End of an Era (Project Chrysalis Book 2), John Gold [ebook reader online txt] 📗

even when his own life was painful and difficult. And just now, she’d created a situation that had led him to turn away from the people he loved most.

“Forgive me, Mr. Filtz. It didn’t turn out the way I planned.”

“It’s okay. You gave me the chance to see him, and I know everything’s going to be okay now. That’s good enough for me.”

Anji had turned away from the people he cared about in order to leave behind his weakness and vulnerability. She hadn’t realized that during their conversation in the virtual space. But that’s what it had led to. The force of the boy’s resolution was off the charts.

But he’d let one thing slip. He’d said that he was glad to see his friends before leaving for the colony, although he couldn’t have known that he wasn’t being transferred to another orphanage at the station. It sounded like nothing much, but it was Anji. Given his intelligence, it had to mean something.

***

Leon sat on the windowsill watching the turmoil in the castle courtyard. Airis Castle, the clan’s headquarters ever since his cult had been founded, was leveling up. A line of ditches was being dug around the outer wall, right up against the foothills of the mountain.

Global notification: An undead invasion has begun.

Merlen and his assistants dashed into the room.

“Leon, did you see that? Undead, and a global notification. You were right!”

The young god thought to himself for a second.

“Damn it! The bodies! After the war…there were lots of corpses, and I hadn’t thought about that. Where did the fighting happen?”

“Everywhere! On three continents, only Katain wasn’t touched. The old gods took out everyone who tried to hide there.”

“Start gathering information.” Leon began receding into the astral. “We need to figure out how bad things are. If it isn’t terrible, we’ll send out a couple of dozen squads to clear everything and kill the liches, though we’ll need a larger-scale solution if the problem is worse than that. We have to protect the faithful.”

A minute later, having looked around the land through the eyes of his followers, Leon realized just how bad the situation was and where help was needed most. They had to act fast. He got in touch with all the alliances under their control.

“Comrades, we have a problem facing us around the whole world! There’s a global undead invasion in Ovidius across the human lands. The minimum level is 570. They’re just simple undead so far, but the chimeric undead will start appearing by this evening. The first battles are being fought in the south by the dwarf mountains. The dwarves took on the first wave, but their defenses are going to crack in the next few hours. Once that happens, they’ll retreat into their underground cities. Things are even worse on the other continents. The elves’ Spring Forest is under siege, currently protected by a powerful magic shield. Our most important job is to protect the locals and get them from the villages to the cities. Give them all the help you can. Protect their carts and mounts. Help them get inside the city walls, and put the cities on siege footing. My avatars will cover you until we have everyone evacuated.”

A minute later, Leon’s avatars had settled in the warriors helping to protect the cities. There were lots of undead, all a good 200 levels above the players, and they were just the first to arrive. In fact, it was what Leon saw on the border of No Man’s Land that scared him ten times as much as all that comparatively insignificant stuff: an undead army worthy of a god.

The worst part was the realization of how much prana was flowing through the beasts. Whenever the army decided to move out, the world was going to descend into darkness. Still, it remained frozen until the command was given.

***

As I fly along in the shuttle, I look out into space. It’s an interesting sensation, hurtling through a vacuum in comfort. It isn’t cold, you aren’t hungry, you aren’t afraid. The shuttle has everything you need. It’s my first flight outside the station, and I’m nervous and excited. Space is beautiful!

To pass the time, I think about the game. Lunar created Project Chrysalis, and the nation itself was founded sixty years ago out of Armadillo Industries, a company mining resources in open space and manufacturing parts for space ships and stations. The company had 25 million employees when it declared its independence, the surprising part being that there was just one owner. The head of the company decided against selling off shares. Instead, he used his own money to develop the company. Currently, Lunar occupies the entire Moon and uses it as efficiently as possible: the dark side is for collecting solar energy, while the rest is covered in colonies linked by underground tunnels forming a road network crisscrossing the Moon. Gravity was artificially modified to 1G, the Earth standard.

All ground colonies now use artificial gravity. When Lunar was unveiled after a ten-year period of isolation, it turned out to be twenty years ahead of the rest of the scientific community. To put it simply, they could have conquered the world had they been the slightest bit interested in doing so. The tech and scientific principles used to build the device that created artificial gravity was far beyond those known to science anywhere else. Lunar was forced to reveal another twenty-six discoveries from other fields just so the world could understand how the devices worked.

Over the last fifty years, Lunar has financed research around the world and is currently an active participant in the fight against war between people. The fact that people there are interested in me is scary. What could be more frightening than people whose interests are a mystery to you? They never invest money without good reason, so I’m going to