Rewind: A Grimdark LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1) by James Callum (reading tree .txt) 📕

tunnel. He didn’t get his shield up in time and the jagged tips of the Skeletal Beast’s fingers tore straight through the armor on his side.

Blood gushed from the savage wound. Jacob pushed forward, staggering to one knee and forcing himself back up again as he put as much space between him and the creature as possible.

Predictably, it tried to reach in but couldn’t quite get its whole hand in. The tunnel was barely large enough for Jacob to stand upright in, something he was having an increasingly difficult time doing.

His Health was bottoming out as his side leaked a considerable amount of blood. The quarter of his Health quickly shrank toward a sliver.

Another [Cinder Ampoule] was summoned and crushed, revitalizing him from near-death.

“Six left,” he muttered to himself, leaning hard against the wall and keeping an eye on the Skeletal Beast raging in the larger tunnel beyond. “Man I really hope I don’t have to go back out there.”

Wounds recovered, Jacob straightened and raised his fiery [Mace]. If he had any hope of getting to the bottom of the catacombs, he would have to do it while avoiding that beast.

Eventually, even the scraping and clawing of the Skeletal Beast faded as Jacob followed the tunnel as it bent ever downward toward his goal.

19

“Just another obstacle,” Jacob said, staring at the curtain of drifting fog. The sound of his own voice in the dark soothed him. The dead would know he was there well before the sound alerted them. They held a deep hatred for the living that pierced through the thickest shadow.

But it was no undead skeleton that he feared. This was a Crossing, one of the few areas in Pyresouls Online that allowed players to mingle. It also meant it would be more dangerous, usually with several puzzles that were best completed by working together.

Jacob stared at it for several seconds. He could go back and take another path but it would involve a lot of backtracking. The deeper he delved into the catacombs the more refined the structures became. Natural caverns gave way to worked corridors with fitted stone slabs as flooring.

A vague memory of Alec talking about a Crossing deep within the catacombs played in his head. He must be on the right path then. But he was far from ready to face other players.

If they were anything like Alec made them out to be, they would sooner kill him than work together. Approaching the gray mist that fell in a constant sheet, obscuring the room beyond, Jacob couldn’t help but remember Kim’s face.

He found himself instinctively cupping his hands, fingers – and thumbs, he thought with a smirk, remembering Kim’s words – pressed together. The red flame blossomed in his palms.

This was no magic he ever heard of. It was not inscribed upon his single Spell Gem. And yet there it was. A warm flame that reminded him of a miniature Pyre. Its soothing heat soaked into his bones and began to grow, enveloping his hands until he could no longer see them.

Worry rippled through Jacob as the ruby flame began to grow still. It had never done that before. A thread of the gray fog separating the Crossing from Jacob’s world stretched out to the flame in his palms and began to burn away. Before Jacob could do anything, the flames raced along that thin connection like a fuse.

With a flash of light and an explosion that blew Jacob onto his back, the flames vanished. Coughing through the smoke that filled the narrow corridor, Jacob rose to his feet and summoned his [Kite Shield] and [Mace] to his hands, ready for whatever was about to come through.

His heart stopped in his chest when the face he saw was Kimberly O’Neill. Dressed in a tight suit of scaled mail, she sauntered forward with her signature weapon, a glaive. Though this one looked to be in much better repair than the one he remembered her using.

Her visor was tilted up, her baby-blue eyes regarding him curiously. “What’ve we got here?” she asked, pointing her glaive at him. Jacob found himself staring at its wicked blade, tracing its length to her mismatched gloves and on to her pretty freckled face.

He couldn’t breathe.

She was the last person he expected to see in Pyresouls, let alone so deep already. It had occurred to him that he might be the only one so far into the catacombs at this early juncture.

Kim’s appearance thoroughly disproved that theory.

As much as he wanted to tell her he knew her, they hadn’t met yet. Not for another year or more. She would have no idea who he was. It was a hard thing to remember.

This version of Kimberly was not a friend. Not yet.

He had to assume she would attack him just like anybody else. But still, he found it hard to keep his guard up. The impulse to walk over to her and wrap her in a tight embrace was stifling.

“Dude, you got something wrong with your tongue?” she prompted. Jacob could see the concern in the way she set her stance and tightened her grip on her glaive.

She was expecting him to attack.

“Sorry,” he said with a chuckle, trying to diffuse the situation. “I was going through that Crossing and… well, it sort of blew up.”

Kim looked over her shoulder at the empty archway once filled with falling fog. The area was still shrouded in a thin haze of smoke though and she didn’t doubt him.

With a shrug, she set the butt of the glaive against the floor and jerked her head toward him. “Let’s go.” And just like that, she turned her back on him and walked back through the empty archway.

Jacob’s head spun, and it took Kim giving him a second look over her polished scaled shoulder to shake himself from his stupor and catch up to her. He expected the archway to stop him, forcing him back for the offense.

He tensed, but nothing happened.

It made no sense. Crossings