Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3), John Gold [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

mage working in his security service. Kirk was an investigator and scout who was able to apply his skills to his work. It was his job to make sure the clan’s main buildings were free of seeker spirits, and he lost his free time the minute he joined the clan. His mornings were for work, his afternoons for boosting key skills and handling an endless flow of assignments, and his evenings, straight through until he fell asleep, focused exclusively on his skills. He got a quick break in the barracks’ social room before bed.

Leon and Nate insisted that he live in the barracks. It might have appeared as though Kirk had been thrown into slavery or the army, but a wiser person would have understood that it was all for his own benefit. He simply had no time to feel lonely. There was so much work to do that he sometimes just couldn’t get enough sleep, in fact. Nate kept an eye on him—as soon as one job was finished, he was handed another. And no matter how much Kirk wailed about it, he was having the time of his life. He was the detective assigned to a group of experienced fighters, so somebody always had his back if a fight broke out.

Right then, he was updating the protection for the room the treasurers were in. It was supposed to have ten layers of protective magic, and Kirk was only on the first. While even the storehouse only got five, the treasurers themselves got ten layers. Nobody was going to be listening in on them.

The head of security dashed into the corridor. He was agitated, his glance darting around as if looking for someone.

“Kirk, there you are! Go check the main entrance to the castle. There’s a chance we’re going to be hit with a mental attack today.”

“Who? How strong? How many mana crystals should I take with me?”

“The Gordona clan. You just head straight to the gate; everything you need will be there waiting for you.”

A second later, the head of security disappeared into the flash of a portal. Kirk’s group perked up and started to change into their combat outfits. They’d been in their civvies, which made sense—they were in the city, and nobody was going to attack them there. Unless it was a mental attack…

Two warriors slipped on the armor of paladins in Leon’s order. Mirania, a priestess of light, grabbed her battle mage outfit. Even Sit and Radidz, the jokesters, were soon wearing their killer clothes.

Silence hung in the room. The priestess and killers turned invisible, leaving just the two paladins to stand there waiting for Kirk so they could head toward the gate. The dumbfounded kid slowly started to realize that he’d been prepared for exactly that day—that’s why his squad had revealed their true identities to him. Whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to see what was at the gate.

While they were walking to the gate, the thoughts swirling slowly in his head started to sort themselves out. Something important was about to happen, and the Gordona clan was just a pretext.

Nobody was at the gate. Kirk started checking the castle for seeker spirits and setting up mental first strike shields.

Everything was quiet. It was almost as though the streets had been evacuated, to the point that he could hear the sand rustling and the paladin’s chainmail jingling a couple of meters to his left.

Just in case, he looked around the castle wells to see if there were any signs of a magic siege. Nothing there either.

Silence. Complete silence.

When the mind mage turned around, however, he found himself face to face with the player the whole world was looking for.

“Hi, Kirk. I see you found yourself some new friends. Lots and lots of new friends.”

Kirk replied with everything a mind mage might have in his arsenal: a mental hammer, horror instilled, an astral vampire, and even a canna spear, the ability for the third mastery level.

But his opponent was too close, and everyone there was hit with the shock wave from the powerful astral spell. Only Femida, who was watching from behind Sagie, stood there unperturbed.

Human, Sagie, Mage, Level 2515

“This is presumably ‘Bloody Sagie’s savage attack on Castle Airis.’ Soon, there will be a couple of hundred bodies screaming to avenge the remains of the poor people I killed. Then, a group of eyewitnesses will say something about how I made them watch as I carved up the bodies. Brutal. And there you were, a brave warrior heroically defending the castle from the attack. Bravo!”

That monologue gave Kirk enough time to save up sufficient mana to activate the two abilities he got for his ranks of scholar and apprentice.

They were reverse shield and soul-sucking. The shield wrapped itself around Sagie…and burst. The snake draped itself around his neck, though it couldn’t bite through the defenseless skin. It was only then that Kirk remembered Sagie’s mental modification and 50% resistance to mental damage.

A column of light struck from the heavens, and a barrage of lightning bolts rained down from the wall. The mages in the castle fired off everything they had. Kirk was protected by a paladin from the shock wave, while a crater formed around Sagie. Both he and Femida, however, stood tall, not budging an inch. The mages stopped shooting their spells.

“What a dilemma. I could kill all of you, but then I’d have people saying that I was the one who attacked.”

“You’re a murderer! I saw with my own eyes how you killed hundreds of innocent people, and I’m going to make you answer for it!”

“You don’t have any clue what you did. You want me to answer for the people I killed? The victims I took? It’s all because of you! It’s all your fault! You’re the one who found