Dodge Tank: A LitRPG Fantasy Sci-fi (Crystal Shards Online Book 1), page 1
Contents
Title
Chapter 1: My Sucky Life
Chapter 2: Logging In
Chapter 3: Gilly
Chapter 4: The Journey Down
Chapter 5: Noobs
Chapter 6: Dodge Tank
Chapter 7: Highs and Lows
Chapter 8: Gimp
Chapter 9: Reality Bites
Chapter 10: Corpse Run
Chapter 11: Decisions
Chapter 12: Rebirth
Chapter 13: Level 1 Warrior
Chapter 14: Dungeon Date
Chapter 15: First Boss
Chapter 16: Uneasy
Chapter 17: Thief
Chapter 18: Ninja
Chapter 19: Shadow Copy
Chapter 20: Mike
Chapter 21: Secrets
Chapter 22: Aftermath
Chapter 23: Insomnia
Chapter 24: Solo
Chapter 25: Sheeba
Chapter 26: Taste of Victory
Chapter 27: Shopping at Bloomingdales
Chapter 28: Dinner
Chapter 29: Grinding Gears
Chapter 30: The Burning Sands
Chapter 31: Underwater Raid
Chapter 32: Beast King
Chapter 33: Plains of Duality
Chapter 34: Arena Race
Chapter 35: World Boss
Chapter 36: Citadel
Chapter 37: Revelations
Author’s Note
Dodge Tank
A LitRPG Novel
Crystal Shards Online Book 1
By
Rick Scott
Cover Art and Design by Alberto Besi
Copyright © 2017 by Rick Scott
All Rights Reserved.
VER 2.00
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
* * *
Acknowledgments
My thanks goes out to my wife and kids for giving me countless hours of free time at the computer to punch this novel out. This one is for you guys!
Special thanks to all my beta readers:
Elias Dantas
Ezben Gerardo
Zach Goza
Norman Meredith
Tarcha Saleeba
And to all my alpha readers and supporters on RRL who watched me bring this book together from scratch and helped me do it!
You guys did wonders for the book!
For more great GameLit/LitRPG reads, check out
https://www.facebook.com/groups/GameLitSociety/
Other Books in series
Crystal Shards Online
Book 1- Dodge Tank
Book 2 - Shard Warrior
Book 3 - Shard Wraith
Book 4 - Gun Blade
Crystal Shards Online Omnibus - Books 1 - 3
Sundered Soul Series
Sundered Soul - Book 1
Will you leave me a review? Your feedback and thoughts really make a difference, especially for people who want to know what the book is about. If you can, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com.
My eternal thanks in advance if you do so!
-Rick Scott
Chapter 1: My Sucky Life
The best part of my sucky life is that I get to play Crystal Shards Online for a living.
Not ‘a living’ as in, I make so much money playing that I don’t have to work in the real world. More like, playing Crystal Shards is the only work I can do.
But I make the best of it.
It’s not a great living, for sure, but I earn enough to help pay the rent, buy food, and hopefully one day save up enough money to pay for my mom’s operation. That’s one reason my life sucks right now. My mom has been ill for a while—radiation sickness from fallout debris, the doctors say. That’s the other reason my life sucks. Most of the world was made uninhabitable by a nuclear war a couple centuries ago. They say one day we might be able to live on the surface again, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.
Now we live below ground, in cities carved out by giant automated boring machines called Builders. “City” is a bit of a generous term for it, though. It’s more like thousands of shipping containers linked together by tunnels. My home is one such shipping container, that I share with my mom and older brother Mike.
Mike is kind of a dick, by the way. But he’s my brother, so what can I do?
At least we have separate rooms now. When I turned seventeen last month, my mom let me splurge on a couple sheets of drywall and a door frame. We couldn’t afford the actual door, so I hung a shower curtain in the frame for privacy. Of course, Mike the jerk still barges in anytime he feels like it, but it gives me some small peace of mind when I jack into the network to play Crystal Shards. I can’t count the number of times Mike has yanked me offline in the middle of a session. It’s his idea of a prank, I think.
Idiot.
He spends more time out of the house now. I think he has a girlfriend or something, but I don’t really care. I’m just happy that it leaves me with more peace and quiet.
And more time to mine in Crystal Shards.
Just the thought of mining gets me out of my bed, which is a mattress on the floor that I’ve been sleeping on since I was six. I reach for Mutt and Jeff next. The two crutches are lying next to me as always. My “assistants,” Mom always calls them. I tell the lights to switch on and a bright LED glow illuminates the cement gray walls of my tiny room. My VR rig, my key to the world of the living, is in the corner, and I give a short prayer of thanks that Mike hasn’t messed with it while I was asleep.
I prop myself up against the wall with the help of Mutt, and then head for the living room to check on my mom. She’s on the couch, as usual, a blanket covering her tiny frame, frailer even than my own.
“What d’you want for breakfast, Ma?” I say as I hobble by, headed toward the food processor in the corner.
“Pancakes with sausage, two eggs,” she says without missing a beat. “And black coffee. Make it strong this time.”
“You got it.” I chuckle and key her breakfast order into the device. It’s a nano-processor that’s designed to make almost anything. It uses the same technology the Builders used to make the city from the earth they chew with their cavern-sized maws. The catch is that it takes a lot of credits—and a much better grade nano-machine—to make anything that tastes even remotely close to real food. I access the joint family account and check our balance.
Your balance is ….. 1,217 Cr
My stomach does a little flutter. The rent is due next week: 3,500 credits. It’s a lot to make up for, especially since I can never count on Mike to bring much home from whatever it is he does out on the streets. Half the time, I think he’s holding back, spending the credits on himself. The most he’s ever contributed is 1,000. That barely covers Mom’s medicine. I sigh, hoping Mom doesn’t hear. She hates it when I worry. It only stresses her out more.
I spend 30 of our too few credits on breakfast. The processor buzzes a minute later and I remove two recyclable bowls of steaming oatmeal. At least, that’s what it tells me it is. I’ve never tasted the real thing, so I wouldn’t really know. I take our bowls back to the living room and sit on the couch with Mom to have breakfast with her. The “oatmeal” tastes as bland and mushy as it always does.
“Have you seen Michael?” she asks. “I don’t think he came home last night.”
I look at my Mom and fail to hide the eye roll. I know because she gives me a look of despair that makes her sunken face look even sadder. “He is your brother, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. My older brother.”
I shove down a few more spoonfuls of oatmeal, avoiding her eyes.
“He’s fine, Mom,” I say eventually. “I saw him leave for work early this morning.”
I can’t tell if she’s bought the lie. Her faded blue eyes finally leave mine, though, so she’s bought it for now, or maybe she’s just faking, too. “So, where you off to today, Ryan?”
I perk up at the change in topic. “The Silvertooth Mines. I’ve been watching the market. Silver ore should be in high demand for the next couple days. There’s a big werewolf expansion pack coming out for Witch World this weekend. The PvPers are going to be looking for a lot of silver.”
She laughs.
That’s the coolest part about Crystal Shards Online. The developers made it a completely connected virtual world, where the same character can enter any number of Shards. Each Shard has its own world and setting, but everything within them is interchangeable—even the currency and items. Crystal Shards has an economy where items and materials can be exchanged for the same credits that can buy you stuff in the real world. Plus everyone connects to Crystal Shards for a break from the drudgery of reality. People go on vacations, explore, even have relationships. And thanks to the VR rig that connects directly to the nervous system, it all feels 100% real.
Except for pain, unless you wanted it—and then there are mods for that, too.
In fact, if they can afford to, most people live more online than in
My ambitions however are much simpler than that.
Enough to pay the rent would be a start. 500k to pay for my mom’s operation would be a dream.
“Or you could finally level up something besides Miner and take out a world boss.” My mom grins at me as she says it. “A 20 million credit drop would be nice.”
“Ha ha . . .” I say as I dump our empty breakfast bowls into the recycler. “Maybe once they make combat classes that don’t rely on your actual agility for controls.”
But Mom is right. The pinnacle of the game worlds are the world bosses. Rarely was one ever defeated, and it normally took a team of high-level players to achieve. I’d only ever heard of one guild able to defeat the one in my particular Shard: the Silver Rangers. And that was like ten years ago. There are thousands of guilds like them now, all throughout the Crystal Shards, all vying for the same achievement.
To defeat a world boss.
The prize for defeating a world boss would not only pay for my mom’s operation, it would be enough to fix my legs, as well. We’d even have enough to move to the lower levels of the city, away from the radiation. Where real water exists in deep underground lakes and the processors are able to make real-tasting food.
Unfortunately for me, Mutt and Jeff are also the reasons why I could never play a combat class, and could never go on a raid. The developers made the combat hyper realistic for full immersion, separate from the regular game stuff, but all that came with the entry fee of a normal nervous system. For me, swinging a pickaxe in a mine would be the extent of my combat ability.
“You could always play a tank?” Mom jokes. “Don’t they just stand there and get hit?”
I chuckle. “I think there’s a bit more to it than that, Mom.”
I hobble over to help her with her own rig. “And where are you off to today?”
“Shopping at Bloomingdale’s.”
I force myself to smile at her rote response. It’s the same answer she’s given my brother and me since we were old enough to know she was “going” someplace else when she put on her rig. That was just around the same time she started getting sick from her job as an air scrubber technician and couldn’t go to work anymore. Now, I’m old enough to understand what she’s really doing in Crystal Shards to earn her share of our monthly income. It’s what a lot of women probably did. Enter a world where her avatar could be the object of any fantasy and guys would pay credits by the minute for her interaction.
The thought makes me sick to my stomach and I can’t wait to escape to another world.
A world far away from this one. A world where I might just hit a rare ore and free my mom from all her pain and suffering.
A world called Crystal Shards Online.
Chapter 2: Logging In
I put Mutt and Jeff to the side as I pull on my VR rig. The buzz of electricity flows through my body as the neural jack connects to the implant at the base of my neck. It’s a standard implant for all citizens. Even gimps like me get one at birth, thankfully.
As the system boots up, my vision and senses fade for a moment.
Then, all at once, the main menu screen bursts to life. An all too familiar musical theme sends sparks of excitement and anticipation racing through my body. I’m all at once at work and at play, ready for my fourteen-hour shift in the virtual mines of Nasgar, one of the fantasy-based Shards. I check my access credits and top up my account to cover the fourteen-hour play time, paying 5 credits per hour. The daily and monthly passes work out cheaper, but mining is not a guaranteed profit maker, and going in the hole is a lot easier to swallow when you’re risking a week’s worth of food rations rather than a couple months’ worth of rent.
I check my avatar next.
He’s modeled to look like me, except cooler looking, of course: short black hair, a chiseled jaw, and a buff bod instead of my scrawny one, with legs thick like tree trunks, instead of thin like tree branches. I pull up my character stats.
Name: Reece
Sex: M
Race: Human
Class: Miner
Level: 6
Guild: Nasgar Labor Union
Strength: 6
Determines melee damage and requirements for heavy armor.
Dexterity: 3
Determines melee accuracy, critical hit chance, and activation speed of ranged weapons.
Agility: -10
Determines dodge ability, attack speed, and requirements for light armor.
Intelligence: 6
Determines spell cast speed, technique points, and potency for Elemental Magic.
Mind: 8
Determines magical defense, technique points, and potency for Celestial Magic.
Vitality: 8
Determines stamina, HP, and regeneration speed.
HP: 79/79
Stamina: 152/152
TP: 55/55
Each stat can go as high as 99, max. Each time you level up, you’re awarded one or two attribute points to place wherever you want. I put most of mine into Vitality, because mining takes a crap load of stamina. I glare at my -10 Agility. Thanks a lot, glitchy nervous system. With an Agility score like that, I’d pretty much get hit by almost anything, and it would take me a year to hit them back. Worse still, I can’t even raise it. No matter how many points I put in there, it stays at -10. It also means I lack the stats to wear anything not considered regular clothing. Unless it’s heavy armor, I guess, but I don’t have the money or Strength stats for that, either. Besides, it doesn’t look as cool as the agility-based stuff to me.
Luckily, Miner’s gear doesn’t count as armor. It’s just regular clothes with special skill bonuses. As a Miner, I really only have two skills: Perception and Mining. I list them to check their current levels.
Perception: 59 +13
Mining: 74 +22
The first number is my base skill level; the plusses are my bonuses for gear, which is what I check next.
You are equipped with:
Initiate Miner’s Overalls: +5 Perception +12 Mining +2 Vitality
A pair of coveralls designed for the strenuous rigors of mining.
Initiate Miner’s Helm: +8 Perception
The lamp on this helm makes seeing into the darkness much easier.
Rusted Iron Ring: +1 Strength
A simple iron ring that has seen better days.
And of course, my most important item: my pickaxe.
Iron Mining Pick: +2 Strength +10 Mining
A sturdy tool perfect for chipping away at hardened rock.
It’s pretty decent gear for a Level 6 Miner. I try to keep up to date as much as I can, but with the amount I have to pay for my game time, as well as the help I give my family, I don’t normally have much to spare for gear. The mining pick alone set me back 500 credits on the auction house. But it was a steal for that price. Most times, the crafters sell them for twice that. I probably lucked out with some high-level player who got it as a drop and just wanted to get rid of it quickly to free up inventory space.
The ring is my other prized possession. I dug that up as a rare find.
That’s my other big reason for mining. For every node mined, there’s an extremely small chance of unearthing buried treasure. On the net streams, there are vids of Miners finding rare armor and weapons that could sell for hundreds of thousands of credits. It adds an extra bit of excitement for me. That rare chance of striking it rich and making my family’s dreams come true overnight.
Just the thought of it has my juices pumping and raring to go.
I confirm my selection for class, and then access the fantasy Shard of Nasgar.
My senses go dark for a second time, and then I emerge into a new world . . .
It’s always kind of awesome logging in. But for me, it’s literally like being born again. As my avatar materializes on the Steppe of Andor, my senses come back to me in full 3D overload. I feel strength in my legs, and I can stand on my own. That alone is a miracle worth logging in for. The in-game time is noon, and a gorgeous blue sky is overhead, dotted with puffy white clouds. A cool breeze whistles over the sparse steppe land of low grass, and white rocks protrude from the ground like half-buried bones.
