Shirtaloon

Chapter 549: Hope

Liara sensed Cassin Amouz leave the Adventure Society administration building, her face filled with anger not at him but at herself.

“Dammit.”

Her hand came down forcefully on her desk and it broke in half, scattering books and papers onto the floor.

“Damn it.”

“Lady Liara,” Shade said, emerging from her shadow.

Liara grimaced.

“I’m sorry you had to witness that. The man’s son and heir is missing; of course he’s angry and willing to do e...

Chapter 548: Delicate Flowers

Sophie’s attempt to escape the clutches of the gold-rank monster did not go as planned. Her time-accelerating power, Eternal Moment, did not last as long as the name suggested. She did escape the tentacle forest rising from the water in her frozen moment, but as soon as it ended, even more tentacles emerged from the water to surround her again.

The monster was clearly a vast presence under the water, despite her not having sensed it at all. Escaping it would be trickier than she had a...

Chapter 547: Speed

Jason and his team were having a relatively relaxed time in the days after the Builder island expedition. The monster surge raged on and the Purity worshippers remained a lurking threat, but after a day off, the team were assigned to low-priority missions. With Jason awaiting word from his familiars stuck behind enemy lines, Liara didn’t want him roaming all through the Sea of Storms, at least not for any length of time. As such, Jason, Humphrey and Clive were all placed on portal duty.

Chapter 546: Blame

The Adventure Society functionary left Liara’s temporary office after informing her about the arrival of Lord Cassin Amouz. Once she was alone, Liara allowed shame to flash over her expression before schooling it. Liara had been determined to avoid casualties in the expedition to the Builder island but the unexpected raid by Purity worshippers had led to her failure. Three adventurers had been captured in battle and only two were recovered before they could be taken from the island. The son...

Chapter 545: That Kind of Power Can Be Lonely

Jason and Clive were in the waterfall room in Jason’s cloud house. The walls were still covered in writing boards and they were looking at a section where Clive had scrawled small, densely packed notes.

“I think enhancing your portal ability might actually be viable,” Clive said. “The key is using the cloud constructs from your cloud flask as the medium. Boosting the power would wreck you very quickly, but I believe the cloud flask can handle it. It may not be higher rank than y...

Chapter 544: Bait and Switch

Hidden inside a mountain was the Order of Redeeming Light’s submarine dock. There was a rare gathering of the order’s local forces and four of the cell leaders were confronting their overall leader, Melody Jain, in front of everyone. She looked slightly confused as she looked at the other leaders. Her second in command, Sendira, stood beside her, as did the church representative to the order, Laront. Melody addressed the cell leaders.

“Caitlyn. Heston. Marika. Elise. Is there some...

Chapter 543: It Won't Be a Good Reason

The Sea of Storms has no shortage of small, uninhabited islands. One such island was a small scrap of land that was periodically scoured by the magical storms that passed through the region, stripping the land bare except for a gully where hardy magical plants had managed to hold on.

The plant life that survived was not particularly exceptional. Examples of all of it could be found throughout the Sea of Storms, frequently being cultivated in specialty farms. What it did do, though, in t...

Posters now available + promo codes

The posters that were in the giveaway last month are now available for purchase from my audiobook publisher, Podium Audio. The store can be found here: https://store.podiumaudio.com/ 

As a special service to my high-tier patrons, Podium was generous enough to send out promo codes all patrons who were active at gold-tier and above on the specific date of September 28th, when the codes were sent o...

Chapter 542: Portal Logistics

Suffering the full effects of the aura beacon for only a few moments had left Humphrey spiritually exhausted, but by the time he finished talking with Jason, he was ready to get back into action. While Humphrey knew his silver-rank recovery attribute was part of his rapid restoration, he suspected that Jason’s spirit realm was also somehow contributing.

Translating the power and potential that every soul contained was the entire purpose of absorbing essences and advancing through the ...

Chapter 541: Domain

The moment Humphrey appeared in Jason’s spirit realm, he lost the protection of Jason’s aura. The artificial aura of the beacon wasn't attacking him, but being so close to its source was like his soul being dangled upside down in a raging river full of razor blades. He dropped the beacon, staggering as he pushed his own aura out to resist, but the extremely powerful, gold-rank device was too strong and too close.

He took one unsteady step and then another. He was stumbling, which sh...

Chapter 540: Not Really a Rules Guy

Belinda panned her gaze over the broken Builder constructs, destroyed not by adventurers but by the Purity worshippers that were their ostensible allies.

“I can only guess at what they want,” she said. “Whatever they’re after, they think it will be gone if they wait for us to come and go. Something that the Builder doesn’t want them to take or, at least, didn’t give them permission to. It has to be something valuable enough that they’re willing to go against the wishes of ...

Chapter 539: Here to Steal

The commander of the Purity forces on the island was Sendira. She had separated from most of the converted in her group, leaving them on the surface to delay and distract any adventurers that found the entrance to the underground complex they were using. Only the other two essence users and the pair of gold-rank converted assigned to her moved with her into the underground portions of the city.

The subterranean infrastructure beneath the city had been devastated by the detonation of a w...

Volume III PDF Bundle (book 7)

Here is an updated PDF bundle collection for volume three. The small bundles are the same ones that go out at the end of each week but the large bundle is a (somewhat) cleaned-up version, with corrections made based on reader contributions to the report-errors channel on the discord.

Chapter 538: Trying to Kill Jason Again

Sophie had one of the gold-rank converted bound up in personal combat. The gold-rankers were the primary threat to the adventurers, so keeping them occupied while the adventurers took down the rest of the Purity forces was critical. Sophie had managed to box hers up effectively but she had the advantage of an enemy that lacked area attacks. The other gold-rank converted was more trouble.

Spewing fire from an orifice on his forehead, like the empty socket for a third eye, was the signatu...

Chapter 537: Ideal Enemy

The Purity forces arrayed against Jason’s team and their adventurer allies numbered in the dozens, although more than half were only bronze-rank. The key threats were the two gold-rank converted, the three silver-rank essence users and, to a lesser degree, the fifteen or so silver converted.

The powers of the converted were less bizarre than those of their Builder equivalent, without the body-horror transformations. Beneath the surface, however, Jason could sense that the cores inside...

Chapter 536: A Bland Kind of Alchemy

On the ruined island city that was once a flying Builder fortress, the adventurer expedition Jason and his team were part of regrouped. With multiple forces of Purity troops arriving on the island, the expedition commander, Liara, was changing their approach. As her primary concern was the safety of her people over the swift elimination of the enemy, she chose two basic doctrines for their response to the arrival of the Purity forces: simplicity and safety in numbers.

Avoiding any attem...

Chapter 535: Opportunists

The Order of Redeeming Light had long travelled using underwater vehicles that were neither fast nor efficient but were very hard to detect. As such, they were able to avoid detection by the scouts watching the Builder island until they had almost arrived, their vessels surfacing shortly before beaching against the crumbling stonework shore. The vehicles looking like large, flat whales of green metal.

One of the vehicles pushed up against a point where the canted angle of the city had r...

Chapter 534: Strictly Necessary

“There’s something odd about this city,” Humphrey said, prompting the rest of the team give him a confused look. Even Sophie stuck her head over the roof she was standing on to look his way.

“Um, yes,” Clive said. “I may have spotted the occasional eccentricity of civil construction myself.”

“Just to be clear,” Neil said, “you think there might be something odd about the city that is really a giant dimension-hopping ship that fell out of the sky, is tilted at a...

Chapter 533: Special Boy

Jason’s team arrived with the others on the shore of the island that had once been a flying city. The city was severely damaged, with cracked streets and buildings in various states of repair. Even more noticeable was the cant of the city, which had fallen on a lean of around twenty degrees. The result was a feeling of alienness, like staring at an optical illusion for too long.

The expedition had two gold rankers. Liara Rimaros was in charge, with Jana Costi as her second. Jana was a...

Chapter 532: Good Luck Fighting Evil

The other members of Jason's team were conducting their own affairs prior to meeting up for their new contract. Neil went to church. Humphrey and Sophie followed Belinda to browse for items at the trade hall as Belinda's powers had become increasingly item-dependent at silver rank. Livaros was often an expensive market but had no shortage of quality goods.

Clive went with Farrah to look in on Travis, who had been holed up in the Magic Society ever since his development of the weapon tha...

Chapter 531: You Don't have it in You

With his team needing to assemble for a contract mid-morning, Jason set out early to conduct his own affairs. He portalled to Livaros, arriving in one of the squares marked as legal teleport destinations. Another person followed him through before he closed the portal. She left immediately with no more than a nod to Jason, moving quickly. He set out at a more sedate pace making his way through the streets at a leisurely meander. His destination was Sensual Attire For the Sensual Gentleman, th...

Chapter 530: Tampering With That Kind of Power

Jason and Clive made their way down the stairs in the cloud house and into the waterfall room. The natural stone of the cave it occupied was hidden behind walls, floor and ceiling of cloud stuff which radiated soft, ambient light. Sparkling sunlight streamed in through the waterfall outside the cave entrance that was the only part of the underlying stone that remained visible. The room was empty of furniture, only the staircase in the middle spiralling up into the cloud house through a hole i...

Chapter 529: Information Exchange

Clive had already been aware that in Jason's time away his soul had undergone some extreme changes. While he had no knowledge of what a spirit domain was, he understood that something had saturated Jason’s cloud house with his presence in a way that Emir’s cloud house did not replicate. Jason’s spirit realm escalated that feeling drastically. Where the spirit domain was Jason imprinting himself on reality, the spirit realm was a reality forged from Jason himself.

The rest of the t...

What's in a name?

As some of you have already noticed, I've added my real name to the Patreon here and Royal Road. My name will be appearing on my books in future, albeit in smaller letters under my pen name - the Shirtaloon moniker is going nowhere.

I'd ask you all to be delicate because I'm feeling very exposed right now but if I was really feeling exposed I'd put on some pants. I love being a writer.

Chapter 528: The Pile of Disturbing Things

The fortress town was a tragic disaster. The gates were intact but the high stone walls were coated in deep gouges where the monsters had scrambled over them. Once the magic dome atop the walls had failed, the monsters had swarmed inside, turning a safe haven into a meat grinder. Inside the fortress town, buildings made of sturdy desert stone were half-collapsed, blood painting macabre murals across the pale yellow brickwork.

Jason’s group of three adventuring teams searched the ruine...

Chapter 527: Band of Misfits

The northern end of the Storm Kingdom was the coastland of the northern continent, much of which was barren desert. This was quite different from the equivalent area in Jason's world, which was the southern United States. Compared to Earth, the region was significantly more arid; not just the counterpart to Texas but everything from Louisiana to Florida was barren and dry.

The other difference was the presence of pockets of odd magic. Frequently these were located in canyons and gorges,...

End of book 7 and resumption of chapters

What will eventually be book 7 comes to an end with chapter 526.

I have taken a two week break to refill the creative tank before pushing on and the silver-tier and higher patrons will be seeing the resumption of chapters this week.

Other tiers and free chapter releases continue to have the usual delay compared to silver+ patrons and their two-week break begins following the release of chapter 526 on their various schedules.

AMA thread open

The thread for the reddit AMA with myself and Heath Miller, audiobook narrator extraordinaire, is now live for questions. We'll start answering them at about 5pm US Pacific time. The thread can be found here.

Book 3 Kindle correction.

There was something of an editing goof where some of the instructions for the narrator weren't removed before uploading to Amazon. That has been fixed, so if you re-download the story you'll get the corrected version.

Book 3 out now, plus AMA details

Book three is now live on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited and Audible here. Paperback is coming soon; got a little delayed because my publisher copped a dose of the 'rona, but is feeling much improved.

The AMA will be on the r/litrpg subreddit, with the thread opening at about 2pm US Pacific time. Audiobook narrator Heath Miller and myself will start an...