Savage - Melee: A LitRPG Adventure: Book 1

I t was several hours into the game, and twenty minutes after the acid rain stopped, that the sky opened up and it began to rain spiders.

Fucking. Spiders.

Not the crappy little fly-stalkers you shoo away with a broom, by the way. No, these suckers were bigger than a mousepad and had bulging white sacs on their asses filled with piss and venom.

One of us was the cause of it. I knew that because thats what the aliens did. They loved calling audibles during the fighting, conjuring up nightmarish things out of the nothingness that fed on your deepest, darkest fears.

I smacked the side of my head and my SecondSight HUD flickered back to life. My vision swam with boxes, icons, and a targeting reticle that I panned left to right, up and down. The alien ghost voice in my head, the one that had been with me since their arrival, whispered:

Soon you shall know the peace of the great void, Logan James. True virtue lies in the shedding of blood. The engine of the universe is lubricated with the souls of warriors.

Fuck off, I said, shrugging on my flamethrower backpack, dodging the corpses, and running across the field with the others to fricassee some arachnids.

Thats the only way to make it out, you see. You have to block it all out, forget everything you thought you knew, and concentrate on killing. You have to kill and keep killing until theres nothing else left alive. Thats the only way to get enough points, level up, fight your way to the pyramid, and find a way out of the hellish game known as the Melee.

I dont think Ive ever looked for trouble a day in my life, but Ill damned if it doesnt have a way of finding me. On the day it happened, and it is some truly mind-bending, alien-invading, world-changing kind of shit, I was busy stocking shelves and pricing items at Barrys Market + Convenience Store, a place I liked to call 99 Cent Dreams, a rundown Maryland discount shop alongside my buddy Dwayne F.X. Jackson, who had a habit of picking at his afro while waxing poetic about the beauty of dollar stores.

Now take your Dollar Tree for instance, Dwayne said as we used our pricing guns to mark down some Chinese knockoff landscaping tools. Everything is priced at a dollar whereas the DG

DG?

Dollar General, Logan, cmon focus...

He took my gun and flipped the number roller over to 7.99. Id screwed up and was marking a collection of hedge shears at 69 cents. Sorry, I said with a sheepish smile, wondering why the hell we were selling landscaping stuff in December.

The DG sells things that cost more than a dollar, by the way, Dwayne said, adjusting the glasses hed been given three years before on his twenty-first birthday.

And?

And the DG is much more than a dollar store. Its what we in the African-American community call an urban discount retailer. It sells everything, even seafood.

And thats the reason why youre planning on leaving here to go work there?

Absolutely, Dwayne replied, beaming.

Well, I guess if somebody has to sell week-old shrimp it should be you, homie.

Im gonna let the homie thing slide, but keep hating and I wont bring your sorry white ass on board once I get in good with the manager.

Me at the DG, Dwayne? I replied, making a happy face. A fella can dream.

Dwayne rolled his eyes, then paused and leaned in close to me. Dont look now, but the new girl has eyes on you.

I looked back and caught the eye of our willowy new cashier. Somebody mentioned her name before and I think it rhymed with Tricia, but my mind hadnt been firing on all cylinders after the accident, so Id been forgetting a lot of stuff.

Whatever-her-name-was moved toward me and my eyes skipped between her piercings and the spidery ink running up and down her exposed arms, the kind of stuff that seems cool when youre in your early twenties. She was hot in a bad-girl kind of way, the type of chick whod probably have three kids or be a meth dealers main squeeze in three or four years.

She tossed aside her mane of chestnut-colored hair in the manner that pretty girls are wont to do, and flashed a killer smile. Dwayne patted my shoulder, grimaced as he stood on his bum right foot, and headed off.

Can I ask a huge favor? the brunette asked as I set my pricing gun down.

Anything.

Im going to talk and maybe smile a little and Id really love it if you could respond and smile back so that it looks like were having a real conversation.

Why? I asked.

Because someone wants to know something about you, she replied.

Who?

That glorious specimen of womanhood currently laboring in aisle eight.