Hell's Glitch (LitRPG): Into a Dark Adventure (10 page)

BOOK: Hell's Glitch (LitRPG): Into a Dark Adventure
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On approach, the huntsman hefted his mighty greataxe
overhead and came down with a powerful blow that Sam knew would cleave the
swordsman right in two.  The swordsman was too fast however and had anticipated
the blow.  Sam had seen it all.  The swordsman had stopped the blow at its base
by catching the greataxe’s handle and pushing it aside.  The swordsman then
took his greatsword into both of his hands and sliced through the huntsman’s
right shoulder and neck.  The huntsman’s blood had sprayed through the air and
his head went rolling along the open forest trail and into the dark woods.  Sam
had to stop himself from cursing aloud and whistling at such an impressive yet
frightening showing of strength.  He certainly didn’t want to attract the
attention of the bloodthirsty swordsman, so he kept completely silent and still.

“Now, I guess you’ll do then.  I’ll hang you up real nice
too,” the swordsman said, murderous glee in his voice.

He bent down and grabbed the dead huntsman by his foot and
started dragging him down the forest trail.  Sam felt an unease in the pit of
his stomach as the swordsman and his carcass passed by, only a few feet in
front of him.  The unease turned into a heaviness when the swordsman had
suddenly stopped only a little ways past that.  He inclined his head to the
side of the forest that Sam was on.  Sam couldn’t help but stare into the
hollow sockets of the vulture mask that the swordsman wore, but he made sure to
stay low and out of sight.  There was no way that he could be seen from the
clearing, no way at all.

Sam resolved not to move until the swordsman was completely
out of sight.  Nothing would convince him otherwise.  Thankfully the swordsman
focused his attention to the path ahead of him.  Mentally Sam was relieved, but
his virtual body had yet to relax even as the swordsman began to shuffle
forward.  A light breeze buffeted Sam, the swordsman, and the forest trees in a
brief cold wind.

“Ah, there it is.  Another trophy.”

The swordsman dropped the huntsman’s carcass and drew greatsword
so fast that Sam called BS.  The nightmarish warrior quickly closed the
distance between him and Sam.  Once he knew for certain that he was caught, Sam
lifted his shield and drew his Dagger.  With both hands on his sword hilt, the
swordsman busted through Sam’s meager defense easily with one downward strike,
draining all of Sam’s stamina in the process.  Sam was left stunned and
vulnerable as the swordsman naturally finished his attack with a vicious two-handed
thrust into Sam’s midsection.  Sam felt the tremendous pain and cold weight of
the steel inside of his digital body, which was starting to feel indistinguishable
from his real one.  He felt all of his strength draining right out of him as
his blood spilled onto the forest floor.  The swordsman violently pulled his greatsword
upwards and wrenched it out of Sam’s body with a vicious slash that ripped apart
Sam’s flesh from inside out and sent his blood spraying into the surrounding
forest.  Sam’s health had already depleted and he was now simply waiting for
the translucent ghost health bar to fade completely.  His vision had blurred
and he felt an overwhelming urge to just lie still and rest.  And so he did,
not knowing if it would really be his last breath.  His vision faded to black
and dark red words painted his screen:

YOU HAVE DIED

10 Undead

“Sam?”

A voice, but whose was it?

“Sam!”

There it was again, but who was calling out to him like
that?

“Oh my god, Sam!  Are you okay?”

It was a woman, but who?  Was it Alex?

“Come on now, Sam!  Wake up, you still have some glitches to
find.”

It was Alex and she was right, he did have a lot of glitches
to find.  He just knew that he was behind.  But right now he couldn’t see
anything.  He also had a horrible headache and overwhelming nausea.  Was this
an aftereffect of faulty Full Dive technology?

“Ow, I’m up Alex, but games shouldn’t make you feel like
this.  I feel like I’m coming down with some sort of illness while I’m playing
this.  Is it intentional?”

“Not intentional Sam, but it is an aftereffect of dying in
the game.  We did want a penalty for it and the penalty is supposed be an
aversive stimulus to the brain, like a dull mental discomfort.  Our algorithms
should have adjusted to your mental state, but it seems to have given you more
pain than was necessary.  I’ll work on a fix for this and we’ll call it your
first glitch for now.  I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah, well I don’t feel okay.  I can’t actually die in here,
can I?”

“No, not at all Sam.  Nothing in the game will affect you to
that extreme of a degree.  As a matter of fact, all the pain you feel in here
is completely simulated.  If you were to log out, you’d see that your physical
self is still feeling as good as you did when you first started playing.  Well,
maybe a little more hungry than before, but you get what I’m saying,” she
explained.

That gave him some comfort, but the pain he was currently feeling
didn’t fully convince him that she was telling the truth.  He was at least
satisfied that he had been awarded one glitch pretty effortlessly.  Though he
wondered if the pain was worth it.

His vision was starting to clear and he could feel the
game’s cold forest atmosphere.

“Okay Alex, I got it.  As long as you assure me that I’ll be
okay then you don’t have to worry about me.”

“That’s great Sam!  Hang in there.  You’re doing really well. 
I’ve been checking the data of the other testers and it looks like they’ve been
dying at much more frequent rates than you.  As a matter of fact, only you and
four other testers have died less than three times so far.  Only two other testers
haven’t died in the game at all so far.  All things considered, that’s a good
start.  Now, until I fix the pain threshold, try not to die again.”

“Hell, Alex, I can’t promise anything as long as this madman
is roaming through the woods.”

“Haha, good luck Sam.  Sorry about all this.  I know you’ll
continue to do well, just keep pressing forward and playing smart.  I’ll be in
touch.  Ciao!”

And that was it for the cheer.  Sam’s eyesight had now
completely returned and he found himself in a horrible predicament.  He was
upside down, hanging from some really tall tree.  He looked around and saw
other corpses hanging around him.  The corpses were hanging from long thick
gray branches on a score of tall trees.  There had to be at least a few hundred
of them.

Most were dry mummies, but a few were actually still moving
around and moaning with low forlorn voices.  You couldn’t call any of them
alive as it seemed every one of them had been robbed of their very
quintessence, that which made them human.  They were all revenants.  Some were
just closer to becoming mindless husks than others.  Sam remembered the term
from his days of playing The Death Planes.  He saw at least close to a hundred
of these revenants wearing the same equipment as the starting classes.  There
were more than a few twilight garbed Cutthroats hanging right near Sam. 
Unfortunately the game devs (developers) had even included a sense of smell
into the game.  The forest now reeked of dead and decaying things.

How the hell did they even know how to program that smell
into the game
, Sam thought. 
Frickin sickos
!

Sam started swaying his body without even thinking about
it.  He looked over to his left and saw a humble wooden house hidden in the
thick woods at the end of the forest path below him.  He tried to twist his body
in the direction of the house and was mostly successful.  His stomach tightened
when he saw the vulture headed swordsman walking from the residence down a dirt
path towards him.

“Fuck.” he whispered to himself.

When the man was right below him, Sam heard something
peculiar, something he didn’t think he was really hearing.

Is he crying
?

“Oh no ... I can’t believe this.”

He wiped something from his unseen face.

“I’ve messed it all up now, haven’t I?  What will they say
when they see that old Caesar is just hanging up anyone?”

He must’ve been referring to himself.  Sam heard him sob
some more, but kept still on the off chance that the fiend thought he was still
dead.  That hope ended when Caesar, as the man called himself, looked up at him
and spoke.

“You’ve gone and really messed it up for me, haven’t you
boy?  It was all perfect before you came.  A forest of the fiercest warriors in
Heimfall.  The strongest undead from around the world on display.  It was fine
art, really.”

He wiped his face again and sighed for an unnaturally long
time.

“But I suppose it’s my fault for putting you up there.  It
was an honest mistake and I didn’t dare pillage your quintessence.  That would
completely ruin everything, all those years of beautiful work on my greatest
masterpiece.  I’ll have to correct this and go get that huntsman instead and
put him in your place.  You’re such a pain to get down though.  Please find
your own way down.  If not, the only way to get you down is in pieces and I
don’t want to worry about cleaning that mess.  I wonder if the mad king is out
there now?  Snagging him would fix everything that I bungled.”

The madman walked off down the forest path and out of Sam’s
sight.  Sam looked up at his own body and saw that he was still in his gear
like many of the others.  He even still had his weapons equipped and hanging
from his sides.  He quickly grabbed his Dagger and worked at the rope that was
binding his legs together.  That rope snapped and Sam fell to the ground hard. 
Sam was hanging so high up that the fall had shaved his health down to forty
percent.  He landed right on his back and although in a lot of pain, he quickly
got to his feet and took a swig of Soul Fire.  His health still didn’t restore
itself completely, and so Sam took another swig from the silver container with
no results.

“What the hell?”

Sam looked closely at his health bar and saw that there was
some sort of metal bar where his health had stopped.  It seemed to be
preventing his health from filling to maximum.  Then he looked at his stats and
saw that his health was locked at one-hundred and eighty and next to his
character name it said, (Revenant).

“Oh yeah, I’m dead now.  So I’m a revenant.”

He took off his gloves and looked at his skinny mummified
hands which confirmed his suspicions.  He put on his gloves and started to run
away into the forest, until a crazy thought crossed his mind.

His house is probably unguarded

I might find
some rare items inside of it
.

Sam thought that the chances of that happening were highly
likely.  After all, who would invade this madman’s house?  The game devs would
count on no one wanting to do that.  If Sam wasn’t so desperate for good gear,
he wouldn’t even consider it.  Now though, he had nothing to really lose,
except the pain that came before and after dying.  He figured that the chance
of finding rare loot outweighed the horrible pain, so he ran up to the
residence as fast as he could and circled around to the back of it.  Already,
he found a treasure chest right near the house.  He leaned down and opened it
and found some sort of rosary called the Priest’s Charm.  He didn’t have time
to read the stats for it.  He was quickly on the move again and quickly ran to
the front of the house, opened the door, and snuck inside.  There was a single lit
candle sitting on a large wooden table in the first room.  There were wooden
carvings of many people fashioned into crude partially finished dolls, all
lying across the floor.  Sam crept past all that and looked around the mostly
empty house.  The only part of the house that looked lived in was the room with
the strange blue hearth fire.  Inside of it was a small unburnt stone snake
totem.  How it survived the fire unscathed, Sam had no idea.  He reached out
and touched it and suddenly found himself with a similar Soul Beacon menu to
the one that was displayed at the cave.  It surprised him that the two beacons
were so different.  A thought popped into his head then.  He felt he’d made
some sort of mistake.

Will I respawn (revive and teleport) here after I die? 
And how come I didn’t respawn at the cave Soul Beacon the last time I died?

It was all very strange.  The manual had clearly stated that
Soul Beacons were respawn points that reset much of the world, and that players
would respawn at the last Soul Beacon they rested at upon death.  What had
happened when he had died?  It was a question that he had no time to answer. 
He exited the menu and removed his hands from the fire.  After refilling his Soul
Fire, he saw nothing else around of interest in the room, so he quickly crept
to the other side of the house and found the madman’s bedroom.  It was also
very bare, with only a small wood frame bed, large wooden dresser, and a bunch
of small wooden crates.  Sam did find one small treasure chest here.  Inside it,
he found two items called a Wishbone along with three Quintessence items and a
Forest Residence Cellar Key.  He wondered what these items did, but he didn’t
dare stop and look.  He made his way to the back of the house and found the
cellar that the key went to.  He quickly summoned the key from his inventory
and unlocked the cellar doors.  He crept down into the dark cellar and
activated his torch.  He looked around and was surprised by what he didn’t
find.  There were no dead bodies or even any prisoners, but there were two long
rows of treasure chests.  Sam hurriedly stooped down and opened them
one-by-one.  There were six in total.

In the first one he found something called Broken Shackles (wrists)
which sounded quite useless.  Then he found the matching Broken Shackles (ankles)
in the chest next to it, followed by something called a Priest’s Extinguisher
in the next.  On the other side he found an item called Sinner’s Scriber and
next to that he found a Three Headed Hound Seal.  Each item sounded fairly
useless and Sam was now dreading the fact that he even journeyed into the
house.  Sam was most disappointed in the final treasure chest.  When he opened
it, there was nothing inside and nothing special happened either.  He wondered
if it were another glitch or not, so he quickly made a call to Alex from the
Alpha Build menu.

“Yes, Sam?”

“Alex!  I’m short on time here!  Can you check this treasure
chest to see if something was supposed to be inside of it?  I know you guys can
be trolls, but I don’t want to miss out on any good items.”

“Gotcha.  Let me check it out ...”

It only took her about ten seconds to check her data.

“Wow!  I can’t believe this, it’s so careless,” she said
with a frustrated tone.  She sighed and continued, “this used to be a mimic,
but the other devs thought it wouldn’t be very fair or make much sense to have
a mimic here, so we changed it at the least minute.  It was one of the few
instances we decided to have mercy on the players.  Though I can’t even
remember what was supposed to go in there.  I think it was a weapon, but I
wasn’t the one who finalized it.  I don’t want to slow you down either, so I’ll
just analyze this one on my own.  In the meantime, we’ll just note this down as
your second glitch and put you a decent weapon in there, nothing game breaking
though.  So what do you need, Sam?  I know that the Dagger is causing you some
frustration,” she asked affably.

Sam couldn’t contain the crazy grin now plastered across his
face.  How lucky was he?  Whatever was supposed to be in that chest might not
have even been useful to him.  Now though, he could get something directly
tailored to his playstyle.

“Thanks Alex!  Can you get me a mid to long range DEX
weapon?  Preferably a sword if possible.  This Dagger’s lack of reach and base
attack power is killing me, literally!”

“Okay, will do, sir.  Give me just a sec and I’ll randomize
it to make it a little more fair.  Each weapon will match the parameters you
asked for, but you won’t know which one you’ll get.”

“Fair enough,” he said still buzzing with excitement.

The chest closed itself.

“Can I open it now?”

“Go right ahead, Sam.”

He gleefully did as instructed and received a Rapier for his
troubles.

“Fuck yeah!”

“Sam?  Sounds like you got what you wanted,” she said,
amidst giggles.

“Yes Alex, thank you so much!”

He equipped it as fast as he could and extinguished his
torch.  He still didn’t think he stood a chance against that madman Caesar, but
at least he was better equipped than before.  He snuck out of the cellar and
unlocked the back door of the house so that he could sneak out from there. 
When he saw no one approaching, he ran back into the dark woods and kept
running until he was sure that he was well away from the residence.  He still
wasn’t sure where Caesar even was in the forest, but if he saw him, he would
start running right away.  Combat was suicide.

He kept going until he found himself back near his old
training grounds, near the cave, after having evaded some new enemy types after
taking a new route through the forest.  One of the enemies was a Cutthroat like
himself.

BOOK: Hell's Glitch (LitRPG): Into a Dark Adventure
11.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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