Mark of the fated 3 a li.., p.1
Mark of the Fated 3: A LitRPG Adventure, page 1
Mark of the Fated - Volume 3
Realm of the Lich King
Ricky Fleet
Mark of the Fated – Volume 3 – Realm of the Lich King
Copyright © 2023 by Ricky Fleet.
Optimus Maximus Publishing, LLC, in partnership with Ricky Fleet.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Christina Smith.
Cover design by Luciano Flietas.
ISBN: 978-1-7392275-2-4
First Edition: 2023
I dedicate this book to my long-suffering family. For all the times they've tried to talk to me, only to find me staring off into space without answering. Love you all millions.
Acknowledgements
As always, the feedback from the Royal Road readers has been invaluable in keeping the story engaging. You're all awesome!
My editor and friend, Christina, who gives me a rap on the knuckles when I fill a page with repeat words. I couldn't do it without you.
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
About the Author
Also By
Social Media
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Prologue
Holy fucking shit. We made it. Again. And, once again, I’m sat on the shitter with a nervous belly. Strangely enough, it never hits when I’m fighting for my life, only when I arrive safely home. Go figure. Even Marco has evacuated the area until the smell clears. Traitor. I don’t have the same luxury when he does his business and I have to scoop it up under threat of a fine.
We’re now two worlds down. God knows how many more to go. One, I hope. None would be better if they had a sudden change of heart, though I doubt it. I’d thought orc invasions and goblins in mechanised suits had been bad. Not to mention beautiful, but utterly insane sorceresses who tried to tear my mind apart. I look back on my reluctance to kill her and compare it to who I am now. The vastly inflated body count which is only going to go one way. Up. The pessimist in me cries for the innocent, sometimes weak man I’d once been. The burgeoning optimist tallies my loss of soul against the people I’m saving and figures I’m about even.
Kherrash had been a bloody nightmare in many ways, with an enemy of green.
Osterland, and its Prehistoric Pandemonium had been so much worse. Many of those I had killed had no green to their skin at all. They were people, dead by my hand.
The modernity of the place had worked against us from the start. I’d gone through life using our technology, blissfully unaware of the downsides, thinking the advances had given us more freedom. The ability to talk to friends across the world. Never once had I given thought to how it also worked to enslave us inside an inescapable global web of surveillance and monitoring. For every marvel like mobile gaming while curling one out on the toilet came a Five Eyes network of intergovernmental spying. They not only knew what level you’d reached on Candy Killer, but your porn preferences too. I didn’t trust a VPN to entirely hide my Wonder Woman versus Buffy oil wrestling searches.
Anyway, it was the pace of the events that topped off the insanity. A maelstrom of unrelenting horror. If you wanted to start a war in medieval times, you sent off an envoy and waited six months to see if he returned with his head still attached. From there you spent a year amassing an army and another six months marching. Most people on both sides of the argument had died of old age or dysentery by the time swords clashed. In our world, an angry diplomatic email could reach the other side of the planet in a split second, and the responding nukes would arrive a few minutes later. Then BOOM! Goodbye humanity.
Osterland came damned close to the apocalypse. Except in place of million degree heat and catastrophic radioactive fallout, they had ill-tempered carnivorous reptiles who’d been extinct for a few million years. It was our job to stop them.
I’d been dropped in a jungle near the world’s equator, far from civilisation. The humidity was so bad it felt like I’d been smacked in the face with a hot flannel. It was almost unbearable, like breathing steam. I’d not had much time to complain about the heat when charging out of the jungle came gigantic fucking scorpions that had already wiped out one tribe of locals. With the assistance of Liza Fisk, a scientist sent to investigate the events, I’d managed to kill the queen and burn their hive. Little did I know that was going to be the easiest part of my time on the world.
Cody, Liza’s older brother, rescued us from the middle of nowhere. My party arrived mid-flight and we’d discovered through small talk that he was a ranger. A wildlife ranger, sure, but he was adequately versed in ranged combat, which was a boon to our ongoing efforts. No sooner had we made it to a waystation when one of our key enemies arrived and snatched Liza from under our nose. With the aid of some attack choppers, I might add. I didn’t fancy taking on dual gatling guns and rocket pods. The enemy in question was General Milley, the head of the CID. He was neck deep in the shit about to overtake Osterland.
Through our abilities, we’d turned the tables on the soldiers left behind to kill Cody. We hitched a lift in the chopper with the lone survivor to the city of Marnmouth. Walking the decaying streets, we were demoralised and directionless. Our only target was a black site within the city that was used to hold prisoners before they were spirited away for questioning or worse. We struck in the dead of night, wiping out the team of killers. Unfortunately, Liza wasn’t held in the apartment. She had already been moved on.
Instead, we found her boss, Professor Jessop. We also found a local gangster by the name of Rhys Payne. Or he found us, which is closer to the truth. One seemed quite keen to help. The other seemed upset that we were messing with the lucrative deal they’d arranged with Milley for drugs and power. A mad plan formed in my mind as we stared each other down.
The organisation he represented was known as The Disciples, a satanic gangster cult who controlled half the city. It was all bullshit. They were just greedy fuckers who used the religious angle to ensure compliance with terror. After a pleasant limo ride, we were invited to be guests of honour at one of their sacrificial ceremonies. It was our turn t
With so many satellites in orbit, we were forced to move underground to hide our activities and movements. We used our new army to save as many civilians as possible, bringing word of the protection we could offer. We bribed them to take shelter in the drainage system with the drug money that had blighted their lives for so long. Many had rightfully been suspicious and ignored the piles of cash. Until the inevitable happened.
Professor Jessop’s earlier promise of aid came in the form of his expert knowledge of science, particularly biochemistry. Using the equipment stolen from his university laboratories, we set him up in the city’s pump station. While we extracted the required goods, we’d been collared by the campus security. After a brief standoff with the septuagenarian guards and a quick use of my healing skills to cure some of their ailments, our nemesis was finally revealed – Sheldon Lake.
A trillionaire with sociopathic tendencies and arrested development, he was striking back against the perceived selfishness of the modern generation who’d treated him like the cause of all their problems. I won’t lie. When I found out what he’d gone through, I kind of agreed with him. A dinosaur apocalypse was just a slight overreaction. Slight, mind you. A worldwide bout of spontaneous vomiting would’ve been sufficient. Twenty-four hours praying to the porcelain god would have them all thinking on their poor life choices.
I’m getting off track. I need to get this scribbled down and get back to my friends and dogs.
The outbreak happened, and it was everything I’d feared. Lake used the human propensity for greed to lure people to the epicentre of the horror. Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurs, and all manner of other creatures burst from their containers, devouring anything they could get their teeth on. The entire city descended into a human buffet. Using The Disciples, we rescued as many of the trapped civilians as we could. These efforts included the Campbell brothers, who I’d managed to yank from the jaws of death on an extremely unsafe bridge that collapsed without any intervention on my part. Honest, the thing just crumbled into the river. It was lucky only the dinosaurs got hurt. The thing was a death-trap. Engineering oversight, I reckon.
The brothers formed the leadership of the opposing faction in Marnmouth, controlling the other half of the city. They were no less brutal than my new faction, but we had bigger fish to fry. With our forces combined, they fought back as best they could and turned their attention to saving their own people.
Reaching a bit of a dead end, Cris and I headed off to try and discover the purpose of a secret location contained in a quest reward. It turns out that the secret was a failsafe mechanism that would fill the atmosphere with a gas that only affected the resurrected beasts. Apocalypse averted, and Lake would have dominion over a far less populated world. One that he would have total control over after wiping out the militaries of the world. They’d been targeted alongside ourselves during the first wave of modified, ravenous locusts.
In our struggle to secure the city, we proceeded to take on advanced main battle tanks, a shitload more dinosaurs, ruthless assassins, and rogue soldiers. Against all odds, our new alliance achieved that feat and allowed us to turn our attention to the cowering trillionaire. He was securely stashed away on a private island, protected by the latest in defensive military technology. We managed to bypass the security measures with the help of one of my would-be killers. I sensed in Morticia the same loneliness that had plagued my life as an unwanted child. Yeah, yeah, poor me. It sucks, so cut me some slack.
Reaching the island’s dock, we found the remaining mercenaries completely demoralised. They fled in droves at the first sign of danger, leaving only the strongest dinosaurs standing between us and the final boss. The creatures were cyborgs, as much machine as meat. A vile blasphemy against nature and the feared hunters they had once been.
It was far too close, but the incredible gift provided by Bart in the form of a living computer managed to get us into Lake’s building before we were eaten by the monstrosities. Their creators lurked in the same location as the trillionaire, imprisoned and guarded around the clock. The best and brightest of the scientific community from across the world, kidnapped and put to work on bringing the crazed ideas of the megalomaniac to life. Among them was Cody and Liza’s missing mother, Janice. What promised to be a joyful reunion turned into a nightmare when it was revealed she was a true believer, fully supporting Lake’s evil scheme. That was an issue that high-priced therapists would need to work through with them after we’d completed our trials.
Meanwhile, we were forced to put ourselves at Lake’s mercy when he threatened to kill a group of children. After being gassed, we awoke in an underground chamber. The vast cavern was home to more than darkness and damp. Lake’s personal toy stomped out to kill us. A gigantic, robotic Tyrannosaur. The perfect example of inordinate wealth combined with a spiteful, murderous nature. We’d almost fallen against the mighty construct. Through grit and sheer bloody-mindedness, we’d somehow prevailed and destroyed the overpriced tin can.
Our final enemy was cowering in his personal chambers. Lake’s threat against the children had been a bluff. Their cries were stolen from a movie, and played over loudspeaker. His pitiful attempts to beg for his life had been for nothing. I could only picture the millions that had been killed by his plot. I’d taken great pleasure in feeding him alive to the creatures he’d brought back from the dead. There was something poetically karmic about the Pteranodons tearing him apart after the hell he’d unleashed on the world.
And that just about wraps it up for Osterland.
A modern world with a prehistoric problem.
Another victory to add to the tally.
I think my belly is empty again. It’s not gurgling and complaining anymore. I’m going to go and spend the last bit of time with the others. I’ll see you in the next world.
Pray for us.
Chapter 1
Mrs Atkins had quickly returned with our hot drinks. Only after minutes of polite refusal did she return to knitting the scarves, instead of collecting a few packs of condoms from the unmanned corner shop. I knew it was unmanned because the furore in the streets outside was still in full swing. It was a bit of a mind fuck to have experienced the horror of the price many days in the past, only to wake again in the midst of the crisis minutes later.
The news on the TV was no better, limited in scope by the mere two hours that had passed since volunteering. I turned it off less than a minute after switching it on. My world hadn’t had any time to process what was going on, and I was beginning to feel like an alien in more places than one.
“Shall we go over the park and enjoy the sun?” I asked my party, no longer able to listen to the screams.
Honey and Marco had already made up their minds at the p word and bolted to the front door.
“Looks like that’s a yes,” said Cris. “Do you mind if I bring my mug?”
“Not at all. Sun, you’ll get to see another side of my world. A greener one.”
She glowered at my pitiful accommodation. “Good. I dislike this place more each time we arrive.”
The quick run down the stairs cut off the wails of the grieving from the main road. Emerging into my tiny garden, the woman’s cries were audible again, but muted.
“Try not to listen to them,” said Cris.
“You can still hear my thoughts?” I asked as I opened the rear gate.
“No. Your head keeps turning like The Exorcist, trying to make them out.”
“So you can’t hear me?” I tried picturing a candlelight dinner with fine French cuisine.
Cris didn’t pick up on it at all. “Bart’s little trick doesn’t work here. And you’re not responsible for what’s happening out there.”
“I guess,” I replied, joining the dogs at the roadside.
To no one’s surprise, the street was empty and I gave my pooches the signal to go. They raced off and started to frolic with each other, playfighting across the grass.
“No guessing,” Cris continued as we crossed. “You’ve still not died. None of those lost lives are your burden to bear.”
Sun’s dark demeanour had softened as she marvelled at the large, well-tended park with its trees, pond, and acres of lush lawn. “This is almost like Kherrash.”
