Respawn: Lives 1-5 (Respawn LitRPG series Book 1)

by Arthur Stone

  “What happens when all ninety-nine run out?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s nothing good. It’s... Look, everything here is unpleasant. No exceptions. So quit wasting lives. There’s this superstition here that we have a responsibility to help newcomers if possible, and that the Machine approves when we do. Plus, I mean, I wouldn’t just abandon you. You’d just die, respawning over and over. I need to get you out of the area and teach you what you need to know. So do you want to be on your own, or are you coming with me?”

  “Never thought I’d say this to you, but you’ve got good persuasion skills.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes. Better to stick together.”

  “Good choice, moron. I’m your only chance. Are you at the end of the street or the beginning? By which I mean the east or the west side?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Quickly, then, ask someone where Metal Boulevard is. Walk down Thirty-first to Metal and wait at the crossing for me. Got it?”

  “Piece of cake.”

  “At last he understands something I say to him.”

  * * *

  His knee, which had started aching as soon as he exited the dorm room, was thankful that the crossing wasn’t far. A little under a mile. When he reached it, his knee had begun creaking badly, which he hadn’t noticed the last time. This is bad. If his knee went, it would ruin everything. He doubted Kitty would want to help a one-legged invalid. A slow-moving cripple would be easier to shoot in this mad world. At least his knee would probably be better on his next revive.

  Once he had reached the place where the street intersected the wide boulevard, Rock looked around, checked the signs to make sure he was in the right spot, and searched for Kitty. He didn’t think it would be any trouble that he had never seen her face in a state of reasonable hygiene. He just had to look out for an unshapely short woman with abnormally thin, smooth legs for such a torso.

  He moved his gaze back and forth. Nothing ugly enough in sight, meaning he was here first. To make sure, he typed a chat message.

  “I’m here, but I don’t see a fat ostrich anywhere.”

  “What? Why would there be an ostrich in this city?”

  “You know, plump up top, with these thin stick legs underneath. I mean, you’re plump as a pregnant flounder with these tiny legs that look like you stole them from a tiny supermodel. So where are you at?”

  “A flounder, you say? Huh. Wait there. I’m a minute away. Get ready.”

  “Get ready how? For what?”

  “You’ll see what. Just wait. And you might want to hold your eyes in.”

  “What for?”

  “Just so they don’t fall out.”

  “What do you...”

  “What are you standing on right now?”

  “The pavement.”

  “So you want your eyes to fall onto the pavement? Alright, quit distracting me. Just keep waiting.”

  So he waited.

  As first, he waited on a little bench nobody seemed to notice and worked on his menu. Thanks to Kitty’s confusing crash course, he knew how to move things around, but so far he didn’t understand anything but the chat system, which had shown its usefulness over the past few hours.

  He was too hesitant to experiment with the rest, so he closed the menu and took up the most captivating occupation he could think off under the circumstances: watching the girls walking by. They were soulless digis, sure, but he had to admit that the developers of this game had a sense of feminine beauty that poked through all too often. Even the older women in their seventies often didn’t look too bad. And the younger ones—none of the girls he saw could be universally branded as ugly. Not a one.

  But Rock always tried to make use of the time he had, so he attempted to figure out what his tastes were. Thanks to the busyness of the intersection, he came to his conclusions quickly. He liked girls in their twenties who were a bit taller than average, with long, light-colored curly hair and wide hips. The fatter ladies didn’t draw his fancy, but neither did the diet queens. The kind that couldn’t be food for the infecteds even if they wanted to. In fact, choking the zombies with their lean bones might be the best plan for cleaning up this world. As for breasts, he preferred them large and supple and had similar standards for asses. He preferred European faces, too, with a small, balanced mouth, lips a bit puffy but not overly so, and wide oval eyes, blue or green in color, with plucked eyebrows and smooth features. No sharp cheekbones or other angles.

  So what did combining all of that get him? A soft, sensual face, probably belonging to a woman unafflicted by farsightedness. One confident of her worth and what she wanted in a man. And yes, long well-groomed legs emerging from her short skirt or dress. That was important. If they had high heels, well, that was ideal. Even grounds for overlooking a few other shortcomings.

  So Rock established his preferences, down to nail color and length. Kitty still wasn’t there. Despite the frequent smiles from girls noticing Rock checking them out, he quickly became bored, even disturbed. He had to escape the city with all speed, but he was just sitting here instead, wasting time waiting for his repulsive date to appear. What if she had been joking with him? What if she was speeding off in the other direction entirely, laughing to herself?

  There was no way to find out.

  So how long should he wait? Until the starving beasts began to invade?

  He must admit, during his visual make-out sessions, he had liked some of the finer specimens that seemed to meet his ideals. Some of them were valuable additions to the city, and it made Rock sad to think they were just puppets. Visually indistinguishable from real women, but still puppets.

  His eyes picked out one of the more stunning exceptions. The most stunning, in fact. She was noticeably shorter than average. Not gaunt, but slender. The sides of her waist almost touched, being hindered, it seemed, only by the presence of her spine. He couldn’t see her backside, but her breasts, as far as he could tell, were a full size under his checklist’s minimum. Her figure was just too thin. Even with his bad knee, he could carry a girl of her weight under the arms for as long as he liked, without even being out of breath at the end. Perhaps I should take her with me out of this city. Saving a digi—that had to count for something.

  But she had a few other marks against her, too. She sported dark brown hair, almost completely straight. Not the curly blonde hair he was looking for. In addition, it was cut short, to just above her shoulders. Her hairstyle, a boxy cut with a part in the middle, would have been Rock’s last choice. Her face ran like a checklist of the features he had decided he didn’t want. An angular chin, a broad mouth with razor-thin lips, a nose just as wide and much too long, cheekbones sharp enough to shave with, almond-shaped greenish-blue eyes with tiny eyelashes, and perfectly straight eyebrows that widened towards the middle, their growth unhindered by tweezers and other tools for fighting back unnecessary facial vegetation.

  Her expression was wrong, too. It had no gentleness to it, not to mention no sensuality. She looked alive, attentive, even cautious. Like a frightened, muzzled beast wandering through the dangers of a dense, distrusted wood. That look showed that she didn’t know her own worth. Worse, it showed that she didn’t even care to know.

  Only one item matched Rock’s dream list: her shorts were tiny and tight, and the legs that extended from them got five stars. But the hips that gave birth to them, not so much. Whatever. Proportions and slenderness were more of a package deal. The overall picture was sound.

  This woman, so unusual for this town, was very close now. Rock could see the color of her eyes perfectly, along with the childlike neglect of her eyebrows and every fold of the venom-green top she wore, which emphasized that she ignored a certain undergarment. Perhaps she had ignored the other, too.

  So she failed nearly every one of Rock’s tests—but the combined result, he had to admit, was very nice. She wasn’t a beauty, but she was cute, and her eyes were better than most of the busty
blondes walking by who scored better on his list.

  The cute girl turned from the sidewalk, high heels clicking loudly—which Rock liked—and walked to the bench, stopped in front of it, cocked her head to the side, and stared at him impatiently. Displeased, even. She spoke with a voice that was as sweet as her looks. “Why the hell are you sitting here?”

  Her words didn’t seem to match the modest femininity of the behavior patterns he had encountered. What was wrong with her?

  “I can sit here. It’s a public bench,” he replied, thrown off by the odd question but answering without hesitation.

  What was going on here? Had his gaze lured her in? All of the others had only smiled in response, not rushed in hoping for a warm embrace. But it didn’t look like she was searching for a man’s affection. She looked like she couldn’t give a damn.

  Gracefully spinning on one leg, the eccentric girl spat at him, full of arrogance and condescension. “Get your eyes off the pavement and follow me, moron.”

  She moved away, not looking behind her, her words accompanied by the same clinking of her heels, the same light but purposeful gait. She walked like a girl on a mission, with one singular goal in mind.

  Rock jumped up like a pile of sticky manure tossed from a shovel and caught up with her, wobbling along on his agonizing, creaking leg. He turned his head to face her as he walked, astonished. “Is that you, Kitty?”

  The girl gave the sort of eye-roll reserved exclusively for the most profound cases of idiocy in the history of the human race. She answered with the tone a man might use with his dog. “Oh no, I’m just a digi, couldn’t you tell? I walked by and realized I had finally found someone less intelligent than I am!”

  Rock replayed his brief acquaintance with Kitty through in his head, trying to comprehend. “Wait, no, you were fat, with legs tiny as atrophied pinkies, and you walked all bent over, with a voice like you were shouting into a beer keg. What the hell kind of magic is this? Are you sure you’re Kitty?”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re not even smart enough to get the title ‘moron.’ Go ahead, call up my information panel, if you can.”

  “Yeah, I can.”

  “Why haven’t you, then? That congenital dementia of yours keeping you too occupied?”

  Object: immune. Humanity: low negative. Nickname: Kitty. Not armed. High probability of unknown Continental combat abilities.

  Rock read every word, twice, but refused to believe his eyes. That thing had looked like this girl about as much as a quivering doe looked like a prize hog.

  “Better minimize that, idiot, or you’ll run into this lamppost.”

  He took his inconceivably transformed companion’s advice at the last possible moment, then looked at her and expressed his doubts again. “You’re not at all like she was.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. So after everything that I’d gone through, what do you think I should have looked like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sat in a black swamp for two days! Barely kept the leeches out of my ears! Imagine it. Leeches everywhere.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Right. And that’s not all. Later, they drove me into the sewers, and I took a bullet in the stomach and a cleaver to the head.” The girl winced and ran her palm over her skin. “In that blackness, I threw a sniper’s cloak over me to hide myself. It was cleverly made, on a rope frame. Asymmetrical, and it hid outlines well. Well, the sewer turned it black. You must be a real idiot to not have realized that. Oh right, you are, I already knew that.”

  “Fine, to hell with your figure, but what about your voice?”

  “What do you want from my voice?”

  “It wasn’t the same voice. Not at all the same.”

  “What do you mean, not the same? Try thinking with your head. Does wonders! Oh wait, I forgot—you’re incapable. Sorry. So, moron, I suppose you could sing a beautiful aria after a rifle butt to the larynx, a swollen tongue, and a good choking with blood mixed with teeth?”

  Rock didn’t always choose his words carefully in conversation. He was taking in the details slowly, beginning to realize with growing conviction that his nickname should indeed have been “moron.”

  He was a rare kind of fool, to be sure. He had been tricked into thinking this slender, pretty girl was a fat ugly woman.

  The little bitch continued pouring fuel on the flame, too, along with some bits of information. “Globes is probably still laughing at you. Not only did you fail to take him out first, you also screwed up your insults. His sister was ‘even worse than scarecrow here,’ I believe it was? Man, did he find that funny. You know, I’m not surprised that you’ve died thirty times so far without making any progress. I’m surprised you haven’t died more times! Here, when you die, one good thing happens: you come back to life healthy. All of your wounds, even your scars, go away. I hate always ending up in high heels and with this manicure that drives me nearly as crazy as you do. Plus, earrings, and often a chain or a bracelet. No gold or silver, no, just cheap jewelry, and often ugly jewelry. But you know what the worst part it?”

  “Shoes too tight?”

  “Wrong, moron. It’s the hair. It’s too long. Not everyone’s hair, of course, but mine is almost always waist-length.”

  “What’s so bad about that?” asked Rock in surprise.

  “You really don’t know? Grow up and you’ll figure it out. Long hair gets in the way. Badly. Always wrapping around the wrong thing at the wrong time. I can cut it myself, of course, but that ends up kind of crappy, you know. It took me a while to find a decent hair salon. And the hairdresser took forever, too. I’ve never seen someone work so slowly with hair!”

  Rock was listening to Kitty’s explanation with all ears, but now he couldn’t hold his tongue.

  “Are you saying... So while I was here waiting for you, you were at the haircutter’s?”

  “Well, where else could I have gone to waste so much time? And they did a decent job, didn’t they?”

  Chapter 13

  Life Five: A New Name

  “Here, splash this on you,” said Kitty, tossing a small bottle to Rock. “Time to celebrate!”

  “What the heck is appropriate to celebrate in the middle of a doomed mob? My mother-in-law’s birthday, maybe.”

  Even then, he would have picked a decent open-air cafe at a busy intersection. But this was a square dining area with four large umbrellas, massive piles of pigeons, dirt-cheap tables and chairs made out of dirty, cracking plastic, some grumpy middle-aged women sitting among boxes of unknown foodstuffs to go, dispensing them out through a window that was almost as wide as her ass. Beer bottles littered the street, with vomit and urine soaking the bushes that grew alongside the fence, and the ground beneath them.

  Rock would have kept a mile away from the place if Kitty hadn’t have brought him.

  But she was leafing calmly through an illustrated brochure. “We’re going to celebrate your nameday!”

  “Oh, that was my two hundredth guess. So why do I need a nameday?”

  “Otherwise you’ll be a moron forever,” said Kitty matter-of-factly.

  “Alright, you’ve convinced me.” Rock still had no idea what was going on, but he figured it wasn’t in his best interest to object. “Summon the priests or whatever you need for the ritual.”

  “No priests. Just me, your godmother.”

  “Godmother? Aren’t you kind of young for that? I was trying to figure out whether you had passed kindergarten yet.”

  “There are no minors on the Continent, and I don’t suffer from moron’s dementia like you do, so I must have finished kindergarten. Maybe even first grade.”

  “But I’ve seen kids around.”

  “How the fuck are you so stupid? Those were digis. I’m talking about immunes.”

  “I know, I know, I was just getting a reaction out of you. It’s funny.”

  “Funny? We’ll see how funny it is when you get eaten alive becaus
e of your idiocy!”

  “Kitty, hasn’t anyone told you that a beautiful girl like you is supposed to be nice, too?”

  “And haven’t you learned that nice people don’t last any longer than an hour in this world? No? If only you have a micron of gray matter, you’d have figured that out.”

  “So what did you mean, ‘must have finished kindergarten’?”

  “How’s your memory, moron?”

  “I mean, I remember you all dirty, with a bag of shit tied onto both of the legs sticking out of that dirty cabbage torso thing you had,” Rock snapped back, tiring of the endless insults.

  “Not that memory. Do you remember anything from before the Continent?”

  “You all call this shithole the Continent?”

  “Just answer the question. What do you remember?”

  “Basically nothing. Some elevator, stairs, and I was wearing a jacket. Where I was, I don’t know. What about it?”

  “All the zeroes are like that. Some remember more, some less. You remember the least of all. That explains a few things. Tough luck. Unless you get control of your mind, you’ll stay limited. You need to reach level ten at least for the blocks to begin dropping.”

  “But you don’t remember your own schooling,” said Rock, starting to understand.

  “I do, but not everything. I have managed to remember a lot. Some parts are missing.”

  “‘Some parts are missing’? So your memory is coming back?”

  “Seems so. Not just to me, either. Like I said, the memory blocks start to deactivate when you pump.”

  “Could you explain that?”

  “Not quickly. It’s not easy to understand. You have to grow up. Level up. Do things, not just sit around idly. From time to time, pieces of your old memory come back. It’s a reward for making progress. They say the only thing you can never remember is your name. Everything else will come back eventually. But no one has managed to get all of it back yet. Unless they have, and I just haven’t heard of them. The Continent is a big place.”