Dead Man Gaming: A LitRPG Series

by A. J. Markam

  And I’d screwed it all up.

  I finally put down the lockbox. There was no way I could concentrate.

  I should probably just log out and go get drunk in the real world or –

  There was a knock on the door. I tensed up, waiting to hear the voice of the innkeeper – but instead it was even worse.

  “I know you’re in there,” Arkova said, her voice muffled through the door. “I saw you on the immersion pod’s screen.”

  I sighed, got up, slid the dresser back, and then opened the door. She frowned as she looked around.

  “Where are you?”

  I realized I was still in Stealth and came out of it.

  “Why are you invisible?”

  I closed the door behind her and barricaded everything again. “Don’t you want to be in a private chat room before we talk about that?”

  “Good point.”

  I thought back to my conversation with Jen, Slothfart, Russell, and Richard earlier that day, and how I hadn’t asked them to go into a private chat room. I was so upset at the time I hadn’t even thought of it.

  Oh well.

  At this point, who cared?

  After we had privacy, Arkova asked, “What’s going on?”

  “The orcs found me again. They attacked me, my friends attacked them, and it all ended really badly.”

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “How badly?”

  “Well, I wound up at the bottom of the moat for half an hour, my friends got threatened with rape, and then the orcs killed them and dumped their bodies in the moat. And then they kicked me out of the group.”

  “Shit,” she murmured. “Are you okay?”

  I looked over at her, surprised by the question – and a little irritated, to tell the truth. “What do you care?”

  “I was just asking how you are.”

  “If you cared at all how I feel, how about not blackmailing me into infiltrating the Russian mafia? Or maybe just not threatening to send me back to prison?”

  “Because then you wouldn’t do the job. Besides, I don’t have control over either situation. Another FBI agent would do the exact same thing to you anyway if I quit. That’s why.”

  “Then don’t ask me how I feel,” I snarled.

  “Fine, I won’t,” she snapped. She paused for a second, then frowned. “Your friends – why did they kick you out of the group?”

  Crap.

  I hadn’t really thought out where that whole conversation was leading.

  I hesitated a little too long in answering, because she got a panicked note in her voice as she asked, “What did you tell them?!”

  Screw this. I’ll tell her whatever I want, whether it’s the truth or not.

  I might’ve been willing to go to prison for my friends and family, but I wasn’t about to go to prison because the FBI were a bunch of tight-asses.

  “You’re my ex-girlfriend, we have a kid together, and Oktar’s your jealous boyfriend who hates my guts.”

  To my surprise, Arkova laughed. I’d never heard her do that before. It was nice – for a second, I forgot how much of an asshole she could be.

  “They bought that?” she finally asked.

  “No, which is why they kicked me out.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a moment, then tried to put a positive spin on it. “Well, I know you liked them, but it’s probably for the best. What we’re planning needs your undivided attention for the next week.”

  Again, back to business. That’s all I was to her – just an asset she could make jump through hoops. No matter what she said, she didn’t give a damn about me at all.

  “Did you get the five million in gold?” I asked bitterly, expecting her to say ‘no.’ And once she did, I could throw her out on her ass –

  “Yes.”

  My eyes bugged out. “What?! How?!”

  “I had to go through bureaucratic hell to do it, but I got it. They confiscated a bunch of jewels from the game in another money laundering case. Because we got a conviction two weeks ago, the Bureau gets to keep it – but nobody at the top understands anything about the game, so they stalled on exchanging it because it’s not gold and they can’t directly cash it in on the stock exchanges, so they’d have to find a buyer, yadda yadda yadda. I convinced them to let me use it in our investigation instead.”

  “Holy shit – you actually got the five million?”

  “5.2 million, if the appraisal’s right,” she said, and smirked. “Now you’re really going to have to go through with it.”

  I walked over and sat down in a daze on the bed.

  She was right – now I really was going to have to go through with it.

  That was overwhelming. Suddenly it was real. I was in it, and there was no getting out.

  “You alright?” she asked, then added sarcastically, “Or am I not supposed to ask that anymore?”

  “…I’m fine…”

  “So how are you going to do the heist?”

  “…I have no idea.”

  “WHAT?! You’ve been telling me all week to get the five million – ”

  “I know I can use the money to get into the bank,” I interrupted. “The problem is, the orcs hate my guts. If I rob the place and they happen to be in there – if even one of Oktar’s guys sees me – then I’m screwed.”

  “That wasn’t a factor in your plans before this?!”

  “I didn’t think it was that big a problem until they kicked my ass today.”

  She groaned. “All right… leaving that aside for the moment, let’s say you get an appointment with the bank and you actually get inside. Then what happens?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?!”

  “Not yet.” I collapsed on my back, put my hands over my face, and tried to block the world out. “All I know is I have to do surveillance. I have to figure out which rooms the orcs are renting, and which ones belong to the Shadow Bank’s other customers.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  I smiled grimly. “By doing one of the things I do best.”

  “What, getting caught by the police?” she asked, sarcastically quoting me from one of our very first conversations.

  I pulled my hands away from my eyes and looked at her. “No. Dying.”

  53

  I stood on top of the roof of a building a quarter-mile from the Shadow Bank. I was in Stealth; Arkova lay on the rooftop next to me, out of sight from anyone on the ground.

  From this vantage point, I could see some things about the bank building that I hadn’t before. For instance, there were four people on top of the flat-topped building, continually patrolling the boundaries of the rooftop.

  “Probably snipers, or the equivalent in this world,” Arkova said, though she didn’t want to get up and look for fear of being seen. “Mages and hunters, most likely.”

  It made sense. If you had two billion dollars inside a building, it was smart to have people up top ready to rain down hell on any potential thieves.

  Still, though, their presence didn’t impact my immediate plans.

  “You sure about this?” she asked.

  “No, but I can’t think of any other way to do it.”

  I lay down on the gravel rooftop on my back and came out of Stealth.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded and closed my eyes. “Do it.”

  She hit me with her main offensive spell, which was some sort of shadow damage that took a quarter off my hit points. I grimaced, then nodded.

  “Again.”

  She hit me twice more, and the edges of my vision turned red.

  “Again.”

  Two seconds later I was in the Sillomar graveyard with my old friend the Grim Reaper, and the world was a silvery haze of black and white.

  Time to get to work.

  I ran through the graveyard and hustled back to the Shadow Bank as fast as I could. When I got there, the metal gate was closed.

  Dammit.

  I stood the
re for five minutes, but no customers came in or out.

  This SUCKS.

  When I reached the last minute of my ghost state, I ran as fast as I could back to the building I’d started from, went up the rear stairs to the roof, and jumped back in my body with only seconds to spare.

  “Any luck?” Arkova asked.

  “No,” I said. “Do it again.”

  And so began a grueling, faster-paced version of Groundhog’s Day.

  Every time I jumped back in my body, Arkova would kill me, and my ghost would run from the cemetery to the Shadow Bank. I literally did this once every six minutes for hours on end. The durability of my armor and weapons dropped away to nothing after just a few deaths, but that didn’t really matter – I wasn’t planning on fighting anybody up there on the roof. And it made it that much easier for Arkova to kill me. Two shots and I was done.

  The good news was that the gate opened up occasionally, and I was able to slip inside the bank.

  I spent as much time as possible racing through the hallways, memorizing numbers, and figuring out which clients were connected to which rooms. I kept track in my head – after all, there was no way to write it down as a ghost. Then I would relay everything back to Arkova when I resurrected, and she would write the details down in a notebook.

  Unfortunately, most of the time I got inside the bank, I couldn’t get back out – so I would have to resurrect in the graveyard with Resurrection Sickness. In the end, Arkova just came down to the graveyard and would kill me there to save me the time and effort of having to drag myself back up to the roof. When I died in the graveyard, I woke up in the graveyard – and she’d just go ahead and kill me again.

  Through the endless cycle of dying, high-speed haunting, and resurrection, there was an unexpected benefit: I was too busy to think about Jen. The constant pain, danger, and confusion kept my mind off of her.

  Well… for a good ten minutes at a time, anyway.

  All in all, we got good intel. It took three days of continually dying and being resurrected, but Oktar finally showed up, and I was able to slip in after him and his group. The elf manager opened a separate door for all five orcs – 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, all on the same side of the hallway. I burned those numbers into my memory. And when Oktar went into his room, I followed inside and watched him open gigantic safes and deposit diamonds big as grapefruits.

  I had hit the mother lode.

  I couldn’t get out of his room before I was sent back to the graveyard, but I had good news for Arkova when I resurrected.

  “I know where the orcs’ rooms are,” I said.

  She stared at me intensely. “Did you see anything?”

  “Only about $100 million worth of diamonds.”

  Her jaw fell open. “Are you sure?”

  “That they were diamonds, or that they were worth a hundred million dollars?”

  “The hundred million dollar part.”

  “Well… I guess I could be wrong.”

  Her face fell.

  I shrugged. “Could’ve been worth 200 million.”

  She didn’t even register that I was joking around. She just stood there and shook her head in amazement.

  “You knew they had a lot of money in there,” I said. “What’s with the shock?”

  “Well, we figured they had a lot of money… but we didn’t know. Does that make sense?”

  I knew exactly what she meant; I’d had experience with that phenomenon the second she’d told me she’d gotten the five million in gold.

  “It’s real now,” I said.

  “It’s real now,” she agreed quietly.

  “By the way, that was just one safe,” I said. “God only knows what they have in the other ones, not to mention the other rooms.”

  She exploded with excitement. “Do you realize what this means?! This could be HUGE! This could be put an enormous dent in their organization!”

  “Can’t you go to somebody with this information? Get a search warrant or something?”

  “No, for a lot of different reasons. One, we don’t have legal jurisdiction over the servers since they’re mostly in other countries. Two, there’s the argument that this video game is its own legal space which we don’t have jurisdiction in anyway. Three, the way we got the information wouldn’t stand up in court. And four, we can’t show that the money is coming from illegal deals. A lawyer would just argue that all we saw was a rich man putting money in his vault.”

  “So basically this is all still riding on me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “Just what I wanted to hear.”

  She killed me again immediately, but I wasn’t able to get back into the bank or go to the orcs’ rooms before they came out.

  Once they were out in the street, I snuck behind them for a while – but again, all I could hear were a bunch of hushed whispers all around me, and I couldn’t read lips. Since I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about, I quit following them and went back to casing the bank.

  At the end of the third day, Arkova asked, “Do you think you have enough information now?”

  “Yeah, I have enough. The only problem is what to do with it.”

  “You figure it out yet?”

  “I’ve got a plan forming.”

  “Forming?”

  “Just… let me work out the details tonight. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.”

  Arkova sighed in exasperation. “The deadline’s in a few days – after that, your case gets passed off to somebody else. You understand what that means, right?”

  “You don’t get your promotion?” I said with more than a little bitterness.

  “It means that I don’t have control over what happens to you anymore. Which means that whoever takes over the case might decide to just drop your ass in prison and abandon the whole thing.”

  “I don’t suppose that, based on all the information I’ve been able to give you about the orcs, that you’d consider letting me go.”

  “You’ve made a huge effort, I’ll give you that, but you still have to try to infiltrate them. That was the deal.”

  “Well,” I said as I lay there on my back in the graveyard, looking up at the stars and two moons in the videogame sky, “then I guess I’ve gotta try – or die trying.”

  54

  After Arkova logged out, I went back to Morningstar Inn. She had rented a room and given me the key. That way I didn’t have to show my face to the innkeeper, or worry about somebody trying to barge into a barricaded room I hadn’t rented.

  As I was moving through the bar towards the stairs, trying not to get jostled out of Stealth, I saw Slothfart.

  I froze as some pretty intense feelings came over me.

  I thought about going over and saying ‘Hello,’ but that would mean coming out of Stealth – and he would probably just tell me to screw off. And then orcs would show up, things would go to hell, and –

  Except something weird was going on.

  He seemed like he was looking around for me. Or someone. I actually snuck over close to him.

  He was talking to the bartender – the guy who had served us untold numbers of drinks over the last several weeks. “Hey, you seen that dead guy lately we used to hang out with? Bald, pasty, dressed all in black?”

  The bartender looked at him in silence.

  “Fine,” Slothfart sighed, then slapped several silver coins on the bar. “You seen my buddy or not?”

  I was struck by his use of the word ‘buddy.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was just using it because the bartender would know who I was that way… or if it meant the orc still considered me a friend.

  “No,” the bartender said as he pocketed the silver and turned away.

  Slothfart glared at the guy’s back, muttered, “Asshole,” then turned and walked out.

  My buddy…

  I had to know what this was all about.

  I followed the orc out of the inn and down the dark street.

  As
he was coming up on an alleyway, I snuck ahead of him, darted into the shadows, and came out of Stealth.

  “Slothfart,” I whispered.

  He jumped like someone had zapped him with an electric shock. He put his hand on his scimitar as he craned his neck and peered into the alley. “Jimmy, is that you?”

  I edged out of the alleyway just far enough for him to see me.

  “Holy shit, it IS you!” he chortled, then relaxed. “I’ve been looking for you – damn, what are the chances?”

  “Pretty good, since I followed you from inside the inn.”

  “What?” After a second, he finally made the connection – that I had been spying on him. He started chuckling again. “I forgot you’re a Rogue. And a pretty good one too, apparently.”

  “Thanks.”

  We stood there in awkward silence for a couple of seconds.

  “So…” I finally prompted him.

  “Got a minute?” Slothfart asked.

  “That depends. Are you going to try to kill me?”

  “What?! No! Why would you think that?!”

  “Last time we saw each other, things didn’t go so great. And now you’re walking around at night, asking people where I am, and you put your hand on your sword when you heard my voice earlier.”

  “Oh, yeah… right. Mixed signals. Gotcha.” He looked down, then up again shyly like a little kid asking for a favor. “Actually, uh… you wanna get a drink?”

  55

  Slothfart led me out of the city gates and into the countryside. I was in Stealth the entire way, or at least until we got well outside of the city.

  “Didn’t those orcs slap a death sentence on you, too, if they ever saw you again?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That’s why I came in at night. I was hoping they wouldn’t be around.”

  “You know they’re the Russian mob, right? They’re probably more active at night than they are in the daytime.”

  “Shit, I didn’t think of that…”

  “Why did you risk coming back in?”

  “Let me save that for when you see the other guys.”