A bustling town center unfolded before them. Tantalizing scents rose from market stalls, where vendors grilled strange meats and deep-fried unidentifiable vegetables in batter. Over in the corner, three supers surrounded a twenty-foot-long wolflike monster with green fur and black bone spurs, busily hacking it to pieces. Blood drained into the street, and bits of white bone chipped into the air. A burly female super in charred armor dragged a black-and-neon-orange python by its tail, the pyth...
2024-02-29 02:17:25 +0000 UTC
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A knock at her hotel room door. Fira jolted. She jumped up from where she was watching television and approached the door warily, one hand outstretched, fire cupped in her rear hand. Lowering her head, she peered out the peep hole.
Levi beamed from the other side of the door, dressed in a tattered white shirt and jeans, a backpack on his back. He gave a jaunty wave.
Fira opened the door. She frowned, glancing at the clock. “What are you doing here? Don’t you have the meetup—...
2024-02-29 02:16:34 +0000 UTC
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Levi bounced along, humming to himself as he walked. A backpack thumped against his back, bulky with clothes but light for the same. He walked through Central Square, not a care in the world.
Already, cops and supers bustled around the space, setting up cordons and preparing for an influx of idiots. Levi tossed a few nods their way as he walked. One of the supers straightened up and waved, giving him a surely-patented smile. He smiled back, sweeping his eyes over the rest of them as wel...
2024-02-29 02:15:45 +0000 UTC
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Oz glided through the camp, using his light body technique to land soundlessly between long steps. Careless undead wandered by, eyes blank, mouths gaping, carrying masses of raw materials in their arms. Some were mundane: wood, bricks, cloth. Others were less so: bundles of strange herbs, stacks of raw meat, piles of still-bloody organs. One carried half a deer, the half-body marked with bite marks and still dripping.
Oz frowned at that, watching that particular undead shamble by. T...
2024-02-28 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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After a time, Heather came back with a few tenants and members of Erica’s army, and with their help, Zeke and Domi made short work of the cooking. The two of them carried the bit pot out into the apartment’s massive Convention Hall, careful to keep the chili even between them.
“Do apartments usually have Convention Halls?” Zeke muttered to Domi.
“It’s the end of the world,” Domi muttered back.
“Yeah, right…” Zeke said, nodding.
Domi shot him a look....
2024-02-28 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Oz caught his breath. Holy shit!
Instead of trees, a forest of tents spread before him, spreading from an enormous central tent like spokes on a wheel out to a wide circle that filled up almost the entire valley. Open pits of reddish fluid stretched for hundreds of yards, with thousands of pale forms laid out like sardines in a tin, packed so tight he could only see the fluid where it pooled up around the bodies. Here and there, small pools of black tarlike liquid slowly churne...
2024-02-27 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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“Stop.”
Oz jolted. He looked up at Aisling.
She stepped away from him, removing his hand from her arm. “Stop. I have my own methods. Don’t hurt yourself, pushing yourself too far to cast a spell you can’t afford.”
“But I—”
Aisling gave him a firm look and shook his head. “You’re too young and too weak. I can find my own method. Once you become older and stronger, then ask me to rely on you.”
Oz bit his lip, but said nothing. He cut the spe...
2024-02-26 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Oz tumbled into the mirror. For a moment, the world whirled around him as the directions inverted, and then he hovered there on the other side of the mirror, looking back at himself. Silvery material shimmered all around him, then resolved into the familiar library. His body settled into the same nook, though, at the opposite orientation, it felt strange. Oz shifted, uncomfortable in how exactly, perfectly comfortable he felt.
It would be easy to get lost here. To mistake this for t...
2024-02-25 15:00:06 +0000 UTC
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As he peered into the mirror, Oz caught sight of his eyes. Dark blue, tired eyes gazed back at him, the left one ever so slightly darker. He squinted. A paper-thin ring of bright neon blue glimmered in the center of the darker iris, fluctuating slightly like dust particles in the sun.
Oz touched the skin just below his eye, pulling it back to get a closer look. The sclera, that is, the whites look normal. The color is a bit off, but not noticeably. There’s just that thread. That t...
2024-02-24 15:00:04 +0000 UTC
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In a matter of moments, Oz reached the side of the lake. He paused and turned back, taking in the distance between him and the closed door to the library. Damn. That’s a long ways, and I crossed it in instants. With that movement technique, I’m easily faster than the fastest sprinter back in my world.
Damn. Mages are awesome! Even someone at my low level can already move that quickly. If nothing else, it’s incredibly convenient.
He settled down under a tree...
2024-02-23 15:00:06 +0000 UTC
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“Roan is dead, Baltair is dead. Baltair’s body is host to some powerful other soul, that isn’t even the main necromancer. We have an army of undead dullahan and water fey to deal with, and that’s just the surface level.” Oz sighed heavily, wiping his face down as they walked away from the lake. Roan’s robes faded beneath the murky surface, and then a pale hand wrapped around his body’s waist and yanked it down. “The field is stacked against us.”
“We don’t have to d...
2024-02-22 15:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Winding through the region, the path ground on. Slowly, the sky darkened, and the air thickened. Strange wisps of dark energy danced on the air, bouncing amid swirling mist. A mist unlike the wall of fog, but which nonetheless clung heavily to their bodies, cold and dark, an accumulation of the dark magic energy that made Oz almost choke with every breath. He covered his mouth with his sleeve, trying in vain to filter some of the dark qi all around them.
A narrow valley closed in around...
2024-02-21 15:00:04 +0000 UTC
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The road wound on. A few other towns loomed along their way, but Oz led the way around them, rather than through, wary of encountering another situation like the dullahan town. No one wandered the fields or walked the roads. All the farms laid fallow, and no livestock appeared anywhere. Silence hung over the land, broken only by the caw of a few lonely ravens and the crunch of loose pebbles under their feet.
Oz drew up alongside Roan. He tossed him a nod. “So, how uh, how’s death tr...
2024-02-21 04:00:01 +0000 UTC
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“Leaving so soon?”
Oz whirled.
The man from earlier, the one who’d invited them into the town, stood behind them. His head tilted, and he smiled.
Darkness flashed across the world. For a moment, Oz caught sight of a ruined version of the same main street. Spoiled fruits and vegetables spilled out of the stalls. All the citizens wandered around, their neck stumps exposed, revealing bone and rotting flesh. Men, women, children, all of them decaying, all of them headless....
2024-02-19 15:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Tap. Tap. Tap.
Slow, deliberate footsteps approached the tree from the shadowed road, tapping against the cobbles. Passing into the thin light, a dark figure approached the tree. Save his face and hands, no part of him stood exposed, all of him cloaked in pitch black. He faced the tree with palms outstretched, red eyes gazing at the charred stump and cracked branches. About Oz’s apparent age, his skin was deathly pale, making those ruby eyes stand out ever brighter.
Oz ...
2024-02-18 16:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Loup landed lightly beside them, bare feet making as much noise as the paws of her two lupine companions. She carried a yellow bundle in her arms. The bundle shifted, and an arm fell out. A set of three gold discs hung from its waist, flashing even in the low light.
Roan. Oz moved closer, hesitant. “He’s dead, right…?”
One of the wolves turned, a messy, hairy ball in its mouth. It lowered its head and spat, and Roan’s head came rolling over to Oz’s feet.
2024-02-17 15:00:04 +0000 UTC
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A/N: whoopsie, put this under the wrong category! Should be good now.
Roan’s head popped off its body. With his fey vision off, Oz couldn’t see the threads, so it simply appeared to fly of its own volition. Roan’s jaw hung open, slack and loose, his lower eyelids drooping to show too much of his eyeballs.
Oz jumped back, startled. Instantly, he activated his fey vision again. Threads filled the air before them, twisting and twining like hungry snakes.
Aisling didn’t ...
2024-02-16 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Aisling stopped. She turned back, confused. “What about Roan?”
Oz flinched. He lifted his hands. “Please, just stand completely still. Don’t move. Don’t—don’t breathe too hard. Don’t bend over.”
Furrowing her brows, Aisling froze. She squinted down at him. “What’s wrong?”
Oz swallowed. How do I explain this?
Gossamer threads wound around Aisling’s throat, spooling from every crack and cranny and dark alley around them and twisting tig...
2024-02-15 15:00:18 +0000 UTC
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Light poured from the pages of the fey book, backlighting the text. Oz squinted, a little uncomfortable. Does this thing have a dark mode? No? Unfortunate.
The text twisted away, written in the fey text. Oz began to pull up his dictionary, pressing his lips together. I’m going to be at this all day. Hopefully Fflyn and Aisling don’t die while I’m busy.
The page glowed brighter. Oz’s eyes blurred, and the text flowed directly into his mind. The fey script ...
2024-02-14 15:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Without the fog hiding the horizon, the barn wasn’t that far from town. The fence around the barn butted up against the town’s stone wall, and Oz only had to follow it along its edge for a minute or two before he came upon the town gates. Before he entered, he took in the fields one last time. Like the last town, the fields lie fallow, and no livestock graze in the fields. Not a good sign. We should be on our guard.
The town’s gate stood closed, as Oz expected. He walked ...
2024-02-13 15:00:14 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone! I'm proud to announce Apocalypse Me, my LitRPG, is getting an Amazon release as a real published book tomorrow! That's right, tomorrow!
If you have Kindle Unlimited, download it now! Doesn't cost you anything!
If you don't, consider buying a copy! It's yours. FOREVER.
(Unless a nasty timelooper deletes this timeline, but Ryan wouldn't do that, would he?)
And of course, don't forget to RATE and REVIEW on Amazon! You guys are the bes...
2024-02-13 13:00:08 +0000 UTC
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Oz checked in over the night, but when he realized Fflyn was sleeping, he left quickly without disturbing him. After sleeping himself, he checked in again, and seeing more fog, he returned to reading. Books piled up beside him as he worked his way through the books he hadn’t scanned or accidentally absorbed from the sea of knowledge. Pages turned, quietly resting against one another. The smell of old leather and book filled the air, as the sun crept slowly across the sky.
I really...
2024-02-12 16:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Oz leaped into the hayloft. He landed lightly, barely stirring the hay where he landed. A low pile of fresh hay sat in the corner, but otherwise, the hayloft stood completely empty.
Fflyn stopped screaming. He sighed. Thank goodness. They hid somewhere else.
“Hello, there. Would you like to come out?” Oz asked the fresh hay.
What? Fflyn asked, startled.
Oz nodded. “Fresh hay. A good choice of illusion in a hayloft. Unfortunately, everything in t...
2024-02-11 16:00:04 +0000 UTC
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As Oz closed in on the girls, he glanced behind him. The fog closed in on them, the front of it pressing through the trees like cotton stuffing. A chill crept through the air ahead of the fog, threatening to grip him. Figured out that breathing technique just in time! Close, too close!
He caught up to Loup and Aisling enough to lift his head and shout, “How far do we have left to the town?”
“Not far!” Loup shouted back.
“Fog’s getting close!” Oz replie...
2024-02-10 16:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Oz looked over his shoulder. A solid wall of fog closed in on them, still far off, but growing closer. He paused, frowning.
“What is it?” Aisling asked.
“I… don’t know. The fog…” He pointed behind them. “The fog is giving me… bad vibes?”
Aisling frowned, mimicking his expression. She closed her eyes for a moment. A rush of power pulsed from her body, momentarily sending Oz’s clothes into a flurry. When her eyes opened, her brows furrowed deeper. She lic...
2024-02-09 16:00:03 +0000 UTC
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The man stepped forward, pushing a pair of round glasses up on his nose. The priest appeared, gazing down on them. To his left, a burly man loomed, face empty, eyes white. To his right, a slender young girl stumbled over the rocks, her eyes white as well. Blood dripped down her knees, but she walked on with no reaction.
Oz squinted. He’s the necromancer? No way.
“How fortunate that he left these two puppets behind,” the priest murmured to himself. He snapped his fin...
2024-02-08 16:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Levi slid into Maury’s base. “How’s it hanging?”
“I got a request,” Maury grumbled.
“I thought you don’t do this anymore?” he asked, kicking off his shoes.
She shrugged. “It was someone who’s covered my ass before. I couldn’t refuse.”
“Aight. What’s the situation?”
“Nothing big, just a contract killing. I’ve contacted a few underworld types who are still active, and they’re sending their expendables. If you’re interested, i...
2024-02-08 00:29:11 +0000 UTC
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With a roar, the last white-armored monster charged Stoneheart. Calmly, Stoneheart raised his hands and narrowed his eyes, putting his thumbs at a ninety-degree angle to his index fingers, thumbs overlapping. A rectangular hole opened up in front of the monster. The monster dug in its claws, struggling to stop in time.
The second it slowed, a blast pierced it from overhead, cutting a small round hole through its heart. The monster cried out and slumped, sliding lifelessly into the hole....
2024-02-08 00:28:12 +0000 UTC
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I know what you’re thinking.
I hate unnecessary death, and I just walked away? Some hero, huh?
Well, look. My death is unnecessary, too, sometimes. I mean, even if I ran down the hill the second I saw the monsters, Alpha’s Asshole Association would’ve gotten there first. My skills are basically nonexistant. What could I have offered? Dying like the rest? Adding more mass to the concert crush, so the crush killed more people?
I don’t have crowd control. My killing cap...
2024-02-08 00:21:35 +0000 UTC
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Once again, the boy’s voice echoed through the stadium, louder and clearer than the music. “Everyone, please. Get out. Now! We’re in danger. You n—”
The speakers cut off with a thump. Onstage, Rainer Drift waved and smiled, shrugging and shaking her head to show that she had no idea what was happening. She looked around, glaring at the techs and giving reassuring looks to the rest of the audience.
With a whine, Rainer Drift’s mic cut back on. “Hi, sorry about that! I...
2024-02-08 00:20:36 +0000 UTC
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