Legacy of Merlin: A GameLit/LitRPG Portal Fantasy Adventure Read online

  Legacy of Merlin

  The Abduction Cycles

  John Elijah Cressman

  Maverick-Gage Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 John Elijah Cressman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, subject “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.

  ISBN: 978-1-954524-17-0 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-954524-18-7 (Hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-954524-16-3 (Amazon Kindle)

  ISBN: 978-1-954524-19-4 (Audiobook)

  Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s twisted imagination.

  Front cover image by Christina Myrvold

  Editing By Celestial Rince.

  Printed by Maverick-Gage Publishing in conjunction with IngramSpark, in the United States of America.

  First printing edition 2021.

  Maverick-Gage Publishing

  Allentown, PA

  [email protected]

  www.maverick-gage.com

  John Elijah Cressman

  www.johnecressman.com

  In memory of my friend and mentor, Sam Losagio, Jr., who helped me at time when I needed it most and opened a new pathway for me that gave me the confidence to try new things - like writing.

  Samuel C. Losagio, Jr

  1947 - 2021

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Epilogue

  Join the Adventure

  LitRPG

  More LitRPG

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  ⁠Two full moons and a sliver of a third moon illuminated the night sky as Ethan and his group sat huddled around the crackling fire. The orc shamans and their escorts were camped a short distance away. The distance wasn't just physical. There was now a coldness from the orcs that hadn't previously been there, and he hoped it wouldn't escalate into trouble.

  "You really believe my father is alive?" asked Guinevere. The blond warrior woman sat on a rock, across the fire from him. Her face was dirty from days of travel and her blond hair was limp, but neither could hide the fact that she was beautiful.

  Guinevere had been the wife of King Arthur and former queen of Camelot, a thousand years ago. She was also the daughter of Merlin, the legendary wizard. Back in that time, she had drunk from the Fountain of Youth and no longer aged - her beauty and youth immortalized by magic.

  The concept of magic and fountains of youth would have seemed pure fantasy a year ago to Ethan. Back before any of this happened, he'd been just an average computer technician in a dead-end support job. Then he'd been abducted by aliens and dropped onto an alien world.

  Ethan looked up into the sky at the moons and the strange configuration of stars as if to remind himself this was all real. Yes. It was all real - as was magic. In fact, he was a wizard. He could manipulate magical forces that back on Earth would seem impossible. He didn't fully understand exactly how he did it, but he could bend elements and even space to his will. And that wasn't the only strange thing.

  Thinking about it, he opened up his HUD - his heads-up display. Like something from a video game back on Earth, the HUD displayed images about his stats. The words and numbers appeared in what appeared to be English, seeming to float in his vision. Yet, it was invisible to everyone but him.

  He assumed the aliens had done something to him - modified him in some way - so that he saw the HUD. It seemed a logical assumption considering he'd discovered that the natives of this world didn't have a HUD and the few other abductees he'd met did have one. But what that meant was anyone's guess.

  As he thought of other abductees, he glanced at his wife, Nia, on his right-hand side. He'd originally met three other abductees who had been dropped into the world at the same time he had. There had been Nia, Ainslee and Yuliana. None of them were human.

  Nia was a foxgirl. She looked like a human, but had fox-like ears that poked through her rust-colored hair. She also had a large, bushy fox tail. In addition, she had fine hair across her entire body. The hairs were rust colored on her back and sides and white all along her front.

  She had a keen sense of smell and hearing, though her hearing wasn't as sharp as the elves he'd met. Nia was an extremely skilled warrior who came from a more primitive planet that adhered to some sort of male-dominated pack system where tribes followed a powerful alpha.

  When they'd first met, she'd been unable to kill enemies due to orders from her previous alpha. This had hamstrung her in combat until they'd made love and she'd informed him that he was her new alpha and that they were married.

  Ethan didn't know the legalities of it, but he wasn't about to argue with the deadly foxgirl. Besides, he actually did care for her and was captivated by her exotic beauty and inner strength. She was certainly leagues above the women he'd dated back home.

  The other two abductees, Ainslee and Yuliana, no longer traveled with him. Ainslee, who looked and acted like the quintessential dwarf from fantasy novels, had never wanted to be an adventurer or fight monsters. She just wanted to work a forge.

  After they had found Camelot, the dwarf had called it quits and had gone back to Hawkshead. They'd found enough money to fund her forge and Ethan hoped she was happy back there crafting items for the villagers.

  Then there was Yuliana. The strange elf had come from a world where she and the other elves tended groves that were maintained by huge tree creatures. They'd found some of the same creatures around Camelot and Yuliana had decided to stay and tend their grove here on this plane
t.

  He missed the two women. They'd all faced death together many times and Ethan owed his life to them. They'd been good comrades through their many adventures since arriving on this planet.

  When they'd first arrived, they'd been completely lost and had managed to make it to a village called Hawkshead. The traitorous ex-mayor had set the village on a collision course with destruction.

  The mayor had equipped one of the local kobold tribes with weapons to scare away the trade caravans and isolate the village while he hired bandits to terrorize the villagers. It hadn't worked out the way he planned.

  The kobolds used the weapons to destroy the other tribes in the area and, with their competition gone, had turned their sights on the village. It had taken all of them working together to defend the village and kill the kobold leader.

  That's when he'd met Par'karr, the little kobold on his left. Small and scaled, looking like a three-foot-tall humanoid lizard or dinosaur, Par'karr had been one of the few survivors of the kobold purge by the dominant tribe.

  He'd joined with Ethan and revealed that he was a summoner. Using a type of magic Ethan didn't fully understand, he was able to summon large rabbits with unicorn horns, large teeth and glowing red eyes.

  For his part in the defense, Ethan had been made mayor. But even after the village had been saved, it was still in danger of dying out. The kobolds had stopped the trade caravans and the village was being starved of the goods it needed to survive.

  As mayor, Ethan had been tasked by the villagers to go to a nearby city called Castlehaven to re-open trade. But that hadn't been the only reason the villagers wanted him to leave. He'd learned of a much darker reason.

  Ethan was a wizard. He found out that something had been going around killing wizards and sucking out their brains. Not only that, but people around wizards tended to get hurt when the wizards were killed. The villagers hadn't wanted him in the village, in case the same fate had befallen him. He'd been fine with leaving, eager to learn more about the world and more about the magic he wielded.

  In Castlehaven, Ethan had found an order of sages with an immense library. The problem was, it was for members only. To become a member, they'd given him a quest to retrieve some tomes. The only problem was, no one who went into the lost library ever returned.

  He and his friends had journeyed to the destroyed city of Patheos and retrieved the tomes, meeting the elven wizard, Michalus, along the way. The wizard had since become a trusted friend.

  Looking across the fire at Michalus, Ethan knew anyone looking at him would never guess he was over 800 years old. Unlike when they'd first met him, Michalus appeared to be in his mid-20's in human years. In fact, he looked like a human except for the sharper features and long tapered ears.

  Elves lived for nearly 1,000 years and Michalus had been an old elf when they'd met him. Now, thanks to a drink from the fountain of youth, the elf had been restored to his prime and would never age again.

  Despite his young appearance, the wizard held centuries of knowledge about magic. Though, if Ethan was honest, Michalus was much more of an academic than a field mage. Even after plenty of battles, Ethan's own battle magic was much more potent than the wizard's.

  Ethan shook his head as he thought about Michalus and the fountain of youth. The wizard hadn't been the only one to drink from the fountain. A fountain they'd found in Arthur's tomb.

  When Ethan and his friends had returned from the library of Daemonium, in Patheos, they'd learned that a terrible high-pitched sound was scaring off all of the game around Hawkshead. They'd tracked it down to the tomb that the former mayor had uncovered.

  After exploring the tomb and fighting the spider-like denizens, they discovered that it was the final resting place of King Arthur. Resting on his tomb had been the legendary Holy Grail - a cup with amazing healing properties.

  Also in the tomb was a pool of water they had learned was the fountain of youth. A single drink from it made the drinker immortal. Or rather, it made them ageless. They would never die of old age but they could die from other wounds. Nia, Ainslee, and Yuliana had all drunk from the fountain. So had he.

  After realizing that King Arthur had been real and had lived on this world, Ethan had decided to read a book he'd found in the library of Daemonium - a journal from Merlin, the fabled wizard of Arthurian legend.

  In the book, he'd discovered directions to Camelot and he and his friends had set off to find it. Little did he know that he'd been subtly manipulated through magic by Arthur and Guinevere's son, Mordred.

  Mordred had transformed into a tentacled demon and waited for them in the ruins of Camelot. Luckily, Ethan and his friends had defeated the prince-turned-demon and released his mother, Guinevere, from his mental control. The former queen had told them of the fate of Excalibur and they'd set off to find the most famous sword in history.

  But finding Excalibur had been more complicated than he thought. The orcs had seized the tomb of Lord Bryan, the man who carried Excalibur away from Camelot. They demanded that he find the dragon Firestorm and discover why the dragon had begun attacking the area around the orcs.

  Ethan had done so and to his surprise, found out there were two dragons. Firestorm's mate had been injured by a Doemenagg. The Doemenagg were a race of sentient praying mantis creatures that were responsible for the deaths of the wizards - and their missing brains.

  Using the Grail, he had healed the dragon's mate and in return, Firestorm had given Ethan a glowing sigil on his chest. He still was not sure exactly what the sigil did.

  One side effect of having it - and being declared Dragonfriend by Firestorm - was that the orcs had taken him to Excalibur. They took him to Lord Bryan's tomb and - with magic - Ethan had pulled the sword from the stone.

  Looking at Excalibur across his lap, he remembered how he'd teleported himself and the sword out of the stone. During his trip through the Bifrost, he'd been approached by a ghostly apparition. The misty form of Merlin's head had appeared and told Ethan to find him. He'd even gotten a quest to do that very thing.

  "Do you?" Guinevere repeated and Ethan realized he'd zoned out after the warrior woman had asked about her father.

  Ethan looked down at Excalibur. The first time he'd traveled through the Bifrost with the sword, her father had appeared to him and spoke. The old wizard was alive. He nodded. "I think he is. We just have to find him."

  1

  "You really intend to go after Merlin?" Michalus asked, one eyebrow raised.

  Guinevere frowned at the elven wizard for even asking the question but Michalus didn't flinch away.

  Ethan nodded. "Of course."

  "Do you have any idea where to look for him?" the wizard inquired, giving both Ethan and Guinevere a serious look. "He's been missing for quite some time. Where could Merlin be that he can't free himself?"

  Ethan considered the wizard's words. As he did, he saw Guinevere bite her lip and look down. While the rest of them could only speculate on the fabled wizard's powers, only Guinevere - his daughter - would have a good understanding of the man's magical ability.

  He turned to the former queen and daughter of Merlin. "Any idea where we would start looking?"

  Guinevere shook her head. "I don't know where he could be." She sighed. "I thought he died in the explosion. I thought he sacrificed himself to save me - and prevent the warlocks from having their library."

  "That is the last time you saw him, my dear?" Michalus asked.

  "Yes," she replied in a quiet voice.

  "And when was that?" the wizard inquired.

  "I'm not certain." The warrior woman shrugged. "Things were... strange... when I was under Mordred's spell. I lost track of time. It could be a hundred or two hundred years."

  Ethan brought up his HUD and looked at the quest he had received right after the vision.

  You have received a new quest "Legacy of Merlin - Part I"

  The legendary wizard, Merlin, has spoken to you in the Bifrost and asked you to find him.
>
  Find Merlin (0/1).

  Reward: 5000 experience, Unknown.

  Accept quest (yes or no)?

  The quest was vague and really offered little insight into where he might be. It didn't even give Ethan a place to start looking.

  "You've traveled through the Bifrost many times," Michalus said. "Why do you think he chose that particular time to contact you?"

  Having been wondering the same thing, Ethan pointed to the sword that lay across his legs. "It has to have something to do with Excalibur."

  Guinevere peaked an eyebrow. "What makes you think that? Plenty of people have touched the sword before."

  "Yes," Ethan replied with a grin. "But none of them ever pulled it out before."

  "Only Ethan," Nia said with a proud smile and a slight wink at him. "He is the strongest alpha."

  The warrior woman rolled her eyes. "I'll at least concede that you are the first person to pull the sword out since my father put it in the stone. But why would that make a difference? You could be anyone."