The Demonic Games (Disgardium Book #7): LitRPG Series, Dan Sugralinov [the read aloud family TXT] 📗

you say about him, you can’t deny he has spirit! You have the floor, Alex! Will you share what you’ve done with your competitors and the audience? Can you stop time? Bend space? What powers do you wield?”

“You know the answer, Mr. Octius,” I smiled. I liked the master of the Games, who was the same every year and only got more popular for it.

“Oh sure, I know it!” he said, smiling back at the cameras. “But I don’t have the right to reveal your secret. That’s up to you!”

“Then I prefer to leave my competitors in the dark. But… Mr. Octius! I want to say something else!”

Guy Barron, already turning around to return to the stage, stopped.

“Yes, Alex?”

“Mom, dad!” I blurted out quickly. “I love you lots! I’m doing fine, don’t worry!”

“Anything else?”

“Ed, Hung, say hi to everyone from me. And especially to Ir…” I closed my mouth quickly, stopping short of naming Irita. “To you know who. Tell her I miss her.”

“Aww…” Octius said, touched. “How adorable!”

The gamesmaster leaned down and ruffled my hair, then headed back to the stage, but stopped en route:

“Wait! ‘Ir’? I remind our viewers that in this hall sits Alex’s ex-girlfriend, Melissa Schafer.” Octius looked her way and spoke to her. “Any comment, Tissa?”

A close-up of her face appeared on the holocube. Tissa nodded, smiling.

“I think I’ll show my answer instead of tell it, Mr. Octius…” she said, then leaned over and kissed Malik.

They’re both losing their Sleeper priest rank! I thought, grinding my teeth, but my comm interrupted my fantasies of vengeance with a message from Kerry — a thumbs-up and a text: Maybe now they’ll see you as a normal teenager, and not a freak and a monster?

Next Octius spoke about the groups that had formed and made the most progress. The raid led by titan Quetzal from Excommunicado and orc Marcus from Warsong was in the lead. Both had been gladiators, both in the final of the solo Arena. Quetzal won, but it seemed Marcus never took the defeat personally, and they joined forces for the Demonic Games. Which was perfectly understandable; both clans were in the Alliance of Preventers.

This group included my victims Yermak, Naiterio, Perant and Enigma, plus around twenty other strong contestants.

The group of the elf woman Destiny was second on the leaderboard. That surprised me. I underestimated the connections and capabilities of the woman from Children of Kratos. The silver ranger had forty people, and they were strong and experienced players. The ones I knew included the shapeshifter magician Messiah and the lopher torturer Urkish.

A joint group made up of Modus, the Travelers and the White Amazons numbered only twelve. They had been in second place at the start of the day, but dropped in levels by dying twice at the hands of fighters from Destiny and Quetzal’s groups.

Of the bosses and mobs, the ones that surprised me the most were the gwortlings, flying menaces as if woven from writhing darkness, legless, but with two pairs of arms and a horned head crowned with a single gleaming red eye. The level 19 monsters seemed weak to me at first, but later I realized why Quetzal and Marcus’s raid got stuck at that floor.

They defeated the boss easily, but the difficulty began when the raid went to clear the instance. The mobs’ aura of terror more than made up for their fragility. One gwortling scared any players nearby for a second, and was then usually killed. But the more mobs gathered together, the more powerful their aura became. They called to their kin with piercing bat-like cries, and at some point, the tide turned on the raid.

Under the overwhelming collective aura of terror, Quetzal’s people fell apart, curling up on the floor, covering their faces and screaming. And then it turned out that the gwortlings had bite as well as bark: tooth-filled maws and sharp blades as claws. And they moved so fast they turned into a blur amid spraying fountains of blood and scraps of flesh as the players screamed. A minute and Marcus the orc was torn to shreds, only his skeleton remaining.

Quetzal lasted the longest. He recovered from the terror and tried to leave, gwortlings hanging off him. Blood flowed out of him as if from a faucet while he worked his massive arms to try and sweep away the mobs like mosquitos, but there were too many of them. He was like a bear in piranha-infested waters. Right by the exit, he fell to one knee, held himself up with a fist, then… collapsed, crushing dozens of gwortlings with a squelch. The other beasts continued their feast.

“And that’s a wipe,” Octius said in satisfaction. “You all just witnessed the death of a titan! But, as we will soon see, Quetzal and Marcus learned from this grievous error…”

The raid returned, forced out another group that had begun tentatively probing the floor — and violently at that, sending them to the graveyard, — and started clearing it more carefully. There the raid stayed until the end of the day.

“Clearly, Quetzal and Marcus decided not to risk taking their group onto floor 21 after they all lost a level! And remember, beautiful Destiny’s group occupied and conquered floor 20. Miss Windsor, any comments on your success for our viewers?”

The woman declined to comment, and Octius moved to the final part of his summary. He told us how Meister and Roman’s raid was doing, suggested we applaud the viewers’ sense of justice in giving another chance to Michelle the dryad after she died on the first day, and showed us the highlight of the day for that group: a curse that the troll Roman inflicted on me.

“Hope you die!” the troll shouted as he sent me on my three-minute fall into the abyss.

The winner of the Darant Philosophy Tournament