we found no secrets during our journey, although as we got closer to the city we began to see lights over the horizon in the night sky. Flashes of red and blue that quickly faded.

  When we first started to see the spires of the palace, we found a glass mountain to climb so that we might get an idea what was going on.

  The palace was intact. The wards had held and the towers of white and black still entwined and made their way towards the heavens. Nothing else was the same. The city was completely gone with not even a trace that it had ever existed.

  I hoped that was Gina’s doing and that she had managed to make my wish come true. Still, the city being gone was one of the least surprising things we found.

  The spaceship had survived, somewhat. The lines were melted and deformed, and a giant rent marred one side, and yet clearly many of the crew had survived. A perimeter of fencing was set up with mecha walking guard duty. They had a need to, for occasionally along the line there were furious battles. Winged demonic creatures or tentacled monsters that hurt my mind simply to look upon engaged with the soldiers.

  It was mind-bending horrors versus high-tech soldiers, neither of which had been here before and none of which seemed suitable now.

  “Awesome,” Ashley said. “I want a blast cannon. I mean, my crossbow is cool, but I could do some amazing things with a blast cannon.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be helping them much,” Walt said. “Although I can’t tell if that’s because it got scaled down to match the local equivalents, or if those monsters they’re fighting are just that badass.”

  While I was tempted to ask Yvera, I didn’t think she’d know what was happening here.

  “Ashley, can you rub the lamp and conjure Gina. Maybe she can give us some clue what is going on.”

  Ashley extracted the lamp from her inventory and after a quick bit of rubbing the Djinni was poofing in with a cloud of turquoise smoke.

  “Woah,” Gina said, taking in the scene down below. “That’s all new.”

  “Part of the price you paid for saving the people?” I asked.

  “What?” Gina seemed surprised by the question and shook her head. “Oh—no, for that I just moved the entire city to outside Castle Sardonis. You should see the place now that it lives in perpetual darkness. It’s amazing. I outdid myself.”

  That was a thought almost as scary as what was happening below. Almost. It was also an opportunity, we had been short of people to keep the castle going and there might be worse things than having an entire city just appear.

  “So do you have any clue what is happening down below?” I asked.

  Gina pointed towards a massive patch of black, oozing tar. “Semhal the all-consuming.” Her finger then traced upwards in the sky to where red lightning crackled regularly. “Avaressa the Red. Those are just the ones I know. If I had to guess, the folks from the falling star decided to storm the palace and Liara opened up the cells.”

  So these were some of the evils that she’d had locked up?

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Liara won’t let herself lose and she’s never been afraid of pitting one deadly force up against another. They must have put her back to the wall and she unleashed,” Gina said.

  “What is our plan here?” Walt asked.

  We could go up to the ship and say hello. We were, after all, from the same world and they might welcome us. I didn’t know if they were in touch with the other artificial intelligences or not, but they were in the same mess we were. Lost and alone in a world they didn’t expect.

  Yvera had tried her best to wipe them out however and I couldn’t be sure of the reception we’d receive. I thought we’d be welcomed back at the palace. We might have made a jailbreak from there a short time ago, but that was obviously no longer an issue.

  “The ship is from our world. We can be certain of one thing, it’s filled with total psychotics that will kill and loot anything put in their path. We want to get to the palace. Liara will be looking for allies and hopefully Elsora has got the transportation network back online by now,” I said.

  “You think we could go right back home to Castle Sardonis?” Walt asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “You sure you’re comfortable leaving all this here?” Ashley asked, sounding aghast. “I mean, even ignoring the matters of what loot we might be able to find, this is hellish. We fucked the world up.”

  That was unfair—to her. This was my doing. The desert of glass was my doing, the ship being here was my doing, these evils being unleashed was my doing.

  I’d done a lot of damage by letting Mela out. So far all the good that had come of the deal was I’d gotten laid and Walt had gotten philosophical. I didn’t see a way to fix it.

  “What are we going to do, Ashley?” I asked. “If we had Cobalt here maybe she could do something. I think all of this might be beyond even her.”

  Ashley scowled. She didn’t like being reminded that someone was deadlier than she was.

  “Mela thinks she might be able to interfere with their machinery,” Walt said.

  Right now, horrors and technology seemed to be at something of a standoff. If either of them won out we’d have a different kind of problem. We needed them to weaken each other.

  “Leave it,” I said. “Although if she would care to help to blind them so we can get to the palace, we could use the assistance.”

  “She’s not a signal jammer,” Walt said, after a moment. It was worth a try.

  We left the carpet behind and made our way on foot. We needed to be ready for a fight.

  We hadn’t made it far before a flying metallic orb rushed up. A blue line of light quickly swept over us. We were being scanned, and I did a little scanning of my own.

  Probe Bot

  Level 15: Type: Construct HP: 100/100

  Probe Bot’s are mechanical constructs designed to identify potential threats. While they possess only limited combat ability they are able to summon powerful reinforcements.

  Aimed Shot

  Critical Hit

  Before I could blink Ashley had loaded her crossbow and fired off a bolt. It took the Probe Bot in the eye and it exploded in a shower of sparks.

  A red light was blinking in the ruined husk. I feared that this wouldn’t be the end of it and soon enough I was proven right. Three figures in jump packs were descending from the sky.

  Mechanized Marine

  Level 25: Type: Construct HP: 250/250

  The backbone of the Imperial Navy. Mechanized Marines sport a variety of weaponry and are capable of engaging targets in both space and on planets.

  Altari Voras

  Level 1: Type: Human HP: 10/10

  Working in the hydroponics facility Altari has served duty as a farmer maintaining supplies for the Hyperion. The crash of the ship and the loss of most of the crew has opened up new possibilities

  There were two marines and the crewman. That answered some questions. The ship’s NPCs must have come through at their equivalent levels, but all PCs were starting over in this world.

  That made them less dangerous for now, but somehow I didn’t doubt that they wouldn’t be long leveling up. With the threats they faced they were going up against some serious challenges.

  “Do we leave him alive?” Ashley asked, indicating Altari with a jerk of his head.

  “He’ll know how many survived the crash and the state of the ship. Capture him, if you can,” I said.

  Sapping Shot

  Ashley lowered her crossbow and quickly fired off a shot towards the human amongst the robots. It caught him along the side of his head and sent him sprawling unconscious to the ground. Well. That was fast.

  “Poor guy. That must suck—you finally get out of the kitchen, and in your first fight you go down with one blow,” I said.

  Rifleman

  My sympathy was short-lived as the marines unlimbered rifles and energy blasts bega
n to fire in my direction. I blocked several with my shield, seeing one rebound towards the marine that fired it. I loved this shield. I really loved this shield.

  Displacement Field

  Walt brandished his staff and the air around the bots started to shimmer as space twisted and distorted.

  Fixed Space Enhancers

  The marines flashed orange for a moment and Walt’s effect faded.

  Backstab

  I hadn’t even seen Ashley slip into stealth, but I noticed when she appeared behind one of the marines and drove her daggers deep into one of the robotic arms, twisting the metal and causing black fluid to leak.

  Smite

  I let loose with a spell and flame engulfed the marine Ashley had just attacked, before I rushed forward, my shield taking rifle fire from the other as I hit one of its legs with a powerful swipe from Intemperance.

  The blow was strong enough it would have cut deep into the flesh of a human adversary, but here I was simply met with the clang of metal and the feel of an aching arm—mine.

  Taking Stock

  The marine spun the rifle around and delivered a blow to my face with the stock. I felt my nose shatter and blood begin to flow. This thing packed a punch.

  With one arm mostly useless it threw the rifle away and drew a fearsome-looking knife.

  Dimensional Tremor

  Walt fired a rippling distortion of space at the other marine, which seemed completely unfazed.

  “Your class stuff isn’t working. Try electrical or fire blasts,” Ashley said, before she blinked out of existence as she stealthed again.