The two red arrows grew larger and larger the faster he ran. Xavier felt an urgency he hadn’t in a while. He was getting a strange feeling in his gut. Something was wrong, and he wasn’t sure what.
He ran along a road, one the System appeared to have mostly left intact, though every now and then the road was cut through by a copse of trees or, at one point, a rushing river. Xavier kept pushing forward. The road was taking him exactly where he needed to go.
Auras appeared in the...
2024-03-21 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Adranial was a shrewd negotiator. Xavier wondered how she’d gotten that way. Something told him she was used to getting everything she wanted growing up, because she wasn’t familiar with the word no.
“You want first-clear rights for every dungeon you encounter?” Xavier raised an eyebrow. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Can you really put a price on their lives, Xavier Collins?” Adranial said in a crooning voice.
Xavier bit back a harsh response. “First-cle...
2024-03-20 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Xavier watched as Adranial stepped out of the portal, closely followed by three other Denizens. Adranial herself somewhat matched the description that Howard had given him—white robes, white mask, unarmed—except for the fact that she wasn’t wearing a mask of any kind. She was dressed in all-white robes that clung to her figure and almost touched the ground. Her hair was pure white, and he wondered if it had somehow been dyed, or if that was entirely natural. Her skin was pale, almost as...
2024-03-19 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Adranial stood at the top of an astoundingly tall tower, so tall it pierced through the clouds. She leant against the side wall, looking down. Today, nothing of the city was visible with the clouds obscuring her view.
She always preferred being up here on cloudy days like this one. It gave her a sense that the rest of the world—the rest of the Greater Universe—didn’t matter, and all she needed to worry about was the task at hand.
She took a deep breath of the clear, thin air...
2024-03-15 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Xavier found the elven leader of the invasion force within the fifteen-storey compound to be quite cooperative. Surprisingly cooperative, actually. The man could clearly see how strong Xavier was, and didn’t try to challenge him in any way. At first, Xavier thought that was rather cowardly, then he put himself in the man’s shoes.
It would be beyond foolish for him to challenge me. If I were him, seeing someone able to control over a hundred people with nothing but his mind, I pr...
2024-03-14 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Xavier cursed himself a fool for letting that dark-haired murderer, Alistair Reed, get away.
He had underestimated the man. Since he’d returned to Earth—even long before then—he’d been facing challenges that he considered to be beneath him.
As arrogant as that sounded, it had been the truth.
Unfortunately, that had led him to not taking any threat seriously.
Xavier searched for Alistair Reed. He tried to go after the man. But he found no trail to follow. The da...
2024-03-13 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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“My name is Xavier Collins.” Xavier held his hand out to the man.
Alistair smirked at his hand, then looked at his own—which was still covered in blood. “Wouldn’t want go get this on you.”
Xavier withdrew his hand and nodded. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about this guy, but if he’d been in Fronton—or whatever this city would now be called—since the System integrated Earth, he might know a thing or two.
Besides, he was good with those daggers. The more...
2024-03-12 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Amaxian Riven stood in front the building where he’d made his camp, in the slice of this alien city that was supposed to be his, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
These bastard children from this bastard planet were fighting back!
Two humans had simply run straight up to his base as though he wasn’t a threat to them at all. It was disrespectful.
I didn’t de-level myself to be treated in such a way!
He would deal death to them as swiftly...
2024-03-08 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Xavier searched through the dead commander’s Storage Ring before he left the mountain’s peak, trying to see if there was anything valuable inside.
To his surprise, he didn’t find much. It appeared as though everything of value that the man possessed had been his equipment. This invasion commander hadn’t been half as extravagant as the last he’d defeated.
And the last one I defeated had a much smaller camp, with nothing more than tents set up. Odd.
Th...
2024-03-07 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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First Lieutenant Allegra Delacorte leant backward againt an old stone wall near the First Army base of the Invasion Force Division. She tossed a round, purple fruit up twenty feet into the air over and over, staring at one of the five open portals in the large, desolate field.
Technically, she was supposed to be on guard duty. There was one guard posted to each of the portals. The five portals stood about a hundred feet apart, to give the separate invasion teams room to gather around th...
2024-03-06 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Xavier stood in the middle of an invaders’ camp. Though it was less a camp, and more a full-on army base, with a myriad of different buildings atop the mountain peak where it was situated.
Around him lay roughly a thousand dead soldiers, along with their commander—a man that had been entirely useless to Xavier.
Now, Xavier was speaking to a woman somewhere on the other side of the universe.
He’d certainly come a long way since dreaming about becoming a writer.
He...
2024-03-05 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Commander Alden Trellot was furious.
His eyes were wide, and he felt a vein in his forehead throbbing wildly. He hated that vein. It always served to show his anger to anyone whom he was interacting with, not matter how expertly he tried to hide it. It was fine if his anger was obvious when dealing with those inferior to him—which, on this backwater planet, was everyone—but when he was speaking to his superiors back home?
It often served to get him into trouble.
2024-03-01 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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For the first time since his return to Earth, Xavier felt… free. He enjoyed being with his party, and he wanted to ensure they became stronger and stronger, but he also didn’t want them to become as reliant as they had been of him in the past.
He was glad they’d been breaking out of that reliance, paving their own way by defeating that dungeon boss and splitting up the party—even if he’d been unsure of doing that at times.
Xavier zipped through the trees at a sp...
2024-02-29 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Xavier stood on the lower floor of his brand-new base. The Sanctuary Seed he’d planted hadn’t just grown up. Its roots had dug deep into the ground and created what appeared to be some sort of control room down here. The room was oval shaped. In the centre of the room was a round table, reminiscent of the one in legends about King Arthur, though one of the chairs around the table had a taller back than the others.
At the far end of the room was another set of chairs. These ...
2024-02-28 06:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Xavier stood at the side of a clearing in the middle of a giant forest. A cool breeze rolled in through the trees, fluttering the leaves. Here there were breaks in the thick canopy above, where sunlight spilled through and illuminated the space in its golden light.
That light shone on a sapling sprouting from a small patch of freshly turned soul.
The sapling was deceptive, however. This was no mere plant. It had just had enough power to push Xavier one hundred feet away. He’s ey...
2024-02-27 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Xavier was a little shocked by how easily Justin had killed the dungeon boss, the Alpha Werewolf.
He’d been leaning against the temple’s stone wall, more than ready to intervene, yet Justin had simply killed the thing with two hits of his Airstrike spell. It had been clever, getting the beast to drop the temple’s roof on itself, but as Xavier had watched it happen, he’d worried it wouldn’t be enough to actually hurt the thing. The attributes even a low-level beast or Denizen p...
2024-02-23 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Justin was just as determined as ever to become one of Earth’s elite fighters, and it was strange to think that he might already be one.
All we have is off the back of Xavier’s power. I want to show him we have power of our own now—that we can take care of ourselves.
Xavier wouldn’t be able to take them all with him when he flitted about the world, clearing the invaders away. They’d always planned to, at some point, split the party and their efforts here on Eart...
2024-02-22 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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The Moon Sky Dungeon was the farthest dungeon from their makeshift camp. They had to scale a small mountain to get to it. Not wanting to waste any time, Xavier had sent the others back to camp through the Portal Stone, then climbed the mountain on his own.
The entrance was at the mountain’s peak. The entire time he’d been climbing the jagged rock face, he’d kept an eye on the mini-map, following the yellow dot. A part of him wondered if it would have been faster to send Justin up ...
2024-02-21 06:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Xavier made The Great Romalda Heralda’s death a swift one, as painless as he possibly could—and he refrained from harvesting her soul.
Something about that didn’t feel right, knowing she would be alive again once he exited the dungeon. How could her soul exist in two places? It baffled the mind.
Speaking to the woman had given him a new perspective on the Greater Universe, and just exactly what the System was capable of. As far as he could tell, it was capable of just about ...
2024-02-20 06:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Several thousand shambling corpses moaned, their bones creaking, creating a deathly symphony as they made their way toward where Xavier, Howard, Siobhan, and Justin stood near the entrance to Great Romalda Heralda’s throne room in The Deathly Dungeon.
Howard retreated back toward the archway that marked the entrance to the massive stone chamber, creating a chokepoint as he activated his Bulwark spell. Siobhan stepped behind Howard, her Divine Guardian stepping in front of her, its arm...
2024-02-16 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Xavier decided, rather quickly, that he did not like the undead.
CRAAACK!
Using Heavy Telekinesis, he’d flung a dozen skeletons into the stone wall, breaking their bones and killing them instantly.
Skeletons didn’t have souls. Soul damage did nothing to them. They also lacked minds. He’d tested his spells—Willpower Infusion, Soul Strike, Soul Shatter, Soul Puppet, and of course Soul Strike were all useless against these things.
And so was Core Burn, wh...
2024-02-15 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Xavier stepped up to his loot box.
“Loot boxes at the end of a dungeon,” Siobhan muttered. “I thought this might happen.”
“This is feeling more and more like the Tower of Champions,” Howard said.
“That’s a good thing, right?” Justin asked.
“It’s definitely good for our progression,” Siobhan said. “Though I’m worried we’ll lose our focus.”
Xavier’s focus was entirely on the box in front of him, though something told him he wouldn...
2024-02-14 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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The Crystal Dungeon had turned out to have roughly one thousand enemies within its massive cavern. The purple “sky”—an assortment of crystals that gave off a consistent glow—never changed. It was difficult to know how much time was passing in this place.
That was, at least, until Xavier had discovered the Dungeon Interface.
Dungeon Running Time: 55 minutes.
Users previous record: n/a
Dungeon Record: n/a
W...
2024-02-13 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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[Author Note: I've decided to move to a 4 chapter per week schedule for various reasons, especially as people had a positive reaction to the poll I ran last week. This will help take some of the stress I've been feeling off so I can better focus on the story, rather than worrying about the word count/deadlines as much. This also means there won't be a chapter tomorrow. Thanks everyone for reading!]
Xavier didn’t want to waste any time. He sprinted through the fore...
2024-02-09 04:42:34 +0000 UTC
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Xavier laid out the contents of the dead invasion leader’s Storage Ring. He had to do it outside out the leader’s tent, considering how much stuff there was inside of it. Most of it looked like junk, if he were to be honest. Expensive looking junk, at least. More fancy furniture, books, and even… a statue.
Of someone who looked remarkably like the dead invader, and could have easily been his relative.
This man enjoyed travelling in style…
He was honestly a l...
2024-02-08 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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When Xavier had deemed it safe, he’d pulled the blackout arrays’ spikes out of the ground and deposited them back into his Storage Ring, then he’d contacted Siobhan to let her and the others know what had happened.
Getting the captives to all come back to one place was more difficult than he’d expected. Apparently, a muscular man in a dark robe carrying a wicked looking scythe-staff with the ability to kill a camp full of over a hundred invaders was a scary sight to them. He sup...
2024-02-07 06:00:02 +0000 UTC
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Xavier made a count of the slaves he could see. He didn’t know how many he expected to find, but he ended up counting twenty-two slaves. As for the invaders, there were more than his mini-map had shown. The tents that the invaders had brought with them blocked auras from being sensed.
That was an interesting detail. It made him wonder if his Seed Sanctuay would be able to do the same. It made sense that it would.
Focus, Xavier chided himself.
By his count, there w...
2024-02-06 06:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Xavier sped away through the forest, leaving the other members of his party to locate the dungeons that had appeared on their new mini-map.
It still felt so surreal, being back on Earth. The trees looked familiar, and at the same time incredibly different. Though he had never spent all that much time wandering through forests, he was sure they’d never had trees as large as this.
I wonder where we are,he thought as he ran, taking in his surroundings, sensing a few weak a...
2024-02-03 06:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Hi guys! I've been finding my chapter's have been getting a little longer as I'm writing the third book.
Instead of cutting them short, would you guys be open to me moving to a 4 chapter per week schedule? It might help take a little of the pressure off. I just want to gauge people's general feelings! I haven't made any decisions yet.
Thanks everyone for all your support! It means the world to me. :)
2024-02-02 07:09:22 +0000 UTC
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[Author note: I changed the "*" beside his race in his status to a (?) because I use asterisks to denote bold when I'm writing in software without formatting, so my macro stripped all the "*" in my manuscript. I'll go back and edit this in at some point.]
Congratulations XAVIER COLLINS. You and your party have completed the first ten floors of the Tower of Champions! You have taken the first step on becoming stalwart protecters of your world. As you are the firs...
2024-02-02 06:00:04 +0000 UTC
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