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

ground—then, he froze, staring at us maliciously. I had never liked the way he looked at us. Now, that disgust was amplified by an order of magnitude.

He grabbed Tatai’s neck and squeezed, beginning to chock the boy. Even from such a distance, I could all but see the boy’s eyes bulging from their sockets.

“Bastard! What are you doing?” I yelled.

Romris showed his teeth and continued his abuse of the child.

Boiling over with anger, I seized the anchor rope. “Help me, Beko. It’s time to take that monster down!”

“Let them sort it out,” the ghoul responded, clearly reluctant to engage with his nemesis.

“Do what I say, or he’s going to kill the boy! He’s gone mad!”

The rope came up far too easily. No anchor was attached. Only then did I realize that we had not in fact stopped—the current continued to bring us along down the sandbar.

I seized the pole, but it failed to reach the bottom, as the river here was deep. Beko understood what we needed to do and grabbed the oar, shoving it into the water.

With a crunch, the blade of the oar snapped off and began floating away. I tried in vain to reach it. “Genius, Beko. Genius!”

“I... I don’t know what happened,” Beko blinked. “It just broke on its own, before I knew what was happened.”

Romris continued strangling Tatai’s crumpled body with one hand—and waving goodbye with the other. Once more, my hatred multiplied.

“We have to get off of this!”

We were only fifteen yards from the rock atop which the trading post was built—but that distance might as well have been a hundred yards. The river was too strong here, and too deep. I could jump—abandoning all of the goods on the raft, and the raft itself, to the mercy of fate, and risking getting attacked by a swarm of the kotes with which the waters teemed in early summer.

Beko sat down gloomily. “The rope was cut.”

“I figured. That bastard broke our oar, too. But why? If he has killed Tatai, everything is over for him. He’ll be lucky if all they do is break both his arms.”

“Yes,” Beko said, an evil joy in his voice. “We’ll be back before long and tell Hugo everything. They’ll break his arms right then and there. And maybe they’ll hang him!”

I looked downriver and shook my head. “This will take us a while. The right bank here is a cliff too tall for us to climb. And we’re far from the left. The river is deep. Also, there’s no bridge from the other side—we’ll have to shout and wave our hands in order to get those blind tower sentinels to notice us.”

“Blind?” Beko blinked.

“They never seem to notice anything. They didn’t see what just happened. Unless... Maybe Romris somehow knew that they wouldn’t see it.”

“How could he know that?”

“I have no idea. He was so sure of himself, attacking Tatai out in the open like that. He’s never behaved like that before, has he? I don’t know what’s happening here, but one thing I do know: Romris never struck me as crazy.”

“You don’t know him at all!” Beko said, as if offended. “He’s always been a nasty man. Always.”

As we continued to float downriver, the right shore continued to offer us no opportunity to ascend it. Vertical rock, plunging from high above us deep down into the water. My fishing talents showed me that our poles were useless here. Not that we could climb well, anyway.

“Unless we get to shore fast, Beko, we’re going to have to spend the night on the raft.”

“No,” the ghoul answered calmly, “see that turn up ahead?”

“Of course.”

“Around the bend, we can climb up the right bank. There’s one place where a creek has cut through the cliff, all the way down to the water. In the spring, it brings rocks with it. In the summer, it brings sand. And so there is a sandbar that stretches out, nearly to the middle of Blackriver. Everything floating down the right side runs over it. One time, our fishermen were out here drunk. They set out the nets and took a nap. They ended up hitting the sandbar, and so will we. Then, we’ll head up the creek. There’s a trail leading from there.”

I grabbed the scooping net and started rowing.

“What are you doing?” Beko cocked his head. “Just sit and relax. Soon we’ll be ashore, and we’ll walk up to the bridge. We’ll tell them everything about Romris.”

“We can’t let ourselves be stuck on that sandbar.”

The ghoul was taken aback. “Why not?”

“They’ll be waiting for us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who, but I do know they won’t be waiting with floral wreaths. Don’t you see? Romris was one hundred percent sure we would be unable to ruin him. They intend to catch us. This was all planned out. I bet that Tatai found out about their evil plan and ran to warn us, but he was too late.”

“Who’s waiting for us?” Beko insisted.

“Someone looking to rob us, kill us, enslave us, I don’t know. I just know that we must not end up on that sandbar. Help me row.”

“With what?”

“With your ears, if you have to. Quickly!”

* * *

They were indeed waiting for us.

Three men stood on the sandbar, which was clear on one side and swamped with debris on the other. In the darkening twilight, it was difficult to discern any details, but they seemed to be adult men, clad in discreet apparel. One had something that looked very much like a large bow.

The rope had been severed very close to the anchor itself. Thanks to that, we had a lot of rope left, and we used that to wrap the net and turn the scooping net into little less than a full-fledged paddle.