Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) by Grayson Sinclair (black authors fiction txt) 📕

and items stood before me, easily up to my chest. It was more gold than I’d ever seen before, millions, a literal fortune, and that wasn’t even counting the number of hero-tier items scattered around.

It was by far more gold than I’d earned in all the years since coming to this world. This amount of money was nothing short of a game-changer; it would set our guild up as a powerhouse. With this much wealth, we could challenge even the Alliance. For once, we could even the playing field.

“By the nine kings of Hell,” I whispered.

“Right! The hell we going to do with it all?” Levi asked.

“The better question is ‘how are we going to get it home?’” Gil asked.

He had a point. No way could we carry even a tenth in our inventories. We would need some expensive storage chests to store it all in, and even then, it would take several trips to collect it all. I was interrupted from my thoughts by Alistair.

“Guys, do you see that?” he asked, pointing at a dark wooden staff in the middle of the pile.

I tuned him out; it was a magic staff, something I had no use for. I ignored his continued ramblings and went back to logistics when Alistair suddenly bolted and went and grabbed it.

The moment he put his hands on the staff, the pile of gold started to glow. It’s a trap! ”Alistair, run!”

But it was too late. A bolt of lightning fell from the heavens and struck right through him. Ground had long since worn off, and he had no defense against the lightning magic; the spell was so powerful, it nearly disintegrated him, blasting him apart and sending a massive wave of force to throw us out of the immediate area. My health bar dropped to half just from how close I was, and it took a moment to recover from having my bells rung.

By the time we’d risen to our feet, the area around where the treasure had been was nothing more than a blasted wasteland, the gold and items reduced to nothing but bits of charred metal and ash. The ground was blackened glass, and Alistair’s body was gone. I checked my friends’ list only to confirm my fears. A small pile of items and gold remained behind—everything Alistair had on him when he died.

I stared at the spot where Alistair had been moments before, while a small wave of grief rolled through me. We survived a fucking elder dragon, only for him to die to a stupid trap. “Damn it.”

“Fool,” Gil said with a shake of his head. “That was a rookie mistake.”

“Yeah, and an incredibly expensive one at that. It’ll be god knows how long it’ll take him to level back up. That puts the Gloom Knights a man down, and he was our war mage. Markos sure as hell isn’t going to step up to the front lines.”

“Well, looks like we need to recruit some new blood. We now have two empty seats to fill.”

“Let’s worry about that later. Let’s get off this accursed island first,” I said.

“I like that plan,” Levi said and bounded forward.

Levi was a brutish man, in every sense of the word. Short brown hair and dull brown eyes. He was only a few inches shorter than me, but he outweighed me by an order of magnitude. Decked out from head to toe in the heaviest plate mail he could get his hands on, he was a real beast of a man. Absolutely nothing could get past that shield of his.

Following his lead, we set off back down the mountain.

Over the next day, we climbed down the rocky mountain and sheer cliff faces, back to the perpetually wet and sad gray stretch of beach where we’d landed our rowboat. Though it was less miserable-looking than when we’d arrived. The storms that gave Stormstruck Reef its name peeled back to reveal bright blue skies.

I nudged Gil and pointed up. “Think the dragon was the cause of the storms?”

“That’d be my guess, but I think we have more important matters to deal with right now.”

I followed his gaze out towards the Delilah, the ship we’d chartered to ferry us out here, and I knew what he was getting at. “Captain Avery isn’t going to let us walk, not when he thinks we have the dragon’s hoard.”

Levi spat on the ground. “Fucking pirates.”

“My sentiments exactly. Well, let’s get this over with,” I said and climbed into the rowboat and set back to the ship. The Delilah was a rough-looking ship, its name painted on the side of the vessel in neat letters, which stood apart next to the worn and somewhat rotted planks that comprised the hull. A brace of cannons lined the deck, with several more protruding below from the gun deck.

As we climbed aboard the brigantine, we were met with a ghost ship. Not a soul was on deck, which only confirmed what we’d suspected. They’ll ambush us when we leave the captain’s cabin.

From a look, I knew the others were thinking the same thing, but I was confident we could handle anything they tried to throw at us, so I sauntered forwards to the cabin without a care in the world, acting like a bumbling fool. “Avery, we’re back,” I called too loudly as I thrust open the door.

Avery’s cabin was what tipped me off in the first place; it was too well decorated for a simple merchant ship. Expensive wooden furniture and a black drake leather chair dominated the cramped space; it was a marvel he could move around at all.

The cabin was empty, and knowing what awaited us, we filed out of the cabin and found ourselves surrounded.

Nearly a dozen men, all dressed in mismatched clothing but all bearing the same hungry scowl as they