“What sort of monsters are in Castle Six?” Jonah asked.
Oliver shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Speaking of Chief Musa,” I said. “Do you know where he might be hiding? Or Sandra the Learnt?”
The platypus man shook his head. “That wombat and two of his companions each took my best spider mounts and disappeared into Castellane when those bloody wankers took over the castle. They meant to bring the polecat with them, but one of those giant red buggers plucked her right off the spider as they fled. Later I found the spiders wandering around the parks south of here.”
“Okay,” I said, looking up into the darkening sky. “Here’s the plan. I’ve ordered all the mercenaries from Quibou to get their asses into the city, and to bring all the supplies they can carry. Granger and Nale will go out to meet them and guide them off the path so they don’t accidentally trigger anything. We’ll try to get some sleep, and tomorrow we’ll figure out what we’re going to do about Prince Kankan. We’ll get some of these mercenaries trained in how to use the towers, and we’ll start the process of catching monsters for the traps.”
Gretchen raised an eyebrow. “You’re really taking to this Regent Poppy thing.”
I grunted. “I’m the only one who can be doing it.”
Jonah added, “I’d like to spend some time playing around in the defense cockpit. I’m hoping to figure out how to get Spritz trained up so we can move the towers around. Did you look at her experience? She didn’t go up at all for helping to kill those hobgoblins. It looks like she only levels by building things.”
“We also need to make sure Jonah is in the castle by 9:58,” Gretchen said. “I don’t know if Riot Castle has the same magic protection as Castle Harmony, but we need to find out right away. What day of the curse are we on?”
“Sixty-six,” Jonah said.
That’s it? I thought. That meant we’d been awake in this damn game for just about two months. It seemed so much longer.
“So every undead within 6,600 meters…” Gretchen said, calculating. “That’s 4.1 miles. I need to look at the map of the spiral, but I’m pretty sure the Catacombs are closer than that. We might have to deal with a couple hundred skellies in a few hours.”
I nodded. There was so much to do. We needed to find sappers. We needed to promote some NPCs and send them out to the neighboring towns to arrow everyone they could find. We needed to find Chief Musa and Sandra the Learnt. We needed to keep Jonah safe. We had to talk to Bingo and figure out what he learned at the Menagerie. We needed to explore Fort Bloodgasm and see what resources were available here in the castle. We needed to explore Castellane, and we needed to check out this new church as well.
Alice was talking to me, but I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts it took me a minute to realize it.
“…these little sausages, and they taste so good. Bruce Bruce tried to eat five, but Oliver said we could only each have four. None of the other mounts got any, and I could tell they were mad, especially the scorpion. That thing doesn’t talk anyway, and she just wants to attack us. Bruce Bruce is afraid of her, but I’m not. Some of the other mounts seem nice. Not the spiders. They kind of freak me out. He has an iguana in there named Smelly Pierre, but I took a good sniff, and he didn’t really…”
She continued like that while we walked back into the castle. I realized suddenly I was exhausted. I checked the time, and it was just past 8 P.M.. So much had happened today. My exhaustion level was perilously low, 10 percent. If I didn’t sleep soon, I’d end up collapsing whether I wanted to or not. Once I hit 9 percent exhaustion, I’d receive a one-point debuff to all my main stats. Two points at 5 percent. At zero, I’d have a 50/50 chance of either dropping dead or falling unconscious for 10 hours straight.
“Let’s all get an hour and a half before we do anything else,” I said. That would kick my exhaustion up to 40 percent. “We’ll wake up at 9:30, see if Jonah’s curse triggers. If anything is summoned, we’ll figure out what to do from there.” A row of hobgoblin-sized bedrooms stood one after another just outside the defense cockpit. I knew there were likely better, more opulent quarters somewhere in this massive castle, but we’d have to explore for them tomorrow.
Gretchen pointed out we couldn’t all go to sleep at once in case Prince Kankan and his nine remaining soldiers decided to emerge from their castle. She agreed to take the first watch. She’d catch up on her sleep later.
Jonah seemed just as exhausted as I was, and he barely said anything as he took a room. I took the next one down, with Alice parking herself just outside. She couldn’t fit through the door. She circled a few times and decided she couldn’t get comfortable.
“Can I go back out to the stables? He has room out there,” she asked through the open doorway.
I smiled. “Of course.”
“Oh boy,” she muttered excitedly and bounded away, but not before whispering something to Bruce Bruce who also rushed back outside.
I laid down on the bed and closed my eyes, only to receive an unexpected notification.
Warning! Sleep is unavailable while a spiral wave is active.
“Fuck!” I said, bolting upright.
Jonah appeared at my door. He held a pair of yellow stamina potions. “No rest for the wicked, huh?”
Popper Note 15
The thing with stamina potions was you could only take two before the side effects started to fuck with you. A single drink from one of the expensive potions brought your exhaustion back up to 100%. If you took a second without sleeping, it’d only knock you up to 75%. A third potion would only bring you to 25% and imbue you with a “Potion Sickness” debuff. Your hands would start to shake, and you’d get double vision. I’d only done three in a row once before, during the storm giant quest. I’d gotten separated from my party and hid in a closet, unable to sleep because of the Lightning Crawlers just outside. I had two magical items in my pack, and I didn’t want to lose them. I was up in a cloud, and there would be no corpse run to get my stuff back if I died. I would lose every unequipped item I had. I had to put my half-ogre into auto-pilot while I logged out, with strict instructions not to move or attack anything. Three days later, I was still stuck in the closet. I took my third stamina potion, and I instantly regretted it. My heart fluttered, and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I ended up equipping the unidentified magical gear, a tiara and a bracer, and stepping out to face the Lightning Crawlers alone, which was the equivalent of battling an oncoming train with a Jell-O-filled sock.
I was killed right away, of course. The bracer ended up being worthless. The tiara was cursed. It stuck painfully to my head and lowered my Magic Ability stat by two. It also showered me with pink sparkles when I walked. I couldn’t afford to get it removed for almost a week. Monobrow Sam thought it was the funniest shit he’d ever seen.
Anyway, the moment I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep as long as Prince Kankan was holed up in that castle, I knew we’d have to go haul his ass out right away. I was ready to get him out right then and there, but Jonah and Gretchen both convinced me to wait for morning.
Bingo still hadn’t returned, but he insisted he’d be back as soon as he was done “negotiating,” whatever that meant. He also added, worryingly, that Chauncey was now with him at the Menagerie. He didn’t elaborate why.
Gretchen, Jonah, and I found a balcony that faced north, overlooking the city. We ventured outside into the cool air. We still had a half hour before Jonah’s curse cycled. I was hopeful that the castle’s magic protection would block the curse, just like it did at Castle Harmony, but we needed to be ready, just in case. The skeletons would pour out of the Catacombs and shamble their way toward the island. That was the last thing we needed. Would the automatic spiral defenses even work against the skeletons? And if there were any other undead beasts roaming freely in the city…
I sighed. It was always something, wasn’t it?
Lights dotted the giant metropolis, mostly along the tops of the buildings. The remaining
hobgoblins, I realized. I knew the population had been decimated by starvation, but if the lights were any indication, several thousand still remained.
I wondered if they were staring back at us now, wondering what to do about the human usurpers in their castle.
“It’s just a game,” Jonah whispered, as if his thoughts mirrored my own.
“I forget sometimes,” I said. Sometimes I don’t want to remember.
Thinking of that made me wonder on the nature of our situation. I’d been deliberately not thinking about why we were really here for so long, my brain rebelled against reality. I didn’t want to face the real world because facing the real world made me think of things I didn’t want to think about.
“So, I don’t understand what Waldo does and doesn’t know,” I said, looking over the twinkling lights of Castellane. “I think he knew that Bingo had been here before. That’s why he suggested I take him with me. He seems to know everything about us and what we’ve done so far in the game. He knew the hobgoblin army was marching on Harmony before we did. But he didn’t know that Sandra the Learnt was here. Or was here at least. He didn’t know Keta was planning on betraying us. Why is that? Are we sure he’s, I don’t know, a good guy?”
Jonah seemed appalled at the idea. “I trust him. He saved me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. But you’re right. I don’t know why he knows what he does. I believe he can see and watch all the active players in the game, and he knows everything they know. But not so much with the NPCs.”
“He’s the life-control AI,” Gretchen said “All the stuff that happens here in the game gets here,” she tapped her own forehead, “and to get there, all the things we’re seeing and experiencing are filtered from the game into our neural cradle. Waldo is in charge of our life control rigs. So it would make sense that everything we see and hear, he can also see and hear. He has limited control over the game itself, but he has full access to the knowledge of all thirteen of us.”
The number of active players in the game had gone down by one when Daniels had been banished, but it had gone up by one a few days later. Waldo had said the number would fluctuate as others woke up or got themselves trapped in business centers.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, realization dawning. “If Waldo can see us, then he knows where the other active players are. Hey Jonah, maybe he can tell you where Isabella is.”
Jonah looked down and shuffled his foot, that way he always did when he was about to say something. “Yeah, so, there’s something I gotta tell you.”
“What is it?” Gretchen asked.
He sighed. “Waldo does know where all the active players are, but he won’t tell me until he’s supposedly ‘cleared’ them, whatever that means. There are a few folks out there who are members of the primary crew, the crew who were all awake and on station when the order to crash The Hibiscus supposedly came through. Smallthunder was one of them, as was Daniels and Isabella. He only wants us to contact these crew members as a last resort because he doesn’t trust any of them. He tried to talk me out of distributing that book, but I told him to suck it.”
This revelation wasn’t particularly surprising, though I wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t have told us this sooner. “Fuck those guys,” I said. “Especially your ex-girlfriend.”
“Wait, you finished your book?” Gretchen said.
“This morning, right after Popper left. I wrote the last part and dropped it off at the scriptorium guild.”
“You should probably have waited,” I said, waving my hand at the city in front of us. “This shit that’s happening now could probably go in there.”
Jonah scowled. “Didn’t we have this conversation already?”
I grunted. “I’ll let Raj write it for me.”
Jonah let out a stream of breath. “Anyway, there’s more. Remember how I told you that Keta had tested her Portal spell ability on me?”
“Jonah, what did you do?” Gretchen asked.
“Yeah, so I had a hunch. In the real world, there’s this small village in Nigeria called Akilaiya…”
“Nigeria?” I said. “Isn’t that in Africa? Where all the emails come from?”
“Yes,” Gretchen said, her voice cold.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Are you about to tell me you went to fucking Africa by yourself? Because if that’s what you’re about to tell me, fair warning, man, I’m about to kick your fucking ass.”
Jonah smiled sadly. “I went to Africa. Here in the game the country is named Rafingo, and the city of Akilaiya isn’t even there. It’s pure jungle.”
“There aren’t any major cities in Africa, except in the far north and the far south,” Gretchen said. “They were supposedly keeping it open for the next expansion. All the countries have just one capital city, very few quests, and that’s it. It’s all wild terrain and crazy monsters, like Bingo. The developers would beta test new creatures there in massive, inaccessible wildlife reserves. Only an absolute idiot would travel there by himself.”
Jonah nodded. “The village wasn’t there, but a small castle was, surrounded by a moat and guarded by…well, I don’t know what the hell that thing was. I didn’t actually see the castle as it was all thick jungle, but it was clear on the minimap. I zapped in about a quarter mile away, and I immediately knew I’d gone to the right place. I saw a single blue dot just outside the castle. It disappeared and reappeared a minute later with four others, a total of five people. There was also a big orange dot. I got a glimpse of it before I jumped back into the portal. It was like a mix between a brontosaurus and a pit bull.”
I looked at Gretchen, and it looked like she was coming to the same conclusion as me.
“Jonah,” I said. “You said this was about 120 miles from that big city, what was it?”
“Lagos. The capital of Nigeria.”
“Are there any other real-life big cities that are closer?” Gretchen asked.
“Why?” Jonah asked. “There’s Ibadan, which is pretty damn big, maybe four million people.”
“How far is that?” Gretchen asked.
“About 50 miles.”
“There has to be a closer city than that,” I said.
“Why?” Jonah repeated. “What’s going on?”
Gretchen answered. “You can’t just use the Portal spell to pop anywhere in the world. At its most basic level, you zap next to a travel beacon. The further away from the beacon, the stronger you have to be. When Keta opened the portal at the base of the Defender’s Door earlier, it was about a mile and a half away from the beacon in Quibou, and she made a big show about it being just on the edge of her ability to do so. Remember when she was going to zap us to get the abbot fruit? Before Raj saved the day, she’d picked a place near a large city.”
“We don’t know what the country borders in Africa look like,” Jonah said. “There’s dozens of medium-sized towns in that part of the world. You said each country has one city, right? Maybe there’s one nearby. There’s a bigger village to the west of there, about three miles away in the real world.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she’s full of shit, and she didn’t zap you to where she said she did.”
“Or,” Gretchen added, “She did, and she’s significantly more powerful than she let on.”
“Eh, she’s strong. But I still killed her in the tournament,” I said.
Gretchen grunted. “You didn’t kill her. You killed yourself and took her with you.”
Jonah seemed to brood on that. “I’m pretty sure that was Africa,” he said after a moment. “The country name, Rafingo, sounds Nigerian, and all the country and city names seem to take inspiration from their real-life locales. Plus the geography seemed correct to me.”
“And you didn’t see anything else on the map except that castle?” Gretchen asked. “What did Keta say when you asked her to zap you there?”
“There was nothing,” he said. “Except loads of pink dots in the jungle and these oryx monsters. As for Keta, I pointed out the spot
on my map. She took it, looked at it for a long time, and then just asked me when I wanted to go.”
“Oh shit,” I said, a notion forming. “That crazy bitch. She has your map now, right?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said.
“Did you ever actually finish it?” I asked.
“It’s pretty done,” Jonah said. “I keep doodling. When my map skill goes up, sometimes certain areas just pop in my head, and I add details. It’s actually kind of creepy. Did you know there’s a continent in the South Pacific? Centered right where the Pitcairn islands used to be, before they got wiped off the planet?”
“What’re you thinking?” Gretchen asked me.
“Remember what Yi said about his map?” I said. “That it was magic. And remember when we tried to look at it that one time? The system said it was an unidentified scroll.”
Gretchen’s eyes went wide. “It’s the map. Keta can use the map to cast Portal anywhere she wants.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “Without fast travel, someone with that map and the ability to cast Portal would be one of the most powerful motherfuckers in the world. Can you imagine?”
“That must be it,” Gretchen said. “That’s why she turned on us.”
“I thought we were friends,” Jonah said, fuming. “You think she did it to steal the map? Not the crown? Or do you think it was both? Can she actually take over the Dominion?”
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “I don’t think she can. I think they’ve set it up so only players and a few special NPCs have the ability to take over whole countries, like that Orochi demon and the hobgoblin warlord. If someone like Keta can do it, there’d be chaos. There’s a lot of evil NPCs in this game. Besides, you would’ve gotten a notification right away. You’re not in the castle, so someone can occupy it for 30 days and take over. The fact that hasn’t happened suggests Keta isn’t attempting a coup.”
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 22
