Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) Jez Cajiao (top ten books of all time TXT) 📖

plenty of room, having gained a lot by discarding the shit I’d piled up, but when I turned to the glowing Core, I growled in mounting anger.

The Core stood atop a tall narrow plinth, made up of rings that spiraled upwards, with manastones set in them, glimmering faintly. They looked to be almost exhausted; a faint glow remaining in around half, with the rest lying cracked and dull, and I swore as I realized that I might have doomed us all.

I quickly pulled up the quest and read through it while I started pulling the stones that had any charge free and dumping them into my bag.

Congratulations! You have made progress in your Quest: ‘Fix the Fixers’

You have discovered the chilling secrets of the Prax ‘Glorious Retribution,’ discovered a working, if unpowered, portal, killed the ‘Master’ and his unwilling servants, and looted the Vault.

Due to the level of difficulty involved, and the bravery shown by your acceptance of the realities of your situation, the Goddess Jenae has increased your rewards and has altered the Success Conditions of the Quest.

1)     Recruit the Gnomish Survivors: 21/27

2)     Recover sufficient manastones to power the ship ‘Interesting Endeavors’: 43/40

3)     Eliminate Bartholomew the Lich: 1/1

4)     Find and prepare the ship ‘Interesting Endeavors’ then use it to escape: 0/1

5)     Bonus Condition: For each SporeMother killed, receive an additional 10,000xp.

Reward: Improved technological capacity in the Great Tower, Possible technological boosts to the fleet, Survival , Gnomish exploration vessel ‘Interesting Endeavors’, ‘ 500,000Exp

I grimaced as I dismissed the screen, seeing that I had literally just enough to get the ship up and in flight, and wishing I’d brought some of the hundreds we’d looted from the Stockpile to help power the damn thing.

When just the Core remained, I paused, turning to look at the wisp, who had been yammering onto me about protocols and requirements the entire time.

“Can you seal this up again and keep your core safe?” I asked her, and she glared at me.

“I’ve just been explaining why…”

“Yes or no, wisp!” I snapped.

“No!” she replied sharply, and I nodded to her before pulling the Core free of the stand. It was a single gem, larger than my fist, which glowed with an inner light, and as I pulled it free, I felt… something… change.

The Prax shuddered faintly, and the room around me seemed to become… lifeless. The walls stopped glowing, the lines of silvery mana that had continued spreading across the floor suddenly ceased in their movement, and the magelights began to lose what little light they held. Instead, the entire room started to dim as the power began to leech away, fading into the ether.

“Noooo, my Prax!” the wisp wailed, and I shoved the Core into my Bag of Spatial Folding, making her scream as the mana composing her dissipated.

I staggered to a halt, sensing her flowing past me and sinking into the bag, and I let out a relieved sigh, even as something else cracked and the roar of water climbing grew louder.

I’d not killed her with my thoughtless action, I hoped, but with the lights dimming and the room becoming dead, the rising black sea, and the collapse of some of the Prax, I couldn’t take the time to find out.

I shoved my naginata into the bag of holding and ran the last dozen feet, leaping onto the gnomish contraption. Even the prisoners were hanging on for dear life further down the train.

“What…” I started to say, when Yen screamed at Frederikk.

“Go!” she yelled, and he grinned gleefully, hunching down and burying his hands in a pit of levers and switches. “Go as fast as you can…” she screamed, in clear disregard of her earlier advice to me. “… get us to your ship!”

The vehicle shuddered, then leapt forward like a greyhound after a rabbit. It was a single creation now, rather than a series of smaller ones, and was more rounded than before, with the additional wheels and legs from the older creations sticking out at odd angles.

As he gunned it forwards, I grabbed desperately onto a rough patch, my fingers scrabbling as I started to slide from my perch. Then a calloused hand gripped me by the back of my armor, shoving me forward, and my fingers caught the lip of a section of machinery. The small handhold allowed me to pull myself in and hunch down as flat as I could, while the wind began to whistle past me.

I glanced to the side and saw Grizz behind me. The Legionnaire nodded and forced a smile, then closed his eyes and hunched down further, going pale.

I squinted past him, finding Arrin, who was seated next to the still form of Lydia. She and Bane were strapped down, with gnomes hanging onto the machine and holding them down at the same time, but Arrin was grinning ear to ear as the walls flashed past in the darkness.

I nodded to him, flashing a sudden grin and feeling some of my annoyance and anger with him slipping away as we shared a mutual love of insane speeds.

I turned back to stare at the rapidly approaching far wall, swaying as we slalomed between the narrow corridor walls and built up even more speed, hurtling toward the far end.

The doorway that led out of the room was small, and for a brief second, I worried that it was too small, but we didn’t slow down; if anything, we picked up more speed, as one of the Gnomes further down the line started to sing.

It started as a low voice chanting, then it built as more and more joined in, intoning a weird, deep-voiced chorus. The song built as we shot into the tunnel, the extra wheels and limbs sticking out suddenly making perfect sense as we merely bounced off a wall and kept going.

We took a left, then a right, crossing corridors blurring past almost too fast to see. The contraption slammed into a pile of collapsed bones at the next intersection, sending