I crossed my arms and looked at Dart, who was still lying on the floor in the middle of us. He looked back at me with the same smug expression I wanted to punch off his face. In fact, I resolved to do one better. There was no reason I had to look at it.
“I hate you.”
Dart just shrugged. “Time’s on my side here. I can do this all day.”
I raised my axe again, prepared to smash Dart’s face to a pulp. I’d just brought my hands overhead when a thought flashed through my mind and I froze. Debuffs.
I knelt down beside Dart and triggered my new Haymaker skill. My fist connected with his chin in a satisfying smack. While Dart’s HP remained at one, I saw his eyes roll back in his head as the stun debuff took effect. Several seconds later, however, he blinked and was back to normal.
“What’re you doing?” Leesha said. “You already know you can’t kill him.”
“Yeah, you’re just making yourself look like an idiot,” Dart chimed in.
“You shut up,” I said. I turned and looked at Brandon and Leesha, trying to contain my excitement. “He still suffers debuffs. And you know what counts as a debuff? Dismemberment.”
“Why would you…oh…” Leesha’s confused expression curled into an evil smile. “Oh, yes, please.”
Brandon laughed. “No way did he screw himself over that bad.”
“Hold on a second.” Dart’s confident tone waned as he understood what was coming next. “Think about what you’re doing here. Look, I’ll give you the token, okay? Just calm down and think —”
“I’ve done enough thinking.” I hefted my battle axe, ignoring Dart’s screams, and brought it down with all my might. The blow severed Dart’s head clean off his body. It hopped once and then rolled facedown at Leesha’s feet. We all held our breath, waiting for Dart’s screaming to stop. It only ended when he took a shuddering gasp of air.
“Home run!” Leesha hollered. She bent down and tossed Dart’s head between her hands like a volleyball.
Thankfully, there was very little gore to be seen, just a red, low-detail spot where the neck should have connected to the head. All of the nasty detail was blurred out. Leesha gave it another shake.
“Stop it!” Dart managed to yell, voice cracking in irritation.
“Whoa!” Leesha said. “You’d think getting decapitated would at least put him in a daze. Is his HP still above zero?”
I glanced at the bar — which now hovered above Dart’s head — and saw it was still at one. In addition, there was no cooldown timer on the “Decapitated” debuff, which now appeared alongside his health bar.
“Looks like it. Dude has no head, but he’s still alive.”
“This is freaking weird,” Brandon said, poking Dart’s body with the butt end of his staff. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things in this game, but this takes the cake.”
“This is science,” Leesha said. She held Dart’s face out in front of her — clearly it weighed less than a real head would have. “Magic 8-Ball, will we get our token soon?” She shook the head again.
“Stop it!” Dart squealed.
“Is it decidedly so?”
“I’m not giving you anything!”
“Boo.” Leesha unceremoniously dropped the head on the floor and made her way over to his body. She cracked her neck and her fingers. “Let’s get to looting this guy, then.”
“You’re enjoying this way too much,” I said.
“I really am.”
She set to work looting Dart’s body, removing items and articles of armor and clothing one at a time, always remembering to ask him whether or not he’d changed his mind yet. But with his additional Bag of Holding soulbound, there was no way for us to actually get the token without his permission.
“Come on, Dart,” I said, growing tired of the standoff. “Just give us the token already. Do that and maybe we’ll give you back all the stuff we stole.”
“Maybe,” Leesha emphasized.
Dart proceeded to tell us all to do a few choice things to our mothers that ended with Brandon swinging his staff like a hockey stick and knocking the severed head across the room. Once Dart had been retrieved, I held him up so he could watch Leesha strip away the last of his armor, leaving his decapitated corpse in its starting underwear.
“You can take it all, but as soon as you leave, I’ll come back stronger than ever. I’ve got enough RuneCoins in my soulbound inventory to replace everything you just stole ten times over.”
Leesha held up a finger to her lips to shush Dart and then turned to me. “You can carry his body, right?”
I looked at Dart’s pale, freckled body. There were kids in third world countries with more muscle than this guy’s character had. “Yeah, I doubt he weighs much. But why should I…”
Leesha pulled out a sack from her own inventory and grabbed Dart by his red hair, stuffing the head inside. “Let’s get out of here, then, before we get caught. He wants to play this game? We’ll carry his body with us, keep it separated from his head, and make it virtually impossible for him to ever use this character again. You screw us. We screw you.”
“Wait a second!” Dart cried out from inside the bag.
“Oh, what’s this?” Leesha said, holding up the sack at eye level, but not bothering to pull his head out.
“I said hang on.”
“We’re listening.”
Dart remained silent for several long seconds, apparently weighing his options. He could do a forced respawn, but not only would that lock him out of MythRune for ten in-game days, it would likely reset his God Mode, too. We had no way of knowing if he was forced to stay logged in like I was, but it seemed like a good bet that logging out would send a flag to the moderators. He’d done much more than exploit the same glitch Brandon had found. And now that Dart had made himself invincible, it was stupid to think he wouldn’t want a crack at the tournament, which was only six game days away. And finally, the kicker of it all was that with his God Mode enabled, there was no way he’d rat me out. Not if he wanted to enjoy the same abilities I did.
“I’ll do it,” Dart finally said. “If I give you my soulbound bag, you’ll let me go?”
“If your soulbound bag still has a token in it, you have my word,” Leesha said.
Dart sighed, and an instant later, a pouch appeared on his body’s belt. I picked it up, hands shaking with anticipation. Knowing Dart, it could very well have been another trap, but I reached in nonetheless. An inventory sheet appeared.
RuneCoins: 10,236
Luck Attribute Orbs: 2
Speed Attribute Orbs: 4
Agility Attribute Orbs: 4
Health Attribute Orbs: 2
Defense Attribute Orbs: 3
Attack Attribute Orbs: 7
Tournament Token: 1
My stomach practically dropped — and, for once, it wasn’t out of dread or another missed opportunity. I turned the token over with shaking hands, fingers rubbing the engraved lettering: LMR.
“Well?” Leesha said.
I swallowed.
“Z!” Brandon said. “What’s in there?”
“It’s all here,” I said in a hushed tone, hardly believing it myself. “Over ten thousand RuneCoins, a bunch of Attribute Orbs, and a tournament token.”
“Shut up!” Leesha said in surprise. “What kind of dummy doesn’t use his Attribute Orbs when he gets them?”
“The enterprising kind,” Dart’s muffled voice said through the sack. “I steal them, earn them, use some, and sell off the rest. Do you realize how much those are going for as people prep for the tournament?”
“You’re disgusting…but well played,” Leesha admitted.
“It’s super smart,” Brandon said, shrugging.
I rolled my eyes. “We have what we came here for, can we please go now?”
“Hold on! You’ve got to let me go!”
“Hmm.” Leesha tapped her teeth, the effect wasted, as Dart was still inside the sack. “I don’t ever remember saying when I’d let
you go.”
“What?”
“The second we let you go, you’re going to find a way to get back at us and screw us over,” I said. “We can’t have that.”
Given the opportunity, Dart would definitely find a way to get his stuff back. We’d made it personal. He’d betrayed me before, and I had no doubt he’d do it again.
“Do you actually think I’m just going to sit here and take this? Mark my word, I’ll find a way to —”
The bag fell silent. Brandon lowered his hands with a sigh. “That’ll shut him up. With that enchantment, he can’t hear us and we can’t hear him.”
As we made our way toward the secret exit, I noticed Leesha glancing back at all of the items inside the underground warehouse. It was plain that leaving them behind was killing her.
“Hey,” I said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “We got more than we could have hoped for — no need to get greedy.”
She huffed but turned around. “A girl can dream.”
The sound of armored boots descending the spiral staircase echoed through the room. Whatever fake emergency the guards had been dealing with over at the Lucas Sevenday Company had run its course. Either that or one of the Livermoor folks had found their hog-tied clerk and pieced together what had happened.
“Time to go,” Brandon said, beckoning to us. “Leesha, you take the lead. I’ll follow behind and seal the tunnel so they can’t follow.”
I hoisted Dart’s body over my shoulder, smiling. Just before she stepped into the dark tunnel, Leesha looked back at me and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s gotten into you, Mr. All-Business Urok? I didn’t know you were capable of smiling. Wait a second. Are you actually having fun?”
I shrugged. “It’s nice to catch a break every once in a while.”
Leesha laughed. “Can’t argue with that, but we’ve got a long ways to go before you’re filling your bathtub with hundred-dolla’ bills, pal.”
“Maybe.”
I followed Leesha down the tunnel, for once not worrying about what was going to happen next. My knee felt great, my brother was with me, and even if it was just in avatar form in a game, he was healthy and enjoying himself. And Leesha was growing on me a little too, although I’d never admit it to her.
We had a long way to go before we even made it to Mythgard, let alone won the tournament. With every step I took in MythRune, there was a chance my God Mode glitch would be discovered. And unlike Dart, every hit I took still hurt like hell. I had a long, painful road ahead of me if I wanted to save Brandon.
But in that moment, it felt like that wasn’t so impossible after all.
Quest Log:
The Blockhead Lumberjack (Complete)
A Lesser Problem (Complete)
Ghoul Me Twice, Shame On You (Complete)
Road Less Traveled (Complete)
Fair Trade (Complete)
Horse Play (Complete)
Frosty Relations (Complete)
Yeti-gain (Complete)
Hands of Gold (Failed?)
Tournament Token Acquired
Character Stats
Name: Zane
Title: of the Horuk Tribe (displayed), Yeti-Bane (hidden)
Race: Urok, male
Level: 7
Total Attribute Points: 38
Attribute Points needed for next level: 2
Health: 10 (230/230) (Base 200, +30 Torc)
Attack: 8 (Arcana 160/160)
Defense: 9
Speed: 4
Agility: 3
Intelligence: 2
Luck: 2
Unused Skill Points:
One-Handed Battle Axe: 1
Two-Handed Battle Axe: 6
Exploring: 3
Combat Assessment: 0
Medium Armor: 2
Backstab: 3
Unarmed Combat: 0
Dual Wielding: 1
Sneaking: 3
Heavy Armor: 4
Mercantile: 4
Tracking: 3
Riding & Combat Riding: 0
Survival: 5
Firebrand: 0
Construction: 1
Unassigned: 1
Unassigned Arcane Fire: 0
Unassigned Arcane: 2
ALSO IN SERIES
GOD MODE
GLITCH KING
FROM THE PUBLISHER
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God Mode: A LitRPG Adventure (Mythrune Online Book 1) Page 38
