Arcadia Unlocked: A LitRPG Novel (Arcadia LitRPG Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Publication Information

  Dedication

  Invitation to Readers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Arcadia Unlocked: A LitRPG Novel

  Copyright © 2017 Parnassus Cloud Publishing

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or brief excerpts as described in the FAIR USE Act.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is coincidental.

  First Edition

  For my friends in Azeroth, who thought I should give this writing thing a go, and for Ryan—always.

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  Chapter 1

  Two more seconds. That’s all I need before the food buffs will kick in. But the battle erupts around me after just one second. I stay seated, letting the food take effect, as balls of magic flame and arrows whiz past my head. Stats float all over the deck of the ship, enemies and allies alike taking damage. But not me.

  I slip into the shadows and pull out my daggers, making my way through the fray with precision. I avoid the enemy’s blades and projectiles, diving and weaving as need be to stay cloaked.

  Finally, I reach the captain. I check the raid stats. About half of my team is down. On the map I see my two fellow rogues also advancing toward our main objective. If we can take the captain down, raid’s over. We win.

  “Let’s do this,” I say, and launch myself at the captain with a powerful backstab.

  My blades skitter off his armor. I barely make an impression; I can’t even hit this guy. I try again, with a different attack. Same result.

  Fuck.

  “He’s got some sort of magical shielding!” I shout into the headset, knowing the wizards in my party are the only ones who can help us now.

  “On it,” Cornelius yells into the comms.

  I slip out back into the shadows and get away from the intensity of the fight. I’m kind of a wimp—if anyone were actually to hit me, it would hurt. I mean, not really. This is just gloves and goggles, so I wouldn’t feel a thing. There’s a new tech on the market, though. I’ve been hearing whispers about it. Been thinking about checking it out ...

  “Try it now!” Cornelius shouts and I reorient my avatar to the captain and take a running leap for him. My daggers plunge into his back and his health bar plummets.

  “Yes!” I shout. “Rogues to the captain!” I start flaying the boss’s skin. He’s massive, bulging muscles threatening to pop out from under his leather armor. Still, my knives are keen and they shred his armor like it’s butter.

  My friends join the fray and, in spite of our losses, the day is ours.

  “Yes! Fuck yes!” Alturas, the captain of our group shouts into the comms. “I’m cracking a cold one over that.”

  “You mean you haven’t been drinking all night like the rest of us?” It’s Sweeney Todd. His slurred British accent gives him away.

  “Shit, no wonder half of you are dead,” Alturas says.

  Someone pulls up the group damage stats and someone else gives a low whistle. I smile to myself when I see my name close to the top.

  “Well, guys, guess I deserve a cold one, too.”

  #

  Sometime after I crash into bed in a stupor and before I wake up, I dream I am dying. The air around me is all thick with dust and the walls of the cavern I’m in are rumbling, like they’re going to collapse at any moment. I’m panicking. The oxygen bar over my head indicates that I’m almost out of air, and when it hits zero, that’s it. Game over.

  I look across the room and that’s when I see her. Catriona. My in-game elf girl. She’s with me, and she’s already trapped under some fallen debris. I want to get to her, but I’m too weak. I can’t move; my legs feel like rubber. I can see blood coloring the strands of her long silver hair. One of her svelte, pointed ears is cut—or is there a gash on her forehead? I call out to her, but she only moans in response.

  She’s so beautiful and so hurt and here I am, gasping for air like a fucking fish. My constitution is approaching zero and any movement I attempt makes me realize I move like molasses. I’m slow, heavy, and completely useless.

  “Catriona ...” My voice comes out like a raspy whisper. It’s no good anyway; her avatar is fading out of the game. Her whole lush and gorgeous body slowly dematerializes before my eyes. I try to breathe, but it’s like sucking on a straw jammed full of ice cream. Nothing enters my lungs. My oxygen bar turns dark red and my body starts to fade too. Goddamn, dying actually hurts! I feel a prickling sensation all over my skin like a thousand needles plunging into me. I hate needles.

  Then I blink my eyes and come awake, alive, and the first thing I do is take in a huge lungful of air. I sound like a hulking dork, the air wheezing against my throat. I take in as much as I can. The air in my bedroom is oxygen rich and I swallow it like it’s water.

  Molly is shaking me, I realize. “Trent! Trent!”

  “What?” I’m right here. She doesn’t have to yell at me. She’s shaking my shoulder, her perfectly painted fingernails digging into my flesh, and I push her hand off. “Enough,” I say. “I’m fucking awake already.”

  “You don’t have to be so angry. I was trying to help you,” she says. “It looked like you were having one of those nightmares again. Either that or you were having a really good time. You were convulsing and moaning. You weren’t spending time in your dreams with her again, were you? You sounded like you were in pain. Maybe you like pain, hmm?”

  I sit up in the bed and sigh. “C’mon, Molly. It’s not like I can control my dreams.” Wrong words. What can you expect from me, pre-caffeine?

  “You were with her.” She’s angry now, her brown eyes blazing. “I don’t know what’s worse, that you spend all your spare time playing that stupid game, or that you spend all your dream time with another woman. She’s not even real, Trent!”

  It’s true. Lately it seems like I’d rather be hanging with my friends in Arcadia than spending any time with my girl IRL. Molly and I have been together for a few years now. Maybe the luster is starting to wear off. We don’t have that much in common. Mostly we’re just a habit now.

  “You
can’t even log off when you’re sleeping,” she accuses me, and she’s right. But I don’t care. I have all of zero fucks to give about that anymore.

  “Do we have to do this right now, Molly?” Seriously. Because coffee.

  “It’s never a good time with you,” she says. “There’s always some reason we can’t work through our problems.”

  I sigh again, and lean my forehead onto my palm. “I just woke up, Molly,” I say. She nestles up against me from behind, her curly black hair tickles my bare back and I feel her soft lips brush against the nape of my neck. I turn to her, envelop her in my arms, and pull her in for a real kiss. She doesn’t even flinch at my morning breath. One of her hands goes to my crotch and she feels up my hard morning wood.

  “You were dreaming about her,” she says again, but this time her voice is husky. She wants me, so I keep kissing her. I take her by her upper arms and push her back against the mattress, begin to rock myself against her. I reach down and pull her sexy satin panties down, then plunge a finger into her hot, wet pussy. She really is fine. She’s ready for me whenever I want it.

  But I find myself thinking of Catriona. I take Molly quickly, ramming inside her with fast, hard strokes. I moan as the tension inside me moves to climax.

  It’s over in a minute. A quickie by anyone’s standards.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I shake my head, get off of her, and sit up on the bed, rubbing my eyes. “Maybe I’ve just been working too much. Maybe I just need a vacation.”

  “Hey, that’s a good idea. We could get away to the islands! Tahiti, Cuba, Haiti ...”

  “Haven’t most of those been swallowed up by the rising tides?” I ask. I can’t keep up with what islands still have actual beaches. So many have been devoured by the ocean in the last decade. Fucking global warming.

  “You know what I mean. Someplace tropical.” Molly’s voice is cajoling. She’s excited. I hate beaches. Sand flies. Sun burns. Nothing to do but get drunk and then get robbed on the way back to your hotel room because you’re drunk. Not my idea of fun.

  “I’d rather go to Arcadia proper,” I say. The land my favorite MMORPG is based on actually exists. It was a huge discovery when the elves opened the portal and started fraternizing with our human kind. I was seventeen years old at the time and part of me still can’t believe it. Elves, dragons, unicorns, fairies. All that shit is for real. Arcadia is like the final continent, the one that’s been there all along, but hidden behind a shroud that protected its inhabitants from corruption.

  Molly shakes her head at my fantasy. “Trent, we’d have to mortgage the rest of our lives away to afford that. I mean, I know you make a good living, but come on.”

  She’s right. No one I know can even dream of affording to go there. The ticket prices to get into Arcadia make them all but out of reach to peons like me. All we can do is see it on the vidscreen and log into the fantasy game. It’ll have to be enough.

  My alarm goes off. It’s the first one, the one with the softly chiming bells meant to charm me out of bed, or at least out of sleep, with their tingling jangle. “Fine, fine. I’m up,” I tell the AI. “Alarm off.” The AI complies and I roll out of bed and into the kitchen. “Vidscreen on,” I say and the talking heads appear, images of the Arcadian queen in the PIP cube. “Speak of the devil,” I mutter.

  “Elven Queen Layora Lunacaller reports in a statement today that the rogue factions we’ve heard so much about should have no impact on tourism. She assures us all that the city streets of the Capital are safe, and the portal remains open. So, if you’re one of the lucky few with tickets to the city of the elves, there’s no need to request a refund cred.”

  The voice changes and I look up at the screen, where the reporter has been relegated to the PIP and the queen has taken over the main screen. I stare. It’s not often they’re able to get a recorder on the high queen. Her huge purple eyes look like they’re gazing straight at me. Even though they’re the same color as Catriona’s, they look nothing like hers. The queen’s could be made from purple ice for all the warmth held in them.

  “The rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated by the rebels,” she says. “All propaganda, no truth.” Her accent is stilted, strange. Almost like she’s trying to talk while holding water in her mouth. “Citizens of earth, we look forward to hosting you in our lovely city and showing you the wild beauty of our lands.” Her voice is devoid of emotion or welcome of any kind. Freaky. And still. What I wouldn’t give.

  Molly’s right, though. Like I could ever afford the creds for that. I’m well paid, but I’m just a code monkey.

  “I don’t know why you’d ever even want to go there,” Molly says as if reading my thoughts. I didn’t even notice her coming out of the bedroom. “It looks dangerous. Besides, haven’t you seen it all already? With your goggles and your gloves?”

  She’s still pissed at how much I spent on my home VR setup. I live pretty frugally, but some things are worth splurging on. Some part of me doesn’t want to tell her how fucking awesome it would be to go to Arcadia proper. She doesn’t play the game. She wouldn’t understand. Some part of me knows I wouldn’t want to take her with me even if I could afford to get us in. But that’s not something I have to deal with right now either. Silence is my best bet in this situation.

  I get breakfast ready for us, fry up some protein-packed synth eggs and synth bacon in one of our more extravagant luxuries, real butter.

  “I bet it’s not even as safe as they’re saying it is,” Molly muses, smoothing her eyebrows as she speaks with a perfectly manicured finger. “I bet they aren’t telling us everything.”

  She just can’t stop picking at that wound, can she?

  “What kind of name is that anyway? Queen Layora Lunacaller. The whole thing’s a joke, Trent.”

  She turns off the vidscreen.

  “Hey, I was watching that,” I say.

  “Oh?” She comes next to me in the kitchen and gets some coffee out of the podbrewer. “You can talk to me instead. Is anything exciting going on at work?”

  So that’s how it’s going to be. Fine. I’ll play along if it means she’ll leave me in a little peace. “No. Is there ever?” I say. “It’s just another day at the salt mines.”

  “So you could take some time off. Trent, we could go to Paris or Bangkok—we could even live it up in Dubai and still have savings cred left over. I think you really do need a break, baby. Let’s do this.”

  “I don’t know.” I chew some of my eggs, but they’ve gotten cold and rubbery. They’re hard to swallow. “I guess I want more out of life than a trip to the beach,” I say. The words stumble out of my mouth before I can stop them. “I just feel like I was somehow meant for more. Like the train was right there, waiting for me in the station, and I forgot to get on it.” I can’t even believe I’m saying this out loud to her. I can’t remember the last time I was this honesty with Molly.

  “What fucking train? What fucking station?” Her words don’t even sound angry. She’s just confused. And that’s probably why we don’t talk anymore.

  “I mean, I hear you, Molls,” I say. “It’s just that I’m such a fucking cog in the machine at Goliath Corp., and going on the same vacations everyone else goes on just feels like I’m giving up on the dream, you know? Like I’m just a part of the matrix.” I can see from the disappointment written all over her face that she doesn’t know.

  “What dream?” she says, then rolls her eyes. “Trent you make everything too hard. Try to relax. Just because other people enjoy going somewhere doesn’t automatically make that place less special or enjoyable. You don’t have to be different from everyone else. You don’t get points in life for being different. Just think about it, okay?”

  I give her the lip service she wants. “Sure, babe. I’ll think about it.” Fucking Dubai. Cocktails and clubs. No thanks.

  She knows me too well, though. “Seriously, Trent. You have got to stop dreaming about something you can never, ever hav
e. You’re not leet enough. I’m not leet enough. You have to find a way to be happy with what you have.”

  She’s right. I know she’s right. So why do I feel so fucking depressed?

  Chapter 2

  I catch a bullet train to the office. I don’t know why today is especially bad. Maybe I stayed up too late. Maybe I got worse sleep than I thought; maybe those dreams actually sapped my energy. I’ll have to get a power drink before I clock in or they’ll dock me with zombie pay when my coding isn’t up to speed.

  The AI units already outperform human workers in my field; I can’t give the powers that be any more reasons to get rid of actual people in the workforce.

  We’re a dying breed as it is. Some days I’m just not sure what humanity is coming to. We’ve managed to replace even our creative skills with capable bots. Most of the best sellers these days are written by robots. Some of the most popular original paintings are made by them, too. What’s left when there’s nothing at all for us to produce? Fuck, here I am depressing myself again.

  As if in answer to my thoughts, an advertisement for VR World blares on the vidscreen next to me. “Want to go to the mountains, but you don’t have the creds to earn a sexy ski instructor’s attention? No worries! Shred the slopes at VR World!

  “Want to feel the sand in your toes and the sun on your skin? You can at VR World!

  “Maybe you’re a real dreamer, and you want to frolic with the elves in Arcadia. You can even ride the dragons at VR World!

  “VR World ... it’s cheaper and safer than the real thing, and you feel like you’re really there. Whatever it is, you can live your dream at VR World!”

  I get to my cube in a daze. The power drink is just barely working. I make it to the break, having only passed my morning quota by a few lines of code. Good enough, I guess. My friend Mike joins me in the cafeteria line. We plop some synth burgers and fries on our trays.

  “Hey, man, what’s up with you?” he asks. “You seem out of it today.”