Hive Knight: A Dark Fantasy LitRPG (Trinity of the Hive Book 1) Grayson Sinclair (book recommendations website .TXT) 📖

“That’s disturbing,” Gil said with a shake of his head.

“Was worse to watch, poor guy looked like a watermelon in a blender when it was over.”

Levi turned green. “Well, I can’t eat watermelon ever again.”

I laughed as we waited our turn, joking and cutting up with Gil and Levi for the next few minutes. After what felt like a lifetime, it was our turn, and we stepped through the swirling mass of blue light to head home.

Chapter 3 - Memento Mori

We arrived at the front gate of the Castle Gloom-Harbor. The dark gray stone looked sallow in the bright summer afternoon, but the soft breeze coming in from Lake Gloom was heavenly. The giant wooden bridge lowered at our approach. I looked up to see one of the guards operating the switch. As we walked through the outer bailey, we passed several of our NPC men at arms, who stood at attention as we passed. I nodded back out of politeness and headed inside.

A trio of our maid staff were in the entranceway, cleaning and polishing to their hearts’ content. They too, stopped and bowed respectfully as we approached. “Jade, Ruby, you know you don’t have to act so formal with us,” I said, turning to Amber. “Didn’t I tell you that it’s unnecessary to bow?”

“My apologies, lord. But Mistress Evelyn demands it.”

I grumbled to myself, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Evelyn and her godsdamned jokes. “All right, fine. Whatever,” I said with a sigh. “Not like I can force her to stop. Amber, would you mind bringing drinks to the guildhall?”

“Right away, lord,” she said with another bow and headed toward the kitchens.

“All right, let’s get this over with,” I said.

I took a left down the hallway to our meeting room. Once inside, I sat back in my chair and called a meeting through the chat in my interface. The three of us settled in to wait for everyone. As usual, it took about half an hour for everyone to rouse themselves from whatever they did to occupy their time and arrive.

Markos was the first to arrive, followed closely by Yumiko and Makenna. Behemoth lumbered in next and went and sat by Levi. I didn't see Wilson enter, but cloth rustled against wood, and I turned to him as he sat down next to me. Evelyn and Adam walked together and sat down in their seats, only to start whispering to one another. Harper was the last to sit down, but that was par for the course. Once everyone had sat down, I got right down to business, starting with the bad news.

“Alistair is dead.”

A round of solemn looks passed around the group, though none were shocked by the news. He wasn't here, and I'm sure a few noticed his absence from the guild roster. Soon after, Amber walked in, carrying a large tray laden down with drinks and began serving us.

We held a small vigil, more of a wake really, telling stories about Alistair, an odd ritual considering Alistair wasn’t really dead, but it would still be many years before he could level up enough to return. A fact that some people didn’t really understand.

“I don’t get it,” Harper said after draining his mug of ale. ”Why don’t we just go pick Alistair up when he respawns in two months?”

I turned my gaze to Harper, who had the misfortune to enter the Ouroboros Project when he was only eighteen. As such, his horrible acne clashed with his bright orange hair, which he’d shaved to the scalp on each side of his head leaving a garish fauxhawk which he kept insisting was “dope.”

Harper was perpetually a teenager, which, in my opinion, was a hell unto itself. To top it off, he was a brash, impulsive hothead who was generally a giant pain in my ass. His only saving grace was he was the best shot I'd ever seen.

I was about to reply when Wilson spoke up from next to me. “That’s not how things work, Harper.”

Harper slammed his mug down on the table, spilling some onto his blue shirt, his face red already from one glass. “I don’t get it. Other guilds have no issue helping to level up their fallen members, why can’t we?”

The vein in Wilson’s head throbbed as he let out a deep sigh, running a hand through his swept-back, steel-gray hair. He opened his mouth to respond—probably too harshly—but I stepped in.

“Wilson, Harper’s still new. This is the first time we’ve had a member die on us since he’s been with us. And he’s right—we operate by a different set of rules than most guilds,” I said to my apoplectic second-in-command, turning to Harper. “Because of how we do business, we can’t afford weakness. Even if we were to help him level, it would still take a good couple years to get Alistair back up to strength to be of any use to us. That’s years where we’d be weakened, and we can’t afford it.”

“He does make a good point though, dear guild leader,” Evelyn said, looking up from the conversation with her brother. “We already have one empty seat, and Alistair makes two. That puts us in a precarious situation.”

She made a valid argument, but then again, she was rarely ever wrong. Evelyn shared many of the same traits as her twin brother, Adam. Both were pale as ghosts and had the same silver hair and radiant golden eyes. Adam was taller than Evelyn, though I knew she had more lean muscle than he did. He also didn’t share Evelyn’s sharp cheekbones and had a more rugged set to his clean-shaven face.

Wilson tugged at his neatly trimmed gray beard, clearly wanting to say something, but we’d gotten off track.

“Look, this