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

stared us down. Captain Avery was in the middle of the crowd, leaning against a large wooden crate.

Avery was a snake in human clothing with thin, sour features and weak, villainous green eyes. He couldn’t have looked more sinister if he’d started twirling his thick mustache. He cleared his throat as we approached. “All right, you lot. Hand over everything in your possessions, and I may just let you live.”

Normally, I’d have just tried to barter, work out a deal that would benefit the both of us, but fresh from the death of one of my friends, I had no mercy to spare. “Gloom Knights, to war,” I whispered to the others.

Without waiting for their response, I bolted ahead to the nearest pirate, a thick man with chestnut tanned skin who wielded a length of pipe. He swung carelessly with the rusted metal, slow in his meaty hands. I sidestepped, parried his arm, and pivoted, bringing a right hook to his cheek, sending him to the deck and the pipe spinning out of reach.

Two others rushed in, one unarmed, the other held a wicked fillet knife. I flicked my foot out, catching the unarmed man in the side of the knee and shattering it. He fell to the deck, screaming, clutching his ruined leg.

The knife entered the edge of my vision, and I took a single step back. The blade passed an inch from my face. I shot my left arm under his to grip his wrist, and my right on his tricep, just past his elbow. Pushing with one and pulling with the other, I snapped his arm at the crook.

Taking the knife from his limp grip, I slid it across his throat, turning his screams to a gurgling death rattle.

I ducked the arterial spray and kicked the unarmed man with the broken leg in the face. With him stunned with a broken nose, I jammed the stolen knife home in his eye.

Blood sluiced across the deck and down the side of the Delilah in rivers.

In the minute it’d taken me to dispatch those three, Gil and Levi had torn apart the others, leaving only Avery to contend with.

He shook with fear and dropped his sword, staring wide-eyed at us like we were devils. “Please, spare me. I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. This trip had brought up too many old memories, and I was out of forgiveness—for him or myself.

“Ask the gods for mercy. You’ll get none from me.”

***

I cleaned the blood off my knife using Avery’s coat and stood up from beside his corpse, careful not to step in the pooling blood.

With the crew dead, we set about looting their bodies and the ship. It seemed Avery was a highly successful pirate, as the cargo hold was filled to the brim with chests of gold and items, though it paled in comparison to the dragon’s hoard.

Gil whistled long and slow as he took in the sight. “Well, looks like we still came out ahead during this trip after all.”

“Seems so, but we now have the same problem as before. How the hell are we going to move all of this back home?” I asked, searching for an answer. “Lake Gloom is halfway across Nexus, and none of us have leveled up Sailing.”

Levi just nodded along, not helping the conversation in the slightest. Gil perked up, before groaning.

“What?” I asked.

“All we need to do is hire a crew to sail her back to Lake Gloom…” he trailed off, leaving me to put two and two together.

“Not a bad pl—oh, son of a bitch.”

“Yep.”

“All right,” I said with a sigh and climbed the steps back to the upper decks. “Let’s go talk to Miguel.”

He’s on the other side of the isle, though. Looks like we’re burning our teleportation scrolls. They were incredibly expensive, but we’d made more than enough gold to cover the cost. We teleported to the gate on the outskirts of Arroyo, which lay just outside the borders of the West Kingdom.

The unmistakable odor rising from Causwick Bay was especially pungent when we stepped out of the gate.

“Must’ve had a good haul today, judging by the stench,” Gill said, breathing through his mouth.

On the many docks that lined the port, seven of them held large fishing vessels, and most of them had a steady stream of workers unloading the day’s catch. We walked past the docks towards the center of town, past a slew of worn and rotting wooden buildings. The salt and moisture in the air played hell with the buildings year-round.

“Shit,” Gil said, pointing up ahead. “We picked the wrong day to show up.”

A fleet of armored stagecoaches and wagons rode past, filled with dozens of armed Alliance soldiers.

“Long as we stay out of their way, they have no reason to notice us.”

The coaches headed to the edge of the docks, and the soldiers began loading up crates by the hundreds to the wagons with practiced efficiency.

“Looks like they’re loading cargo to take back to Central, so let’s get to the Cask before they get done,” I said.

The Gray Cask was the only stone building on the street, and it stood out next to its shoddy wooden neighbors. The loud drone of its patrons bombarded us as we walked down the steps to enter the tavern.

If the stench was bad outside in the open air, it was repugnant inside. We were assaulted with a pungent mixture of smells. Ale, wood smoke, and roasting meat mixed with the sour stench of sweat and the rawness of the sea and its bounties.

I tried to ignore the smell and sat down at the nearest empty table. Knowing that we’d be here for a while, I ordered a round. We sat, nursing our drinks for over an hour. I tried to keep my number down,