Luke did not consider himself to be a particularly observant person. Even here on Aros, after all the fighting for his life and the system giving him the ability to literally count the ants on a tree a thousand feet away, he’d only recently started trying to sort through what his senses were te...
2023-06-26 12:47:12 +0000 UTC View PostThis is a completed novel available exclusively to library tier patrons that was originally written as the first book in a trilogy. Those other two books... are not written yet.
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Charlotte has wielded the power of necromancy to destroy countless zombies and ghouls, send raging sp...
2023-06-26 12:31:45 +0000 UTC View Post“Back on Earth, we had this thing called a telescope that let us see stuff from far away. They came up with all sorts of stuff from it, microscopes used for medicine and science, binoculars used for hunting and by the military, even big-ass telescopes that took up whole rooms and were pointed a...
2023-06-23 13:22:40 +0000 UTC View PostIt took Zea two days to admit that she just couldn’t do the enchantments that blocked scent with her current level of skills. “Maybe we should call off the whole thing,” she told Luke.
Considering that she hadn’t been all that keen on Project: Ant Smiter to begin with, Luke wasn’t...
2023-06-22 13:57:41 +0000 UTC View PostLuke prodded the dead boar… thing… with his foot. It had a lot of bone spurs across its skull and shoulders, and instead of hooves on its front two legs, it had appendages that looked an awful lot like monkey feet. It was also a lot bigger than a regular wild pig, at least any of the ones he...
2023-06-21 13:05:12 +0000 UTC View PostThe ship was called Averast, which maybe meant something, but neither of Luke’s language skills translated it for him. It was one of the big ones he’d spotted earlier, which was somewhat comforting. He wasn’t sure exactly why he wanted the ship to be bigger, other than that bigger ...
2023-06-20 12:45:34 +0000 UTC View PostLuke was just settling his packs back into place with their new additions when he heard Zea moving toward the tailor’s shop. Specifically, he heard the clinking sound of coins smacking together with every step she took. It certainly sounded like there were a lot of them, and he almost thought h...
2023-06-19 14:51:08 +0000 UTC View PostSicanti was smaller than Luke expected it to be. He supposed it counted as a city by Aros standards, but it didn’t seem like it could hold that many people to him. Then again, they were approaching it from downhill and couldn’t even see the harbor, or any of the ocean itself for that matter. ...
2023-06-16 13:40:35 +0000 UTC View PostZea’s eyes went wide. “No. Noooooo. Bad idea. No!”
“What? Why? What’s the big deal with ants?”
“You have to have a special build to be an ant hunter,” Zea told him. “Because of the pheromones. They’re not the only bug monster that has them, but they’re the worst ...
2023-06-15 12:17:23 +0000 UTC View PostLuke experienced a moment of sheer, visceral panic when he read that notification and realized that his lungs wouldn’t open up to pull in air. He could try to take a breath, but there was nowhere for it to go. Then he remembered that he could hold his breath for an hour if he needed to, probabl...
2023-06-14 13:21:22 +0000 UTC View Post“This is bullshit,” Zea muttered under her breath. Even from across the room, Luke could clearly hear her, and he wasn’t sure how far away he’d have to be before he couldn’t. She wasn’t trying to be noisy, but his hearing was so sensitive now, and without his ability to sense XP activ...
2023-06-13 15:03:20 +0000 UTC View PostLuke stared down at the headless corpse in shock. “What even the fuck?”
A moment later, he got the ding of the kill notification, which was a whole new level of fucked-up. Had that merc been alive for a few seconds after his explosive decapitation? Just fucking how?
[You h...
2023-06-12 14:14:54 +0000 UTC View PostHello,
I still have 14 people on tiers that are no longer updating. Please, please, please, please, please, please go cancel your subscriptions (or change to GM only updates if you're on a library tier right now and would like to continue reading ahead on that story) . I ca...
2023-06-09 15:35:58 +0000 UTC View PostBertram Singer had joined the Blacktongue Mercenary Company when he was sixteen. He had spent the better part of his life fighting men and monsters, sacrificed his future for the privilege, and grown to the point where it was rare for him to meet anything or anyone who could challenge him. This b...
2023-06-09 12:27:50 +0000 UTC View PostIt wasn’t that Luke expected to get away, though that would have been the best possible outcome. Enough of the Blacktongue mercenaries had run off that he’d accepted he wasn’t going to kill all of them, and that it was a distinct possibility that they’d continue to be a problem in the nea...
2023-06-08 13:04:10 +0000 UTC View Post“Gods above, what are those idiots doing up there?” the boss muttered to himself as he glanced up at the ceiling.
Zea would have laughed if she hadn’t still been gagged. Luke was generally pretty easy going, but she’d seen him when he got riled up about something. From the sounds of...
2023-06-07 14:00:10 +0000 UTC View PostLuke was planning on killing a lot of people in the next few minutes. He wasn’t sure what the exact number would be, and he supposed that really depended more on them than it did on him. But he was sick to death of people in this world fucking with him, and abducting Zea crossed the line. She...
2023-06-06 13:30:49 +0000 UTC View PostLuke had forgotten how uncomfortable a rank 1 language skill was. The way it twisted his lips and tongue around to form sounds he was pretty sure he’d never made in his entire life was downright creepy, like feeling someone else’s fingers in his mouth forcing it into the shapes needed to say ...
2023-06-05 14:40:39 +0000 UTC View PostWhile Luke wove through the trees to reach the next archer, a woman at level 24 with high agility and perception, but not much else going for her as far as [Analyze] was concerned, he tried to remember what it was that System had said the highest level mercenary was. He wanted to...
2023-06-02 11:39:32 +0000 UTC View PostThey were both up early the next morning, having only gotten a few hours of sleep. Even that was more than Luke needed, but Zea continued to insist that she was going to sleep every night, regardless of how much stamina she’d gained. He didn’t much see a reason for it, but since they’d paid...
2023-06-01 13:16:39 +0000 UTC View PostLuke supposed it wasn’t unusual for a hotel to have a bar somewhere in the building. People liked to drink, hotels liked making money, so it made sense to him that they’d try to tap their current customers for some extra income. It hadn’t really been all that relevant to him, what with the ...
2023-05-31 13:42:31 +0000 UTC View PostThey left a lot of miles of dirt road behind them that afternoon. It wasn’t that it was hard to keep a conversation going while they ran, but it was easy to just fall into the rhythm of the movement and not think too hard on anything. At least it was for Luke. He wasn’t sure that Zea’s brai...
2023-05-30 14:14:17 +0000 UTC View PostThe road ran north and south, and the farther north they followed it, the more the trees thinned out. Within an hour, the landscape had given way to wide, flat plains dotted with occasional farmhouses. Luke and Zea approached the first one they found, a sprawling, multi-family building sat right ...
2023-05-29 15:25:28 +0000 UTC View PostThe breeze didn’t bother Luke so much because it was cold; it was just that he was aware of the breeze in the first place. Despite his best efforts to turn the leftover scraps of his clothing into some sort of loincloth, the bulk of his repair work went to the harness for his mace and what was ...
2023-05-26 14:31:49 +0000 UTC View PostNow that the fight was over and the adrenaline was wearing off, Luke started to feel all his injuries. He’d had a few dozen holes of various sizes poked, ripped, or torn in his body over the course of the fight, and what wasn’t actively dripping blood was swollen, inflamed, or bruised.
...
2023-05-25 13:55:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe lesser guardian’s snapped off arm regrew before Luke’s eyes, a process that took a second at most. High stamina wouldn’t account for that, so he was guessing it was some weird skill the monster had. He just hadn’t seen it before because the squirrel folk were shielding it from harm. 2023-05-24 13:33:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The lesser guardian of nature crashed through the squirrels, unheeding of the damage it did to them in its rush to reach Luke. The squirrels themselves dodged out of its way, an action which reduced the death toll from dozens to a mere four or five in the second it took for the two to collide. 2023-05-23 12:25:00 +0000 UTC View Post
At first, he had a hard time picking the thing out of the background, but eventually it stepped away from the trees. It was shaped like a man, but eight feet tall. Long, spindly arms made great, ponderous swings with each step it took. If Luke had to describe it, he would have said it was a skele...
2023-05-22 14:46:51 +0000 UTC View PostThe tree wasn’t moving very fast, perhaps only a foot or two every second. Occasionally, a huge root would break itself free, slam down into the earth, and drag the whole thing forward in a ten-foot jump. The whole process was so ludicrously slow that there was no way it could ever catch up to ...
2023-05-19 14:31:33 +0000 UTC View PostIn hindsight, altering their direction to run closer to the mountains probably wouldn’t have actually helped that much. The squirrel folk seemed to keep an absolutely enormous amount of territory and almost certainly would have found them anyway. They would have delayed the initial contact, but...
2023-05-17 15:36:01 +0000 UTC View Post