Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 4

  This means the corporation cannot allow Scyth to eliminate the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague. To do that, Scyth needs Concentrated Life Essence – the reward given to the champion of the Demonic Games.

  Nearly late, Alex arrives at the European hotel Ruhm und Ehre, where the nineteenth Demonic Games are being held this year. While there, he is forbidden from making any contact with the outside world.

  At registration, some of the contestants, of which around four hundred were gathered, fling accusations at him. They all think Scyth doesn’t deserve to be at the Demonic Games, and that he got into them only thanks to his cheating in the Junior Arena. The most impassioned of them is Renato Loyola, aka Quetzal, champion of the adult Arena.

  Alex’s appearance at the Games is a surprise for the organizers; they hoped that Scyth would fail to survive the Ordeal, and didn’t even assign him an assistant. Kerry Hunter, employee of the PR department, is tasked with the duty.

  Director of the PR department Chloe Cliffhanger tries to convince Alex to change his mind about entering. In exchange, Kiran Jackson will fulfill the promise he gave to Alex when they first met in Dubai. Alex feigns agreement.

  During a press conference in which he is meant to declare his decision not to participate, Melissa Schafer and Malik Abdualim run into the hall. Both say they are sick of Alex’s tyranny and arrogance, and have decided to part ways with him. More than that, the young duo announce that they are a couple. Alex is crushed.

  In front of everyone, Kiran Jackson and Chloe Cliffhanger make a show of trying to convince Alex to stay in the Games. They need people to believe that Sheppard’s departure is his own decision, and that Snowstorm has done all it can to keep him there. Alex upsets their plans by declaring that he will stay in, that he will try to prove his worth without his Threat abilities.

  During the opening ceremony of the Games, the viewers vote Scyth the worst contestant of the day: he spends the first day with the Cursed Cripple debuff, slowed and weakened. For her memorable performance at the press conference, Tissa is declared the best. Her reward is Banshee Queen’s Cry, which paralyzes all enemies in the vicinity with fear for one minute.

  Guy Barron Octius, long-time presenter of the Demonic Games, warns the entrants that on the first day, they won’t be able to deal damage to each other. In addition, they will all start the Games with the Amnesia debuff, forgetting all their skills. To restore their memory, they must either kill at least one mob or die.

  The contestants are sent to a forest glade in the elvish lands. King Eynyon opens a portal to the Cursed Chasm – a place torn from Disgardium and thrust into the great nothing, with a village at its heart. Next to the settlement yawns the Pitfall, a vertical drop over eight miles deep, split into six hundred and sixty-six floors. At the very bottom lurks the final boss. If he is defeated, then the Demonic Games ends. In all the previous eighteen Games, nobody has ever defeated the boss. However, there is another way to achieve victory; be the last player left standing.

  As soon as Scyth appears in the Cursed Chasm, the other players grab him. It turns out that the contestants made a deal to first throw the Threat down the Pitfall, then catch him at the graveyard and finish him off. Three leaders command the rest: titan destroyer Quetzal from Excommunicado, orc bruiser Marcus – Quetzal’s opponent in the Arena final, – and Destiny the silver ranger from the Children of Kratos.

  Destiny’s people throw Scyth into the Pitfall. He now has only one life left, but now that he has his abilities back, he manages to escape from the graveyard to the floor of the Pitfall, where he spends the rest of the game day leveling up Meditation. Each level of the skill raises his total spirit.

  On the second day, Scyth is voted worst player again, and gets Paralysis. Using Flight, he knocks contestants down to the bottom of the Pitfall with his own body. Thanks to Ghastly Howl and Spirit Shackles, he manages to take out the two groups hunting him.

  Scyth spends day three in stasis with Abaddon’s Curse while a slaughter unfolds around him – people from Modus and the Travelers protect him, with werewolf sniper Hellfish leading them. Out of mischief, paladin Kharmo’Lav opens the seal to floor 666, paralyzing everyone with Weak Will, and the final boss attacks from behind the gates. Jeweler Meister is the first to figure out how to overcome the debuff – by eating a demonic coin. Due to Abaddon’s Curse, Scyth is stuck in place, but Quetzal shows unexpected generosity, protecting Scyth with his own best-player reward, the perfect shield Aegis, which saves him from getting zeroed.

  Quetzal’s good deed causes a rift in the raid he shares with Marcus. Around ten people remain with the titan destroyer, including Tissa and Malik, while the rest go to the orc bruiser.

  On the fourth day, the final boss stretches out his tentacle-like arms and cracks the Aegis. Scyth talks to him and learns that floor 666 is occupied by the high demon Abaddon, a general in the army of Belial, prince of the Inferno. Scyth attacks the boss’s arms in Clarity, leveling up Unarmed Combat and his spirit reserves. He escapes the boss and hides in the woods. Just as he counts down the seconds until the day’s end, a trio of gankers attacks him. Scyth is saved by the game closing.

  After deciding to make contact with Joseph Rosenthal, the gnome jeweler Meister and leader of a large group of crafters, Alex asks his assistant Kerry for help to ask Ed if there’s anything in the clan vault for a jeweler. Kerry fulfills his request, but is caught by Snowstorm’s security services.

  Kiran Jackson grasps at this excuse to get rid of Scyth. The boy is disqualified for attempting to make contact with the outside world and trying to get an out-of-game advantage, a fact which Octius is meant to announce. But the gamesmaster considers himself obliged to fulfill a request from Mike Anderson, a founding father of Snowstorm, to hand over the decision to a Court of Contestants.

  In the meantime, Alex comes to an agreement with the three leaders of the crafters – jeweler Meister, poet Bloomer and curser Roman – about an alliance. They agree to help Scyth obtain the Essence, and in exchange he guarantees to increase their stats with Unity in greater Dis. Although he doesn’t mention that they’ll have to become followers of the Sleepers.

  In the Court of Contestants, not only the crafters vote for Scyth to remain, but so do Hellfish’s group and Quetzal. Scyth is exonerated and can continue the Games. His nearly-fired helper Kerry is returned to him, but is less friendly than before. As it turns out, she is under strict surveillance.

  Remembering that his character will be surrounded by a trio of gankers as soon as he logs in, Scyth asks Hellfish and Meister for help. And the issue isn’t the gankers, but the fact that they’re Destiny’s people, and her entire raid is sure to join them.

  On the fifth day of the Games, Scyth deals with the gankers on his own, but can’t escape before a battle unfolds in the glade. Destiny buys the right to kill the Threat from Marcus, and comes close to ending Scyth twice, but both times he is saved by rewards given to the best player: first Tissa with her Banshee Queen’s Cry, and then Meister with Escape Pentagram, which sends Scyth to floor 531.

  While the enraged Markers and Desters eliminate the crafters and those of Quetzal and Hellfish’s people who fail to escape, Scyth completes Despot’s Labyrinth, inhabited solely by the demon whose name it bears. After finding his heart, Scyth makes the demon his ally.

  That night, Alex is visited by Destiny Windsor, carrier of royal blood. For helping her eliminate Scyth, the girl promised Marcus her body and a lot of money, but she considered the deal unfulfilled – the hated player had survived. Marcus goes to her and demands payment for his services, and in response to her refusal, threatens to zero her character. Considering that Destiny’s people have defected to Marcus’s side, his threat is more than realistic.

  Destiny asks for Alex’s protection, and he agrees to help. The girl isn’t opposed to sleeping with him, but Alex wants something else instead. Alex wants her to tell all two hundred million of her fans about the danger threatening any non-citizens playing for t
he undead faction. The new faction, tireless and immune to climate debuffs, is advertised on every screen, and more and more non-citizens are switching to it. After she learns of this, Destiny decides to check the information in the clinic where the builders from Gyula’s work crew were treated. And, if the information is confirmed, she promises to make it public knowledge.

  Alex plans to attack Marcus’s people with his new ally, but there’s a catch: Despot refuses to obey, and attacks Scyth’s allies, including Destiny. Scyth uses force, and only then does the demon agree to leave his friends be. However, he can do no harm to other demons. Scyth orders Despot to guard the entrance to the Pitfall.

  Scyth saves many allies and deprives Marcus’s raid of its leader, but Youlang the mage survives, finds Scyth’s weak allies and eliminates them. The viewers name her best player of the day, and Youlang gets the Pentagram of Freedom as a reward.

  Tissa is knocked out of the Games by Marcus, and Infect by Despot, who reads his soul and delivers the verdict: “Neither friend nor enemy…” and, with Scyth’s consent, devours Infect.

  Catching Alex after he leaves his capsule, his former friends try to explain themselves, but he refuses to listen.

  Scyth’s raid, which includes the surviving contestants from the groups of Meister, Hellfish and Quetzal, along with Destiny, who the raid views with hostility, starts clearing dungeons. Despot patrols the Pitfall to cover their backs. But disaster strikes from an unexpected direction – Youlang activates her Pentagram of Freedom. All the demons of the Pitfall are freed, and rush toward Scyth’s raid.

  Despot blocks the passageway to the raid with his body, helping them to deal with the enemy and survive. The demons’ Freedom Day ends, and Eynyon’s Gong strikes, announcing that the next day of the Games will be the last.

  Guy Barron Octius declares that the champion may be either the last remaining survivor or the entire raid, if they defeat the final boss Abaddon.

  On the final day, Scyth heads straight to the bottom of the Pitfall and sees that the boss’s health has increased in proportion to the number of players in the raid. Mathematically, the group has no chance to defeat Abaddon. Scyth makes the difficult decision to fight without the raid.

  With Despot’s help, he destroys the raid at the threshold to floor 666, after first placing Spirit Shackles.

  Abaddon accuses Despot of bowing to the will of the mortals, and kills him. In a difficult duel, Scyth brings the boss to low health and then revives the raid at the last moment.

  Each member is awarded the victory. Elvish king Eynyon appears in Abaddon’s cleansed cave and invites the champions to his domain to accept their reward.

  After celebrating, Alex heads home. His security officers Hairo and Willy fly in to pick him up. On the way, Alex opens Destiny Windsor’s profile online. She fulfills her promise: live on air, she announces to the whole world that the non-citizen capsules are deadly to anyone playing as the undead.

  Alex’s parents delight him with the news that he’s going to have a new brother or sister.

  After contacting Ed and Hung, Alex learns the latest news: Hiros the ninja has moved to Cali Bottom; atop Orthokon, Bomber is approaching the underwater kingdom of the Naga near Meaz; and the clan has received fifty million phoenixes from Destiny. The final piece of news is that Malik has returned to Cali Bottom after the Games, and is now in isolation, cut off from Dis.

  Willy says the situation with Malik isn’t as simple as it appears, and shows Alex a recording of the conversation between the boy and Tissa a day before the Demonic Games. Their ‘treachery’ is explained. As it turns out, they were carrying out orders from Behemoth, who manifested himself to Tissa.

  The Sleeper’s predictions scare Willy: What in the hell is that Behemoth of yours?

  Prologue: Liam

  BY HIS TWENTY-EIGHTH YEAR, Liam Noah Driscoll had figured out the most important thing in life: that there are two kinds of people.

  One kind never has any trouble, because all problems in the second half of the twenty-first century, even those of health and relationships, are easily solved by money and status. The Platinum Hundred were the roughly one hundred thousand citizens in the elite categories, and they usually had far more money than they needed for any quality of life. Liam counted himself in that camp.

  The overwhelming majority belonged to the second camp, in which he included everyone with a citizenship status below C. In his history lessons, Liam learned that these people used to provide at least some value: they worked the land, herded cattle, cleaned the sewers and worked in factories. When there were too many people and not enough resources for them in their country, they were sent off to war. In times when there were hundreds of states and thousands of nationalities in conflict on the planet, it was never hard to find an excuse. And even without wars, there were ways to reduce the population: epidemics, famine, unchecked crime.

  Nowadays, those people do no good to anyone, only harm. All manufacturing is automated: robots controlled by effective AIs shepherd the earth, raise all the cattle, clean the sewers and manufacture all the goods. The world is united, and wars no longer flare up, but even if they did, it wouldn’t be humans fighting, but droids. As a result, around ten billion people became a burden. Dirty, hungry biomass. Much like the cattle their ancestors once herded.

  Praise the UN for resettling most of the dregs to uninhabitable lands! Accordingly, Liam only saw such people in the movies. They were portrayed either as criminals, or… Liam didn’t like this one bit – sometimes the miserable inwinova were shown as handsome men or beautiful women with hearts of gold, penniless, always in love with a high-category citizen. Those movies always gathered a huge audience, and it was clear why – every loser dreamed of rising to the top.

  But not Liam; he had all he wanted since birth. His parents made their fortune after the Third World War from inexpensive personal bunkers designed to operate autonomously for a century. People terrified by the nuclear explosions in Northern China bought them, and if they couldn’t afford it, they took out a loan.

  Nobody ended up needing the bunkers, and many buyers went bankrupt trying to pay for them, but Liam’s parents rose to the peak of social significance, first gaining citizenship category C, and over time ascending to B.

  Liam never had to think about what he would do in life. His parents’ business, which had grown into a global holding company, was run by hired managers, and even the board of directors was half comprised of superpowerful AI controllers. So when his aunt Elizabeth, his mother’s sister, invited him to play Disgardium and conquer new heights there, he gladly agreed.

  His aunt led the White Amazons, known for their highly selective criteria for girls. Considering that in Dis there were guilds and unions that recruited only gnomes, orcs or females, a clan that accepted only beautiful Caucasian girls surprised nobody. It also had stringent restrictions on in-game race: only humans and elves were accepted.

  Aunt Elizabeth was friends with Otto Hinterleaf, leader of Modus, and made a deal with him to take her nephew straight into the main clan without a trial period in T-Modus.

  Several years ago, Mogwai moved to Modus from the Azure Dragons. The druid arrived with the status of megastar and signed the most profitable contract the world had ever seen. The fact that Fen Xiaoguang had grown up in the slums of Shenzhen bothered Liam only at the outset. The past was the past, but now Fen was a respected billionaire citizen. The young men quickly found common ground: Fen was famous, and Liam knew everything that a young man in high society was supposed to know.

  It was a mutually beneficial friendship. Fen had no idea how to behave in respectable company, how to talk to aristocrats, and Liam happily taught him all of this in exchange for a share of Fen’s popularity and a chunk of his fans. Among them many girls, of course. Not that it mattered; Liam liked male and female alike, and all shades between.

  Most of all, by making friends with Mogwai, Liam was freed from routine clan duties. In other words, Mogwai had the p
rivilege of going on exciting quests, and Liam tagged along with him. Hinterleaf generally didn’t object, and Liam didn’t care what Yary had to say about it.

  When Mogwai announced his departure from Dis, Liam was upset. It was one thing to hang around with a top player in Dis, completing divine quest chains like the one with Athena. It was another thing entirely to work to the clan’s schedule. Without Mogwai, Liam lost his indulgences, and Yary immediately had him powerleveling lowbies and participating in the daily social quests – Modus was always leveling up its reputation with various factions with the help of its troops.

  The year before, when the world was shaken with the news of a Threat with maximum potential, Liam contacted Fen right away.

  “Time to come back, old man!”