Hell's Glitch (LitRPG): Into a Dark Adventure (13 page)

With the Sinner’s Encroachment completed, Sam was whisked
away back to his own plane in the same way as before, this time without the red
aura.  There was only a blurred distortion this time.  When the distortion
disappeared, Sam found himself in the exact same place as he was before he
left.  There were no enemies nearby, so he took the time to read the
description of his new item in relative peace.

Bloody Tearstone

A favored trophy of sinners.

When sinful Walkers decide to encroach upon the planes of
those who are innocent, several distortions are guaranteed to occur.  One such
distortion is the creation of these solid crimson colored gems, which are said
to be a physical manifestation of an encroachment victim’s grief.

What was strange about the whole encroachment was that Sam
was able to encroach upon another player’s plane while being in his revenant
form.  In the old Death Planes games, players had to be in human form to encroach
into other planes or even to be encroached upon themselves.  It was a mechanic
that ensured a certain level of balance when it came to the frequency of encroachments. 
That method ensured that players had some control over if they would
participate in encroachments or not.  The more he thought about it, the more
Sam simply figured it to be a product of the alpha build of the game.  The
developers probably just wanted to see if encroachments worked correctly and
didn’t want simple barriers to get in the way of testing it.  That still didn’t
explain why they would hide the item needed to initiate an encroachment inside
of a place that most players would avoid.  Maybe they wanted to test out player
psychology and see what kind of players would find and use the Sinner’s Scriber
or maybe they just wanted players to be at a higher level to defeat Caesar
before they got it.

Whatever the case, Sam was the perfect candidate to get this
item.  He had no qualms about encroaching and killing other players.  In fact,
he found it pretty funny and enjoyable in a game like this.  He could only
imagine the pure terror in the other testers who were likely already struggling
with the game as they got encroached upon by a skilled tester like him who was
out for blood.  It made him feel like a movie monster.  Sam was confident that
he was the first person to get the Sinner’s Scriber, so he would make sure he
got the most use out of it before anyone else.  Since he still had all of his
health and full Soul Fire, Sam used his Sinner’s Scriber again and dove right
into another new plane.

14
The Sinner vs The Immortal

Sam hurriedly lifted his shield in front of his face and was
pushed back a little from the force of the projectile as it collided with his
shield.  It was a wooden arrow, the third one that Sam had blocked in this
fight.  Sam had a hard time getting into the range of the tester he was chasing
who seemed to have built a character even faster than Sam’s own.  The tester
used a Ranger and went by the handle DangerStompz and Sam knew him as a quiet
guy named Steven in real life.  Steven was cool because he told Sam the dirtiest
jokes he’d ever heard in his life.  It was so funny because no one else
believed that Steven told jokes like that.  The other testers always assumed
him to be a nice and quiet guy because he mostly kept to himself.  Besides
telling dirty jokes, Steven also played dirty no matter what the game.  He’d
exploit any advantage in order to ensure his victory, even glitches.

Steven was also really smart and observant.  Every time Sam
blocked one of Steven’s arrows with his shield, Sam noticed that Steven’s
attacks had locked him in his blocking animation for a half second longer than
he needed.  Steven took advantage of this to create more distance.  Sam yelled obscenities,
knowing that Steven couldn’t hear him.  When he was done with that, he puzzled
out a strategy to get in close to his friend turned opponent.

“Alright!  Here we go!  YOLO dash!”

Sam ran forward, laughing at his outdated slang from the
twenty-tens while using the trees as cover whenever he saw that Steven was
about to fire an arrow.  The strategy worked for a while until Steven altered
the timing of his shots.  He waited for Sam to emerge from behind cover then fired
shots at various speeds and trajectories.

One of the wooden arrows pierced Sam’s shoulder and caused
him to reactively reel backwards from the force of the blow.  The arrow had
stunned Sam enough to leave him open to another of Steven’s shots.  The arrow
almost connected, but Sam rolled forwards, past it, just in time.  With a
properly timed dodge roll, Sam found that he could get certain attacks to pass
right through him, even when it looked like they connected.

Steven stood up on a slight incline deeper in the forest,
and so Sam had to run upwards to catch him.  He gained a lot of ground thanks
to his dodging and was now right in Steven’s face.  Steven ran around to Sam’s
right and tried to circle around him, maybe searching for a backstab.  Sam
quickly guessed that Steven was actually trying to bait out one of his attacks,
possibly to parry it or maybe he was just trying to buy some time.

“That’s it!” Sam yelled aloud, but he knew his friend
couldn’t hear him thanks to the way the game was designed.  He also knew that his
earlier guess was wrong.  Steven was actually stalling so that he could equip a
melee weapon.  Equipping more than one weapon would surely slow him down
tremendously.

Sam stopped and charged up his Soul Burning Technique. 
Steven thought he saw some sort of opening and attempted to close the distance
between himself and Sam.  Sam stopped charging his attack and unleashed it on
Steven.  He pivoted around and swept his fiery blade upwards, cutting Steven’s
avatar from hip to shoulder.  Steven was knocked to the ground from the forced
of the blow.  Sam was able to follow up with something new that he totally did
by accident.  As a way to prolong his attack while waiting for Steven to rise,
Sam charged a heavy thrust by going deeper into his stance and tensing his
muscles, just like real life.  Once the charged strike landed, it did nearly
twice the damage of a normal heavy attack and caused Steven’s Ranger to recoil
horribly.  It was all that Sam needed to walk up to Steven aka DangerStompz’s
and backstab him.  Sam stopped and, with outstretched arms, did an “are you not
entertained” pose from a certain classic movie, over Steven’s fading corpse. 

Sinner’s Encroachment Completed

Sam managed to rake in one thousand souls, a unit of loose
Quintessence, and another Bloody Tearstone.  Now he had twelve of those
tearstones, one from each of the testers he had encroached and killed.  Steven
had proven to be his most difficult challenge and even he couldn’t get Sam’s
health down below half.  Each of the testers had proven to be a very good
source of souls and Sam had enough Quintessence to stay in human form for a
while now.  He turned human right after his first encroachment and hadn’t been
killed since.

With his prey now vanquished, Sam was once again returned to
his own plane.  His soul count was looking pretty hefty, so he figured he’d
take a break from killing other testers in order to level himself up and do it
all over again.  The encroachments were proving to be way too much fun.  It was
a welcome distraction from the difficulty of the game.  It felt better being
the predator rather than the prey.  Sam had dug into the game manual a little
more to read up on the ends and outs of player encroachments and saw that an encroacher
stood to lose very little even if they were defeated.  They’d remain in human
form and even had a chance to keep their souls and loose Quintessence as long
as they went back to the spot where they died in the other player’s plane to
pick them up.  That spot would appear in Sam’s own plane.  It was called a
Death Mark and had contained all the loose Quintessence and souls that were in
Sam’s possession upon his death.

Sam rested at the forest Soul Beacon and accessed his Level
Up menu from there.  He threw caution to the wind and rose his soul intensity
up to twenty five by putting all six of his points into his speed.  It had cost
him a hefty thirteen thousand six hundred and thirty souls, but after seeing
what DangerStompz could do with his speed, Sam opted to try the same.  He
grinned as he rose up from the Soul Beacon and started moving.  He immediately
felt the difference in his basic movement.  He tried a roll dodge and saw that
he had cleared much more distance than usual.  Even his attack speed had
improved by a noticeable margin.

“Oh yeah, this is where it’s at!  Hold on to your precious
souls and quintessence, alpha adventurers!  Sarem the Sanguine is coming
‘round, coming ‘round, coming ‘round!  And Sarem wants to hear you cry out his
sins as your blood paints his forest red.”

He knew it was over the top, but he was having fun with it. 
The Full Dive technology really made this game a true role playing experience. 
He knew he’d have some really sick stuff to illustrate once he was done with
the gig.  He was feeling all types of inspired.

“Now, let’s get back to sinning.”

He took out his scriber and etched his crimson sign into the
dirt.  This time it read “
Fear the Cutthroat Walker, Sanguine.
”  Only
Sam could read his crazy messages, a fact that disappointed him.  He knelt down
and touched the message which once again glowed red and whisked him away to
another plane.  He noticed that he was in a random part of the forest, this
time far away from where he was in his own world.  He hadn’t been to this part
of the forest yet in his own game.  He didn’t have a lot of time to survey his
surroundings as the tester he had encroached upon was right in front of him up
on an incline, just staring at him.

Now encroaching upon the plane of IMMORtAL_Kalika.

The tester used a small female avatar and was in human
form.  The avatar had dark brown skin, dark red hair, and even at the distance
he was from her, Sam could see her eyes were a shimmering yellow color.  It
wasn’t an easy color to create with the character customizer.  Sam couldn’t
figure out the setting she chose to get the shimmer effect.

Her long black boots and bright white gloves gave Sam the
impression that she had started the game with the Alchemist class, which was
brand new territory for this game.  He was curious as to what it could really
do.  Instead of wearing the Alchemist’s cloak or any protection for her upper
body, the girl instead was stripped down to her bra which covered all but the
top part of her size B breasts.  She also didn’t wear the Alchemist’s cowl,
instead opting to let her mid-length hair flow freely.

Sam couldn’t get a read on her.  She remained still and her
face seemed totally blank as she stared at him.  He expected some level of fear
or at least some annoyance at his sudden arrival.

They both stood still and stared at each other for what felt
like two solid minutes.  Sam was quickly getting impatient as he listened to
the forest ambience that was the soundtrack to their stare down.  He continued
to remain as still as the girl was and they faced off for another minute before
she stepped backwards, turned, and started running.  Sam laughed before quickly
pursuing her.

Clever girl
, Sam thought,
you were just stalling
. 
It won’t buy you much time though
.

He ran up the incline and as soon as he reached the top, he
lost his footing and fell into some sort of opening at the top of the incline. 
Once he saw what he was falling into, his stomach dropped and he yelled into
the chasm that stretched endlessly below him.  After a while he stopped falling
and his screen turned black followed by the words:

You Have Been Vanquished.

Sam found himself near the Soul Beacon of his own plane
feeling very disoriented and sick.  He felt like throwing up and the headache
was coming back like when he had died before.  Alex still hadn’t fixed the pain
simulators.  Sam had to make sure that he played safer.  He had hoped that
dying as a Walker wouldn’t cause that pain.  The thought of his death made him
think of the tester who had just bested him. 
Was it a fluke
, he
wondered.  He had to replay it all in his head to get a sense of what had
happened.

“That bastard!” he said grinning.  “She tricked me.”

Her staring game was merely a distraction and when she ran
she knew it would bait him into chasing her.  She was already on the other side
of the chasm when he showed up.  That was what he had figured anyway. 
IMMORtAL_Kalika wasn’t a tester Sam had any familiarity with in real life, so
he didn’t really know the player’s style or tactics, but if he or she had planned
that outcome of their encounter then whoever that person happened to be was reasonably
smart at the very least.

“Ooooooh!  I hope I get to run that one back again.”

Sam’s blood was boiling and he hurriedly equipped his
Sinner’s Scriber and wrote “
Salty Runback
” in crimson into the dirt.  He
crossed his fingers as he teleported into the next plane.  Once there, he
immediately started looking around for his target.  He balled his fist tightly
around his Rapier and gritted his teeth in a predatory smile once he saw the
words he wanted to see.

Now encroaching upon the plane of IMMORtAL_Kalika.

He was once again in a part of the forest that he didn’t
really recognize.  There was a large archway covered in thick white mist way up
in the distance.  It looked like it might have been a way out of the forest or
maybe even some type of dungeon.  If he swung around deeper into the forest, he
could reach it, but for now his attention was focused on finding Kalika,
wherever she was.

He didn’t need to go very far to find her.  She was right
ahead, under a cluster of tall trees.  This time, she gave a bow, never taking
her shimmering yellow eyes off of Sam.  Now, there was a playful smile on her
lips, one that Sam read as “I got you last time, now what’re you gonna do?”

Sam returned her bow with a bow of his own.  He also kept
his eyes on her the whole time.  Once they were done with the pleasantries, he
jogged towards her with his Rapier and shield ready in front of him.  He kept
his eyes peeled for any nasty environmental traps, a tough thing to do while
examining his opponent.  At a glance, her playstyle seemed odd.  She wasn’t
using a shield at all, not even a tiny Deflector like Sam had before.  As a
matter of fact, it looked like she wasn’t using any weapons at all.  Both of
her hands were empty.

What the heck are you up to
, Sam thought to himself. 
You must think I’m a small-fry
. 
Let
’
s go ahead and show you
why you need to be taking me more seriously
.

If she was any good then she would wait for Sam to attack and
then parry his attack.  Sam didn’t remember if you could parry an attack with
your bare hands in this game, but he assumed it was possible.  He broke into a
sprint once he was only a few feet away and ran to her side.  His burst of
speed would catch her off guard, especially since he’d increased it.  As she
turned towards him, he quickly rolled towards her back.  He was laughing in his
head.

This
’
ll teach you to fight me with no gear
!

He quickly bounced to his feet and was knocked off guard
when something collided with his face.  Whatever it was had done very little
damage, but it did knock him off balance a little.

“What the hell?” he wondered aloud.

The girl was in his face and actually attacking him with her
bare fists with repeated combinations.  The damage was pitiful and even
multiple hits barely racked up to anything significant.  Despite the low
damage, Sam was still worried.  She had effectively locked him into some sort
of stun state where he couldn’t move until she was done attacking.  Once her combination
ended, she rolled away and Sam gave chase, this time ready to attack.  Once he
closed in on her, she surprised him again by turning around and throwing a wild
haymaker.  He instinctively pulled his shield up in front of him which caused
her hand to rebound off the shield like so many of the plant enemies he had
faced before.  Perfect!  He thrust his Rapier at her for some heavy damage.

Unfortunately she didn’t suffer the same deflection penalty
that Sam and the other enemies faced from having their attacks deflect off of a
shield.  She recovered far faster and was able to parry Sam’s thrust.  Her
timing was perfect and she walked up to him to deliver a cool looking, though
very painful opening blow.  She drove her bare fist deeply into Sam’s stomach,
which caused him to involuntarily cough up ridiculous anime levels of glowing
blood.  She hit him so hard that he was briefly lifted from the ground and when
he fell back onto her fist, she heaved him down to the ground onto his back.