Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

up to the top. For the third minute straight, he doesn’t attack me, just absorbing hits and replenishing his shield. Is he really going to try something big? This is bad.

Krash stops suddenly, grasping a thick branch with all four limbs. I barely have time to hear what he calls up to me.

“You never learn, nitwit!”

My whole body grows heavy, and I plummet downward. As I fall, I hear my last bolt of lightning break through his shield as he yelps in pain, but I have other things to worry about. I’m falling at ten times the normal speed; damage notifications are flying through the chat. For now, my resistance is holding strong, but I’m a goner once the crown ends or if I hit a big branch.

I’m able to slip out of the gravitational well at the last minute by grabbing hold of a branch. Still, the momentum carries me another fifty meters, and I end up right where we started the duel.

My two broken clavicles and two broken ribs heal quickly. But almost before I can pull myself to my feet, a second gravitational well drops me back down. The force is so strong that both of my legs break immediately, and I find myself lying on my back looking up at the sky. The well made a huge hole in the crown, raining leafy branches on me. A few larger ones pierce my body. My head and heart remain intact, though my right lung and crotch aren’t so lucky. Breathing before was hard; it hurts now. It starts to feel like my body is being crushed into the tree by the force of gravity, and the branch in my chest starts to sprout thanks to my healing. Are you kidding me?

The sunlight in the sky starts to fade, collecting into a single large cone. With each second, it grows brighter. The leaves of the tree around me start to catch fire.

Everything else gets darker. The city probably has no light whatsoever, and it’s only from where I am in the middle of the gravitation well that I can see the cone changing shape. My tree isn’t just flickering; it’s starting to burst into flames. Bastard! Bastard!

Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!

Bastard! Bastard! Don’t you dare touch my tree! My tree! My tree! My home!

Fourth-order resonance activated

Fifth-order resonance activated

Sixth-order resonance activated

Seventh-order resonance activated

Eighth-order resonance activated

 

My consciousness drowns in rage. Once again, I’m a malicious, vulnerable child. The world around me bathes in red.

“Screw you and your resonances, bastard! I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to respawn and kill you again! I’ll find your soul in the astral and make you suffer. I’m going to head into the Gray Lands after you and kill you once and for all, you hairy freak!”

The cone starts to press down, burning brighter, and I hear the scared voice of the shapeshifter off to my left somewhere.

“Spiritus autem lux!”

All I have time to see is a flash of light hitting my eyes before I’m sent back to the respawn point. My consciousness drifts off, and I’m already floating in darkness when I come to.

***

For the third day running, the entire guard at Castle Airis was on high alert. Neither Leon nor Nate had slept in the four days since Sagie published his video on the Project Chrysalis site. Leon was the only one of the young gods who wasn’t part of the attack on Valhalla, though nobody blamed him for that—the other gods knew what he had going on. For the last couple of years, they’d all had an unspoken agreement to support each other in their development.

The past couple of days had seen Kirk, Sagie’s roommate, interrogated by anyone who had anything to do with the dangerous criminal’s case. From what he said, they were able to piece together everything Sagie had done, starting with his appearance at the Coliseum in Kkhor and finishing with breaking into the maximum-security prison. The League of Hunters had a quest out for any reliable information about LJ and how he’d been able to hide his real name. That brought a girl out of the woodwork who agreed to tell the story for a million credits.

It turned out that Sagie had been going through treatment at Clover, a psychiatric ward located in the Sea of Loss near Tanatos. He’d broken out seven months before, even though nobody had ever been able to pull that off prior to him. The girl dumped him in Kurg, where he spent half a year and became a local landmark. Most of the locals and players passing by just took him for an idiot who started growing a tree.

But a month after the first demon invasion in Radaam, Sagie set off for the tournament. They knew everything he’d done after that thanks to what Kirk had told them.

There were dragons agreeing to help find the fugitive currently keeping an eye on the clinic. Once they’d heard that Margul’s killer had been found, they couldn’t get involved fast enough. They were all out searching the continent for Sagie.

Two brigades of a hundred high-level players each set off for Kurg and Kkhor, all masters of PVP fighting, tracking, and neutralizing opponents. Artifactors had prepared two mobile respawn points that Leon enchanted himself. Sagie was going to be chased back to them over and over again to the end of his days, and Femida would be powerless to help.

A mobile magic negator was set up around the altar in Kurg. Sagie was a mage, and robbing him of his magic reduced him to an uppity kid who was easy as pie to kill.

The second trap was set in Kkhor.

But Leon was worried Sagie had been able to create an altar to the nameless god.

Did he have abilities similar to the