Dodge Tank: A LitRPG Novel (Crystal Shards Online Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Chapter 1 My Sucky Life

  Chapter 2 Logging In

  Chapter 3 Gilly

  Chapter 4 The Journey Down

  Chapter 5 Noobs

  Chapter 6 Dodge Tank

  Chapter 7 Highs and Lows

  Chapter 8 Gimp

  Chapter 9 Reality Bites

  Chapter 10 Corpse Run

  Chapter 11 Decisions

  Chapter 12 Rebirth

  Chapter 13 Level 1 Warrior

  Chapter 14 Dungeon Date

  Chapter 15 First Boss

  Chapter 16 Uneasy

  Chapter 17 Thief

  Chapter 18: Ninja

  Chapter 19 Shadow Copy

  Chapter 20 Mike

  Chapter 21: Secrets

  Chapter 22: Aftermath

  Chapter 23: Insomnia

  Chapter 24 Solo

  Chapter 25 Sheeba

  Chapter 26 Taste of Victory

  Chapter 27 Shopping at Bloomingdales

  Chapter 28 Dinner

  Chapter 29 Grinding Gears

  Chapter 30 The Burning Sands

  Chapter 31 Underwater Raid

  Chapter 32 Beast King

  Chapter 33 Plains of Duality

  Chapter 34 Arena Race

  Chapter 35 World Boss

  Chapter 36 Citadel

  Chapter 37 Revelations

  Author’s Note

  DODGE TANK

  A LITRPG NOVEL

  CRYSTAL SHARDS ONLINE BOOK 1

  By

  RICK SCOTT

  COVER ART AND DESIGN BY ALBERTO BESI

  Copyright © 2017 by Rick Scott

  All Right Reserved.

  VER 1.00

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks goes out to my wife and kids for giving me countless hours of free time at the computer to punch this novel out. This one is for you guys!

  Special thanks to all my beta readers.

  Elias Dantas

  Ezben Gerardo

  Zach Goza

  Norman Meredith

  Tarcha Saleeba

  And too all my alpha readers and supporters on RRL who watched me bring this book together from scratch and helped me do it!

  You guys did wonders for the book!

  And for more great GameLit/LitRPG reads check out

  https://www.facebook.com/groups/GameLitSociety/

  Will you leave me a review ? Your feedback and thoughts really make a difference, especially for people who want to know what the book is about. So if you can, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com.

  My eternal thanks in advance if you do so!

  -Rick Scott

  Chapter 1 My Sucky Life

  The best part of my sucky life is that I get to play Crystal Shards Online for a living.

  Not a living, as in, ‘I make so much money playing that I don’t have to work in the real world’. More like, playing Crystal Shards is the only real work I can do. But I make the best of it.

  It’s not a great living, for sure, but I earn enough to help pay the rent, buy food and hopefully one day to save up enough money to pay for my mom’s operation. That’s one reason my life sucks right now. My mom has been ill for a while, radiation sickness from fallout debris, the doctors say. That’s the other reason my life sucks. Most of the world was made uninhabitable by a nuclear war a couple centuries ago. They say one day we might be able to live on the surface again, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

  We live below ground, in cities carved out by giant automated boring machines called Builders. ‘City’ is a bit of a generous term for it though. It’s more like thousands of shipping containers linked by tunnels. My home is one such shipping container that I share with my mom and older brother Mike.

  Mike is kind of a dick, by the way. But he’s my brother, so what can I do?

  We at least have separate rooms now. When I turned seventeen last month, my mom let me splurge on a couple sheets of drywall and a door frame. We couldn’t afford the actual door so I just hung a shower curtain in the frame for privacy. Of course, Mike-the-jerk still barges in anytime he feels like it, but at least it gives me some peace of mind when I jack into the network to play Crystal Shards. I can’t count the number of times Mike has yanked me offline in the middle of a session. It’s his idea of a prank, I think.

  The idiot.

  But he spends more time out of the house now. I think he has a girlfriend or something, but I don’t really care. The main thing is, it leaves me more peace and quiet.

  To go mine.

  Just the thought of mining gets me out of my bed, which is a mattress on the floor that I’ve been sleeping on since I was six. I reach for Mutt and Jeff next. The two crutches are lying next to me as always. My ‘assistants’ as Mom always calls them. I tell the lights to switch on and a bright LED illuminates the cement gray walls of my tiny room. My VR rig, my key to the world of the living, is in the corner and I give a short prayer of thanks that Mike hasn’t messed with it while I was sleeping.

  I prop myself up against the wall with the help of Mutt and then head for the living room to check on my Mom. She’s on the couch as usual, a blanket covering her tiny frame that’s even frailer than my own.

  “What you want for breakfast, ma?” I say to her as I hobble by and head toward the food processor in the corner.

  “Pancakes with sausage, two eggs,” she says without missing a beat. “And black coffee. Make it strong this time.”

  “You got it.” I chuckle, keying her breakfast order into the device. It’s a nano processor that’s designed to make almost anything. It uses the same technology the Builders used to make the city from the earth they chew with their cavern sized maws. The catch is, it takes a lot of credits and a much better grade nano-machine to make anything close to tasting like real food. I access the joint family account and check our balance.

  Your balance is ….. 1,217 Cr

  My stomach does a little flutter. The rent is due next week: 3,500 credits. It’s a lot to make up for, especially since I can never count on Mike bringing home much from doing whatever he does out on the streets. Half the time I think he’s holding back and spending the credits on himself. The most he’s ever contributed is 1,000. That barely covers Mom’s medicine. I sigh, hoping Mom doesn’t hear me. She hates when I worry. It only stresses her out more.

  I spend 30 of our too few credits on breakfast. The processor buzzes a minute later and I remove two recyclable bowls of steaming oatmeal. At least it tells me it’s oatmeal. I’ve never tasted the real thing so I wouldn’t really know, but it tastes as bland and mushy as it always does as I sit on the couch with Mom and have breakfast with her.

  “Have you seen Michael?” she asks. “I don’t think he came home last night.”

  I look at my Mom and fail to hide the eye roll. I know because she gives me a look of despair that makes her sunken face look even sadder. “He is your brother, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. My older brother.”

  I shove down a few more spoonfuls of oatmeal, avoiding her eyes.

  “He’s fine, Mom,” I say eventually. “I saw him leave for work early this morning
.”

  I can’t tell if she’s bought the lie. Her faded blue eyes finally leave mine though, so she’s bought it for now, or she might be faking it too. “So where are you off to today, Ryan?”

  I perk up at the change in topic. “The Silvertooth mines. I’ve been watching the market. Silver ore should be in high demand for the next couple of days. There is a big werewolf expansion pack coming out for Witch World this weekend. The PvPers are going to be looking for a lot of silver.”

  She laughs.

  That was the coolest part about Crystal Shards Online. The developers made it a completely connected virtual world where the same character could enter any number of Shards. Each Shard was its own world and setting, but everything within them was interchangeable. Even currency and items. Crystal Shards had an economy where items and materials could be exchanged for the same credits that could buy you stuff in the real world. Plus everyone connected to Crystal Shards for a break from the drudgery of the real world. People went on vacations, explored, even had relationships. And thanks to the VR rig that connected directly to the nervous system, it all felt 100% real.

  Except for pain, unless you wanted it, and then there were mods for that too.

  In fact, if they could afford to, most people lived more online than in the real world.

  But my ambitions were much simpler than that.

  Enough to pay the rent would be a start. 500k to pay for my mom’s operation would be a dream.

  “Or you can finally level up something besides miner and take out a world boss.” My mom grins at me as she says it. “A 20 million credit drop would be nice.”

  “Ha ha…” I say sardonically as I dump our empty breakfast bowls into the recycler. “Maybe once they make combat classes that don’t rely on your ‘actual’ agility for controls.”

  But Mom is right. The pinnacle of the game worlds, are the world bosses. Rarely was one ever defeated and it normally took a team of high level players to achieve. I’d only ever heard of one guild able to defeat one on my particular shard: The Silver Rangers and that was like ten years ago. But there are thousands of guilds like them throughout the Crystal Shards now, all vying for the same achievement.

  To defeat a world boss.

  The prize for defeating a world boss would not only pay for my mom’s operation; it would be enough to fix my legs as well. We’d even have enough to move to the lower levels of the city, away from the radiation. And where real water existed in deep underground lakes and the processors were able to make real tasting food.

  Unfortunately for me, Mutt and Jeff were also the reasons why I could never play a combat class and never go on a raid. The developers made the combat classes hyper realistic for full immersion, but all that came at the entry fee of a normal nervous system. For me, swinging a pickaxe in a mine was the extent of my combat ability.

  “You could always play a tank?” Mom jokes. “Don’t they just stand there and get hit?”

  I chuckle. “I think there’s a bit more to it than that, Mom.”

  I hobble over to help my mom with her own rig. “And where are you off to today?”

  “Shopping at Bloomingdales.”

  I force myself to smile at her rote response. It was the same answer she’d given my brother and I since we were old enough to know she was ‘going’ someplace else when she put on her rig. That was just around the same time she started getting sick from working as a technician on the air scrubbers and couldn’t go to work anymore. Now I was old enough to understand what she was really doing on Crystal Shards to earn her share of our monthly income. What a lot of women probably did. Enter a world where her avatar could be the object of any fantasy and guys would pay credits by the minute for her interaction.

  The thought makes me sick to my stomach and I can’t wait to escape to another world.

  A world away from this one. A world where I just might hit a rare ore and free my mom from all her pain and suffering.

  A world called Crystal Shards Online.

  Chapter 2 Logging In

  I put Mutt and Jeff to the side as I pull on my VR rig and feel the buzz of electricity flow through my body as the neural jack connects to the implant at the base of my neck. It’s a standard implant for all citizens. Even gimps like me get one at birth, thankfully.

  As the system boots up, my vision and senses fade for a moment.

  And then all at once the main menu screen bursts to life with an all too familiar musical theme that sends sparks of excitement and anticipation racing through my body. I’m all at once at work and at play, ready for my fourteen hour shift in the virtual mines of the Fantasy World of Nasgar. I check my access credits and top up my account to cover the fourteen hour play time, paying 5 credits per hour. The daily and monthly passes work out cheaper, but mining is not a guaranteed profit maker and going in the hole is a lot easier to swallow when you’re risking a week’s worth of food rations rather than a couple months’ worth of rent.

  I check my avatar next.

  He’s modeled to look like me, except cooler looking, of course: Short black hair, a chiseled jaw, with a buff bod instead of a scrawny one and legs thick like tree trunk instead of thin like tree branches. I pull up my character stats.

  Name: Reece

  Sex: M

  Race: Human

  Class: Miner

  Level: 6

  Strength: 6

  Determines melee damage and requirements for heavy armor

  Dexterity: 3

  Determines melee accuracy, critical hit chance and activation speed of ranged weapons

  Agility: -10

  Determines dodge ability, attack speed and requirements for light armor

  Intelligence: 6

  Determines spell cast speed, technique points and potency for Elemental Magic

  Mind: 8

  Determines magical defense, technique points and potency for Celestial Magic

  Vitality: 8

  Determines stamina, HP and regeneration speed.

  HP: 79/79

  Stamina: 152/152

  TP: 55/55

  The stats go as high as 99 max. Each time you level up, you’re awarded one or two attribute points to place wherever you want. I put most of mine into Vitality, because mining takes a crap load of stamina. I glare at my -10 agility. Thanks a lot glitchy nervous system. With an agility like that I pretty much couldn’t not get hit by almost anything and it would take me a year to hit them back. Worst still, I can’t even raise it. No matter how many points I put in there it stays at -10. It also means I lack the stats to wear anything not considered regular clothing. Unless it’s heavy armor I guess but I don’t have the money of strength stats for that either. Plus it doesn’t look as cool as the agility based stuff to me.

  Luckily miner’s gear doesn’t count as armor. It’s regular clothes with special skill bonuses. As a miner I really only have two skills. Perception and Mining. I list them to check their current levels.

  Perception: 59 +13

  Mining: 74 +22

  The first number is my base skill level and the plusses are my bonuses for gear, which is what I check next.

  You are equipped with:

  Initiate Miner’s overalls: +5 perception +12 mining +2 Vitality

  A pair of coveralls designed for the strenuous rigors of mining.

  Initiate miner’s helm: +8 perception

  The lamp on this helm makes seeing into the darkness much easier.

  Rusted iron ring: +1 Str

  A simple iron ring that has seen better days…

  And then there was my most important item. My pickaxe.

  Iron mining pick +1: +2 Str +10 mining

  A sturdy tool perfect for chipping away at hardened rock.

  It’s pretty decent gear for a level 6 miner. I try to keep up to date as much as I can, but with the amount I have to pay back for my game time as well as help the family, I normally don’t have too much extra money to spare for gear. The mining pick alone set me back 500 cre
dits on the auction house. But it was a steal for that price. Most times the crafters sell them for twice that. I probably lucked out with some high level player who got it as a drop and just wanted to get rid of it quickly to free up inventory space.

  The ring is my other prized possession. I dug that up as a rare find.

  That’s my other big reason for mining. For every node mined there was an extremely small chance of unearthing buried treasure. On the net streams there are vids of miners finding rare armor and weapons that could sell for hundreds of thousands of credits. That was what added an extra bit of excitement for me. That rare chance of striking it rich and making my family’s dreams come true overnight.

  Just the thought of it has my juices pumping and rearing to go.

  I confirm my selection for class and then access the Fantasy Shard of Nasgar.

  My senses go dark for a second time and then I emerge into a new world…

  It’s always kind of awesome logging in. But for me, it’s literally like being born again. As my avatar materializes on the Steppe of Andor, my senses come back to me in full 3D overload. I feel strength in my legs and I can stand on my own. That alone is a miracle worth logging in for. The time is noon day in-game and a gorgeous blue sky is overhead dotted with puffy white clouds. A cool breeze whistles over the sparse steppe land of low grass and I see white rocks protruding from the ground like half buried bones.

  I equip my pickaxe and feel the wooden shaft in my hand, real like anything I’ve touched in real life. The air is sweet and I inhale deeply to rid myself of the stink of the real world.

  I couldn’t get enough of this place if I tried.

  An automated greeting pops up on my chat bar.