Dukes and Ladders: A LitRPG/Gamelit Adventure (The Good Guys Book 5)

by Eric Ugland

  Maybe that’d get my population growth going in the right direction.

  I chuckled to myself.

  Breeding hut.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I sat against the tree thinking for a while, reminiscing about home and trying to answer honestly if I preferred living in Vuldranni to Earth. Sure, I was basically immortal and spoke to gods on the regular here. Which, you know, pretty damn cool. But there were a lot of things back on Earth that I missed. And on nights like that one, I missed them fiercely. There was the girl, of course. I missed her every time I stopped and thought about, well, anything. Sometimes I felt that my desire to escape her was my reason for acting without thought so often. Keeping her away required action. It required me being busy. But somehow, in this town, I’d managed to lose that busy streak. I had nothing to do. And so her face kept swimming back into view.

  Memories of our time together, just a few at first, flashes of individual events. The time I’d cooked chili shirtless and how it was a lesson learned. Her laughter at the tiny burns all over my chest. The time we wound up at the wrong restaurant and had a meal from one of the most famous chefs in the world. They were beautiful memories, but I knew there was only one thing that could happen — I’d start becoming the man I’d been again. I’d drop into despair, find some way to ruin myself with alcohol or drugs. Lash out in violence as I tried anything to give someone else the pain I felt. It wasn’t something I was willing to do, though. It wasn’t a path I was willing to tread again.

  But while I sat there against that tree, alone in the darkness, I felt myself losing grip on the new person I was becoming. The memories were still too raw. It was easier to live in them than in the present. To close my eyes and dream I could go back there. Not only to that place, but that time.

  Just as I was about to truly give up and let myself wallow for the night, something bizarre caught my eye: a prinky flying through the sky.

  It made a noise, the cute version of screaming, followed by a ploop as it smacked against the mountain wall.

  Then another flew through the night and exploded against the mountain in a shower of glitter. It left a sparkly goop behind in a nearly textbook splatter pattern.

  A third, fourth and fifth went flying over in quick order, and I realized they were all coming from the north side of the wall.

  Springing to my feet, I ran for the rampart. At the top, I skidded to a stop and gawped at what I saw.

  Large grey-green humanoids, 20 or 30 feet tall, grabbing handfuls of prinkies and stuffing them in their mouths. Every time a prinky fought back or bit the humanoids, the big guys would throw or kick the prinky, sending it soaring towards the mountain.

  I shot a quick identification spell towards the grey-greenskinned dudes.

  Forest Troll

  Lvl 28 monster

  Trolls.

  I didn’t like them. Immediately. And not just because they were eating all my little buddies. They were fundamentally gross. There was a real wrongness to them. Four of them were out there, and each one was quite unique in appearance. One had two hands coming off of one arm. But each hand on all of them had a different number of fingers. A profusion of warts pocked their mottled skin, and hair hung them off like moss, twisted into grotesque ropes. Thick tusks stuck out of their disturbingly large mouths. They had big underbites, I think because their jaws were actually larger than the rest of their heads. One of the forest trolls had three nostrils. Any way you cut it, these dudes were disgusting. Viscous ropes of salvia hung down to the ground as they feverishly tried to scoop up all the prinkies. I think one of them had a cold because there was a massive glob of snot dangling precipitously under one large hooked nose.

  “TROLLLLLLS,” I yelled out. “Ragnar, trolls!”

  My lutra buddy happened to be on the far side of the wall. Whether blind luck or whatever, the trolls struck at the perfect time to avoid being seen by our guards.

  Ragnar looked at me, and I pointed over the wall just as a prinky sailed by, nearly striking me. When I glanced back across the wall, all four trolls stared back at me silently, the prinkies forgotten. Apparently they’d heard my call out to Ragnar. It’s not like I’d been quiet about it.

  Maybe the great big monsters realized that eating the prinkies didn’t actually nourish them. Or they got tired of having glitter rain out of their mouths. The sparkling prinky blood did nothing good to the standard troll look. I was staring down at the four worst club kids ever.

  I reached into my bag of holding and pulled out a spear.

  It twinkled in the darkness, just a hint of a magical glow coming from it. I realized I had a minor and somewhat amusing problem to deal with: I'd emptied most of the weapons from my bag and now had all the crap I'd looted from the ancient wyrm's cave, which included a veritable armory of moderately magical weapons. Most of which I'd only done the most cursory examination of. I prayed to the various gods I knew that none of the weapons were cursed.

  "Hey," I shouted, "ugly dudes. Get out of here before I get mad, okay? Those little balls of fur are funky and kind of annoying, but they're my funky-kind-of-annoying balls of fur. So stop eating them and go about your business."

  Whether they actually understood what I was saying was up for debate. They stared at me, then passed some looks between each other, and then one of them threw a squirming prinky at my face.

  He had good aim too — I had to duck out of the way to avoid being hit. Couldn't save the prinky though.

  "Not exactly what I meant," I replied.

  Three-Nostril roared back at me, allowing me to see that his teeth were a really unpleasant mixture of brown and black.

  Then he charged.

  "Fine," I shouted. "Kind of what I preferred."

  I hauled back and threw the spear as hard as I could.

  It whistled through the air and slammed into Three-Nostril's third nostril, hitting with enough force to punch out the back of the creature's head and send a foul spray of blood out across the ground. The blood looked black under the vague moonlight, but it could have been green or orange for all I could tell at the time.

  The troll managed two more steps before the lower portion of the body realized the upper portion of the body was running purely on autopilot. Then it collapsed.

  "Who's next?" I asked.

  Turns out Extra-Hand was next — he’d gone through the trouble of uprooting a tree to use a club.

  I reached into my bag and pulled out a sword.

  Extra-Hand cleared the ditch and put his one giant hand around one of the logs to pull himself up and over.

  With a wind-up, I swung the sword baseball-style, and sheared off all seven of the dude's fingers.

  His grip slipped, and his upward momentum stopped. He scrambled at the fence with the hand not holding the club, but since that hand barely had any grip strength, he fell back, hitting the ground with his spine and rolling into the ditch.

  Not one to let a gift troll go to waste, I leapt from the top of the wall and fell on the troll sword first, plunging the blade deep into his chest. I must have sliced through an artery, because there was a fountain of gore around me. I slipped a bit, hauling myself up out of the ditch, just in time to catch a fist to the face from Wartface, troll number 3.

  He hit hard, and I got air-time, cartwheeling through space until I smacked against a tree. Thankfully, there were enough branches to break on the way down that I didn't knock myself out.

  In any normal circumstance, a blow like that probably would have broken my spine. But here it was the sort of thing I could just get up from. It hurt like hell — the pain was still there even if the broken bones weren't — but I could move.

  And I had to move fast.

  Wartface was nearly on top of me, swinging his giant fist my way.

  I leapt back, hitting the tree trunk again just as Wartface's next punch was coming my way. With nowhere else to run to, I jumped forward, feeling the wind from the troll punch ruffle the hair on the back of my head. />
  I landed in a roll, and continued on through Wartface's legs. Once clear, I came to my feet, sliding to a stop.

  Hand into the bag, thinking of a mace, hoping there'd been a mace in the treasure hoard.

  There had not been.

  My mind went blank.

  I remembered a big statue, some majestic woman carved out of beautiful white marble.

  It was in my hand, and I pulled it out just as Wartface turned around and roared at me. It was a heavy hunk of fine art, and whomever had sculpted the lady had done a fantastic job, as even the folds of the woman’s dress were perfectly represented in the marble.

  Lady Kensington

  Item Type: Rare

  Item Class: Two-handed Improvisational

  Material: Marble

  Damage: 40-80 (Bludgeoning)

  Durability: 780/820

  Weight: 480 lbs

  Requirements: Str 35

  Description: An exquisitely carved likeness of the Lady Kensington in her royal robes by the sculptor Ellis Allison.

  Wartface lunged for me just as I swung, and there was a tender moment as the lady statue kissed Wartface’s warts before sending his tusks and teeth flying across the landscape.

  He stumbled, clearly woozy.

  I brought the lady down on the back of his head, the marble making a dull ‘thunk’ on his oversized noggin.

  Wartface dropped to the ground.

  Just for good measure, I got the statue up in the air and was about to plant it in the back of Wartface’s skull when a tree trunk collided with my trunk, and I went flying for the second time of the night, soaring across the land until I smacked into our wall and rolled into the ditch.

  I heard the ‘twang’ of a bowstring above me, and I saw Ragnar shooting at the trolls.

  “I didn’t know you knew how to shoot a bow,” I mumbled through a mouth full of foamy blood.

  Following the trajectory of the arrow, it was quite clear he didn’t know how.

  You’d think hitting a troll thirty feet tall would be on par with hitting the broad side of a barn.

  Apparently not.

  The troll, however, was more than happy to send his ‘club’ our way, the tree tumbling end over end until it slammed against the rampart with an explosion of bark and branches. Ragnar, for his part, disappeared.

  I dragged myself out of the ditch, and looked at my opponent.

  Correction: opponents.

  Two trolls were facing me: Extra-Hand was back up, and the last of the four trolls, Sir Snot, was holding a very large rock above his head.

  “Look, guys,” I said, “maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe it’s fine that you guys are covered in glitter because you’ve been eating my little friends. It’s not like it’s that hard to make more.”

  I summoned a bevy of prinkies, and they popped into existence around me.

  “Attack them!” I shouted.

  Pro-tip: Prinkies are essentially pacifists when it comes to any creatures besides other prinkies. So they mostly just stared at me, and then the huge boulder Sir Snot had thrown crashed into the collection of cute. I got splashed by a wave of sparkling blood right before the bouncing boulder bounded into my balls, and I maybe blacked out from the incredible pain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I came to when my head bounced against the ground. I was inverted, and something was holding onto my leg.

  Also, my balls hurt.

  Sir Snot was dragging me through the opening in the walls while three other trolls walked in front of him. All four of the trolls were up and mobile again. Sir Snot, being the largest, got the prize: me. I didn’t see Ragnar, but it was dark and my head was doing a solid impression of a basketball at a Globetrotters game.

  All four trolls. Which meant that the spear through the head of Three Nostrils hadn’t taken him all the way down. He’d gotten back up. I could see the gory remains still stuck to the back of his head, but otherwise, he was whole.

  This was bad.

  Trolls in this world seemed to have the same unbelievable regenerative powers they had in the games I’d played back on Earth. Even better regeneration than I had, considering it didn’t seem to matter if they were in combat or not. And that made them really fucking hard to kill. I hoped there was some way to keep them from healing every injury.

  Despite their size, the trolls moved with surprising stealth. And whatever noise we’d made in our fight hadn’t carried across the camp — at least I couldn’t see any indication that it did.

  Instead, it seemed like the trolls could just walk across the open ground, rip open the roof of the longhouse, and be treated to a bunch of sleeping snacks, all wrapped up and ready to munch upon.

  I had to do something. And by something, I meant killing trolls. Killing them to the death.

  Sir Snot seemed unconcerned that I was moving, so I got my hand in the bag of holding and thought of a sword.

  In one motion, I pulled it out and sliced across, the long sword biting deep into Sir Snot’s arm. He turned his face so quickly that his namesake dangly mucus went sailing into the darkness.

  He roared, and tried to lift me up with his arm and smash me on the ground. But that’s pretty hard to do when missing several key tendons.

  I got a second slice going, and hit perfectly, going right through the cartilage of his wrist, cutting mostly all the way through. There may have been a little sawing at the end, but then his hand dropped off, and dropped me with it.

  Sir Snot the One-Handed lifted his arm up to his face, his huge eyes bulging out at the fountain exiting where his hand once was.

  I wasn’t about to lose even the slightest opportunity, so I wound up and swung for the fences, slicing right through the big bastard’s knee. It took two chops before he was ready for a peg-leg, and then he toppled over with a resounding thud, screaming in pain as he went.

  The other trolls had turned and saw what I was doing, and they headed back towards me.

  I grabbed Sir Snot’s leg and shoved it in the bag of holding, followed by the hand. I didn’t know if trolls could regenerate from anything, but it wasn’t the time to try it out.

  Then I jammed the sword in Sir Snot’s neck and sawed frantically, doing what I could to avoid the tusks and the flailing hand. I also got doused quite liberally with troll blood, which washed away all the sparkles from the prinky smash. Frankly, I preferred the sparkles. Troll blood smells rancid.

  I had the neck down to just a few tendons, but I was running out of time. The other trolls were just about to run over me. I grabbed Sir Snot’s hair, and pulled. The head came off with a snap, and I chucked it into the bag of holding.

  “Regenerate that,” I said, “motherfucker.”

  And then I turned and ran.

  Extra Hand stopped to look over Sir Snot’s headless corpse. But Three Nostril didn’t bother. He just scooped up a rock and threw it at me.

  It went right by my head, clipping my shoulder with enough force that I skidded to the ground. I knew my pursuers were on me, so I did my best combat roll to get up, then planted my feet and prepared to receive their charge. I swung the sword up as Three Nostrils reached out with both hands, ready to tear me apart.

  The sword cut cleanly through the troll’s stomach, allowing a steaming pile of ropey intestines to spill out. The troll couldn't stop his forward momentum, and his next step went into the worst possible place, and the poor bastard wound up tripping on his own tripe.

  I started for an overhead chop to cleave Three Nostril’s head, but damn Wartface was there, and I had to jump back to get out of the way of his trunk-club ramming through the air.

  He swung again and again, and I had to keep dodging. The motherfucker was strong as fuck, and he had impressive control over his club. Every time I tried to set up to fight back, the club would come at me again. Finally, I tried to block the troll’s pummel. The trunk-club hit the sword, and the sword shattered, the metal pieces shooting past my face and hitting the ground with a tinkling
noise.

  Then the trunk hit me. It hurt, but I didn’t go flying this time. I slid across the ground, sure, but I wasn’t flying. That’s progress there, that is.

  Behind Wartface, as he wound up to pummel me into paste, there was a tremendous whomp and Three Nostrils went up in a blaze of gory glory.

  Wartface spun, eyes searching for whatever had caused the gout of flame.

  It was pretty obvious to me. It was the man walking towards us, his hands on fire.

  Tarryn.

  Another fireball streaked through the sky and slammed down on the remains of Sir Snot.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, I reached into the bag and grabbed a dagger out. It was a jeweled thing with a brilliant gold sheath. I tossed the sheath to the side and held the wicked dagger in front of me.

  I had to scramble across the ground, but I brought the blade across Wartface’s Achilles heel, sundering the tendon with a surprisingly loud snap.

  Wartface howled, and dropped, his feet unable to support him. He looked over his shoulder, his red eyes filled with rage.

  He tried to swing the trunk-club, but being stuck on the ground, he just couldn’t get the leverage to do anything.

  I leapt up onto his back, and grabbed onto his green mane.

  Shaking from side to side, he was trying anything to get me off him.

  I started stabbing, hoping I’d hit his heart before he realized he could just roll over and crush me.

  He realized.

  And rolled.

  And I was smooshed under the big stinky troll.

  But it also drove the dagger deep into the troll’s chest, and my hand was still on it. So I kept pushing, and once I was elbow deep, I pretended I was whipping up some eggs, and I made a fine mess of his lungs.