Hell's Glitch (LitRPG): Into a Dark Adventure (15 page)

“I met the king too and he taught me his Techniques.”

Sam said brazenly in an effort to prove his mettle.  The
merchant’s face went sour.

“The mad king didn’t kill you, eh?  Well you’re just a lucky
one, now aren’t you?”

His smile darkened and Sam was forced to wonder if the
merchant actually wanted him dead.  Well, it did make sense since the merchant
was a corpse robber.  He could make quite a profit recollecting items from
Sam’s corpse that he sold him earlier and then reselling them.

“The king that I met in that forest wasn’t mad at all.  He
was actually the most upstanding person I’ve met so far.”

The merchant put his hand over his mouth as he chuckled.

“Then you have been deceived.”

“No, I haven’t!”  For some reason, Sam was genuinely upset
at the accusation.  He had no clue why he cared so much about the reputation of
a fictional character.  He continued, “King Herke is a just man.  He only wants
to get justice for the murder of his family.  He even went out of his way to
help me.  The only madman in this forest is that killer, Caesar.  He is clearly
deranged.  His hanging body art gallery should’ve given that away.”

“From the sound of it, you’ve allied yourself with the
king.”

From the growing mistrust in the merchant’s voice, Sam
didn’t think mentioning his pact with the king would be beneficial.

“He will show his true nature soon enough, mark my words. 
You’d be a bigger fool not to kill him when the next opportunity presents
itself.”

Sam knew the king’s character.  In his brief time with the
man, he knew that he could trust him.  But right now, he lacked the drive to
continue this argument with the merchant.  He instead opted to get some
information from him.  Something that could help the king along with his quest.

Ahh, I know what I’ll ask.

“Have you seen a Cutthroat around these parts called Rondo? 
Probably someone from Aschelund or a nation near it.”

The merchant’s face seemed to quickly drain of all emotion. 
He narrowed his eyes on Sam.

“I have no more interest in your questions, traveler.  You
have proven yourself to be a complete fool.  You won’t survive this Forest of
Woe, as slow witted as you are.  And I won’t share my wares with weak dim-wit
fools who ask too many questions.”

“Whoa!  What the hell!?  I only asked a question!”

“It was one question too many, now go.  I don’t want to
chance you bringing any madmen to my cave.  You seem to attract them all.”

Sam backed away from the merchant, glad that he had already
bought all the items and equipment he needed.

“Your wares were mostly crap anyway.  I found better stuff
in the forest on my own.”

“Back to foraging with you then.  We’ll see how long you
survive in the forest without my help.  You’ll never make it out of here,
hehehehehe.”

Sam left the cave before his urge to murder the merchant increased
any more.

“I should just take all of your merchandise you cowardly
sack of—aagh!  You know, Alex.  People normally play videogames to get away
from assholes like this in the real world.  Why’d you bring the assholes here?”

This time he didn’t get any response.  Perhaps she was still
mad at him from before.  No matter.  He had one more stop in this area before
he moved on to another part of the forest.  Before he moved, he removed his
Sinner’s Scriber and placed some Absorption Herbs and Bandages in his Quick Select
slot.  He wanted to be properly prepared for his next battle.

Not too far from the cave, Sam found his opponent.  It was
the Cutthroat from before, clad in the customary black hooded garb.  The dark
colors and a face mask hid the person’s expressions, but now that they were
still Sam could see that this Cutthroat had an average build and was a little
taller than average.  Whoever it was, was also very thin.

“You over there!  Are you the Cutthroat, Rondo?  I need to
know.”

The shadowy assassin didn’t say a word and continued to
approach slowly with knife in hand.

“Alright, well, maybe my sword will loosen your tongue.”

The roleplaying was exhilarating to Sam.  He drew his Rapier
and as he did, the Cutthroat ducked into the forest to circle around him.  Sam
could still see his opponent even amidst the trees, so he turned and ran
after.  Once Sam had closed in the distance, the Cutthroat brandished another
knife in the other hand.  The Cutthroat quickly ran towards Sam and began
slashing at him.  Sam could do nothing, but put his shield up to block the
incoming barrage.  One of the Cutthroat’s knives bounced off the metal part of
the shield and left an opening for Sam to attack.  He thrust his sword forward
quickly and did some damage with a light attack.  The Cutthroat’s health bar
had shown him that he did a little less than an eighth and she let out a
feminine grunt before lunging forward with her own left handed counter stab. 
Sam’s health ticked down by a tenth and he backed away to avoid the rest of her
barrage of slashes and stabs.  She caught him again right before he was able to
lift his shield up in front of him and did another tenth.  This time she
smartly backed off once Sam’s shield was up and tried circling around him for
an opening.  Sam kept his shield up between him and her as he turned to keep
his focus on her.

“Listen you data packet, if you’re not Rondo then just say
so.  We can stop this fight.  And if you tell me where he is, I’ll get out of
this forest and leave all you forest weirdos alone.  I don’t really like it
here anyway.”

She still had nothing to say.  When she approached, Sam saw
that her eye sockets were hollowed out and inside of them was the tiniest speck
of fire.  It looked like a tiny ember, but had somehow given her vision, for
wherever Sam went, the ember in her socket followed.  The flesh around her eyes
was drier than Sam’s flesh had been when he had died before at Caesar’s hand.

“You’re mindless,” Sam said of the Cutthroat.  “You can’t
even talk.”

At this point, she was no different than some random
monster, but what were the chances that she was Rondo or at least knew where he
was?  She couldn’t tell him anything now, so it was time to defeat her.

He held his shield down to the side, baiting her to
approach.  When she still dallied and continued to circle around him, he
completely unequipped the shield.  Now with nothing in his left hand, she
approached, first thrusting out with her knife.  Sam tried to be cool and parry
the attack, but he was much too slow.  He took full damage from the thrust and
quickly rolled out of the way to avoid any more punishment.  She pressed him,
smelling blood in the water and Sam was forced to roll away again.  Finally, he
was able to rise and meet her, blade to blade again.  She came forward again
with the same attack as before and this time Sam had the right timing for his parry. 
He threw her right knife hand up, surprising her, then quickly thrust his sword
into her chest.  He kicked her off and saw her health go down to nearly
nothing.  Opponent’s that were recovering from the ground were dangerous.  As
they rose up, they had all manner of options to counterattack such as sweeps
and sudden slashes.  Sam patiently picked his spot and swiveled around to her
back.  His next move was tricky.  He had to estimate which side she would
choose to respond to him from.  He effectively had a fifty-fifty choice to
make.  She could turn to his left or right.  He looked at her as she rose up
from the ground and predicted that she would turn towards her right, where he
was now standing.  He took one quick step to the left near the center of her
back and waited.  As predicted, she turned to her right searching for Sam.  Sam
was free to do what he wanted now and, so he plunged his knife into her back
for critical damage.  It was extreme overkill.  The Cutthroat revenant let out
an anguished death cry then fell to the ground in a heap.  Sam was rewarded
with two thousand souls.

“There’s no way you could’ve been Rondo, is there?”  Sam
thought it over while staring at the mummified corpse as it faded away.  “No,
you can’t be.  The king referred to Rondo as a male.  But what if he doesn’t
really know either.  He’d only heard of Rondo through reputation it sounded
like.”

Sam thought over all the events of his time in the Full Dive
simulation.  Those thoughts brought him to his meeting with the merchant not so
long ago.  He still couldn’t figure out exactly where the merchant’s anger with
him had come from so suddenly.  His hatred of the king also seemed strange, but
perhaps it was well placed.  The merchant was dressed like a Cutthroat, so
maybe the king had mistreated him in the past.  But no, that couldn’t be the
case, since Sam himself was dressed in Cutthroat garb during his first
encounter with the king.  The king was annoyed by it, but he quickly judged
Sam’s character and offered his help after.  Maybe the merchant was someone
that the king didn’t respect?  That would mean that he was an unjust man,
exactly the kind that the king despised.  But maybe it was all due to a vicious
rumor gone rampant.  Maybe some lie had spread about the king murdering someone
close to the merchant.  As Sam pondered it all, something popped into his head. 
He whispered his question to himself.

“Why did he get so upset when I mentioned Rondo and
Aschelund?”

The light bulb finally went off and Sam’s mind started
racing.

“What if he is Rondo!?  Or at least one of his allies?”

This was bad.  If the answer to either of those questions
was yes then the merchant might use that information to his advantage.  He
could in fact hunt Sam or King Herke down, if such a thing were possible in
this game.

“Okay, okay!  I need to go back to the cave.”

He ran there and found the cave to be pitch black inside. 
He lit his torch, this time carrying it in his sword hand.  He held his shield
up with his other hand to fend off any surprise attacks.  He found nothing
inside the cave.  The merchant had taken everything with him.  Even his
standing torch sconce was gone.  Sam went down and snuck around the corner to
see that even the Soul Beacon was extinguished.  He quickly reignited it with a
touch and rested.  He had a lot to think about now.  Mainly, he thought of his
next move.

16
Sample Data

Alex Madura pored over the tester data for much longer than
necessary.  She felt a pain creeping into the center of her forehead and tried
to rub it away.  When that didn’t work, she just ran her fingers through her
untidy black hair.  The creeping headache had come only after Milner’s latest task
for her.  He wanted her to monitor Sam closely and note any changes to his physical
and mental status.  This was after the man had increased the pain simulators in
twenty percent of the alpha testers without telling any of the staff he’d put
in charge of the testers ahead of time.

“An experiment in player motivation,” he called it.

All Alex knew, was that she didn’t like the idea of a game
she helped make inflicting pain upon people.  She also didn’t like lying to Sam
like she did before, telling him that the pain feature was a glitch, but that
was also Milner’s decision.  He didn’t want the testers getting wind of his
tests.  “Better that they think it’s unnatural,” he reasoned to Alex.  The only
reason Alex hadn’t quit and reported Milner right there—besides needing the
money—was because she knew that the added pain didn’t affect the player’s
bodies in any way.  None of them were in any real danger.

“Think of the devil,”  Alex mumbled under her breath as Milner
strolled up to her desk, his dark eyes locked on one of her many screens the
whole time.  She had six of them currently up in front of her.  She had three
feeds, each dedicated to one of her testers, in a row above three screens with
numerical statistics and other useful data for each tester.  The screens on the
left were for Dan aka Corbine, the screens in the middle had Sam aka Sarem in
the middle of the forest king quest, and the screens on the right was Jacob’s
aka JakThe_MonarchBfly.  Milner focused on the middle screens, mainly on the
detailed player data on the bottom screen.  With only a quick ciphering look, Milner
seemed to grasp the numbers and what he needed to know from them.

“Disappointing,” he muttered.

Alex was tempted to keep her mouth shut.  Milner paid her
well to do just that, since he never seemed interested in what she had to say. 
She had never quite understood what he was looking for, really.  Whenever she’d
ask a question about it before, she always felt like a fool.  It was a
combination of Milner’s silences in the face of her questions and her own lack
of being able to understand what the heck Milner was talking about half the
time that led to her feeling like she did, so she created a “stupid quota” for
herself so that Milner wouldn’t truly think her an idiot.  Now though, her
curiosity had overwritten her desire to stay quiet on the issue.

“What do you mean?”

Milner looked at her with disinterest.

“Your tester, Sarem.  He is one of the top performers and
yet he is not progressing as I had hoped.”

“Sam is doing fine as far as I can tell.  What exactly are
you expecting from him?”

Milner ran his left hand fingers along his beard and finally
showed some other emotion besides disinterest.

“I expected a more spirited performance.  He’s one of the
few with the highest levels of pain receptors.  Of the twenty percent with the
heightened pain receptors, there are ten percent in this group who are very
near the maximum pain threshold.  With his body being able to handle that, I
assumed he’d excel in battle.  Like a true warrior.”

Alex thought about that, but she still couldn’t figure out
what the man wanted out of all this.  As if sensing this, Milner continued his
response.

“I expected these testers to quickly cannibalize the game as
their senses of survival kicked in and for each of them to be in the top ten
rankings or to fill out the top thirty by this point at the very least.”

“Well, no ... ”

Milner seemed genuinely confounded by Alex’s answer.

“No?” he asked.  “Care to elaborate?”

“Sure.  It’s simple.  People are afraid of pain.  For most
of them, they won’t excel with life or death pressure, they’ll crumble under
it.  You’ll just have more of these testers afraid to play the game and
experiment.  They’ll do everything the safest way that they can.  These are
regular people we’re talking about sir ... well as regular as gamers can be
anyway.  These aren’t trained soldiers we’re talking about here.”

Milner’s grin was the closest thing to a smile that she had
gotten from him so far.  Strange, he was oddly handsome for the second he held
the grin.  That caught her off guard.  All she had ever seen was Milner’s robot
face.

“That is exactly right.  But there is a small probability
that some of the elite players should bloom under such dangers, but I’m not
seeing that so far.  That’s why I’m disappointed.  None of these testers are
the alphas that I’m looking for.”

“But that’s why Sam should impress you.  Even with his pain
levels as high as they are, he is still as adventurous and fearless as ever.  He’s
still playing this like he’s playing an old school video game, like the best
players used to play The Death Planes.  He’s really making good progress.”

“Yes, he’s the best of the failures.  I’m aware that he is our
third best player right now.  I’ve been monitoring that data very closely.  But
being third place means nothing when Immortal Kalika is so far ahead of
everyone in terms of skill,” Milner answered her snidely.

Kalika was another beast entirely as a player.  She had
already completed most of the quests in the forest and found most of the
treasures yet she still hadn’t died.  Maya, the designer that was helping her,
had told Alex that the system had fit Kalika like a glove at the start and that
her gameplay skills were out of this world.  Alex wondered if she was a speedrunner
in the old Death Planes game.  If she was, she wasn’t a famous one, since Alex
didn’t recognize her gamer handle or her real name.  But if she knew that game
intimately, then it would give her a big advantage over the others here. 
Still, it was strange that she became accustomed to the controls so quickly. 
Everyone was still warming up to them, more or less.  The way it felt to be in
the game was unlike anything else, even reality.  The world of Project DH was a
strange mixture of realism and complete fantasy, including the physics.

“I’ve been hearing that Immortal Kalika is very good, but it
doesn’t take away from players like Sarem the Sanguine and Sword Wrench Man. 
Kalika is just a freakishly good player.”

Milner studied the data on Alex’s screen again, then
projected a three dimensional hologram data screen from his watch.

“I’m not getting anything I can use from this test.”

She still had no clue what this man even wanted.  Everyone
was playing the game and enjoying it and the only bugs that the testers
reported were those that were purposely programmed into the game to keep them
on their toes.  What more could Milner want?  Everything seemed to be on course
for a successful release.  Alex thought to directly ask him, but now she felt
she was getting close to her “stupid quota” for the day.  She instead chose
something that wouldn’t peg her as an idiot.

“Mr. Milner, is Kalika a part of your experiment too?  Does
she have the same realistic pain simulation as Sam?”

“No, she doesn’t.  She’s playing with the default settings.”

Which meant that only dying and getting hit with certain
attacks and status effects would send a light adverse stimulation to her brain. 
It was nothing like the sharp spikes in pain that Sam felt.

“Even with the lack of eminent danger, she still manages to
fight through each of her battles as though each were her last.  She’s fighting
like the perfect warrior I need her to be even though she’s only roleplaying. 
The others will have to follow suit.  For now, I’m advancing to the second
phase of this alpha test.  I need more output from these testers.”

Alex stared at Milner, worry and confusion clearly painted
on her face, she knew.

“Second phase, sir?” she asked.

“I’ll be announcing it shortly.  In the meantime, keep
monitoring your testers and report any new developments.”

He walked off down towards Maya’s cubicle at the other end
of the large office area.  Fifty designers were sat, cubicle to cubicle, in the
spacious room with its high ceiling.  It was the same with two other rooms, one
directly across from them and the other down the hall.  Alex stood and
stretched for what felt like the first time in hours.  She took a moment to
look around the room, mainly to see if anyone fun was also up and stretching
like she was.  Sue liked to work while standing and sure enough she was a few
cubicles over, absorbed in whatever she was doing.  Alex looked around for
Milner.

“What the hell?” she whispered her question quietly to
herself.

A gray haired man dressed in an ornate white and green long
coat walked up to Milner and whispered something into his ear.  Alex was
curious about what the men were talking about.

“Is that cosplay?”

If so, then why?  Was Milner doing some sort of contest? 
Was the man in the jacket here to promote the game in some sort of way?  Before
her imagination ran too wild, Alex took another look around the room to see if
there was anything else crazy going on.  Her eyes didn’t disappoint her.  There
were other men in similar colored security uniforms around the room.  There were
now men at each of the doors and two of them randomly walking around the room
surveying the developers.

“What the hell is going on?  Well, Alex, if there was ever a
time to ask your boss a stupid question, now would be it.”

She put all her equipment down and made her way over to her
boss, the enigmatic Fulton Milner.