We the people a kingdom.., p.1
We The People: A Kingdom Building LitRPG, page 1
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
Epilogue
Final Character Sheet
A Message from the Author
Goblin Summoner Sample - Chapter One
Chapter One
Matt hit the ground with a painful thump and immediately found himself rolling down the side of a hill, mud and grass spraying into the air. Trees rushed past him and despite the shock of the sudden impact he found himself desperately hoping he wasn’t going to crash against a trunk.
“Ow, shit, god damn it,” Matt spluttered, the words forced out by every impact. Things had been going so well, he was nearly in, they had been signing the cheques! He couldn’t remember how he had gotten from there to falling but he assumed that it had been an angry husband or an enraged family member. It usually was.
The hill ended, Matt rolling across a small patch of grass and coming mercifully to a stop. Every part of him ached, his body rebelling at the forces that had been thrust upon it. It wasn’t the worst Matt had been beaten up and he was grateful for that at least.
“Their loss. I hear those timeshares are kind of nice this time of year. If you like rain. And snow. And freezing cold.”
Raising his hand to shield his eyes from the bright sun Matt took in his surroundings. He wasn’t in the city anymore, that much was clear. Had he really missed that much time? Driving out to the countryside would have taken an hour, at least. Blacking out for that long couldn’t be good for his health.
“Ok, so where are you, Matt? Survival skills aren’t exactly your forte. It can’t be that bad, can it? Probably just a short walk to the nearest Tescos. Some places are rural but nowhere is that uncivilised.”
Matt didn’t know why he was talking out loud. There was no one else around and the odds of him suddenly conjuring up answers to his questions were low. He couldn’t help himself. If there was one thing Matt knew how to do, one thing that he was best at above all others, it was talking. It was how he made his living, talking, convincing others to part with their cash. Of course, most of the time the thing they were buying didn’t work as advertised if it existed at all. Matt had spent most of his adult life running every scam in the book. Timeshares, multi-level marketing, even the odd Ponzi scheme on occasion.
Matt was proud of what he did. To most people this would have seemed like a horrid thing but as far as Matt was concerned a fool and their money were easily parted. It wasn’t his fault that people believed his outrageous lies and ultimately, he never forced anyone to do anything. Not directly anyway, he could certainly pile on the pressure selling when he wanted to. He had realised his talent doing exactly that as he sold vacuum cleaners door to door.
Mana Link Established
Level Set To 1
Class Unlocked
Bureaucramancer- You have a mastery of the rules, able to bend both laws and the people who follow them to your will. You are a caster class, one that focuses on manipulation.
Skills Unlocked
Law Magic- By shifting the laws of nature you can alter the properties of the world around you. Law magic can be restrictive but powerful.
Basic Survival- You can survive in the wilds, for a time, provided it’s not too difficult an environment.
Spells Unlocked
Change Wording-Law Magic Spell- Alter the text on one document in your line of sight. Three-day cooldown.
“What the hell?” Matt said, waving a hand towards the words that had appeared in his vision. His fingers passed through them, the letters intangible. “What is going on here? Did I get slipped something? Is that why I can’t remember?”
He put his hands on a nearby rock and hoisted himself to his feet. Matt realised for the first time—as his leg brushed against the cold stone—that he was naked. He let out a long, pained groan. The day was just getting worse with every moment. Dumped in the middle of nowhere, hallucinating, and now exposed to the elements. The only way it could get worse was if some crazed animal attacked him.
There are certain moments in every person’s life where the cosmos aligns with such perfect timing that it's almost enough to make someone believe that everything is foretold. For Matt, this was one such moment, his fears about being attacked summoning a beast from the bushes nearby. Of course, it had been there for several minutes, the loud grumbling and swearing of the naked man enough to attract it, but Matt would instead blame the universe. That had always seemed easier, if things didn’t go his way, then it simply wasn’t his fault.
The monster standing before him—and monster was the only word that came to mind—was a bizarre-looking thing. It was a squat reptilian creature, wider than it was tall with a mouth filled with oversized teeth. Two frog-like eyes blinked up at him as the monster waddled forwards on its stumpy legs, its gangly arms outstretched, thin fingers waggling eagerly at the meal before it.
“Right, uh, what the hell are you? Some kid in a costume?”
The monster replied with a low growl, one that passed across its oversized lips and created a kind of aggressive raspberry. It was hardly the imposing sound that the monster intended it to be.
Matt broke out into a burst of laughter. The creature looked ridiculous, and the noise it had made had only solidified in his mind that the entire encounter was his brain playing a joke on him. Considering the letters he had seen floating in the air before him—the words now faded—he assumed that the monster was his subconscious conjuring up more hallucinations.
“God, whatever they hit me with must be pretty strong. Don’t think I would ever have thought up something like this without it,” Matt said, squatting so he could get a better look at the beast. “I must have seen this in a horror movie or something? There was that whole period in the eighties with things like this. It’s not a gremlin or a ghoulie. Definitely not a critter, they have fur.”
Matt reached out with a hand, looking to pass his digits through the hallucination and ultimately dispel it.
The monster was unamused at the naked humans random prodding. It let out another warning raspberry, but the human just ignored its aggression. Rage filled the beast, anger rising within it and transforming into motion, the barrel-bodied monster snapping its toothy maw around the human’s hand.
Six damage taken. Current hit points 4/10
“Ow, ow, ow!” Matt snapped his arm back in reaction to the monster clamping its jaws around his wrist. The beast was surprisingly light and lifted off the ground, its limbs swinging wildly as Matt flailed his arm about. “Get off! Get off!”
The beast was no hallucination. Its teeth had dug deep into Matt’s flesh and were refusing to let go. The pain was so great that Matt ignored the message in his vision about hit points, though the nearly half-filled green bar that had appeared was difficult to dismiss. Whatever was going on would have to wait before the monster chewed clear through his arm.
Matt was no fighter, he had never been, preferring to rely on his words over everything else. It had served him well so far though Matt had spent more time running from angry marks than he would like to admit. His reaction to the monster’s attack wasn’t elegant, no daring riposte or swashbuckling swordplay. It was simple, raw, and extremely effective.
Turning to the rock he had pulled himself to his feet with, Matt swung his arm towards the stone, the creature still clamped on to his hand. It squealed as it collided with the rock but refused to release its grip. Matt swung repeatedly, the sound of the creature crashing against the boulder a sickening dull thump.
Two damage dealt
Two damage dealt
Two damage dealt
The notification appeared with every strike. Matt didn’t have time to question what was going on, he just kept swinging, battering the beast against the rock.
Two damage dealt
Two damage dealt
“Why won’t you die!” Matt screamed as he slammed the beast again. This time it released its grip, tumbling to the ground and scrabbling to get back onto its stumpy legs. Its amphibian eyes stared up at him, but they had taken on a different look. There was no anger there anymore, only fear. The creature whimpered, shifting its rotund body forward in a display of obedience.
Skill unlocked- Unarmed Combat - Sometimes the only weapon you need is your bare hands. You're not a martial artist, more of a bruiser or brawler.
Unarmed combat experience points gained – 50 points
Unarmed combat rank up.
Overall level increased to two.
5 hit points gained.
Skill unlocked – Monster Wrangler– You have learnt that some monsters can be tamed, or close enough to it anyway. Eventually, you might be able to domesticate them fully.
Monster Wrangler experience gained
A barrage of information appeared in Matt’s eyes, blocking his view of the creature for the moment. He waved his arms to brush them away and he could hear a pained whimpering coming from the beast. It likely assumed he was going to strike it again.
“No! No! I’m not going to hurt you!” Matt said, crouching down close to the creature. Whilst it had been clamped to his arm he had been desperate to get it loose but now the thing just looked pathetic. Matt had never really been an animal person, but something about the sad eyes the scaled thing was giving him made him feel pity, an emotion he had only briefly had dalliances with in the past. It wasn’t a useful feeling for a con man. “Truce.”
The creature let out a long whimper, one that Matt assumed was an agreement of some kind, though he doubted it truly understood him.
“Right, well, let’s just go our separate ways then.” Matt’s wrist throbbed with pain as he took a step backwards from the creature. He was still bleeding profusely from where it had bitten him. He needed to try and stem the flow somehow and he dreaded to think what the risk of infection was wandering nude through the countryside.
The monster shuffled forwards towards him, following Matt as he moved away.
“No, stay there!” he said, taking another step. The creature moved again. It wasn’t threatening him, Matt knew that, though he didn’t know how he knew that exactly. It was a feeling in his gut and Matt had long ago learned to listen to those. It was how you made it in his profession, operating as much on instinct as skill. “You’re just going to follow me forever, aren’t you? What am I now, like pack leader or something? The alpha? You know all of that is nonsense, right? Of course you don’t, you don’t even understand me.”
The monster perked up, shuffling towards Matt almost excitedly. It clearly understood that it was being accepted. Perhaps it wasn’t as stupid as Matt assumed. It shuffled towards Matt’s injured arm and gripped it lightly with its fingers. Matt considered snapping the limb away, afraid the beast would bite him again but something inside him told him to wait.
“Yeah, you did that. And I beat you up. We did a real number on each other didn’t we?”
The creature opened its maw but there was no aggression in its body language. A horrid hacking noise erupted from its mouth as it hacked forth a blob of thick green mucus. It splattered against Matt’s arm and before he could react the beast’s long tongue had darted out of its mouth and spread the slime across Matt’s wounds.
“Ugh! What the hell is wrong with you!” Matt snapped the limb back and went to brush the ooze lose. He was surprised to find that it had hardened almost instantly, forming a tight cover over where he had been bitten, tight enough to stymy the blood flow. “Oh, this is for me bleeding, isn’t it? Disgusting, but honestly, it’s worked pretty well. I suppose a lot of animals lick their wounds to keep them clean. I’m going to assume that this is something like that and not you just being gross.”
The creature answered by coughing up another ball of slime onto the ground and smearing it across its scales, presumably on the locations where it had been bruised by Matt. A few licks of the tongue solidified the ooze, covering the beast in pale green scabs.
“Ok, so a bit of both then. What the hell are you? Where the hell am I? Something weird is going on here and I can’t say I like it. You need a name…” Matt's eyes fell to the green crust around his wrist, “Chomper. I’ll call you Chomper. Seems as good a name as any.”
Chomper didn’t respond. He either didn’t understand the concept of a name or simply didn’t care. He waddled forward, pulling close to Matt.
“Yeah, that’ll do then. Ok, right well next thing to try and work out is where we are. I’m guessing you don’t know?” Matt watched Chomper snuffle at the ground, something drawing the creature’s attention. “I’ll take that as a no then. And what the hell were those words floating in my vision. Levels, experience points? You would think I had wandered into some damn video game or something.”
A chill wind blew through the trees, rustling their leaves and causing Matt’s skin to cover itself in goosebumps. Whatever he was going to do he needed to do it quickly. The weather was starting to turn, the clouds in the sky above turning an ominous grey.
With little else to go on Matt turned to face a random direction and began to walk. For all he knew, he could be striding deeper into the countryside, but he was never one for standing still. Of course, with the career he had chosen, staying in one place for too long could be trouble, something he had learnt early on in his professional life when he had been running Vitalax, a combination vitamin and laxative meal replacement shake. That had been a lucrative endeavour, a pyramid scheme that was technically legal thanks to needing its participants to buy a product. Things had gone south eventually—they always did— and Matt just barely managed to sell the company to one of his rubes and get out of town before the fraud squad moved in.
A thin drizzle began to rain down on him, the kind of light sheet of water that somehow soaked to the bone, the water hanging in the air like a curtain of dampness rather than crashing onto the ground as it should. Matt thought it very inconsiderate of the universe, though he assumed that he wasn’t its favourite person, at the moment. How else could he explain what was happening to him?
As he wandered through it, Matt took in the landscape around him properly for the first time. He wouldn’t have said he was in a forest, there were trees, but they were too scattered apart, the towering plants having plenty of space to spread out rather than fighting amongst a canopy for scraps of light. The ground around him was covered in long grass that tickled his knees as he walked. The trees were placed too haphazardly for it to be an orchard and if he was on a farm Matt assumed that someone would have come running at the fight between him and Chomper. He had hardly been quiet with his cursing.
The rain slowly grew to be worse, the clouds above disgorging their contents. Matt knew little about survival, but he was certain hanging about in the rain without clothes was a one-way ticket to pneumonia. He doubted Chomper’s slime could help with that ailment, not that he wanted to find out.
“We need to find shelter!” Matt said, finding he was shouting over the building torrent. “I don’t know why I’m telling you that, you obviously don’t speak English. Or even understand words at all.”
Chomper grunted a reply, but Matt had no idea of knowing what the creature meant. He had no way of gauging Chomper’s intelligence at all. His mind had flagged the beast as a monster rather than a simple animal and Matt wasn’t entirely sure why that was. Monster was just a word for an animal mankind didn’t understand, in a way, but the text that had appeared in Matt’s vision had agreed with him. Monster Wrangler, it had said. From the words that had come with it there seemed to be an effect attached, a skill it had called itself.
Matt was not unfamiliar with video games. The opposite, in fact, the entire point of his chosen profession was so he could work as little as possible, so he had spent many long hours tapping away at keys or pressing the buttons on a controller. Why work a menial job his entire life for a pittance when he could spend half the time and effort convincing other people to give him the fruits of their labours? Someone had once asked him how he slept at night and the truth was extremely well without the stress of a daily grind. Matt simply asked people to give him their money. It wasn’t his fault if they fell for it. His victims just needed to take some personal responsibility.
Matt’s eyes landed on something through the rain, the drizzle a faded memory now, overwhelmed by the deluge it had become. Ahead of him was a large tree, one bigger than anything he had ever seen. It wasn’t quite the giant towering redwoods that existed in America, but Matt assumed that he hadn’t been tossed across the ocean and was still in Britain somewhere and for his native country it was a behemoth. His eyes fell to Chomper, the creature covering his head with his thin fingers as best he could. There was certainly nothing like him in Britain and Matt was sure there was nothing like him on Earth. That raised a worrying possibility, one that Matt assumed had to be wrong because of how outlandish it was.
He began to move towards the tree, seeking the shelter it could provide. There was a gap in the base of its trunk, one big enough to shield both Matt and Chomper until the rain passed. From how grim the clouds looked above that could take a while, but Matt was willing to wait, anything was better than the current soaking he was receiving.
