Alpha Zero (Alpha LitRPG Book 1) by Arthur Stone (top 5 books to read TXT) 📕

The rewards I received were much more generous than usual. Perhaps that was my Measure of Order state at work, or perhaps garpikes had some unique loot-boosting characteristics.

Even with its smallish size, the fish had been level 4, which was nothing to sneeze at. It was a good thing I had boosted some of my attributes.

I was no longer the weakling I had been.

“Look what we caught, Beko! It’s a garpike. No scales, so no need to clean it. Convenient, don’t you think?”

Something was wrong with my ghoul friend. For a moment, I was scared that the fish might have hit him with some deadly fighting talent just before the final club blow. Beko himself looked like a fish out of the water. He stared at the prize, without blinking, and made awkward bubbly movements with his mouth.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked tensely, trying to remember the principles of CPR.

“It’s m— m— mine! It’s mine!” Beko screamed madly. Then he shook his head and calmed down a bit, but there was still something abnormal about his voice. “Ours. It’s ours! All ours!”

“What the hell is up with you?”

Beko turned towards me with a moan of excitement. “A garpike!”

“Right. That’s what I said. A garpike. What about it? You’re behaving like a man skewered by the emperor of pain’s speartree!”

Beko half jumped in the air, chortling deep in chilling glee as he slapped his knees with both hands. If I were responsible for casting a horror film, I would have hired him on the spot. Every audience to the film would have gone gray early.

There was a reason these people were called “ghouls,” after all.

Beko stopped laughing, and his voice was almost back to normal. “You know a lot of things, Ged, but not everything.”

“Right, so what don’t I know?”

“This is a garpike.”

“So?”

“So I’m very happy to see it here. We hardly ever catch garpikes. The whole last year, we caught twenty, and that was only at the end of summer. They’re unusual fish, spawning their eggs at the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, instead of in the spring. During that time, they become easier to catch. But not much easier. They’re like kotes, in a way: they avoid nets, they avoid hooks, and often they even avoid the surface. So we don’t catch many of them. Much, much fewer garpikes than kotes make it into our baskets, and like I said, those that do only come between summer and autumn.”

“Judging by your reaction, though, it’s not the garpike’s rarity that has you excited, but something else.”

Beko nodded. “Right. This isn’t a kote. It’s worth more. A lot more.” His eyes sparkled. “And it’s ours! All ours!”

I saw pure avarice overtake his eyes. It seemed like the garpike really was worth a pretty sum.

I tried to calm him down. “What’s so valuable about it?”

“Caviar,” Beko replied.

“What else?”

“At summer’s end, it starts to spawn caviar.”

“Right.”

“Well, that caviar is worth quite a lot.”

“I had guessed.”

“It’s not the most valuable spice in the world, but it’s up there. And it’s ours! All ours!”

“More valuable than kote brains?”

“Hah, kote brains is what we use to prank the Carps!” Beko snorted. “No, this stuff is rarest of the rare. Each egg is a square! And this is a female, which means it should have caviar. We can buy so much food now. The best food. We’re not going hungry this winter. We’re not going hungry ever again!”

“If caviar is really so valuable, we should catch as many of these garpikes as we can,” I murmured.

“What? What do you mean?” Beko blinked.

“I’ve seen schools of garpikes pass through here, where the current is strong. I saw them from shore—but I didn’t know what they were. Some sort of variant kote species, I thought.”

“You’ve seen more than this one?” the ghoul’s eyes widened in multiplying greed.

“I’ve seen them come through a dozen times, at least. Not that frequently, but every now and then. After all, I noticed this school from far away, and cast my lure right in front of it. If I see more, I’ll repeat the trick. If we’re lucky, we can catch five or so.”

“Five!?” Beko squeaked, and I was afraid he’d have a heart attack.

“I don’t think we’ll have enough time for more than that. The afternoon is growing late, and they don’t swim through that often. You can help me, you know. I’ll show you what their splashes look like, and you can keep an eye out for them.”

“Even if you just catch one more, just one single garpike more, I will be truly happy. We. We will be truly happy.”

Chapter 30 Stubs the Stern

No Stat Changes

I didn’t manage to catch five of the rare fish. Only three—plus one that got away just before I got him to the raft, which dramatically plunged Beko from his ninth cloud down into utter depression. The sun was threatening to set, but the ghoul demanded we keep fishing. “One more cast,” he said. Again and again. I feared we would be spending the night out on the raft.

I was steeling myself to deny him when, suddenly, a shout rang out from the shore. “You two! On the raft! Come here, and bring that raft with you!”

I turned to see a strange man waiting on the beach. I was sure I had never seen him before. Either he was very good at hiding, or he was not a permanent resident of the trading post.

His form was stocky, nearly rectangular, and was protected by dark chain mail running nearly down to his knees. Judging by his musculature, I imagined him capable of forging metal with his bare hands. No hammer required.