by P A Wikoff
As Ambrose turned, I jumped up, pulled my dagger out of his knee and continued to try to reach a safe distance, all while avoiding a couple more of his hits.
With two potions left, I took aim and threw the dagger the same exact way as before.
This throw looked even better than the first one. An uplifting thought came to me. This could be it.
It could have, except Ambrose moved slightly at the very last moment, and now my weapon was lost in the distance.
It was a huge miss, one that wasn’t easy for me to recover from. I had to get it back, but the spot fire was now raging out of control. Columns of flames were everywhere. With limited paths to take, there was no going around Ambrose The Inferno.
First, I flanked him. Then I went around his foot. I tried to shield my back from falling embers as I passed under his legs.
I spotted my dagger on the other side, jammed in the base of a bordering tree, with the wildfire creeping up on it.
I ran, losing sight of the boss behind me. Skidding to a stop, I pulled it out without too much difficulty while I collected myself. I glanced at my arm—nine hit points.
Ambrose turned to look at me with literal fire in his eyes.
“One more time!” Again, I hurled my dagger, this time like a frisbee. I wanted less power and more precision as I aimed for his toe.
I knew from his stance that he was gearing up for his faster lance throw attack, which meant his foot would stay firmly planted down.
End over end, it spun, slicing directly between his toe and nail for another critical hit.
Ambrose yelled out in pain.
The good news was that I had interrupted his lance throw attack. The bad news was what I had interrupted it for.
I ran at him as he started to pull back to do his devastating charge attack. This time, I didn’t have three potions to protect me from it. I had only two left, and I was pouring one of them in my mouth right now.
Holding the liquid in my cheeks, I made my way towards the giant foe. I snatched my dagger out of his toe and climbed up his burning leg in two bounding leaps, all the while swallowing the liquid in my mouth, healing me and protecting me from the flames that engulfed me.
I was now exactly at the weak spot MacGavin had found on the back of Ambrose’s neck.
In the thick of the fire, with the hit points I had just regained rapidly decreasing, I stabbed at his neck over and over and over. Numbers flashed by as I put everything I had left into him.
Once I had climbed on him, however, he started to execute a new life-ending attack. For the first time in a long time, I saw him do his timber attack—the very one that had killed me twice before. I now knew that it was really made for people climbing up on him.
Out of stamina, and hands, I let the Blood Dagger fall from my grasp as I pulled out my last remaining potion. I held on for dear life, my head back in a full guzzle.
Ambrose fell on top of me in a flaming, crushing mass.
I didn’t know how long I could survive, but I kept on drinking like my life depended on it.
My potion now empty, I finally managed to squeeze out from under him. Momentarily in a daze, I staggered around looking for where my weapon had gone. I knew this was the end of the line.
Then Ambrose started to rumble, shake, and subsequently crumble. All the flames in the room began to suck into his joints, like in a vacuum.
Moogi and I both looked at each other with utter horror.
Was this a final attack?
I checked my inventory. I was completely tapped out of potions.
Moogi pointed at the entrance. A pile of earwigs was now rushing into the clearing.
“If they can come in, we can go out!”
I took off towards the entrance, avoiding the snaps and charging headbutts from the incoming monsters, who had been chomping at the bit to chomp a bit of me for nine run-throughs.
Behind me, Ambrose exploded with great force, killing all the earwigs instantly.
I flew out of the doorway, getting hit by some of the fiery blast.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Fallout
F or a moment, I just sat there in silence, holding my eyes shut tight. I was scared that if I opened them, I would see Erilyn’s face, or worse, nothing at all. Did I really put everything on the line for a stupid boss? What was wrong with me? I wanted to live, but somehow I got more obsessed with winning than taking care of myself. The cost was far too high. I should have quit when I was ahead. It was like I turned into an irrational, self-destructive alter ego. For lack of a better term, I decided to call him Just Suicide Jim, or Jim for short. This Jim side of me was dangerous, and he scared me half to death. Or maybe I was already full-on dead because of him.
When I finally got enough courage, I slowly peeked out with one eye, then the next, to see Moogi facedown with its hands over its face. We were more alike than I thought.
Without hesitating, I looked at my arm. I had two hit points left.
“Moogi. Moogi. Did we do it?”
My companion slowly turned to me, as if I had just awoken it from a cozy summertime nap.
Suddenly, as though it had just remembered where it was and what had just happened, it abruptly stood up and jumped around like a crazy ghost.
“Calm down. Calm down. Stats? Numbers? Give me something—anything.”
“Moooogi! (Quest complete: Free the Forest Slave. You are the first to have slain the Wooden Knight Ambrose. You’re awarded 15,000 experience points!!)
I looked at my arm again and, sure enough, I had 15,000/2400 EXP. How did I miss that a second ago?
“What the heck?” This was a five-person boss that I just soloed. Well, the band did a lot of damage, at first. Also, Moogi was a huge help, but still. That was a lot of levels. I was sure of it.
We cautiously walked into the clearing. Everything was smoldering but not currently on fire. Among the garbage and debris, there was a whole bunch of twinkling loot indicators scattered beneath the rubble. Stuff was everywhere. This place was a gold mine—a vault—and I was dwelling in the center of it.
I bent down and picked up a tattered cloak and equipped it straight away, without bothering to look up its weight and resistances because…I didn’t have one, and now I did.
Moogi was already putting amazing armor pieces inside my inventory. Golden Kabuto, Wooden Breastplate of the Forest, Wooden Leggings of the Forest. We were getting it all. The treasures of an uncrippled boss.
As Moogi kept piling the stuff in, I decided to try on the Golden Kabuto. I didn’t know what it was until it equipped snugly on my head. The magical helm had three glowing gems on the outside. I was about to ask Moogi to give me the fine details on the helmet, when it stopped looting and turned to face me, tears welling in its eyes.
“What is it? Wait…are you crying?”
“Moogi. (Check your inventory.)”
Reaching for my back, I felt something big—like, bigger than big. I pulled out a huge sword, nearly the size of me. Even with both hands, I could barely keep it off the ground. Holding this dangerously large sword, I felt powerful—no—unstoppable.
Right away, the Golden Kabuto started to glow from its five points on top of my head.
Looking down at the weapon in my hand, I didn’t need Moogi to tell me what it was, because I already knew its name.
“Ambrose’s Monstrous Greatsword.”
We hadn’t just survived; we’d won the big prize.
And there was nowhere else I’d rather be…in this world,
or the last.
The End
Imprisoned Online
Feeding the Trolls
(a LitRPG Adventure, book 2)
Bonus Chapter
Nights into Dreams
I t suddenly felt a lot darker than the rest of the crypt for some reason. Everything was quiet and not in a good way. We had been clearing these halls for a while now, in a steady rhythm. That momentum was now good and gone.
Moogi loo
ked at me like it had seen itself.
I had learned to trust its expressions, and now that it was on edge, so was I.
Right on cue, all the darkness started to pull off of every wall, object, and surface. Some of it was even pulling off of me. The dark flowed like black lace against the wind. At the center of the crypt, it started to conjoin into a single spot, growing in mass and substance. This was not a good sign; it was horrible. The room was substantially brighter. Torches and sconces lining the walls were no longer engulfed in darkness. It was like a different world was unmasked by the terror that stood before us now.
The void distorted into a loose shape with two arms, two legs, a head, and two stark-white eyes peering out. This must be the mini boss everyone was talking about.
I adjusted my stance and readied myself for a powerful strike, to purge the land of its evil presence.
Then all the excitement stopped mid animation. The shadowy being started to shrink as the darkness drifted away, like paint dripping off an oversaturated surface.
“What gives?” I dropped my arm to my side—giving up on the fight.
It was all so anticlimactic, and truth be told, a little disappointing.
The darkness monster walked over to a torch and pulled it off the wall, then puffed on it like a cigar.
“That was random,” I said to Moogi. Then suddenly it didn’t seem so.
“Hey, Jim. How’s tricks?”
I knew by the way it said my name and the manner with which it walked that this was no mistake.
“Mario? Is that you?”
“Yeah. I had to, uh, hack my way through this little program here. Sorry we got cut off last time.”
“You’re hacking programs?”
“Yeah, well. How else would I get in contact with you?”
He had a good point. I mean, since entering this online prison, I had lost all contact with the outside world…until now, I guess.
“The Shadow Beast could come back at any time. So watch out when it does.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been monitoring you. And I’m not the only one. Things are very complicated right now. I know, what else is new?” the Mario shadow thing took another deep puff of its torch and blew the black smoke out into rings.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“You never got a chance to answer me before, but how is all of this possible? It seems too realistic—much too vivid to be real. I just can’t wrap my head around it. I mean, I normally hate games and…”
“Look, remember how I told you chip processors were no longer advancing? Well, they found a better computer, in a sense. The long and the short is that this game utilizes your brain as if it were a supercomputer, your ears as a soundcard, and your eyes, well, as the video card.”
If my vision really was a video card, was that why I couldn’t use the overlay displays, because of my astigmatism? This was all too much to take in. “I’m getting confused. What do you mean?”
“You know how in the early days, the predecessor to the intercloud was the internet, or interfail, or whatever you want to call it?”
“Yes. It was a bunch of computers linked up together to form a network.”
“Right, well, this is the same idea, except your computer is your brain. It’s connected to everyone else’s…”
“…minds?” I finished his sentence.
“Exactly. This game seems real, because your brain thinks it is. It looks real because your eyes see it so. It sounds real because your eardrums hear it. Imagine the system is hacking into your body’s senses, right below the surface of consciousness.”
“Let me guess, it feels real because that suit is stabbing me every time I get hurt?”
“Precisely. That’s why I warned you to lay off all the dying for a bit. You almost bled to death.”
“That was you? Of course, it was you.” Why hadn’t I realized that before. The smoking was a sure tip-off.
“The answer was so simple. We’ve had this powerful hardware inside us all along.” Shadow Mario tapped his would-be temple with his index finger. “Most of it we don’t use to its fullest potential. No data screen could be better than what our vision can produce, and if it could, our brains would reject it and downgrade the quality anyway. The chamber can maximize everything to your body’s fullest capabilities. The computers had all the answers. It just took a while for them to figure out how to hack into them.”
“So, this whole experience is inside my head?”
“Technically, it’s in your dreams. When you advance a level, that’s in your head.”
I had to sit down. My legs were feeling like spaghetti.
“This is way more real than any dream I’ve ever had.”
“To be fair, have you actually been able to dream and be awake inside that dream simultaneously? I thought not.”
I liked dreams, and I hated games, which all sort of added up to my whole take on this world.
“I only have a few minutes before this nightopia reboots, so I’ll get on with it.”
“Get on with what? I don’t think I can handle much more right now,” I said, rubbing my forehead.
“Never speak of our encounters with anyone. You understand? It could get us both in a lot of trouble. They are everywhere, watching, learning, and judging. I have something in the works, but it’s not ready yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s your parents.”
I suddenly found the strength I had lost and stood up abruptly. “What about my parents?”
“They need your hel…p.” The Shadow Mario started to shake and quake and grow in size. The shadow reclaimed its form as if our casual conversation hadn’t transpired.
It dropped the torch on the stone floor without care.
Mario was gone. The boss was back. And I really wanted to hurt something.
End of Sample
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After surviving an almost fatal car accident directly in front of a bookstore, P.A. Wikoff decided not to ignore the sign and proceeded to self-publish his work. Mr. Wikoff kick-started his writing career by releasing the epic fantasy novel “Feylin Lore: Reflections.” When P.A. is not writing, he spends all of his free time with his beautiful wife and two fabulous kids who inspire him every single day.
Another book by P.A. Wikoff
Magical libraries, ego-eccentric gravity experts, O.C.D. people, scary stage shows, dirt-poor romance, spirit guides, calming yourself down, moment stealing harpies, corrupt elections, gluttonous cake eaters, evil doppelgangers, drunken incoherence, circles, cross dressing witches and warlocks, catching up with the past, antiquated technology, treasures in the trash, brain surgery, irreplaceable loss, gangbangers and their dogs, comic books that contain bats and/or wolves, the murder of relatives, revengeful ex-girlfriends, changing fact into fiction, magical smartphones, facing your unfiltered fears, severed lizards and dangerous Christmas gifts. 28 shorter works accompanied by photographs P.A. Wikoff took to add a visual aid to each literary piece.
Review:
“Splashes of engaging poetry are sprinkled in between some of the most extraordinary, thought-provoking, short-stories.
Each story immediately draws me in, pulling me deep into a relatable, yet mind-bending plot-line.As I crawl into each character’s mind, I’m taken on a new, sometimes mysterious adventure. Then, it’s wrapped up to its end. Leaving me desiring more in only the bes
t of ways.
So many questions and creative energy spring forth in my mind. These stories make you consider things, you may have never given a second thought too.
If you enjoy Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, then you will definitely love this book.I know that I will be thinking on many of these stories and tales for a long, long time!
I really recommend that you check out this book. It is so unique and different from the majority of the books out there.
The author has a way of making mundane sentences hilarious or making ordinary conversation suspicious.
I will be looking forward to see what else will come from this author in the future.” – D.G. Alan
