EverRealm: A LitRPG Novel (Level Dead Book 1) Read online

  “That’s not how it works, Henry,” Trish said. “Goddammit, you know better.”

  “I thought I had it beat,” Henry said. “I was going to tell you guys, but there was no reason to since we were going to do this.”

  He spread his arms wide then coughed even harder. He doubled over and rested his arms on his knees.

  “Where did you put Jeremy?” Ming asked.

  “He said he put him in a spare immersion tank, dude,” Coz snapped. “Listen up!”

  “He knows what I mean,” Ming said, his eyes locked onto Henry. “Henry? Where did you put Jeremy?”

  Henry began to reply, but his coughing got worse and he fell to one knee. Then he collapsed completely onto the floor. Holo began to growl low in his throat. Everyone whipped around to stare at my dog. He’d never done that before in the Center. They didn’t know what it meant.

  I knew exactly what it meant.

  “Ming!” I shouted.

  “I am trying!” Ming shouted back, his voice filled with panic. “Henry has his portal locked open! He encrypted it so I cannot close it!”

  “What the hell is happening here?” Trish yelled.

  “Is he dead?” Laura asked, moving closer to Henry’s unconscious body.

  Sandra put a hand on Laura’s shoulder and stopped her from getting any closer.

  “He stinks,” Holo growled. “Bad. Make him go away, bro. Get him gone. Now!”

  That last word came out as a harsh bark. A warning bark. A bark that something undead this way comes.

  Henry’s eyes shot open just as that flickering black spot on his arm stopped flickering. There was a mouth-sized hunk of flesh missing from Henry’s forearm. He sat up and hissed at us.

  “Oh, shit!” Trish yelled.

  Holo was up on all fours, barking and snarling, but he didn’t dare get any closer to Henry. I shook my right hand twice and my axe appeared in my grip. Everyone else did the same thing and various weapons appeared in shaking hands.

  “Hold,” Ming ordered. “Let me try something.”

  A purple light flashed from above us and an iron cage dropped from the ceiling, trapping Henry.

  “There,” Ming said. “Now it is contained.”

  “Not an it,” Sandra whispered.

  “It is now,” Ming said. “Henry is no longer there. He’s not back home, either. What is in that tank is not Henry. Our friend is gone.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Coz said.

  “Yeah,” Kip said.

  The undead quantum Henry slammed himself against the bars of the iron cage. He tried to reach through the gaps, but they were only illusions. Ming had built an impenetrable cell and only made it look like a cage.

  “I have to wonder if there was any lag from when his physical body changed and when his quantum representation changed,” Ming said, more to himself than to any of us.

  “Ming? What the hell are we going to do with him?” Trish asked. “Kill him? Is that even possible?”

  “A very good question,” Ming said. “Henry is already dead.”

  He drew a katana from beneath his robes. I caught a quick glimpse and I could swear the man wasn’t wearing underwear. You know what? I’d been through a lot, all of us had, and there was no reason he needed to be subjecting anyone to that kind of horror. Asshole.

  “Ming? What are you doing?” Coz asked.

  “Ending his time here,” Ming said.

  “But we don’t know what it will do,” Coz said.

  “Kill it,” Holo snarled.

  “I’m going to listen to the dog,” Ming said before any of us could stop him.

  “Can’t we just banish him?” Sandra asked. She was as far away from Henry as she could get, her back against the wall, her arms cradled around her chest. “Send him into exile?”

  “Of course,” Ming said. “What a splendid idea. We send him into exile in one of the Domains. Perhaps his own? Which Domain did Henry create?”

  The Domains.

  Part of being one of the Nine was that we each got to create our own Domain—a quantum world that was as alive as the real world. More so since the real world was overrun by the dead.

  Each Domain had a specific theme. That was the one concession we had to make. No two Domains could be the same. Mine is Technopolis, a cyberpunk mega-city that covered an entire planet. I was a high-tech gumshoe with a talking dog as a partner. Animals can talk in my Domain due to enhanced intelligence implants. It made things easier for Holo.

  Coz had Grimm City. That was an urban fantasy setting where he was a homicide detective that dealt with supernatural and magical killings.

  Sandra had Star Fortress which was a far, far future space station that she ruled like a space queen.

  Trish had Elder Mansion which was a Lovecraftian horror Domain that none of us ever wanted to visit again. Scared the living shit out of me and Holo refuses to even listen to her if she starts talking about the place.

  Kip has Dodge County. A wild-west-themed Domain where he’s the silent gunslinger that wanders the land, handing out justice to the robber barons and heartless outlaws that plague the settlers and townsfolk that are only looking for a simple life of peace.

  Jeremy’s Domain was a League of Heroes. All superheroes, all the time.

  The weird one was Laura’s. She was a hardcore gamer, but she chose to make a Domain called Wuthering Moors. Total gothic romance scenario where the hero is constantly bemoaning the love he lost while burying his grief in the bosom of the closest lass he can get ahold of. Laura prefers we don’t visit. Not a problem.

  Ming’s Domain, the first Domain, is EverRealm. A total Tolkien rip-off, like all of the fantasy RPGs ever created, the Domain is filled with orcs and goblins and dragons and elves and all of that shit. The funny part is that Ming’s great-great-great grandfather invented the world as a cheap knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons. It died like all the cheap knockoffs did back in the 20th century.

  Except, someone in his family later revived it once the world had become Internet savvy. It turned into the most played game on the web. A MMORPG of epic proportions, dwarfing its closest rival by a factor of ten to one in players.

  A few generations later and you’ve got Ming, one of the smartest people on the planet that happened to be part of one of the wealthiest families on the planet. Not that money could stop the undead. A massive bank account and trust fund didn’t stop the infection.

  For the record? Not a fan of EverRealm. Some of the others would play with Ming in his Domain all the time, including Holo. They had badass characters that could slay dragons and take on troll clans by themselves. My character was a human Ranger that always ended up getting nearly killed. I stopped playing with them all after a while and hung out in Technopolis by myself instead.

  That left Henry’s Domain. Slasher Lake. He was a huge fan of the slasher horror genre and decided he wanted to create a world where every trope of that genre could be explored. Personally, I think he just wanted an excuse to save half-naked (sometimes fully naked) chicks from machete-wielding psychos. It made him feel good.

  “Slasher Lake,” I said. “That’s Henry’s Domain.”

  “Ah, yes, right,” Ming said, a look of distaste filling his features. “That place. What a waste of bandwidth.”

  “No judgement,” Laura said.

  “Yes, of course, my apologies,” Ming said. “So, are we in agreement that we will banish this version of Henry to his Domain?”

  “Will we sever the link?” Sandra asked. “Cut it off from the Center?”

  “I would say yes, except that would present a few problems,” Ming said.

  “Infrastructure deterioration,” Coz said.

  “The wheel needs all its spokes,” Trish added.

  “Yes, quite,” Ming said. “If we sever Slasher Lake’s connection to the Center, then the entire infrastructure becomes imbalanced. We are only as strong as we are because we are together. That counts in the quantum setting as much as it counts in life.”<
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  “But when we send him there he can’t get back here, right?” Sandra asked.

  She was almost shaking with fear.

  “I believe that our combined skills can create a firewall strong enough to keep his consciousness from returning to the Center,” Ming said.

  “We could also create a scenario in the Domain that will keep his undead persona occupied,” Coz said.

  “Yeah,” Kip said.

  “Good idea,” Trish said. “Populate the place with re-spawning co-eds that are too delicious looking for him to do anything else except chase them, catch them, eat them, and repeat.”

  “You all are forgetting something,” Holo said, his voice still a low growl, his eyes locked onto undead Henry. “Where the hell is Jeremy?”

  “He is in Henry’s spare immersion tank,” Ming said.

  “No, the dog is right, dude,” Coz said. “Henry said he brought Jeremy here early in order to see if he could help him. Where is he?”

  Everyone froze. Then we started looking around the Center for signs of undead Jeremy. The place wasn’t big enough for him to hide, but maybe there was something that could tell us where he ended up.

  “Henry would have taken him to his Domain,” Sandra said.

  “Whose Domain? Henry’s or Jeremy’s?” Laura asked.

  “Jeremy’s,” Sandra said. “He has to be in League of Heroes right now.”

  “Perhaps,” Ming said. “Let me check to see if there are any remnants of a trace path.”

  His eyes glazed over as all of ours do when we’re accessing the backend of the Domains to work some maintenance or institute upgrades. It took him two seconds flat.

  “His taint is all over everything,” Ming said, sounding deeply offended. “Our Henry panicked and made a mess of it all.”

  “Okay, so what the fuck does that mean?” Trish asked.

  “It means it will be faster visiting each Domain than it will be to clean up the quantum mess and find out where Jeremy was placed,” Ming said.

  “Dammit,” Coz said.

  “Yeah,” Kip said.

  “Shall we get to work?” Ming asked and clapped his hands together.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “How about we—?”

  I was cut off by a string of chimes that echoed through the Center. My shock at the noise was echoed on the others’ faces. If it was Jeremy trying to get back to the Center, although how he could do that in his state was a very good question, then there should have only been one chime. We were hearing dozens going off at once.

  Then they began to appear and all hell broke loose.

  Eight

  We didn’t get a chance to get to work. Hell, we didn’t get a chance to even think about checking any of the Domains.

  Something went very wrong on Henry’s side of the world. The real world. The world that had undead in the billions walking around looking for food. If the undead made it inside Henry’s compound, and saw him floating in his tank, then they’d be awfully tempted to break in and grab a hunk of Hank for a snack.

  Technically, Henry was undead also inside the immersion gel. He wasn’t living flesh anymore and wouldn’t make a very good meal. The thing was that the undead weren’t exactly quantum scientists. To their eyes, there was a living human being suspended inside that tank, ripe for the plucking. And the eating.

  We all had our theories afterwards, but what it came down to was that the undead broke his tank open then climbed inside to get a taste. Once they were inside the immersion gel, they became incorporated into the quantum matrix. They became players in the game.

  Within seconds, the Center was filled with undead. Hungry, confused, enraged undead. There was no time for us to plot, plan, come up with any type of strategy. The one place in all of existence where we should have been perfectly safe had become a crypt. Our crypt.

  “Go!” I yelled as I brought my fire axe down on the skull of a woman that was more of a husk than a body. Her head cracked like a dried-out walnut and desiccated brains sprayed everywhere. “Move!”

  No one needed me to tell them what to do. We were all veterans of the apocalypse; we were all experienced in what had to be done to survive.

  But we were also only people. Except for Holo, of course.

  Laura panicked. I think the fact that the Center had been breached, which no one suspected could be done, totally fried her brain. She froze up and stood there, screaming her head off, as six undead tackled her then proceeded to tear off that screaming head.

  I don’t think anyone will forget when her screams were cut off. I know I won’t.

  Three undead went for Coz and I took out two at the legs with my axe, chopping them off at the knees. The third grabbed him around the throat with its putrid hand, but Coz was able to snap the thing’s arm off at the elbow then beat its head in with its own arm. It was impressive.

  Coz got his shit together and held his hands out. A machete appeared in each hand, and he began hacking and slashing at anything that moved and obviously wasn’t living.

  Trish had an aluminum baseball bat in each hand and was smashing two of the undead into juicy pulp. Holo gave a warning bark in time for her to duck her shoulder and let one of the undead tumble across her back. She stood up at the last instant, knocking its legs up into the air, causing the thing to flip over onto its back. Down came the bats and more pulp covered the floor.

  “Follow me!” Ming yelled as he held his hands out, palms up and summoned the doorway to his Domain. A circular portal of bright light appeared before him. “Hurry! We can’t let them follow us in!”

  Despite her delicate persona, Sandra was no wimp when it came to combat. Wimps didn’t survive in the apocalypse. She had a military-grade combat knife in each hand, both with blades easily over ten inches long, and was spinning through the quickly massing undead, stabbing, shoving, stabbing, shoving, stabbing, and shoving. It was a technique we all knew, but she’d mastered perfectly. Stab an undead through the skull, shove it away, turn and stab another, shove that one away, and keep on repeating until they’re all dead or you are.

  “Holo! Go!” I shouted and pointed the head of my axe at Ming’s portal. “Make sure that side is secure!”

  He didn’t have to be told twice. There was nothing he could do against the undead. He bolted towards the portal and was the first one through as Ming continued to stand there, holding it open for all of us.

  I swung my axe and chopped an undead teenager in half. Right down the middle. She split open and her insides became outsides. The smell made me want to gag, but I didn’t have time for that. Four undead were headed right for me.

  Kip let out a battle cry that was so loud I could feel it in my bones and charged the undead that were charging me. He didn’t carry weapons. Kip was the weapon. He wore top-grade riot gear body armor and had thick, reinforced gloves. He slammed his body into the undead and knocked them right off their feet. Then he set to work stomping skulls with his steel-toed combat boots. The one undead that managed to sit up had his head knocked off by a wicked right hook that Kip threw his entire body weight into.

  “Thanks!” I shouted over the chaos.

  “Come on!” Coz yelled as he raced by me towards Ming’s portal. He was gone before I could say anything.

  “We should split up!” I yelled at the others.

  “No time!” Trish said as she was next after Coz.

  I was right. We should have split up and gone to each of our own Domains. All of us stuck in one Domain was not a good idea. It’s why we had all of the others. To minimize risk.

  “You going, too?” I called to Kip who was smashing two undead heads together and trying to create one. He simply created a huge mess that squirted up high into the air.

  “Yeah!” Kip said as he let the headless bodies drop and kicked out at an undead man that was reaching for the back of Sandra’s neck.

  The undead bastard fell against Sandra and she whipped about, stabbing it through the eye before shoving it backwards. Kip
tossed it aside and gave Sandra a huge smile. She didn’t waste time smiling back. She was all work and no smiles.

  Kip turned his smile on me then sprinted at the portal.

  “Steve!” Ming shouted. “I can’t hold it forever!”

  He was right. It took a lot of energy to maintain a portal. Do it for too long and you risked having your consciousness dissipate within the quantum matrix. You’d lose yourself forever. I guess that was our new death, in a way.

  “Sandra!” I yelled.

  “You go!” she said as she stabbed two more undead then dropped to a knee and severed the leg tendons of two more before standing back up and shoving the crippled undead at a group of six coming at her. “I have this!”

  I wanted to argue, but she was right. I needed to go next. Sandra was much faster than me and could dodge the horde that was filling the Center better than I could.

  “Don’t wait!” I shouted then turned and ran straight for the portal.

  I gave Ming a glance as I passed him, and the last thing I saw was the sweat pouring down his face. He was struggling to keep the portal open. But there was nothing I could do to help him.

  I was through the portal and into EverRealm without feeling a thing. One moment I’m in the Center, the next I’m not. It’s how quantum transportation worked.

  Not that it was all peaches and cream when I got to the other side.

  Usually, we have a specific place we open portals onto in our Domains. A safe spot that is free of ambush possibilities or any other dangers. No point in appearing in our Domain only to be run over by a truck or eaten by some otherworldly demon.

  Ming must have been rattled because instead of appearing in the meadow of wildflowers that he preferred, I was falling in open space, my arms pinwheeling as I stared up at a bright blue sky. Then I hit the water and was under and being tumbled by the power of a massive waterfall. I barely had the presence of mind to go limp and let the current pop me out and away from the down force of the waterfall.

  When I finally came up for air, I was a quarter-mile downriver and exhausted. It took all of my strength to paddle my tired ass over to shore. I dragged myself up onto a small beach of coarse sand and pebbles. After about fifteen minutes of just breathing, I managed to sit up and look around.