The Gene of the Ancients (Rogue Merchant Book #2): LitRPG Series by Roman Prokofiev (ebook reader for comics .TXT) 📗

I came up to the rails, looking around in curiosity. Jerkhan stopped paying me any attention; he kept silence, his hands on the wheel. The colossal frame of the juggernaut slowly turned, gaining speed and moving in an unknown direction.

I had already realized that we were in the Astral Plane, the interdimensional space between the worlds of Sphere. Were we going to transfer the souls? Where would it happen? And how? I was at a loss, angry that nobody was explaining that to me. I tried to distract myself by studying the haze overside that gleamed all shades of red. Pretty soon, I grew tired of that: it was empty, and I could see no monsters that were the talk of the official Sphere forum. The Astral Plane wasn’t easily accessible. Only clans with their own fleet of flying ships could enter there, and even then, you had to be prepared to lose a few.

In the meantime, the juggernaut slowed down to a crawl. We hovered in one place, and the engines went out with a soft whoosh. The sails were down. Did something happen?

“A storm!” Jerkhan bellowed as if reading my thoughts. “The Seekers report that an Astral Storm is headed toward us! We need to wait it out.”

The girl that had met me at first ran up the bridge.

“Roahildorn, walk this dunce, or he’ll burn a hole through me with his eyes,” Jerkhan glanced at me. “Give him a tour of the Stormbringer, you have about an hour.”

“I’m surprised that Jerry didn’t cut you in two,” said the girl with an unpronounceable nickname after we went down to the deck. “I think he likes you!”

“Excuse me, Roahild...”

“Just call me Roa,” she replied, giggling. “In any case, don’t go screwing around with him. Jerkhan is a shaman and a high priest of the Old Gods. He can cast month-long debuffs like no tomorrow!”

I raised an eyebrow incredulously. I had never heard about the Old Gods before — or about such archetypes. Still, it didn’t prevent me from studying the kill rating of my new associates, thanks to the habit instilled in me by Liberty trainers. Wow, they are real veterans. Jerkhan had more than nine thousand kills, and Roa, six thousand and a half. Both of them were in the top thousand of PvP Ranking, the Silver Elite.

“So he’s one tough cookie,” I said. “Okay. Do you have anybody else I should know?”

We walked along the deck. Roa nodded toward the stern, where another ogre, armed with a sword and a shield, was fighting off three attackers. He seemed to be pretty successful, huge as a mountain, and fast like a tiger, a truly dangerous opponent.

“Dargesh, our navigator, strategist, and the strongest warrior. I recommend you remember him.”

“I thought Jerkhan was the strongest.”

“Ha! Jerkhan’s in charge of ideology, diplomacy, and talking to the Old Gods.”

“Oh, that’s how it is. And what are you responsible for?”

“Me?” Roahildorn’s laughter was clear as a bell. “You’d be better off not knowing that. Torture and experiments on slaves!”

The juggernaut was enormous. It had four decks riddled with passages, an elevator, lots of living rooms and facilities, a mess room, a powder magazine, a pilot’s cabin, a control post, and a reactor compartment. The ship was built using odd white material resembling fishbone. Roa told me that it was the skeletons of Astral Beasts, the giant monsters of the Boundary. For several years, it had served as home to the Steel Guard, almost four hundred belligerent scrappers. With its eight elemental engines, a spelljumper that allowed the creation of portals, six ray guns, thirty guns of varying caliber, and harpoon cannons on rotating platforms, it was a real flying citadel. I went online to find information on the price of such an astral juggernaut and was shocked: there were no blueprints or pre-built ships of that type for sale.

“Yeah, building a juggernaut is a story in itself,” Roa said, nodding. “The source of the blueprint’s top secret. They say you can only get it by donating money or via RMT. Construction requires renting a separate wharf in the Forgeworlds for a month.”

“There are probably only a few of them.”

“A year ago, only Pandorum had them,” Roa sighed. “But now, I think there are more than ten. The alliances are getting rich. The Americans and the Chinese have some, the Hird have two, I hear...”

I stopped on the artillery deck. Dozens of cannons were set along the ship’s board, and magecables were wired across the ceiling, powering the massive ray guns.

“Rippers, Thunderstrikes, Colossus...” Roa listed the names of the weapons and then stopped, saying simply, “Well, you have to see it with your own eyes. If we fly above a lousy NPC kingdom, firing everything at once...”

I had seen it, and I knew. I remembered how one burst had annihilated dozens of Watchers at Eyre.

Meanwhile, the engines sprang back to life, and the juggernaut shuddered, gaining speed. The girl and I hurried to climb upstairs.

“The storm’s over, and our tour as well,” Roa announced. “We’ll arrive in an hour.”

A rogue spot appeared on the unchanging pink clouds of the Astral Plane, black as coal. With each second, it grew closer. We were approaching one of the biggest Shards. Later, they would tell me that in the Astral Plane, such objects could be seen from a distance and couldn’t be missed.

The Shard was a huge black rock that soared in zero gravity, made possible by Sphere’s mechanics. It was shaped like a bloated human head, its bumps worn with time. When I learned about the origin of Shards, that shape started to make sense.

A menacing gothic fortress arose from the rock, its material the same color as the stone. It was a clan stronghold, the main keep of Pandorum in Sphere.

“Atrocity,” Roa said with barely restrained pride.