Alpha Zero (Alpha LitRPG Book 1) Arthur Stone (hardest books to read .txt) 📖

of makeup, not the faintest line from a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Even her hair had the look of being arranged not by a brush but by the wind itself, putting every single hair precisely in its proper place. Her attire—a loose-fitting black robe-like garment that covered everything save for her palms and head—was entirely unfashionable. Her face had mostly Western features, yet with a touch of the exotic, suggesting partially Asian ancestry.

“Taise amushabi, abi Treya,” said the other person present, his head slightly cocked.

This one, in contrast, was not good-looking at all. Though, admittedly, I was no expert on male beauty. I could tell a voguish pretty boy from a macho gym rat, but that was probably the extent of it.

Though either prototype enjoyed some success with the fairer sex, you could never know in advance which of them, if any, would be preferred by any particular female. Hell, the female herself couldn’t answer that question most of the time.

As befitting those mercurial creatures.

As far as Traco Darce went, he was about as close to a voguish pretty boy as a grizzly bear roused awake from hibernation in the dead of winter. The man was in charge, emanating an aura of danger and unwavering confidence strong enough to send beta males within a four-block radius running for cover. Dirty traffic cops from third-world countries probably paid him, as did escorts from first-world ones after copulation. How else could you explain how he managed to look so regal while wearing the same modest attire as Treya?

He had the air of every waiter’s dream customer. The kind who left a bar of gold as a tip.

In short, here was a man who was the alpha of alphas, which made his presence in these gloomy ruins rather suspect. He was fiddling with a brazier of some kind, as if prepping for a barbecue. Only instead of meat, he was heating a long curved dagger with a hilt sparkling with red gemstones.

The walls were ancient. The sections that weren’t gaping with missing blocks, were covered with moss instead. Piles of bones and skulls hid in numerous niches. A huge flat slab of stone stood in the center, to which my body was securely bound. A young child squealed somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t turn to see what was happening.

Where the hell am I? Is this a dream? The last thing I remembered was falling back in my seat on the bus for a nap. That was preferable to staring out the window, as the driver had apparently believed himself to be not a municipal employee but a getaway driver for a Mexican cartel.

What was this basement? Who were these people? What language were they speaking? And how did I know their names?

Odd that none of this seemed like a dream. Typically, I would wake up immediately upon realizing I’d been dreaming.

Hold on just a minute! I did know their names!

And I understood what they were saying, too. Only I hadn’t realized it until just now.

There was one other thing I realized at the same time.

An important thing—and a terrifying one.

I realized that this was no barbecue.

That knife with the fancy hilt. I knew the purpose for which it was being heated.

Finally, having remembered everything, I realized that this was, indeed, a dream.

And that it was time to wake the hell up.

* * *

So, having escaped one incipient nightmare, somehow I found myself in another one that I hadn’t yet experienced. At least I was still alive, if only because no dead body could suffer like this. Even if I were a soul cast down to hell, my suffering would be strictly spiritual in nature, and not so blatantly corporeal.

I squinted one eye open as my hand twisted to hide my palm from the unbearable heat. My skin was already starting to smell of cooked flesh. A unique, unmistakable stench.

My consciousness, though dim, still registered the peculiar depth of the disturbing odor. We were well past the point when a steak goes from being well done to hopelessly burnt, transforming even the tenderest piece of meat into inedible waste.

It couldn’t be my burnt palm exuding such an odor. The fire hadn’t even gotten to it.

Right, the fire. I hadn’t even noticed it until now. It was taking my consciousness way too long to get going, perceiving reality fragment by fragment instead of the complete scene as a whole.

The terrace floor was ablaze. The floor planks had been crafted in quite an original fashion, to the point where you couldn’t even call them planks. Logs, maybe? I couldn’t be sure of the correct term given my ignorance of carpentry.

Or of the world as a whole.

The lumber had been split using wooden wedges that Camai would hammer into them with his bare hands, thereby killing two birds with one stone: taking care of a chore that needed doing while getting a workout in for his palms. The resulting halves were then hewed until their surface was smooth, and ingeniously stacked flat-side up.

The upshot was that the floor of the terrace comprised of large components that took a long time to ignite, but even longer to burn through. That was why the flames from the blazing house were taking a while to reach me.

I didn’t know why the fire had started, but I had an inkling that the cause had been the power released from the vessel, having been violated by my amulet. The apparent fallout suggested that I had been the epicenter of a serious explosion. The blast had scattered chairs and other furnishings in all directions, ripped off the terrace guardrails, caved in the nearest wall, and demolished the roof. The ground in front of the homestead’s main structure was littered with many of the things that had been blown away from here.

Being at