Chimera Summoner: A Deckbuilding LitRPG, page 1
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Goblin Summoner – The Rules
Chapter One
Gareth crouched under the trunk of a fallen tree, the plant having gotten stuck on its nearest comrade and forming an artificial wall in the jungle. Gareth found it shocking how used he had gotten to the thick undergrowth and unending heat. Even with his recent foray into the chilly land of Thot-Ankor returning to the jungle had been like coming home. It probably helped that the tower at the heart of the rainforest was the closest thing to a permanent residence he had found on Acamida, especially since Wildermount had been presumably destroyed by the nightmares unleashed upon it.
Discovering exactly how bad the damage to the city the creatures had inflicted was on Gareth’s list of things to do, though there were more pressing issues at the moment. Besides Jack had gone there despite being told specifically not to and hopefully, he could enlighten the others if he ever returned.
Right now, Gareth was more worried about the strange fungus that had taken root in part of the jungle. The substance had come into being from dark necromantic energy creeping through one of the eight portals spread around the tower in a star shape. The fungus that sprouted in its wake was something that he had seen up close and its effects weren’t pleasant. Through the portal, an entire nation had sprung into being that used it to raise the dead and shackle them into menial tasks. Gareth and his friends had purged the source of the unusually large surge of magic, saving Thot-Ankor in the process. Not that they had been appreciative of that, chasing back to the jungle.
“You ready, Mags?” Gareth whispered as he crept beneath the tree. The ground before him was covered in the pulsing indigo growths.
“As I can be,” Magda said in reply, the former goddess adjusting her dress slightly. The outfit was a powerful runic item, but she still wasn’t used to how revealing it was compared to her usual choice of clothing. “I just hope I’ve got enough divine power left to do it.”
“I thought you were pretty certain?” Gareth said.
“I was but now…It’s hard to explain. It’s like the brief contact with the other me is a hundred years ago now. Fuzzy and indistinct.”
“Like a dream.”
“Exactly,” Magda said, following Gareth beneath the tree. “I’ll try my best.”
“That’s all we can ask of you,” Sarkuran said. He had gone on slightly ahead and was sitting halfway up a tree with his hands resting on the branches. His ashen grey hair was stark against the withered bark.
The area around the fungus had taken on a bizarre look. The substance had a corrupting effect on the land around it, trees withering like they had been drained of life, their leaves and those of nearby ferns turning a vivid purple. Gareth could only hope it would return to normal once the fungus was cleared.
“Awfully nice of you,” Gareth said, looking up at the man who used to be a demon king, before being sealed away for a thousand years.
“What can I say?” Sarkuran plucked one of the purple leaves from above his head. “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.”
“That’s quite possibly the worst joke I’ve heard in a long time.” Imelda had slunk into the small clearing through a gap in two close trees, subtly displaying her superiority by moving around in what was just a different variation on her forest home. Her horns caught a beam of light that had snuck through the canopy above, the protrusions glinting as she moved.
“I thought it was rather droll.”
“Droll? Would you get a load of him,” Imelda said, pointing a thumb at Sarkuran.
“Are we good to go?” Gareth said. He was eager to get on with it. Removing the growth would finally clear out a quest that had sat on his menu for the entirety of his adventure in Thot-Ankor. Considering what the party had learned in that forsaken city they would need every scrap of experience they could gather.
“I think so. I couldn’t see anything, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had missed something. The creatures here have been living in this rainforest for thousands of years. They’re much better at hiding than I am at finding them.”
“So, you could just be wrong and they’re all around us?”
“Well, no,” Imelda said, her face twisting as she felt insulted. “Not all around us. I would have spotted anything big. I just mean there might be one or two small creatures I’ve missed. You’ve got to assume that this fungus is making them slower as well, and the fact everything is purple has to be messing with their camouflage.”
“Sounds like a lot of excuses to me,” Sarkuran said with a grin across his lips. Imelda was his warden and he liked to needle at her when he could.
“Look, we just need to keep an eye out,” Gareth said, his fingers resting atop his deck box, the tips of them settling on the lip of the lid. “When Magda removed this stuff from the Godsword it tried to defend itself. I trust we all remember the giant wave of angry zombies we had to deal with.”
Sarkuran swung his legs twice and then threw himself off the branch, landing on the layer of fungus with an unpleasant squelch. “It’s hardly something I could forget. As efficient as an undead workforce is that particular problem is a hard one to overcome. Something goes wrong with your control mechanism, and you go immediately from obedience to flesh eating. At least with most workers, there’s a middle ground where you can try and talk them around.”
“Yes well, it’s worth remembering that the zombies from this batch are less random guy and more giant killer dinosaur. The base lifeform is significantly more dangerous.”
“You boys done being depressing?” Imelda said. “It’s hard enough for Magda as is.” She turned to face the nervous goddess. “Ignore them. You just do your thing and we’ll be fine.”
“Yeah…yeah,” Magda said, her shoulders rolling as she built herself up. “Besides we can take any of the monsters in this place anyway, right? We’ve done it before.”
“Exactly!” Imelda said, not wanting to bring up the fact that the enormous dragon that guarded the tower had technically been a monster living in the jungle. “Come on, let’s get started, then we can go home and work out what we’re going to do next.”
“Ok, you’re right,” Magda said. Like the rest of the party what she had discovered in Thot-Ankor weighed heavily on her. The great monolith known as a Godsword was a relic leftover from her past life, part of a network that when fully reactivated would form part of a weapon that could slay the gods. Killing what were technically her children—even if she couldn’t remember making them—wasn’t something that Magda could imagine doing in any other circumstance, but they had simply left her no choice. The way they had twisted the afterlife into a sick game was proof enough that they had fallen past redemption. “Stand back,” she said, cracking her knuckles.
Magda wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Purging the Godsword had come naturally to her. All she had needed to do was put her hand against its cracked surface. Part of that had to have been the fragment of her original self preserved inside the stone. That wasn’t the case here, the fungus stretching across the ground rather than snaking out from within an ancient relic. There wasn’t the same connection to her.
Placing her hands on the ground Magda tried to focus as best she could. Considering her friends around her watching intently it wasn’t easy, the crushing weight of expectation getting to her. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore their gaze. It wasn’t working, nothing was happening.
“Come on,” Magda whispered to herself. She knew she could do it; she had done it once before and she could still feel the last remnants of the wellspring of power that had flowed into her. No matter her current situation, no matter what had happened in the past, she was a goddess, and she could do anything.
It started slowly at first, the power flowing through her arms in a trickle, a tingle that danced across her skin and out through her fingers. Golden sparks arced into the air as the fungus shuddered, the drip of divine energy enough to cause it pain, or as close to pain as the profane mushroom could feel. Magda steeled her resolve, willing the flow to grow, pulling at the thread that had revealed itself.
“Keep doing whatever you’re doing, Mags,” Gareth said. “It’s working.” He could see the fungus reacting, its grip loosening on some of the nearby trees. It was only a small patch of the larger area it had enveloped, but Magda had been confident her effect would spread across the entire region, every part of the fungus connected in some way.
“You’re going to distract her,” Sarkuran barked. “This kind of ritual work is delic
“Is it ritual work?”
“It’s close enough,” Sarkuran said with a shrug.
“I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about us distracting her,” Imelda said. She had turned away from the others, something in the forest catching her attention. “You know I said I was certain that there was nothing nearby…”
“You might have been wrong,” Gareth said, flipping open his deck box, cards flying out and taking up position near his left hand.
“I might have been wrong.”
A beast lumbered through the trees, a rotted fetid thing that had already begun to fall apart. Great patches had formed in its feathers whilst sections of its scales had come away to reveal glistening muscle beneath. It had three massive horns protruding from its frilled head, bringing to mind a triceratops for Gareth, though it was significantly bigger and more undead than he would have expected.
The fungus working its way through the corpse of the monster pulsed and squeezed, the substance controlling the body like a puppet. It began to charge, rushing towards the crouching goddess.
Gareth didn’t have time to look at his hand, acting entirely on his gut. He threw himself forward, arms crossed together instinctively though he knew that it wasn’t necessary.
Golden light flashed through the clearing as the monster slammed against his shield. As well as providing him with the means to fight, his enchanted deck was a form of armour, three cards imbued with magic that allowed them to deflect any blow. Of course, once those three hits had been absorbed Gareth had little to protect himself with, but he wasn’t planning on getting struck again.
“Come on then,” he said, staring down the creature the locals called an ancient. “Let’s be having you.”
Gareth’s eyes danced to the cards floating above his hand. He had drawn one of his newest cards, an expensive but powerful option gleaned from his party's brief foray into another universe entirely. He selected the Hobgoblin Brute, the card shifting into a bolt of light that expanded into the monster’s form.
It was taller than Gareth, the creature essentially a massively oversized goblin with rippling muscles and little more than a loincloth covering its modesty. It looked a little like Gareth’s ubiquitous Puny Goblins, if he had put them on a strict regimen of protein shakes and steroids. It wasn’t a cheap monster to summon, costing six mana as its printed cost. Thankfully Gareth’s affinity for goblins cut that cost by one mana and his mask reduced it by another, causing the hobgoblin to consume only four of his precious nine mana.
The hobgoblin wasted no time, rushing towards the ancient with its meaty fists raised. It swung them downwards, its hand slamming against the armoured frill of the ancient. There was a loud audible thud as the hobgoblin did no damage, the natural armour of its target stopping the blows.
“Of course,” Gareth muttered. He had seen cards with the Armoured ability before, and he suspected this undead monstrosity had it. It prevented the first point of damage the monster took in a turn. Out here in the real world, beyond the rules of formal duelling, that meant it was effective once every twenty to thirty seconds.
“Heads up!” Imelda shouted as an arcane arrow launched from before her, the projectile slamming into the soft exposed muscle of the ancient. It would do no damage, both duellists knew that, but it would slow the beast for a moment, the same time as it would take for its Armoured rule to come back.
“You got anything, Sark?” Gareth said. He suspected the answer was no, his comrade's deck taking some time to get doing. It was based around bringing out fodder creatures to sacrifice to allow more powerful beasts to be summoned. It would be a few moments before Sarkuran could contribute.
“I do not,” the demon king confirmed.
“Didn’t think so.” Gareth grimaced and looked at his hand again. He had a few cards he could choose from, a Goblin Soldier, a Goblin War Banner, a second banner from his shield, a Goblin Battlemaster, two Goblin Den Mothers and finally a Chain Lightning. He hated having to use the powerful removal spell to deal a single damage, but Gareth couldn’t see any other way. Summoning another monster would risk possibly wasting his opportunity.
The jolt wasn’t as impressive as Gareth’s usual Lightning Blast. Chain Lightning was supposed to serve a different purpose, its damage was half, but it had the option of paying more mana to hit multiple targets. Against people flooding the field with cheap weak monsters it was the perfect tool, able to trade multiple cards for one. This was a concept key to the card games Gareth was used to. Using one card to gain two, or to destroy more than one of your opponent’s cards was called card advantage. In general, whoever gained the most over a match was usually the winner.
The bolt was enough, rotted skin sloughing off where the bolt lashed against the ancient’s body. That it remained standing was a worrying sign. It meant the creature had multiple hit points atop its Armoured ability, something that made the skill far stronger than it was on weaker monsters.
“I don’t want to rush you, Mags, but now would be an excellent time to do that thing you do,” Gareth said. The wave of energy that had come rushing out of the Godsword back at Thot-Ankor had purged the fungus controlling the zombies sieging the temple, rendering them little more than lifeless bodies once more.
“Working on it!” Magda shouted back. She was trying her best to ignore the fight happening behind her though that was proving difficult. Divine power was still flowing out of her, the energy that her fellow gods called Divinity. The revelation that the force was tiny fragments of herself—parts of Magda’s being that she had handed out to form the spark of life—had been a shock.
There was more there, more energy deep within her, Magda could feel it. She just needed to draw it out, to unleash it as a single burst rather than a slow flow. The fungus was in pain, but the power she was putting out wasn’t lethal, it couldn’t be. The fungus had to be exposed to this much pure life energy regularly as it took over dying bodies.
Magda could feel a second force growing inside her. Rage, pure unbridled hatred for not just what had been done to her but at her own failing to purge to fungus. Divinity was her being, her soul for lack of a better term. She should be able to control it better than anyone else. The other gods had stripped her not only of her memories and purpose but of her sense of self, changing her so much that her very spirit no longer responded to her. It was unacceptable, an affront to the universe that could not stand.
Her anger triggered something within her, the rage rushing up through her body and bringing with it a tsunami of divine energy. Hatred had unlocked the floodgates, releasing Magda’s store of power in the single burst she desired.
The jungle shuddered, the necrofungus spreading across it convulsing in unison as divine power flowed through it. The normally silent forest became a cacophony of pained roars, the various enslaved ancients forced to bellow by their fungal puppeteers.
Before her eyes the mass of indigo fungus began to disintegrate, turning to a dust that was picked up by a faint breeze and carried away. It took but a moment for the necrofungus to vanish, Magda’s task done. It had been enough to cleanse it all, she could feel that somehow, and a smile crept across her face. She had done it, and all it had taken was allowing her anger to take control for a moment.
Gareth watched as the monster he was fighting slumped to the ground, the growths spread over its corpse falling apart. It was reanimated no longer, returning to being simply a dead body and nothing more.
Boneceratops defeated. 240 experience points gained.
Quest Complete: Investigate the strange mana leaking into the jungle.
Reward: 3000 experience points.
Level Up – Level 32 gained.
Current exp 2589/2605
Seven skill points gained.
Gareth had to admit to himself that gaining a level was a rush. He had become addicted to the constant progression, to the steady increase in power. He looked forward to earning a new batch of skill points and he found himself wishing things on Earth had been so straightforward. Life would have been much easier if he could have put points into the things he needed to be better at. Basic nutrition and financial literacy most likely, Gareth had a bad habit of ordering too many takeaways. The thought made his stomach rumble.
Food in Wildermount had been reassuringly familiar. All things considered, it was close enough to British cuisine that he had been perfectly happy with it. Runic magic meant even things he would have imagined impossible were readily available, chips cooked fresh in the arcane equivalent of a deep fat frier along with battered sausages. Pies and pasties were common, and he had even once found a place that did a delicious Shepard’s pie. What he really missed though, was curry. His thoughts of takeaways had brought the memory of them back.
