I felt a heavy pair of hands on my shoulders. A man spoke to me in harsh tones. A baby cried. Molly. Molly cried. Where was Juliette? I shook my head, trying to shake the cobwebs. They’d unplugged my cradle and peeled it off my head. You’re not supposed to do that, I thought. You could really get scrambled that way.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said when I finally found my voice. My stomach lurched. Nausea swept over me. My head felt flayed open. I’d have a headache for a day, maybe more.
“Elijah Hoover,” a voice was saying. The male voice boomed with authority. “Elijah Hoover, do you hear me?” A pair of fingers snapped in front of my face. I tried to sit up in my rig, but the heavy hands held me down.
“Who are you? Where’s Juliette?”
“I’m here,” she called from the doorway. Her voice betrayed fear. I blinked. People filled the room. Big men and women. The crackle of radio chatter burst from the hallway. Juliette clutched Molly in her arms, who wailed.
“Elijah Hoover,” the voice repeated. “We have a warrant to search these premises.”
Part 1
Jonah Note 1
New Quest: The Chasm Troll’s Teat.
Having just given birth to a new brood of trollish warriors, the Chasm Troll Queen Mother needs your help. Her breastmilk, used to feed the troll larvae, is not coming in due to an infection. Find flesh of abbot fruit, have it converted to a salve, and rub the concoction on each of the queen’s infected nipples. If you do not complete this task in a timely manner, her nipples will become gangrenous and fall off. The starving troll larvae will devour her and will turn their efforts on the city of Harmony.
You have 24 hours to complete this task.
Reward for completing this task: You will earn the Chasm Troll Queen Mother’s undying loyalty and gain control of the trollish army.
Penalty for failing this task: The ravening troll horde will sweep upon Harmony, devouring everything in their path.
This is a Unique Quest!
This is a Kingdom Quest!
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Popper said, looking up from the table where he sat with Raj. They were tasting the cook’s newest attempt at making donuts. I’d tried one, and they were not good, but you couldn’t tell based on the look on Raj’s ferret-like face. The polecat shoved them in his mouth, one after another, squeaking with delight. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Gretchen stormed into the great room, Bruce Bruce on her heels. “Jonah,” she said, looking at me. “Jonah, tell us what you did.”
Alice the hippocorn looked up from her favorite spot by the massive, crackling fireplace to eye Bruce Bruce. She growled at the bear. Bruce Bruce growled back, the brown hair bristling on the mount’s back.
I reread the quest, dumbfounded. You dumbass. A 24-hour countdown appeared in the top right of my vision. Waldo had warned me not to mess around too much with the Kingdom Management menu. Hire workers, the AI had told me. Fix the damaged parts of the city, especially the wall. Recruit citizens. Do not attempt to build anything new. Do not venture into any of the deeper menus. They’re untested, and the results are unpredictable.
It’d been a single, alluring menu in the Factions tab of the Harmony subsection of the Kingdom Management screen. The system recommended we needed at least 300,000 recruits to effectively protect the city from the hobgoblin horde, and at least 500,000 recruits and 3,000 ships to defend from the burning fleet. With three weeks to go before the hobgoblins arrived—and no way to know for sure when the fleet would attack, we currently had only 125,000 arrowed citizen defenders, and every single one of them was spending their days working on the wall expansion.
The glowing button had read, “Mob Recruitment.”
I’d clicked on it, and a long list of monsters appeared from adlet to kobolds to zorigami. Most of the monsters, about three-fourths of them, were grayed out. I scrolled through, noticing a few of the non-grayed out monsters had the upside-down teardrop shape icon indicating a GPS marker. I hovered over the green icon, and a tooltip appeared: This mob currently resides within 25 kilometers of Harmony. The monster type was Chasm Troll: Melee.
I figured just clicking on it wouldn’t do anything. Usually, when you clicked on something that caused an action, you would get an Are You Sure? This time, however, that didn’t happen. I’d just wanted to see what it said, not actually initiate anything.
“Well,” I said, hastily closing the window. “Uh, well. The good news is, I found a way to hire more soldiers for the defense.”
“What the hell is an abbot fruit?” Popper asked. “I never heard of it.”
“An abbot fruit is a plant that only grows on the other side of the world,” Keta said, striding into the room. Larissa, the captain of the guard and widow of the now-dead King Bartholomew clomped noisily into the room after her. The large, female human looked alarmed, which was a bad sign. The NPC never looked alarmed.
“Your majesty,” Larissa said. “My air guard reports that a large crevice has appeared in the Aurora neighborhood of the city, just northeast of here. The last time this happened, we’d discovered an entire stench of trolls living in the caverns below. I request permission to lead the guard and a platoon of the new recruits to exterminate these vermin before they pour into the city.”
“That was fast,” Popper muttered.
“Not yet,” I said. “We have twenty-four hours before they attack.”
“How do you know this?” Larissa asked. “And if that is so, then now is the best time to attack.”
If we sent the guard in there now, it’d probably be disastrous. I was still relatively new to this game, but I knew by now shortcuts like that had a way of backfiring. The game liked it when you solved quests in unusual ways, but when you tried to cheat your way through things, the results were usually…unexpected.
I looked at Larissa. The NPC stood about six and a half feet tall, taller even than Gretchen. She kept her black hair cropped short, and a long scar ran down the left side of her face. She held Native American features, and Gretchen said the woman closely resembled the wife of Bart Hughes, the founder of Dominion of Blades, though the real-life version wasn’t nearly that tall. I’d never seen Larissa without her gleaming plate metal armor, though she never wore the helmet within the castle. The first time I’d seen her, she’d been killed when her flying drake had been turned undead by an angel horror. She’d plummeted to the ocean below. She’d regenerated after I had killed her husband, King Bartholomew in the arena. Her drake, however, still hadn’t come back.
Like Keta and Larus, she’d shown me no ill-will, even though I’d effectively staged a coup, resulting in the death of her husband. The entire court all treated me like I’d been king the whole time.
The same couldn’t be said for how they treated Gretchen and Popper. Keta, especially, treated them both with open contempt. Only after I ordered the guards and the rest of the court to address my companions with deference did the tensions calm down. Keta accomplished it by just pretending the other two weren’t there.
I ignored the question from Larissa. “We need to find this abbot fruit,” I said. “We need to make it into a salve.”
Larus, the seagull-like royal steward flapped into the room, coming to a landing on the table. His feathers remained ruffled. The seagull hated it when things in his city were out of place.
“Abbot fruit?” Larus said. “That is a rare fruit indeed.”
“You know what, fuck it,” Popper said. “This is a good thing. I say we pull out of the city now before the trolls attack. We can’t protect this place. Let’s take the money we have, steal all the silverware we can pawn, and shack up with the moon aurics in one of their floating cities. That way your curse won’t attract any undead the aurics can’t handle. If Harmony gets invaded by troll larvae, so damn what? Let the hobgoblins and primordials fight them when they get here. This place is as cold as a snowman’s ball sack. It’s summer, and it’s still cold as shit.”
“Yeah
,” Alice added, whose new permanent spot was in front of the fire in the great room. “I don’t like the cold.” She’d stopped sleeping in the stables despite the stablemaster’s best efforts to keep her happy.
“You know the moon aurics fly over the arctic circle,” Gretchen said. “And I’m not so sure they’d let Alice up in one of their cities.”
“Yi let me on her boat,” Alice said.
“Yi is gone. We don’t know where she is,” Gretchen said.
Indeed, Yi had disappeared immediately after we won the tournament. I had a pretty good idea where she was now. She’d gone south to Los Angeles, the city of Grandeur here, to talk to the good Rector Smallthunder.
“I can’t abandon the city,” I said. “You know I can’t.” I loved the idea of just running and finding someplace safe to hide until my curse dissipated. But I couldn’t. If I lost this city, then I would lose this castle. If I lost the castle, I’d lose both the free zone that kept my curse at bay and my access to the room where I could touch the glowing stone globe and talk to Waldo. We needed the AI to point us to the crew members. As soon as we dealt with the two armies and the Sandra the Learnt kidnapping, Castle Harmony would be the training grounds for The Hibiscus’s new crew. Once they were trained, Waldo would initiate the wake-up sequence for everyone involved, and they would rush to the cockpit and correct the starship’s failing orbit in the minutes we had left. It was the only hope we had.
“Jonah,” Popper said. “You’ve done your best. Every day, your soldiers ride out further and arrow more citizens for the upcoming fight. It’s not going to be enough. We all know it. We tried, but it’s just not going to work. And now this? Do you know what a chasm troll larva can do? If we stay, we’re going to die.”
I had no idea what a chasm troll was. It didn’t sound pleasant. “We just need to find some of this abbot fruit, and then those things will fight for us.”
“I’ve done a lot of whacked-out shit these past few weeks,” Popper said. “Crazy, soul-wrenching things. I am stuck, probably forever, in the body of a little girl. I’ve helped slaughter a whole village of gnomes. Gnomes who turned out to be innocent, mind you. And then I abandoned their children. I was melted by a chinchilla who shot acid out of its ass. I talked a kid into blowing up a brothel filled with innocent NPCs using illegal explosives. I have done all of these things because that’s what we’ve had to do to survive.” He jabbed his finger at me. “But every man has a goddamned line. And let me tell you, I have found that line. You want to know what that line is, Jonah? It’s rubbing lotion on the infected nipples of a troll. That is some sick fucking shit, and it’s not going to happen.”
“Oh quit being such a baby,” I said. “I’ll rub the lotion on the nipples.”
“That’s what you say now, but who always ends up having to do the dirty work? Just like last week when we were scouting those drainage tunnels for the wall expansion. ‘Oh, I know I said I’d go in there, but I can’t fit. Raj isn’t here. Popper, why don’t you crawl into that hole and see where it comes out.’ That thing bit my arm off, Jonah. It literally ate my arm like it was a goddamned Twizzler.” He waved his now-healed arm in the air.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “Are you still whining about that?”
“Guys, we have to find this salve first,” Gretchen said, raising her hand. “This is serious. If we’re going to do this, we have to act quickly.”
Popper took a deep breath. “No, I’m serious, too. We’ve talked about this. Maybe it’s time.”
Gretchen put her hand on Popper’s shoulder. “Let’s give it a shot first. If it starts to look like we aren’t going to stop the trolls, then we initiate our escape plan.”
Popper shook his head, but he stopped talking.
“Okay,” I said, jumping into action. “Larus, you fly to the Light Cleric guild and see if they have any of this abbot fruit stuff on hand. Popper, go to our emo-tong friends and ask them the same thing. I will find some druids and also ask around. Even if they don’t have it, we’ll ask them if they can make a salve out of it if we brought them some. Keta, prepare a portal scroll in case we come up empty. We’ll have to zap over to wherever these things grow. Larissa, set up a perimeter around the crevice. We don’t want anyone going in. If anything comes out, don’t attack it unless it attacks first. Understand?”
The NPCs, who’d been standing by glassy-eyed while we talked game mechanics all hopped into action at my orders. Larus flapped off complaining about being an errand boy. I met Keta’s questioning eyes as she left the room. I gave her a quick nod.
I looked at Gretchen. “I need you to stick to your original plan. How long do you think it will take?”
“Bruce Bruce and I were headed out to Hiram Island,” Gretchen said. “I wasn’t expecting to be back until after dark, but I’ll try to be quicker.”
Alice looked up from her spot by the fire and growled at the sound of the bear’s name. Bruce Bruce stuck his tongue out at the hippocorn. Alice looked ready to leap up from her spot and spear the bear in the face.
I nodded. I’d put Gretchen in charge of investigating the Sandra the Learnt disappearance, and she’d taken to it right away. She’d only been working on it for a few days, but she’d already found numerous clues. If we were going to abandon the city, getting this done now was crucial.
“Wait, where are you going?” Popper asked Gretchen.
“Okay, so remember how Sandra was supposedly kidnapped while she was out visiting family? Well, I found where her family lives, and I’m going out there to talk to them. They live in a warren on that island in the middle of Lake Aberdeen.”
“A warren? I thought she was human,” Popper said.
“She’s not,” Gretchen said. “She’s a polecat, like Raj.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Popper said. “There’s a picture of her in her office, and she is clearly human.”
“He’s right,” I said.
Popper and I had ransacked the woman’s office looking for clues. None of the NPC staffers had anything to say about her beyond the basics. She came to work every morning, did her work—whatever the hell a royal cartographer did day in and out—and left. A few had mentioned that she’d been “kidnapped and taken over the ocean,” but none of them seemed to know where they’d heard that from. We didn’t know if it was just rumor, bad programming, or an actual clue.
Gretchen nodded. “That’s what you were supposed to think. This whole quest is set up to be a mystery. Her office is in the first, public ring of the castle, and they want you to go in there and look around and to see that picture.”
“The picture has her name under it,” I said.
“The picture actually says, ‘Sandra the Learned’ with an ‘ed’ at the end, not a ‘t.’ I looked her up, and the ed version is some obscure cartographer from the past. The whole thing was thrown in there as a red herring.”
“Well, shit,” Popper said. “Look at the big brain on Gretchen! Jonah here is gonna have to name you chief investigator extraordinaire.”
“What do you want Raj to do?” the young polecat asked. “Do you still want me to check on the workers today at the wall?”
I hesitated. We’d been worried when we moved the little street kid from Valisa to Harmony, but he’d mixed right in. We’d used him numerous times already to find certain labor leaders who wouldn’t go on strike right away, or whose crews wouldn’t suffer from “accidents” while working on our developments. The trade unions and gangs were the real leaders of this city, and now that the 50-mile wall project was in full swing, Raj’s help was crucial.
But if we did have to flee the city, we’d need Raj with us. The kid had a tendency to stray. He spent a lot of time at the beach. He wore several pouches on the inside of his vest, all filled with sand and seashells. The kid would spend all day wandering the beaches if we let him. I didn’t want to have to go chasing after him.
“Not today, buddy. You can either stay in the castle or go with one of us, but I don’t
want you wandering. Things might start moving quickly.”
“Okay, King Jonah.”
“Raj shall travel with us,” Bruce Bruce the bear declared, speaking for the first time. The Russian-accented mount tended to shout all his words. “Raj needs to learn how to be strong. How to fight! Not spend his day pulling dead rats off the horn of this overweight water pig.”
“Oh now you said it,” Alice said, scrambling to her feet. “Motherfucker, I’m going to…”
“Stop,” I bellowed as Alice rushed toward the bear, who had slinked back to stand behind Gretchen. Bruce Bruce was large, but Alice was bigger.
She stopped her charge but issued a low, constant growl. Popper stood from the table to put a hand on her side. The enraged hippocorn breathed heavily.
Gretchen had found Bruce Bruce in the royal stables, and he was quickly becoming her favorite mount. The bear was a great fighter—a rare quality for a mount—and moved quickly. Eli, the donkey she’d ridden all the way here from Icardi, remained in the stables, spending his days happily eating hay. I rode Jenny whenever I went out, but she was not fast and was not really a suitable mount anymore. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to give her up.
Bruce Bruce was not a pet like Alice was. Bears were stubborn, and in order to bond with a bear, you had to fight alongside them for a long time before you could make the transformation. While Alice was considered an Epic mount, Bruce Bruce was merely Uncommon. Still, the bear was perfect for Gretchen’s needs. The only problem was that he simply didn’t get along with Alice. Whenever they were in the same room, they spent the entire time trading insults until Alice was goaded into attacking.
It was all because of the twin unicorns, also from the royal stables. They hadn’t gotten along with Alice, either, so we’d had them moved to the white jacket stables on the other side of the castle grounds. Bruce Bruce had been good friends with the unicorns and had taken their banishment personally.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 2
