Shaman's Call- Frostburn: A Litrpg Adventure Read online

  I couldn’t say for sure since the one time I had seen one before it had glowed red in the danger sense system the game provided. Red meant deadly threat for whatever party you were in at the moment. Glowing red essentially meant not a snowball’s chance in hell.

  So far, all the adventurers had mostly avoided it. I knew of a party of level twenty-fives that was wiped when trying to take one on. This wasn’t something that luck would get me through. I had to find a place to hide. Hopefully, a cave with a small entrance.

  I reached an outcropping of rocks large enough for me to climb up on. Maybe there was a crevice on top, big enough to accommodate my fat backside but small enough to stop the wurm from getting me. As I was scrambling up the side of the rock formation, I realized another ogre problem. My hands were massive, but my fingers were relatively short and chubby, proportionally. It didn’t help with the climbing.

  When I made it to the top, I dared to look back. Almost instantly, I wished I hadn’t. Thirty feet out from the edge of the rock formation, the ground burst up in a geyser of dirt and rock. Even where I was standing was pelted with rocks.

  As the falling debris settled, I saw a creature out of a fever dream shared by Alice and Goldilocks. The creature had the head of a polar bear that was fifteen feet across and the large, segmented body of a centipede covered in white fur. Unruly tufts of white fur were growing out between each of the ten-foot-long segments. Each segment had a massive bear leg and paw on each side rather than the normal pointed legs of a centipede.

  It was quite a monstrosity. The bear jaw opened impossibly wide, and it roared in challenge at me. I could feel even my huge body being shaken by it as bear-pede saliva gave me an unwelcome shower. The hand gripping my spear trembled, and the sonic force was literally threatening to knock me off the outcropping.

  A quick notification popped up, but I had to push it aside. I felt rage and anger that this creature was trying to kill me. I didn’t want to be here. At least I didn’t want to be forced to be here. Now this thing was threatening to end my life. I didn’t even know if I would respawn.

  Yet for all that, I had given up the idea of hiding. I was Frank the Ogre, and I wasn’t going to be run down by a furry bug. Instead of giving in to the rage and leaping at the head that was coming down to bite me in half, I raised my hand. With no conscious thought I shouted, “Flameburst.”

  I felt the mana surge through my body as I willed a bomb of fire to burst inside the cavernous mouth coming for me. In my head I saw the bear-pede’s head explode from the fury of my magic. The reality was far more depressing.

  You deal fire damage: 11

  The flames exploded inside the mouth alright, but the entire spread couldn’t have been more than a couple feet wide. The bear-pede didn’t seem to be hurt at all. If anything, it was startled. That bought me a second to think as the massive head pulled back and then shook from side to side.

  When it looked at me again, there was raw hate in those black eyes. It wasn’t just coming after me for a kill. This was personal. Apparently, it wasn’t used to its snacks fighting back. That didn’t deter me, though. I looked for other ways to use the spell.

  Those big, black eyes that were staring at me now seemed my best chance. I envisioned boiling the liquid in those eyes with my fire spell. I held my hand up again and shouted out, “Flameburst.” This time, I willed the orb to appear inside its eye.

  Another notification popped up, but I ignored it as my sphere of fire came into existence, not inside the eye of the behemoth but right outside of it. At least I saw it had caused critical damage.

  You deal fire damage: 42 (critical hit)

  Again the enormous head shook. I waved my hand and began chain casting the spell. I could have shouted the word faster, but something about the magic wouldn’t allow me to cast it more than once per second. Still, even at that speed, and even targeting the eye repeatedly, I only hit it three more times. The other flame bursts exploded harmlessly against its thick hide, doing nothing more than lightly scorching the white fur.

  Ten more Flamebursts were all I had the mana for, and then it was back to running. Not that I thought I had a chance. At least the bear-pede was being more careful because of the fire. Finally, though, its hatred of me won out and it lunged for me again.

  What I hadn’t noticed while blasting away at the bear-pede was how the rest of the creature’s body was now coiled around the rock outcropping I was standing on. Some brilliant tactician I was. I had allowed my only escape route to be cut off. So, when it lunged at me, I threw myself to the side and thrust my spear at the same eye I had been targeting.

  Luck is a fickle mistress and one with a sense of humor because not only did I make contact with my spear, but I drove it straight into the center of the beast’s eye.

  You deal piercing damage: 107 (devastating critical) You have blinded frost wurm’s right eye.

  I would have cursed about the fact that I had dealt more damage with one thrust of a pointy stick than I had with all my magical attacks, except I was already busy cursing about my predicament. When I leapt off, it wasn’t onto the snowy ground. No, I leapt right into the segmented coils of the bear-pedes body. It might end up killing me, but I’d bite my tongue off before I called it something as inaccurate and lame as frost wurm.

  That attitude didn’t save me from being repeatedly batted about by massive bear-like paws and then squeezed tight by its body.

  You have taken damage:

  34 blunt

  11 piercing

  22 blunt

  13 piercing

  37 blunt

  9 piercing

  39 blunt

  11 piercing

  44 crushing pressure

  My HP bar was plummeting, but I didn’t need to see that to realize that I was in deep doo doo. The system might quantify the damage as blunt for the paws and piercing for the claws, but all I knew was it felt like being dragged behind a car over broken glass. I felt my skin tear and my bones break and then I was having the life crushed out of me.

  All of it stopped and for just a moment I hoped something else had distracted the monster. But no such luck. Instead, it was staring down at me. All of that malevolence was condensed into one eye. This was not going to end well for me. Both my arms were broken, and I was held immobile by its coiled body.

  Best to close my eyes as that maw came down over top of me. I could smell its fetid breath. The saliva was dripping down onto me. Yet it wasn’t biting down. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was doing. Its massive tongue lolled against me, pushing me by its sheer size up against the teeth on one side of the mouth.

  I bit down, unwilling to scream, as it seemed intent on playing with its food. Maybe this was revenge for its eye, but it pushed me back-and-forth, nibbling on me repeatedly, before finally ending it all. The worst part was that I remember being bitten in half. The notification that I got was one to remember.

  You have sustained fatal damage: bitten in half. Ogre Toughness activated. You may fight on for 11 seconds.

  Feeling my innards slide out of my upper half for eleven seconds is not an experience that I ever want to repeat. All I can say is that shock or Ogre Toughness, whatever that was, saved me from the pain. I only felt a numb anger as I drifted off. All the toughness in the world couldn’t save me when my arms were broken, and I was being squeezed down a giant throat.

  Dying clearly sucked, but the final notification at least gave me some hope.

  You are being sent for respawn.

  Chapter 3- Being Useful

  Instead of waking up in a cemetery or church as were the most usual respawn spots for players in Legends of Selmia, I saw blackness engulf my vision and then was floating bodiless in a vast ocean of light. There were occasional blips of brighter light against the pure white background, but they came and went so quickly that I couldn’t track them.

  UNABLE TO RESPAWN- HI HAS NOT SELECTED A RESPAWN POINT.

  LEVEL 1- MAY ONLY SELECT 1 BIND SPOT

  OPTIONS:

  1) Original formation location

  2) Spot of death

  3) Ogre Fortress of Malgrim*

  4) Ogre Village of Ghazban

  So, this was cool. I was glad to be alive. If I had been a player, without a bind spot, I would have just reformed in the cemetery of whatever starter zone I began in based upon character race. For me now the original formation location would have put me in the cave with the snapjaws. Although that would be preferable to the spot of my death, since that was likely still occupied by a furious bear-pede.

  At least I could pick my bind spot, well from a short list. One and two were right out, leaving the fortress and the village. My initial reaction was the fortress, but then I realized I had no idea where either of them was. The fortress might be more of a city, but it needed to be close to what I knew so I could gain an advantage. I had already figured out several good hunting spots, but needed to be close to them.

  I figured I had nothing to lose, so I called out, “Excuse me. Can anyone answer some basic questions?”

  What felt like a minute passed with no response, but likely it was only a few seconds. Patience wasn’t exactly my strong suit.

  “Greetings, I am sub-AI X4.X1. I can answer basic questions for a new monster corps Hybrid Intelligence,” said a robotic voice, which spoke out of thin air.

  “I can’t see you. Where are you?”

  “Sight is unnecessary; however, I was warned about you low integration HI’s,” the same voice said. Meanwhile, a small square robot materialized out of nothingness. It was maybe three feet tall and just as wide. Two droid-like legs stuck out of the bottom on spring legs. It looked like a wider version of the Star Wars droids from the old holo-films, the remakes
from 2164 not the old ones. You could only learn about those in a holo-museum.

  “That’s better. Now, where am I?”

  “You are in the loading matrix,” the robot answered. He clearly wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

  “You’re gonna have to explain what you mean by loading matrix. Try to remember this is all new to me,” I said.

  “The loading matrix is where all monster corps intelligences go upon respawn even if it is normally only for a nano-second. This includes those run by reactive AI’s and you, the supposedly better HI’s.” His tone may have remained robotic but there was something about the way he spoke that made me sure he didn’t hold the opinion that HI’s were better in any way.

  “Okay, so this is like a train station between trips. When I go back will I be in the same body as before?”

  “That is not possible. Your prior avatar was destroyed by the frost wurm,” X4.XI said.

  “Bear-pede.”

  “What is a bear-pede? There is no listing of a bear-pede in the database. Running system check.”

  “Easy, don’t blow a circuit there. A bear-pede is what I’m calling that hairy son of a gun that bit me in half,” I said, laughing.

  “The designation is frost wurm, not bear-pede. There is no such designation.”

  “Well frost wurm is a lame description for that monstrosity, so I refuse to use it.”

  X4.XI didn’t respond for a couple of seconds and then suddenly said, “Inquiry has returned. Core AI has accepted your input. Henceforth all MOBS formerly designated as frost wurms shall be designated bear-pedes.”

  “See, you can make a good decision if you want to,” I said.

  “I made no decision. I simply reported your input to the AI network. It caught the attention of the Core AI, and he modified the system. This meets one term of your contract under which you volunteered to become an HI for the monster corps.”

  “Volunteered? I didn’t volunteer for sh…” I began, but was interrupted by the AI speaking in his clinical voice. He read off for me the relevant portions of the contract I had signed in order to join the closed beta as a bug tester. I really wished that I had read the whole thing now.

  I let it go. There was no way I saw myself winning an argument with X4.XI. “So back to my question, I wasn’t asking if I would be returned to the same avatar. I was asking if I would return as an ogre.”

  X4.XI responded, “Yes, you are part of the static monster corps division. Your purpose is to learn and help design optimal play patterns for ogres. Advancements may be considered but are not guaranteed. However, you are entitled to a minor boon because of your naming convention.”

  “Okay, so always gonna be an ogre, check. Now what is a minor boon?” I asked.

  “It is a way for the AI system to encourage you to contribute in meaningful ways. Because of your suggestion a type of MOB received a new designation. The change may even go further than that as the AI network will evaluate your naming convention and may make further changes to other MOBS in the future.”

  “That tells me what its purpose is, not what it is.”

  “Yes, yes,” X4.XI said. “It would be so much more convenient if you had at least some rudimentary access to the AI network or even your own bio-digital coding.”

  I wanted to make a comment about how it would be fine by me if he granted me access to any or all of the aforementioned, but I didn’t think he had a sense of humor or was even a he. I didn’t want to come off in the wrong way now, so I just let him continue.

  “Options for minor boons include +1 to any base stat, +1% resistance to any type of damage although there are caps on those at 20% physical and 50% elemental. You can also be granted a basic skill, or one level for any basic skill or spell.”

  “Intermediate boons can be double those, or a new minor spell or skill, as well as a piece of equipment of uncommon or lesser rating.”

  “Major boons include +5 to two stats, +10% to any resistance with the same caps, a journeyman level skill or spell with certain limitations, minor status modifications including permanent spell like abilities with limited daily uses, or faction modification.”

  “There are also grand boons but those are not applicable to our conversation.”

  I sat there taking it all in and then realized something. Looking at X4.XI, I asked, “I thought you said I only got a minor boon but then you told me about Intermediate and Major boons. Why is that?”

  “The system has upgraded your boon to a major boon. Further analysis suggests that this naming method will increase player enjoyment by as much as 4.3% during the initial encountering of new monsters. This defies logic, but players are illogical to begin with,” X4.XI answered.

  I got excited at that point. Gaining an extra stat point or skill wasn’t something I would have turned down, but it wasn’t exactly exciting either. The major boons, on the other hand, had tons of good stuff. I threw out the bonus stat points right away as a dummy prize. Sure, it would have been valuable, but I could gain stat points by leveling.

  The damage resistances might be useful because they weren’t gear dependent. Of course, I didn’t know if they would stack with gear, but having a 10% reduction to say physical damage would be a huge boon.

  Gaining a higher-level spell or skill would give me an early game boost, if I could use it correctly. Yet that benefit would fade with time. The same might be said of a spell-like ability. It would probably be broken early on, but would have a decreasing value unless it scaled.

  I tried to ask A4. XI some questions about the boons, but he was not very forthcoming. Once I learned that a spell or spell-like ability boon would be determined by whatever the AI network thought was most valuable to me, I threw out that option. So, what did that leave?

  I grinned or would have if I had possessed a face at that moment. I should have seen it from the very beginning. I didn’t want to be a monster, and the system might have just given me a way to change that. I mean, I would still be a monster, but at least I might be able to play the game, or rather live my life with the peeps I wanted.

  “I choose a faction modification, so long as it applies to the faction of my choosing.”

  XA.XI was silent for a moment, something which I was coming to associate with him communicating with the AI network. I assumed that communication was happening at some astounding speed, which begged the question of how I even noticed it was happening, but I would leave that issue alone for now. Finally, he answered, “That is acceptable. But note that the faction can only be changed by 4000 points. It is not enough to make you the king of the ogres or anything like that.”

  My incorporeal grin got bigger as I said, “That is fine. I choose the general faction for Players.”

  “Wait, that makes no sense. You are part of the monster corps. You will only lose faction with the players again as you kill them,” XA.XI replied.