Trapped in a Video Game (Book 5)

by Dustin Brady

  Eric pulled out his reflective shield and winked at me. “Do your worst, Dark King!” he shouted.

  A black beam shot from the king’s finger and instantly melted both Eric and his shield into a puddle of black tar. Before the Dark King had time to turn his attention to me, Eric had already respawned in the pod and begun charging with his sword outstretched. “AHHHHHHHH.”

  BZZT.

  Another pile of black goo.

  The Dark King then pointed at the ground, which transformed into a lake of burning goo. I screamed and tried swimming toward the pod.

  “I’ve got you!” Eric yelled. He jumped into the goo and immediately died again. I flailed helplessly as my health meter dwindled. Finally, the Dark King put me out of my misery.

  BZZT.

  I slammed the pod door shut as soon as I reappeared, and I yelled at Eric, who was digging through his backpack for another weapon to waste on the Dark King. “Hey!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do that again!”

  “It’s fine; you just come back to life!”

  “We don’t have nearly enough weapons or XP to try this!”

  “You need 1,000 XP to enter the Palace of the Dark King,” Siri Lady interrupted helpfully.

  “See?” Eric said smugly. “Plenty of XP.”

  But Siri Lady wasn’t done with her report.

  “Current combined XP: 399.”

  Chapter 6

  Planet Ninjas and Sneaky Snakes

  “What?!” Eric exclaimed.

  I checked my XP—319. That was half of what it’d been before I died. “What are you at?”

  “It says I’m at 80, but that can’t be right.”

  I got a sick feeling in my stomach and did some math. “I think you lose half every time you die. You died three times.”

  “NOTHING CAN EVER BE EASY!”

  “Why don’t we play it safe now, huh?” I asked.

  Eric sulked.

  “Siri Lady, can you show us some easy planets?”

  “Displaying low-difficulty Warrior planets.”

  I scanned the buttons and tapped one on the top right.

  “Oh, come on,” Eric moaned.

  DING! Fall. WHOOSH.

  “Welcome to Planet Dumb Noobs with Wooden Swords!” Siri Lady chirped.

  Eric and I stepped out to a desert stretching as far as the eye could see. Also as far as the eye could see was an army of goofy-looking guys stumbling around with wooden swords in their hands. Many held their swords upside down. Eric and I got to work mowing them down with our glowing blue swords only to discover that each dumb noob gave us .0001 XP.

  “OK, I think we’re done here,” I said as a cross-eyed man clunked my head again and again with a shoe instead of a sword. “Why don’t you pick the next one?”

  “With pleasure!” Eric said. He ran back into the pod and started scanning Warrior planets. Finally, he said, “That one!”

  I squinted at the button, then recoiled in horror. “Absolutely not! What did we just talk about?!”

  “Set course for . . . ” Eric began.

  “No!”

  “We’ll go to . . . ”

  “STOP!”

  Eric huffed at me, then lunged for the button.

  DING! Fall. WHOOSH.

  “Welcome to the World of Wolf Spiders!”

  I screamed when I looked outside. It was so much worse than I’d imagined. Naturally, everything was covered in wolf spiders. But there were also these creatures that seemed to be a combination of the most terrifying parts of both wolves and spiders. When the door opened, a gang of them started charging.

  “CLOSE DOOR!” Eric screamed at Siri Lady. “CLOSE IT NOW!”

  From then on, we made a rule that we both had to agree on a planet before traveling to it.

  We started finding our groove on Planet Pirate. We spent six hours in that world sword-fighting peg-legged captains with bad breath, hunting for buried treasure, and joining in yo-ho-ho pirate songs. That experience was so much fun that we followed it up with a string of pirate-themed planets. There was Planet Pirates of the Caribbean (just like the movies, that one started out fun but got more disappointing the longer we stayed), Planet Piratez (I think this was an attempt to make pirates cool for today’s youth? There were strobe lights and pirate DJs. Didn’t really work for me), Planet Pirate Pets (we didn’t earn many XP points here, but we did come across some adorable bunnies wearing eye patches), and Continent Cannonball Run (we were disappointed to find that this had nothing to do with pirates, cannonballs, or running).

  Slowly but surely, we started building our XP. Along the way, we also discovered a few things:

  1. We could pack as much junk as we wanted into our backpacks without filling them up or making them heavy. At one point, I was carrying 23 different types of swords (including four that were on fire), brass boots, iron fists, magnetic mittens, four types of explosives (classic round bombs, sticks of TNT, flash grenades, and an exploding boomerang), a harmonica that put enemies to sleep, a trumpet that called fire from heaven, seven suits of armor, a flamethrower, a random scroll, two hover bikes, and an ice cream cake. Speaking of cake . . .

  2. Cake replenishes health in the Reubenverse! Take that, science!

  3. There’s no nighttime in the Reubenverse, at least, not a regular nighttime (I imagine it’s always nighttime in the Palace of the Dark King). Apparently, there’s no need for nighttime when no one needs to sleep. Eric and I planet-hopped for three days straight without getting even a little tired.

  Next, let me run through a few planets we visited on our journey:

  Planet Trampoline

  I love trampolines. I’ve always said that my first purchase once I get a job will be a trampoline. Planet Trampoline broke me of that real quick. I barfed twice and got my ankle caught in the springs once.

  Tiny Town

  We were big people in a tiny town. There was a tiny mayor and everything. It was cute. Then we sliced a house open thinking it was a treasure chest and felt bad.

  Planet Chocolate

  Definitely the low point of our journey. This planet seemed like a no-brainer cupcake. It was not. I mean, there were cupcakes (so many cupcakes), but the world itself was a nightmare of chocolate terrors. Chocolate lava monsters. Chocolate quicksand. Chocolate chupacabras. On top of all that, Eric lost a bunch of XP in the dumbest way possible. He ate devil’s food cake and exploded.

  Planet Obnoxious Eaters

  Another lowlight. We didn’t spend a lot of time on this planet because it didn’t seem to offer any way to earn XP. I think it was just meant to torture people who committed crimes in the Reubenverse. As soon as we landed, a soundtrack of someone slurping soup started playing, and an indestructible guy chewing with his mouth open began following us.

  Planet Ninjas and Sneaky Snakes

  It’s a good thing Eric and I had beefed up our health before reaching this planet, because during our 35-second stay, we got attacked 297 times. I swung my swords wildly. “WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?!” I yelled.

  “THEY’RE SO SNEAKY!” Eric yelled back.

  We dove back into the pod, huffing and puffing with only 2 percent of our health left. I shared a cake with Eric. “Can we do an easy one next? I don’t think we hit one thing back there.”

  Eric stared past me with wide eyes. “I think we did.”

  I turned and gasped when I saw a glowing green message.

  CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE LEVELED UP.

  5,000 XP

  Chapter 7

  Perma-Death

  I cracked my knuckles and checked my watch. Three days and six hours left.

  “We got this,” Eric said as he hit the “Ultimate Warrior Challenge” button.

  “Engaging Perma-Death Mode,” Siri Lady warned. �
��Continue?”

  “Of course,” I said, my voice a little shakier than I’d like.

  DING! Fall. WHOOSH.

  We stepped onto a circular steel arena, probably 100 feet in diameter, floating over a bottomless pit. The pod disappeared as soon as we left it. I gulped and put on my iron fist. Eric pulled a flamethrower out of his backpack. “Let’s go!”

  As soon as Eric said “go,” four little gremlins materialized. (Now, when I say “gremlin,” I don’t really know if that’s accurate. They were ugly green guys with pointy ears, big claws, and no noses. Are those gremlins? I’m not big into mythical creatures.)

  Without hesitating, Eric lit up the entire arena with his flamethrower. The gremlins screeched and disappeared.

  “Is that all you’ve got, Max?!” Eric yelled.

  “Wave One defeated,” Siri Lady said from the clouds.

  “Wave One?” I asked. “How many waves are there?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “AHH!” Eric and I screamed in unison. Six more gremlins appeared. Eric continued screaming while he flamed the gremlins.

  “Wave Two defeated.”

  “Hey, Eric?” I asked.

  Eric was still screaming, but now it was more of a warrior cry. Ten more gremlins turned into burnt toast.

  “Wave Three defeated.”

  When Eric ran out of breath, I asked my question. “Don’t you think you need to cool it on the flamethrower?”

  Twelve gremlins and a dwarf appeared. (Again, it might not have been a dwarf. It was tiny and angry, though. Maybe it was an elf?)

  WHOOOOOOSH!

  “Wave Four defeated.”

  “Why? This is the best weapon we have.”

  Five gremlins and five dwarves appeared. One of the dwarves had a sword.

  WHOOOOO . . .

  Eric’s flamethrower ran out of fuel before he could get the dwarves.

  “That’s why.”

  I finished off the dwarves with my iron fist, then Eric took care of the next 17 waves with a sword so long it could be used for pole vaulting. By Wave 22, Eric was so bored that he was just holding the sword out and spinning in circles with his eyes closed. Then—

  CRACK!

  Eric’s eyes popped open. Half his sword lay on the ground, snapped by the rock monster he’d just hit.

  “ROOOOAAAAAAR!”

  I punched the rock monster as hard as I could with my iron fist. CRACK! (That was my fist breaking, not the rock monster, in case you were wondering.)

  The monster glared at me. “Help!” I yelled as I started to run. “HELLLLLLP!”

  Eric pulled out a Thor hammer and threw it at the rock monster. The monster broke into a thousand pebbles.

  “Wave 22 defeated.”

  Over the next three hours, we faced off against every kind of creature imaginable—elves, dragons, centaurs. There were even unicorns that shot lasers out of their hooves. (You’d think they’d shoot the lasers out of their horns, right? No! That’s where they got devious. You’d try sneaking up behind them, then they’d hoof-laser you.)

  Slowly but surely, we started losing weapons. We used the last of our flame arrows by Wave 59. Ice arrows were gone by Wave 74. The lightning monsters from Wave 88 shorted out four of our lightsabers. Even the Thor hammer wasn’t safe—that got cracked by a knight in chrome armor on Wave 132. Then, on Wave 223, things got really dicey.

  “Cake me,” I said after getting hit in the shoulder by an acid slimeball.

  “I’m out,” Eric replied as he battled an ax-wielding toad.

  “I know you’re out of the chocolate. I’m at 20 percent. At this point, I’ll take the coffee cake.”

  “No,” Eric said after kicking the toad off the edge of the arena. “I’m out-out. No more cake.”

  “Wave 223 defeated.”

  I got a panic pain in my stomach. “We’re not gonna make it!”

  “I’m still at 79 percent. We’ll be fine.”

  “You might be fine! There’s no way I can survive more than a couple waves on 20 percent!”

  “Stay low,” Eric said. “I got youuuuuuuuuuu—”

  Right in the middle of Eric’s sentence, a skinny brown vine monster snaked out of the ground behind him, grabbed his waist, then grew 30 more feet.

  “HEY!” I ran at the vine and swung my sword with all my might. The sword broke in half.

  The vine monster held Eric upside down 50 feet above the level and shook him, causing his backpack to open and drop weapons all over the ground. I had to scramble out of the way to dodge Eric’s knife collection.

  “Use my chain saw!” Eric yelled.

  I ran to Eric’s chain saw, but the vine creature wouldn’t let me kill it that easily. It used Eric as a flyswatter, thwacking him on the ground over and over to squash me. I rolled, grabbed the chain saw, and started the motor in a single motion. I figured I only had two, maybe three seconds to chop down the vine before it dropped Eric and came for me.

  I was wrong.

  The vine didn’t care about me at all. Instead, just as I started sawing its base, it reared back and whipped Eric off the edge of the arena.

  Chapter 8

  Wave 301

  I’ve never been good at thinking on my feet. My brain always provides me with my best comebacks at 3 a.m., which is a totally useless thing for a brain to do. But at that moment, with my best friend’s life on the line, my brain came through big-time.

  I finished my cut and, without pausing to think, used the vine monster as a giant whip.

  THWACK!

  Thanks to my bullwhip practice on Handsome Archaeologist Planet, I wrapped up Eric on my first try! Or, at least, I wrapped up his backpack. I yanked as hard as I could, and Eric tumbled back to the arena. His backpack was not quite as fortunate. It tore off his back and went flying with the vine monster off the edge of the arena.

  “Wave 223 defeated.”

  “What are we going to do?!” I yelled as three more vine monsters shot up from the ground.

  Eric grabbed the chain saw and ran around the arena, cutting them all before they could grow big enough to kill us.

  “Wave 224 defeated.”

  “We need a superweapon,” Eric said.

  “We don’t have a superweapon.”

  A spiky-shelled turtle with ninja stars appeared, and Eric grabbed nunchucks from the ground. “We craft one.”

  “Craft? Like scrapbooking?”

  “Scrapbooking?! Are you . . . ” Eric jumped as the turtle pulled out its own nunchucks. “Are you serious?!”

  “My mom does a lot of scrapbook crafts. You know, with a glue gun.”

  Eric whacked away the turtle’s nunchucks, but before he could finish him off, the turtle pulled out two small ninja swords. Eric groaned. “Video game crafting lets you take two things you’ve collected and put them together to make something better.”

  “But how?”

  “WHAT?!” Eric yelled, annoyed at either my question or the turtle that’d just sliced his nunchucks in half.

  “How do you craft something in here?”

  “Crafting is not supported in the Reubenverse at this time,” Siri Lady answered from the sky.

  “NOTHING CAN EVER BE EASY!”

  Eric and I found a way to craft superweapons anyway. Sort of. We started by dumping the contents of my backpack into the middle of the arena with Eric’s stuff. Then, we worked together to make the most of the weapons we had left based on the current enemies. For example, Wave 241 introduced giant jelly blobs. I tried throwing a bomb at the first one, but that didn’t work—the bomb just bounced off. However, when I tried tossing the bomb to Eric, who hit it with the club, the explosive rocketed off his bat with enough force to reach the middle of the blob’s jelly belly and blow it into a million pieces. We’d just invented
the Home Run Bomb!

  By Wave 254, we’d perfected the Mega Ninja Star, where Eric would pick up two swords, and I’d spin him across the arena with my magnet mittens. During Wave 261, we discovered Knives from the Skies when I accidentally stepped on our makeshift teeter-totter catapult with my brass boots while Eric was setting up. Eric went flying into the air, which gave him the perfect vantage point to whip throwing knives at all the bad guys.

  By working together, we actually had an easier time clearing the expert enemies in the final waves than we had with the easy enemies. “Wave 299 defeated,” Siri Lady said.

  Eric and I cheered, then we saw the final enemy and cheered even louder. It was a jelly blob! Granted, it was bigger than any of the previous jelly blobs by 30 feet, but still, we knew exactly how to take care of it. Eric picked up the club, I tossed him a bomb, and he smashed a home run right into the blob’s belly.

  KABOOM!

  “Wave 300 defeated.”

  I collapsed on the ground. “Yes, yes, YES!” Eric shouted. He clubbed another bomb off the arena to create a celebratory firework.

  “Did the pod come back?” I asked without opening my eyes.

  “Not yet,” Eric replied.

  I breathed with my eyes closed for a few more seconds, then noticed a low rumble. “What’s that?”

  Siri Lady answered for Eric. “Wave 301.”

  “WHAT?!” The rumbling got louder. I leaped to my feet, scrambled back to the weapons pile, and grabbed the first thing I could find—the magnetic mittens. Eric held the club over his head. “Bring it on.”

  WHUMP!

  A giant boot materialized to our left.

  WHUMP!

  Another appeared on our right. Boots that big could mean only one thing. Eric and I both looked up at the same time to see the new biggest man we’d ever seen—a 100-foot-tall green giant in full armor.

  “AHHHHH!” Before we could do anything besides scream, the giant bent over, scooped us both in one hand, and brought us all the way up to his face. Eric was the first to meet the giant’s gaze. He suddenly calmed down. “Closer,” Eric said with his club on his shoulder like a baseball bat. The giant squinted.