vol 1, ch 0: you will see death, foolish boy, and lots of it

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Rick was standing in a burning field on the outskirts of a village. Smoke rose to the sky, and dark scarlet beads slipped down the length of his sword. The longer he stared at the blood, the more he felt like retching, barely holding it back.

Beneath him was a corpse with its face hidden in the weeds. A stab wound bled from its back. The wound matched the profile of Rick’s sword, and it should since it was him who had backstabbed his friend… Lucy.

“It had to be done,” he mumbled, looking around for someone to tell. “I had to do it. Guys, don’t you see?”

There was nobody around that could respond and agree with him. The village had turned out to be empty despite Rick and the Team being sent here on a quest. The place had been dismantled, the belongings of the farmers and their families scattered and trampled. The Team quickly realized that the village had been pillaged, all the villagers taken. The villains had been violent if the trails of blood were anything to go by.

Before they could investigate further… Lucy had arrived with her weapon aimed at her friends, the Team.

Rick stumbled away from Lucy’s corpse, his sword hand shaking while his other hand combed furiously through his hair.

“Why did you attack us, Lucy? Why were you killing our friends?” he accused. Why did you force me to kill you? To murder a friend?

This world, separate from Earth… this game… was already hard enough. For Rick and his six friends to be violently taken from their home and drafted into a fight against an evil magitek god remained a hard pill to swallow.

But to add to it, the game's difficulty was all the way to the max, and no matter how far they progressed, something always threw a wrench at their plans. And this was the bloodiest wrench yet.

Because Lucy hadn’t died alone. With a look across the grassy field, Rick spotted his friends. The sun was setting, and the surrounding forest and the mountain east of here drew long shadows, but the shape of Jac, Dika, Woo, and Sammy’s mangled corpses stood out to Rick. Each dead friend was a reminder of his failure to lead them properly. Even Lucy, who had ambushed them and caused all of this, was a failure he took to heart.

It’s my fault for not keeping track of her when we got separated.

It could have been his fault for taking this quest. It could have been his fault for not thinking of a way to detain Lucy and keep everyone safe. It could have been his fault for leading them from the mountain all the way here or for setting up the whole party that doomed them in the first place. That got them killed the first time and forced them to be heroes of a world in suffering.

There were lots of faults Rick could find with himself. It was easy, his mother had always called him a loser, and other kids had done the same as he grew up.

I shouldn’t be trusted with this responsibility.

Perhaps that was true and worth sulking over, but Rick had a new responsibility that emerged from the forest before he could continue contemplating all of his faults. He had no choice but to deal with this new interruption since she stood twenty feet tall, had skin the color of ice, and was wielding a massive ax.

The ground rumbled with the giant’s every footfall. Grass froze wherever the ax head passed, the weapon releasing an icy, sparkly mist that trailed after its wielder.

The air around Rick cooled as the ginormous woman gained on him. If Rick were of his usual mind, he would’ve been bothered. His mind was a little off at the moment, his emotions in turmoil. But he did have enough sense to face the new threat as she lumbered to a stop that was nearly right on top of him.

“Are you a Granter of Amnesty?” she asked, her voice like the howl of a tundra mixed with something faintly nordic. Like people from Minnesota.

Rick pointed at Lucy’s corpse. “Did you do something to make her attack us?” he asked, sidestepping the giant’s question.

The frost giantess looked at Lucy. Then she surveyed the other bodies. With the sun setting, and darkness engulfing the world, it was hard for him to make out her expressions. A shroud of shadows draped over her face, one that was so high above him.

He ought to be more afraid. His stomach was still roiling, ready to pitch, and this was his first time meeting a giant. But he was surrounded by dead friends, one of which he had killed. He was starting to come to terms with being past the point of reason.

“Well, did you freaking do this?” Rick pursued the question before lunging toward another question that seemed smarter to him. He wasn’t the Nerd of the group, but it was worth a shot. “Was this the Troll Chief’s doing?”

“It’s best I kill you now, Granter,” she grunted, ignoring his questions. “I take no pleasure in this, but it is my current duty to see to your destruction.”

“So, it wasn’t you,” Rick assumed. “Was it the Troll Chief or those damn Hobgoblins? What the hell did they do to Lucy? She’s… she wouldn’t attack us like that.” Psycho, or not, Lucy’s part of the Team.

The giantess raised her ax high, frost mist trailing, and chopped down at Rick. She swung with enough force that could blast a shack house into splinters. She gave the ground a good whack just as easily after Rick had rolled out of the way. Chunks of topsoil and ferns froze as they flew around him.

Since a dragon had taken his shield, Rick focused on getting his footing under him and wrapping both hands around his sword’s handle. He braced himself, knees bent, sword held closer to his body as he prepared to thrust once he found an opening. The giantess was wearing thick pelts and strings of animal skulls around her body. Aided by his War Fighter skill, Rick's instincts told him slashes wouldn’t do him any good here.

Warning! Frost G-G-Giant appppppeaaared! Difficulty: High If you’re not a frozen sausage in the snow yet, you better dig a grave first.

Of course, the glitchy system was late with the warning and appeared right in the middle of the fight. His foe gave Rick no time to read it. She pressed her advantage in size and reach, chopping at him again.

He skipped backward, the ax head slashing through the blue box before it finally disappeared with its stupid message. The most he saw was ‘Warning,’ everything else was a scramble of text due to his dyslexia.

Screw reading, someone teach me how to kill this chick. Then kill the hobgoblins. Then the trolls, the Troll Chief’s army, and the Troll Chief himself. That was all Rick could imagine himself doing right now because anything else would be too depressing.

Besides, if he won this session, his friends would revive. Then they could pick up from where they had left off without restarting. An unlikely outcome to achieve by himself, sure, but it gave him some hope.

That was enough to motivate Rick to dive in for an attack after a couple of dodges. He lunged over patches of torn frozen earth, ducked under another of the giantess’s swipes, and ran in between her legs.

He thrust his sword up into the flesh just above her knee and inside her thigh. His metal spilled her blood, and he was rewarded by a sharp hiss of pain from above. Rick pushed past the relish of success and darted out from under her backside.

He wasn’t the fastest member of the Team, but he was fast enough to hit, run, and jump out of the way of a deadly backswing.

A fiercely cold wind gusted at him from his skin-of-his-teeth dodge. When he got to his feet after the saving dive, frost covered his boots and calves. The gray bodysuit he had found himself in since getting drafted here did a poor job of insulating against the cold crawling up his legs.

Rick ignored it in favor of staring down his foe, who was resting on one knee. Their gazes locked, and for the first time since they’d met, he saw how crystal clear her eyes were. They carried more humanity in them than any monster he had faced so far.

“Why are you doing this?” Rick asked, lowering his sword a tad. “What’s your goal in attacking and killing us?”

“My goal is to serve the will of the Frost King, and the Frost King willed that I aid the Troll Chief.” She was basically a loan-away soldier then. “I am sorry for the loss of your friends. Their deaths were under dishonorable terms. Let me do you this favor, Granter, and pass you on so you could join them in the Starry Mountain Above.”

“You act like you’re sympathetic, but you’re still trying to freaking kill me!” Rick yelled.

“Yes, because death by my ax is better than death by the horde.” She pointed her free hand in a direction past Rick.

That was the oldest tactic in the book, something Dika would do for fun. But in the short time that he had known this foe, he had a gut feeling she was above petty tricks.

Rick gritted his teeth and followed her gesture. Good thing, too. The added awareness allowed him to duck under an arrow in the nick of time.

Rick fell face-first into the dirt. With an irritated grunt, he pushed up slightly and looked above the weeds. He saw the horde before he heard them, a mob of man-like monsters swarming across the field.

There were a hundred of them. No! Two hundred. There were more than Rick could count as the forest line crawled with gnolls, goblins, hobs, orcs, and other giant-kin like the frost giantess. And somewhere within that swell of gibbering, screeching, roaring, teeth-gnashing beings was the Troll Chief.

“Do you see now, Granter?” the frost giantess asked plainly. “You are outmatched. I’m too prideful to accept the curse of the Wurm, but those fiends, you see, they have welcomed it heartily. They will not give you quarter, nor respect, as I do. Let me end you rightly.”

Rick glanced back, and just like she had said, she had on no magitek⁠—no machine parts added to her body. When he returned his attention to what was ahead, he saw Orcs with mechanized arms. Goblins with shiny, metal legs. He saw one giant with two heads, and one of those heads was fully robotized. They were a menagerie of the Wurm’s disciples, afflicted by the magitek curse that turned fantasy creatures into medieval cyborgs.

Without the Team, Rick was hopelessly outpowered, outnumbered, and more than likely a walking corpse. If he accepted the frost giantess’s offer, the Team would revive, but they would have to start from scratch.

“I can’t,” Rick said.

“You are a fool if you think you can beg for mercy,” she spat. “Weakling men without morals, certainly, we’ll take them as bandits. But you, a Granter, there is only death or torment. For you are the enemy of their god, the Mecha Wurm.”

“I never said I was going to beg.” Rick raised on his knee, one hand gripping the soft earth. “And I’m not that moral either. Hell, I think the person who picked us is nuts. My friends and I are a bunch of rejects and rebels. We’re the worst possible heroes, so why is it our job to deal with this crap?”

Dozens of goblins and gnolls started breaking away from the mob and charged forward. Their howls and chatters were filled to the brim with bloodlust.

“But my friend⁠… Jac⁠—she said we can't ever give up.” Rick bolted forward into the rush. “We won’t game death, and we won’t back down!”

His first sword swing chopped through goblin skin, fat, and metal bone. The second swing slid in and out of a gnoll’s ribcage. The third swing struck off of another gnoll’s steely claws before Rick rebounded with a flourish and necked the monster. The fourth and fifth swings⁠—and two goblins had their heads rolling. The sixth attack gutted another goblin’s potbelly under its metal chest. The seventh attack was a kick to a monster’s balls. Eighth—

A metal fist clocked Rick across the jaw. His brain bounced around his skull, and the world around him tilted suddenly, his vision hazing. Inconvenienced, but not defeated, his instincts drove the next attack as a thrust through the heart. With a shove, Rick pushed the corpse onto more oncoming monsters.

He raised his blade once again and kept attacking, giving no heed to his own safety. His rage drove him into a theater of war and death.

Arcs of brownish, oily blood flung off his sword with every cut and thrust. The stench of pissing and shitting green-skinned and furry cyborg bastards thickened the air.

With every breath he chugged in, foul vapors dirtied Rick up from the inside. It weighed on him as he went as berserk as Mad would if she was here. But she had been dead for weeks already.

It was the only way to fight. He had to go crazy because nothing here was sane⁠—stepping over monstrous corpses, squashing spilled intestines, smashing techno-limbs with savage blows, and wetting the ground into mud with brackish blood. It was a demented, grimy, and adrenaline fueled-ride straight to hell.

“You screwed with the wrong fool!” Rick yelled from the top of a heap of bodies.

Rick had no idea how many he had slain at this point. He didn’t know how he was still alive. But this was just the start of things. Soon, the orcs crashed in, followed by trolls, and bandits, and giants.

A single person could only do so much as the orcs hammered with huge blunt weapons and the trolls cast spells through magitek orbs that shot volleys of magic missiles. Then the giants kicked Rick like he was a ball. The rest became a reddish, nightmarish blur as Rick was smacked around the bloody earth.

Then he was beaten some more for good measure.

The next time he came to, he found himself held between two long-limbed trolls, their hands fully mechanized by the Wurm’s curse. Before him lay a stained rug draped over some steps that lead to the top of a makeshift platform of hastily nailed planks. On top of that platform was a throne made of human effigies, and sitting on that throne was a troll. Despite the trauma of his beating and the haze of his thoughts, Rick took a fairly safe guess.

“You’re… the Troll… Chief,” he said, his words strangled by the loss of his teeth and the swelling around his face. Honestly, he was swelling everywhere. And he could feel himself getting colder. Was that internal bleeding?

The Troll Chief was like the other trolls, about eight feet tall. His arms were long and could reach down to his ankles if he was to stand. But he was the most mechanized creature Rick had seen yet. No part of Troll Chief was flesh anymore. Exposed cords were lines filled with bluish magic. His power glowed through his eyes and an orb embedded in the middle of his chest.

Despite his metallic body, at his feet were various female cyborgs, from troll to orc to goblin to even human. They lounged around the Troll Chief like cats⁠—some busying themselves by rubbing his metal limbs as if to appease him.

Rick wondered if the frost giantess got it pretty rough working for a pompous asshole such as this.

“Why do you attack me, Granter?” asked the Troll Chief. His tone was calm, reasonable, and slightly hinted with static. His voice and dialect were so neutral it reminded Rick of people from sanitized states… like Connecticut. “Can’t you see I am but a humble creature making my way in this cruel world of ours?”

“It’s cruel because of bullies like you.” Rick sputtered blood from forcing himself to speak. Everything hurt. He pushed through still, letting his mouth go off despite his apparent doom. “You did something to my friend. What did you do to Lucy?”

“I would share the experience your friend… enjoyed… Granter, but you are too far gone,” the Troll Chief said.

Some members of the female harem lounging at the wings laughed like screeching harlots. The others remained focused on stroking the chief’s shell of a body.

“I pity you,” the Troll Chief said. “You have the blessing of magitek just like I do. But you choose to war against me, to war against the Wurm! You don’t even know the depths of your foolishness, boy. Why war with power when you can join with it? Then all that you wish will belong to you when you are one with the Wurm.”

“Oh, bite me, loser,” Rick muttered.

“Funny, the lowly troll I once was would’ve bitten you,” the Troll Chief said. “But I have evolved beyond such mortal needs. I am no longer the weakling Troll that humans hound and torment. I will no longer stand by as humans put fire to my kin and the kin of the many beings that stand proudly with me! I am chief of the Troll Army, and this realm will submit to my master and I. Or face a fate such as yours.”

The Troll Chief motioned his hand forward. The women turned from their chief to Rick. Like animals, they crawled down the platform’s steps, growling and yipping, wagging their ends for their master’s viewing pleasure. Rick watched as the female humanoids bore their teeth and converged upon him.

Rick shivered his head as the other monsters that were gathered near cackled and howled. He looked around at the laughing goblins, orcs, and trolls. Then his attention locked onto a familiar form to his right.

It was the frost giantess. Thanks to the firelight that illuminated the scene, he saw her face in more detail and recognized the expression directed at him.

Disappointment.

That… that look was all it took to break him truly.

“No!” Rick screamed as the cyborg women tore him from the grasp of the troll guards.

“No!” he uttered again as they piled upon him, their nails clawing, their fists pounding, their teeth finding flesh.

No, was what he wanted to say as he succumbed to the realization that he had no place to call the Troll Chief a loser.

I’m the loser.

With that in mind, Rick died once again.