Endgame: A LitRPG Adventure (The Crucible Shard Book 7) Read online

  We’d recently seen a battlefield of great proportions, but this was worse. Those were warriors who would rise the next day. None of these people would be getting back up ever again.

  “Does anyone feel particularly murderous?” I asked. I think I did a bit, a sensation just pushing at the edge of my consciousness.

  “No,” Cobalt and Hope said in unison.

  “Always,” Ashley said with a freakish little giggle. Right, I’d take that to mean Wrath wasn’t affecting her, it was only Ashley’s standard murderous issues.

  Walt shrugged.

  “I feel it. My brain doesn’t work quite like it is supposed to because of my origins, so I think I’m not getting the full dose,” Yve said.

  Good, we wouldn’t be turning on each other in a violent rage.

  Drawing near to the church we heard the sounds of fighting from within, and we passed through the doors. Wrath stood near the altar slamming it with her fists. It looked like she’d been at it for awhile, her hands were broken and streaked with blood, and her cheeks were flushed. I think she’d been crying.

  The sound of our entrance caused her to look up, her gaze hopeful for just a moment before she recognised us. “Fantastic. King Liam and his merry fucking band of misfits.”

  Wrath saw Hope and looked disconcerted. “I don’t know you. I should know you.”

  “I’m Hope. I’m your sister too,” Hope said.

  Wrath laughed, a pained and raw sound, and she punched the altar again. “Isn’t that fucking perfect. There is another of us. You do know that you’ll be fucked to fucking hell too?”

  I needed to teach my daughters some more creative cursing. This was a little sad for all that she was giving it her best effort.

  “You tried to save all these people,” Hope said.

  Wrath turned towards the door. “It didn’t work. It never fucking works. I liked these people and this is what I did to them. How screwed up is that?”

  Hope looked at a loss for words. This much rage and sadness was too much for her.

  Ashley stepped forward. “I get it, you know.”

  Wrath scowled. “The fuck you do.”

  Ashley jerked her head towards me and said in a voice trembling with fury, “This fucker here got to pick between a sociopath me and a wounded me, and picked the sociopath because she was useful. This was after I got bonded to an ocean Goddess with a hell of a temper. Then, by rewriting the god-damned time-line, when I finally knew peace and happiness and being a good person, he wrote it back and trapped me in this living hell.”

  “No shit?” Wrath asked.

  “He’s also your dad. The ancient blue-eyed bitch is your mom and those mother fucking computers that created you copied the nice one, Hope. I stabbed one of them a lot, the computers, it made me feel better,” Ashley said.

  This was the strangest and most awkward stream of consciousness I’d ever seen, but it seemed to be working. There really was something in Ashley’s rage that was getting through.

  Wrath looked at me for a long moment, and then Cobalt, before letting out a low breath. “Fuck. We wondered. Hubris is the smart one, she always said something seemed off about the data. That really pisses me off.”

  Ashley moved to sit on the altar. “When we killed the main one, called Veros, he kind of killed the rest of them. We don’t have one for you to kill, but if you want I’m sure we can find something else to hurt.”

  Wrath smiled at Ashley. “You’re more broken than I am. Thanks, I needed that. So Mom, Dad, Sis, what do you want?”

  “We want to be a family,” I said.

  “Happy, sis? You’re okay with this? With someone like me? With someone like Dad?” Wrath asked Hope.

  Hope gave her sister a helpless sort of shrug and then looked at me. “I hadn’t heard a lot of that until right now, but I’d guessed. Mom and Dad thought they were being subtle, but they aren’t very good at it. I guess I’m kind of the good kid in a family of super-villains. I think you’ll like them and your evil stepmother.”

  In an instant all the rage in Wrath seemed to evaporate into something far more vulnerable, “Can you help?”

  Cobalt stepped forward to pull a rigid Wrath into a powerful hug. “Baby, I know you don’t know me, but you’ll learn. I’m a killer, we’re all killers and getting pissed off is a part of us. It’s going to be a part of you more than most, but I promise you it isn’t all of you and it isn’t all bad.”

  Ashley looked peevish as she got off the altar and came back over. Angry bonding time was past.

  “I didn’t know all that still pissed you off so much,” I said.

  “You knew. You just didn’t care,” Ashley said.

  Cobalt spent a few minutes speaking quietly with Wrath and came back. “We’re going to head back to the castle. Hope, can you get the others to Famine?”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Hope said.

  Wrath said, “You do. We always know where each other are, we share the same blood. We didn’t know you existed, so we weren’t looking for you, but think about feeling hungry, reach inside your blood and twist.”

  As instructions went they didn’t make much sense to me, but Hope nodded after a few seconds. “That’s weird. But yeah, I’ve got her.”

  Chapter 19

  You would think that going to meet Famine would be less dangerous than Wrath. You’d be wrong. Hope teleported us and we materialized in the middle of a dense jungle. It took all of two seconds for something to be lunging at my throat.

  It looked to be some sort of massive centipede, with an alarming number of legs and vicious teeth lining a round mouth. I tore it away and a lot of my flesh went with it as I threw the beast into the foliage.

  It took that long for a swarm of bats to surround us. Hope drew her sword and dispatched them with several quick lunges, but no sooner were they down than a massive lizard was trying to take a bite out of Walt.

  “This is familiar,” I said.

  “How is this familiar? What kind of places do you go?” Hope asked, as she kicked a massive rat in the face that was trying to take a bite out of her leg.

  “Your sisters were made on a life world. Rivers of blood, lots of monsters everywhere trying to murder everything in sight,” I said.

  “Endless murder,” Ashley said, delighted. Ashley’s twin daggers were already out and she was laying in with the murder on everything that got close to her. As soon as one beast would perish a swarm of them would be on the corpse devouring it.

  I understood at once what Famine must be doing. Like Wrath, Famine was trying to lessen her impact. If she made things so ravenously hungry that they ate everything or anyone around them, then there wasn’t a safer place to do that than this. Here all of that hunger would simply blend in with the surroundings and become just part of the background.

  Hope at least had no problems about killing when it came to monsters trying to eat her, setting about her in an orderly fashion. She seemed the deadliest thing in this jungle although Ashley was holding her own better than I’d have expected. I flung away an acidic snail that was trying to dissolve one of my fingers.

  “We need to get out of this. The monsters are going to be nonstop trying to swallow us for lunch. Can you find your sister?” I asked.

  Hope led the way through the jungle. This life world was like the last one, there truly were rivers of bloods. Insects tried to eat us, mammals tried to eat us, reptiles, even a few trees. Everything that moved upon the surface of this world was a buffet to everything else.

  After half an hour, battered and bloodied, we came to the foot of a large mountain. We discovered a futuristic-looking steel door half overgrown with killer vines that required a bit of fighting off, and what looked like a retinal scanner off to one side.

  Hope didn’t need to be told, she leaned in and let the lasers do their work. A moment later the hatch hissed and the door slid aside. The others made their way inside while Hope and I fought a rearguard action against a number of especially
savage ferrets.

  Inside, the door sealed behind us and gas billowed for several seconds before an inner door opened.

  A long corridor led us to a banquet hall where a number of large tables were set and loaded down with food. Their scents filled the chamber with appetizing aromas, although nothing had a bite taken out of it. At the far end of the chamber was a thin woman dressed in blood-red leathers, her feet kicked up on the table. Her face was Hope’s, although perhaps a little more drawn.

  “Mom, Dad, Sis… other people I neither know or care about,” Famine said.

  “You know who we are?” I asked.

  “Wrath sent out the word. Nobody believed it at first, but Hubris checked it out and gave you the all clear,” Famine said.

  I was actually kind of proud. My daughters really had gotten dealt a crappy hand and it did my heart good to see them working together this well.

  “You’re telepathic?” I asked.

  Famine gave a wry smile. “Nothing that easy. We share the same blood and we can make it sing to each other. Hurts like hell.”

  “If you knew we were coming you might have saved us the trip. It’s kind of murderous out there,” I said.

  “You don’t get anything for free, Dad. You want to play the loving father, we’re going to make you work to prove you mean every little bit of it,” Famine said.

  That made me proud too. They weren’t going to take crap from anybody, especially me. I’d probably resent that, if I’d raised them, but this was a tough world that for the most part was going to want them dead.

  I picked a chicken leg off one of the plates and took a sniff. It smelled delicious. I had to wonder why none of the food was eaten.

  “So what is all this?” I asked.

  “I’m hungry. I’m hungry all the damned time. But I don’t actually like to eat, isn’t that funny? If I eat much at all, I get sick. So I content myself with the smells,” Famine said.

  It was kind of sad.

  “You have a chef?” I asked.

  “Robots. This whole place harvests a little of what dies on the system and brings it back down here for me to sniff at and pick at,” Famine said.

  “I’m Hope,” Hope said, giving her sister a hug that Famine reluctantly allowed.

  “We’re not real big on the public displays of affection,” Famine said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Hope said.

  “Wrath is getting the run-down from the wicked stepmother now. You want to give us whole worlds to rule. How do you think that’s going to work? What world do you think is going to accept being hungry all the time?” Famine asked.

  “Have Wrath ask your evil stepmother,” I said.

  Famine shrugged and looked focused inward for a moment. “Huh.”

  This was always the difficult part of not being filled in on Elsora’s plans. Pushing them forward while not having a clue what actually were the plans.

  “Good, right?” I said. It was Elsora, of course it would be.

  “Vampires are always hungry anyways. It’s built into their blood just like it is built into mine. And the werewolves and Wrath…” Famine said, excited for just a moment. “This could actually work, Dad.”

  There were moons of werewolves and vampires? I’d never made it to any of the other moons. It didn’t fit anything I’d heard but then, I was certain if they weren’t there now Elsora had a plan to make sure they would be.

  “It will work. You’re not alone, none of you are,” I said.

  “We never have been. Well, I mean apart from the living alone in a secret bunker thing,” Famine said.

  “What is that, when all of you obviously get along?” I asked.

  “Hubris said it isn’t a good idea to be together. Our blood isn’t naturally attuned to fight itself, but it’s best not to give it any ideas,” Famine said.

  That was news to me. Their Right of War didn’t easily trigger on each other. It was good news if so, great news. Eleven of the moons would have no compulsion to fight each other, although that did make Cobalt and Maria the odd one out.

  “Will you work with us?” I asked.

  Famine stared at the floor, then looked to Hope. “Should I? I’m not… I’m not very good at this. I’m hungry for things. I’m hungry for things all the time and I want a family so bad it hurts.”

  Hope gave her a second even tighter hug. “It’s okay to hunger for that. It’s normal. Everyone does.”

  “Really?” Famine asked.

  I was glad that the artificial intelligences of Earth were dead, because if they weren’t I’d have to kill them for what they’d done to this family. I got that I wasn’t the best person, I’d obviously been a bad friend and was probably going to be a pain in the ass of a husband. But I was going to an amazing father, I’d not let myself be anything less. These girls deserved so much better than the hand they’d been dealt.

  “Bet you’re wishing you’d used protection,” Ashley said to me.

  It was a thought I didn’t quite know how to handle. It was always a risky thing to crawl into bed with a stranger, but the universe did seem to be going to a few unnecessary extremes to make a point.

  Chapter 20

  Famine knew the way to Castle Sardonis and, having the Right of Travel, was able to get there herself. That left us free to move on to the next wayward daughter, Greed.

  Given the situations we’d found the last two in, I wasn’t expecting anything easy. What I got was a nice change. We arrived in a futuristic world inside a massive shopping plaza lined with stores. The entire city was beneath a dome, starships visible coming and going in the distance.

  “This is a step up. Think they sell high tech armor here?” Ashley asked.

  “Looking for an upgrade?” I asked.

  “A bunch of lazy bears totally kicked your ass in power armor. Fuck yeah, I want me some of that. I mean, I’d need the infiltrator model, but even so,” Ashley said.

  Ashley was really going to get along well with this daughter too, I could already tell. Wrath and greed, especially when it came to loot, had always been her things and while I hadn’t seen much of the greed lately, it was always there lurking just beneath the murder.

  “We’ll have a look,” I said.

  It would have to wait. Shutters were sliding down over all the storefronts and people were quickly vacating the area. Well, most of the people—a contingent of heavily armed and armored individuals were coming our direction.

  I slipped on my glasses of Game Sight and had a look at their leader.

  Victor Adams

  Three tours of duty in the Sutherland Expanse and four years guarding the Crown Prince of Oboros. When Victor formed the Murder of Crows as a mercenary band it was with a wealth of experience. Every one of his men is a trained killer, and they are also talented bodyguards and versatile fighters armed with the best cybernetic implants and weaponry money can buy.

  He looked competent, a welcoming party from my daughter?

  “We’re looking for Greed. I’m assuming you have something to do with her,” I said.

  “You could say that,” Victor said, and his men moved to circle us. Right, this wasn’t a friendly welcoming party then.

  “She should know we were coming,” I said.

  “Oh, she does. We’re here for a reason,” Victor said.

  I didn’t see what they triggered. For a few seconds everything exploded in light and sound, a disorienting blend that left me grasping to put the world straight as the men closed in. One was trying to grab my arms and secure them around my back—and he was strong, far stronger than he should have been. But he wasn’t as strong as me, I broke free and broke his arm in the process. Then three shots took me in the stomach. Stun rounds of some kind. They left me doubled over.

  “Hit him again,” Victor said.

  “What is he? Three rounds are enough to bring down a carnivorous corbath bull,” said one of the mercenaries.

  “I don’t care. Hit him again and get on to the girls,”
Victor said.

  The girls. Hope and Ashley were fighting back-to-back, Ashley with her daggers out while Hope was going hand-to-hand in an effort to save lives.

  Another few shots hit me and I grew more disoriented with each. I blacked out for a moment. Not more than ten seconds could have gone by when I came back to myself. Yve and Walt were unconscious on the ground, restraints binding their arms behind them. I was unbound, they’d probably figured I was safely out of things for awhile.

  Hope was trapped in some sort of bubble of force. The remaining mercenaries were on Ashley. It looked as if half of them were out of the fight.

  Beneath Hope I spied a mechanical disk of some sort that must be the source of the field holding her. I charged forward and with a kick sent it soaring through the air to explode into sparks when it hit the far wall. Hope dropped to the ground and in a blur moved forward, a kick to the knee of one mercenary followed by a chop to the neck sending him stumbling back.

  Victor called out, “Enough!”

  The remaining mercenaries disengaged at once. Ashley took a few more stabs at the one at her feet, she was a little lost in battle fury.

  “Stand down, Ash,” I said.

  Ashley took a few deep breaths and kicked the mercenary a few more times in the face for good measure. At least she stopped using her daggers.

  “Sorry about that. Greed wanted to get your measure,” Victor said, sheathing his gun.

  I knelt and checked on Walt and Yve, both were still breathing.

  “Just stunned, they’ll come out of it in about fifteen minutes. You’re a tough son of a bitch,” Victor said.

  A voice said, “Nice to know father dearest is good for something, even if it is just soaking up stunner blasts.”

  Greed stepped into sight. She was dressed in combat armor similar to the mercenaries, but far more ornamented, gold and silver inlays and etchings on every metallic piece.

  “Daughter, happy to meet you. Did you really have to send the mercenaries?” I said.

  Greed grinned at that and looked to Victor. “Are your men okay?”