Into the breach, p.1
Into The Breach, page 1
INTO THE BREACH
BOOK NINE
OF
THE WORLD
Copyright 2021 Jason Cheek
Published by Jason Cheek on Amazon
Cover Art by Leonardo Black
ISBN-13:
License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Amazon.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Preface
Map of the World
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Appendices
Character Sheet
Startum Ironwolf’s Gear
Character List
About Jason Cheek
Connect with Jason Cheek
Post Credit Scene
Preface
A Note from the Author about Book 9 being split into two books:
I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up, book 9 is being split into two books. The first half will be the book 9 that you’re currently reading, and book 10 will be the second half that I hope to have completed and out within a month or possibly two. That’s because book 9 was nearly complete when I discovered an issue with releasing longer books on Amazon as a self-publishing author.
When releasing book 5 of The World in German, I found out the hard way that Amazon only allows a self-published author’s paperback book to be 828 pages long. The only way I can counteract the restriction is to start producing shorter stories in the 400 to 500 range, which I would say is still a very large book for the litrpg/gamelit genre.
In the future, I will be able to plan a better-balanced story but this won’t work for splitting Book 9. The story is nearly completed so I’ve just decided to split the book down the middle as closely as I can. This was the best compromise that I could think to come up with. It also gives everyone a solid story to read right now which I thought worked out pretty well.
The good news is that this change will allow me to start releasing new books every three-to-four months. The bad news is that these stories won’t always be a full day. It will depend on the detailed action going on within the story arc at the time. The bigger battle scenes when Star is away from BrokenFang Hold will be more stretched out between multiple books, while at other times, Star will be exploring new locations in The World that will allow the story to encompass multiple days.
Thank you for the support. I hope everyone will understand and work with me on these slight publishing changes.
Additionally, I hope you enjoy the story and apologize in advance for the grammar and proofreading mistakes that are sure to be a part of this work. Being an ‘Indie Author’ typically means that you do not have the extra money to pay for a professional editor or proofreader and end up doing all of the work yourself. While I do the best that I can to find mistakes, I know well my lack of ability in the proofreading, spell-checking, and editing arena. At the same time, I have done my best with the tools available to clean up the story for publishing to the best of my ability.
I would like to give a shout out to a number of fans and friends that have put a huge amount of effort into getting this story into as good of shape as it is in. Eric (Toten Sie), a friend who offers his expertise for editing my books, and Aaron who has been assisting in getting the book cleaned up for release. Steven (Zeven) is another friend that helps with the ideas and concepts that makes the series so great. I also had the assistance of Katie, Jonathan, Tricia, and Travis. Fans who’ve volunteered to help beta read the series. I’ve been slowly opening up the beta reading option after having a few difficult issues pop up in the past. An additional thank you to Braid and Jodi for finding spelling mistakes.
Lastly, I would like to thank those fans who support me on Patreon at tier level 3 and higher: Michael, Travis, CUI13, S, Tucker, David, Bryan, Justin, Dylan, Braidborn, Keith, Patricia, Jonathan, Nash, Jodi, Luke, Mike, Travis, CU113, S, Bryan, Justin, Rob, Kore, and Bilal. All of you’ve helped to make this possible.
Map of the World
Chapter One
(Saturday, May 10th / Day 20 of The World.)
(Jason waking up at home.)
The bleating of an alarm woke me out of a sound sleep as I automatically came awake and stretched out my arm to silence the annoying sound. Instead of a nightstand, my hand weakly flailed at my pillow before it sunk into my consciousness that something wasn’t right. Blearily looking around in confusion, I saw what the problem was as I sat up into a sitting position on the side of the bed while letting out a painful-filled groan.
“Fuck my life,” I croaked to the empty room as I shut off the alarm. Digging in the nightstand, I found the bottle of ibuprofen and popped four of the gel tablets into my mouth and downed the glass of water by the bed without a second thought. It wasn’t that waking up at five thirty in the morning was a problem. I’d gotten more than four hours of sleep which meant I was golden. No, the problem was that my body was stiff and sore.
Climbing to my shaky legs, I slowly made my way to the bathroom whimpering the entire way. It felt like my legs were going to give out any second. Doing my best to ignore the pain, I climbed into the shower and put the hot water on full blast.
The instant shock from the cold spray woke me up completely as I let out a silent gasp. All thoughts of the agony of my sore muscles were forgotten as I froze in place waiting for the hot water to make its way through the pipes. Fifteen heartbeats later, I noticeably relaxed, pressing my forehead against the plexiglass as I let the steaming hot water seep into my bones. Ten minutes later, I climbed out of the shower squeaky clean, feeling Human once again.
Completing my morning rituals, I was surprised to find that the stiffness and pain in my legs were mostly gone. While I wouldn’t be doing squats any time soon, it felt like my body had more or less recovered. I grabbed my smartphone and empty glass, before making my way to the kitchen.
Pulling out a box of pizza from the fridge, I began munching on a cold slice as I started making a large cup of Cuban coffee while my laptop booted up. Good pizza, in my mind, was a pizza that was just as good cold as it was piping hot and fresh. Holding the last quarter of the slice in my mouth, I quickly added a little espresso to the cup of sugar and began frothing the mixture up while chuckling at my odd line of thought.
It made me think of some of Domenic’s and my inane arguments. It was just something we always did with one another whenever we were together. It wasn’t that Domenic was being an ass or that I was either. There was just something fun about being contrary with one another and poking holes in each other’s arguments. Basically, it was our version of talking shit since we both had sarcastic and dry senses of humor.
The last time we’d gotten on the topic, Domenic argued that my logic was innately flawed. His reasoning was that no one called up a pizza joint to order cold pizza. Henceforth, how good a pizza tasted cold was a moot point. Grabbing my finished coffee, I headed for my stool while gulping down the slice that I’d been holding in my mouth.
While Domenic’s argument might be logically true, for anyone who enjoyed eating cold pizza the next day, that decision was most definitively a major part of the initial purchase choice. Maybe it should just be called a bonus to an already tasty pizza, I mused, my eyes lighting up in excitement. That was actually a pretty solid argument. I’d have to remember that for the next time we were arguing about the topic.
I shook my head as I pulled out another cold slice of pizza. Why did my old arguments with Domenic always come up at times like this? Probably because we were always jockeying to one up each other on whatever we were doing. Kind of like the whole “Who has a better plan for killing more Orcs” like we’d done the night before.
The reason I was always going over stuff like this in my mind was to keep ahead of my enemies and my friends alike. That’s because, everyone always wanted to knock you off the top of the hill when you were king, I thought with a laugh, as I opened up the email program on my laptop.
To my surprise, there were a bunch of messages from John Fay, JellyDonutMan, Little Asian Girl, Zilla, and Chutzpah. A quick scan over their messages gave me a decent rundown about the issue they were facing. They’d all been hit hard by a series of raids by Orc Slavers that were hitting the villages of the Kingdom of Ocilimma up and down the coast. That wouldn’t have hurt them so much if they hadn’t been fighting off the Triple A guild’s constant harassing attacks.
From what everyone was saying, they were pulling back to JellyDonutMan’s lands since it got them off the coast and helped to consolidate their remaining strength. Due to his stronghold’s location, he’d been able to mostly hold off the PKer assaults while retaining most of his defenses intact. It sounded like a pretty shitty situation.
As I read further, it became obvious that no one knew that they could pack-up their strongholds and move them. While there wasn’t any direct support that I could give, I could at least help them with that. In the midst of typing up everything I knew on the topic; I linked the videos of Krishna and Domenic’s strongholds folding up for transportation. Before sending the email, I also added the files I had for the Chinese Double-Barrel Chuguo Nu, aka our Double-Barrel Hollysharp Specials, a brief description of Forrest’s BAMP design, the various anti-personnel traps, and the Roman Scorpion and Onager siege engines that I’d brought into The World.
It took a lot longer to get everything together with their appropriate videos but I figured it was well worth the effort if it helped them survive the shitstorm that they were dealing with. The biggest time sink was getting all of the videos snipped out and uploaded to our guild’s private area on my Twitch Stream channel. Well, that, and getting the permissions set up for their crew since they didn’t always play with us in MMOs and weren’t set up to use our private area. Wishing them luck, I hit send and moved to the next email which was from Orion.
Wtf, I silently thought, as I read through the first few lines of the email. Why in the hell was Orion apologizing to me? Did Minny die or something? Getting to the part where he’d logged back into the game basically “balls deep” as the saying goes, I instantly understood the entire tone of the email. Even so, I had to laugh. It was almost as if he was acting like I was Minny’s father or something. Out of everyone playing in The World that I knew, I was the last person to be throwing stones from glass houses about sleeping with the people of The World.
Nonetheless, I was happy to hear that he was in the right mindset. At least, he was for me. Orion didn’t seem to be looking at Minny like a piece of meat, nor did he seem to be casually taking advantage of her. If anything, it sounded like she’d earned some of his respect. Most importantly for me, he wasn’t forcing her to do anything that she didn’t want to do.
As far as I was concerned, for better or worse, consenting adults were responsible for their own actions and decisions when it came to interpersonal and, cough … cough, interspecies relationships. My thoughts went back to my own awkward experiences with Fylreh. While all of that was true, I still couldn’t stop myself from playing the overprotective father to an extent. At least, I couldn’t in this situation. I was too much of a joker for that. Without reading the rest of the email, I popped open a window to reply.
“Orion, I’m glad to see that you’re watching over Minny and taking care of her inside and outside of the sack,” I started the message as my lips turned up in a huge grin, “That’s all well and good as long as you don’t purposely hurt her. If that happens, then know we’ll be having a serious chat and that I’ll be following up with Thomas to take up the in-real-life portion of the discussion.”
While I was having fun giving Orion shit about sleeping with Minny, a part of me wondered at the semi-expected response to such a turn of events. It was always the woman that we automatically wanted to protect. Not a thought went to what Orion might or might not have personally wanted. It was somewhat disappointing in a way that we didn’t automatically hold both sexes accountable for their decisions. Similar to my own situation, Orion hadn’t exactly been given much of a choice in the matter, especially not with how the Warm Logout feature functioned within The World for players. Though, he did take ownership of the situation that he suddenly found himself in like I did. Making a mental note to have a similar discussion with Minny about not playing with her new boytoy’s heart, I stopped myself from ribbing the Devil Dog further and went back to read the rest of his email.
Once again, I found myself wondering what the hell was going on back at BrokenFang Hold as I read about Orion’s adventures with the Dread Herd. The man was even crazier than I was. He didn’t just open up the entire Sulfur Springs that we needed for our fledgling society. He also made peace with a powerful new race and added their strength to our growing alliance. Not only that, he did that with a monstrous race without even having the ability to communicate with them. That was completely off the hook.
Seriously, think about how much discrimination there was amongst the humanoid races and the hatred they had towards the demi-human races in general. And we’re talking here about races that look mostly human! To achieve not only a peace treaty but adding the new race to the House of Kayden as powerful allies with what basically amounted to a race of, I paused trying to remember the nickname that Orion had used in his email. Oh yeah, that’s it, I thought as my eyes scanned over the email once again, a race of monstrous Zerg-Horses.
That was completely insane, Orion couldn’t even speak with these creatures. Even as they were killing everyone in his raid, he had somehow found a way to communicate with these murderous monsters. Not with words, but with empathy and images. I didn’t know if this guy deserved an award for accomplishing the impossible or if this was all a ticking time bomb that could explode in our faces at any moment.
Hoping beyond hope that Orion and Kyarina knew what they were doing, I thanked Orion for a job well done and said that I’d work with the Matriarch once I got back. Mostly, that would entail trading oaths that equated to what the Devil Dog had agreed to in their mind meld. I couldn’t see any problems popping up there once we were able to clearly communicate using the Helm of Inaxidor, I sarcastically thought, letting out a heavy sigh. Need made strange bed partners. I just hoped the alliance would hold together after the Hobgoblin threat had been dealt with.
Hitting send, I opened up Kyarina’s email next. Reading over her decision to join the scouting group that was doing their best to disrupt the advancing enemy, I was of two minds. On the selfish side, I wanted her back at BrokenFang Hold doing everything that she could to make sure the defenses were prepared in time for the approaching force. On the other hand, I didn’t blame her one bit for wanting to get out and level up some. It was always that difficult balance of every MMO. How much time did you take out of leveling to build up your skills or home base?
To be perfectly honest, even though I’d been the one to send them a bunch of information on possible strategies to use for guerrilla warfare, I didn’t see how such a small group was going to create enough chaos to slow down the enemy’s advance out on the Plains of Atoll. It wasn’t like they were fighting from heavy foliage and could fall back from the enemy’s advance undercover or easily hide. It seemed like it would’ve been more effective if they’d simply freed up the Sulfur Springs and headed back to BrokenFang Hold to continue building up the defenses, Fire Spitters, and anti-siege weapons.
Though as I read, it slowly dawned on me that maybe I’d been wrong in my initial assessment. From what Kyarina was saying, Forrest and Connor’s attacks had been surprisingly effective in interfering with the Hobgoblin invaders’ ability to effectively collect the food they needed to feed their forces. It was impressive to say the least, I silently thought, as I read on. The attacks had noticeably slowed the enemy’s advance and accounted for hundreds of the enemy foragers being slaughtered.
From what Kyarina was saying, she expected that their raid would be able to meet up with the scouts sometime tomorrow in the late afternoon. If everything worked out as planned, she hoped that their raid would have that much more of an impact. Besides leveling the rest of them up like Connor and Forrest had, the aim was to slow the Hobgoblin’s advance until the rest of us could return. Because, without our additional forces, Kyarina admitted, she didn’t think they had the numbers to effectively hold the walls against the coming assault.
The Valkyrie woman’s grudging admission came from the reports that she was receiving from the two scouts. Supposedly, they were saying that the Hobgoblin force was massive. I felt a cold shiver run down my spine as I read the disbelief in Kyarina’s words. How could you tell the difference between fifty thousand or two hundred thousand invaders? At some point, it simply didn’t matter. It was too many to face. As she said, if the Hobgoblins wanted to, they could simply breach our walls by stacking their dead to form a ramp.
I stopped reading to consider Kyarina’s words. Obviously, the Valkyrie woman had never played a Warlock before in any of her previous games, I reasoned as a savage grin turned up the corners of my mouth. While the demi-humans had probably successfully used that tactic in the past, that wouldn’t be so easy to use against the House of Kayden. At least, not if we had enough troopers to brunt the initial attack and play to our strengths.
