Greenfire: (Sky Realms Online Book 4): A LitRPG Series, page 1
GREENFIRE
©2020 TROY OSGOOD
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.
Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Art provided by Jackson Tjota.
Published by Aethon Books LLC. 2019
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Contents
ALSO IN THE SERIES
Prologue
I. PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
II. PART TWO
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
III. The Depths
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Hall Stats
FROM TROY
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Troy Osgood
LitRPG
ALSO IN THE SERIES
GRAYHOLD
SILVER PEAK
AXESTORM
GREENFIRE
Prologue
The man known as Bastian the Sage looked down at the pile of rubble.
Chunks of shining black stone. Large, small, broken and cracked. No way to tell the shape of what it had been from the large pile of stones, other pieces scattered around the room.
But he knew what it had been.
A golem.
He knew what it was because he was responsible for its creation.
Looking around the large room, he realized he should have visited sooner. The gas lamps were malfunctioning. The result of centuries of neglect. His workshop had remained untouched for so long, until a couple of months ago when a group of adventurers had found it.
And robbed it after destroying the guardian.
Bastian wasn’t concerned about the money and items they had taken. He had placed them there for exactly that reason. Adventurers would get suspicious if there was no loot to be had. And there was not a lot of value to the coins and ingots. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t just sealed the workshop so no one could get in.
A test of some kind?
There had been no guarantee that the person, or persons, he wanted to find it would end up being the ones to find it. They had, or one of them had, more accurately.
He walked around the room, running hands over tables and shelves. Empty shelves. He remembered when this workshop, like the others he had scattered around the islands, had been full. Workers, equipment, resources and construction. Experimentation. Development.
So much had been lost in the years since the Fracturing.
Not just for him, but the world.
He had many regrets, but losing all that was not one of them. It was the price he paid for saving them all and one he would happily pay again.
Next time I’ll get a better deal, he thought ruefully.
Bastian stopped at the corridor that led to the bronze doors. They were closed now, had been closed since the visitors and would remain closed. He had thought their locking mechanism one of his better puzzles.
He sighed. There wasn’t much he could accomplish here. No real reason why he had even come. It had been a couple of months since the visitors had destroyed the guardian. He could have come sooner, but there was always something popping up. More and more somethings lately.
Which was as it should be. Events were in motion and he had much to do.
Bastian knew that his opposite, the Feardagh, was not sitting idle either. He had already seen some of the machinations that one was orchestrating. He still wasn’t sure who the Feardagh had chosen for his Champions, but Bastian knew that they would be powerful and deadly and that the Feardagh would push the boundaries of the contract.
Something that Bastian could not do. He had read through it many times over the years. Every word was memorized, burned into his mind. There were no loopholes for him to exploit. The black iron nail made sure of that. He had chosen his Champions, and he had to have faith that they would win out.
There was no choice but to have faith.
It had taken a lot to get the right people to Hankarth. So many years of preparation and waiting for the right moment, the right time. And it had come. But no matter how he had planned, chance could always interfere.
Or the Feardagh’s plans.
Bastian knew why he had come here, to this specific workshop. This was not one he planned to restart, as he had a couple of the others. This workshop would remain empty and lifeless. Bastian had only come here because the Champion had.
With his limited ability to teleport, this workshop was the closest place to the village the Champion had chosen to call home. Bastian smiled at the memory of the image seen in his crystal scrying globes. They had alerted him when the village had been claimed.
That had been the moment that Bastian had known the endgame was approaching.
It was still a long time off. He hoped. But it was coming. The end was starting.
He would be ready. Had to be ready.
Bastian walked back to the middle of the room. Using his staff, he pushed some rock chunks off the rune inscribed into the floor. He briefly thought about repairing the guardian, but it would take time.
Which he did not have.
Maybe after everything was done. It had been a long time since he had constructed a golem. Would he still know what to do?
Questions for another time.
Stepping to the middle of the rune circle, Bastian shifted his feet so they did not step on any of the many runes. He had carved them all himself. Months of painstaking work. But back then, so many years ago, he’d had nothing but time to devote to projects such as the rune circle.
Each mark had a purpose. Most had multiple meanings depending on what he needed and wanted to do, how they were aligned with others, which ones they were adjacent to. The language of runes was complex.
For now he only needed one sequence.
Standing in the center, over his personal rune, Bastian reached out with his staff. He gently tapped a single rune in front of him, halfway up the multiple layers. It flared a light green, others around the circle following. There was no pattern, or at least there didn’t appear to be. Two runes in the same ring, five in the lower, two in one ring higher, and four in the highest. Each rune flared, but not in time with the others. No set sequence, but it was getting faster, the bursts brighter and quicker.
Beneath his feet, the larger rune started to glow. A steady, consistent light green. It seemed to flow up Bastian’s legs. He looked down, watching it climb up his body. He looked straight ahead, the glow swallowing his head. The bronze of the room took on a green tinge.
Bastian closed his eyes.
He felt weightless and then a pressure against his body.
Bastian pushed through the thick growth of trees.
He listened to the sounds of the forest. The sun was setting, night coming on, and the nocturnal world was waking up. He glanced nervously into the trees. Far from defenseless, he still wanted to avoid conflict if possible.
The smaller island was behind him, floating above the water, his workshop in a hidden cave on the other side of the lake, along the edge of the larger island. More of a laboratory than a workshop, it had been built for observation.
He had spent weeks studying the floating island over the lake shortly after the Fracturing. The Branches of the World Tree kept the scattered islands of Hankarth floating, but that one small island had been an oddity. A floating island on a floating island. Even after weeks, Bastian had been no closer to finding out why.
It just was, and in the end, he was satisfied with that. He had to be.
There was so much about the world post-Fracturing that was new. Even to him. Even now, after so many years. Centuries.
Which Bastian always found odd. He had played such a large role in shaping the new world, and it still continued to surprise him.
The wind shifted and he caught a strange scent on the air. Decay.
Altering his course, Bastian followed the scent on the wind. The ground around him changed. The thick undergrowth disappeared. Bushes were still there, but some had been flattened by heavy loads. Something had been dragged over them, breaking many of the stems and branches, leaving an obvious path.
It meandered, not straight. Widening in areas, thinner in others. As Bastian followed it, the end of his staff thumping on the ground, the scent of decay grew stronger.
He found the source a couple of minutes later.
A shallow pit filled with piles of bones. Not human or any kind of humanoid species. They belonged to some kind of lizard. Flat and wide bodies, four limbed with long tails. The top level of bones had been thrown aside, the result of being dug through. Bastian could see the remains of meat buried deep beneath the bones, some with scraps still on them.
The source of the smell.
What had happened here?
He didn’t recognize what creature the bones belonged to, but someone had killed a good number of them. He moved closer to the edge of the pit, crouching down. Bastian poked the end of his staff against one of the bones, shifting it out of the way. More bones were revealed. These with more meat left on them. The smell grew stronger.
Bastian stood up, stepping back. He looked around, listening.
This pit would be an attraction for the scavengers on the island.
A new sound rose above the awakening nocturnal noises. Louder. A smashing sound, something breaking.
He knew what made that sound.
It was why he had come here.
Turning away from the pit, putting it out of his mind, Bastian pushed into the forest, following the noise. The ground shook. He heard branches snapping and breaking with loud cracks. Not small branches either. Trees.
He stopped at the top of a small valley and smiled. There at the bottom was the source of the noise. What Bastian had come looking for. He took a step forward but stopped, a quieter noise coming from next to him, something scurrying through the bushes.
Turning, he saw a large frog hop out into the grass. It looked up at him with wide and curious eyes. Floating above its head was a crown that seemed to glow.
“Greetings, my friend,” Bastian said to the frog.
He gave a nod of his head, which the frog seemed to return. The creature’s front body seemed to dip and rise back up again with a quiet ribbit noise. The glowing crown flared briefly.
“How has he been?” Bastian asked, motioning with his staff down into the valley and to the source of the noise.
The frog looked that way, down the grassy slope. A river flowed down one side, along the bottom and into a small pond. The large creature sat by the shore. Twenty feet tall, a tail that was half as long, large and bright yellow eyes. Long legs and arms on a thin body, with hands that ended in long claws that dug furrows into the ground as the creature shifted its position. Covered in green scales, the head of a lizard and the body of a monkey.
A Monmodo.
But one five or more times the usual size of the creatures.
Croaking, the frog seemed to speak for a minute. Neither frog nor sage spoke loudly, not wanting to disturb the giant creature below. Bastian tensed as it lifted the large head, sniffing, giving a low growl that revealed a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Not sensing anything, the giant Monmodo shifted its attention back to the pond.
Looking for fish, Bastian thought.
The frog continued its croaking for another minute.
“There were visitors,” Bastian asked, interrupting. “Not the Serenti?”
The frog’s croaking seemed annoyed.
Bastian held up his hand in a calming motion. “Another crashed ship? But this one was able to leave? Interesting.”
He remembered the first crashed ship. Members of the Highborn Confederacy. Bastian had worried that they would somehow kill or injure the giant Monmodo. He shouldn’t have worried.
Bastian stared down at the giant, watching. The silence dragged as Bastian watched.
Finally, the frog croaked.
“I’m fine,” Bastian replied. “I need you to watch Konglo for a while longer.”
This time the croak was long and mournful.
“Yes, it is important. Someday it will all make sense.”
Bastian fell silent, not noticing the frog with its floating crown disappear into the bushes around them. He stayed there, watching the giant Monmodo for a long time.
Konglo sat still, clawed hand raised over the water, large eyes watching. With a splash, the hand speared into the water, closing on something. Eyes bright with triumph, Konglo pulled out a closed fist. Water dripped back down into the pond, rivers of it flowing down his arm. Opening the palm, the Monmodo looked down at the handful of large fish flopping around. Lifting it up, mouth open, Konglo quickly swallowed the fish.
Rapidly standing up, the large Monmodo used his long arms to pull himself out of the valley and into the forest opposite Bastian. It was easy to follow Konglo’s progress. Each step was loud, tall trees shaking as the great creature pushed against them. Branches snapped and birds burst from the canopy.
Bastian watched him disappear. The sounds faded the further away the giant got from the valley. The Feardagh would exploit every loophole in the contract that the demon could find. Bastian could not do the same. Not if he wanted to win, and he badly needed to win. Hankarth needed him to win. Bastian was no fool; he would not wait for the conflict. He would actively work to set the playing field so he would win. Numerous plans were in motion. With his Champions and others.
Konglo was one of those plans. Had always been one of those plans. From the very moment Bastian had created the great creature in the hidden laboratory and had set another of his creations to watch.
Now it was time to advance other plans.
Bastian’s eyes became unfocused as he opened up his interface. He tabbed to the screen he wanted, opening the messenger application. Starting a new message, he thought about what he wanted to say. Words appeared across the translucent screen as he wrote.
“Someday soon it won’t matter if it makes sense or not. It will only matter that it works,” he said quietly, glancing back at where the crowned frog had disappeared.
Chapter 1
The moon was at his back as Hall activated Leap.
He didn’t arc a long jump into the air like normal, instead using the ability to cover the last dozen feet between him and the top of the ridge, jumping high and then a short arc down. Landing, he stabbed with his spear, catching the surprised Trow in the chest. The tip sank in deep and the gray-skinned creature fell back.
Holding tight to the spear, Hall pulled it out as the Trow fell off the tip.
He couldn’t afford to lose the spear.
There were more Trow.
Lots of them.
He hadn’t expected this second raid. He should have.
That was his job as the lord of Skara Brae. He was supposed to anticipate what his people would need and provide it. He was supposed to anticipate the dangers his people would face.
He knew that there was a tribe of Trow in the area. They had encountered a scouting party on their first trip to Skara Brae, only a couple of days travel away. He hadn’t seen the village, but knew it had to be near. But with everything else that had happened, Hall had forgotten about them.
Until the first raid barely a week ago.
Why the Trow had waited to launch their attack, Hall didn’t know. He and the others had been living there, rebuilding the village, for months. Why wait? Unless the Trow had wanted the citizens to build up resources, make it worthwhile to raid.
