Vigil's Wrath: A LitRPG Adventure (Vigil Bound Book 4), page 1
Vigil’s Wrath
VIGIL BOUND
BOOK FOUR
JAMES A. HUNTER
Contents
Summary
Author and Publisher Updates
1. Visions of the Past
2. Juggling Chainsaws
3. Party Preparations
4. The Once and Future King
5. Possibilities
6. Baron of Ironmoor
7. Play Nice
8. Negotiations
9. Ghost Hunter Interdimensional
10. Spirit Cage
11. The Best Laid Plans
12. Ruler of the Thrones
13. Face-to-Face
14. Welcome Back
15. Boil and BBQ
16. All Hail the BBQ King
17. After-party
18. Loadout
19. The Road to Blackvale
20. A Warm Welcome
21. Vengeance Calling
22. Meat Golem
23. The Winner Is…
24. Horn of War
25. Twist of Fate
26. Hard Goodbyes
27. The Ultimate Hunt
28. Gears of War
29. Ascension Shrine
30. Release the Bees
31. Monarch’s Fury
32. Performance Issues
33. Let’s Make a Deal
FREE Novel
The Adventure Continues…
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About the Author
Summary
When the Wyld Hunt rides, no one is safe. Not even the most Vigilant.
Marine turned Monster Hunter, Boyd Knight, has found himself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Fae Queen of Oblivion. Although the first leg of the Wyld Hunt has drawn to a close, there are still two more Hunts to go, and the targets will only get deadlier.
After slaying a Vampire Monarch and being cheated out of victory, the time for fun and games is officially over, and Boyd is ready to unleash some good ol’ fashioned fire and brimstone on anyone who gets in his way again. But it’s not just the nightmarish monsters and Fae champions that Boyd has to worry about—the Dark Queen has some nasty tricks up her sleeves, and if Boyd isn’t careful, he could find himself facing off against some of his closest allies.
If Boyd has any hope of survival, he’s going to need to make a few dark deals of his own to level the playing field and deliver some well-deserved Old Testament Wrath in the process…
Full of heart-pounding, shoot-’em-up action and suspense, Vigil’s Wrath is a must-read for fans of LitRPG and fantasy alike. Grab your copy today and join Boyd on the Wyld Hunt of a lifetime!
Author and Publisher Updates
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1
Visions of the Past
Horrifying visions danced in front of me.
And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
I watched a string of grisly deaths play out, over and over again, like a broken record stuck on repeat, the needle tracing a constant and inevitable path over the same grooves of vinyl. Sometimes I died. Sometimes it was Cal. Other times it was Melwyn or Kerra, Renholm or Arturo. Sometimes it was all of us. We died a thousand different ways, each more horrific than the last, and in every scenario, Queen Ionia’s grinning face hung above me like a giant, sickly moon peering down on my string of failures.
Taunting me.
Laughing at me.
Whispering poisonous words in my ear, confirming my worst fears and deepest doubts.
You’re a failure…
You don’t know what you’re doing…
You’re out of your depth…
You’re going to get everyone you’ve ever loved killed…
Although it was Ionia’s mouth that formed the insidious words, they sounded a helluva lot like my own voice.
Some part of my brain knew the images weren’t real—that they were dreams, or nightmares, drummed up by a steady diet of too much stress and too little sleep. But none of that mattered. Not even a little. Logic is a powerful tool, but I’d learned through painful experience that in the face of emotions, logic was often useless. Right now, logic was a tool on a shelf, just a little too high for me to reach. I was frozen, a traveler bound and gagged in the passenger seat of a Humvee, and my subconscious mind was driving us right off a cliff.
None of this was real.
All of this was real.
The world blurred on the edges and suddenly I found myself patrolling the dusty, quiet, and oddly empty streets of Orezan. It was a scenic little village nestled in the shadow of the Dellavant Divide, just four leagues south of the crossroad city of Sligrad.
A crude palisade wall, constructed from simple spiked logs, ringed the town.
It was supposed to keep threats out, but instead, it felt like a cage, keeping me in.
The buildings of Orezan were all rough gray stone with thick thatched roofs, and the center of the village was dominated by a looming stone church. A thin layer of late winter frost covered the hardpacked roads and dusted the eaves, but no smoke rose from any of the chimneys. No torches lit the streets. No townsfolk milled about in doorways or shuffled along the walkways. Orezan was the kind of place I’d expect to find on a Swedish travel brochure. But no one in their right mind would want to visit. Not now.
This place was dead. Filled with infection.
“Melwyn,” I called over one shoulder, feeling a knot of worry form in the pit of my stomach. She’d been right beside me a moment before, but when I turned to look for her, she was gone.
I wasn’t alone, however.
Crowding around me on every side were lurching corpses with their arms outstretched as they made their way closer and closer toward me. These were the missing residents of Orezan. Men, women, children. Five hundred and seventeen of them. All had been slaughtered like livestock. No, that wasn’t right. Even livestock were treated more humanely.
Many were missing limbs and almost all were gutted, but that didn’t seem to bother them too much. Their pale, ghostly eyes burned with ravenous hunger as their feet dragged across the hardpacked roadway. Their mouths had split wide open, and a pair of mandible-like protrusions extended from their lower jaws. Each had a long fleshy tongue, which hung down from its open maw, undulating back and forth like a wiggling worm.
These things had been human once, and not so long ago, but now they were just twisted lumps of meat. Cocoons for the unholy Vampiric Grubs taking shelter inside their flesh, eating and biding their time until they could emerge in all their flabby disgusting glory.
My friends were nowhere to be seen.
It was just me against hundreds of these disgusting, body-stealing cockwombles. The numbers weren’t in my favor, but I was Vigil with the divine might of Raguel flowing through my veins.
I didn’t die easy.
As the creatures charged—their undulating cries ripping at the frosty winter sky—I thrust one hand out and called for my Soul Bound weapons. I waited for a beat, both hands open in expectation.
My weapons never came.
Sweat poured down my face, and I thrust my hands forward this time, attempting to channel power from my core so I could cast Unbound Blaze. Let these fuckers burn.
I felt a small surge of Arcana warm my palms for a moment, then it guttered and died, leaving me weaponless and powerless as the monsters swarmed me. I punched and kicked, thrashing with every ounce of strength in my body. It wasn’t enough. I was too weak and there were too many of them. The deck was stacked against me.
They dragged me to the ground, and in the background, I heard a voice whisper, I win again, Boyd Knight. I always win…
Claws ripped through my armor and ravenous mouths gnawed at my flesh.
I took one final breath and the world blurred again…
Suddenly, I was in the cathedral-like belfry of an enormous clock tower, which rose high above the dreary, gray city of Sligrad. Five brassy bells were before me, the largest in the center, with four smaller bells of varying sizes arrayed around it in a square. Thick ropes, which looked like strings of gory gray intestine, descended from each bell, disappearing through narrow holes drilled in the wooden floor below.
Brilliant moonbeams streamed in through a series of horizontal wooden slats, casting a striped pattern of light and shadow across the floorboards. More moonlight spilled in through a circular stained glass window positioned above an archway that let out onto a wide balcony with a commanding view of the city below. Standing on the balcony, soaking up the pearlescent light of the moon, was a girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen.
She had ivory skin, a band of freckles across her nose, and fiery red hair pulled back into a braid that hung over one shoulder.
Yenifer van Walgien. Yenifer the Undying. The first target of the Wyld Hunt.
Or so I’d thought.
I’d replayed this fight a dozen times during our silent and sullen ride home from Sligrad.
I’d been so close to victory—
Only to have it snatc
I’d just assumed that she had been the target.
Except I’d been wrong. Dead wrong. Ionia had played me like a fiddle.
Yenifer’s father, Martien van Walgien, Cleric of Tharnir, had been the real target. He’d made the deal with Ionia. He’d been the one to sell his soul for a chance to see his little girl again.
I hadn’t realized the truth until it had been too late.
“You were always destined to fail,” Yenifer cooed at me, her voice soft and sweet.
The words snapped me back into the present. Or the past.
The scene had changed during my moment of inattention.
Instead of squaring off against Yenifer all by my lonesome—which is how things had happened in real life—the belfry was now filled with a variety of Yenifer’s hellish spawn.
Adolescent Vampires.
Unlike the sparkly vampires of the modern era, there was nothing sexy or appealing about these nightmares. They were flabby and gray, with upturned noses, large ears, and mangy fur covering their shoulders, chests, and backs. They shuffled about on short, squat legs and impossibly long and delicate arms that reached to the floor. A thin black membrane spread between the arms and body, forming what could only be a set of wings. They didn’t look even remotely like the Hosts we’d wiped out back in Orezan, but then they were also further along in their evolutionary transformation.
The Adolescent Vampires weren’t the only new additions to the party either.
One of the gray monsters held Renholm in one spidery hand.
A second had Arturo in a bear hug from behind. The priest’s arms were pinned to his sides and a pair of venom-laced fangs were pressed against his neck, dimpling the skin. Another ounce of pressure and the blood would pour.
Yenifer, still in the guise of a sweet sixteen-year-old girl, stood hand in hand with Melwyn.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, you know,” Yenifer said. “You’re only putting off the inevitable. You’re a nobody. A flea hoping to devour a tiger. There’s no path to victory, Boyd. At most, you are an irritant biting at the neck of your betters. We both know you never wanted to get involved with Ionia or with the Hunt, but now it’s too late. It’s spiraled out of control and the people you care about the most are the ones who are going to pay the price for your hubris.”
As the words left her mouth, the flabby vampire holding Renholm squeezed its hand and the Pookah’s head exploded in a shower of blood and bone.
More violence followed.
There was a crack of breaking bone as Arturo’s arms and ribs shattered, then the vampire tore his throat out, killing him in seconds.
There was nothing I could do for either of them, but Melwyn was still alive.
I bolted forward, but there was something wrong with my legs. It felt like I was running through quicksand. Every movement was sluggish, like a wall of invisible force was actively working to hold me at bay.
Yenifer offered me a small sad smile, then twisted and casually flung Melwyn from the balcony with a flick of her wrist. Although the Vampire Monarch may have looked like an innocent child, she had the strength of a demon, imparted to her by a lesser deity of Chaos.
The Princess of Petals let out a strangled cry for help, then disappeared over the railing. Whatever implacable power had previously held me back vanished, and I closed the distance in a heartbeat. But I was too late. Always just a little too late. I skidded to a stop by the balcony rail and looked down. Melwyn lay on the cobblestones below, her eyes unblinking, her lips parted in a shocked “O,” a pool of bright blood spreading around her in a halo.
I win again, Boyd Knight, someone whispered in the back of my mind. I wasn’t sure if it was Ionia’s voice or my own. I always win…
Melwyn’s body was gone and I found myself in a familiar scene.
Martien van Walgien was kneeling on the cobblestones. He had Yenifer’s broken body cradled in the crook of one arm. He was bowed over, his face buried against his daughter’s chest, almost as though he were praying or crying. Truth of it was, he wasn’t doing either. Martien was dead. A pair of dull black arrows skewered him back to chest while a third inky shaft had pierced clean through his throat. The two of them were hunched together, their grief and death on display for all the world to see, like a perverse version of the Madonna and Child.
I hadn’t known Martien long—we certainly weren’t friends—but this made me sick.
Ionia had taken advantage of a grieving father, promising him a chance to see his daughter alive again, all for the low, low price of his soul. He’d taken the deal, as many fathers would, never knowing what evil he was inadvertently unleashing on the world at large. Instead of losing his daughter once, he’d been cursed to watch her die twice.
All around us, Ionia’s champions padded forward from narrow alleyways and dimly lit connecting streets like the fingers of a giant hand curling shut.
In reality, several champions had been absent from this terrible, mule-kick-to-the-teeth moment, but in this nightmare version, everyone was present and accounted for.
Aymer the Primeval, a red-skinned demon with curling ebony horns, appeared on my left. I’d killed him during our raid on Jeffery’s hunting lodge. Poor bastard had fallen face-first into a bear trap, but he stood tall and proud now.
Next to him was Drusk, the Warmaster of Araethyrea. He was a hulking insectoid warrior that looked like a giant praying mantis with sword blade arms. Drusk was a master of the sword but could also conjure an army of weapons and control them with his mind—a skill I’d experienced firsthand during our pit fight in the forests of Mag Aisling, the Land of Desolate Dreams. I’d beaten Drusk to within an inch of his life, but instead of killing him, I’d extended him mercy, hoping to win him over to our side.
Only time would tell if that worked out or if I’d made a terrible misstep.
Bogen CrowEye trailed behind the mantoid warrior. He was an assassin from the Sibylline Court and was easy to pick out at a distance since he had the head of a giant raven. Cal and Renholm had caught the birdman snooping around Starlake Keep early during the first hunt. After some light torture and a few minor war crimes, I’d cut him loose, too. He’d had the good sense to keep his distance, though what he would do for the second hunt was anyone’s guess.
The other champions trickled out like avenging spirits, materializing from a thick fog. Ku-Aya, the spider-faced Seer of the Hallowed Memory. Iret, the moth-winged huntress from the Throne of Tears. Khapi, the lizard-man warlock and emissary from the Four Seasons. Elyon, the sultry summoner of the House of Lust. Narvik, Host of the Fell, a burly centaur with the lower body of a tiger and the upper body of a man. Then came Shuri, a golden-skinned elf-woman, spoken of in whispers as the Arc-Healer of the Six Nightmares.
As Shuri’s name skipped through my thoughts like a stone over the placid waters of a lake, I half wondered if this was somehow her doing. I knew there were Vigils capable of dream walking, so it stood to reason that there were Fae shitheads that could likely do the same. The thought was fleeting, though. Immaterial. It vanished as the greatest of Ionia’s champions appeared.
Sir Jeffery the Stalwart, Herald of Eternal Twilight, champion of the Oblivion Court, and Renholm’s former mentor. Or brother. Or maybe lover. I still hadn’t really figured out what exactly their relationship had been, other than weird as fuck.
