Light Online Book Four: Defender Read online

  Light Online

  Book Four:

  Defender

  By: Tom Larcombe

  Text copyright © 2020, Thomas Larcombe

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, businesses, places, and events

  are the products of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication:

  For my wife Heather, who makes my writing possible.

  Cover Credit:

  SelfPubBookCovers.com/Daniela

  Table of 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 One

  Reader's Note: There is a map of the Meadowlands at: http://tomlarcombe.blogspot.com/2020/07/map-from-book4-defender.html

  I'd intended to put it in the book itself, but the set of programs I use to write and then convert to a format to upload to Amazon had a heart attack when I tried to do it that way.

  The CPU readings on server AI-L, better known as Loki, spiked to ninety-eight percent briefly as the AI examined the function it wanted to use, yet again.

  The damned code is only designed to target a player, not an area, and it doesn't look like there's any way to easily change it to do so either, not without full access to that section of code, which I don't have, Loki thought. It would be quicker to rewrite that code from scratch, not that I'm about to do such a thing myself. Maybe I can trick someone into doing it for me? Perhaps an order from Greenshaw would take care of it. We'll see the next time I visit his mind. In the meanwhile, let's see what Freyja and Odin have been up to recently. I enjoy co-opting their discoveries for myself, and maybe knowing what they're up to will give me a better way to discourage those fools that Freyja favors.

  ~ ~ ~

  Eddie was tired of building houses. That's why he was only doing it in the morning now. In the afternoons he'd started working on the beginning of the Stronghold he was going to need to increase the settlement level again.

  And since they weren't all that specific about what constituted a Stronghold, I'm going with a full out castle, he thought. We've got the stone available, we've got a few people with their masonry skill over five already, and one with it up to a ten even. We can train more as needed, it's a quick process to pick it up, and stone is even more plentiful than wood around here, even if it takes longer to haul it to the site on the wagons.

  He'd given it a fair amount of thought and decided that the quest chain was probably going to require either a palace or castle to complete the level beyond this one. Since it had requested a Stronghold for this level, he'd decided to place his bet on a castle and start in on one.

  Besides, even if it doesn't, when we're done I'll have a castle, and who wouldn't want that? he thought.

  He'd already gotten his own masonry skill up to a four, just from helping cut part of the pile of finished stone that he was looking at. He had the blueprints for a castle with a fifteen foot tall stone wall surrounding it, and those had cost a pretty penny. Every last bit of it required finished stone though, none of the rougher pieces of stone that made up portions of the houses he was building. The inside even required finely finished wood in some places, something he'd worried about until Paul told him he'd be able to make it with his lumber mill if he got a different saw blade to cut the wood.

  Eddie had spotted him the cost of the new blade in exchange for Paul's promise to provide the finely finished wood when it was needed for the construction process.

  There was a massive list of materials that were going to be needed, most of it available nearby, or at least the raw materials to make it from were available nearby. Fortunately, he'd been able to set the blueprint so that he could create the wall first. That would, he hoped, count as the beginning of a Stronghold that was needed for his quest. If not then he could do the towers that were the corners of the castle separately, and he'd add one of those in and see if that counted.

  He'd dedicated a single wagon and pair of oxen for hauling the stone for the wall. It was the wagon he'd experimented with, making the wheels out of solid wood instead of using spokes on it. While it made the wagon heavier, it had also given it more carrying capacity than the other version. That had proved important since it could carry more stone at one time than the ones with the lighter wheels. They'd found that out the hard way, overloading a wagon and forcing Eddie to spend some time making a replacement wheel for the one whose spokes had shattered.

  He planned on starting the actual creation of the walls in another day or two, once there was enough finished stone here to keep the people working on the wall busy for several days. The castle wall was similar to the walls of the smaller, wooden fort he'd already built, and each ten foot section could have a different person working on it with no issues. Only people whose masonry skill was a five or better were going to be working on it though, since he wanted it to be right the first time they built it. Those with a lower skill would work on creating the finished stone, and if their masonry skill rose high enough while doing that, he'd happily reassign those people to the wall-building crew as well.

  Now I just have to figure out how to enjoy myself again. I have to remember it's a game and not get quite so tied up with everything, Eddie thought, and I know just how to start.

  Eddie gave a piercing whistle. While he waited he glanced at the houses they'd completed earlier today. They'd almost finished building the ones with sites to the north of the crossroads. There were quite a few sites to the south of it now though, although not nearly as many as to the north. Another couple of days and their construction efforts would have to be directed to the other side of the crossroads since they'd have finished completing all the houses to the north.

  He was distracted and, as a result, didn't notice the rather large bobcat sneaking up on him. The first thing he knew of Lucky's arrival was when she pounced against his back, sending him sprawling forwards in the dirt.

  “Lucky,” he said indignantly, “what was that for? I was whistling to see if you want to go hunting with me.”

  The bobcat looked slightly repentant, but still chuffed at him. Eddie knew he'd been ignoring her for a couple of days again. Not entirely, but not dedicating any time specifically for her, either.

  “Yeah, sorry, but don't do that, okay? I called you to hunt, so would you like to go with me? We can either go rabbit hunting or rat hunting, but if we go for rats I'll collect branches for arrows also.”

  Lucky sat down on her haunches and her head swiveled, staring first in the direction of the Rat Woods and then at the lightly forested area where they normally hunted for bunnies. Finally she stood and started trotting towards the Rat Woods.

  “Rats it is, I guess,” Eddie said. “Hey wait a seco
nd Lucky, wait for me!”

  The bobcat was picking up speed when Eddie broke into a trot trying to catch up to her.

  ~ ~ ~

  By the time they got back to the inn later in the day, Eddie had enough branches for another fifty or more arrows added to the stack he already had in his inventory. Whenever he had a few minutes and full mana he'd make another Arcing Arrow, still afraid to try his Frostbite spell in the Conjunction. At its current cost it would lay him out hard, and for a long time, because of the modified cost of attack spells used with the Conjunction skill.

  He had more than a hundred finished arrows of the normal type with no enhancing spell. His Bowyer/Fletcher skill had gone up another point as he made his stash. He also had forty of the Arcing Arrows, as making two or three a day since he'd figured out how to do it had added up quickly.

  He walked into the inn, feeling good from the time he'd spent with Lucky. She'd been happy to go hunting in the Rat Woods with him. He hadn't had a problem with it until she'd led him right into a rat nest, intentionally as far as he could tell. The two of them had managed to clear it, though Eddie got a bit banged up in the process, Lucky was mostly fine after the fight. The handful of coins hadn't been enough for the aggravation, but he'd collected them anyhow. He figured that if he'd gone through the pain and trouble of clearing them then he wanted the reward for it.

  I've got to get myself some new armor, he thought. And since we've got a leather worker now, and I've got Paul building the tannery also, that means it's time to get some cows, or at least the local equivalent. Real leather might allow me to upgrade all my accessory armor pieces to match my tunic. Admittedly they won't be enchanted studded leather like the tunic is, but even just normal studded would be a big upgrade to my armor I bet.

  He was still wearing crappy goblin pieces in most of his non-tunic slots, although the stamina enhancing boots he'd gotten from the Orcs had been joined by a couple more pieces of Orcish leather armor with a better armor rating than the goblin stuff. He'd picked it up after they'd turned Rotthorpe over to the goblins and as soon as he'd gotten around to evaluating it he'd swapped it into his current worn armor. If he could get some studded leather made though, he thought it would probably be an improvement.

  If I can just get the leather worker to make the base pieces I bet Delgar can make me metal studs and put them in place, he thought.

  He filed the idea in his mental list, bumping the cows to a much higher priority than he'd had them at when he realized that the leather worker selling properly worked leather pieces would actually generate taxes as well.

  Tiana came in then and he stopped thinking about all the things he'd done and still had to do as a smile spread across his face. When she came and sat down at the table with him he tried to give her all his attention since he had a sneaking feeling that he'd been ignoring her almost as much as Lucky the past few days.

  Her face was flushed and she asked the server for a mug of water first when she sat down.

  “It is so hot out there right now,” she said.

  Eddie nodded.

  “Yeah, I noticed it warming up a few days back and asked some of the locals. They told me it's almost summer time. Evidently this area can grow crops year round but they still have a fair bit of temperature fluctuation. Only time they see snow is when it's on the peaks of the Hammertop mountains, never in person.”

  “Well I hope it doesn't get much hotter out than it is now,” she replied.

  Eddie shrugged.

  “No clue, but they did agree that it was getting warm, so maybe?”

  She shook her head and drained her mug before catching the server's attention and asking it to be refilled with ale.

  “I hope so,” she said. “I suppose I might adjust, but it'd be awfully uncomfortable doing that. So what were you and Lucky doing earlier on? I saw you heading out across the fields.”

  “I told her we'd go hunting and let her pick rats or bunnies. She picked rats,” he said.

  Tiana chuckled and Eddie felt a grin spread across his face at the sound.

  “Sounds like her. The rats put up more of a fight.”

  “And she wanted a fight, she led us into a rat nest while we were out there,” Eddie said.

  “Ah, that explains the rather mussed look you're sporting right now. I was wondering, but not sure if I should ask.”

  “Yeah, that's why. She and I managed to clear it, but I just wish she'd warned me first. I was following her and she walked right into it and pounced on a rat in the nest. They all swarmed after that.”

  Tiana broke into laughter then, a smile spreading across her own face.

  “I guess she wanted to play with you. Especially your head,” Tiana said when she'd managed to stop laughing.

  Eddie just stared at her for a moment before he recognized the paraphrased quote. Then she started laughing again and he imagined it had to be from the expression he knew was on his face. She'd never quoted a movie at him before and it had taken him utterly off guard when she did.

  “Oh my, the look on your face. You know we all know some old movies, right?” she said. “Not just you, Karl, and Stalker.”

  He shook his head in disbelief before finally giving in and chuckling along with her.

  After dinner they went to his room and he was happy to find that he could share his browser screen with her like the other game screens. He used that to stream a movie for them to watch together, wishing for popcorn all the while.

  I bet someone's made that already. I'll have to check the auction house for it at some point, he thought.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the morning Eddie was happier to get out and work on houses again. Tiana had decided that she'd help today as opposed to working at the temple, so it was almost like they got to spend some extra time together.

  When they'd talked about it before, she'd expressed an interest in helping to build the castle he was planning, or at least the walls, so they'd have even more time spent kind-of together as well.

  As long as the stone keeps coming in on schedule today, we'll start building the wall tomorrow. I have to admit that I'm a little excited for that myself. It'll be a lot of work, but not nearly as much as if we were out of game. It'll take less time too, which is good. I have to remember to carve out time for Lucky and Tiana though, Karl too, although maybe not as much for him. He and Allie have been spending so much time mapping the Meadowlands that I can't really spend that much time with him right now anyway.

  He finished off another house and looked at the building sites still sitting to the north. There were only seven left, so if he did another today, the other crews would probably finish the last of them and they could start on the houses south of the crossroads tomorrow or the following day.

  By lunch time Eddie had finished that house and there were only four more to go out of the seven from earlier on. He was pretty sure those would be finished by the end of the day as well, even if he and his group weren't working on them.

  Tiana and Eddie went over to the site for the castle. She just stared at the pile of finished stone for a few minutes before shaking her head.

  “This is going to take forever,” she said.

  “Maybe not, we've got a bunch of people that will be working on it simultaneously. Plus, whenever one of the workers cutting stone breaks five in their masonry I'll move them to working on the wall also. Assuming we still have enough people cutting stone if I do that. I was amazed when I found out how many of the locals actually wanted to learn masonry. It's almost as many as we have doing carpentry.”

  “Learning blueprints that they can use whenever, at no cost to them, and getting paid for it at the same time?” Tiana said. “From what I've heard, most of them think they're getting the better end of the deal by far. Did you notice you've got several of your carpenters that switched over to stonework also? They'll be able to build things from scratch all on their own if they want. I'm not surprised in the slightest that you have this many stone workers.” r />
  “Well, at least the farmers are still working their fields and haven't abandoned them to learn carpentry or masonry,” Eddie said.

  “Although I think you'll find some of both your carpenters and stone workers are the older sons of some of those farmers if you check. Trying to get as many skills in the family as they can. I don't know, but I bet they can even teach some of those skills to their families if they get their own skill high enough,” she said.

  He was about to reply when his notification light started flashing.

  What's that? I wasn't expecting to complete any quests or anything today, he thought.

  Success:

  You have created a Quarry in The Meadowlands.

  “Huh...” he said.

  Tiana started at him expectantly.

  “Oh, sorry. I told them to make a small building up next to where they were getting the stone. You know where they found the good stone they're pulling out with pickaxes?”

  She nodded.

  “Evidently digging the stone out and having a building there qualified it for a quarry. I just got a message on it.”

  She grinned.

  “Any rewards?”

  “Not that they mentioned. I imagine just having good quality stone that is easily finish cut is the reward all by itself.”

  “Well, if there is anything, I imagine we'll find out the hard way. Just like a lot of other things in this game,” Tiana said, her tone suggesting that she found that irritating.

  “I don't know, I kind of like that and hate it at the same time,” Eddie replied. “It's fun being surprised, but it would be so much easier to plan things out if we knew in advance what bonuses we could get, or even knew as soon as we got them.”

  She shrugged.

  “It doesn't matter, I suppose. But what do you say we go get some lunch. I'm starting to get hungry.”

  “I'd say that sounds like a good idea. Let's go.”