Ripcord Online: (LitRPG Series Book 1)

by Brian Simons

  I imprisoned others behind bamboo walls, hoping the woody plants would hold them off while I thought of a next move.

  Unfortunately, none of that magic was free. I had spent 120 MP on cacti, ivy, and other plants, leaving me with only 100. I had used more than half of my mojo on the worker drones and still hadn’t caught sight of their boss yet.

  A few determined drones had found gaps in the bamboo and pushed their arms through the shoots, grasping at me from yards away as they continued to cry their wretched unending sobs.

  I took another step back, even though I was a safe distance from them.

  The players I had trapped had run quickly, not weighed down by heavy weapons or armor. Two sad forms shambled onto the beach now from the rearguard. One was a man in a black suit with a long, narrow sword in his hand.

  The other was a woman holding a black ball of glowing energy in one palm and dressed in gleaming black platemail. It was the wrong armor for her class. Not that anything about the Stricken seemed right, and as someone still dressed like Peter Pan, I wasn’t in much of a position to judge her sartorial choices.

  The woman threw the glowing ball of magic at me and wailed.

  I dodged to the side, but not quickly enough. The burning heat of her spell seared into my leg and singed 40 HP from my meter. I was down to 220 just like that. I should have realized her magic might be fire. The Stricken dripped with unnatural black color, but it was comprised of players with every class under the sun. She could wield blue magic, even white, and it would look black as night in her hands.

  Another fireball crackled through the air as the melee fighter converged on me. I dove into the sand and out of harm’s way, pulling my sword from my bag and rolling onto my back. I lifted my wooden blade just as his saber slammed into my weapon. I held the suited swordsman at bay and kicked him in the crotch to force him off of me.

  Back on my feet, I raised my sword against another evil ball of flame from the fire mage, my æmberwood blade absorbing the heat. The handle warmed only slightly after her attack.

  Æmberwood. My natural defense against flames of all colors. I grew a massive æmberwood tree between us both and turned my attention to the swordsman. Tears streamed down his face as he approached, brandishing his sword through the air with the finesse of an Olympic fencer. It was like he was going to slice me and dice me, but he felt really bad about it.

  I conjured two earth treants and set them loose. They turned into a frenzy of branches as they pounced on him with pinwheeling arms. The sword fighter’s weapon tangled in the treants’ leafy bodies and he fell under the weight of the tree monsters. I trusted my bark-skinned familiars to take care of him for the time being.

  No sooner did I turn to find the fire mage than a torrent of fire fell on me from above, drenching me in black-hot heat like a flame-throwing waterfall. I rolled to the side as the smell of hardened æmber resin filled the air. Another 42 HP vanished from my meter. I filled my fists with silverthorn, but each sharp bullet I threw from the plant ricocheted from the mage’s metal armor without harm.

  I kicked backwards in the sand, struggling to find my feet while she ambled toward me. She wiped tears from her face and ran a hand through her long black hair, gripping it in her fingers as if she would tear the strands from her scalp.

  The few moments she spent distracted by despair were all I needed. I grew a few tendrils of spring ivy right from the æmberwood’s trunk and snaked them around her wrists and her ankles, pulling her body against the tree’s trunk as the ivy coiled tight. She railed against the tethers, but couldn’t break away.

  Her whole body lit up in flame in an attempt to burn the vines from her, but I regrew them in place as quickly as she could burn through them. It was a surefire way to deplete myself of mana, but I needed her in place for what came next.

  Mulch. If it worked like I hoped it did, it would turn that tree into her temporary burial ground. I used my newest skill to turn the regal æmberwood into soil and wood chips, winnowing down the leaves and the bark into a massive mound of dirt that swallowed her whole. Good luck burning your way out of those æmberwood chips, I thought.

  Then I turned toward the swordsman. He had his saber through the heart of one leafy brawler. The other lay in a heap by his side. He pulled his sword free and aimed it at me.

  I readied my wooden katana as he charged at me, and I swatted his blade upward. He pressed his sword arm against mine, bringing his face within inches of my own.

  He was a walking corpse of a person. I wanted to push his body away from my own as forcefully as possible and get away. His skin was so pallid, and his eyes so black, that I almost didn’t recognize him.

  “Alonso?” I asked. So he hadn’t gotten away after the Stricken took his compound by storm. I wondered how many other workers were conscripted into the Stricken’s ranks, and how many were simply left for dead.

  While I was busy searching his face, he brought up his foot and kicked me in the stomach, forcing me onto my back in the sand.

  “Alonso, stop!” I pleaded. “You don’t have to do this, you’re under his control!”

  The former drug lord lifted his blade and spun it downward. His once-beige suit flapped in the island wind like the black flag of a pirated ship. It was fitting. The Stricken had pirated his soul. He was lost at sea, awash in the inky black magic of a powerful “griefer,” as Pickman had once called him.

  He was also about to stab me in the heart like he had done to my poor treants. I rolled to the side as he buried his sword hilt-deep in the sand instead.

  Alonso, or what was left of him, tugged at his weapon. I kicked him in the side, pushing him away from the saber and depriving the sword fighter of his best weapon. He took a swing at me but missed, punching into the air and losing his footing.

  He fell to his knees and sobbed. I walked up to him, holding my sword ready. “Alonso?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, torment scrawled across his face. He was in there, somewhere, and he desperately wanted to stop fighting the Stricken’s battles for him.

  Then he ground his teeth and reached his hands up, grabbing my own hands where they held my katana. If he couldn’t retrieve his own sword, he’d try to steal mine.

  I hated Alonso for what he did to me, for the drug he pushed, for the indifference he showed toward other people. I didn’t hate him enough to kill him though.

  I twisted my arms against Alonso’s grip to pry my sword out of his hands, then I put it into my inventory bag. I lunged at Alonso and wrestled with him in the sand. Just behind his head, I Grew a small, familiar plant. It’s blue-tinged leaves unfurled from its twiggy branches with thin brown veins. It was lite, or at least a variant of it.

  I reached up and snatched a few leaves from the plant and pressed them into Alonso’s face. “This is for your own good,” I said.

  I expected resistance. I expected him to bite my finger. Instead, he stilled for a moment. A tear ran down his cheek. He opened his mouth and accepted the lite.

  This wasn’t the hemlock-infused deathweed I had crafted in his mansion. This was infused with valerian root to help the man finally get some rest. He whimpered for a few moments before relaxing against the beach and falling into the tranquil embrace of sleep.

  I tried to raise a spring ivy rope to keep him leashed to the sand just in case, but nothing happened.

  I was out of MP.

  I spun around, suddenly aware of the hundreds of voices crying out all around me. I couldn’t see all of their faces, but I heard them, whimpering and moaning from the bamboo cages and banyan prisons I had erected.

  “I know it,” a man said, stepping out from behind one of the banyans. He didn’t charge at me or raise a hand the way the others did on instinct. His jet black eyes and tightly closed mouth set him apart from them. It was him, the Stricken. The black mage that swept these other players up in a wave of grief.

  “I know the feeling you have,” he said. “I have sensed it from the time you first set f
oot here, since that first time in the shanty town outside of Cortina.”

  I said nothing as I walked backward, digging my heels into wet sand as I approached the lapping water behind me.

  “You run from your sadness,” he said. “I did that too. Until I realized that this world is saddest alone. Let us be sad together. Bask in the company of my misery. Channel your grief through me and let us share it with others so they too know how badly we hurt.”

  “No,” I said, but I felt my resolve faltering. The black cloud emanating from the bodies of the damned seemed to touch me, drain me. He was the ultimate harbinger, using his dark magic to aggrieve me in ways a harbinger would only dream of. Harbingers told of others’ deaths. The Stricken was convincing me to welcome my own.

  His eyes were polished stones devoid of light. They seemed to cast shadows through the air, locking onto my own. “We can be together at last,” he said. “You, and me, and her.”

  My lip quivered. “Her?” I couldn’t bear to process what he meant.

  “The widow to your widower,” he said, “two soulmates both dead. Mourn the loss of the lives you wanted with me, and help me mourn my own.”

  I shook my head vigorously.

  “There is a place for you here, in my eternal procession,” he said.

  I continued to shake my head. I couldn’t let this happen.

  “It breaks my heart to force you,” he said, “but if I must…”

  With a flick of his wrist I watched my shadow elongate on the beach. Its angle was unnatural, tilting into the sun instead of away from it. My shadow lifted a leg on its own, and then my leg followed, a puppet to my own shade.

  “Stop!” I yelled. I thought of my hand, attempting to fill it with silverthorn, but I had forgotten how empty my mana meter was. I’d need to drink my MP potion, but I had lost control of my limbs.

  Tears streamed down the Stricken’s placid face as his army howled behind him. I walked against my will, stepping over a sleeping swordsman and traipsing up a mound of mulch that held down an enthralled fire mage.

  Sadness crept into my bones from the Stricken’s dark magic, but I had to resist. I would never find Nadine, never save her if I let this melancholy mage defeat me. I forced my body to turn back toward him, breaking contact with the shadow that impelled me forward.

  The shade kept walking without me. “Enough!” I yelled. “If you have her, let her go and leave this place! Let them all go! They don’t deserve this, they deserve a chance to be happy.”

  The Stricken winced at the word happy. “We aren’t programmed for that anymore,” he said. He hung his head low and held his hand out, forcing a beam of dark energy at me that forced me into the air as it thrust me backward.

  I slammed into the bamboo wall I had erected. Gray hands grabbed furiously at me between green poles. Long nails dug into my shoulders, my face, my legs, all taking precious health points away. I couldn’t swat them away fast enough. With each health point I lost, I felt myself lose my will to resist. I was being whittled down to nothing.

  He walked toward me almost casually, a shadowy man with translucent skin. The bamboo started to rot as he approached. I took out my potion and drank. The thick golden tincture was sweet and smooth, and I felt a warm energy filter through my bones. My MP meter shot back up, even as my HP was gradually diminishing at the hands of the Stricken’s gray army.

  I raised another wall of bamboo in front of the first, forcing the groping hands of the half-dead back into their woody cages.

  Silver blades flew through the air as I pumped one fistful of silverthorn after another. Each hit lowered his HP bar, little by little.

  When he was within striking range, I yanked my sword from my inventory bag. I need a proper scabbard, I thought, hoping it wasn’t wishful thinking to envision a future for myself where I wasn’t under the Stricken’s control.

  He raised a hand toward me and I slashed my sword at him, sinking the blade into his arm and drawing blood, the first red I had seen among any of the Stricken’s brood. I lifted my sword again, but he jumped back and erupted in a burst of black flame.

  His skin turned black as pitch. He didn’t just radiate darkness now, he started to suck in all of the light like a black hole. I shot another round of silverthorn toward him, but this time they landed on him like snowflakes. He had toughened up his skin somehow.

  I wondered how many mana points he could run through before running dry so I squinted at him for a moment. He was a Level 128 Black Mage. I didn’t even know levels could go into the triple digits. He must have enough mana to last for days. My heart sank.

  He plunged his hands into the sand and I watched all of the plants around us begin to wither. The palms and bushes, the beautiful flowers, then the bamboo and banyan. They grew dark with rot and then folded like wet newspaper.

  I could breathe life into the land, but his power of death would always overshadow it. Alonso roused from his sleep with a moan, and I saw a hand burst from beneath the mound of æmberwood mulch. Then the gray bodies of all the players I had previously trapped came rushing toward me.

  I ran from them and toward him, the black-hearted man that brought misery to humanity’s second chance. I ran my sword straight toward his chest but he grabbed my blade with both hands and stopped me abruptly.

  Still holding the katana’s handle, I slid to the ground, landing at his feet. His dark attendants swirled around us. The sad forms of withered players ran in circles a few feet away, crying out in torment as they waited for me to join their retinue.

  I tried to raise spring ivy, but he killed it as soon as it poked from the sand. I gazed up at the dark robes covering his chest and activated Grow, envisioning a cactus swelling inside his evil heart.

  He placed a hand over his chest. I felt him beat my magic back, killing my budding cactus before it was more than a thought in my head. It didn’t matter what I grew, he was showing me. Death was more inevitable than life.

  Maybe if I had been stronger and spent one more afternoon in Cortina I’d be a level ahead. I could yank the trees from the earth and bludgeon him dead. I could climb a magic beanstalk into the stars. Here I was, strong enough to blast a sea monster to smithereens but it still wasn’t enough.

  I had little time to decide what to do. Was it worse to die or to be absorbed into the Stricken’s company of misery? If there were ever a time to poison myself, this would be it. But I couldn’t do it. Suicide wasn’t something I had in me.

  I had MP left, but I didn’t have enough HP to last this fight. All the MP in the world meant nothing without a heal spell that could pump vigor and strength back into my bones. I would die here on this shore.

  The Stricken’s horde came closer, reaching out for my pale peach flesh with their ashen fingers.

  Perhaps I could evade death a moment longer. I thought back to my wedding day, the delicate pink petals fluttering in the wind. I invited a cherry blossom to sprout beneath me, with all of my remaining MP. I couldn’t defeat the Stricken, not really, but I could control my last moments. I wanted them to be a beautiful tribute to my wife.

  The tree shot from the ground, catching me between two branches where they forked from the trunk. I toppled forward, my face mere inches from the people clawing at the base of the tree. Long branches wilted toward the ground, grazing against our heads. Then the tree burst into bloom, light pink flowers erupting from their buds.

  I stared forward, as my HP bar ran low. The constant clawing of desperate hands would drag me down into an abyss from which I would never return. I watched my hands grow pale, then gray. I felt the sadness they all cried out.

  The emptiness of loss, the twisting agony of a heart cut in half, the painful uncertainty of a future without the ones we hold dear. I felt all of their sorrow. Everyone they had lost, I had lost. I opened my mouth to let out a cry as my life drained away.

  The woman in front of me was crying too. I looked into her black eyes, ringed with thin slivers of iris. It was more than I ha
d seen in any of the other faces in that dark crowd. A flash of pink glinted in her eye as a petal fell from the tree.

  Then her lips lost their dull grayness and took up a maroon color, then an almost-red. Her cheeks flickered with a splash of life.

  “Caleb?” she said, as if emerging form a dream.

  I had run from the Stricken for so long, when it concealed the very person I had hoped to find. But I was too far gone, and she was a lost soul too late to be found. In a moment I would join her in misery and wander Ripcord’s digital terrain with her, but apart from her, two sad souls separated by a black mage’s curse.

  “Caleb!” She said it again. Her brown irises constricted, her lips burst into full color. She raised her hands and grabbed two handfuls of the cherry blossom’s wispy branches, already losing the gray that had enveloped her.