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

He felt sick to his stomach, but he believed Arkham. The innkeeper would tell Milisandra to wait if she arrived. For his part, LJ would do his best to make short work of the tournament. He didn’t need to win; he just needed to fight in the first battle.

The next morning, the day after his conversation with Kasami, they met up with the third player and set out for Kkhor, the capital of the Darin Empire. Kasami created a group and invited LJ before stepping into the portal.

“LJ, why is your chat blocked? And why doesn’t your level show up? That’s no good—we all have our levels available, and that’s standard, so just go ahead and do it.” LJ just shrugged. He was there against his will, and he didn’t care what anyone else wanted. Two minutes of shouting and arguing later, LJ turned and decided to walk away from the fighting pair. They quickly calmed down and agreed to his terms.

In reality, there was somebody out there willing to pay fifty thousand credits just for information about LJ’s level. He would have paid anything in fact, just to know what his strength was, even if the people weren’t that interested in him.

The portal took the trio to the main square at the center of the capital. Kkhor was one of the world’s oldest cities, and the buildings in the center had been built two eras previously. The best banks had offices there, the master craftsmen dreamed of opening shops there… It was the cultural, business, and trading hub of all of Radaam.

There were still six hours left before the tournament, but Kasami said it was better to head straight to the administration desk and let them know they’d arrived. They could spend the rest of the time at the coliseum to make sure nothing happened.

At the desk stood a group of players collecting data about the tournament’s participants. They were information traders—the better their ability to predict the winner, the more they were paid.

***

Kilaya wasn’t your ordinary information trader. She was a shaman who specialized in conversing with animals. In fact, she was there to work on her empathy skills. The shaman class was a tough one, and empathy only appeared after a specialty was picked. It could be used to see what a person or animal’s mood was—the higher the shaman’s perception, the wider the range of emotions it could diagnose. And the higher their empathy, the easier it was to sense hidden emotions and really pick out regular ones. Less than one percent of all shamans made something of their empathy. Players like that, however, were worth their weight in gold—they could tell how strong opponents were without looking at their level or clothes. The magic vision shamans enjoyed changed depending on the way they developed as players as well as their personal qualities. Kilaya was one of those shamans, and she’d been learning quickly how to contact spirits to offer faster and more detailed analysis of their opponents.

A group of three players walked up. One of them was dressed like a clown, in a cat costume with a face drawn on. But of all the information traders there, only three didn’t run up to the players. They just stood there watching the walking marvel.

He didn’t behave like a leader or hero. But the strength they could sense was beyond anything they could imagine—in the shaman girl’s magic vision, he shone so brightly that she wanted to close her eyes. The spirits couldn’t find anything out about him, and he ignored all attempts to cast perception spells. There was just one way left to find out how strong he was and what he thought of his own strength.

You could always touch the player you had in mind to get contact empathy to work, establishing a baseline for their strength and emotional mood. Kilaya’s empathy skill was highly developed—she’d been working on it for six months already. That was why she’d left her clan. She sensed more than what people said, so she spent all her free time in public, evaluating other players.

After waiting until the trio walked away, Kilaya tried to push her way through the crowd of information traders looking for interviews. None of them paid any attention to the cat. Other players, understanding what was going on, took care not to stand next to him. The cat’s aura shone brighter than a saint’s, and that was an anomaly.

At the last moment, right before the trio got to the gladiator quarters, Kilaya was able to grab the cat by the forearm. He just turned and smiled. Then, the guards brushed her arm away and closed the door.

The girl just stood there, tears welling up in her eyes. Without understanding what was going on, she stood there staring at the door. Contact empathy made a connection between the shaman and their “victim” for eight hours, which is why most people tried to avoid using it. Sometimes, living other people’s emotions is just too difficult.

Her old friend Anderson brought her back to reality. Next to him stood Marapet, and they both knew the cat was no normal gladiator.

“Hey, Kilaya, what’s wrong? You saw him killing kids?”

The girl wiped away a few tears before covering her face with her hands for a few seconds.

“There’s nothing in him except loneliness and grief. All that clowning around is just a thin shell keeping the harsh world out,” the girl replied with a sniff. “I can’t imagine what he must have gone through to gain that kind of power and that kind of pain—you’d have to descend into lunacy for five years, maybe more. No, death is better than that kind of life.”

Among the shamans, her empathy skill was the best thanks to her natural predisposition. The guys had different classes, so they used different criteria to evaluate players. But they couldn’t have