Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris (phonics readers .txt) 📕

“Should we go aid him, Yalfrigg?” the orc asked as everyone else was on their feet, waiting for him to issue orders.

The dwarf sighed, put his gloves on again, and dusted off the knees of his heavy armor.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a long day for everyone. I like Neleth, but sometimes he needs to be reminded of his place. I think I’ll go doff my armor and see to that human too. We lost enough men as it is for today.”

“I guess we’ll call it a night too,” the orc said.

“No!” Yalfrigg almost shouted just before he left the bonfire’s light range. “Ye think it’s important to know why I trust this human. And it’s not only because we’re both berserkir. You’re gonna listen to his story.”

For a moment nobody said anything and simply nodded at the tattooed dwarf. Once he turned his back again and walked away from the group, one by one, the warriors—the slaves sat back down, for all their accomplishments mattered little in the ludus. A naga, an orc, a minotaur, and a pair of vampire twins stretched their tired limbs and looked at Alexander expectedly.

“Continue with this story of yours, mortal,” the male vampire hissed and licked his lips in an intimidating manner.

Alexander, having paid little attention to the vampire’s mind games, produced a small flask of water and took a couple of huge gulps. “As I said, things were about to become bad. Worse than bad. They were about to become bloody. The die for my coming here had been cast.”

8

Money for nothing

A couple of months after I crafted the very first batch of arrows, my job as a developer in the game studio had become more of a front to my actual source of income. The okayish salary—by game development studio standards—I earned there accounted for no more than pocket money compared to what I was making in the Dark Energy Marketplace. As a side-effect, I’d stopped caring about what my department lead had to say about my hair and beard and so I had gone full Viking. And I enjoyed it!

My hospital bills were paid within the first month and after that, I’d started saving to pay off my student loan. Sooner or later, I knew I’d have to find a way to transfer larger amounts of money from the Apocosmos to my normal bank account without alerting the tax authorities, but that was something I’d worry about in the future.

At the moment, most of my weekly income came from the switch between the low buying prices of the weekend and the high selling prices at the beginning of the week. It initially struck me as odd that the Apocosmos work week was defined in the same way as in most of the countries in our world, but a quick search online—the Apocosmos online that is—revealed that the work week actually originated there and seeped into our world in the early 1900s. As much as I appreciated my workers’ rights as a Cosmos employee, I had no doubt that work never stopped in the Apocosmos. I might only have been selling arrows in the small confines of New York State, but there were thousands of worlds connected to the marketplace. I was doing well, but I was only a small fish in a small pond, or maybe just a puddle next to the ocean.

Having sorted out the issue of the money I owed, I finally managed to return to my old routine. I started visiting the gym six times a week again and even though working out didn’t bring a numerical change to my STR stat, I felt much more energetic compared with the previous weeks when I had completely stopped going. But getting back to it wasn’t as easy as I would have hoped. Up until now, Louie had been used to staying home alone for the couple of hours that I’d be in the gym. And he was still okay with me going to the gym and leaving him alone, but it just didn’t feel right anymore. Not now that I could be there and talk to him. So I started waking up at 4 a.m. so that I could be back home before he woke up.

Louie had actually developed quite a few new habits since he’d acquired his sapience or whatever it should be called. First of all, he loved YouTube. He started binge-watching Critical Role episodes and pretty soon fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons. However, since he couldn’t convince me to take him to join one of Leo’s sessions, he tried playing online a few times. Being a dog who wanted to play D&D with other people meant there were only two possible ways of doing this: join an online group in the Apocosmos, which was clearly a bad idea since we were trying to steer clear of people in it, or join Cosmos groups that didn’t use cameras.

After his first few attempts, he was pretty discouraged with how “dispassionate” and “vanilla”—his words, not mine—these groups were. What’s more, the people playing were mostly longtime fantasy and video game geeks and many of their references didn’t land for Louie. The last time he’d played with an online group, he made a list of things he didn’t understand while everyone else had laughed at the reference. The most frustrating instance was when his group had failed to save a group of villagers. They had found them impaled outside of the villain’s castle, and one of his teammates asked “Did Sephiroth do this?”

After I explained it to him, without spoiling too much, he decided it was time he started playing some video games. I was more than happy to accommodate him, so I purchased a few controllers that looked like the original Nintendo and Sega ones, though USB-powered, and I set him up with emulators on my desktop computer. This meant that I wouldn’t be able