He Who Fights with Monsters 6: A LitRPG Adventure, page 1
HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS SIX
©2022 SHIRTALOON
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CONTENTS
ALSO IN SERIES
1. Looting a House as it Burns Down Around You
2. Domain
3. Needs of the Moment
4. A Beautiful Woman and a Sack of Cash
5. You Have to Be True to Yourself
6. One More Secret
7. Instinct is All We Have
8. Step Back
9. Guns & Money
10. Old Habit
11. It’s Still Not About Killing Monsters
12. Open to the Unanticipated
13. I’m Going to Bet on Myself
14. No Perfect Options
15. Stillness
16. Whatever We Face
17. You Really Aren’t Local
18. A Sliver of Hope
19. End-User Licence Agreement
20. Negotiations
21. Another Day for Vampires
22. Less Freud and More God of Healing
23. Little Cost in Exploring
24. Intentions
25. I Need That Song to Play Out
26. Wash Them First
27. The Language of Passion
28. Forthright Honesty
29. Pertinent Factor
30. More of a Focus on Nipples
31. The Job That’s in Front of You
32. Going Suspiciously Well
33. One of Asano’s Secrets
34. Swarm Against Swarm
35. Necessary Evil
36. Balls
37. Which One of Us is the Villain
38. That Passion Didn’t Come From Nowhere
39. The Upstart Magician
40. Too Much Over Pride
41. Trust All the Way
42. Time to Choose
43. Four-Score Men
44. The Very Opposite of Fantastical
45. Small Mercies
46. Salus Mundi Suprema Lex Esto
47. Something Other Than Human
Author’s Note
Epilogue Chapter 1
Epilogue Chapter 2
Epilogue Chapter 3
Epilogue Chapter 4
Epilogue Chapter 5
Epilogue Chapter 6
Thank you for reading He Who Fights With Monsters, book six.
About the Author
ALSO IN SERIES
HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
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1
LOOTING A HOUSE AS IT BURNS DOWN AROUND YOU
Jack Gerling was a gold-rank essence user, what most of the world called a category-four essence magician. He was a part of the USA Network branches, who, at least internally, used the same terminology as Jason Asano had learned in the other world. This was due to information these branches had obtained when the United States was still a new nation. This had given them an advantage over the other branches that led to their modern dominance, challenged only by China.
Gerling had been dispatched to represent the US Network in Slovakia, where a magical event was taking place. Outside the city of Nitra, a massive, magical dome had appeared on the plains, consuming kilometres of farmland. This was not the first such event, and the so-called transformation zone would leave an alien landscape behind when the zone finally vanished. After that would come a race for the magical spoils within, most notably, a reality core.
Reality cores were unquestionably the most powerful source of magic the world had ever seen, as well as the very power that had led to Gerling being woken from decades of stasis. His gold-rank power was too much for the world to sustain without a sufficient source of concentrated magic, and the reality cores perfectly fit the bill. Their appearance was causing the US and China to awaken the powerful individuals like Gerling they had secreted away decades ago.
Despite the importance of reality cores and Gerling being assigned to snatch them, they were not what held his interest. His attention was focused on another power altogether. While the forces of Earth’s magical factions swarmed the impregnable dome, Gerling remained in Nitra, sipping coffee at a street café.
Like most places in the world, Nitra had shut down in the wake of the apocalyptic monster waves that had ravaged the world, but the arrival of the transformation zone had been a boon. It attracted powerful essence users, rendering the entire region safe. Further, it allowed the city to open up, in order to serve the wealthy and powerful visitors.
Jack’s gold-rank eyesight picked out a tiny black shape in the sky. Air traffic avoided the transformation zones, so Jack knew exactly what the approach of an onyx-black jet meant: the arrival of the power that held Gerling’s interest.
“He’s here,” Gerling muttered, putting down his coffee.
Jason Asano was weaker than Gerling by no small measure, but it was not small enough for Gerling. Asano and his otherworldly companion, Farrah Hurin, shouldn’t have been able to put up any kind of fight against him. Yet when they clashed, Jack had to use all his most powerful abilities and Hurin had still escaped. As for Asano, his capture had lasted only minutes before he too escaped, somehow defeating the tools that should have suppressed his powers.
That Asano and Hurin were so powerful when their powers were below his was bad enough, but Asano’s ability to do what should not have been possible at all had pushed Gerling over the edge. He knew that when Asano reached the same rank as him, it would swiftly lead to his death in revenge for killing Asano’s brother, lover and friend.
Before that happened, Gerling needed to find Asano himself. Not only did he need to kill Asano before his power became too great, but he wanted Asano’s secrets. If he could claim that power for himself, Gerling would be able to reign over the other hidden gold-rankers who were being awoken, along with any new ones that cropped up.
His eyes locked on the plane in the sky, Gerling stepped out into the street and launched himself into the air with gold-rank strength, sailing high over the rooftops. As he reached the top of his arc, he triggered an explosion that sent him rocketing higher through the sky. More explosions continued to send him hurtling towards the giant dome out on the plains.
Jason’s dark plane was not an actual jet but an amalgam of the many bodies of his shadow familiar, Shade. As it hurtled through the sky, it disintegrated into a cloud of shadows from which a dark-cloaked form plunged, plummeting through the air like a missile. The cloud of shadow twisted through the air in pursuit, trailing Asano’s freefalling form like the tail of a dark comet. It slowly disappeared at it was drawn into the cloak.
Jason didn’t slow his fall towards the city-sized dome, even angling his body down to accelerate as his senses took in the situation around the dome. The auras surrounding the transformation zone told the story of the magical factions waiting to exploit it. The contentious Network factions were split into various camps. There were the American Network and the old leadership faction, still calling themselves simply the Network. Jason couldn’t differentiate one from another just by the aura of essence users, but the other factions were more obvious.
The breakaway Global Defence Network was not just comprised of essence users but also former EOA and Cabal members. Unhappy with the direction their factions had taken since magic was revealed to the world, they had banded together and were the most numerous of the current magical factions. For all their numbers, though, they had a limited number of powerful elites.
Jason would be more sympathetic to their cause if they
Jason’s goal was nothing short of saving the world. He’d absorbed the power of a magical doorway that gave him access to a dimension where he could manipulate the fundamental underpinnings of reality. In this node space, he could slowly undo the modifications that had left the Earth in a magically unstable state. This had been done through a link to another world, one that Jason now realised he had ridden when he travelled between worlds by accident.
Jason was working to undo that link by making changes to node space, but even as he was changing it, it was changing him. Spending time in the strange realm where mortals had no place, he was constantly bombarded with dimensional forces. Only the many changes he had undergone over time allowed him to survive.
Jason was not the only one changed by node space. The level of magic rose as Earth grew more unstable, and with it, the node space leaked dimensional energy, creating the transformation zones. This was the source of the reality cores, which were common in node space as an intrinsic part of reality.
Unfortunately, the reality cores were of immense value to Earth’s magical factions, leading to the cores being fought over instead of left alone. Each reality core that was taken from where it was exposed only furthered the instability of the Earth. Jason had informed the factions of this, only for them to either not believe him or not care as they scrambled for power.
The magical factions were in flux in the wake of the massive changes taking place around the Earth. The revelation of magic existing brought the factions into the light after centuries, or even millennia, spent hiding in the shadows. The subsequent monster waves, bringing about millions of deaths, likewise brought upheaval to the factions.
The youngest of the magical factions was the Engineers of Ascension, the EOA. They were splintering as the other factions and the world authorities hunted them down. They were the ones who brought down the grid that had helped prevent the monster waves, making them responsible for the monster apocalypse that ravaged all but the protected cities in which humanity had huddled in confusion and fear.
The oldest faction was the Cabal. Made up of the strange and ancient creatures older than humanity itself, a schism had occurred after the rise of old and powerful vampires within their ranks. Some served the vampires that had wrested much of Europe from the control of humanity. The others sided with humanity.
The most powerful faction was the Network, but their ever-fractious nature had caused them to split as well. Mostly they were gathered into four blocs, the strongest of which were the US branches and the Chinese branches. They had always dominated and had long been prepared to go their own way; the US branches even staged a secret coup of the US government. This had not gone well, however, with civil unrest threatening to spill over into outright civil war. This left China as the strongest faction standing, having already taken a strong hold over their nation.
The other Network factions were led by what had formerly been the International Committee ostensibly operating as the Network leadership. Calling themselves the True Network, they held on to much of the governmental connections the Network had built in recent years. They also retained many of the Network’s most powerful members not already affiliated with China or the United States.
The final Network faction were now calling themselves the Global Defence Network, having taken the name the Network used after first going public. The GDN had been made up of large numbers of the Network’s rank and file, and had been taking in members of other factions. This was largely members of the EOA who had not realised what they were part of, and they were aligned with the parts of the Cabal also fighting the vampire threat.
Jason could pick out members of the various factions, often telling them apart by aura. There even seemed to be a faction of EOA who had managed to hold together. Jason had met their leader and knew there was more to their origins than even most of their members knew. Their most powerful members were magically modified humans who could boost themselves with magical drugs and masqueraded as superheroes for publicity purposes.
The EOA had largely abandoned the superhero gimmick to operate more openly. It was a difficult position to maintain when other forces were demonstrably stronger than what were ostensibly superheroes. They now operated more like superhuman paramilitary, although their signature flight and eyebeam powers maintained a superheroic flavour.
The factions were in a general truce as they surrounded the transformation zone dome, saving their strength for the fight over whatever treasures lay inside. There were several gold rank auras present in the vampire camp, but the most powerful aura Jason sensed was approaching at blistering speed from the direction of the nearby city. There were explosions of magic in the distance, one after another. Jason sensed them before the sound reached him. They were propelling the gold-rank aura that rocketed towards the dome at supersonic speed.
“He’s here,” Jason murmured, his words whipped away in the speed of his descent. He angled his body down for maximum acceleration, trying to reach the dome before the gold-ranker that killed Kaito, Asya and Greg arrived. He aimed for the very peak of the dome, to avoid the factions gathered around the base. He used his cloak to decelerate at the last moment but still landed hard on the glassy surface of the dome. Underneath the glassy surface, energy swirled like a rainbow lava lamp.
Without hesitating, Jason opened a magic door with his powers. Instead of the usual freestanding arch, the door he called up this time was set directly into the surface of the dome. Dark, translucent crystal that sparkled with shifting light of blue, gold and silver formed the ring. Within the ring, the glassy surface of the dome was gone, exposing the rainbow energy that roiled and churned like a witch’s cauldron.
Gerling landed heavily on the dome with a gong-like sound, along with a shockwave that whipped at Jason’s blood-coloured robes. Standing on opposite sides of the portal, the two men stared each other down. Gerling was a huge brute of a man, while Jason was small and shrouded in a dark cloak, speckled with stars. The cloak was not fabric but a dark, magical miasma, looking almost like a Jason was enveloped in black flames. Within the hood, Jason’s face was hidden in darkness but for his shining silver eyes.
“I talked to my girlfriend after you killed her,” Jason said. “She told me that I shouldn’t go looking for revenge.”
“You don’t have the strength for revenge.”
“Not today, it’s true,” Jason said as Shade’s bodies emerged to stand around him. “But you don’t have a fancy teleport trap in place either. I don’t think you can catch me. Neither do you.”
“How did you get away the first time?” Gerling asked. “It was something to do with your aura, right? Negating the suppression collar? Is it an essence ability that lets you do that? An outworlder power?”
“I’m not here to answer your questions, Gerling. I have more important things to deal with.”
“Like what? Finally joining the fight for reality cores?”
“The cores should be left alone,” Jason said. “I’ve warned you all and no one cares.”
