He Who Fights with Monsters 7: A LitRPG Adventure, page 1
HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS SEVEN
©2022 SHIRTALOON
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CONTENTS
ALSO IN SERIES
1. Of Course He Doesn’t Have Pants
2. Connotations
3. What a Monster Surge Feels Like
4. Strategic Doctrine
5. I’ve Seen Your Best
6. Responsible Dad
7. Surge Protocols
8. Disappointed or Relieved
9. More Paperwork
10. Multi-Talented
11. Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned
12. Contribution
13. Small-Town Lifestyle
14. I Don’t Need to Invent Ice Cream
15. Remaining Unremarkable
16. A Damn Fine Way to Start Off a War
17. It Will Not Be Fine
18. A Story of War
19. Any Help They Can Get
20. Little Man Problems
21. Enemies Even I Would Fear
22. True Elites
23. Diligent and Considerate
24. That Doesn’t Make the Pebble Important
25. They Don’t Send Their Best People
26. An Old Friend That He Had No Time For
27. Never Underestimate Adventurers
28. Better Strange Than Scary
29. Going Overland
30. Small
31. Uneasy Allies
32. Supply Chain Problems
33. The Hitting-It-a-Bunch Plan
34. I Liked the Fighting Better
35. That Usually is My Day
36. Unyielding Faith
37. Something He Could Never Get Back
38. Dignified Young Adventurer
39. I Can Do Sleazy
40. An Object Lesson in Foolish Risks
41. Murky Waters
42. Integrity is Forever
43. How Deep a Hole
44. The Part That Knows How to Quit
45. Bad Apples
46. Idiot Plan
47. The Days They Sing Songs About
48. The Source of the Madness
49. A Fair Fight
50. Put the Mask Back On
51. I Don’t Think You’re Angry
52. Staying with Friends
53. Meanwhile, Two Weeks Ago in Vitesse
54. Hegemon’s Will
55. A Story About a Magic Trowel
56. What It Sent Us
57. I Am Not Jason Asano
58. That Powerful and That Old
59. One Battle at a Time
60. No One Telling Me I Can’t
61. A Lot More Steps
62. A Normal Man
63. This One Time
64. Between Mortal and Something Else
65. Stand at the Front
66. The End of the World
Thank you for reading He Who Fights With Monsters, Book Seven.
About the Author
ALSO IN SERIES
HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
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1
OF COURSE HE DOESN’T HAVE PANTS
In outback Australia, there was an empty town left abandoned after the monster waves. No wave had come through, but the town was falling apart anyway, most of the buildings having been empty long before the evacuation. Upriver cotton farming had long ago depleted the town’s primary water source, and what was left had been diverted by a major battle between monsters and essence users that had devastated the land to the north. When the waves came to an end, the town hadn’t been worth reclaiming.
The old football oval had been nothing but patches of dry grass clinging to a field of dirt when Jason Asano and Farrah Hurin claimed it. The handful of buildings and the old grandstand couldn’t blame the recent troubles for their state; they had been little more than dried-out shanties long before magic came into the open. Only the bar had seen regular maintenance, even having a coat of paint younger than Jason, if only barely.
Something incongruous now occupied the dirt oval, standing stones set out in a ritual pattern of concentric circles. At a glance, it looked like someone was attempting to ostentatiously outdo Stonehenge in a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. Jason and Farrah sat in the sun-bleached grandstand, looking out at their work. They’d been sitting there for some time, talking.
“It’s time,” Jason said.
“You know they’re watching us, right?” Farrah asked.
“I do,” Jason said, his voice weary. “Every petty faction in this world. Dogs fighting over scraps. Once we’re gone, they’ll swoop down on this place, looking to plunder any knowledge or power we leave behind.”
“Leave them to their petty squabbles,” Farrah advised.
Jason nodded.
“I’m done,” he said and pushed himself to his feet, the old wood groaning underneath him.
“Did you end up talking to Amy?” Farrah asked as they left the grandstand and walked towards the standing stones. “I know you were in two minds about it.”
“I did,” Jason said. “Not that there was much to say. It was just sad, more than anything. Once upon a time, we knew each other better than we knew ourselves. Now we barely recognise one another.”
“She wasn’t angry?”
“She was tired. Kaito made his own choice to stand up for his world and she knows that. It doesn’t change the fact that her kids will grow up without their father because he followed me.”
They reached the standing stones that Farrah had hauled into place using her prodigious strength. They passed between the stones to the empty circle in the middle. It was one of the few patches of lingering grass, jutting from the hard dirt, yellow and brittle.
“You won’t be back for a long time,” Farrah said. “If you want a last look around Earth, this is it. If we wait another day or two before going, it won’t make a difference.”
Jason didn’t say anything. Instead, he opened a portal to his spirit vault, the extradimensional realm that existed within his soul. He stepped through without looking back.
Jason’s spirit vault was increasingly becoming less of a vault and more of a realm. His power was growing and the outworlder ability that created it had gone through a rare secondary evolution. It had also been shaped by introducing the dimensional door he had taken from the Builder’s control, and the dimensional bridge given freely by the World-Phoenix. Most of all, the realm inside his soul was shaped by the tribulations his soul had endured before recovering all the stronger.
The layout of his spirit realm reflected his spirit domains, the regions on Earth that existed in normal reality but were under his power. It centred on a towering pagoda tower of smoky crystal, each brick infused with sparkling motes of blue, gold and silver light that danced within the solid bricks as if they were liquid. From the tower, a vast estate of cloud buildings sprawled out into landscape that ranged from wild groves to carefully cultivated gardens to a cave system filled with luminescent fungus.
At the edge of his domain was a wall of darkness that seemed to devour the light around it. Even the starry void beyond was bright by comparison. The most prominent change brought about by the World-Phoenix's bridge was that the wall now had an arched gate. Beyond the gate, a rainbow bridge extended into the star-speckled dark. In the distance, a stream of multicolour light passed, coming from the depths’ void and disappearing into the distance.
Jason had vast power in his spirit realm, and with a blur, he and F
“That’s the link between your world and mine?” Farrah asked.
“Yes,” Jason confirmed. “Beyond this wall is the deep astral. What we’re seeing is more metaphor than reality. My spirit realm trying to quantify that which cannot be quantified.”
“So, how does this work?”
“However I like.”
Jason flicked his hand, and with that gesture, his entire spirit realm started moving along the rainbow bridge. It accelerated more and more until Farrah realised that what she thought was a narrow stream of energy in the distance was planetary in scale, simply much further away than she realised. As they drew closer, the stream became a vast rainbow wall in front of them, blocking out the starry void behind it.
The spirit realm passed into the stream, the rainbow energy engulfing them but not crossing beyond the wall or an invisible dome above it. The gate rose back up and Jason turned away.
The people observing the stone formation from several kilometres away in a helicopter watched as the standing stones transmuted from ordinary desert rock into dark crystal, the inside of it speckled with shifting blue, silver and gold light. They reported that Jason Asano had left the Earth behind.
On Farrah’s homeworld, the companions Jason had left behind were gathered in a town recently fortified against increasing instances of monster attack. Jason’s team, plus Rufus, Gary and Jory, were all present. There were also two diamond-rankers, which was essentially unheard of for some unremarkable town in the middle of nowhere. One was Virid, the weaponsmith whom had become Gary’s mentor. He sat behind the group at a feasting table, cowed by the other diamond-ranker.
Dawn was not using an avatar projection the way she had on Earth. She stood in the fullness of her power, which was so vast that only the other diamond-ranker had an inkling of her might. In some parts of the world, such as the one they were in, diamond-rankers were barely more than legends themselves. Virid could sense that a similar gulf existed between himself and Dawn. They were both diamond-rankers, but she had clearly touched on something that lay beyond both his reach and his understanding.
Dawn stood in front of Jason’s assembled friends. They couldn’t even sense the power she possessed but were all watching her fiercely. The twisted remains of the sword Gary once gave Jason sat uneasily in Gary’s hands. A feast had been going on, but the townsfolk knew adventurer business when they saw it. They had already cleared out the area to give the group a wide berth.
“You’re suggesting that Jason is alive?” Sophie asked. “Why should we believe you? If he’s alive, where is he?”
“Jason is on his own world,” Clive said, surprising the others. He didn’t notice, staring at his feet as he absently scratched his head in thought. He looked up, starting slightly as he noticed everyone looking at him. He turned to Dawn.
“You serve the World-Phoenix, don’t you?” he asked her. She smiled.
“He wasn't wrong about you being the smart one,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with Jason's collection of astral magic theory. Your notes are impressively insightful, Mr Standish. Especially given the level of astral magic in this world.”
“What’s a world phoenix?” Gary asked.
“A great astral being,” Clive said. “I only know a little, but my understanding is that it’s largely antagonistic to the Builder. Its domain is dimensional integrity, which directly clashes with the Builder’s habit of plundering worlds.”
“Then where has this great magic whatever been all this time?” Sophie demanded, thumping a fist down on a wooden feasting table. Her silver-rank strength smashed a hole right through it. “Is its other domain taking a nap when it should be getting off its butt and kicking the Builder in the fruit basket?”
“The World-Phoenix is famously indirect,” Clive said. “It works through agents and pawns, which is why information about it is limited. The very fact that one of its agents is here at all is quite worrying. It makes me wonder what the Builder had planned that would warrant intervention.”
“You are right to worry,” Dawn said.
“What does any of this have to do with Jason?” Rufus asked.
“Jason always said he had a way back home,” Clive said.
“One that he didn’t know how to use,” Sophie added. “He showed it to me once. It was an item. Red, with a picture of a bird on it.”
“So, it’s true, then,” Clive said. “World-Phoenix tokens really can bring back the dead.”
“Yes,” Dawn said. “This is why they are handed out sparingly. Jason Asano was reborn in his own world.”
“I thought his world didn’t have magic,” Gary said. “What would someone like you be doing there?”
“Jason’s world held many secrets. On returning, he found himself with responsibilities that someone of his rank should not have had to shoulder. Enemies whose power utterly dwarfed his own.”
“No change there, then,” Jory muttered. “Still picking fights he can’t win.”
“I never said he didn’t win,” Dawn said. “Jason managed to provoke my counterpart within the Builder’s forces into overstepping his bounds. This has forced certain compromises on the Builder's part, allowing for my presence here. There are extreme restrictions on my power to intervene directly on events, but I have already started preparing this world for what comes next.”
“Which is what?” Humphrey asked. The team leader stood at the forefront of his assembled companions.
“It doesn’t matter what else is going on,” Sophie said. “The issue is Jason.”
“Since I left Jason’s world,” Dawn continued, “he apparently provoked the Builder’s agent again. In recompense, I am allowed a single instance of intervention on behalf of this world, using the full measure of my power. I intend to use it well.”
“If you were in Jason’s world,” Sophie said, “why didn’t you bring him back?”
“I told you that he has responsibilities,” Dawn said. “Once they are complete, he will return on his own. Further explanation can be left to Jason himself, once he returns. I will warn you that when he arrives, he’s bringing the monster surge with him.”
Monster surges were a regular event taking place every ten years or so. The current surge was some five years overdue, during which time monster activity had gradually increased. Once the surge proper began, it was expected to be more brutal and last longer than any in history.
“Why?” Rufus asked. “How? Is Jason somehow related to why the surge hasn’t come?”
“I will give the details to Mr Standish soon enough,” Dawn said. “He’s the only one who would truly understand what is happening anyway and can explain it for you in turn. In the immediacy, I have something that you will want to see more.”
“Hold on,” Humphrey said. “You’re doing a lot of talking, but words are easy. I haven’t seen anything to prove you aren’t just playing some game with us.”
