Vigil's Justice: A LitRPG Adventure (Vigil Bound Book 1) Page 2

  Chatfield and Dixon were in position, their backs pressed up against the sandstone blocks of the temple, weapons locked and loaded. The place was silent at the moment, but that didn’t mean those sneaky bastards weren’t in there waiting for us to let our guard down. We couldn’t leave anything to chance.

  Chatfield, on point, slammed his heel into the sturdy door barring our way into the temple interior. The wood cracked and swung inward as though in invitation. Dixon reached around and lobbed a grenade in. “Frag out!” Both men ducked back, waiting for the five count and the rattling boom that followed.

  Choking smoke billowed out from the entryway as they moved.

  Chatfield turkey-peeked the corner and hooked hard right, pieing his section of the room, while Dixon pivoted left, clearing his section. I came in hard on their heels, sweeping the top and back, searching for any combatants. All clear.

  All clear of enemies, at least. The room was a shitshow.

  There was debris everywhere—tables and chairs in splinters, pictures smashed in their frames, bedrolls shredded. A quick scan revealed AKs lined up against a wall covered with runes and pictographs in a language older than Arabic. More of the markings were carved into the stones underfoot—deep channels zigzagging and swirling their way across the floor. Stacked in the corner were wooden crates that held Russian made rocket-propelled grenades. The same type of RPGs that had killed Cal.

  No bodies, though.

  Didn’t mean there weren’t bad guys in the building somewhere. This was a weapons cache—the mujahideen wouldn’t just leave all this equipment sitting around, unprotected. They were probably tucked away upstairs, rigged with booby traps for the uninitiated and sentimental.

  We’d have to take this place room by room.

  There was a staircase toward the back that doglegged sharply left after the first two steps, making it the perfect spot for someone to lie in wait.

  “Moving,” I called, assuming point as I glided for the stone steps.

  Everything slowed to a crawl, time doubling back on itself as a barely audible plink drifted to my ears. That was a sound I knew well. It was death. I screamed at Chatfield and Dixon to take cover. I knew what was coming. I felt it in my bones even before I could see it with my eyes. The sound was followed by the appearance of a green sphere, no bigger than a tennis ball, rolling down the stairs like it was nothing at all.

  An M-67 frag grenade.

  “Back,” I screamed, eyes wide, face beet red. My legs moved like pistons, driven by adrenaline and the need to protect my friends better than I’d protected Cal.

  That little green ball, packed full of hell and vengeance, thudded down the last two steps and came rolling to a stop.

  I knew what I needed to do. It was stupid. Moronic. And the only way to save Dixon and Chatfield.

  I leapt, smothering the grenade with my body, curling into a ball and muttering a silent prayer under my breath. I positioned my flak jacket over the top, hoping it would offer me some scant protection from the imminent blast. A part of me knew that was a pipe dream. There was no coming back from this. But I was dead anyway. This way, my friends might have a chance to live. I tensed a second before the explosion ripped into me, hot and crazed and metallic, turning my world upside down. I cartwheeled through the air and landed on my back with a resounding snap.

  Resounding snaps were never good.

  My legs weren’t my legs, and my arms weren’t following my orders, but worst of all, my guts were outside when they were supposed to be inside.

  There should’ve been stabbing pains, the smell of burned flesh, and a shit ton of screaming, shouting, and swearing while my buddies dragged me out, patched me up, and lied about my chances. None of that was happening.

  The pain was amped up to an eleven out of ten, but that score was intellectual, rather than physical. I floated outside my body, detached and distant, waiting for reality to sink in. But it seemed reality didn’t have time for me or my bullshit. Reality had left me to my fate, and I had the weirdest sense this was all happening to someone else. Start the breathing, stop the bleeding, protect the wound, treat for shock, I repeated inside my head.

  Except, it was going to be damned tough to stop the bleeding, because my blood was actively crawling up the goddamned walls. The strange grooves gouged into the floor were rivers of crimson. I could feel my body growing cold as the room siphoned out the life force flowing through my veins—funneling it away from my body and directing it into the runes and shapes decorating the walls. What I was seeing was impossible since, as far as I knew, gravity only worked in one direction.

  I chalked it up to shock. Some people saw tunnels made of light when dying, others saw friends and family members welcoming them with open arms. I saw my blood crawling up the walls. What does that say about me? I wondered idly.

  “They get you when your guard’s down,” Cal said. I could hear his voice even over the ringing in my ears, courtesy of the frag grenade. “Come on, Boyd, if you don’t get your shit together, you’re gonna die here. We both can’t die here, man. I don’t want First Sergeant Cortez breaking the news to my mom—that guy was such a colossal douche. You gotta be the one to do it. I’m counting on you. So move your ass and get into a better fighting position.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” I muttered under my breath, frothy blood coating my lips.

  Hallucinatory Cal was right—obviously it would be better if I could sit up and find some cover—but with a stomach full of shrapnel, it was going to take more than sheer willpower to get me off my back. With a grimace, I groped at my midriff with a trembling hand. Soft to the touch, meaty yet pliable, my intestines were kind enough to slide back inside without too much hassle. I held my hand over the gaping wound, still waiting for the sensations to kick in, but damned if I wasn’t immune to the whole experience.

  God bless adrenaline. It had spared me the worst.

  Better yet, I was alive. Maybe not for long, but alive was still alive. My heart and lungs hadn’t been shredded or nicked. My ticker was ticking and my wheezybags were filling and emptying the way they were supposed to. Turned out, I’d been saved in part by the ceramic SAPI plates in my vest, but there was something wet soaking through my cammie bottoms. Likely another injury I couldn’t feel.

  “You got this,” I told myself. “Just get up. Get up, you miserable son of a bitch. I am not going to join Cal in Hell. Not today. I am not gonna give these insurgent assholes the satisfaction of killing me.”

  As soon as I turned my attention to my legs, the nerves fired up, sending jolts of energy surging down my thighs and into my feet, which twitched and flapped, ready to move. With a groan, I slowly stood. I wobbled on numb, unsteady legs. But I didn’t fall right back onto my ass. So far, so good. Next, I drew my service pistol—a matte black Colt 1911 that fired .45 ACP rounds—from its holster with one hand and my service issued K-Bar with the other. Chances are I wasn’t walking out of here, but at least I would die on my feet with a weapon in my hand.

  Couldn’t ask for much more than that.

  2

  Interlude of Gods

  The walls were shimmering, dancing with my blood, and there were shadowy figures flickering and crawling out from the cracks between the stones. They were hunched things, bent and twisted. I ignored them. None of it was real. Probably just hallucinations conjured by a mind flooded with a chemical cocktail of endorphins. Instead, I focused on the stairs. Grenades didn’t toss themselves. Some mujahideen dickhead had thrown it, and I intended to see they got a face full of lead for their trouble.

  There was no sign of Chatfield or Dixon—no bark of rifle fire or the shots of the dying—but it was impossible to miss the steady thud of footsteps that emanated from the staircase. I braced myself, weapon at the ready.

  But what rounded the corner wasn’t human. Humanoid, sure. But not human.

  It was a creature of shadow and smoke, ten feet tall, with writhing tentacles protruding from its back. It had no face. No eyes. No defining features at all. Its body was a void space filled with the twinkling lights of distant galaxies.

  I blinked, trying to banish the hallucination, but it didn’t disappear. It drew closer with every second, marching inevitably toward me like death made manifest.

  “Ritualas kaipic atliktaes,” the creature intoned, pointing a finger straight at me. Its voice was like the crooning of a thousand locust and set my teeth on edge. “Aukaum bryuvo preimtia. Kompaktias pragamintas. Dubar ateinek ruosprendium.”

  Maybe I hadn’t survived the grenade after all.

  I’d spent more than a few Sundays cooling my heels in church, and if this ugly sumbitch wasn’t a demon getting ready to drag my unruly ass straight to hell, then I didn’t know what was. But I didn’t lower my pistol. Even if this thing was the Devil himself, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  “Come and get some,” I growled, squeezing the trigger three times in quick succession, two shots to the body, one to the head just like I’d drilled a thousand times. The Colt barked but the rounds disappeared harmlessly into the empty void that comprised the creature’s shadowy form. It didn’t slow. Didn’t hesitate. More of the shadowy creatures—these smaller than the behemoth in front of me—were closing in on every side, their motions disjointed and strangely out of synch with time. Shadowy hands reached toward me.

  I lashed out with the K-Bar, but the blade passed harmlessly through their limbs.

  “Yes, this one will do nicely,” the creature said, this time in English.

  A shadowy hand the size of a hubcap closed around my throat, squeezing until my eyes bulged and my lungs burned. More of the otherworldly shades wrapped themselves around my arms and legs, dragging me down into the floor. I felt myself sinking into the ground while the walls of the temple pulsated with crimson light, strobing in time with the thunderous hammering of my heart. I screamed as the world spun apart around me, flinging me not into a burning lake of fire, but into the vastness of the Milky Way.

  In the span of an eyeblink the inhuman shades were gone, replaced by an endless sea of twinkling stars and spiraling galaxies, spinning away in the distance.

  Far down below I watched my body slowly die. Watched as Chatfield and Dixon surged up the stairwell, guns blazing as they dropped the man responsible for my untimely demise. I should have been happier about that—my friends had survived and avenged me, hell yeah!—but honestly, I was pretty fixated on my soon-to-be corpse.

  All the duct tape and morphine in the world wasn’t gonna fix what ailed me.

  “He isn’t the worst candidate we’ve ever had,” someone whispered.

  The words drew me from my thoughts and dispelled the gruesome scene below like the rising sun burning away a layer of morning mist. The voice—soothing, and sweet, and oddly feminine—reverberated through the cosmos, bouncing off distant planets. Above me the faraway stars began to swirl and morph, taking on the rough visage of a face. I squinted, confused by what I was seeing. Not one face, but five. Five faces built out of constellations and galaxies, all of them inexplicably intertwined.

  “Far from the best either,” came a retort from one of the other faces. She was gruff and matronly. “He’s physically and mentally fit, I’ll give you that, but the transition will be jarring. His is a world devoid of magic. They’ve long ago given up the old ways in favor of their science.”

  “Oh, give over, Gadriel. I like him,” growled a man positioned just to her left in the swirling star cluster. “His death was glorious. I could watch it a thousand times and never grow bored. Saving his comrades. Jumping on that grenade. Scooping his guts back up. He even tried to fight off the heralds. That’s what killer instinct looks like. That’s the warrior spirit. I can mold that. By the gods above and below, I can mold that!”

  “We all know you’d approve, Thuriel,” sniffed a fourth voice, regal and somehow more levelheaded than the rest. “But Gadriel’s point is valid. Our ways will be strange and foreign to him. Mastering our magicks is the work of a lifetime, and most of the Vigils start training from infancy.”

  “We always have this problem with Inkarnates, though,” said the first voice. “By their very nature they are outsiders. We’ve always found a way before.”

  “You’re not wrong, Lero,” chimed in the naysayer, Gadriel, “but usually they’re from shadows that are far closer to our own realm.” The voice paused, clearly worried. “This one is so far off the central finite arc…”

  “You’re saying that like we have a choice,” interjected the final member of the odd celestial group. “Why are we even discussing it? It’s not like we have another option, do we? We wouldn’t be fishing so far from Cantorii Prime if we had better candidates. He died valiantly, defending his brothers in battle, and fell with weapons in hand. And the sanctum sanctorum accepted his blood offering, or else he would not be here. Those are the criteria, are they not? Akora, surely there must be a way? You’ve done more with less.”

  “Once or twice,” the levelheaded voice in the center replied. “It will all be moot unless he decides to take on the mantle. But assuming he is agreeable, I can adjust the system so that it will work with his… natural aptitudes.”

  The cosmos whirled and I abruptly found myself sitting on a velvet chair across from what might have been a man, if a man had a rotating head with five different faces protruding out from each side like cancerous growths. There were two female faces—one steely eyed and matronly, another young with a dazzling smile—and two male, one stately with a black beard peppered with silver, the other gaunt and slightly crazed looking. I’d seen battle-hardened Marines with that same thousand-yard stare. The final face was androgynous, the skin waxy and pale, its eyes a milky white.

  Naturally, weirdo face was the one that settled on me.

  “Welcome, Boyd Knight, to the Inbetween. I am Akora, Ward of Truth, and we collectively are Raguel.” It dipped its head in a small bow. “This is a space that dwells in the crevices of existence, tucked away between time and matter and space.”

  “Am I dead?” I asked, my voice a hoarse whisper.

  “Oh, most certainly,” the pale face replied.

  “And in a most glorious manner,” the gaunt, crazed face added.

  “Does that mean you’re God?” I asked. “I always pictured God… well, with less faces I guess.”

  “Some call us a god,” Akora replied with a shrug, “though we are not the god you are thinking of. We like to think of ourselves as a protector. As for our likeness, that is not our doing but your own. Whatever you are seeing is not really us as we are in truth, but rather a rough facsimile that your mind is capable of comprehending. None of that matters, though, Boyd Knight. What matters are these things three. First”—a pale finger went into the air—“would you like to live?”

  I squinted at the five-faced space freak like it had just grown even more faces. What kind of question was that? Did I want to live? Of course I wanted to live. Who didn’t want to live, given the option?

  “Honest question. Does anyone say no to that?” I asked.

  The gaunt face chortled. “What’d I tell you? I knew he had it in him. Takes a special kind of crazy to lose all of your intestines and want to go back for seconds.”

  “A simple yes or no will suffice,” Akora replied, ignoring the other face’s remarks.

  “Yes,” I grunted, not entirely sure where this was going.

  “Very good,” Akora said. “Wouldn’t want there to be any loopholes or misunderstandings. There are powers that be, other than ourselves, you understand, that might take umbrage should the process not be followed to the letter. Now, if you were to continue to live, would you willingly pursue justice, valor, balance, wrath, and truth?”

  Now that question took me a moment longer to parse.

  I definitely wanted to keep on kicking, but that sounded like a lot of commitment to me. Sure, I was dedicated to Corps and country, but outside of that I was mostly dedicated to the pursuit of drinking good beer, eating good barbeque, finding the perfect fishing hole, or grinding out levels in Deadwatch Crusade. I couldn’t say any of that, though. I might’ve grown up in the backwoods of Kentucky, but I wasn’t stupid, and the way Akora was looking at me practically screamed that if I said no, I was going to get my ass booted straight into the sun.

  Since I was interested in not being a charbroiled soul I said yes.

  “Excellent,” Akora replied with a nod and a slight smile. “And three.” A final finger joined the other two. “Do you like to play games?”

  “Games? What’re we talkin’ about here? Risk? ’Cause if it’s Risk, I’m gonna whoop all your asses, gods or not. I’ll just hole up in Australia and wait it out.”

  “There is Risk indeed, but you won’t be a general. You will be a piece placed carefully on the board, but a potentially powerful one, given time. The game we are playing is Risk on a cosmic scale, Boyd Knight, and the rules we use are called the Ascendant System. The world we are sending you to, Alkran, is but one of many we oversee. Yet it is of great interest to us. It is a world out of balance, and we are unsure why. Something dwells there that even we cannot see. You will ferret it out in due time. Assuming you survive.”

  “And if I don’t survive?”

  “We will find another and try again,” Akora replied evenly, folding its hands passively in its lap. “Now, there will be many dangers presented to you,” it continued after a moment. “Alkran is not a particularly kind or coddling world, especially to an outsider. Which is why we shall give you what advantages we may. First, I will assign you a spirit guide to act as your intermediary while on Alkran—we have a host of accomplished warriors who may guide you along the path.”