Reborn: Evolution: A LitRPG Series (Warlock Chronicles Book 3) Page 15

  “You’ll answer for everything, you fucker! What are you waiting for, huh?! Kill me! Come at me!”

  Did he really think I’d get close after seeing what he had done to Ivan? A minute longer, and he’d cling to my body, setting off for the ninth mad run across the desert to the Oasis.

  Without stopping or trying to kick the annoying head, I gripped the hilt of the dagger. Loris clenched his fangs and fell silent, as if hoping that I’d change my mind. I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes — the fear of being trapped for another fifty years in a deserted tower hidden between dunes.

  You have reached level 105!

  You have reached level 106!

  The dagger’s blade came out of the back of Loris’s head without much trouble. He instantly went limb, his face settled in a serene smile — a bait for the naive and kind-hearted travelers, unaware that they’d be used as a vessel and a vehicle for a maniac.

  But could you really blame him for wishing to escape? Even at the cost of someone else’s life? Was I any better, condemning the poor thing to endless torture? Aslan was able to adapt and even seemed to have made peace with his fate, preferring sleep to being awake. Loris was still kicking, not wanting to become a toy in the System’s hands. One day, even his spirit will be broken, and he’ll become a part of the Game, part of this mad world, the purpose of which still remained a mystery.

  ***

  I had to send Rat to get us some water from the eighth floor to finally bring Ivan back to his senses. The pet, folding the long tentacles into a bowl, immediately brought two liters of fresh water, half of which he poured on Ivan’s cherry-red face.

  “What...? Oh, God... My fucking head!” he cried.

  “Get up, it’s time to go back,” I said, holding out my hand to help him up.

  He somehow managed to get back to his feet, and we wandered south — toward the portal and the Oasis.

  Standing on top of the dune, I took one last look at the Tower. Loris’s head, as Aslan had said, was slowly rolling back toward its home, leaving a shallow trail in the sand behind it. The dagger followed its example, reflecting the bright rays of the sun in its green glass. I squinted; one of the rays hit me square in the eye. Loris was barely moving and it looked like it’d take him a couple of months, if not a year, to reach his spot on the red velvet. The Tower seemed to have some sort of a magnetic field around it that prevented the stray travelers and its inhabitants from escaping.

  The structure itself had begun to sink back into the sand. Two of its thirteen floors had already disappeared under the ground.

  I caught a glimpse of the wide window of the “winter” floor, in which the Red Monk was now standing, having abandoned its prayer. I activated Visor and zoomed in: the NPC was clearly staring at us, looking straight into my eyes, completely oblivious of Loris’s rolling head. It looked like an anthropomorphic mouse dressed like a Buddhist monk, bald and blue from the cold: small in stature with fluffy ears and a wrinkled muzzle.

  After standing there for perhaps a minute, it suddenly nodded. Next to it appeared a symbol that was too familiar to me: a yellow square, enclosed in an equilateral triangle, with a small plus sign in the middle.

  The Piper’s symbol.

  The Tower hurried up, and in a minute, it was completely hidden in the sand. As it sank, I numbly watched as the Monk disappeared from my sight.

  ***

  I couldn’t reactivate the tower and ask the Monk how it was connected to the Piper. I cut my hand, Rat’s paw, and even Ivan’s palm, but the opening mechanism simply refused to work. Perhaps it had a cooldown. God only knew how long it’d be before the Tower would rise again.

  The sun had passed its zenith, making the air and the sand hotter and hotter. Despite the thick snakeskin, my feet were covered with burns, Rat smelled of burnt fur (although he was holding up well), and Ivan seemed ready to pass out. We had to go back. As soon as possible.

  Fortunately, we knew the way to the Oasis. During the time we had spent in the tower, the wind hadn’t had the time to change the desert terrain and make us wander between the shifting dunes. Still, the journey back wasn’t easy. The sand scratched our skin, burned our feet, tried to slip under us... There was nothing for miles around. Only the sun, heat, and endless sand...

  In the desert, I realized four things.

  First, in all his attempts to escape, Loris only once managed to reach the Oasis where he drowned. Seven times he died in the desert, burned by the sand and the scorching sun. Second, Ivan and I had made a big mistake not taking any supplies or water with us. Third, I’d have to bring Kay-Si on the next trip. I remembered him complaining how he hadn’t jumped into a portal and escaped from the infection that had destroyed his entire faction. Most likely, he had the same skill as I did. We could’ve definitely used his help today.

  And finally, the Piper had definitely been to the Tower before. He lived in the Sage, under which was the portal to the Oasis. He had also probably used it more than once. That was the only explanation as to how the Monk knew his symbol.

  Why didn’t the NPC say anything when I was passing through its biome? Did it not want to interrupt its prayer? Or did it think that we’d meet again?

  Rat had been carrying me for the last twenty minutes. With his tongue hanging out and breathing heavily, he dragged my exhausted body, collapsed from heat stroke, across the hot sand. Ivan trudged along on all hours. His entire body, unprotected by the wet shirt, was covered with burns.

  We literally crawled to the Oasis.

  ***

  The fresh air seemed to breathe life back into me. I woke up.

  Lying in the shallow water, Ivan gave me a tired look and a faint smile, showing that he was alive and kicking, and immediately buried his face back into the wet sand. Rat, who had just emerged from the water, was gnawing furiously at the pelvic bone of the skeleton lying on the bank, trying to extract the bone marrow from it. I was sure that during the trip to get the water, he had eaten a few toucans (or even piranhas), and that there was nothing edible left in the yellowed bones but I wasn’t about to stop him. I was too tired to talk.

  A marker suddenly flashed on the mini-map — the Compass had located the next, fifth fragment. Luckily, it wasn’t in the desert, but in a completely different place: right on the top of the portal leading to the Oasis. I dreaded the swim back to the portal leading out of here. We were exhausted. Only after half an hour of rest did I finally manage to dive to the bottom where I activated the Portal Operator skill, which instantly pushed us out of the desert.

  ***

  Something soft and heavy fell on me, pinning me to the cold stone, and making it impossible to move. Rat had lost all orientation due to a sudden shift in plains .

  A moment later, something even heavier fell on me: Ivan flew out of the portal, falling straight on Rat with a loud cry.

  Successful use of skill [Portal Operator].

  Reward: +1 Portal Operator

  I gasped, feeling one of my ribs crack.

  ***

  For all his trouble, Ivan was given two new levels. I invested my skill points into Portal Operator, increasing it to level twenty-three. Now I could get six players and three mobs through a portal at once.

  The Compass indicated that we’d have to jump through another portal to find the next fragment. It was located right above the Magi’s Abode, hidden deep in the swamps. It was the exact same portal I had stumbled upon when I was chasing the mob hiding in the Elder about a month ago. The mob had gone to the other side without any problems. Unlike me.

  Now, after a journey through the desert that had almost claimed my life, I hoped that after passing through this portal, I’d find myself in a place with more pleasant weather conditions. After all, the mob that I had encountered couldn’t survive among the dunes, tundra, or windy mountain ranges.

  When I got out of the Sage, I looked around in surprise.

  During our leave, the snow had piled up to our knees, and the temperature plummeted.
The cold wind instantly cooled my wet body and crawled under the armor, sending chills down my spine. I could feel my feet begin to freeze and I instantly cursed myself for not having any shoes.

  “Out of the fire and into the frying pan, huh?” Ivan muttered, squeezing through the hole in the trunk and gritting his teeth. “First the heat, now the cold... When will this end?”

  “Be patient. We don’t have much time left... Three more fragments, and we’ll be saved. Or we’ll die. We’ll see.”

  “I hope we get to live.” Ivan chuckled, toying with his club. “And then what? I’ve been eating raw meat for more than two months and mining for twenty hours a day... And for what? To be squashed like a bug?”

  “I feel you... So, ready for our next adventure?”

  “God help us.”

  ***

  There was another surprise waiting for us back in the base.

  The palisade was broken in several places, and some of the stakes were even torn and thrown aside by a...

  The remains of a Brown Mammoth.

  Legendary

  A huge elephant with rough fur and sixteen-foot-long tusks, each of which weighed about a hundred pounds, ran into the sharpened logs. Thrashing about, it only made things worse as the stakes drove themselves deeper into its stomach, piercing internal organs and severing arteries. After a while, its agony came to an end, and the Mammoth died, having dyed the snow and ground under it scarlet. It looked like some gross modern art installation: an elephant stuck on logs, with its guts spilling out, still hot and steaming...

  “Poor thing,” Amoeba mumbled, crawling over on his translucent legs. He was the only one who didn’t have to wear clothes due to his high damage resistance. “We were lucky that Korzh pushed the idea to use thick pines. Otherwise, the thing would’ve broken through the palisade like it was nothing. Anyway, how did your mission go? Did you find the fragment? Yes? Good. A lot of interesting things happened while you were away...”

  The second wave of cold had swept over the Black Mountain, bringing with it snow and frost and making even the most resilient mobs migrate from the north. In the morning, several saber-tooth tigers were seen near the base, and in the afternoon, a mammoth was knocking on our door, having strayed from the herd. It would’ve probably avoided us had the Goblins not been carrying the last crop of grain into the underground silo. The hungry mammoth smelled the food and ran headlong into the palisade. The sentries perched on the towers immediately showered it with lit arrows and poisoned spears (some of the Goblins still had poison glands, although after the transition to the Iron Age, they began to atrophy due to lack of use). With the beast killed, the Goblins began to cut it up and dump its meat into the “refrigerator” made in the ground: a deep hole filled with ice and snow.

  “Hold on... Since when do we have a fridge? Did they spend the last twenty hours digging this thing up?”

  “No, of course not, we’re not crazy,” Spider replied once I asked him this question, carrying a severed tusk. “Greek and the worms did it. This is the result of a few days of experiments and a couple tons of devoured ground. He was looking for you, by the way. Said it was urgent.”

  ***

  For the past few days, Greek had barely slept, dealing with the worms assigned to him. First, he came up with a cage for them — a wooden one, which the worms, even if they could, didn’t want to chew through, preferring the ground shoveled into the cage. Still, managing them turned out to be a difficult task. No matter how hard Greek tried, and God knows he did, all of his attempts yielded no result.

  But during his trip for coal (when we met him on the lake), he got an interesting idea — to try and tame the worms. Not with the help of mental powers, like me, but in the usual way — with a carrot and a stick.

  The carrot in this case was... a bunch of pebbles, gathered on the riverbank, made of quartz and granite, cut by water and wind. This turned out to be a real treat for the worms, who agreed to perform any task, even digging a fridge, in exchange for the tasty treats.

  Unfortunately, the worms were stupid and making them do what you needed them to do was rather difficult. Which was why Greek decided to turn to me for help.

  “Can you do me a favor?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  “What kind of favor?”

  “We need to replace their brains with better ones. I heard you have a lot of Evolution Points... Could you make them your pets? I’ll figure the rest out myself...”

  “Sure, no problem,” I said after a moment. “But I warn you that nothing will really change even if we give them a better brain, they’ll be just as dumb...”

  “Anything helps, Loki.” He smiled.

  ***

  The “operation” took only half an hour.

  Before sunset, we descended into the tunnels and made several foundations for the generators that White had already built. While his assistants were installing the bulky metal appliances powered by coal, we were collapsing and closing off tunnels to create a ventilation network: otherwise, we’d suffocate from the smoke.

  The process was as follows: Korzh threw the pebbles in the direction the tunnels needed to be dug, and the worms instantly crawled after them in anticipation of a tasty treat. If they did everything right, Greek threw them more pebbles, if not, he gently hit them with a stick. Just enough to make them understand that they had made a mistake.

  “There’s no other way,” he told me, “they only understand violence.”

  It seemed that Greek was the only one that didn’t mind the smell coming from the worms. My allies and I, who were installing the generators, could barely stand the stench, holding our noses and trying not to breathe at all. Greek just grinned as he continued to throw pebbles.

  When the work was done, Greek headed toward the south tunnel. Looking at him in surprise, I said:

  “Um, Greek... The exit is that way...”

  “We have enough coal for two or three weeks, maybe less,” he replied, walking away, “imagine what will happen when it’s minus bajillion outside? We won’t be able to get out! To mine coal or carry it to the base... My plan is to dig a tunnel straight to the mines! It’ll take a few days, but it’ll get done.”

  Greek’s eyes shone at the thought of adventure, and his hands were almost shaking in anticipation.

  The plan sounded risky to me. Then again, in the Screeching Mountain, the worms had made hundreds of bigger tunnels and even entire caves. Not like any of that would help us against the Giant. Still, it could make our stay here a bit more pleasant.

  Wishing Greek good luck, I headed for the exit.

  ***

  The first thing I did was drop by the tailor’s. Then I went to the shoemaker who quickly made me a pair of leather boots, insulated with wool.

  After trying out my new clothes, I looked like a humanoid alien who had come to sixteenth century Russia and was trying to pass as a “fellow human.” My head, covered with snakeskin, the absence of a nose, my toothy, lipless mouth, and the third eye on my neck gave me away. I would’ve probably been burned on the stake.

  It was getting dark. Together with Rat, I headed toward the Valley. Kay-Si could be of great help in tomorrow’s mission, and he could move through portals on his own. However, he wasn’t home. I remembered him mentioning some important matter he had to deal with... but why would he need to take so long?

  ***

  I must’ve waited for three hours, but he never showed up. At my call, the Worm and its clones came crawling from the forest. The big guy immediately slid under my feet, greeting me joyfully.

  “Hi, guys... Sorry for not bringing you along, but now I got a very important task for you...”

  I began to divide them further with lightning, creating more and more clones. To reduce the damage (which was a serious problem in the past), I blocked their blood flow in the Lab and gave them as symmetrical organs as I could so that I could divide them into two equal parts. In the end, I ended up with thirty small worms, which I strengthene
d with additional mods. Further division was pointless: their level was smaller now, and the weaker ones could die from basically anything. Not to mention that I couldn’t control so many mobs.

  At the head of this worm army, was the second Brain-eater, sitting in the “original” Worm. I sent the pets to level up in the swamp while I returned to the Mountain.

  Tomorrow, we’d be on our way to get the fifth fragment.

  Chapter 14

  THE FOREST FOLK

  A morning after four hours of sleep never was a good one. I woke up before dawn and went to join the squad at the campfire, mumbling curses under my breath. The guys were having breakfast when I arrived.

  “We’d better take Ronin with us. Unlike Willow’s skill, we know that his works.”

  “What are you on about?! And who was it that my Phoenix saved a few days ago, hm?”

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose and sighed. Valkyrie was arguing with Willow about who would get the sixth spot in the expedition. The first five places had already been occupied by Ivan, Spider, Amoeba, Valkyrie, and myself, while the sixth still remained vacant.

  Having been harboring a dislike toward Willow from the very beginning, Valkyrie wasn’t about to let her join the team, insisting that Ronin should join although he, oblivious that this was going on, was sleeping the day away in his house. Willow seemed to want Valkyrie out of the team as the latter, in her opinion, thought too highly of herself, having suddenly decided that she was the one in charge of team management.

  “Young lady, you need to learn how to respect your elders.”

  “Respect is earned, not given. Besides, this isn’t your call. Loki’s the one who decides.”

  Spider and Amoeba were laughing, not even trying to hide their amazement. Luckily for them, the two ladies didn’t seem to pay attention to them. Ivan, who seemed to have grown more serious and mature in the past week, was chewing a piece of roasted mammoth meat, his thoughts far away.

  I froze, looking at Spider. He just spread his arms and shrugged as if saying that I was on my own.