The Call of the Coven: A LitRPG novel (Shadow Kingdoms Book 2) Read online

  It seems – at least from what I read – that Champion was responsible for the concepts behind a huge number of aspects of the game world, from unique species of monsters to the physical layout of the world map to NPCs to plotlines. One video explained that much of the world was based on a D&D campaign that he wrote and ran as a teenager. I guess that checks out – though there are other parts that are more like sci-fi or imaginative fiction.

  I guess there was a falling out at some point because it looks like Champion has nothing much to do with the game or the company now, just as his email told me. I searched for Viperstar Games, too – they are based in the city, not too far from here.

  Despite his having left the setup, it still feels pretty wonderful to have heard from someone who was so closely involved in its inception. I mean, granted Shadow Kingdoms is not all that huge, compared to some platforms. But still. To have heard from someone who was involved at the very start, took part in creating all the places that I have visited and adventured in during my time in the game, and may even have drawn up some of the characters that I interacted with. It’s an amazing thought.

  I’m curious, though, how Champion arrived at the notion that PreacherKorp kicked the players because they wanted to modify the storylines. If so, how would he even know about it, when he’s no longer in the inner circle? This also doesn’t quite fit with my own experience, either – whatever has been happening has not been about changing or creating storylines. Quite the opposite – events have been messing with the game, toppling kingdoms and assassinating powerful NPCs. It can’t have been the developers themselves, surely?

  My working theory is that the NPCs themselves, perhaps due to being left to their own devices for almost three decades of play time, have developed something akin to consciousness. The ones I interacted certainly seemed like people; I know I am young, but I don’t think I am wide-eyed and innocent enough to be fooled just by convincing plot points and characterization.

  And while it’s interesting to know that devs can only change things through direct in-game action, I don’t think there were any other players online after the reset.

  However, perhaps I am wrong. Maybe someone in the real world was behind it – perhaps even controlling the murderous Knights of Dawn for their own ends.

  Either way, I am going to do my best to stop the brutality of the knights.

  Chapter 3: Testing the Concept

  I don’t get many messages on my phone, but later that day there is one from Kashif. And this is all that it says:

  Check the news. K

  After our conversation of the evening before, it’s not hard to guess what this is going to be about, and my heart is racing with excitement. Can it be… could the game be back?

  I do as he suggests, and this is what I learn:

  The popular virtual reality game Shadow Kingdoms is to be relaunched early next month, according to a spokesperson for the company behind the game, PreacherKorp.

  Jaden Lucho, executive director and head of creative development at PreacherKorp, promised that the new version of the game would be both fun to play and safe. “Game worlds nowadays are like countries in the real world, and it is important that they are properly regulated,” he said.

  “Our relaunch of Shadow Kingdoms will allow us to run a more stable version of the game, without the risk from hacking or exploits. To do so, certain new features have been added to the code, but player accounts will still be compatible, and everyone will retain their previous level and equipment, I am pleased to say. The game world itself will be the same, too, with all the great features and depth that our player-base loves, but events will begin at a period 27 years later than the original version, providing a set of exciting new challenges.

  “If you haven’t played Shadow Kingdoms before, this 2.0 release is the best time to get involved, with several new starting locations to be added in the coming months,” he added.

  Lucho declined to comment further on what safety modifications have been made, simply stating that the game’s use of the standard Kjatari implant is ‘completely safe and rigorously tested.’ “What’s more,” he added, “the Kjatari will allow players to transfer their real world learning directly to the game. This means that Shadow Kingdoms is really more than a game…”

  He’s right about that last point, at least. I experienced it myself – my character and stats were reset, but I still had my crafting skill. I was also able to transfer things I knew from the real world – like swimming, for example – to my character.

  I am lost in thought for several minutes. One thing above all that stands out to me – twenty-seven years later. Why on earth would they choose to restart the game at exactly the point it had reached? Surely this is simply untrue, confirming what Connor Champion had said in his email, and making me a little suspicious about how much he knows and how he knows it. Perhaps there is a lot more than he is letting on. Could he be directly involved in some way? Some kind of pitch to take back his intellectual property? It might make a certain sense.

  I resolve to reply to Champion – to stay in touch with him if possible and get more of a sense of what he knows or believes about PreacherKorp. There’s a good chance that he knows what their real motivations are. Perhaps he will confide his plans in me if he thinks my coding skills could be useful to him.

  Of course, the timeline suggests something even more important to me – it seems that I can expect the Shadow Kingdoms world to be just as I left it. All of my friends – and the dangers they were facing – are still there.

  But I am not there to help.

  One other thing runs through my mind as I get up and walk to the kitchen for breakfast: “Game worlds nowadays are like countries in the real world…”

  So – the person who rules Shadow Kingdoms is like the ruler of a nation, or even a world.

  Perhaps the motivation of PreacherKorp is out in the open after all.

  * * *

  “I won’t be long. I’m just testing the concept, that’s all.”

  I am standing outside a small laboratory in our college building. It’s still really early – just after eight, and the corridors are quiet. Andros has agreed to keep an eye on things outside, and he will wait at a study desk located off the corridor and immediately opposite the lab. I told him that I need him around just in case I do manage to get into the game – because I don’t want to be in an immersive VRMMO game in public – the Kjatari implant acts like a headset, meaning I only see the game and nothing that is around me – but I can’t do it at home, either.

  Kashif is primed to take over from Andros later this morning, too. They have both told me they are happy to sit and get some work done, and make sure nobody comes in to disturb me.

  Finally – we have found a reason to work as a team. I smile to myself but don’t comment on the irony as I enter the tiny lab alone.

  The first job is to access the Kjatari implant itself. It’s still in my head, even though my uncle talked of it being ‘disconnected’ – I can feel the slight bump behind my ear. I know that they didn’t physically operate on me and that it must therefore still be connected to my brain by thousands of tiny fibrous connections.

  All they actually did was knock it offline somehow. And that means that it can be re-booted. Doing so will be the first step in getting it reconnected to Shadow Kingdoms – so that I can access the game world once again.

  I spend some time trying to get the thing to respond by running a series of troubleshooting scripts on my laptop. I try different frequencies – no doubt the hardware has functionality known to the manufacturers (and perhaps my hospital) that are not known to a layperson.

  And sure enough, after about half an hour (or it could have been an hour – time flies when I’m doing this kind of thing), I get the first sign of life. A response. An answer from the other side of the universe.

  Or to put in another way, the first hint that there may be hidden doorway through which I can access Shadow Kingdoms.
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br />   I check outside – Kashif is there now, exactly as promised (it must have been over an hour, indeed). I see a few other students in the distance, too, though nobody is nearby. Kash is sipping on a carton of juice and playing a game of his own on a laptop, headphones on. I catch his eye and he nods once, and then returns to what he is concentrating on. I smile, then close the lab door once again and get back to my work.

  Having got the implant to respond, there is still more to do. After all, I’m now no further on than the tens of thousands of others who play the game. Their Kjatari implants weren’t switched off like mine – they were active. But they were disconnected from the game.

  But from what I pieced together – and now apparent confirmation from Connor Champion – the game itself has kept running in their absence.

  That means I must find a way to get the implant to connect to the network. That is going to be difficult, because it is expressly trying to block players from accessing it. I ponder this for a moment. When I carried out my hack before, I disabled the section of code that recognizes a player’s personal login as well as the mechanism for scans for player status.

  Hmm… I pause for a moment. Is that what stopped me from being kicked with the rest of the player-base?

  I guess so.

  But I can’t have been the only one to do this, because there were still other players online at the time of the reset – as evidenced by the others who ended up in comas, and in some cases dying as a result of the neurological trauma this caused.

  So why did I stay in playing, rather than anyone else who was trying to cheat the system?

  And then I think… the only reason I thought there were no other players online is because I couldn’t see them. But they wouldn’t have been able to see me, either.

  I collapsed and was unable to escape from the game until the hospital disabled the Kjatari hardware.

  But what if I had not been found after I had collapsed – a player who was at home alone when it happened, for example?

  I dismiss this terrifying thought from my mind.

  As I start to fiddle with the code again, I try to force it to access the game, and as I expected, I am immediately kicked. But this is informative. There was a connection. Something kicked me. The game is running – with a kind of firewall to keep the players out for now.

  I scroll past the disabled section of code that previously allowed game developers to check on my status. Again, I sowed the seeds of my own problems – as I hacked the game to make my own status hidden, nobody could find out where I was, or what I was doing. Should I switch that back on? It would be safer… but until I know what motivated PreacherKorp and their “intermission”, I’m just not sure I trust them enough. I leave it as it is.

  I try several more things, tinkering, fiddling, switching off various features which I think might identify my headset as that of a player. If I can look like something else – an NPC perhaps – then the game might accept me.

  And then, just as I am beginning to get frustrated, something clicks. I toggle the internet location function – an old-school approach, if ever there was one – so it is unable to recognize me as logging in from a particular world location. Almost as soon as I do so, the Shadow Kingdoms launch screen opens up across the top of my field of vision – and this time I don’t get bounced.

  I check outside once more – I’ve not yet logged on, and can see what I’m doing. Kashif is still outside. I grab his attention. “This may take a while,” I say, unable to keep the grin off my face. He looks curious, excited even, but simply nods again, then silently holds both thumbs up before returning to his game.

  I turn back into the lab, locking the door behind me. After the last time, I am not taking any chances in terms of how long I might be logged on – but at least someone I trust knows where I am.

  I sit back down that the desk inside the tiny lab, mentally saying ‘log on’. There is a screeching noise, like the gearbox of a car being crunched and the accelerator revved simultaneously – that’s new and wrong, and I feel an ache of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.

  And then silence.

  I open my eyes…

  Chapter 4: Back at the Coven

  My eyes flicker and then open. And I see – ah, yes! I see it: the same room that I lay down in when I was last in Shadow Kingdoms. I am home – well, a home of sorts. I am where I last lay down within the game world – Maleki’s coven in the city of Vel.

  The room is small, with a single bed, a bookcase, and a tiny window. A glance in that direction suggests that it is daytime – as it is in the real world – and leaning closer, I see that the streets appear to be pretty quiet. Too quiet?

  My clothes are just where I left them… but my backpack and weapons are missing. Shit. I could do without having to take another shopping trip. I need to find where my companions have got to, and catch up with them if (as I assume) they have moved on from the Islands of Dubasa.

  I get up, hoping that I’ll be able to find at least one familiar character and discover what’s been happening. In principle, time should have moved on at the same rate as in the real world – around two months. But who knows for sure?

  On the positive side, I am not in my starter room near the blacksmith’s forge, so have not reset, it appears. And normally, even with a long time out of the game, nothing should have changed in terms of my stats and other key information, but what with the public vagueness coming from PreacherKorp today – possibly outright misinformation – it feels like I need to take a look sooner rather than later.

  First, I check ‘status’.

  Status: human, female, 26 hit points Name: Daria Level: Journeyman crafter Location: Vel, Isles of Dubasa Time: 11:17

  The same place, and the same time of day as the real world. And of course, I have to quickly hit the ‘calendar’ command, which also confirms the time again:

  Time: 11:17 Day: Thirdday, month of Obanask Year: Imperial year 47

  The notification about hit points also reminded me that they increased just before I left the game last time. Each character in Shadow Kingdoms has numeric hit points, and these reduce when you get injured. Character starting hit points are based on starting stamina plus/minus a modifier which is based on character class, +2 in the case of crafters. And when stamina rises, so do hit points, and you gain the same character class bonus plus an additional +3 each time you advance on your career path. This meant that I started with 20, which rose to 21 when my stamina leveled up, and then 26 when I advanced to the journeyman crafter rank.

  If hit points fall to 0, the character falls unconscious, leading to death if they are not healed soon after. For human players, that means a partial reset, returning to your starting location. Though not fatal, that’s something I really need to avoid.

  Next I check skills and stats, and find them also unchanged. The most notable ones are my crafting score of 32, my skill with the mace and chain of 21, and my archery score at 22, having been boosted by my latest dex increase. Nothing else is above 20, and most of the others are little more than defaults, with a level or so here and there. In terms of stats, a couple are above their starting level, and everything looks as I remember it:

  Strength: 16 Agility: 11 Stamina: 19 Dexterity: 17 Spirit: 12

  Finally, I check on my money situation, though I am already almost certain that it will be unchanged from my last day in game terms, and this is indeed the case, as I find when I mentally utter ‘wealth’:

  Copper: 15 Silver: 2479 Gold: 339

  I started off the game wealthy – thanks to buying real-world PreacherKorp credits – but I’ve managed to spend almost half of what I had in just a few days. In part, this is because money appears to be worth less than it was in Imperial Year 20, when my character was first generated. So that sucks.

  On the other hand, I still have enough to re-equip myself, as long as I can find my way to shops in safety.

  And so, unarmed, I push open the door and creep out into the upstairs hall of
the coven.

  * * *

  Again, things look much as I remember them. It comes as a relief that there are no signs of damage or bloodshed, and the minimal furnishings are pretty much as I remember. At least my worst fears have not been realized – it appears that the Knights of Dawn have not destroyed the place and murdered every member of the coven, and my other companions too.

  There are several other doorways on this level, but I make instead for the top of the stairs.

  “Hello?” I call, looking downwards.

  It feels strange to be back in the game – using my character Daria’s voice, feeling her clothes and the surface beneath her feet. That sense of hyper-sensitivity will settle down in a few minutes, I know, and Daria will just be ‘me’ once again.

  There is no response to my call, and I take another step forward, leaning to peer down the stairs. But just then I feel something press against the side of my neck, and I freeze, glancing sideways.

  The tip of a sword blade.

  Its holder has sneaked up on me and is holding it steady against my neck.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” I say softly, and I raise my hands, avoiding what may look like sudden or threatening movements. “I’m unarmed,” I add, “and a close friend to some of those who live here.”

  As soon as I say it, I realize that it was quite a gamble. Is the sword wielder friend or foe to the coven, and are Maleki or any of the others even still on this island?