Immortal (Titan Online #2) - A Superhero LitRPG Story Read online

  Immortal

  Titan Online: Book Two

  Steven Kelliher

  Contents

  1. Refresh

  2. The Mess

  3. The Kennelmaster

  4. A New Age

  5. Operations

  6. The Path Ahead

  7. Crow’s Bargain

  8. Web on Fire

  9. Dragon and Tiger

  10. Victory?

  11. Black and White

  12. Upgrades

  13. Vanish

  14. Big Game

  15. Pebble and Avalanche

  16. Inside Man

  17. Heart to Heart

  18. The Synth Strip

  19. The Gothicomb

  20. Discordant Symphony

  21. Queen’s Mercy

  22. Dominance

  23. Bright Side

  24. Ruthless

  25. Starlight

  26. Strike First, Strike Last

  27. In Deep

  28. The Calm Before

  29. Silver Bridge

  30. The War for Titan City

  31. Moment of Truth

  32. Chaos Unleashed

  33. Homecoming

  34. Super Sphere

  35. Mortality

  36. The Calm After

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  One

  Refresh

  “You sure about this?” Blackstrike asked.

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “Because if you are, it’s getting to that ‘now or never’ point.”

  No shit.

  “I’ve always been more of a ‘now’ than a ‘never’ kind of guy,” I said.

  This time, I wasn’t lying. After all, just a few short weeks ago, I had engineered a plot to take down the most powerful hero in Titan Online. A plot that had been, somehow - against all reason - successful. And so here I was again, with a risky plan that I had no certainty would actually work. Plans were plans, but at a certain point, you just had to go for it, consequences be damned.

  Consequences and, of course, the rare successes.

  I was hoping this was one of those.

  Still, I have to admit, as we laid on our stomachs slowly sinking into five inches of digital muck and sewerage—bless that AI, not sparing so much as a buzzing fly or rancid odor to pepper that needed authenticity into the proceedings—I was beginning to have my doubts.

  It was strange how much you could still doubt after achieving the grandest success of your entire digital existence - which was the only existence I felt the need to explore in any meaningful capacity these days. Then again, I suppose that was the way of things. After all, it’s easy to risk everything when you’ve got nothing.

  “Why are we here, again?” Blackstrike asked, not altogether pleased with our current surroundings. “I mean, I know why we’re here in a micro sense, but enlighten me with the macro.”

  I suppressed the urge to sigh out loud.

  “We’re here,” I said, “because I need insurance.”

  “Insurance,” Blackstrike returned, deadpan.

  “Lot of perma-kills happening on our side of the bay, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I said. “Things are getting tense in the wake of … well, you know.”

  “One doesn’t have to stretch too far to point the finger your way for that,” the villain said. “After all, in taking out Leviathan and Meteora, as well as bringing down the Gallant Guild—in reputation, at least—you sort of opened the door. You knew she was going to walk through it. Anastasia might not be pulling the trigger herself, but she’s giving the orders. She’s free to do as she pleases now.”

  There it was. The name that was always at the front of my mind, but the back of my tongue in recent weeks. The player I had unwittingly unleashed.

  “What do you know about her?” I asked. Blackstrike had been a villain a lot longer than I had, across a number of builds.

  “Same as anyone,” Blackstrike shrugged. “Which is decidedly little for someone as notorious and pervasive as she is. She has real sway in this game. Half of War Town owes her one of her infamous ‘favors’, and the other half don’t do a damn thing about it because it’s impossible to know who she has her strings on.”

  “Anyone could be in her pocket,” I said, nodding. “And it looks like the bill has come due for those who haven’t satisfied their marks on her ledger.”

  I was referring, of course, to the rash of recent perms in War Town. No one was claiming responsibility for them. And it was always different players doing it. But everyone knew. Anastasia was up to something.

  “Anastasia is a Day One player,” Blackstrike continued. “Just like Leviathan and Deadlock. The whole favors thing is just a cover for her real stock-in-trade: Anastasia is an assassin for hire. As an immortal, she can perm consequence-free.”

  “Technically, all villains can,” I said.

  “You know better than that,” Blackstrike returned. “Any villain who gets too murderous gets marked by players on both sides of the bay. What’s it matter if Anastasia gets marked? Or someone working for her? She can’t be killed. Drop a building on that one, and she’ll just come back and get one dropped on you. All of her years of accumulated in-game assets remain. All of her NPC faction relationships. All of her tech, weapons, items, she keeps it all. If anyone gets on her bad side, retribution is inevitable – she always comes back, her enemies don’t. Her, and those who work for her, are untouchable. If you want to keep your current build, that is."

  “Which brings us back around to the point,” I said, eager to get off of it. “My need for a new insurance policy. Whether Ana … whether she’s at the heart of it or not, the fact is, Supers are dying throughout War Town, and I recently made a few headlines.”

  “Just like you wanted to,” Blackstrike said with a smirk. “Though Star seems to be getting most of the shine.”

  I swallowed that one. For now.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, just call it a hunch. I’ve got a feeling that being infamous isn’t a great look right now, even for a villain. And much as I love our talks, I prefer the silent type of reliability—and protection—that only loyal NPCs can provide. And I’m in the market for some new recruits.”

  Blackstrike inched his way forward, army crawling through the muck to my right and starting up the steep incline. The bank was dark enough brown to appear black, with bits of weeds and moss sticking out among the bleached plastics and sodden, yellowed papers to add some contrast. At the top of the slope, a twisted length of steel fence broke the transition from muddy ground to overcast digital sky. And over the top of the gnarled claws of barbed wire, a gray monolith with no windows and many towers loomed.

  “Coming?” Blackstrike sneered over his shoulder at me.

  “Yeah,” I said, reaching down to check that my Stasis Gun was still secured at my hip under my cloak, and brushing my gloved hand across my belt, laden with metallic spheres that were my Swarm Grenades. I thought it likely I’d be needing them. Then there was the Shock Spear across my back, the point of which had jabbed me in the top of the buttocks so many times throughout our creeping, crawling, and trudging in the last hour that it was a wonder I hadn’t begun leaking HP.

  “If we get killed before we make the building,” Blackstrike said, fixing his dark eyes against dark skin on me, “I’m gonna haunt your next build.”

  “You mentioned that. Twice.”

  Blackstrike couldn’t see my face behind my white and red painted Kabuki
mask, but I hoped the feeling of my disdain came across.

  He made a dismissive noise and started up the rise again, his black martial arts Gi making him look like a congealed oil slick as he snaked his way around an exposed aluminum pipe that I had considered using as an entry into the compound. Before B5 had come over the comms to dissuade me from the notion of wading through the facility’s septic system. Digital or not, you still had to maintain some level of decency. Especially when the world felt real.

  “What was the signal supposed to be again?” Blackstrike asked, knowing the answer.

  “Time is the signal, Blackstrike,” I said for the third time that afternoon. “And we’ve still got a bit more of it to count down before the loading dock’s unlocked.”

  “Three minutes,” B5’s deadpan, artificial voice crackled over the receiver in my ear.

  “Loading dock,” Blackstrike sniffed. “You’d think it was a grocery store and not a high-security prison.”

  I only shrugged at that. We were in a game world modeled off of the silver age of American Superhero comics. Prisons weren’t really meant to keep high-powered criminals in them for too long. Just enough to give the next story arc time to breathe.

  Still, the Titan Online AI had managed to rig a fairly threatening defense system to the TC Asylum, one that was tied directly into the narrative rails of the Mayor and, I hoped, his paramilitary commandos—the elite NPC soldiers of Titan City.

  But that brings us around to the point of exactly why Blackstrike and I were crawling through muck on the banks of a drainage creek beside Titan City Asylum. In short, I was here to farm. Specifically NPCs, since—Shock Spear or not—I wasn’t all that threatening without a growing, loyal army of AI minions at my beck and call. And given that I had lost some and dismissed others during my heroically villainous triumph over Leviathan and Meteora, it was just about time to replenish the old coffers.

  That, and B5 had been riding me about it for the last two weeks.

  “Five minutes.”

  You see, I had strung together a hodgepodge band of NPC’s immediately following what was now being dubbed the Battle of Hero’s Square as I struck out with my newfound Infamy—both in terms of XP and a bit of the genuine thing—and attempted to figure out what my next mission would be.

  The thing is, it was kind of hard to top taking down Leviathan, or helping to take down Leviathan. I certainly hadn’t done it alone, something the blogs, highlight packages, and even Valorous Industries themselves had seemed to take painstaking effort to remind as the fallout of Leviathan’s death reverberated throughout the industry.

  And so, before I got around to the original point, I had kept myself busy influencing various dock workers, low-level NPC criminals, and digital sacks of muscle and bone to do the heavy lifting as I set to tidying up my new base of operations and keeping the War Town docks clean of everything but the specific brand of ne’er-do-wells I chose to let fester in the place. In short, I had followed up my key role in arguably the most improbable, impactful Crisis Event in the history of Titan Online by becoming a glorified home-maker.

  Needless to say, B5 had not been impressed, as he went to great lengths to tell me exactly what I should be doing and why I needed to expand beyond farming the docks for red shirts and thugs. He was right, of course, but that wasn’t why I found myself in the current setting.

  Frankly, I was beginning to come back around to the point of it all. I was having fun. That had been the point, after all. The point of taking down Leviathan, of freeing Titan Online from his corrupt, perma-killing grip. I was here to make stories, or to play a role in them, and I have to say, in the last few sessions, I had really begun to warm to playing the villain role.

  In the interest of stealth, I had dismissed my entire Sphere the day before. All but for one. Castle, the Captain of the Titan City Guard, former personal protector to the Mayor and someone the AI colloquially labeled an Uber Cop, was one of the said paramilitary commandos, and he had earned my respect and my trust. He wasn’t the most powerful NPC. Good in a scrap, for sure. Handy with weapons and a quick learner regarding all manner of tech. But he wasn’t going to stand toe-to-toe with anything above a Tier 6 Player for long.

  Still, Officer Castle had a particular set of skills, and rather than farm the rest of Titan City’s paramilitary unit for Castle clones, I had decided to follow the macro line of thought that kept him in my circle in the first place, and what better way to find an eclectic, varied collection of NPCs than in the hard-coded confines of a place meant to house the ones notable enough to be kept by the AI in cold storage for use in later plot rails.

  In short, I was on the hunt for quality over quantity when it came to filling up the empty slots in my recently-expanded and recently-vacant Sphere of Influence. While a direct assault on an AI stronghold in enemy territory was near the bottom of your traditional ‘good ideas’ list, Titan Online was still just unstable enough to allow for significant opportunities within the chaos.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  B5 approved of the plan, the entire basis of which counted on two things to even get it off the ground: first, that B5 was right, and that the Mayor’s recent capture and continued imprisonment in War Town had the AI characters that ran Titan City in disarray; two, that whatever NPC do-gooders there were guarding Titan City Asylum had been recalled into the streets and alleys of the massive virtual city in order to stamp out the increasingly-bold incursions of villain players and antagonistic NPCs alike, now that the two most powerful heroes in-game—along with the tower that had housed their Gallant Guild—had been vanquished in a rather permanent fashion.

  The problem with Blackstrike was the problem with me. He was a cynic. And in my experience, it only ever made sense to have one cynic to a team, especially if that team—as was the case in the present circumstances—only consisted of two people.

  You see, one cynic was a boon. It was the reason villains had been excelling since Leviathan’s fall. Cynics were more adaptable than optimists. They were more realistic. But, even I had learned in very recent days that pure, unfiltered cynicism was as likely to get you killed as anything else.

  That's where our formerly bright but still plenty bold girl Starshot—my rival turned ally—usually came in. So far, she hadn’t logged in for the day’s session. I wasn’t worried.

  “Three minutes,” B5 said.

  At least, I wasn’t overly worried.

  “Does that droid actually have eyes on Castle?” Blackstrike asked without turning back to look at me. We had crawled to the top of the rise but hadn’t yet peaked over the slick grass and through the chain-link fence.

  “He’s got eyes on his tracker,” I said.

  “So he doesn’t know if he’s actually gotten through security or not.”

  “Well,” I said. “Technically, he has gotten through security. It’s just a question of whether or not he’s in custody or walking free. The locks are all based in the control room, and Castle is presumably heading there as part of the city inspection excuse he fed to the guards.”

  “How do we—“

  “I can’t communicate with him while he’s in there, Blackstrike. We’ll just need to have faith.”

  “In an NPC.” More lovely deadpan from the ninja. I almost preferred the thought of getting into a scrap we couldn’t win at this point. But I’d much prefer if Castle finished implementing B5’s maddening prison maze plan.

  “Two minutes. Still no sign of hero … villain Starshot.” Starshot had earned so much Infamy after delivering the killing blow on Leviathan that she had Tiered down twice, enough so that she flipped to a villain role, with colors to match. It was a rare mistake by the Ythilian AI and one of many reminders that he wasn’t wired quite the same way as other Titan NPCs. B5 was always thinking. Always planning. It made him formidable, but it also meant he had occasional mental hiccups, like the best of us.

  “She’ll be along,” I said. “Besides, we don’t need her to be here when w
e make our entrance, only once we’re inside.”

  “And once we’re making our escape, assuming we last that long,” Blackstrike added. He was scanning the guard towers, trying to confirm that the rotations were off relative to the norm.

  “Run through the sequence again, B,” I said.

  “Officer Castle will enter the premises through the front door. Accomplished,” I sighed. “Officer Castle will proceed to tell four lies to the officer on duty. Presumably accomplished. Officer Castle will then perform an inspection of the facilities on behalf of the acting Deputy Mayor, Clarissa –“

  “B,” I said, short and clipped.

  “Once inside,” he skipped to the relevant part of the plan. The part he knew I’d been referencing when I made the request in the first place. “Under the guise of running a software security check, Castle will unlock facility doors four, thirteen, sixteen, forty-two, forty-four and fifty-one while locking doors one, two, three, five, six, seven, eight—“

  “The rest of them,” Blackstrike said, reaching up to silence the receiver in his ear.

  “Correct,” B5 said.

  I nodded. The sequence would allow us the best possible route through the building while insulating us from the defensive routes of the guards on duty once the alarm had been raised.

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