Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) by Jez Cajiao (free ebooks for android .TXT) 📕

aside, pulling me into cover, and a voice I knew I recognized told me to be still and silent. The sounds of creatures moving nearby rose and fell.

Time passed, as someone forced a healing potion into my mouth, and I heard cursing as something seemed wrong with my head.

I blinked blearily as someone pulled off my helm, tearing my skin; then it was like I’d been plunged into an ice bath. I stiffened and my eyes were forced open wide with a gasp of pain.

The world came back into focus, and I blinked at all the blood on the wall and on Bane’s hands as he held my damaged helmet in one hand, helping to hold me upright with the rest.

I shook myself, looking about frantically, and saw the rest of the team were there, and that Oracle, sweet Oracle, was kneeling by my side, exhausted, as she struggled to get my last mana potion out of my bag and lift it to my lips.

I drank it, still in shock, then shuddered as she hit me again, healing me all the way to full.

I sagged back and Bane lowered me against the wall, then handed me my helm. I stared at it and let out a low whistle as I took in the cracks and the dented-in section; no wonder it’d hurt coming off.

I looked up, finding my entire team there. The gnome, Gint, was there too, seemingly ignoring me. I frowned at him, and Oracle spoke up quickly.

“Jax, it’s okay. He helped us,” she said reassuringly before continuing through our mental link.

“He turned up halfway through the fight; he has a nasty-looking crossbow in a bag, and he helped to take down the other gnomes, but he’s not happy about it. He can talk now, more or less, but he’s seriously pissed. Oh, and he swore the Oath,” she added as an afterthought.

“Okay… thank you, Gint, for helping us…” I said, and he grunted and hunched his shoulders.

“It’s Giint, actually, Jax,” Oracle corrected me gently, reaching out and brushing my hair back, then kissing my cheek.

“Are you okay?” she asked privately again.

“I am…” I said to her in the same way; then I saw the look she gave me. “Honestly, I am. I just had my bell rung a bit; what happened?”

“When you crashed into the side of the building, you took out a section of the supports, and the red-robed mage fell out of sight when some of the roof caved in. It’s somewhere inside, and the one in the black robes came up here as fast as it could. Bane managed to make it to you first and get you to cover, thankfully,” she said aloud again, and I nodded gratefully to her before reaching up and bracing myself against the wall, then climbing to my feet.

“Sorry, Giint,” I apologized to the gnome, who glared at me, then huffed and went back to staring at his hands. “What’s going on here?” I asked, and he looked up at me. For the first time since we’d healed him, I got a good look at his face.

The seemingly ingrained snarl and general hatred of the world around him was gone, instead replaced with a bone deep self-loathing that seemed to shriek up at me from his gaze.

“What’s… wronnng?” he croaked, his voice sounding old and hard-used. “What coulddd be wronnng? I…wake… from a nightmaaare to find it’sss my liiiife. I kiiilled my wife. My childrrren. I ate…” He broke off, looking away and clearly trying to fight back tears and disgust. He started to shake, and more tears flooded his cheeks, carving tracks in the filth that coated his skin.

He was dressed in a mixture of clothes, clearly scavenged from other dead gnomes. He wore thick leather pants with reinforced knees and multiple pockets, a tunic that, while grubby, was still an off-olive green color and was similarly reinforced, along with four sets of tool belts looped around his waist, one over each shoulder to the opposite hip in a bandolier style, and one cinched to his right leg in a spiral that wound around it.

The outfit itself was obviously strong and made to last, which was the only reason he was decent still, considering that it was torn, shredded, burned, and filthy with every possible combination of stains that I could see, not to mention it reeked. I knew that was, at least in part, the body, or bodies, that had worn the clothes recently.

“What happened here?” I asked him, glancing up at the building above us, and back at the mushroom fields, seeing the trail of corpses, flaming wrecks, and destruction that both I and my team had left to get here. I could see movement in the distance, but it seemed we’d actually managed to break through even the fanatic insanity of the gnomes by now.

“The ‘Maassster’ happened,” he said flatly. “He… itttt… came. Itttt fed on usss, made ussss ssslavessss… then ittt took the waterrr… all we haaaad leffft wass the metalll and morrre drinkiiiing metal, morrrre madnesss.” He refused to look at me now, twisting his fingers together over and over and shuddering as the sobs tore through him.

“What’s the ‘Master’?” I asked him, and he just shook his head, refusing to say more.

“He doesn’t know,” Oracle said softly. “We questioned him on the way over as well; all he knows is that he or it has powerful magic, and it makes them do whatever it wants. He vaguely remembers before it came, when the gnomes lived here; they literally lived here for over a century, in relative peace, the specters seemingly content to not kill them if they didn’t enter the other portions of the city. They’re from a scout vessel that found the Sunken City. They tried exploring it, and a party got cut off, trapped down here. The rest of the crew came to rescue them and got trapped as well. The spirits were still about, then; the revenants of the