Steele Alchemist: A LitRPG Series Read online

  Suddenly, Elliot’s face drained of color. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Jake didn’t take offence; he was used to it. When Jake’s parents had been killed, people didn’t know how to act as around him. Jake just wanted them to treat him like normal. Even now, two years later, his best friend still struggled with his behavior around him sometimes. Jake tried putting him at ease whenever this happened, but it was like the area around him was made completely of egg shells.

  Jake patted his friend on the back. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Have you even heard back about the scholarship?”

  Jake held his friend’s stare. “Nothing yet.”

  “Don’t worry. They probably have a lot of applications to get through, but with a portfolio like yours, you’ll get the scholarship. In a few days, you’ll get the letter. Trust me - I’m a doctor. Or I will be in six years.”

  That would have been fine, had Jake not completely lied about applying for the scholarship. He had always wanted to study photography at college. For a large part of his life, he’d been obsessed by it. Growing up, he’d won junior competitions, then young adult ones, and everyone said his stuff would make him rich one day. Or they’d make him broke, but famous. Either way, they said he wouldn’t be working a nine to five.

  The problem was that after his parents died, Jake hadn’t even picked up his camera. It was one of the few things that had been salvaged from the old house, but since that night, he hadn’t even taken off the lens cap.

  So, when Elliot found the scholarship and excitedly told Jake he’d be able to go to a college only fifty miles away from his, Jake didn’t have the heart to tell his friend that he couldn’t face picking up his camera, let alone studying photography. Then, the lie had gone on for too long, and now he was stuck with it.

  He didn’t like lying. In fact, this was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told, but he just couldn’t bring himself to make it right.

  He didn’t dwell on things much. His parents, what happened, his life after that…it was what it was. No point moaning about it. It just meant that he’d developed the viewpoint that there wasn’t much point working toward stuff long-term, since the bitch called fate could sock you in the jaw whenever it pleased and end your fight for good.

  Making long term plans in life was like building a mansion on a foundation of quick sand, and only a lunatic would do that. Whereas time with his buddy, drinking beers…well, fate was hardly likely to interrupt those kinds of plans, was it?

  “Since we’ve both got something to lose,” said Elliot, “Let’s just go, and then find some other place tomorrow. I get the feeling this place is too hot. Like there’s more to it than we thought.”

  Jake couldn’t take his gaze away from the blue light and the way it zapped across the rectangle from side to side. Hypnotic, almost. If he listened carefully, he was sure he could hear a buzzing sound coming from it. It seemed to radiate off a deep sense of cold.

  “Steele?” said Elliot.

  Jake nodded, and then faced his buddy. “Deal. We’ll find somewhere else tomorrow.”

  Chapter Two

  Despite leaving the warehouse at the same time and only living two streets away from each other, Jake knew that Elliot would have gotten home an hour before he did. It wasn’t that Jake had screwed around before going home or something like that.

  If only.

  The problem was that the route home was quickest if you went via the tunnel under the train tracks, which cut an hour off the journey. Right after the tunnel, it brought you out onto Sickelmore Elm. That was the street where Jake used to live with his parents.

  He tried going that way. He really did. He followed Elliot all the way to the tunnel, right up close enough to see the dim glow of the cheap, dirty lights that lined the stone walls. And then he stopped.

  He looked into the tunnel, and all he could think about was Sickelmore Elm laying right outside it. Of the old house, which the new owners had probably spent money renovating after what happened. The more he thought about it, the more his older memories threatened to reappear. He almost heard the smashing glass and the screams and the blood…

  He turned around. He said bye to Elliot and took the much longer route home. By the time he got back he was exhausted, yet when he went to bed, he still couldn’t sleep.

  All he could think about was the blue light. Whenever he shut his eyes, there it was shining back at him. Pulsating, buzzing. What was it?

  When Elliot called him the next night, he made an excuse. Then, as soon as the sky turned black, he went to the factory, climbed over the chain-link fence, crept down the stairs and sought the rectangle of pulsing light.

  He came back night after night, always drawn to that same, dank, circular room. He spent hours there. Even a whole night, once. Missed calls piled up on his phone. Bags grew heavy under his eyes from lack of sleep, yet he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  The first time he went, he took a bunch of water bottles and dried snacks and kept them in a rucksack that he put next to a wall. In a fit of paranoia, he also brought a baseball bat with him. It had been years since he’d hit a ball with it, but it’d serve as protection in case anyone ever followed him down here.

  If he was really honest, in a way he could never be with another person but only to himself, he also wanted protection from something else. What if something came through the portal? Some kind of crazed lunatic? It was safer to have the bat. One sweet swing and anyone threatening him would hit the ground.

  With food, water, protection and a burning sense of curiosity, he began experimenting. First, he tossed a handful of stones at the light rectangle. He listened to hear them landing on the floor, even though he knew that they wouldn’t. When they hit the light, they were sucked into it. The question was; where were they going?

  He tried tying a stick to a length of rope and tossing it into the light to see if he could pull it back out. Instead, the rope was yanked from his hand so fast that the friction burnt his skin. Next, he tried throwing water at it. Then a handful of muesli, followed by a potato. He lobbed anything at all he could possibly think of and wasn’t worried about losing, but all with the same result.

  After two weeks of his nightly visits to the rectangle of light, he gave up. There was no figuring the thing out. What’s more, he’d only gotten four hours of sleep per night for fourteen days. He was tired, hungry, and the light was mocking him. He was a wreck.

  It was time to give in.

  Despite that, it was a rainy night not too long after he’d made his decision, when things changed.

  He was at home. He walked through the house and into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and grabbed a beer. He untwisted the cap and sank the bottle back in one long gulp. After that, he found his pack of hidden smokes. He’d given up a few months earlier, but he kept a pack in the house for times when he felt like crap.

  He’d gotten through four beers and half the pack of smokes, when Elliot rang him. This time, Jake answered. He expected Elliot to be angry with him. He braced himself for him to be pissed. Instead, his buddy sounded sad.

  “I was hoping you’d come by before I went, Jake.”

  The scholarship – shit! He’d been so wrapped up in that damn rectangle of light that he’d forgotten about Elliot!

  “Let me get a shower and I’ll be right over, buddy. We’ll see you off in style.”

  “It’s too late, man. I left yesterday. You didn’t pick up your phone.”

  So that was it, then. His best buddy had gone across the country to college. Jake only had himself to blame. Not just for the last few weeks, but he’d been the one to persuade Elliot to go to college in the first place.

  Elliot used to get bullied a lot in school, and they became friends when Jake stopped it. Elliot hadn’t been planning to go to college since he thought it’d just be like a more stressful version of school; bigger bullies, more work. Jake had talked him into it.

  Where did t
hat leave Jake? He had the grades for college, but didn’t have the money. His best friend was miles away, and Jake hadn’t even gone to say bye to him. He was the biggest jerk ever.

  Fuck it.

  There was no profound epiphany for him, no moment of self-reflection. The only thing he could think was ‘fuck it.’

  He left his house. Nobody would miss him. After his parents died, Jake was facing a stay in foster care, since the Steele family tree was more of a shrub than a mighty oak. Then, Jake had remembered his uncle.

  He was his mum’s older brother. Jake had never met him, but mum had talked about him. How much of a recluse he was, that he used to just go travelling for months on end and not tell anyone. It had started, according to Jake’s mum, when his uncle had been in a car accident, and his wife and children had died. After that, he couldn’t stay in one place. Jake had never met his aunt or cousins, since they died before he was born, but he guessed it gave he and his uncle something in common. If only he’d ever seen the guy.

  After his parents died and the system wondered what to do with him, Jake tracked down his uncle’s house. He went to see him, only to find it empty, and that he must have been away travelling. Jake decided that he’d prefer to live in his uncle’s house than a care home or with a foster family, but the problem was that his uncle wasn’t around to give consent.

  Jake wasn’t about to let a little thing like that stop him.

  He wasn’t proud of what he did to solve this. Well…maybe he was a little proud. It was wrong, but he reasoned that when his uncle got back from whichever far-flung part of the world he was in, he’d listen to Jake and he’d understand why he did what he did.

  With that in mind, he broke into his uncle’s house, which was pretty easy since his urban exploring usually involved some kind of breaking and entering.

  Once that was done, he found a draft of a letter with his uncle’s signature on it, and he used this to fill out custody forms, so that he registered his uncle as his guardian. Then, for the all-important face to face meeting with social services, Jake paid a homeless man to clean himself up and pose as his uncle.

  The guy was named Ken Delph, and he deserved an Oscar for his performance in the meeting. He was so good that with the paperwork complete and the meeting done, Jake found himself under the guardianship of his uncle, a guy who he had never met, and who happened to have no idea he’d agreed to become Jake’s guardian.

  Since then, Jake had been living alone in his uncle’s house. All the bills seemed to get paid from his uncle’s bank account, so there was no trouble there. The only problem was that he didn’t have any money for clothes and stationary for school, little things like that.

  One day, Jake rang his uncle’s bank. He had the idea that since he knew his uncle’s account number and other details, he could pretend to be him on the phone and transfer money over to his own account. This plan hit a snag when he couldn’t answer one of the security questions; the woman on the line asked him what his favorite color was, and Jake didn’t have a clue which color his uncle had chosen as the answer.

  Eventually, he took a job at the Dime Mart so he could buy food, and aside from a little loneliness, he got by. Later, he got a job at the Rum Drum Bar. The owner was a shady guy, and he didn’t care that Jake was too young to work in a bar, just as long as he could pay him cash in hand and avoid taxes.

  Still, that meant that now, at a time where he was feeling pretty dark, there was nobody to talk to. He put on his warmest coat and his comfiest trainers and prepared to leave the house. On a whim, he darted upstairs and grabbed a box from under his bed. He pulled his camera out of it, slung it around his neck, and then went back downstairs. He couldn’t say what had made him get the camera, and he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to think too much about it.

  He took one last look around at his uncle’s house, and then opened the front door. There was nobody to say bye to as he left and then walked down the street under the flickering streetlamps.

  He jogged across town until he was at the factory, and then he climbed the chain-link fence again. The rain fell so heavily that the patters drowned out every other sound. The drops pelted thin metal roof of an adjoining storage building. It drummed onto the top of a rusted barrel.

  Turning around, he listened for any cars nearby. He hadn’t even taken time to listen on his radio at home and get an idea of the police squad car patrol routes tonight. He just didn’t care. Right now, he couldn’t hear anything.

  The factory door gave way reluctantly, turning on its stiff hinges and making a creaking sound that echoed through the abandoned workshop. The darkness inside was so thick that it was like syrup that he had to wade through, and he felt as if the blackness stuck to him. He flicked on his torch and sent a beam of yellow light in front of him to guide his way. He crossed the factory floor and reached the end.

  That was when he heard the noise.

  It was the telltale sound of a siren wailing. He stopped. On and on the siren went, dim at first, but getting louder and louder, and being joined by another one. They were getting closer.

  Surely they weren’t coming for him? There hadn’t been a problem when he and Elliot had been here before, or all the other times after that when he’d come alone. But maybe someone had spotted him coming and going, and maybe they knew the owner and they’d told him about it. Perhaps someone had installed an alarm system. It was pretty annoying when people employed rightful measures to protect the property they owned. People ought to make it easier for trespassers.

  The sirens reached the peak of their volume now, before cutting out. The drumming of the rain on the tin roof became the loudest sound. Then, he heard the slam of a car door.

  His stomach shook. They were here. The cops. He’d had run ins with the Five-O before. Sometimes, even the best of plans threw a surprise in his face. Despite that, he didn’t have a record, since he always managed to get away. Now, though, he was pretty stuck.

  He could turn and leave and try and outrun them. It probably wouldn’t work, but it was his only chance.

  And he wasn’t going to take it.

  He rushed down the never-ending staircase so fast that he almost tripped. At the bottom, he crossed into the circular room and saw his old friend, the blue light. His pulse hammered like a pneumatic drill.

  Footsteps from somewhere above; way above him, all the way on the ground floor. He heard the dim call of voices. They were looking for him.

  He looked at the light. Was he imagining it, or was the light crackling more than usual tonight?

  It didn’t matter. He had no objects with him today. No coins, no ropes, nothing. He had just a vague plan and maybe even something of a death wish. He knew it was dangerous, but he just didn’t care anymore. If he didn’t do this, what was waiting for him? More nights in front of the TV?

  No. At least this way, he’d be doing something. Exploring. College was out, the cops were here, and Elliot had left.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Heavy boots clanking on the metal staircase, one clank after another. They were rushing down. They knew he was here.

  No way back now. No regrets. No point wasting time. Let’s do this.

  He took a deep breath and charged toward the light as though he was rushing into a tackle.

  He had just enough time to think ‘what the hell am I doing?’ before he crossed into the light and heard it buzz all around him.

  The blue rays washed over him, freezing cold. It felt like he’d plunged into a pool of ice water, yet he wasn’t wet. The blue pulses blinded him until he could see nothing else. In a moment of panic, he wondered if he’d fried his retinas.

  But then his vision came back. There was no darkness. No dank walls, no shadows.

  He was sat in the middle of a field.

  Chapter Three

  The grass around him was yellow and dead, and some of the stalks snapped when the wind blew them. A mean-looking cloud brooded in the sky. He smelled something earthy in the air.
A bitter aroma of herbs. Rosemary, maybe, and Oregano, but different. He liked it, but didn’t quite recognize it.

  Where the hell was he?

  He stood up. On the ground next to him was a stick with rope tied around it. A few yards away, a coin was nestled in the grass. Near that was a potato. Jake would never profess to be an expert or anything, but he was pretty sure that was his potato. Hell, he’d recognize that potato anywhere!

  So, this was where all his stuff had gone when he threw it through the portal. The place was beautiful, no doubting that. Jake knew beauty when he saw it, and being in the countryside brought back memories of trips he took as a kid. There was something about being in a grassy plain that made you think everything was right with the world. That when you got away from the smog-filled cities, nature smiled at you.