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Somnus IV - Chapter 29

Kat’s foot scraped across tree bark, missing its mark and sending her tumbling to the side off of the massive branch.  For a fraction of a second, her heart leapt into her throat before she channeled mana into Flight.

A second later, hair tousled and face red with embarrassment, she floated back up to the branch and touched down gently.  Jaalin glanced back at her, muzzle pursed and shook her head.

Dorrik’s hand gently touched Kat’s shoulder, and she looked up at t...

Somnus IV- Chapter 28

“This is blackmail!”

Kat took a second to enjoy the puffy, cherry red sight of Blake Daniels blustering before she tried her best to channel Belle Donnst.

“I prefer the term extortion.  Blackmail implies that I am only threatening to reveal secrets that implicate you criminally or harm your reputation.  Extortion encompasses blackmail, but it also includes a range of other intimidating behavior such as physical harm and the abuse of a position of authority or respe...

Somnus IV - Chapter 27

Emma’s voice droned on.  At the other end of the small conference room, Heather was sitting attentively in her chair, back ramrod straight and her cybernetic arms folded on the table as her eyes flicked back and forth underneath her smartglass eyepiece.  Occasionally the smartglass would flash dimly as the system processed her notes.

Kat reached up, pinching her temples between her thumb and forefinger and trying in vain to rub her budding headache away.  To her right, ...

Somnus IV - Chapter 26

Hestia stood on the stone walkway in front of the research facility, hands tucked into her pockets as she looked unperturbed at the sheer reinforced concrete walls and humming electric fences.  Two members of the 3445 in APEX armor stood about twenty paces apart, their rifles ready but not quite pointed at the woman while a third guard approached her.

On the walls of the facility a half dozen guns, four of which were hidden behind thin coverings of paper or holographic light, train...

Somnus IV - Chapter 25

“Kaleek,” Kat said theatrically as she sloshed through waist deep clouded water, “The next time Dorrik suggests that we raid a dungeon with a name like ‘The Murky Depths,’ I would be grateful if you could smack them on the back of the head for me.”

The big otter’s nose twitched.  Scattered around the room were a half dozen monster corpses that resembled deflated beach balls.  In life, they had been inflated with gas and had moved around the room with alarming swi...

Chapter 18

A day or two turned into the better part of a week.  Occasionally Kassar chimed in to offer a tip or two, but most of Bruce’s time was spent with his legs crossed trying to sense every single detail of the area around his sanctuary.  At first, it was a bit boring, and Bruce began to feel himself going crazy with boredom as he tried to make sense of the different colors and intensities, but after a day or so of concentration, he began to make serious progress.  Not enough to m...

Chapter 17

Bruce made it two steps onto the ninth floor before everything went pear shaped.  The wall in front of him blurred slightly, bulging outward in a hemisphere that split horizontally to reveal a yellow eye the size of a dinner plate.  He froze, hoping that it wouldn’t spot him if he didn’t make any sudden movements.

It blinked.

Bruce blinked back, barely breathing as he did his best to blend in with the featureless walls.

It focused on him, and Bruce felt somethi...

Somnus IV - Chapter 24

“There,” Kat whispered, one hand dug into the massive tree’s bark while she pointed with the other.  A white shape popped its head out of a knothole on the next tree over, looking back and forth before climbing out entirely.  It was segmented and insectoid, clinging to the surface of the tree with six pointed legs while its antenna and vestigial glimmering wings waved in the breeze.

“Good eye,” Jaalin said with a grunt, squinting as she looked at the other tree. &nbs...

Somnus IV - Chapter 23

“Katherine!” Kat flinched as her mom’s voice echoed across the hallway.  “Oh thank God you’re alright!”

Penelope pushed past a security guard in a suit.  The guard reached out to stop her, but thought better of his actions when he spotted Jeffrey glowering at him above crossed arms.

“Hey mo-” Kat began only for her mother to all but tackle her into a hug.  Somehow, years of living on a razor’s edge and tweaking her reflexes until she could spear fl...

Somnus IV - Chapter 22

“Aaand done,” Emma tapped the side of her head beneath the infiltration suit.  “We have ninety minutes of plausible deniability before we need to hit the road, and that’s only if there isn’t much traffic.  We should try and get in and out in sixty minutes if possible.”

“Chiffon?” Kat whispered, nodding toward Whip.  “Do you think you can handle that?

Emma held out both of her hands, opening her fingers to reveal a square about the size of a closed ...

Chapter 16

“Bruce,”  Kassar’s voice boomed in his head.  “Start running!”

“What?!” Bruce yelped back, looking back and forth in the hallway just outside of the sanctuary.  The strange light illuminating the slate gray corridor was dimmer and a dark angry red.  Even without Kassar shouting at him, the entire tableau was beyond foreboding.

“Where should I go?” He asked, summoning his hammer to calm his nerves.  It wasn’t a clean and well crafted too...

Somnus IV - Chapter 21

Kat rolled to the side, a gust of air filled with glittering ice shards tracking her as the massive translucent spider unleashed another breath attack at her.  In its wake, a half dozen or so smaller monsters burst out of the ice, birthed by the magic from their mother’s ability.  They weren’t as large as the usual dungeon denizens, but the smaller ten-legged baby ice spiders were fast, and their fangs were heavily laden with a paralytic poison.

Kaleek’s trembling body i...

Somnus IV - Chapter 20

Rainbow light swirled past around Kat, disappearing with a puff as her body solidified in the dungeon.  Breath puffed out in front of her, condensing into mist that dissipated into the murky air.  A second later Kaleek appeared at her side in a flash of light followed shortly by Dorrik.

They were in a cave.  The walls and floor were covered in a gleaming layer of ice, but underneath the frozen water they were uneven and rocky, branching off into any number of small crevic...

Somnus IV - Chapter 19

“-and our scientists have managed to decrease the size of our capacitors by eight percent while increasing their energy density by twelve percent, all while holding production costs steady.  In ordinary times, this would be enough for us to corner the market, but as you all know we more or less already have the market cornered.  Instead, these advances when coupled with the previously mentioned increases in muzzle velocity and heat dispersion for our magnetic accelerators, open th...

Somnus IV - Chapter 18

“Are you sure about this?”  Whip asked uncertainly, her fingers gripping the bottom of her shirt and twisting the fabric.  “I bet they’re busy right now.  There’s probably a lot going on with the new heightened security after the attack on the penthouse.  We could always come back another day when things are a bit quieter.”

“Things are plenty quiet,” Kat replied, leaning forward to press the buzzer.  “The housing is new and more secure, but oth...

Update - 3/28/23

Hello friends!

I've been MIA for a bit mostly because I've been working on a super secret story.  The goal of said story (The Great Predator) is to eventually put it on Royal Road, but I am waiting until I have a pretty hefty backlog (60-80 chapters) to do so.  Given that Predator will be a Patreon Exclusive for a while, I've added an index and a handy navigation bar at the bottom (this made posting...

The Great Predator (New Book Announcement/Index)

The Great Predator is a Science Fantasy LitRPG.  The goal is for the actual science to be 'hard' (meaning that it is a natural extrapolation of current science without any hyper blaster pistols or trans dimensional scanning arrays).  This ordinarily would mean that humanity would be stuck to our solar system, but the central conceit is that we discover 'magic' (extra dimensional energy) that can be organized into a LitRPG like system to allow the more fantastic elements of most Scie...

Chapter 15

“Kassar!” Bruce called the alien’s name for a third time, but the big white ape was still snoring soundly in his hammock.  He glanced back and forth for something to wake his companion up with.  Finally, he settled on the handful of shells he was holding.

The first clamshell missed, but the second bounced off of Kassar’s face.  He woke with a start, a tangled mess of flailing limbs as he fell out of the hammock, planting himself face first in the strangely spongy ...

Chapter 14

“Choose wisely, human.”

Bruce shook his head, trying to clear it of outside thoughts.  It was impossible to rid himself entirely of Kassar’s presence, the alien felt like a weight pressing down in the back of his mind, but he wanted to do his best to think clearly.

His passenger’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm was a bit unsettling.  Bruce didn’t want to let the alien’s obvious enthusiasm toward the ‘path of the neutron star’ influence him too much, but at the s...

Chapter 13

Bruce coughed nervously.  Kassar was staring intently at him.  He wasn’t sure if it was the fact that skulls didn’t have eyelids, or if there truly were something that made the alien seem like it was watching his every movement with the alertness of a hawk, but the entire situation unnerved him.

“This, uh,” he half mumbled, reaching up to scratch the back of his head as he tried to find the right words to respond.  “This feels like it could easily be a trap? &nb...

Chapter 12

Bruce fell.  Gray walls rushing past him as he hurtled toward an eventual splatter of raspberry jam.  His stomach was in his throat, the sickly burn of bile threatening to make its presence known.

Silently, he activated Phase Armor.  It would almost certainly do next to nothing when he eventually hit the ground, but it wasn’t like Bruce had a flying pattern or the ability to stretch out his hands and feet and glide away like Treekipp.

A bridge rushed by to his lef...

Chapter 11

“Are you ready?”

Bruce nodded at the whispered question.  There were a half dozen shades flickering quietly as they flowed down the corridor ahead of them.  He surveyed them quickly.  The three four legged shades could grow energy whips, the two legged creatures would react marginally faster, and the pair of six legged monsters clinging to the ceiling could jump about twenty feet in one go.

“On the count of three,” Maddox continued.  “I’ll fire off ...

Interlude - Stats -

-Interlude HUD Output-

EXP: 10

Body-     3
Regeneration
Phase Armor

Agility-   3

Will-       3
Ether Map

Phase Hammer II
Tier One Enhancement [Empty]

Phase Shield II
Tier One Enhancement [Empty]

---------- Navigation ----------
Previous     2023-03-28 14:53:10 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 10

Finding a sanctuary was difficult, even with the help of Maddox’s new Sonar ability.  More than once they found themselves looping around to an area of his map that they had already explored, forcing them to retrace their steps and take a different turn.

Along the way, they ran into two more small groups of shades aimlessly wandering the hallways of the Great Labyrinth.  Without the flares of energy from their gear being destroyed or abilities being activated, it actually wa...

Chapter 9

It took an hour for Bruce to heal enough to stand up.  Every moment of agony wore away at his willpower as he knew that all he needed to do to end the pain was purchase and activate Regeneration.  Of course, doing so would mean highlighting their location to any nearby shades and triggering another fight.

He managed to restrain himself.  Barely.

Finally, pains shooting up his legs and back, he managed to pull himself upward with the help of the Maze’s wall.  ...

Chapter 8

“How many did you get?”  Maddox asked, still not moving from his crouch.  “I must have hit four.  HUD is saying that I have 40 EXP.”

“Looks like six for me” Bruce croaked, checking his HUD.  “Back hurts like hell though.  I’m lucky that my legs are still numb from whatever they did to my nerves.  Once I can feel them too, I’m probably going to black out.”

Maddox nodded slowly, looking Bruce up and down.

“They got you good,�...

Chapter 7

Bruce glared at the squirrel, but it refused to show any remorse.  Already the strange wind carrying the scent of decay and mothballs was beginning to blow over the two of them.  He turned back to the hallway, rotating his shoulders in their sockets as he tried to work out the lingering pain and stiffness from the first hit he had taken.

The injury wasn’t entirely gone, after all he’d only had Accelerated Healing for a minute or so, but it wasn’t slowing him down anymore...

Chapter 6

“I can assure you that I have not read your mind,” Treekipp said huffily.  “It is strictly against the Treaty of Rigel to make any mental contact with a potential client except to learn their language.  I could have my charter revoked.”

“Calm down,” Maddox admonished the excitable squirrel.  “I guess it was just an unlikely coincidence.  Now, if you could give us some recommended suggestions as to what we should be buying, I’d be grateful.”

�...

Chapter 5

A quick punch to the side of a biped’s head, barely enough to produce a dim flash of blue light, and Bruce was through the blockade and running down the hallway.  Maddox was a step or two in front of him, left arm hanging limp by his side and the small green greeter clinging to his shoulder.

The monster’s behind him howled again, but despite their quick speed, they were slow to get moving.  That was something Bruce had noticed in the brief fight.  The shades could mov...

Chapter 4

Bruce held his breath as Maddox’s index finger pressed down on the button.  It slid into the podium with a scraping sound, clicking into place when it was flush with the rest of the pillar.

Nothing happened.

Just as he exhaled in relief, the podium began to hiss and spray thick white smoke.  Both Maddox and Bruce jumped backward, hands grasping at their hips for guns that weren’t there.  The sound of horns playing a quickly paced reveille filled the room

T...