Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris (books for 20 year olds txt) 📗

recovery bed. They looked at him in awe, some with a hint of respect, and a select few with a glimmer of hope in their eyes.

“Your fight was amazing,” said a man Alex didn’t recognize.

“The bards will sing of it for a long time!” another woman exclaimed.

“You did good,” said one of the vampire twins, but quickly added, “for a human.”

“Why don’t you let the man rest?” another voice echoed from behind him but was followed by boos and sounds of disapproval.

“You probably won’t fight again for the next few days,” the other vampire said. “Our master will probably want to let the rumor of you spread down the nine hells.”

Alex didn’t care if there was another fight coming up or not, but he nodded at the fact. The vampire, seeing that he was going to get no reaction from him this way, decided to continue talking.

“The healing spells helped you rest for hours straight,” she said. “You might still need some healing and have trouble moving about, but you won’t be able to sleep much more.”

“Yes,” her brother hissed, and asked a question that everyone there seemed very pleased to hear: “So why don’t you go on with your story?”

Neverending

Epilogue

A couple of months passed after the day that we cleared the Chroma Warehouse Dungeon. Things had changed so much that it felt like a lifetime ago. For starters, business was booming. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen less than a thirty percent increase in week over week revenue.

Rory and I had become the absolute kings of arrow trading in the state of New York. What’s more, we were already the number one arrow provider in the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The other states weren’t as profitable as New York, but I wanted to have a strong foothold on anything east of New York before expanding to the west.

We had already put a couple of mana rechargers on retainer just for Rory and had employed two additional crafters. Both of them were human and much lower level than Rory, but still good enough to be able to craft the level 3 recipes we needed. At first, I thought we’d need a center of operations for all this, but pretty soon realized the dangers this might pose.

Putting multiple crafters under one roof and warehousing arrows by the thousands would make us an easy target for anyone who might have a problem with us running the market. And I wasn’t going to be caught by surprise again. That meant we would need to ward the place and either purchase insurance against attacks, which was ridiculously priced in the Apocosmos, or hire muscle to help protect us.

In the interests of keeping our whole network decentralized, we decided that our crafters would work from their own workshops, and would send their produce to DEM fulfillment centers under my name so that I could put out the listing. This system had so many advantages that I wondered why we hadn’t thought of it earlier.

The crafters never met me and for all they knew, Rory was just another crafter. This both played into the mystery of it all, but also served us greatly in terms of safety.

In addition, the produce was never kept in one place and we always tried to hire or relocate our crafters closer to the fulfillment centers for which they’d be crafting, so we found a crafter from Maine to do the orders there. The materials were bought and sent to his place and the shipping costs for the finished products were much lower. We had to purchase extra-dimensional bags for each crafter upon hiring, but this was a small cost to pay considering how much we saved.

Finally, we paid the crafters according to how many of the arrows they produced got sold in the market. The pricing was of course controlled by me in order to maximize profit, but the crafters had to regulate their output so they could ensure their earnings as well. That took another problem away from us since they needed to make the choice about when and how many mana rechargers they should hire. We paid their costs, of course, but the time we gained by doing this was a blessing.

It was a blessing I used as efficiently as I could to repay my debt to Leo. I’d promised him that we’d take the class upgrade quest together so my daily training at the gym was replaced by daily XP grinding with Louie. Leo had provided us with access to low-level training portals where the Dark Energy spawned monsters for us to hunt. Nothing too fancy—a few feral beasts, a couple of oversized animals, and the occasional magical construct. Just what we needed for quick leveling.

I guessed I could have quit my job and leveled up even faster, but the daily dose of normality was what kept me grounded. That, and the fact that I was doing most of the administrative tasks for our DEM trading at that time. It was interesting to see how a few carefully worded emails to executives about performance-enhancing machine learning systems and neural networks could save me from doing actual programming work.

Both Louie and myself had already reached level 19 and were ready to initiate our class change quests, but I had convinced Leo that we had to take care of something else before doing that. I had finally hit fifty million dollars in my DEM account and had ordered the item that would take us to the plane where the next part of Louie’s awakening would take place, the quest that would make his soul immortal as long as I was alive.

We had agreed to do this the next day, on a Sunday, so we spent the day before relaxing as we waited for the quest item to arrive. Louie decided to spend his time catching up with episodes of Critical Role’s second campaign. Upon noticing which