The Demonic Games (Disgardium Book #7): LitRPG Series by Dan Sugralinov (e book reader free .TXT) 📕

fish in a barrel. Shemshur the tamer, aka Theodor Novak, who I shared a table with on day one, was armed with throwing axes.

“Thirty seconds!” shouted templar Alison, now nothing like the girl I’d seen drunk to the point of unconsciousness at the Boom Boom club. She fought with focus, her cheekbones scarlet and her eyes burning.

“Let’s speed it up, people!” barked Hellfish, who couldn’t have put two words together last night. “Don’t spread your damage, focus fire!”

Quetzal gave the same command, and then, noticing that I was approaching Destiny, he shouted to the sniper:

“Fish, help the kid with Des, she has shields, I can’t take her alone!”

“On my way!”

The two leaders launched into Destiny, whose eyes whirled furiously. The werewolf sniper shot the silver ranger in the back. Quetzal immediately put himself between me and the elf girl, then smashed both her legs at the knee with a single ferocious strike. The ranger fell down, but survived and withstood a range of other attacks and hits from Hellfish before she stopped twitching and her eyes glazed over.

“Three seconds!” Anna shouted. Miss Commonwealth was furiously jabbing her spear into Geyserix, a henchman of Marcus, but she wasn’t going to finish him off in time. “Help me!”

“Step on it, guys!” Hellfish shouted furiously.

But they weren’t fast enough.

When the Banshee Queen’s Cry effect ended, the remaining Markers and Desters came back to life and returned to the fray with renewed fury. They were clearly in the minority, and leaderless. Expecting no danger, I almost decided to stay and see how it all ended, but my common sense won out — I still only had one life left. Shame I can’t fly off! I thought, stepping back to the edge of the glade and hoping my allies would finish off my enemies so I could wait for Overburdened to end and take off into the sky.

The slow pace was infuriating — running, running, but not getting anywhere, like in a dream. I’d managed to walk around fifteen feet when one of the Markers died in the center of the clearing, the light priest Inchito. The instant before his death, he cried out a prayer to Nergal. No god came to his aid, of course, but a shining silhouette split off from Inchito’s corpse, spread huge wings, took off into the air and hovered.

Quetzal was the quickest on the uptake:

“Scyth, fly away!”

“I-I-I-I ca-a-a-a-aan’t…” came my drawn-out answer. The gladiator widened his eyes, looked at my debuffs, saw I couldn’t escape.

“All to me! Cover Scyth!” Quetzal shouted. Leaving their unfinished foes, his people began to retreat. “Hellfish, get your guys here!”

“Raid, everyone to the Threat!” Hellfish commanded as he ran. “Sixth defensive formation! Rogues into stealth! Focus on the squishies!”

Orders streamed in from both leaders. The contestants on the battlefield leaped chaotically into action. Only once I was boxed in by the members of both raids did I understand from their chatter what was about to happen.

“Shit! Inch managed to get it after all…” Kara swore in surprise. The ice mage stood before me, her arms cast wide, ready to drop a Snowstorm on the heads of reviving foes. “Mass combat revive. Even more imba than Scyth’s tricks! Where did Inchito get that?”

“It’s a perk,” Quetzal answered. “He got it not long before the Games.”

“What do you expect from the strongest light priest in the world?” Equilibrium muttered. “Look, it’s starting!”

Sunlight filled the glade, triumphant organ music began to play as if from the air all around. Columns of light descended, lancing into the bodies of Marcus and Destiny’s people. With the sound of breaking glass, the gleaming columns dispersed and fired down again into the land around Inchito. Disappearing again, this time they left behind players, revived and rising. Marcus stood and shook himself off; Destiny smiled wickedly as she proudly straightened herself.

Once they had all revived, the shining winged silhouette of Inchito disappeared into thin air.

“That’s it now, Inch won’t revive until tomorrow,” Blondiecat the paladin said, nervously biting her lip.

Apart from her and Equilibrium, Quetzal and Hellfish had put another paladin next to me, Yermak, who I’d thrown into the chasm on the second day. Judging by his friendly slap on the back, he didn’t hold grudges. All three of the leaders gave orders to cover me and throw shields on me if necessary.

The four strongest raids of the Demonic Games stood opposite each other, each side waiting and sizing up the other. The fifth, and largest in number, was busy reviving at the graveyard. The lull after the shattering sound deepened into dead silence, as if the usual sounds had been sucked out of the world — the birds of the Chasm stopped singing, the grasshoppers paused. The trees emitted a barely audible creak and stretched their branches toward the corpses. The grass around the bodies writhed and filled with red, like a mass of leeches feeding on blood.

Suddenly, aggressive guitar chords beat against my ears. Infect stood next to Tissa, playing rousing hard rock. The enemies answered with the flash of combat buffs spreading across the raid.

“If it gets close, I’ll put you in Iceblock,” Kara whispered to me. “But…”

The battle began before he could finish. The air crackled with lightning and fireballs, roots and puddles of acid grew beneath our feet, arrows, bolts and bullets shattered against shields.

Twenty of Hellfish and Quetzal’s people stood against almost a hundred of Marcus and Destiny’s. I had enough time to see that we had no chance, and decided not to hide, but instead to try and take at least a couple of them down with me.

The enemy melee fighters and a few pets and minions started rushing toward us. Running up and gaining speed, a massive stone golem rammed into our ranks, tossing the tanks in all directions. Behind him came a