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

the living room. “We’re rich, we’re so rich. Let’s go out. Let’s celebrate. Let’s live life with bacoooon.”

He ended his sentence with a long excited howl.

“Wanna go for a walk?” I asked him in the same way that had got him pumped up every day for the past three years.

“Heck yeah!” he said and turned around, waiting for me to put the harness on him.

Another thing that had changed a lot since Louie and I had started communicating was our runs. For starters, he was much sassier whenever I outran him or pushed him too hard. He couldn’t talk, of course, while other people were around but he wouldn’t hesitate to bark at me until we took a break. What’s more, I could no longer listen to my metal music with my headphones in. No, no, no. Louie wouldn’t have that. We had to carry around a small Bluetooth speaker that played his favorite kind of music, because of course he’d developed a keen taste in music. And of all the genres ever created in the world, his favorite was surfer rock.

We must have been a very weird sight, perhaps even worthy of meme status if someone recorded and uploaded us onto YouTube. A dude in shorts and a sleeveless shirt running around with a corgi harnessed to his waist, carrying a little backpack of its own with a speaker blasting out “Surfin’ Hootenanny”. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like an intro to a “Crazy people in public” compilation video. But I couldn’t have cared less what others might think, as long as I got my cardio and Louie was enjoying himself. Worst case scenario, I would be deemed eccentric by a bunch of people swimming in the bliss of their own ignorance about the world. As if I gave a fuck what they thought of me.

We returned home roughly an hour later and immediately split into different rooms. Louie went straight to the couch, practically falling unconscious from his exhaustion. He didn’t even put on a video before falling asleep as he had been doing over the past days. I, on the other hand, got straight in the shower to wash the sweat and fatigue away. Only after I got out, seeing Louie sleeping on his back and dream-running with his little paws, did I notice the notification light blinking on the DEM tablet. I wrapped a towel around my hair and tapped the screen, curious to see what had triggered it.

Your items (Bone Arrow (Birch, 20pcs) x200) have been sold to Abrathion Halciu.

Your listing is now inactive.

Your selling price was $24,000.00

The Dark Energy Marketplace’s fee accounts to $3,600.00

A grand total of $20,400.00 has been added to your account.

Your new account balance is: $39,750.00

That was amazing. This guy had single-handedly bought my whole stock. On a Sunday! Usually I would get a notification when my sale order was fully carried out on Mondays and there would be a breakdown with the names of the different buyers and the number of batches they’d bought. My price being high as it was, I was making money from many people buying small quantities. Never all at once.

The name of the buyer did ring a bell, but I quickly dismissed it. I had probably seen it as a buyer over the past few weeks. That wasn’t really important. What was important was putting down an even bigger purchase order for materials so that I could restock my arrows and hopefully double my savings before tomorrow. Not wanting to waste any more time than I had to, I put down an order for thirty thousand dollars worth of materials. This would be my biggest purchase yet, but it seemed like a good time to ramp up production. Since I had nailed the basics, it was time to commence the second part of my plan: scaling.

Once the purchase order went live, I quickly glanced at the prices for wooden birch stems and bone grain in the sales section. The stem prices were at fairly normal levels, considering it was a Sunday. Oddly enough, there were only a few listings for bone grain, much fewer than what the standard for this time and day was, and the prices were all ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind would ever pay that much money for simple materials, but there were always a few of them. Before putting the tablet down and turning on my PS4 to continue my Assassin’s Creed Viking raid, I took a look at the purchases tab to find my order and check the purchase orders that ranked higher than mine because they were offering more money per material. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Consolidated view of Bone Arrow materials purchase orders

Merchant Name : Abrathion Halciu

Level : 22

Bone Grain : $85 (856/999,999)

The top order in the whole New York state was offering almost three times the amount I was for the materials I needed and there was no way his order of almost a million would be fulfilled anytime soon. And that name again. Not only was he the buyer who purchased all of my arrows, but I remembered where else I had seen it. He was the only competitor I had in the state as far as bone arrows went. But his prices were thirty percent higher than mine and he never dropped them low enough to cause me any problems. It seemed that this Abrathion had had enough of me undercutting him and had decided to disable me. And from what I could see from the order he’d placed, he had the means to do just that.

Putting down an order like that meant that he had more than eight million dollars in his DEM account and he didn’t care about binding them all in this one move that probably wouldn’t bring him any profit, if not certainly sustain him some losses.

Is this really the