Axillon99 Read online

  This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever stayed up late to complete just one more quest.

  Axillon99

  A LitRPG novel

  © 2017 Matthew S. Cox

  All Rights Reserved.

  No portion of this novel may be reproduced without written permission from the author. This novel is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons or events is unintentional.

  Interior art by Ricky Gunawan

  Table of Contents

  Stealth Mechanics

  Extra Shot

  The Prize

  Dead Anarchist

  Inventory Management

  Interactive

  Don’t Stand In Bad

  Complex

  Realism

  Farming

  One Step Closer

  Life Support

  The Feral

  Keep Stabbing It In The Toe

  Venom Shroud

  A Little Help

  Level Up

  Outside the Lines

  Leaderboard

  Fully Functional Robot of Doom

  A Rip in the Veil

  Friendly Rivalry

  The Armadillo

  Completionist

  Side Quest

  Causing Trouble

  Real Life

  Return Fire

  Underground

  No Respawn

  A Few Moves Ahead

  Firelight

  Incoming

  The Reckoning

  Expectations

  Quest Turn-in

  Non-Disclosure

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  Stealth Mechanics

  1

  Quirky music nibbled at the edges of consciousness, a constant loop lurking in the non-space beneath the din of civilization, holding reality at arm’s length. Fawkes kept herself as out of sight as possible, her back to the silvery wall of a ninety-story office tower in downtown Xiānjìng City, observing the steady blur of hovercars whizzing by. Alternating breaths flooded her mouth with the flavor of cheap ramen or the metallic, coppery taste of ionized air from the traffic.

  She didn’t feel like suffering the expense of a portal or the time drain of buying passage on a commuter ship, which left her stranded on Caelin IV for the time being, muttering curses under her breath at whoever decided interplanetary teleportation should cost fifty thousand credits. The mission she decided to solo while the rest of her crew weren’t around only paid twenty grand, about mid-range for the sort of jobs she ran: something not too difficult, but also not boring.

  Fawkes hated boring jobs―their experience rewards sucked.

  She found her foot tapping in time with the pervasive background music. It, more than anything else, served to remind her that the glittering chrome-and-neon cityscape stretching out before her existed only in a slice of virtual reality beamed into her brain courtesy of a Neurona 3 interface helmet. Everything from the cold seeping into her shoulders through her shirt to the fragrance of noodle soup on the breeze had become incredibly believable compared to even three years ago when the game first launched.

  If she concentrated on trying to feel it, the soft presence of her bed teased at the fringes of her awareness. The input from the helmet overpowered the rest of her senses and even inhibited physical motion. Jump scares could shock a person into moving for real and, depending on how a player set up before login, sometimes caused injuries.

  Rumors circulated about a handful of players who had lost their grip on reality after the latest immersion patch. The idea of someone mistaking the humdrum physical world for the simulation, but believing a universe of spacecraft, aliens, magic, and laser pistols as reality made Fawkes laugh.

  Reality didn’t have constant music.

  At least, not without a mental disorder. In Axillon99, she became Fawkes, intrepid interplanetary infiltrator and thief. Outside this place, she had a much lamer avatar: Dakota Marx, a twenty-two-year-old nobody making coffee for a few bucks an hour over minimum wage.

  Arms folded across her chest, she bowed her head and sighed at the metal sidewalk beneath her padded boots. Hot pink hair hung into her field of vision, almost painfully bright compared to her black form-fitting shirt. Wild hair color, one aspect of her nonconformist nature, followed her into the virtual world. In reality, she wore a stark shade of neon blue.

  Team missions offered more experience and better loot, but they also required something she didn’t have―other people. She had a team, but none of them happened to be online at the moment, hence the solo mission.

  It made no difference how long she cased the target. As real as everything looked, smelled, and tasted, only other players would care if she tried to ‘act casual.’ The non-player characters, essentially computer programs, would react purely based on her character’s skill values. They had no capacity to process her ‘loitering around suspiciously.’

  At a change in the holographic traffic signal dots, Fawkes pushed away from the wall and scurried across a street of polished dark-grey metal. Nimbuses of violet, blue, and yellow shimmered within the surface, reflected light from hovercar engines and floating advertisements. She kept her eyes focused on her target, the headquarters building of the Jīngquè Manufacturing Corporation, another ninety-story-plus towering monolith of mirror-chrome. Six Chinese characters, each ten feet tall, floated against the street-facing side of the building, from the second through seventh stories. When she looked at them, the English translation ‘Precision Manufacturing Corporation’ appeared in small text next to the huge red symbols.

  On one level, she figured the little electronics prototype she needed to steal hadn’t existed up until twenty minutes ago when she hit the ‘job board’ for a random quest. The mission text didn’t mention what the prototype was for or who wanted it stolen; it never did for the throwaway side missions. The game had created a fictional ‘prototype’ object of unknown function, merely a token representing what she had to obtain for her mission.

  Still, anything that let her feel like she got one over on a corporation made her happy, even if that corporation didn’t really exist. These non-story missions rarely had static objectives or tied into any overarching plot threads. The game generated them based on simple randomness. However, she liked to open herself up to the immersion and enjoy the escape from reality. In her imagination, this little prototype represented the difference between a mega-corporation making more money and a planet’s worth of low-tech colonists having affordable drinking water.

  Her boots made no sound on the metal sidewalk as she approached the building, one benefit of taking the rogue/spy character class. A reduced detection range kept NPCs and ‘creatures’ from noticing her until she got close, and the almost nonexistent sound of her steps helped her avoid other players if need be.

  The Jīngquè lobby took ‘purple’ and transcended it from a simple color to a mission statement. Violet-tinted marble covered the floor. Everything else from the potted plants to the hair of the man and woman behind the front counter existed in some variant shade of violet from retina-scalding intensity to almost black. A bank of elevators occupied the left side of the room, devouring and disgorging a stream of randomly generated men and women of varying age and appearance. The NPC workers came and went at the rate of a handful every few minutes. A huge glass-stepped staircase at the back of the lobby led up to a second floor.

  Fawkes strolled over to the stairs and went up. Fortunately, the purple-crazy designer hadn’t afflicted the rest of the building. The second story had all the look of a super-modern office. Frosted glass walls ran around the outside perimeter with regularly spaced doors, also of frosted glass. Small silver nameplates adorned each one.

&nb
sp; A man in gleaming white armor jogged up the stairs and went past her. Based on the pair of energy swords across his back and the rifle in his hands, she figured him for another PC. Someone walking into a corporate office armed with enough firepower to sustain an insurrection in a third-world nation was a dead giveaway of a human player. He approached a man in a lab coat sitting on a bench in the center of the room.

  “Can I help you?” asked the older man.

  “Hey, doc. I dropped those medical supplies off at the street clinic.”

  The lab coat man stared at him for a silent, expressionless moment before his demeanor shifted as if he and this man had been good friends for years. “Oh, yes. Miss Leah told me you gave her the supplies.” He pulled a small glowing plastic tab out of his pocket and handed it over. “Here’s your payment.”

  Fawkes ignored them. Well, that at least explained the open second floor. Some of the NPCs in here had quests. She noted the ‘doctor’ for later. A few extra thousand experience couldn’t hurt. Dropping ‘medical supplies’ off at a street clinic full of orphans would either be way easy or have an inexplicable random ambush along the way. Granted, the developers tended to put high experience rewards on ‘good guy’ type missions like that, while the darker missions gave more money or better loot.

  She spent a while roaming the outside, checking out the names on the offices. A few of the doors opened easily while most were locked. Nothing looked interesting in any of them, save for a couple of silver wall vent covers, conveniently placed at ground level and perfectly sized for a person to crawl into.

  Hmm. The prototype is going to be in the R&D lab probably.

  Fawkes grabbed at nothing in front of her, and a game menu appeared. She tapped on the icon for ‘mission notes,’ which opened her mission journal, then poked a line reading Eye in the Sky, the title of her current mission. According to the text, a Dr. Parsons was the lead researcher on it, and she should look for a way into the lab.

  Again, she made a circuit around the offices, eyeing nameplates. She passed by I. Bairnson, R. Cottle, and D. Mackay, before finding one marked A. Parsons – Research Engineering. Naturally, the door’s lock showed red. Since none of the NPCs roaming around had a field of view on her, she activated stealth mode. Her body faded semitransparent indicating she had successfully concealed herself. Swaths of red appeared on the floor, denoting ‘vision cones’ for the various workers. Pale red indicated elevated risk of detection, while a narrower dark red cone inside showed where she would definitely get spotted. Security officers in dark violet armor had larger, longer detection cones compared to the workers, but none of them pathed anywhere near this office.

  There’s probably going to be a vent in the wall.

  She plucked a small black box from her belt―her override kit―extended a wire from the side, and plugged it into a socket on the door panel. A ‘hacking’ mini-game popped up in a small holographic screen. In order to defeat the lock (or whatever object she targeted) she had to tap icons representing various nodes within the computer system, advancing a path from her starting location to the ‘CPU node,’ and do it before the red security line touched her blue line or beat her to the CPU node.

  A grin spread across her face at the relative ease of it. Hacking skills didn’t come cheap in terms of character points, so most lone wolves tended to suck at it since they refused to give up combat ability. Most of the time she played, she ran with a group of friends so the ‘heavy lifting’ in combat didn’t fall on her shoulders. The developers wanted to keep players happy, so the average difficulty on hacking had been tweaked down to make up for so few players investing in those skills. This, of course, made her character a network goddess.

  With a pleasant chirp, the door to Doctor Parsons’ office slid open.

  Fawkes put her interface tool away and stepped into a large, rectangular office permeated with soft cyan light filtering in from the frosted glass. The desk held a large amount of clutter, plus a super-thin display, keyboard, phone terminal, and a stack of optical discs. Unable to help herself, she ran around checking every openable drawer and cabinet, pocketing two energy bars and a fob with a 500-credit balance on it before locating an ID passcard carelessly left behind under the keyboard. A data pad next to the computer displayed the title page for a fiction novel, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Oddly enough, by A. Parsons.

  Programmers and their Easter eggs. She had no idea why they’d embed a novel into a video game, but didn’t feel like sticking around long enough to read it.

  Each item she picked up disappeared into her hip satchel.

  She plopped down in the chair and tapped the keyboard. Another hacking mini-game got her past the password prompt and into Doctor Parsons’ terminal. After skimming a few emails about his dog, complaints about the café food, emails to his wife Eve, and a suspiciously long diatribe about a malfunctioning air conditioning unit near the lab, she found an email from network security telling Doctor Parsons that they had to reset his password to Bubbles_1234.

  Dakota broke character and let out a groan. Having a bit of skill at actual hacking made the idiocy of the supposed security people sending a password in open email painful. This is a game. The password is here for me to find to do the quest. People aren’t really this stupid. She stared straight ahead with flat eyebrows, having caught herself. Yes they are. With a sigh, she forced herself to ignore the conflict between reality and fiction, and let herself become Fawkes again.

  It took her a moment to find the vent she expected, blocked from view by a convenient potted fern. She moved the fake plant aside, opened the hatch, and crawled into a nice, clean silver-walled shaft. Cool air brushed at her cheeks, laced with the smell of food. A few sniffs got her debating between chicken parmesan or pizza, and also made her hungry.

  “That’s the best part of this game,” she whispered to no one in particular. “I can eat as much as I want here and it won’t make me fat.” That got her thinking about in-game booze and recreational chemicals. “They phoned in the drugs though.”

  Getting ‘high’ in game consisted mostly of blurred vision, slowed motion, and penalties or bonuses to stats. Either the developers had no idea what it really felt like to get high, or they hadn’t been allowed to include realistic effects for legal reasons. She grumbled at the developers for allowing kids to play the game. Maybe if it had an eighteen-plus rating, they’d do a better job simulating the effect of drugs. Of course, that got her wondering if virtual narcotics affecting the brain via a Neurona helmet could cause real-world addiction.

  Huh. Maybe that’s why they didn’t do it.

  Fawkes closed the vent cover behind herself, not that she had to―the security guards never reacted to open or closed vents―but it made her feel safer. She crawled into a T-junction and peered right then left. Nothing in Parsons’ office had given any indication of what floor held the lab or which way to go in the vents.

  “Hmm.”

  She summoned the ID card out of her inventory and read it. Doctor Parsons appeared to be in his later forties with shoulder-length brown hair and a beak of a nose. A small blue square at the bottom right corner contained the text 7C.

  “Seventh floor…” She put the card back in her pocket and headed to the right at random.

  Office after office passed, some with workers at their terminals, some dark. After rounding the corner at the end of the shaft, another hatch led into a larger vertical shaft with a ladder.

  “Bingo.”

  Despite being an avatar in a hyper-realistic immersive online game, by the time she finished climbing five stories of steel ladder, her arms had become tired. While resting a few feet inside a horizontal duct on the seventh floor, she tried to figure out if the game forced her to experience the sensation of muscle fatigue or if the helmet had fooled her brain into thinking she should be tired.

  In a few minutes, she caught her virtual breath and continued crawling. Metal clonked and creaked around her, the flimsy ductwork bending under
her meager weight. Soon, the distant rattle of an overly loud fan caught her attention.

  Aha! Busted air unit.

  The mechanical grinding led her to a darker section of shaft on the other side of a right turn. Sparks flew every few seconds from the wall up ahead by a grille. A short distance beyond it, a square of light cut into slats appeared on the left side of the duct, indicating a brightly lit room outside. Fawkes hurried forward, her pink hair hanging down almost to the floor as she crawled. Each breath tasted like metal tinged with smoke. She scurried past the faltering air handler and leaned up to the vent cover.

  Walls, floor, and ceiling of immaculate whiteness framed a huge rectangular room full of scientific equipment and giant computer cabinets. She didn’t have the first clue what any of the machinery did, but they all looked fancy and expensive.

  One man in a white coat milled around, standing over a table with a pink-purple glass cover. He poked and prodded at various controls, but whatever he did defied any attempt to understand. She watched him until his actions looped. As soon as she had a good feel for his pathing around the lab, she waited for him to be at the farthest point of his route and slipped out of the vent in stealth mode.

  Fawkes pulled a small stunner off her belt while sneaking up behind the lab worker. He continued fiddling with dials and buttons on the fictional scientific machine, causing it to beep, whir, and emit bursts of bright light. When she got within grabbing distance, she held the stunner to the back of his neck, and the man collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

  A small ‘silent kill?’ placard appeared above him. If she tapped it and selected yes, the NPC would change status to ‘dead.’ In the grand scheme of things, it meant little, since she’d long ago blown the ‘pacifist’ achievement. Getting to level sixty without ever killing anything took a degree of patience and dedication that would qualify someone to be a Shaolin monk. This ‘man,’ even if she killed him, would reappear in twenty minutes as if nothing had happened.

  Still, being in the game with the Neurona helmet, smelling, feeling, and tasting everything made murder a little too real for Dakota Marx. Fawkes might not bat an eyelash at it, but her player did. Of course, the game didn’t show too much gore. If she silent-killed him, the body would twitch and stop breathing. With kids able to play, they couldn’t exactly render a disembowelment.