Ian Jackson swatted the last goblin-thing with his sword. It hit the ground, disappeared, the victory music played, and then Jackson was back in the stone corridor. The monsters left behind thirty-one pieces of gold.
Supposedly.
Jackson never saw it. He never did. The gold was always transferred automatically to his inventory. Currently he was carrying 1,936 gold coins.
In his pockets.
That wasn't all. He was also currently carrying twenty daggers, fifty arrows, seven swords, seven axes, three spears, eight wizard's staffs, two hammers, three shields, five helmets, sixty assorted bits of armor, six pairs of boots, a whip, and seventy-two medicinal herbs. And this was before even considering the slimeballs and other weirdness he didn't dare sell off in case it turned out to be useful later.
In a rucksack.
It was kind of stupid when you thought about it.
Jackson tried not to.
It was a stupid world.
The corridor turned around to the right. He must be getting near the heart of the dungeon. Nothing had leapt out to commit suicide on the end of his sword for the last fifty paces.
The walls were made out of crumbling old stone, lit up at regular intervals with burning torches. Foul smelling water oozed out of cracks and dribbled down the walls. The corridor continued for maybe a hundred meters or so before turning right again. Jackson was more interested in the big wooden door situated in the right hand wall, about halfway down the corridor.
Such an obvious boss location, he thought. So predictable.
He walked down the corridor and stopped outside the door. It was bigâmore than two meters high and wide enough for two men to walk through abreast. It was also in considerably better condition than the rest of the ruins. The wood was bright red in color and the hinges were freshly polished brass.
This definitely led to the area boss.
Jackson paused and checked his status. The last fight had taken him up to level thirteen. He had some new skill points. He put them into Sword and noticed how the blade in his hand suddenly felt lighter. He cast Cure to take his health back to full.
A little over a week ago Jackson had been living a fairly ordinary, if dull, life as a software developer writing transaction processing systems for a bank. It was as interesting as it sounded, but it paid well and Jackson felt fortunate to have landed the job straight out of university. In evenings he spent his time playing console games and at the weekend he hit the bars to watch sports with the guys from work.
All that had gone to hell when he'd been sucked into a computer game.
It was a long story.
The ending was simple. Beat the game and he was out. No problem. Jackson was fucking shit-hot at computer games...
...but did it have to be a fucking Japanese Role-Playing Game?
Everyone knew fantasy JRPGs were the turdiest of turds in the gaming world. Well, apart from the old nerds that still went misty-eyed at the mention of
Final Fantasy VII
. At least in
Tron
, Garrett Hedlund had Beau Garrett in a skintight silver jumpsuit to drool over. Jackson had bug-eyed morons with memories that would shame a goldfish. On leaving the first village he'd managed maybe forty meters before a giant cucumber had sprung out of the undergrowth and attacked him with a spear.
JRPGs were fucking stupid, and he was trapped in one.
At least it would be easy. All JRPGs were. Kill monsters until you leveled up enough to kill harder monsters. Repeat until the end of the game. Whenever that was.
That was the problem with JRPGs, they dragged on for fucking forever. He knew from bitter experience. Those bastards had sucked up months of his life before he'd finally grown up and discovered GTA and real games.
Maybe he'd figure out some kind of strategic exploit. All these games could be broken in half once a smart player figured them out. The only problem was Jackson was still working through the dull-as-shit early stages. It had already taken him over a week to find this, the second dungeon.
At least he was at the boss.
Okay, let's do this.
He pushed the door open.
On the other side was a large throne room. Gaily-colored silk banners adorned the walls. The whole room was a massive contrast to the rest of the crumbling ruins. A thick red carpet scrunched beneath his sandals as he entered the room. Impressive chandeliers and candelabra bathed the room in a warm glow. At the far end of the room a golden throne sat on a raised dais.
So predictable.
A sexy and extremely sluttily-dressed girl sat on the throne. Demon girl to be more exact. As Jackson walked up to the throne she stood up and purple-black bat wings unfurled from behind her back. As well as the wings she also had horns and a long slender tail with the classic spade-like tip.
Not a bad collection of pixels, if you were into that kind of thing.
"Welcome to the lair of MorÊhâgg the succubus, adventurer," horny fetish-bait said. "I'm going to enjoy playing with you."
"And ima gonna give your face a good turkey-slappin' wiv my penis," Jackson said.
Jackson had given up bothering to say anything sensible. It was a JRPG. No one had more than three lines of dialogue and it didn't matter what he said anyway.
Demonic perv-magnet pouted at him. "Wouldn't you rather I sucked it instead?"
Eh?
No time to ponder what he'd thought she said. He felt that strange swirly dislocation that indicated he was about to enter battle. His vision blurred and then cleared. He was standing in the same location, but everything around him appeared crisper, as if he was seeing it all at a higher resolution.
That included the succubus.
Jackson smiled and shook his head. So predictable. Didn't matter what age the game was aimed at, the dirty old developers couldn't resist sneaking in an obvious fetish fuel character for them and their audience of adolescent boys to perv over. Jackson used to be one of those adolescent boys before he'd grown up and realized how sad it was.
MorĂŠhâgg was worthy of a good perv. She looked like filth incarnate. She possessed the mountainous silicone-enhanced peaks of a porn actress welded to an impossibly thin wasp waistâthe kind of figure that could only exist in hentai. Her costume wasn't exactly there to preserve modesty. Her shiny purple top revealed more cleavage than it hid, and the glossy material was stretched almost to bursting trying to contain her abundant breasts. The eye-shaped clasp that held the thing together at her chest looked like it might pop at any moment. Most of her flat belly, including the little dimple of her navel, was exposed. Her long lithe legs were covered in kinky fishnet stockings that ran down to a pair of sexy stiletto heels. The stockings were attached to her waist with suspenders.
Fetish fuel. Pure filthy fetish fuel.
She was also the area boss. Jackson could tellâshe had her own battle theme.
That was the other stupid thing. Every time he went into battle, music would start playing even though there wasn't a single musician in sight. Usually it was something wibbly-warbly that was meant to be rousing, but instead sounded like someone farting through a tin in a bath full of semen. MorĂŠhâgg's music was differentâslow and slinky. Dirty.
Wait!
Jackson noticed she wasn't wearing any underwear. He looked between her legs and saw a neat little bar of trimmed pubic hair and the shadowy cleft of her pussy.
This was...unexpected.
