Daemonorg Colossus: A Dark LitRPG / LitFPS SciFi-Shooter (Overtaken Online Book 4), page 1
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Daemonorg Colossus: A Dark LitRPG / LitFPS SciFi-Shooter (Overtaken Online Book 4)
Copyright © 2021
Published by Unum
Cover illustration by lgnacio Bazan Lazcano
From simple words to published work by Ormstad Multimedia
Ebook ISBN: 978-82-93724-23-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-82-93724-24-7
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written consent from the author - Ben Ormstad - except in the instance of quotes for reviews.
No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded, or distributed via the internet without the permission of the author and is a violation of the International copyright law, which subjects the violator to severe fines and imprisonment.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents, and places are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real except where noted, and authorised. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events are entirely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
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Daemonorg Colossus
OVERTAKEN ONLINE 4
Ben Ormstad
1
After the current ruler of the daemonorgs – Beliadron – showed his ugly face by teleporting right into our meeting, and froze all of us stiff so we couldn’t move, he proceeded to spew hate and anger over our recent destruction of vital daemonorg troops and resources.
Once done belittling and cursing us, he promised our immediate demise, before vanishing into a portal of flames just as quickly as he’d appeared. Not five minutes later, the entire world began shaking, as if earthquakes thundered repeatedly.
A few seconds later, we fled for our lives as entire sections of our base were crushed to smithereens by something so huge that none of us knew what it could be – well, except Darius, who’d called it The Big One and told us to run just as our part of the base crumbled around us.
When we eventually made it out alive by the skin of our teeth, his words became clear when I laid eyes upon a beast so unbelievably immense it took my breath away.
This colossal demon spanned the entirety of my vision, making it impossible to see all of it without scanning from the horizon and up to the heavens above. And not only did it trample everything in sight, but it also spawned and flung meteor-sized fireballs everywhere with its four enormous, clawed hands.
An actual walking nightmare.
And it all happened so fast. By the time Frida, Hiko, Tasha and I huddled together under a pile of broken vehicles, the Daemonorg Colossus had already completed its terrorizing run and moved on.
Now, as the last rumblings of its thousands of tons-heavy footsteps vanished, and I barely glimpsed the hazy outline of the gargantuan beast in the far distance through all the smoke, I carefully loosened Frida’s tight grip around my waist. Held her shaking hands in mine and swam in those crystal blue eyes for a few seconds, while attempting to block out the wailing screams of wounded soldiers all around us.
Shaken, Frida stared from me to the crushed ruins of what had been the Godmadrigan Army’s Main Operating Base just a few minutes ago. Roaring fires caused by the Colossus’ immense fireballs devoured whatever remained of the army’s vehicles and equipment, flooding the area with black smoke covering everything in a dense, sandstorm-like fog. The smell of roasted flesh and scorched metal stung in my nostrils.
“How… how could this happen?” Frida whispered, lips barely moving. “How is it even allowed?”
Swallowing dry spit, I shook my head as icy shivers rippled down my spine. “Most of all,” I said, “I wonder where it came from.”
“Hell, Mr. Walsh,” Hiko answered hoarsely behind me. “Straight from Hell.”
I nodded. “Yeah…”
“Then Beliadron is Satan himself,” Frida spat, her fingers tightening around mine.
Hiko coughed as he crawled past us and got out from underneath the overturned truck we hid under, before helping Tasha out next. She froze and cupped her mouth with both hands while observing the total destruction. Eyes wide and wet with tears. “I can’t believe everything is destroyed.”
Feeling numb, I looked from her to Frida, and finally squinted in the Colossus’ direction. Now too far gone to be seen anymore, I knew the monstrous demon would soon find someone else to obliterate.
The clock was ticking.
I pushed myself up from the rugged ground, cleared my voice and said: “No time to waste.”
Hiko placed a hand on my shoulder. “How do you suggest we proceed, Mr. Walsh?”
“First of all, we gotta find Darius somewhere in this mess,” I said, gesturing at the smoke-whirling, burning ruins before us. “Then it’s back to the drawing board to find out how the fuck we can overcome a threat of this magnitude.”
He gripped my shoulder once, let go and said: “Sounds like a decent plan.”
I shrugged. “Who knows… but as far as I’m concerned, this is our responsibility, so we need to figure out a way to solve it.”
“With all due respect, Dex,” Tasha interjected, “I call bullshit on that. We are in no way, shape or form responsible for the daemonorgs’ actions.”
“Well,” I said, “you heard what that shit-face Beliadron said: The Colossus is a repercussion for us destroying their Energy Extraction Pods, among others.”
“Of course he said that, but do you really think he wouldn’t have unleashed it anyway?”
A twitch jerked my eye muscles. “Probably.”
“No, Dex,” she said, “that’s one hundred percent sure.”
“Yeah, well, it still doesn’t change the fact I feel responsible. If we’d planned everything better, we might’ve had time to prepare better.”
Frida smiled emphatically at me. “No-one could have known the daemonorgs possessed beasts like that thing,” she said and crouched by a fallen soldier who yammered in the dirt, both his legs shattered. Clasping her hands together, a white light birthed as she pulled them apart again, and she showered the soldier’s legs with it.
Squinting through the curling smoke, I said: “Darius knew about it. Somehow…”
She looked up at me as the wounded man began thanking her profusely when his legs healed. “Darius knew?”
“Somehow… Right as we fled the conference room, he mouthed the words ‘This is the Big One. Run.’”
The now healed soldier bounced back on his brand new legs, jumped up and down in joy and embraced Frida. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! How can I repay you?”
She just smiled at him. “No payment necessary; my pleasure. Just go and be of help to anyone else here.”
He bowed and ran off to some other soldiers trapped under a burning part of what had once been the base’s main entrance.
She looked back at me again. “So that might actually mean they were half expecting the Colossus to appear any day now, and maybe they have plans in place we don’t know about.”
“Hopefully,” I muttered, “but if they indeed had plans, then my guess is they’re out the window now that the entire base is crushed to dust.”
She fell silent as we continued searching the ruins for Darius, while lending a hand to anyone who wasn’t hurt beyond repair.
I half expected Darius hadn’t found time to escape the destruction. He’d probably been splattered and had now either respawned God knew where, or still floated in the nothingness between real and virtual reality. Just in case, though, I opened my interface and sent off a message to him:
Darius
Did you make it out alive? We’re searching for you, so give me a shout when you get this.
- Dex
I sent the message off to him and joined my companions in the main base area.
As we climbed over piles of rubble and junk that had once been one of the watchtowers connected to the base’s fortifications, I got an instant flash of dread that came from three angles at once.
I stopped to listen while peering through the den
“Guys, there’s something-” I began, but the rest of my sentence drowned in waterfall-like whooshing sounds as portals of fire manifested around us – perfectly aligned with the locations my sense pointed out.
Each of the three portals spewed flames in all directions and grew large as trucks, hovering five meters above ground and creating vacuums that sucked in junk from the surrounding ruins.
“Grab something heavy!” Tasha yelled, threw herself on the ground and clung to sandbags that had earlier been a part of the walls surrounding the base, but now just lay spread everywhere.
Before I could say or think anything else, Frida yelped and actually lifted off the ground. On pure instinct, I used my FL-Armor’s Boost Jump ability to launch myself in the air after her. Managed to wrap an arm around her slim waist while passing. Problem was, to catch her I had to jump toward the vacuum-sucking portal-thing, thereby sending us both with express-speed toward it.
While she shrieked into my ear, clinging to me, I activated the Battle-Marine ability Smash-Burst and rocketed us to the left – aiming at a ridge created by a torn wall section sticking out from a featureless pile of bricks.
It worked. Ish.
Unable to brace for impact, I tripped on the edge, Frida was flung out of my arms and we both tumbled head-over-heels over junk, but at least escaped the portal’s area of impact, while scrap and debris got sucked into it like a black hole.
Coming to a stop in a crevice between the scrap, I gripped Frida’s arm and curled my other arm around a broken door, anchoring us to the ground. Wounded soldiers, unable to hold on to anything, screamed around us as they were lifted and sucked into the flaming rifts in the air.
“Oh my god, Dex,” Frida said, clutching me like a life raft. She began saying something else, but stopped when it seemed the vacuum reached maximum power, and then, for about three seconds, the world turned dead quiet.
Even all the things that had been on their way toward the portals stopped mid-air and just hung there, frozen.
Next, pressure increased in my ears. A falling sensation spiked in my stomach. I noticed Frida’s eyes widened, her pupils shrunk, and as she gasped, the three portals exploded around us. Furious flames burst out from them, shooting out in every direction.
I covered Frida in my arms, ducked my head down between us, and held on for dear life as the entire world became a scorching inferno. Somewhere in the background, I even picked up Hiko and Tasha’s shouts amidst a choir of anguished wailings from wounded survivors. Noticing this took only a nano-second, though, before I, too, screamed from pain when everything I laid eyes on was covered in fire.
-34 Armor
-29 HP
The world blackened, and the next moment, the exploding inferno ended as quickly as it started – leaving the surrounding ruins crisply charred, while every flammable material still burned.
Frida and I let go of each other, rolled around on the debris-cluttered ground to suffocate flames gripping us like demonic fingers.
-13 Armor
-8 HP
I got ‘em snuffed out before they could do too much damage. Silently thanked my slowly growing Personal Specialty – Fire-Resistance – for taking the edge off the worst of it. Getting to my feet, I helped Frida up – only to have her jump at me and push us both out of the way of a stream of bullets cutting through the billowing smoke.
Daemonorgs.
Suddenly everywhere. As if the portals had birthed them all into existence in a single volcanic outburst. Tongues of fire licked their boots where they stood on top of junk piles, down in the ditches or covering behind torn brick walls.
“Fuck youuu!” Tasha’s frustrated voice screamed somewhere in the vicinity, coupled with rapid fire from her assault rifle. “Fuck you all!”
Frida rolled over next to me and got up. “There’s just no end to it!”
Getting sick and tired of demonic interference, I popped to my feet, equipped the Celestial Energy-Flinger, and grunted: “Then we will end it.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said, pulling her special katanas out of the scabbards hanging along each of her thighs. Glowing with pink energy, I knew they were magically enhanced with something powerful that she still to this day hadn’t shared what was. Smiling deviously, she blew me a kiss and bolted for a daemonorg bastard shooting at us from behind cover.
I flipped my focus to another asshole standing on higher ground, barely visible in the whirling, dark grey smoke. I avoided another salvo, which tore into a piece of remaining glass in a cracked door beside me.
Leveling the Energy-Flinger, I got him in my sight – at which point his character information printed across my field of vision in translucent, blue letters:
Daemonorg Headhunter
Level 9
HP: 250
Armor: 100
Main Skill: Brain-Drain
State: – –
The main skill made me perk up. Brain-Drain? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Until now I’d only viewed these new ’norgs as a bit tougher grunts than we’d already defeated in droves, but paying more attention, I realized these were not like regular grunts. In fact, the ugly bastard I was staring down right this moment walked on two legs and held his weapon with two arms, like the others, but out from each of his shoulders protruded two thin insect-like arms with red-glowing spikes at the end – and they were two meters long with multiple joints that probably enabled them to curl and grab things like fingers.
“Well, you ain’t snatchin’ me,” I whispered, squeezed the trigger and sent a wave of green energy shards at him. They lit up the surrounding environment and impacted his weapon in a burst of electric sparks. I followed up with more, perforating his stomach, chest and beastly face with energy bursts that had the bonus of causing burning – as if there wasn’t enough shit burning around here already! Never mind; they deserved to choke on their own medicine.
While this guy stumbled backwards with arms flailing, his gurgling scream drew two other Headhunters into our little face-off. Ignoring me, they went straight up to their badly damaged comrade, gripped his arms and speared him with their long insectoid extra-arms.
In a moment of curiosity, I observed while they poked the glowing red tips into multiple places of his body. At first, I thought they were harvesting his vitality, but nope; his wounds sealed up, and he stopped bleeding. Regaining composure, the fucker suddenly began growing in size.
“What the hell?” I blasted another stream of energy shards at them. Ran closer while firing until the energy went from green to blue and finally red, before the rifle burped smoke, empty.
This interrupted their process somewhat, but not enough, because even while losing health and being under attack, they still continued revitalizing the first guy. In a matter of seconds, he’d grown to almost double his original size.
I need more power, I thought, packed away the Energy-Flinger and equipped the Daemonorg Kick-Packer instead. A rather compact weapon with the form factor of an uzi, but fired large canisters chock-full of gunpowder instead of normal bullets – naturally causing destruction.
I whipped up the solid weapon, got the daemons in my sight and smashed the trigger twice. The heavy kickback smacked the weapon into my chest as it sent two canisters their way.
Parts of their mushy bodies ripped open and splattered from the exploding ammunition. The two that energized the first one got flung off to each side, screaming. The first one, however, remained standing, and his HP had barely sunk at all.
At least this got their attention!
The upgraded one roared and threw away his rifle as if it was only a toy gun. Then, using his legs like a spring, he kicked off from the ground and jumped into the air, leaving a trail of flames where he’d stood.
“Shit,” I spat as he came flying straight at me. I fired the Kick-Packer again, but missed him by a centimeter. By side-stepping swiftly, I avoided getting crushed by 300 kilos worth of aggressive demon. He swished past me and screeched to a stop – his burning feet igniting flammable junk around us.
“Brraawh!” he growled, rotated on his heels and swung a fist with spiked knuckles at my head.
