Battleforged: Book 1 - THE BILLION CREDIT HEIST - An Earth Apocalypse LitRPG Adventure

Perception check made! You know a TARP when you see one!

Lilly flashed a fierce smile even as she raced faster than her surviving shadow pumas for the massive tower of bones, blackened steel, and pain.

Though her smile quickly turned to a pained grimace when she detected for the first time in either of her lives what almost sounded like panic? In the voice echoing inside her head.

WARNING! EXTREME ANOMALIES DETECTED!

SYSTEM RED ALERT!

SYSTEM RED ALERT!

EXTREME CAUTION ADVISED! - PLEASE ALERT YOUR NEAREST SILVER OR GOLD TIER REPRESENTATIVE! - SYSTEM BOONS WILL BE GRANTED!

Of course she could sense the twisted thrum of souls tortured beyond any semblance of sanity within the tower before her, force-welded into cogs, gears, and steampunk abominations that Lilly sensed in a flash of chilling insight shouldn’t even exist within the current electromana forces and fields that enabled the System, yet did. And somehow she just KNEW it mirrored the goblin’s original steampunk technological evolution. Ancient and oddly sophisticated techniques for both locomotion, power, and folding space that Lilly’s sworn enemies could perform even now… so long as they did so in a hideous bone prison of torment radiating an event horizon of such spiritual agony that even the System’s ministrations were put in temporary abeyance.

Which meant that when Lilly prepared to leap into the nightmarish cathedral devoted to the vilest technological revelations imaginable, she would in the heart of a battleship assembly plant that forged entire engines of brass, bronze, steam, and chrome far stronger than any Terran steel or mithril alloy… and the one place in the entire System that was completely impervious to the System’s ubiquitous, cloying presence. Truths she was hammered with not by a desperate interface, but by the howling spirits that were still sentient and sane enough to reveal the nature of this chamber in all its hideous majesty.

Even entering this place was a terrible risk. Lilly knew that. Knew that in all likelihood, her continuing sapience was at least in part due to the System that had kept her acerbic company since the minute she had woken up in this world, truly feeling like herself for the first time since she had been violated and slaughtered by orcs, awake and alert and truly autonomous, and not just a girl dreaming of a certain handsome boy.

And she could tell just by the cold-eyed stares of the goblins in that massive chamber who were even now twisting about copper pipes that seemed to scream in protest as they belched constant steam around glowing orbs that swirled and pulsated with unholy light—the starship cores themselves, she was somehow sure of it—That these were professionals who had years of experience with this hideous craft. And somehow those Goblins were able to work with a steam-based technology of necromantic torments without any shields or classes whatsoever.

No matter her shock and dismay, one thing that was utterly undeniable was that the cathedral she was just about to jump in, the building Lord Sloth had just raced within, floating no longer, staff as inert as a lump of wood… was the true heart of their twisted layer.

A place where the System was unwelcome, where goblins were truly at their strongest, and where Lilly absolutely had to be if she was going to save her mother and brother after having thought them dead.

Even when Lord Sloth spun around, sneering at her with gleeful contempt as he laughed like a madman, pulling a blunderbuss out of nowhere… Lilly knew what she had to do.

Bracing herself for oblivion, it was only the memories of her brother’s screams when he came across her brutalized dying frame countless months ago that gave her the courage to do what was necessary. Because even if the cost was oblivion… she couldn’t live with herself if her family was torn from her yet again.

“Fool! You have sprung my final trap and now you will pay the ultimate price!” Lord Sloth chortled even as Lilly squealed as only a rabbit could. Infected by torment she had no words to describe, feeling a part of herself bubble and boil into the ether, knowing that oblivion would be so easy to embrace even as she felt herself drowning in cloyingly thick spiritual waters and she could barely find the effort to leap to the side when the crack and boom of a blunderbuss had lead shot ricoheting across the chamber, more than one pellet tearing into her flesh with the ease of any mortal prey.

Yet there was no blood, and for all that she had to struggle not to drift off into death’s gentle haze, she COULD think, she COULD act of her own volition, even if it felt like a waking dream.

The bloated pustule-coverd goblin blanched. “No, impossible! You’re no longer possessed of a Classer’s gifts! You’re a powerless little rabbit! Meat for my stew and nothing more. Never more!” Lord Sloth roared, eyes glittering with hate as he jabbed a stubby finger the flittering rabbit’s way.

“Get that rabbit!” he screamed. “Skin her alive and bring me her bones! And her soul too shall join our masterwork!”

At that command, a scarce handful of cursing goblins left their workstations, for all that another score seemed far too busy to do anything but spare a single glare for the rabbit who wasn’t trying to confront Lord Sloth at all.

“It’s just a mindless rabbit. We have quotas, Sloth!” Snorted one cigar-chomping foreman. “You want to risk defaulting on delivery of our latest starship? You know damn well what the squid-heads are like! And theirs will need extra insulation so no soul screams bother their sensitive brains.”

Lord Sloth glared. “Carry on then, Truxs.”

The foreman snorted. “Damn right I will. All our heads will be on the block if we fuck this up, Sloth. And didn’t you hire a full company of mercenaries to take care of any Terran Contenders that actually manage to slip through the gates?”

Sloth didn’t bother answering, merely cursing under his breath as he reloaded his blunderbuss, his heavy footfalls making his intentions clear as he unerringly headed for the increasingly confused bunny who no longer recalled exactly why she was running so fervently away from the predator eager to eat her as all predators were, spinning around to leap madly away in this miserable grassless maze of metal, stone, and strangely alluring bone when she saw the scaly doglike face of yet another one of those foul creatures, BunBun darting away as fast as she could when her ears picked up as she found what she desperately needed… a hole to hide in!

“Focus, Lilly! We need to get to the control room. For mom and Tim!” Somehow, those words brought her back to herself, a slender rabbit shivering as massive towering monsters slowly approached, grunting and chortling in words she could no longer understand. Yet some truths she DID understand, even as a rabbit’s panic fought against a woman’s furious resolve.

“We’re not just a rabbit, were a revenant, just a half-step from being fully alive! Magics of blood and spirit bound me to this shape, anchoring my awareness, grounding my soul. Magics far older than the Advent of the System, magics that are now mine every bit as much as my masters!”

With her revelation came a newfound sense of purpose and resolve. Sufficient for her to dart between the legs of one of the smaller goblins, now roaring unintelligible garbage as a wrench was swung half-heartedly in her direction.

A wrench that she’d normally say wouldn’t have a chance of hitting her came damn close to cracking her skull, because if the waves of torment she could sense SO CLEARLY from the steel wrapped bones all around her were any indication, this, for all intents and purposes WAS hell.

A hell she was eager to put to an end as she darted along hallways and corridors, looping under mad scientist workstations filled twisted amalgamations of copper tubing and torment, shrieks of steam and tormented souls both clamoring into her poor ears as she struggled to find any master control room overseeing the cables upon which 60,000 or so lives still dangled.

“Excellent! We have her cornered at last!” Lord Sloth chortled, Lilly too dismayed to take any solace in her ability to parse his madness even if English was the language farthest from his lips.

Not when she suddenly sensed half a dozen towering goblins, each holding massive wrenches, nets, or guns, rapidly closing in.

“And the foolish hare actually managed to trap herself in the room of sacrifices! How fitting!” Sloth’s twisted cackle filled the cathedral-like chamber. “Soon your soul too shall join all those eternally screaming all around us! A choir of torment fitting for all those who dare to challenge the might and supremacy of the Bloodtear Syndicate! We, who will one day own the entire galaxy as your souls eternally feed our glorious and grand elder. It is inevitable. It is destiny! It is only a matter of time!”

Bunbuns’ heart fluttered away in her tiny chest, nose twitching with the scents of sweat, goblin musk, and torment. It was all she could do to resist giving in to her animal terror and zigzagging past the pair of smirking goblins holding the thin mesh she realized would spell her absolute doom if she gave into her panic and charged into those nets, whereupon the others would no doubt pound her trapped body with their heavy bronze wrenches until she was a smear on the ground.

Yet the jolt of relief she felt, when terror at least brought her foggy mind to crystalline sharp focus, was short lived. Despair’s keening dirge sending her into an absolute panic with the tight thrum of snapping steel spools made it clear that the massive super cable supporting so many steel cages was doomed to snap under the growing pressure. Yet with Lilly trapped and barely able to string two thoughts together, without her interface contender’s map or any knowledge of where she had to go… the situation seemed beyond hopeless. She could do nothing at all.

Shuddering and helpless as 250 Perception and rabbit’s ears picked up with exquisite clarity her mother’s shriek, trapped on a suspension cable that would soon give, all of Lilly revenants now proceeding at a shambling gate, without her mind linked to theirs, their last command a fragile cord only half even followed, the other half standing still as stone, no matter how much Lilly’s mother shrieked and screamed for their charges to hurry up and MOVE! Having long since innured herself to their undead nature, or perhaps not even realizing the nature of her champions who only now, in the final minutes, were destined to fail.

As if life was doomed to repeat its nightmare dirge a second time. Lilly just minutes from a brutal death by chortling goblins so like the malicious orcs who had so enjoyed torturing her before wringing all the screams they could from her one final time right before she had died. And now history was going to repeat itself. Yet instead of oblivion, it would be endless agony at the hands of the most ruthless vindictive little shits the galaxy had ever crapped out. Then it would be Lilly and her family paying the ultimate price, three more souls trapped in eternal torment like the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, she could feel shrieking in the ether.

Worse, the instant her back pressed against he wall of bone and tormented steel her awareness of her doom increased a hundred fold, Lilly now wailing as well as she became one with the howling, shrieking souls encased in unspeakable torment, desperate for relief and mercy that would never come.

Their torment soon to become her own.

“Lilly! Think!”

Two words that were not her own. Jolting her out of her stupor as she sensed the heavy price someone had just paid.

Paid so that she could have just a moment’s clarity as the goblins abruptly charged.

Paid so she could THINK!

Yet it was so hard to think with the hideous pressure of so many soul-bound bones all so desperate to be free.

Lilly froze.

The net carefully tossed by a skilled hunter, knowing just where she was going to be, sailed right past her as Lilly suddenly leaped straight UP!

Daring to scale the wall of steel-covered bone, with so many good crevices and toe holds for a supernaturally strong rabbit who was now thankfully out of the range of nets… but not all her foes weaposn as Sloth’s ugly blunderbuss immediately made clear.

So Lilly jumped just as her enemy’s eyes tightened, the single pellet tearing through her tail a small price to pay for all the buckshot that missed as she scrabbled atop the bass relief display of yet another skeleton housing a tormented figure’s beseeching form, to be granted no mercy by the goblins that had encased him in soul-steel. Yet his screams rang with perfect awful clarity in Lilly’s ear.

Tiny heart pounding in her furry chest, Lilly focused on that which she knew was now a part of her, even if she had no interface sheet to summon, no smarmy voice she both despised and took such comfort in.

All she could do was trust in the skills she had mastered in the echo of Eric’s will as she placed paw to trembling bones and gave vent to her plea.

“You wish to be free? YOU ARE FREE!”

She could taste it then, a glorious frisson of possibility, so like the hundreds or thousands of ripe souls recently freed of their mortal shells that she or her master would be responsible for reaping. Souls that would then be given the chance to serve and savor mortal’s pleasures once more, or sink into oblivion forever after. And no matter how much their enemies might have hated Eric or Lilly just a heartbeat before, when doom’s hoary kiss was all they had to look forward to, they almost always chose to bow their heads and embrace sapience once more.

Yet the sudden pressure wave, nay, a sheer flood of desperate souls Lilly was suddenly struck by weren’t a mere thousand recently harvested that she could claim the tiniest bit of dominion over, having been the one to reap them.

No.

This was several MILLION souls that had been locked in unspeakable torment. If a battlefield reaping had the pressure of a spring breeze, this was the equivalent pressure of category 5 hurricane. Promising so much glorious unbridled power and devotion… and the risk of obliviating anything that stood in its way.

Only then did Lilly truly appreciate her peril… the ticking time bomb that was so much impossible torment locked tight within this hellish cathedral of bone, torment, and forbidden technology so vile that even the System the system itself was pushed away, allowing goblins to form the same steampunk starship engine cores that they once had, countless eons ago.

“There’s no where for you to escape, cursed rabbit!” Said the utterly unrepentant Lord Sloth, glaring Lilly’s way. “You’re dead, you cursed abomination, and by the end of this day, I’ll be supping upon your flesh, and feasting upon your soul!”

And with those words, all of Lilly’s hesitation, all of her despair turned to grim acceptance, already knowing what must be done.

She solemnly shook her head, earning hisses and nervous curses from the whole crew of goblins, as if startled to find that she actually did understand their vile threats and twisted promises, even while free of System enhancements.

Lord Sloth laughed with contempt of course, and a half dozen nervous glares turned to sycophantic grins of malice perfectly mirroring their master, before it was replaced with genuine wide-eyed terror when a massive surge of howling fury as if from the heavens washed over them all.

“No! That’s forbidden!” Sloth screamed.

“What’s forbidden, you damned blowhard?” Asked the sneering overseer who still felt the need to follow, earning a hot glare promising retribution at some unspecificed future date from Sloth. Yet for the moment at least, they were on the same page as Sloth’s trembling fingers jolted a furiously focused Lilly’s way.

“She’s trying to free the souls trapped in iron! Foul necromantic magics! She risks rupturing the entire forge if she succeeds!”

The foreman snorted. “Impossible. It doesn’t matter how much leverage that cursed creatures puts on those pathetic souls. Those bones are the perfect configuration to warp and channel our eternal debtors into paying the interest that will eternally accumulate! We made damn sure of that, just as we made damned sure that all forms of necromancy were to be outlawed, then purged on all newly ascended worlds we claim for our factories and foundries!”

The powerfully built forman glared daggers at his pustule-covered counterpart. “This shouldn’t even be a concern, Sloth. You told me that Greed already had this handled!”

Lilly couldn’t help it. Her smile stretched far wider than it had any right to, as she spoke words that should have been impossible to slip from her lips without access to any System enhancements.

“A bone configuration, huh? Funny you should mention that!”

Time seemed to freeze as a full dozen goblins glared up at her with looks ranging from shock to dismay to monstrous fury. Lilly allowed herself to savor what she knew would be her final seconds, even managing to flip a final fuck you to the goblins before the ceiling’s knotwork of steel-covered bones echoed with the sharp reports of what were either gun shots… or unbreakable steel finally surrendering to unspeakable pressure as the entire chamber roared with the sound of countless thousands of tons of rattling bones as it collapsed in on itself, utterly obliterating the wide-eyed goblins who didn’t even have time for a single peep before they were impaled and crushed far more thoroughly than any hapless conscript that had been on the receiving end of an entire army of charging knights.

It was a roar of destruction that did not stop, but rather built and built as Bunbun felt herself tumbling through the air, utterly encased in bone, her mind filled with the howling screeches of countless millions of souls desperate to free themselves of eternal torment.

And a dizzy BunBun, her mind suddenly blaring with countless System Messages that she immediately pushed aside as her mind once more returned to crystalline sharpness, could think of only one way to save them all.

“Surge, Centuria! Ave Imperator Abedimus!”

The rumbling grew to a roaring crescendo, and it seemed like her normal class limits meant absolutely nothing. For it wasn’t grasping souls eager to slip away but simply aiding the escape of countless souls EAGER for her words to resonate through their spiritual forms and snap free the collars of agony that had bound them for so long. Far, far too long.

And the energy suddenly pouring through Bunbun’s form was so sharp and sweet that it was nothing for her to say the words again, and yet again. Till the sound of her voice echoed through the entire caldera, louder than the shriek of strained steel cables, louder even than the crack and boom of massive plates of soul-forged steel shattering upon the skeleton frame of a starship that would never see completion as the hundreds of goblins busily dancing about the scaffolding began shrieking and falling to their deaths as shrapnel tore through them like grapeshot from a cannon.

The echo of Lilly’s words soon boomed through the entire caldera as she belted them out once more in a voice strangely husky and feminine for a rabbit as she embraced her own ascension while countless spirits stormed through the air.

“Surge Centuria! Ave Imperator Abedimus!”

And much to Eric’s awe, he witnessed a brooding volcano filled with magma, boiling steel, and pain undergo the most miraculous of transformations before his very eyes. From hell to heaven, from purgatory to sanctuary, the fires cooled as the trapped souls within fled their torments at last.

Basalt stone innured to time seemed to age a thousand generations under the weight of transformation, turning to crumbling stone, then dirt, then rich loamy soil from which countless flowers and fruit trees now blossomed. Pools of boiling metal cooled into pristine lakes filled with clear blue water from which countless skeletons covered in metal that was the farthest thing from iron torment emerged by the hundreds, and then the thousands.

And all of those skeletons turned in unison to slam their leaf-shaped blades upon shields of blessed steel, their voices ringing in perfect harmony as the hellish volcano turned to a fecund paradise groaning only with weight of rich arboreal groves heavy with fruit, pollen, and the promise of sanctuary to so many lost souls.

“Ave Imperator Abedimus!” The flood of revenants cried in unison to the girl with the brilliant smile who Eric couldn’t help but think now looked a heck of a lot like his sister, except for the golden irises and the very long ears on top of her head.

Even lost in dream and mutually shared epiphany, 250 Perception and a soaring necromancer class meant that Lilly’s smiling countenance immediately turned Eric’s way.

“Well, Father? What do you think?”

Eric, suddenly utterly clear-headed and in the moment, for all that he thought he was dreaming, was stunned by those words. Yet her appearance… there could be no mistake. She looked exactly like what his daughter might look like if he had actually taken up Lilly’s streamer flirting once upon a time and given them both a weekend they’d never forget. And then if eighteen years had passed instead of a single one since the worldwide incursion began.

And as illogical as it was, Eric’s heart still swelled with a painful warmth he’d never expected to feel… honestly didn’t think he’d live long enough to feel.

Yet that blessed warmth froze with the look in Lilly’s eye.

“If you’d like this to be me, well, you’d better stabilize me quick, dad, because in a few seconds...”

“It will all have been a dream, and I’ll be up a territory I never remembered claiming,” Eric realized with a breathless shudder.

Lilly’s closed her eyes, tears streaming freely. “It’s okay, dad… master. At least I was able to save my mother. My brother. They’re down there, with the others, safely wading hip deep in perfect healing waters that was, well, let’s not talk about what it was just a few minutes or millenia ago.”

Even as she said the words, Eric could sense her fading, as the probability of her existence began to fade from the possible to the implausible to the…

“BULLSHIT! GIVE ME YOUR HAND, LILLY!” Eric shouted, not hesitating to do what he had to do to collapse the wave function of his now very real and very much alive daughter into fierce and complete existence.

Not even when it cost him a full twelve Soul Points to anchor the twelve Meridians of the girl that never quite was, but now had always been.

A revenant no longer, but a living, breathing, beautiful child.

Only when she was safely in his arms, crying as he was, for reasons neither could clearly define, did he pay any heed to the System Messages echoing inside his head.

You have sacrificed multiple Soul Points for the sake of your First Born Child!

You have earned the Title: A Father’s Mercy!

Note! Unique Title Boons have already been claimed.

Additional Boons: You now enjoy +4 to all reaction roles from all parents who know of your sacrifice! This title synergizes with the HERO title. Terran parents will absolutely adore you and trust their families and communities under your guidance, should you ever run for office or claim your royal birthright!

All Healer Classes are now open to you!

GOBLIN BREACH OF SYSTEM PROTOCOLS DETECTED!

CONGRATULATIONS! Lillian Hendrix Silver HAS SUCCESSFULLY RESOLVED SYSTEM BREACH!

Lillian Hendrix Silver has been awarded SILVER TIER BOON!

ERROR! Lillian Hendrix is unable to withstand Silver Tier boon.

Suitable alternatives have been authorized.

CONGRATULATIONS! ERIC SILVER IS THE FIRST CONTENDER TO SEIZE TERRITORY WITHIN AN ADJOINING REALM!

Anomaly detected: Your Familiar – DAUGHTER – Claimed this territory. Goblin edicts make leaving initial System a BREACH of ascension contract.

ANOMALY OVERRULLED!

GOBLINOID CENSURE IS NOW IN EFFECT!

ALL SYSTEM CONTRACTS FORGED BUY GOBLIN FACTIONS ARE NOW TO BE HONORED ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS! - GOBLINOID PARTIES ARE STILL BOUND BY ALL FORMER FORGED COVENANTS SO LONG AS OTHER PARTIES WISH IT! -

ALL GOBLIN CLASSERS BELOW GOLD TIER HAVE BEEN CENSURED FOR 3 LEVELS!

NO FRESH CONTRACTS, WARRANTS, OR WRITS OF CENSURE MAY BE FORGED UNTIL 3 ADDITIONAL LEVELS HAVE BEEN EARNED!

You DAUGHTER has deferred rights of Claimance to you! BOTH PARTIES receive TITLE BOONS!

This STANDARD Bronze tier Feat Permanently enhances all Characteristics by 5%! You will additionally enjoy a 5% Bonus to all future enhancements of all characteristics!

Anomaly Detected! - You and your DAUGHTER have achieved this feat while WHITE-tier Contenders!)

Boons have been Doubled!

Enjoy your enhancement, Contenders!

How do you, Eric Silver, wish to shape this realm?