Class-A Threat (Disgardium Book #1) LitRPG Series Page 9

  Not looking away from the bizarre lich, I walked over to where my stuff was piled in a heap that fell after my first death, got dressed and picked up my sword.

  "It'll be faster this way," I explained to the boss, raising the sword.

  He blinked. He understood but kept showering me with stuffy phrases:

  "Shut your mouth, worm! It is not for you to tussle..."

  A Sneak Attack cut him off midsentence.

  You have critically damaged Dargo the Cursed Lich: 9!

  Health points: 271/280.

  Missing every other time, I mixed my only special with normal blows, squeezing my two strength points for all they were worth. I tried not to raise the sword so I wouldn't hit him in the head because it seemed wrong, although maybe I was just making it harder on myself. To the nether with all this.

  Yet another Sneak Attack landed a crit for twelve damage. Dargo didn't even wince, maybe because he didn't feel pain.

  By the end of the second minute, I was done with the crypt boss. A moment before the last blow, he threw up his hands and, his thumb and pointer finger touching, formed a ring.

  "Donuts?" I asked with an exhale.

  He didn't have time to answer.

  You have critically damaged Dargo the Cursed Lich: 5!

  Dargo the Cursed Lich is dead.

  Experience points received: 90.

  Experience points at present level (2): 117/900.

  You have completed the Crypt of the Temple of Nergal the Radiant!

  The damp and crumbly soil floor, which smelled of rot and decay started changing from the place the boss died. Murky and barely lit by the smoldering torches, the room lit up with faces of the Radiant God on the wall. The damp went away, the earth instantly went dry, then just disappeared, leaving a fine wooden floor.

  A series of flashes followed, then a victorious fanfare, and my vision was obstructed by interface messages. I gathered my things, then returned to the lich's body and sat next to it, my hands crossed on my knees to catch my breath. I looked over my rewards.

  Tristad Chief Councilman Peter Whiteacre’s mission completed.

  You discovered that an unknown evil stole into the crypt of the Temple of Nergal the Radiant – an emissary of the Destroying Plague, Dargo the Lich. The lich managed to raise quite an army of the undead, defiling the very foundations of the Temple, feeding off emanations of faith from adepts of the Radiant God like a parasite and threatening the blessings of all city dwellers.

  By your efforts, the Temple has been cleansed of profanation!

  Tell Tristad Chief Councilman Peter Whiteacre to receive your reward.

  Experience points received for completing the Crypt of the Temple of Nergal Radiant: 100.

  Experience points at present level (2): 217/900.

  So there were plusses to soloing through instances. All that experience would mean precious little if I had to share it with a whole party. Eve was still in my group, but she probably wouldn't get experience because she was outside the crypt. Although maybe it would count as her passing it?

  Somewhere behind me, a door screeched open. I turned around and saw a flickering pall in the doorway. The exhaustion and ambivalence that had overtaken me a half hour earlier were swept away by glee. Smiling like an idiot, I swallowed trying to somehow wet my throat. I raised my cottony arms in a sign of victory.

  There was just one message left unread. I purposely left it for last, already knowing what came next, and wanting to savor it.

  Unique achievement unlocked: The Lich is Dead! Long Live the New Lich...

  You defeated the main crypt boss all on your own (!), and it was five times (!) higher level than you. Better yet, you didn't even take any damage!

  Dargo the Cursed Lich is dead, never to return. But before he shuffled off this mortal coil, he inadvertently transferred you a modicum of his power.

  Reward: Mark of the Destroying Plague.

  I opened my profile and read the description of the ability, trying to hack through but my brain was categorically opposed to working at full steam. At first glance, the ability seemed to be of dubious utility. It came with bone-chilling side effects, and the name didn't seem to promise anything good.

  Mark of the Destroying Plague.

  Passive skill.

  Current level: 1.

  When taking a killing blow, you have a 1% chance to receive Curse of the Undead. If it triggers you will not die, and all damage you take will be reduced by 100%. However, your living body will begin to visibly decay!

  This curse will remain active until you completely restore your health.

  Another curse? Was the one from Patrick not enough? I thought about it and decided to figure out how to live with this later. I grabbed the loot off the floor. It was illuminated by the interface. It contained some strange and unpleasant feeling scaled belt. I threw it in my inventory and ran to the exit.

  The workday in Tristad hadn't begun yet, and that meant I would have to first fly home after school to pass the quest, then go see Dargo/Clayton after that.

  The sun was already peeking up over the horizon, coloring the roofs and temple spire a beautiful shade of gold. After the murky and musty crypt, Tristad shone with new colors. The air was transparent, and the smells of fresh morning inspired joy. And I was happy, in no rush to leave this world.

  Somewhere in the city, a bell rang three times, making my temples shoot with pain. I slipped my gaze over a global notification about a new threat. I had seen plenty of them when I first started, but I thought I turned off threat notifications. Strange that this one made it through the filter... Ah, there was the issue – the potential threat level was higher than normal:

  We have detected a disturbance in the strings of creation! A new evil has awoken in Disgardium!

  Estimated potential threat class: L.

  Current threat class: Z.

  Most likely location: foothills of the Nameless Mountains.

  Now that this evil has awoken, we mustn’t let it grow more powerful. Be the first to find and eliminate it, and the powers that be will reward you generously!

  And if you succeed, oh bravehearts and heroes, the gods will be favorable to you as well!

  Nameless mountains? That might be somewhere nearby, but it might also be on another side of the world. It was a mountain ridge that went on for three hundred miles. To the nether with that, I was late for school. And oh how I want to drink...

  I focused on the “Exit” button.

  Oh nether, let me be free.

  Chapter Eleven. Cali Bottom

  I TOOK A SHOWER and got ready for school, then went to the dining table to have breakfast, followed by AT the catdog. Father sluggishly traded curses with mom, while AT laid next to them, occasionally wagging her tail. The robot cleaner hurriedly wiped a red spot on the couch. By the looks of things, mom was drinking wine last night.

  This was not a usual morning. There was none of the usual animation, with father acting nasty toward mom and her quipping back. My parents, fully immersed in their own problems, didn't even notice that I hadn't slept. The cold and damp of our unheated apartment was making us all shiver.

  I finished a bowl of wheat flake cereal, then hurriedly left. Eve O'Sullivan was waiting for me outside as usual. Like always she was wearing an ironed uniform, a crisp white shirt and a long gray dress. In her hand she held a compact airstream umbrella. I was in such a rush that I forgot mine at home, but she gladly let me stand next to her.

  On the way to the parking lot, without getting into the details, I told her how I spent all night in the crypt. She didn't express particular interest, just surprise like “how could you voluntarily lose sleep over some stupid game?” The new Alex Sheppard didn't quite fit into her regular and easily understood world.

  The school lot looked like a batted beehive. One after the next, glassy droplet-shaped vehicles silently whirred up, either following an automatically generated route or on manual control. Most people preferred not to bothe
r with manual, entering their destination and dozing off for the whole flight. Still, no matter how badly I wanted to sleep, I opted to fly.

  Not listening to Eve's chirping, I was mentally in the game. I had already begun to understand Ed and Tissa's behavior in school. Hours spent in the real world for them were the same thing as my required Dis time before. Everything there was brighter, more significant, more dynamic. In one night I had experienced most likely more emotions than in one month in our world. Take those balls of grave worms for example. I still shuddered just to think about them.

  I wasn't the only one in class who hadn't slept. "Bomber" Hung was yawning so much his jaw almost came unhinged, and Malik "Infect" just laid his head on his folded arms. With makeup on, Tissa could hide most of the evidence of a sleepless night, but there was nothing to be done about the burst blood vessels in her reddened eyes. Ed wasn't even there for the whole first period. But eventually the chief Dementor did come to school. And he was in a good mood, which immediately spread to the rest of his clan.

  I only understood why that was later when talk spread throughout the class that he had successfully prevented a Class-Z Threat with the potential to go Y. The clueless necromancer deemed a threat to the world was accidentally outed.

  Realizing there was nowhere to hide in our sandbox, the kid decided to sell his identity. A deal was struck just hours before sunrise, when there were almost no players remaining in the region.

  But Ed had stayed back to sell his loot, a couple high-level alchemy ingredients, through an illegal auction.

  "Why doesn't everyone do it like that?" Tim, captain of our soccer team, asked during a break.

  "Everyone who becomes a threat?" Ed clarified.

  "I mean, yeah. Like that guy. He made some money, got rid of the problem, and now he gets to re-spec with a new toon."

  "Because the closer you get to meeting your potential, the higher the rewards from the corporation." Ed shrugged his shoulders as if he didn't understand how someone could not know such rudimentary things. "And they go up by orders of magnitude! He never made it past the minimum Z-Class, and all he’ll get from the corporation now is a thousand gold or two."

  Tim gave a whistle, then squinted skeptically:

  "And how do you know what he got? No one talks, you know that. Don’t you know what kind of problems that can cause?"

  Ed turned away, hiding his smile, and Bomber answered for him, whispering forebodingly:

  "Believe me, Cap. Ed knows."

  "Oooh," Tim wailed, imitating a ghost. "Boys, that game is making you nuts! Why should you eliminate a threat when it’s a little caterpillar if you can let it level up and destroy it as a butterfly?"

  "Because, Tim," Tissa answered readily. "The preventer's reward, i.e. for the one who eliminated the threat, depends only on potential class, not present one."

  "Ah, I see. Then better to suppress threats while they're weak," the captain nodded.

  "And you don't want..." Tissa started, but the bell rang.

  "Class, attention!" Mr. Kovacs announced. "Your first semester examination..."

  The modern history exam consisted of two parts: a regular test and an essay question. I wasn’t even remotely worried. I was first to turn it in and, with Greg's permission, I left school without waiting for Eve. I told her not to wait for me, then flew home to pass the chief councilman’s quest.

  The black clouds had dissipated, and it was much easier to drive the flying car than this cloudy morning.

  It was completely quiet at home. My parents were working on a project, immersed in their joint virtual workspace. AT was in energy-saving mode as a cat on the windowsill, lounging in the rays of sun and recharging her batteries while the robot cleaner did the same, nestled in a wall nook.

  I hopped into my pod, taking my clothes off as I went, loaded up Dis and ran to the city council building. The game beeped out new messages and notifications, but I decided not to get distracted and look that over tonight. Cali Bottom was not the kind of neighborhood where a young person should be after dark and, in order to make it before nightfall, I'd have to hurry.

  Chief Councilman Whiteacre looked at me ambivalently and listened to my report on the temple crypt.

  "I've already been made aware of your success, Scyth. Here is your reward," he extended me a silver coin.

  Some logs came up saying I finished the quest and received one hundred experience points. And another five points of reputation with the city brought me that much further from hostile.

  "Thank you, Advisor! Is there any other way I could be of use to the magnificent city of Tristad and its residents?"

  "Without a doubt, Scyth!" Whiteacre nodded eagerly. "You can familiarize yourself with the whole list of available city council missions on the bulletin board. It is to the right of the exit, which is right behind you. Have a nice day, Scyth!"

  My hopes of receiving another unusual quest were dashed. I was not going to weed gardens or sweep streets most of all because the rewards for that weren't even close to worth the time they took.

  So then, leaving the building, I left my character at the bulletin board and exited the game.

  Dargo was waiting, and I still needed to buy donuts.

  * * *

  My parents were fairly beneficial to society, so they were assigned the status "F." And we lived in an apartment block of the same category. It wasn't as luxurious as, for example, E- or D-category blocks, but still better than those where citizens with low social significance lived. My parents had a separate bedroom, for example. And I had my own room. Plus we had two bathrooms and a guest room adjoining the kitchen. There was nothing to really complain about. There was even space for catdog AT and a robot cleaner.

  Cali Bottom, which took me more than two hours to reach, was a different world. My flying car came down on the roof of one of the huge drab residential buildings – one-hundred-floor dormitory number two-seventy. This neighborhood was so tightly packed that I couldn't find anywhere else to land.

  This wasn’t the safest area, but I didn’t think anyone would touch me. Noncitizens were subject to immediate sentencing for crimes with little to no judicial process. Punishment came right after any infraction. At the very least that's what Greg told us.

  And this artificial city of uncategorized residences was built for noncitizens. Apartments here were called cubbies. That was how cramped they were inside. Toilets and showers were in the same room and shared for all residents of one block. There were a few blocks per floor, and many of the cubbies didn't have windows.

  This was not the kind of information I would have sought out on my own, but it was part of my education. Greg even brought us on a field trip to show us the various classes of residence, seemingly to motivate us to study harder.

  I got out of the flying car and tried to get my bearings. I was looking for block thirty-six, so I read the numbers on the signs. But my arrival did not go unnoticed. Groups of people in various states of poor dress started closing in around the flying car. Mostly they were teens, but I also saw an old man in a wheelchair and a few old women on a bench staring at me.

  I walked up to them, shivering at their dark and sullen gazes. One of the boys, a lean swarthy pipsqueak in a t-shirt, was blocking my path.

  "Where’d you come from, goody two-shoes? And in a flying car, come on! So jerkoff, you from out here?"

  I turned around and realized I was surrounded. One of the people standing behind me spat at my feet, another was thoughtfully clapping a short piece of rebar in his hand.

  "I'm looking for block thirty-six," I said. "I'm here to see Clayton."

  "What you got there?" the skinny kid pointed at a paper bag in my hands.

  "This is for Clayton."

  "What are you even talking about! Clayton this, Clayton that! Do you think we know who that is? I do not give a shit who the hell Clayton is! Give me the bag!"

  "Boys, I'm just..."

  "Who you callin’ ‘boys,' jerkoff?" the skinny one
asked angrily. "You sound a little mixed up."

  Someone ripped the bag of donuts out of my hands and gave a celebratory squeal:

  "Aw, nether! Just look what he’s got here! Mmm..." the last word bore witness to the fact that one of the donuts was already in his mouth.

  Well then, where was his punishment? Where was the orbital crime detection system? Where were was law enforcement?

  They tore the bag to pieces, a few donuts fell out, and a hunchbacked boy picked them up, gracefully crawling out of the free for all. The hunchback brought the donuts to the old man in the wheelchair.