The First Great Game (A Litrpg/Harem Series)

Blake rolled through the holy city on the back of his living chariot construct. He’d been going for ‘Roman conqueror’, but ended up with something more like ‘Apollo the fire god’. The thing was literally on fire around the metallic base, the ram head cackling with a real Ghost Rider vibe.

But it was pretty cool. And beggars couldn’t be choosers. More accurately, mana users with random spells couldn’t be picky.

He’d told his orc and goblin allies to stay in the palace, then hopped in his new vehicle and convinced Becky and Demi to get in behind him. He didn’t expect to need them, but if it made the others happy, he didn’t mind a few observers of his magnificence.

Now he rumbled through the cluttered streets, summoning more constructs with Primordial Making along the way. He was going for ‘theme’ as much as anything now, trying to make a whole army of rolling or flying, fiery murderers.

“Keep it steady for Christ’s sake,” he muttered as his chariot thumped over a zombie. “Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate?”

He still finished the channel, laughing with delight as he made some kind of phoenix construct. The thing flew right up and started circling, bathing undead in fiery breath. It was quite awhile before he noticed Becky and Demi staring at him like he was some kind of raving lunatic.

“You girls spend too much time with my brother,” he shouted, shaking his head. “All of you. Everyone’s so serious. So gloomy. There’s no reason we can’t have a little fun!”

A skeleton managed to avoid the constructs well enough to lurch at the side of the chariot. He was about to toss it with Telekinesis before Becky’s mace crushed its skull. He winked at her with his best camaraderie-inducing face. She rolled her eyes, but clearly fought a grin.

“Hyah! Hyah!” He flicked his entirely useless reigns, directing the chariot with one piece of his segmented mind. He considered lifting the whole thing and flying them—now that’d be a thrill. But it would take way too much mana. He also decided accidentally breaking one of Mason’s women’s arms would be a really terrible idea.

“I feel like we should get to know each other,” he shouted, looking back at Demi gripping the rail. “You’re seeing my brother now, too, right? How does that all work, by the way?”

She stared at him with a look somewhere between disbelief and exasperation. It was where he liked most of his conversational partners to be.

“Can you please just steer this…thing? So we don’t all crash and die? I’ll be happy to…”

They hit another zombie. Demi clung to the rail and literally screamed, then looked at him and flushed.

“I do love to make women scream,” he said with a grin. She was more pale than anything, but a bit of pink made its way to her face.

“Please just pay attention! We can talk after!”

“That’s usually my line,” he called back.

He maybe wasn’t making a friend for life, but he couldn’t help himself. Something about Demi reminded him of Mason, and the urge to tease was unstoppable.

Becky, at least, seemed like she was having a good time. She was a lot tougher, of course, and probably didn’t care if the whole thing crashed. She was holding on with one hand now, taking the bumps in stride, grinning ear to ear.

“It’s kinda fun, girl! Like bein’ back home on the ranch!”

“That’s the spirit!”

Blake swerved around a broken chunk of building, directing two constructs to rip apart the undead trying to get in. He did his best to quickly patch it with his Making power, but Mason had been very clear this was a ‘rush’.

And it was best to make Mason happy for awhile, he decided. Annoying him when he was under pressure was a bit like standing on a volcano. It might sit there steaming for years, but sooner or later, the thing would erupt in a fiery wave of death.

It was unwise for mere mortals to be anywhere near such things when they happened. Better to keep one’s head down when one felt the violence was near, and let others get consumed. After that, it would be right back to normal.

“Do you have a death wish?” Demi shouted as they smashed through some skeletal giant. It erupted into flames, the bones spraying all over the street in a display almost like fireworks. Blake watched it all in wonder.

And did he? Certainly not. He was no longer afraid of death—not since his little experience with the orc tower trap, maybe—but it still sounded terribly dull. Boldness and risk tolerance always looked like madness to the cautious beings of the world.

“We’re nearly there,” he shouted. “You can stay in the chariot, if you like. But feel free to…do whatever it is you do.”

Demi glared, and Blake turned his eyes back ahead. He wasn’t sure why he was annoying her, other than as a Mason proxy. But some people just needed their buttons pressed now and again. They were too calm. Too void of vital energies. Too boring.

A piece of his brain reminded him that his patron god ‘Psion’ talked more or less the same way. He considered that as he flew past the last few rows of buildings, wondering if it was some kind of flaw associated with Mental Partition.

Maybe if you were pulled in a hundred directions for too long, you could never go back to the tedium of focus. But the topic soon bored him, too.

“Shit, I think it’s bigger,” Becky shouted as the wall came into view.

The gate defender was a horrid looking thing. Blake looked at the tentacles and considered some kind of crude anime joke, but as usual his humor was likely to go unappreciated by the unimaginative and uninformed.

Navi flew out and started to identify, and it all got even funnier. Turned out the thing was an undead construct. A big, gross, and complicated construct, but still full of runes with all the simple stupidity of the Maker’s way of building with magic blocks.

All he was going to have to do was get close enough to pull it all apart, and the big bastard would freeze and crumble like wet paper. If he was really in the mood, he could maybe even take the thing over. But that would involve a lot more work. And Mason had said to hurry.

He clutched the rail and shook with laughter, knowing the hundreds of undead creatures above and below might still be a problem. But Becky and Demi would probably enjoy something to do. It would be a good ‘family’ team building exercise.

‘Mason, Mason! We took down the gate with Blake!’ he imagined them saying later. ‘Just the three of us! It was so much fun!’

He’d shake his head with all due humility. ‘It was mostly the girls. I was barely required.’

They’d deal with the army. Sort out the city. Ally with the other races, and go to the Nexus together and sort that out, too.

By the time this ‘Doom’ came around (which Blake still wasn’t entirely convinced was as bad as Mason thought), they’d be back to old times, ready to face it all together. The dynamic duo again. He had no doubt.

Jeong had been a close call. But they’d succeeded. All Blake’s plans were coming together. Sometimes it was all almost…too easy.

“What’s so funny?” Demi said, glancing from him to Becky as if concerned he’d lost his mind again.

The cowgirl at least seemed like she was getting into the spirit of things now too much to worry. Blake wiped a tear and got a hold of himself, but it was really too hard to explain to people how he saw the world.

“You wouldn’t get it,” he said eventually.

**

Mason landed like a comet near the southern gate, cracking pavement as he got comfortable dropping his boot weight more and more to land faster. He stared up at the writhing, chomping horror, and the small army of undead guarding it. Then he charged.

Archers loosed arrows from every direction. One or two stuck a half inch into flesh before popping out as Transformation rolled its eyes. Most bounced off his skin and armor.

A few skeletal giants met him halfway, swinging huge cleavers in deadly arcs to meet his sprint. He jumped and shattered one head with a fist, running past the others, straight at the ‘gate’.

Tentacles writhed as he came into range. They slammed the ground around him, reaching and grasping at his limbs. He hacked them off with his Claws, and even his marilith arms jabbed without any juicier targets.

One grabbed his leg and pulled, but he dropped his weight so low it was hard to walk. Another grabbed his other leg and tried to turn him into Jean Claude Van Damme. He slashed them both off.

“I’m still coming, big boy,” he growled, looking into that chomping maw. “Got anything else?”

Some kind of purple cone of magic slammed into him from the mouth.

[Title: Ender of the Endless. Multiple bonuses against undead.]

[Title: Protector of Life. Enhanced resistances and power effects against the undead.]

[Title: Champion of the Arena. Gain resistance to a variety of debilitating physical and mental effects.]

He walked forward cutting tentacles, leaving a trail of rotting fluids and twitching bits in his wake.

“Uh huh,” he said, noticing Apex Predator hadn’t even bothered to put its shoes on. “Got a plan c?”

Undead rushed him from every direction. He should have jumped and dug straight into the thing, but he waited. He knew the others wouldn’t be finished with their gates. He had at least a minute to play.

Tentacles, cleavers, spears—the air around turned into a savage mess of creatures and weapons crawling over or banging together to kill him. He dodged, he deflected, but mostly he took it.

“Hit me…more in the back…God damnit.”

He grit his teeth before something big came slamming into his cheek. His marilith arms went after it, so he just spun and broke another giant from the chest out, banishing his swords to rip things apart with his hands.

He was trying to take the worst in the back, focusing on Transformation as he focused his efforts on wings. But the stupid power wasn’t exactly ‘controllable’. And it was wordlessly arguing with him—quite reasonably—that a shell would really be a lot more useful than fragile wings while getting literally mobbed from every direction.

“Yes I know that…” he ripped off a zombie head and tossed it at an archer before huddling back down and weaving. “It’s for…later! Just would you…ow, son of a…”

Something jabbed a spear straight into his ear. He spun and ripped the skeleton apart, clearing a path of destruction around it as he shouted in fury.

“The ear. The fucking ear?”

Still he kept at it for another solid thirty seconds. By the time he’d reduced the hundred undead to about ten, he glanced at himself and found what might have been…the beginning of bat wings? Well, they mostly looked like alien arms, and had no actual flesh to help him fly anywhere. He hissed in pain as he tried to lift one.

A failed experiment. But it had been worth a try. Maybe if he’d had another hundred skeletons, or something? He had the frame, after all. They might even…

His resistances flared in a wall of text again.

“Oh Jesus, I almost forgot about you.”

Mason turned at the gate and inspected with his Ranger’s Mark and a grin. He launched himself straight at the maw with his Claws, then waited and dropped his weight until he was a flying anvil with swords.

A few tentacles waved. The mouth clamped and the outside teeth spun. Mason ripped through its body with a horrible spray of flesh and fluids, landing on the other side with most of its heart in one hand.

[Gate Horror: slain. South Gate: pacified. Gates remaining: 2]

He had a feeling the others wouldn’t try the old ‘jump through its body and simultaneously rip out its heart’ tactic, and would therefore take a little longer. He dropped the chunk of black, almost plasticy muscle and made a face, looking out at the rising dust.

Undead army or not, it was nice to be outside. He breathed the fresh, natural air, watching all his powers flare with green improvement, his muscles zinging with that little extra pep.

Then he summoned his bow, and ran out to teach an undead horde about speed and range. Though he considered one more attempt on those wings…but only if there was time…