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

that the Black Grove is up ahead—and that not even Stubs goes there. He’s a million times stronger than us.”

“A million? How many is that?”

“We could spend all week counting, Beko, day and night, and we wouldn’t reach a million.”

Chapter 34 On the Blackriver

No Stat Changes

Blackriver was a wild, fast waterway. Its shores were cluttered with vegetation, and sometimes large trees piled up to block parts of the river. Even during the day, navigating it could be perilous. Nighttime river trips were utterly foolhardy.

We had no choice, of course. Somehow we continued to pass by every obstacle, running into nothing. Keeping the raft pointed forward did little but waste our strength. It was a precaution, in case of collision. Any dry trees would crush our fish barrels before they could strike our bodies. This barrier had already saved us once today, and we hoped it might again.

The darkness became complete. Clouds blotted out the moon and the stars. I had trouble seeing my hand in front of my face, and I was unable to activate my fishing talent. Not because it was dark—it still worked in the dark, if poorly. No, it was because I barely had any chi shadow left. I had spent so much fishing, and then nearly all of the rest healing Beko. It was recovering slowly, and I decided to save whatever I could regain for emergencies.

My ears picked up the characteristic murmuring of river water encountering an obstacle in its way.

“I hear something,” Beko said, tense.

“So do I, but I can’t see anything.”

“Neither can I.”

“You’re not a very good ghoul, then, if you can’t see in the dark.”

“I know that,” Beko agreed. “Ged, listen. What’s that humming up ahead?”

I concentrated, trying to discern the same sound beyond the burbling river.

A few seconds later I replied, but I was not sure of myself. “You’re right, there’s something I don’t recognize.”

“We must have reached the Stone Shelf Rapids. That must be what’s humming.”

“Rapids? Can we get through them?”

“I’ve heard of a boat getting through, when the water was high. But this is no boat, and it’s nighttime. The raft might be smashed to bits on the rocks. This is bad. Worst of all, there’s nothing we can do about it. Except maybe start paddling blindly, but why? That might bring us to shore, but it might push us into the very rocks, or into a barrier made of fallen trees. A river teeming with kotes is not the best place for a swim.”

The noise was growing rapidly louder, and Beko was most likely right. I had no desire to encounter such a massive challenge in the darkness. I tried to steer the raft blindly, focusing on nothing but the sounds of fast-flowing water.

After a few minutes of work with the makeshift oar, it hit something solid. I hardly saw anything, but I reached out to feel cold stone.

“The cliff!” Beko exclaimed as he also reached out. “We’re at the cliff!”

“But we can’t disembark here,” I said with annoyance.

As we were floating along the cliffside, though, the water was rather deep here. Any vegetation, rocks, and other obstacles were far enough below so as not to concern us. Even experienced alpinists be fools to try to climb the slippery cliff blindly, in utter darkness.

“I’m beginning to see things,” Beko said. “Dawn is coming.”

“It’s still too dark,” I mumbled back. “If we hit the rapids while the sky is like this, we’ll come closer to drowning than ever before.”

The raft hit the cliff again—and once again, we were unable to grab hold of anything. Hopefully the current was weaker here, and we should try to stick close.

For several hours we rowed backwards, keeping to the cliff face. At the end of this, we were so exhausted that we could barely stand. Sunrise was still distant when we hit the rapids. It was just bright enough to see how hopeless our situation was. Here, the river narrowed to two hundred yards across. Both sides were sheer cliffs without so much as a hint of a way up. Only a well-equipped climber could tackle them. They were a hundred feet tall at their shortest points, and generally devoid of cracks and ledges.

The roar of the water ahead of us was growing to a deafening volume. I would have thought it was a waterfall, but I believed Beko. It was just a riffle, a shallow stretch of river—with some resultingly violent water. The sound was amplified by the canyon walls. If any boats could get through, our lightweight raft might, too. Still, I decided to maximize our chances.

I activated my fishing talent and saw that the waters were packed full of kotes. Most were tiny, gathering at the start of the shelf and not daring to proceed any farther, where even such nimble predators as they would have trouble. The rapids were a barrier to the fishes’ migration. I had never seen so many fish in one place before.

Without hesitation, I grabbed my oar and tried to cheer Beko up. He was shaking in terror. “Calm down. We’re getting off here.”

“How? These is no shore here. Only cliffs.”

“We don’t need a shore.”

Perhaps there was once a large rock in the middle of the river here, like the one our trading post sat on top of. But, as time has passed, the water has had its way with it. Now, it’s just a flooded shelf, covered in rocks and debris. There is, however, something like our old sandbar, reaching out thirty yards into the water. At its widest point, it’s hardly ten steps across. The approaches to this area were shielded by huge boulders which dwarfed our raft.

I led us between two such behemoths, and we gently bumped into a bottom of pebbles.

We tied ourselves