Apocalypse knights 3 a l.., p.1
Apocalypse Knights 3: A LitRPG Fantasy, page 1
Apocalypse Knights 3
A LitRPG Fantasy
DB King
Copyright © 2022 by DB King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v003
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Contents
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Contents
Series by DB King
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
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
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
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Free progression Fantasy Novel!
About the Author
Series by DB King
Apocalypse Knights
Crafter’s Fate
Dragon Magus
Dungeon of Evolution
Elemental Mastery
Fatehaven Farm
Kensei
Mage’s Path
Ranger’s Magic
Shinobi Rising
Spellweaver Codex: Elder Mage Chronicles
Summoner’s Shadow
The Last Magus
War Wizard
Chapter 1
Lashing rain and howling wind filled the skies above a churning, ink-black ocean. Yellow light fell from the false moon behind even falser clouds, filtering through to wash across ancient planks that stank of an infinity of salt.
Max stood on the deck of a ship, one so massive it defied comprehension and physical possibility. He’d begun on one end and walked for an entire day in the direction of the other, and he’d only just arrived at its midpoint. No ship he’d ever read of or could even begin to imagine measured forty miles long and two miles wide, while still being able to sail endlessly through a non-navigable expanse of dark water.
But it really wasn’t too strange a thing to find inside a Dungeon, a mystical space that played fast and loose with the rules of reality. A Dungeon was more than that, of course. It was also a realm filled with deadly monsters that sought the deaths of any Knights-Errant who ventured within its depths.
Two of these monsters confronted Max now, jabbing with their spears at his throat and chest. They were shark-people, for lack of a better term, standing slightly taller than five feet and sporting fang-filled maws in place of faces and sinister dorsal fins running along their backs.
The Soul Lens fused to Max’s wrist identified them as seko warriors, Level 4 monsters that resided in the Dungeon known as the Kraken’s Wrath.
Max parried a blow with Stridentsong, his powerful enchanted sword, and deflected another off the back of his armored gauntlet. He didn’t attempt to bind the weapons of his enemies to pull off a riposte. Neither did he take a step back so that he had enough room to cast one of the many devastating spells he knew.
“Any progress so far?” Cahya asked as he twirled his sabers to fend off another trio of seko warriors as they tried to flank the cohort.
The Warmonger was a tall and lanky man of Baneling descent, as evidenced by the dusky hue of his skin and the string of colored beads hanging around the collar of his brigandine cuirass. His voice was distant and tinny amidst the unending downpour, but his words carried clearly to Max’s ears, a likely side-effect of the cohort link the two of them shared.
“Almost done,” Max replied, putting the threads of manipulative energy emanating from his Circumvent spell through a final loop and twist, so that the traps arrayed in front of them came undone. The physical vessels—a motley assortment of buckets, barrels, and piles of nets—in which the traps resided fell apart as well, dissipating into flakes of inky light. “Alright, there. The way ahead is clear.”
“Good job, Max,” Flora said, stepping into the fray alongside Cahya and bashing a seko warrior off its feet with her shield.
Max gave the tall and powerfully built Defender a brief nod of professional admiration. He had previously fought alongside Flora in another Dungeon called Graywind Mage Tower, and she had proven repeatedly to be a stalwart and trustworthy comrade-in-arms and formidable ally. Flora noticed his acknowledgment and returned it, her plate armor slick and gleaming beneath the sickly radiance of the false moon.
Cahya seized the opportunity to stab the fallen monster in the throat with both of his sabers. His strength enhanced by his Prowess spell, the Warmonger punched his blades smoothly through the seko warrior’s tough hide and pinned it to the deck.
But in doing so, he left himself open to the stabbing spears of the other two. Flora whispered a few words. Translucent barriers of magical energy flashed into existence around Cahya’s flanks. The seko warriors’ spears bounced off Flora’s Single Shield spells.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Gunther, the cohort’s Elementalist, cried. He was a stout man with a shaved head, his broad body clad in runic leather armor. Strain etched his grizzled face, and swirls of water spun across his raised palms. Gunther was pitting his elemental manipulation against two smaller shark humanoids—seko shamans—behind the ones attacking Max.
“He’s not going to hold them back much longer,” Nesura warned, speaking directly into Max’s mind. The spirit familiar was tucked firmly into one of the pouches belted across his waist, unwilling to expose her furred head to the relentless spray of salt and moisture in this Dungeon.
“Yes, I know,” Max replied, parrying another stab from a seko warrior before risking a glance over his shoulder at the beleaguered Gunther. The Elementalist was upon his knees, his raised hands trembling. Using his Arcane Flux spell, Max had copied a variety of hydro spells from Gunther earlier, but he lacked the Elementalist’s ability to manipulate water directly; otherwise, he would have added his efforts to keeping the seko shamans at bay.
“The stupid sharks are going to burn out his hydro manipulation capacity any moment now, and all of you are going to become fish food,” Nesura added unhelpfully.
“Thanks.” Max ignored her voice with practiced ease and advanced on the monsters.
He snapped Stridentsong out and around, foiling a stab from a seko warrior and binding its spear upon his blade, before thrusting out the Magus Staff in his left hand and blasting an Icelance directly into the monster’s face.
As the seko warrior fell, a ruin of frozen and perforated flesh where its fanged visage used to be, Max pivoted on his lead foot and fell into a Moonlight Reflection Arc. The blade form swept Stridentsong through the neck of another spear-wielding shark. The monster reeled away, ichor spewing from its opened throat.
The last seko warrior flinched and took a step back, its leveled spear suddenly awry.
Max didn’t miss his chance.
He closed the distance with a Lightness Step, crossing five feet in a split-second, and plunged Stridentsong’s tip between the monster’s eyes.
A pained shriek arose from Gunther, then. Max heard the dull thump of flesh against damp wood. The seko shamans crowed in triumph. The foremost one rattled a coral staff adorned with shells.
“He’s down. Probably dead,” Nesura chirped. Max felt the mental equivalent of a shrug through the connection he had with his familiar. “Oh well. He was weak, mentally and physically, anyway. More Victory Shards for the rest of you.”
Nesura’s words preceded the flicker of his Soul Lens in the corner of his eye.
Gunther Ness
Level 4 Elementalist: Slain
Cohort boosts removed (-1 to all physical attributes, -5 to Health and Mana reserves
Damn it, Max thought.
“Gunther!” Flora cried out in alarm.
Her armored boots thudded across the deck. Max knew she would be trying against all logic to cast a Healing spell of some kind on the slain Elementalist. He di dn’t bother trying to stop her. The Defender’s compassion had always proven to be more of an asset than liability. Stifling it right now would hurt her loyalty to him, something worth far more than the wastage of a handful of Mana points.
Nesura scanned one of the seko shamans on Max’s behalf and filled the corner of his eye with what she found.
Monster: Seko Shaman
Level 4
Health: 40/40
Mana: 23/65
Physical Attributes
Strength: 12
Dexterity: 13
Fortitude: 11
Perception: 16
Abilities
Hydro Manipulation (Major)
Rewards
Victory Shard value: 4
Treasure Class: B
“You’d think a Level 4 Elementalist would know better than to square off directly against two monsters that have major hydro manipulation,” Nesura said, accompanying her words with a mental click of her tongue. “What an idiot.”
The seko shamans raised their coral staves. Massive swirls of water, drawn from the cascading rain and the sea spray, appeared above their heads. Within a heartbeat, the ensorcelled water would descend upon the cohort with bone-crushing force.
He raised his Magus Staff and uttered the casting words for Counterspell, something that he’d been reluctant to do due to the spell’s high Mana cost and unreliability.
Blue light flared at the tip of his staff, and to Max’s relief, the Counterspell latched onto the spell of one of the seko shamans and unraveled the magical energy coalescing within its depths. The spiraling water above the monster’s head disappeared, and it staggered back, its eyes rolling in bewilderment.
The other seko shaman blinked in surprise, and for a moment, it faltered in its spell-casting.
Max capitalized on the delay. Dropping Stridentsong and tucking his Magus Staff behind his belt, he retrieved his enchanted bow and a trio of arrows from his ring of holding.
A single fluid motion had him raising the bow, nocking, and loosing. An arrow sliced through the air, its flight wobbly and unsure beneath the rain, before punching into the chest of the seko shaman that still maintained its spell.
Two more arrows followed. One spun off-course, its magical flight foiled by the wild lashing of the perpetual storm. The other struck true, slicing into the seko shaman’s throat. The monster fell on its back, its heels drumming its death throes against the sodden deck of the impossible ship.
The surviving seko shaman roared in anger and snapped its coral stave level at Max’s face. Fist-sized spheres of water coalesced in front of the monster before hurtling forward.
Returning his bow to his ring of holding, Max raised his forearms across his face and threw himself into a headlong charge.
A watery sphere slammed into his armored forearms with bruising force. Another blasted into his abdomen and stole the breath from his lungs. A third hammered against his pauldron and almost brought his charge to a faltering halt.
Health: 57 [+0]/82 [+34]
“You’re fine,” Nesura drawled. “Don’t start crying on me, Max.”
Another sphere hammered into his hip.
Max gasped as he felt bone crack beneath the impact.
Critical hit taken: x4 damage
Health: 38 [+0]/82 [+34]
“Alright. Now that was pretty bad,” Nesura said. “A few more of those, and you’re done. But maybe that’s not so bad, since I’ll finally be free.”
Max choked down an urge to yell at the familiar and threw himself forward into a roll. More of the watery spheres zipped over his head. He came out of his roll and surged to his feet within arm’s length of the seko shaman. The monster flinched and began to backpedal, but it was too late.
Max reached out and seized a gauntleted fistful of gills. Coarse flesh and cartilage pulped beneath his grip. The seko shaman convulsed and flailed with its webbed hands, scrabbling its clawed digits across the surface of Max’s armor. He ignored the monster’s thrashings and caught it right beneath the jaw with his other hand, preventing it from bringing its fangs to bear.
The seko shaman’s body was corded with lean muscle, but Max was more than two feet taller and at least a hundred pounds heavier, his powerful and athletic frame honed by a lifetime of training and warfare. He also had his Prowess spell, which at Level 4, more than tripled his already prodigious strength. Max threw the seko shaman on its back, put a bootheel against its chest, closed his fists, and pulled them away. Chunks of shark flesh came free in his grip.
Ichor jetted into the salted air. The seko shaman had time to shriek once before Max brought his boot down on its face. Brain and jellied optical matter splattered beneath the impact. He spun on his heel, calling Stridentsong back to his grasp.
A grim sight awaited him: Cahya’s corpse twitching beneath a pile of feeding seko warriors.
Flora lashed out repeatedly with her blade, slaying one monster after another as they devoured the Warmonger’s body. Her eyes were wide with anger and loss, and Max knew her cheeks would be streaked with tears if not for the incessant rain.
Cahya Lestari
Level 4 Warmonger: Slain
Cohort boosts removed (-1 to all physical attributes, -5 to Health and Mana reserves)
“Once they’re done eating the fool, they’re going to start with her,” Nesura pointed out. “Do something, Max. Flora’s actually worth something, unlike the other two idiots.”
The familiar was right. Flora Truesteel was a scion of the Truesteel clan, a wealthy merchant family with tremendous resources. Thanks to his friendship with Flora, the Truesteel clan had agreed to leverage its considerable political and mercantile power in support of the Apocalypse Knights. Max wasn’t naive enough to believe that such support wouldn’t swiftly dwindle—imminent apocalypse or not—if Flora died fighting alongside him.
He bolted off into a headlong charge against the pile of thrashing monsters. Using his Soul Lens, Nesura counted a dozen of them feasting on Cahya’s remains. Three others lay dead and dying beneath Flora’s blade.
Max got within five strides of the grim feast and fell to his knees. The momentum of his charge sent him skidding across the treacherously slick deck, the knee-guards of his plate-armor carving shallow furrows through ever-drenched wood, until he reached Flora’s side.
He got to his feet, spun his Magus Staff back into his grasp, and leveled it at the pile of seko warriors, who’d already begun to raise their bloodied maws and frenzied gazes from their finished feast.
“Flora! Put a Quadra Shield on us now!” Max called.
The Defender complied instantaneously, raising her blade and conjuring quadruple layers of magical barriers between Max and the seko warriors. Max followed Flora’s spell with one of his own: Jolting Arc. A yellow bolt of lightning flared from the tip of his Magus Staff and passed through the Quadra Shield.
It struck a seko warrior, and then the lashing rain and water-laden air discorporated the spell’s electrical energy, turning it from a bolt of lightning into a roaring burst of sparks that cascaded over the pile of monsters but scattered harmlessly across Flora’s magical barriers. The seko warriors shrieked and recoiled, their limbs convulsing as electricity raced through their nerves and cooked their flesh.
“They’re not done yet,” Nesura warned.
“I know,” Max replied grimly as he waited for the last flickers of his spell to die out before plunging through the Quadra Shield, with Flora following close on his heels.
Twirling his blade in his hand, he fell into a Sunflower Scatter blade form, punching Stridentsong’s tip through a trio of shark skulls in rapid succession. Thousandfold Thread was next, opening the throats of five monsters as he danced through their ranks. He hacked a seko warrior in half across the waist with a Weeping Loom, before kicking another off its feet and crushing its skull beneath his heel.
He turned to the rest, but Flora had already finished them. The Defender shook her head grimly as she tore her blade free from a seko warrior’s skull.
“We lost Gunther and Cahya,” she reported, rather unnecessarily.
