The Beginning (Dark Paladin Book #1) LitRPG Series Read online

“Enough! Either you hand me a granis, or I am sending you for respawn right now! Five. Four. Three…”

  “Two days after I leave the Academy I will give a granis to Dangard,” the elf practically shouted. “Voluntarily and without being reminded. Is that it? Are you happy now?! Am I now free to go?!”

  “Now you are free. Completely and utterly.” There was an electric crackle, a stifled rasp from Nartalim, an indignant yell from Monstrichello, a tussle and rattle of steel, several more electric crackles, and then I heard the quiet and contemplative voice of Dangard:

  “Where do they make these morons? Promising something without specifying conditions… Paladins…"

  I clung close to the beam. The electric crackle made it clear: the mages had reached the teacher who trained in the use of abilities. Now one could expect anything from the players: an electric kick, a burst of fire, a water tornado and other magic tricks aimed at killing enemy troops. Now attempting a one-on-one fight would be dangerous for me: I am not immune to magic like Monstrichello.

  “The Paladins have been killed, we lost seven,” I heard quick steps and then some player smartly reported the current situation to Dangard.

  “What about Yari?”

  “Nothing. He did not appear at any of the respawn points; we are controlling all the nearest teachers, he was not seen there either. Dangard, why did you take that Pal aside? I had even thought we were actually going to make an agreement with them.”

  “I bilked him out of a granis, I need to work on my artifact after all. I put him off his guard, subdued his will and forced him to make a promise to the Game.

  “Come on! An entire granis?”

  “I don’t like traitors. Since it’s impossible to punish them any other way in the Academy, I’ll make them feel the pain by taking their money.”

  “Cool… what are we going to do about Yari?”

  “Look for him‒ what else? This Pal turned out to be smarter than Devir thought. In any case, he will soon croak without food. We’ll wait. Are you done with all of the local teachers?”

  “No, I just came up to the fifth when Hendy came running screaming like mad about the Paladins. So I had to drop everything and rush here.”

  “That’s right, the quest is the priority. Let’s go, we need to finish training…”

  The mages left the edge of the clearing, leaving me to my new chunk of information: it’s necessary to eat something in the game, or else you will die. By my estimate I had been a player for a little longer than a day; however, I was still not feeling any hunger. I was neither hungry nor thirsty; moreover, I had not thought of it until now. I assessed my condition and frowned: my body felt no discomfort. Despite spending a day without external nourishment, my body was not screaming that things were dire and I needed to go and eat a piece of bark right away. Meanwhile the mages were certain that soon I would starve and then die. Why were they so convinced that they were right?

  There was no benefit I could get from the current teacher, so I carefully continued moving. All the nearest training points were controlled by the mages, therefore, it would be pointless to attempt to go there either. Seeing no other option I decided to move into the depths of the Academy, following the arrows. They should lead me somewhere after all, right? The most important thing would be to not encounter local animals…

  The first signs of exhaustion started appearing two hours later: my Energy level dropped to 40 units and refused to come up to its original level even after I stopped to rest. Moreover, during the thirty minutes of rest the Energy level dropped by another two units, which enabled the Book of Knowledge to make the appropriate entry: players in the Academy are doomed for continuous respawn. If one were to suppose that there is no food in this jungle of stone and steel (forget about the panther and whatever other living things for now), then sooner or later my Energy level would drop to zero and the mages at the respawn point will have their day, catching me with their greedy paws. By the way, it meant that a non-initiated player would not be able to stay in the Academy forever: sooner or later he would run out of levels and die for good.

  I did not feel any discomfort from the loss of Energy other than minor weakness and shortness of breath, but those could be attributed to having to constantly play Tarzan. Moving along the beams, constantly moving up and down, was not easy. I realized that staying in one place would mean certain death, and kept moving. Even if I were to be sent for respawn, at least I would die fighting rather than hiding under some stone. One thing pleased me: as I was moving along the beams I did not encounter any local fauna, as if the intertwined and multi-level steel bands were a safe route. While I have Energy, I should use that to the fullest. There will always be time to die.

  “Suppose you manage to creep by the guards and reach open space,” a slightly hoarse voice out of nowhere made me freeze, despite an extremely uncomfortable position (I was hanging in the air trying to hook my feet onto the nearest beam). “But will you like what you find there?”

  Completing a trick that would be practically impossible for an ordinary person, pulling myself up and jumping onto a beam, I turned around. No one there.

  “A quick one, aren’t you,” the invisible one mocked. The voice came from everywhere at once, so it was hard to figure out where the old man could be. I had no doubts the hoarse voice belonged to an old guy; it was quite similar to the voice of the first teacher.

  “My greetings!” I said, looking tensely into the jumble of steel and stone. Could I be so lucky as to find a hidden teacher? “Would you allow me to partake of your wisdom, teacher?”

  “Not just quick, but also a smartie-pants.” The voice did not become one iota less sarcastic. “He wants to learn, doesn’t he? Wants to partake of wisdom. You, dearie, should first figure out how to get to me, before trying to partake of whatever you can reach.”

  I was thinking of asking the old guy where he was located, but my memory immediately brought up the conversation with my first teacher. We had conversed quite well, but as soon as I attempted to ask about location of the source of knowledge, the conversation died at once. Something was telling me that I was dealing with the same thing here.

  “Getting to a place is not the problem,” I started cautiously. “What guards do you mean?”

  “Guards?” I could hear surprise in the voice of my invisible interlocutor. “That’s a sudden question. A funny one. And not an ordinary one…”

  “So what about the guards?” I said just in case, as the voice fell silent for an entire minute. “How can one sneak by them? Anyway, who are they? Are they panthers?”

  “What do panthers have to do with it?” The voice returned.

  “I saw one of the panthers kill two rogues…”

  “Pffff! He saw! Do you at least understand what you saw? How can there be a panther in the Academy?”

  “There really was one!” I insisted. “It’s true, I did not get to see how it killed the rogues, but I did see the panther with my own eyes! I even have a picture of it in my Book of Knowledge!”

  “Right, because of such sloppy explorers we get wild tales about the Academy. We don’t have any panthers here! Not a single one at all! You saw an ordinary level 5 player, a druid who has passed initiation and specializes in transformation. An ordinary headhunter!”

  “So then who are the guards?” I was taken aback.

  “Oh yeah: the guards, right?” The sarcastic note slipped back into the old guy’s voice. “OK, take a look. Here’s a prominent representative!”

  There was a reinforced concrete slab not too far from me; it created a convenient path and led away from the steel beam. Had it not been for my decision to strictly follow the arrows, I would have been unlikely to find any reasonable objections against walking on that slab. It looked really good and led to quite an interesting passage in the stone boulders. I frowned, thinking the voice was mocking me again, but then the slab started moving. There was no vibration, no cracks, no dust; in literally a moment the slab moved to a
vertical position, somehow fitting through the top layers of the labyrinth; a huge red eye was staring at me, shining with a blood-tinged light right from the middle of the slab. The concrete slab was alive! Thin tentacles appeared at the edges of the monster and rushed towards me.

  All that was so unexpected that I swayed back, slipped and almost crashed down; at the last moment I held on to the beam, skinning both my palms. The tentacles were just a touch too short to reach me, barely over a meter remained. From fear I shut my eyes, pulled my body up to the beam and hugged it with both my arms and legs, as if it were my closest relative whom I never wished to let go. Fear washed over me in waves, pushing me to abandon the beam and fall down, but I struggled. I did not know what for, but I still resisted.

  Suddenly everything stopped and the fear subsided as if it never was there.

  “While you are holding on to the guiding line, the guards won’t do anything to you,” I heard the old man’s voice again, and dared open my eyes. The tentacles disappeared and so did the monster. There was nothing except the concrete slab leading to the mysterious passage. Just for some reason looking at that passage made cold rush down your spine.

  “A guard can assume any shape,” the voice continued, as soon as I was sitting on the beam again. “It can be a slab, a stone, a branch. The only thing it cannot be is the guiding line. If you were to stop touching it for over ten seconds, they will start a hunt for you.

  “Another one?” I smiled bitterly. “Seems like too many hunts for just a single me.”

  “That’s why I decided to talk to you. I don’t really like what the mages are doing: with each killing the number of trainees diminishes further. This needs to be stopped.”

  “Then why are killings allowed in the Academy altogether?”

  “Life is so complicated! You need to win the right to be a player, even if you are fighting against an opponent who is bound to be stronger, and who took a banned potion.”

  “Mihonarium?” I exhibited my knowledge.

  “Yes.” I could hear bitterness in his voice. “The players were supposed to wake up gradually, so as not to interfere with each other’s exploration of the Academy, but the mages spoiled it all. I don’t like it, so I want to spoil things for them, too. So that’s why I need you. In four hours you will die …”

  “WHAT?!” I was unable to contain my emotions.

  “Practically everyone dies in the Academy. This is normal. Unless a player brought some food with him, every twelve hours he will respawn. The Academy was created to complete training with the teachers, not to hang around here all your life. If you want to survive you will have to work hard for it. First of all, you have to return to the team with which you came here.”

  “They betrayed me to the mages!”

  “Not all of them: just the elf.” The voice was resolute. “Alone, you will not get out of the forest, even the guiding line will not help you. In this area of the Academy there are just five common and three hidden teachers; that will not be enough to go all the way back. You will have to go into open space.”

  “So this is not an obstacle course around me, but a forest?” I frowned, thinking of the old man’s words. It was hard to admit it but he was right: with Monstrichello and Logir with her hammer by my side, we could fight the mages off. The Paladins did that before. If we were to forget about the elf’s betrayal and make use of his saber, my chances of reaching the teacher for class attributes would only increase. The question remained, however: was I ready to meet the Paladins who were willing to sell me out to the mages?

  “Would you help me reach the hidden teachers?” I could not but ask, thinking I would decide on rejoining my team later. “It would feel a lot less nervous meeting the mages with four levels under my belt.”

  “Why do you think that each teacher would give you a whole level?” The voice was surprised. “At level one you need to train with one teacher to get an extra level. At level two it will already take two teachers. At level three it will be three and so on. If one goes quickly through all the teachers the player comes back from the Academy with level four and rosy thoughts. Not more than that.”

  “But the hidden teachers can teach me things to improve the odds of survival and help to stop the genocide of players begun by the mages!” I would not give up. “I am not likely to have much fighting success with my bare hands against lightning bolts!”

  “Not only a quick and smart one, but also slippery as an eel,” the voice was once again sporting snide notes. “Going to fight, indeed… Forget that word! You are an explorer! Your only weapon is hanging onto your leg and sponging up information right now. Use it. No need to lug around swords, cudgels and other metal scrap. You are the knowledge warrior!”

  “Yeah, right. History knows heaps of those,” I grumbled mulishly. “Giordano Bruno, for example. His knowledge didn’t really help him to avoid being burnt at the stake.”

  “You are confused, Paladin. What happens among NPCs should not concern you. Even if they were to blow up the planet the players would move to another game world and keep developing there. Lose the habit of being mortal. If you want to become a real player, you need to reject the world of your past. The Game does not start a large-scale purge so that the players would then reflect on times past. You need to keep going forward constantly!”

  “How did it come about anyway, this blasted Game!” Sad memories of my lost family overwhelmed me again, and, upset, I cursed mightily. I never asked anyone to turn me into a player! Had it not been for Devir, I would have returned to my family without a problem and lived the rest of my life peacefully, not having to worry about being hunted down.

  “Just like any other game: it was created.”

  “By the Emperor?” I ventured a guess. “The mysterious three-eyed moderator?”

  “The Emperor monitors compliance with the main laws, but after all he is also an ordinary player, even though a very high level one. The Game was created by specific individuals for a specific purpose, and currently it fulfils all its tasks. If you want to find out more about it, find me. I am not even going to hide: I am located at the very center of the Academy, on the island, in the third tower. If you crave knowledge: welcome to my abode. Goodbye for now; the time left till your respawn is melting away unstoppably. I agree that you need help; your map will constantly show the current location of your team and — alright! — one of the hidden teachers. He will teach you a lot. Hold on to the guiding line, stop the mages and find me — I have a lot to tell you, explorer.”

  The map has been updated

  Chapter Four. Genocide

  IT TOOK ME about an hour to reach the point marked on the map. At the beginning of the way I was seeing a guard practically in every stone, so I tried to avoid touching things if I didn't need to. But when I almost lost my balance, I stopped caring, and continued on my way grabbing on to everything I could, taking care to make sure that at any given time some part of my body was touching the guiding line. Actually, speaking of body parts… a rather long time had passed since I became a player, but I still had no urge at all to visit the bathroom. I knew that I was losing precious time and looked like an insecure little boy, but I still couldn’t resist it: I pulled down my steel chausses and looked at what the Game had endowed me with in terms of my male equipment. I could not contain a satisfied chuckle once I made sure that everything I had before had stayed with me. Based on a visual inspection my everything looked healthy and — again, I couldn’t help checking! — after several quick strokes it reacted the way it was supposed to: I had an erection. With a heavy sigh I rid myself of the temptation, then dressed and kept moving. The guards of the forest of stone and steel were not the kind of audience I would want to regale with the sight of masturbation, even though it would have been really great to relax right now. As soon I as squirmed out of trouble I would definitely find a woman for a night. Sex is the best method of stress relief.

  The first thing I realized once I saw the teacher was: it would ha
ve been impossible to find him on my own. If you had not known that there was a grey-haired old man in this particular spot, it would have been extremely hard to find him in the middle of a jumble of reinforced concrete. It took me several minutes to orient myself and locate a barely noticeable steel beam a meter below me, disappearing under a huge stone. Having carefully climbed down and made my way along the new guiding line, I ended up nose to nose with an old man covered with dust, sitting in the lotus position. The only sign indicating that he was still alive were two blue eyes in his motionless face, watching my approach intently.

  “Welcome, recruit, I will be training you. Now harken to my wisdom!”

  Learning progress: You have reached teacher 2 of 10

  “You will have to choose what I am going to teach you,” the old man continued in a hoarse voice, as dust fell away from his face at every word. Apparently, this teacher had not talked to any players for some time.

  “What options do I have?” I asked with trepidation. Had I finally got lucky, after all?

  “I can replace any of the ten mandatory teachers. But only one. It is within my power to teach you how to use either the artifact, game interface, defense, attack or secondary class abilities, specialty, craft, attributes, class outfits, or teach you the basics of the Game. Choose what is most interesting to you at this point. I would like to remind you that you need to choose one thing only.

  I took a few deep breaths, fighting a strong desire to study the attack capabilities, so I could go beat the mages. As the unknown voice had said, knowledge was my weapon, so that’s what I needed to increase to the max. Choosing my words carefully so as not to give the teacher a reason to pick on something, I started questioning:

  “Before the Academy I didn’t have a chance to go through the initial training, so it’s hard for me to choose an area of training based just on names… If you were to give me the names of all ten training units, the choice would be more rational and logical. As of now I am being overwhelmed by over-the-top entropy."