The Weaponized: The Complete LitRPG Series Read online

  The Weaponized:

  The Complete LitRPG Series

  Victor Deckard

  Table of contents

  The Weaponized Part I

  David's Current Build Part I

  The Weaponized Part II

  David's Current Build Part II

  The Weaponized Part III

  David's Current Build Part III

  The Weaponized Part IV

  David's Current Build Part IV

  The Weaponized Part V

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  Other books by Victor Deckard

  LitRPG Books

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  Part I

  All of a sudden, consciousness returned to me. I lay on a soft surface that seemed to follow the contours of my body. I just lay there for a moment, pricking up my ears for any sounds. All was quiet and peaceful, though.

  Something was wrong, but it was not until a few seconds later that I realized what was bothering me.

  My mind was empty of any thoughts and memories. I could not remember anything before this moment. Strangely enough, I was not scared.

  I pried my eyelids open to find myself lying supine inside something along the lines of a long box. There was just enough room to accommodate my body. The interior was white-colored and seemed to be made of plastic or metal.

  I lifted my head and looked myself over. I was dressed in a white T-shirt, a pair of blue jeans, and black sneakers. As far as I could tell, I was long and lanky. I seemed to be young. My skin was white. As to my facial features, there was no way to find out what I looked like, because there was no mirror inside the box. I brought my hand to my head and felt my face. I was smoothly shaved. I then ran my fingers over my hair to find it cut short.

  I looked around once again but did not spot anything of interest inside the box.

  I looked up. Above the box was something like a lid. It was round in shape and transparent. Through it, I could see the ceiling. It was white and without any prominent features.

  I put my hands against the lid and pushed. Nothing happened. I pushed harder. The lid would not budge.

  Despite the fact of being locked inside the box—or whatever it actually was—I was not afraid. Since I did not have any memories, I was not even sure if I was supposed to be scared by what was happening.

  One thing was for sure, though. I was trapped inside the mysterious box, and I wanted to get out. The idea of being stuck inside that thing for who knew how long did not appeal to me. Not at all.

  “Hey,” I yelled. “Let me out!”

  The only answer that I received was silence.

  I gave it another try. “Does anybody hear me out there?”

  If there was somebody outside the box, they either did not hear me or did not care.

  Since the lid was not flat but round in shape, it allowed me to prop myself up on my elbows far enough to peek over the edge of the box.

  I saw a square room. It was spacious but mostly empty. It was well lit, though I did not notice any sources of light. The interior of the room was white and futuristic-looking.

  Despite having no memories whatsoever, I intuitively knew that I was not used to living in places like that one.

  There was nobody in the room to be seen.

  I continued to look around.

  The box I was in lay alongside the left-hand wall. Farther down along the wall, at the opposite corner, there was something that looked like a human-sized capsule. It kind of looked like a cryogenic chamber straight out of a Sci-Fi movie. When I turned my head to peer across the room, I saw two more similar capsules or pods along the right-hand wall.

  I realized that what I was actually inside of was not a box but a similar capsule. All the four cryogenic chambers—or whatever they were—were situated at the corners of the room.

  However, unlike the one I lay in, the lids of the other three pods were not transparent. Instead, they were completely dark for whatever reason. Not that it mattered. Even if they were see-through, from where I was, I would not have been able to look inside any of them anyway.

  A thought crossed my mind that the lids of the chambers could be like one-way mirrors, allowing those inside to see out while preventing those outside to see in. Which meant that the outside surface of the lid of my pod might have been completely black too.

  In the middle middle of the room sat a round table. There was nothing on top of it. Behind my chamber, set in the front wall, there was a window. However, since my pod was in the corner next to the window and there was not enough room in my pod to twist around and look back, I could not see what was outside the window. The light the room was bathed in must have been coming in through the window.

  The wall opposite the window had a door set into the middle of it. The door was closed.

  There was nothing else in the room. Whoever had furnished it must have been a fan of minimalism.

  I flattened myself against the bottom of my pod. There had to be a way to get out. I tried to push the lid one more time, but to no avail.

  When I looked around the chamber, this time more carefully and paying attention to details, I noticed something that looked like a small button on the right-hand wall. I punched it with my thumb.

  Against my expectation, the lid above me did not swing open. Something else happened instead. A small holographic display popped up next to the button. On the screen was a piece of information.

  Name: David Tanner

  Nationality: American

  Sex: Male

  Age: 22

  Status: Awake

  Nanotrites: Implanted

  I figured it was about me. So I was a twenty-two-year-old American, and my name was David Tanner. Good to know.

  It also informed me that I was awake. Which was great. It probably meant that it was not just a dream. But not necessarily.

  However, I was still none the wiser in terms of how to get out of the capsule.

  The last line had me confused. Nanotrites? What the heck it was? And where the heck were they implanted, whatever they were? Were they implanted in my body?

  I looked myself over one more time but did not notice anything out of place. I pulled my shirt from my waistband and up so I could see my stomach and chest. There were no scars or cuts from surgeries to be seen.

  I turned my head to look at the holographic screen again. Probably if I tap on the word nanotrites, a piece of explanatory information would pop up.

  So I touched the tip of my index finger to the holographic screen. Surprisingly, my finger did not go through it. I could feel a hard surface beneath my fingertip as if the holographic screen was actually made of plastic.

  No piece of explanatory information popped up. Something else happened instead. The piece of my personal information disappeared, and two buttons appeared on the screen.

  [OPEN CHAMBER DOOR]

  [CLOSE CHAMBER DOOR]

  The latter one was grayed-out and could not be pressed. It figured. I pushed the former one. As soon as my fingertip made contact with the button, the transparent lid above me parted vertically, and then the two halves soundlessly slid in the opposite walls of the pod.

  I was free to go.

  After sitting up, I looked around the room one more time. Nothing had changed in there since the last time I studied it.

  I got to my feet and stepped over the edge of the pod. Since there was hardly anything in the room, I made a beeline for the door set in the rear wall. I came to a stop to examine the door in front of me.

  It did not have a handle. I gave it a push, but the door would not budge. I stepped even closer to it and put my ear
to the surface. No sound reached me from the other side.

  Taking a step backward, I gave the door another quick look-over before balling my right hand into a fist and banging it once against the door. I strained to hear. No sound reached my ears. I slammed my fist against the door a few more times and yelled, “Does anybody hear me?”

  And again, the only reply that I received was dead silence. Either nobody was on the other side of the door or the door was soundproof.

  When I was about to turn away from the door, I noticed a small touchscreen panel set into the wall to the right of the door. The screen was black. I tapped it with my finger. Nothing happened. The touchscreen seemed deactivated. I studied the walls next to the door but did not notice any buttons, levers, or anything else that I could press or pull.

  I turned around, away from the door. As I had noticed before, the room was spacious but mostly empty. In the middle of the room sat something that resembled a small round table. Along the wall to my right, at each corner sat a pod. The one I had climbed out of a moment before was open. The other one was closed and had its lid completely black and opaque. Along the wall to my left, there were two more similar pods—capsules, cryogenic chambers, or whatever they were.

  However, I was looking neither at them nor at the table. My gaze was fixed on the window set into the wall opposite the door. The window was almost as large as the wall itself.

  Through the window could be seen a yellow disk of the sun and myriads of stars against the black velvet of space.

  At this exact moment, I remembered everything.

  I was indeed a twenty-two-year-old American, living in Cincinnati. I worked at a retail store. I did not make a lot of money. In my spare time, I liked to play video games. I gamed on a video game console. I liked to play competitive first-person shooters because they were very dynamic and action-packed. And I also enjoyed playing role-playing games, for they offered the player large and open fictional worlds that the player was free to explore. They were great escapist video games.

  I had never played virtual reality video games but always wanted to. I had been saving money for quite a while. I had wanted to buy a Macro Envision, a virtual reality headset manufactured by a Chinese company. It had been created one year before and quickly become the main competitor to the Valve Index.

  I had finally saved enough money to buy a Macro Envision and a PC build powerful enough to run the most graphically demanding VR video games.

  I had purchased The Weaponized, a VR video game developed by the same Chinese company that created the Macro Envision headset. The Weaponized was a first-person shooter with some RPG elements. The game was set in a distant future where humans colonized lots of solar systems and were traveling the Universe in space ships.

  After the video game was downloaded and all the updates were installed, I had put on my Macro Envision headset, excited to plunge into my first VR video game. A button had popped up in the middle of my field of vision, saying START THE GAME. When I pressed the button, everything had gone dark before my eyes. I had seemed to lose consciousness for a moment.

  The next thing I knew, I had woken up in the pod in this strange place.

  What the heck did it mean? How had I ended up in this weird place? All I had wanted to do had been to play a virtual reality video game.

  Or was I inside the game now? I doubted it. Everything around me looked so freaking real. In fact, if someone told me that I was inside a video game, I would not believe them.

  I lived in 2020, and in 2020 there were no video games that looked so realistic you could not tell them apart from real life.

  If I was actually inside the VR video game, then I should be able to pull my headset off and return to real life, right? But when I had been inside the pod, I had touched my head but had not discovered anything on my head.

  Nevertheless, I decided to try again. I brought my hands up. When my fingers touched my head, I found out that I was not wearing any headsets. It was not surprising at all.

  So where the heck was I and how had I ended up here?

  I crossed the room, stepping around the small table, and walked to the large window. Outside, I could see the sun and thousands of stars scattered across the vast expanse of pitch-black space. The Earth was nowhere in sight, though. Or any other planets for that matter.

  This place appeared to be a space station. But it was no International Space Station, that was for damn sure. I had seen some videos on the ISS, so I knew what the interior of the ISS looked like. It was way too cramped and outdated. The room I was in, however, was spacious, comfortable, neat, and its interior looked futuristic as if it was a decoration for a Sci-Fi movie.

  There was no way to know if the space station I was on was located in the Solar System or somewhere else. I did not know if the sun I was looking at was actually the Sun. It could be some other star located at the center of this star system.

  The stars outside the window were just bright dots to me. I knew that some people could easily recognize stars and constellations. But I was not one of them. I had never been interested in astronomy. I hardly ever lifted my head to look up at the night sky and observe the stars overhead.

  What struck me as surprising was that I could look at the sun without even squinting. It was somewhat bigger than the Sun when observed from Earth and seemed to be brighter. Still, I could look right at the star without squinting. It did not irritate my eyes at all as if I was looking at the picture. The window probably had a protective quality.

  Moreover, while the room was cast in a soft bluish glow, the sun was yellow, which meant that the window somehow prevented the sunlight from reaching in. The room had to be lit by artificial lights. Not that I could see any.

  I turned away from the window and swept my gaze around the room. I looked at the pod that sat along the same wall as mine did. I walked up to it and looked down at the black lid. I had woken up in a pod. There were three others in the room. Was there a person in each of them too?

  The lid of the pod I was standing next to was completely dark, which prevented me from seeing in. I bent over it and said loudly, “Is anybody there?”

  I listened for a moment. No sound came from inside the pod. I knocked on the lid and listened again. All was quiet. If there was somebody in the pod, they were either asleep or could not hear me. Or the pod might have been soundproof.

  I decided to check the other two pods that sat on the other side of the room. I figured the result would be the same but wanted to check them anyway, just to be sure.

  I began to walk across the room. When I neared the small table in the middle of the room, I stepped too close to it, which must have triggered an activation function because a 3D holographic image popped up above the surface of the table. It kind of looked like a colorful cloud with lots of sparkling dots inside of it.

  “What the heck is this?” I muttered to myself under my breath.

  “Welcome, warrior,” a male voice said. “What you are now looking at is a map of the Universe.”

  I almost jumped in surprise. I jerked my head this way and that but did not see anyone in the room.

  “I am so sorry for startling you,” the mysterious voice said. “I did not mean to do it.”

  The voice seemed to be emanating from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  “You didn’t startle me,” I muttered. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I am so sorry,” the voice replied, sounding genuinely saddened. “I hope you can forgive me for being so inconsiderate.”

  “Who are you?” I asked as I looked around the room one more time, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.

  “I’m an Artificial Intelligence of this space station,” the voice replied. “You can call me Echo. This is what my creators used to call me. I’m here to assist you in your work and help you in any way I can, warrior.”

  I realized that the AI must automatically have been activated when I
had approached the small table in the middle of the room.

  I took a deep breath.

  Okay, I thought. Time to get some answers.

  “Where am I, Echo?” I asked.

  “You are on the space station called the SS-29,” Echo replied. “The SS-29 is located in a star system called BZS175-94750-77. There is a single planet in BZS175-94750-77, which is a gas giant with liquid hydrogen oceans on its surface and little else.”

  “Uh, okay,” I muttered. “So this system is unhabitable?”

  “That’s correct,” Echo said. “There are no planets or planeloads suitable for habitation in this system. This is the kind of place that hardly anyone ever visits, which makes it a perfect location for the SS-99.”

  “What do you mean exactly?” I asked.

  “Being rarely visited by space travelers reduces the chances of somebody stumbling across this system to almost zero percent,” the AI explained.

  I had so many questions to ask of Echo I took a moment to think of the next one. I really wanted to know how I had ended up being here but decided to ask something else first.

  “I take it it’s important to keep this space station well hidden, right?” I inquired.

  “That’s correct.”

  “But why?”

  “So people who don’t agree with our organization’s politics cannot assault and invade it,” Echo said.

  “People like what?”

  “The dregs of the Universe,” Echo said. “Criminals. Greedy mercenaries. Bandits. Guns for hire. And other such lowlifes who do not respect human lives and rights and contribute to the killing of noncombatant civilians. Such people do not like our organization and would love to destroy it.”

  “So the organization you’re talking about fights against crime?”

  “That’s correct to some extent, warrior,” Echo replied. “Our organization’s main goal is to help colonists.”

  “Colonists?”

  “Yes. Humans have always been looking for new worlds suitable for habitation and terraforming those incapable of supporting terrestrial life.”