Table of Contents

  Summary

  Black Forge Books Mailing List

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Patreon

  Books by Black Forge

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

  GameLit, Harem, and Cultivation on Facebook

  LitRPG on Facebook

  Even More LitRPG on Facebook

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Summary

  WHAT LIES BENEATH THIS planet of mystery?

  Roy Boss had it made. He had three sexy monster girls and two cute baby girls, and he murdered the hell out of the guy who stole his company. The only thing left to do was to go back through the stargate and take back his property...or at least that’s what he thought before the gateway to the planet’s underworld swung open.

  The revelations of the deep dark are astounding: the birth of the Pelerine, the secrets of the Coptics, and the arrival of the UnWolf. But by learning the secret histories, Roy has drawn the attentions of an ancient foe. He’ll have to level up, gather more resources, and print his own army of monsters, or the planet of Plymouth will die a second time—and this time, the future of the Milky Way Galaxy might perish with it.

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  Chapter One

  ROY BOSS WOKE WITH a nagging feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Either the niddies would wake up and start fussing, or Halcyon would alert him about a new threat. Either possibility made going back to sleep difficult.

  It had been a peaceful four months, ever since Roy took care of Ennis Tolliver, but Roy could feel trouble brewing. He was in the master bedroom of the Yellow Home, in the big king bed between Toxy, a sex-hungry spider queen, and Tails, a sweet hellfox girl. He knew his babies were awake. They hadn’t cried out yet. He was going to give them the chance to fall back to sleep.

  It was a weird feeling, knowing that your children were awake in the middle of the night and might need you. It was primal, a cave dweller’s instinct that had somehow survived his consciousness getting digitized and beamed into a new body in a new galaxy. He glanced at the clock. A little after midnight. It meant both of the little niddies had slept for a full three hours. Now, that was a fucking Christmas miracle!

  The human sleep cycle was measured in ninety minutes blocks. It seemed little spider babies had the same cycle. So Arra and Nida had slept two full cycles without waking. They were only three months old but growing at an exponential rate. In those three months, Roy had learned to appreciate sleep like nothing else. And for a time, family had become more important than returning to the Milky Way Galaxy and winning back his company. Not that he could get back there, since the Plymouth Gate was closed.

  Both he and Halcyon had been working on finding the stargate and opening it. However, with most of Plymouth’s computer network locked down, all information was limited. If Roy could access more of the network, he could find the gate and figure out a way to open it.

  When that did happen, Roy was determined to have an army of monster girls to help him take back VentureForge Industries. That meant he had to acquire raw materials—Effexium and Cloned Protein Material—to print his army. Which is what they were working on now...when he wasn’t changing diapers.

  Arra and Nida weren’t crying out. He heard a soft little coo from the nursery but no cries of alarm. And nothing from Halcyon either.

  Roy figured he was being stupid. He pulled his quilt up against the December night. The quilt had been printed from Effexium, programmable matter based on nanobot technology. He’d printed his own comforter because the spider queen was so quick to steal the covers with her four spider legs, which sometimes seemed to move even when she was asleep.

  Tails didn’t need a blanket. She sprouted her nine tails and slept in a fuzzy bed of bushy fur, all wrapped up and cozy. She radiated heat as well, which made sense since she was a fire-based dungeon boss.

  Tails was still asleep, her cute little foxy face resting peacefully. She’d been relaxing more and more into her full fox face, which made kissing hard. Oh, well. Roy liked the little licks she gave. She had red fur, a big bushy mane of red hair, fox ears, and freckles where she didn’t have fur.

  Toxy was also snoozing, one leg adjusting the bedspread to cover an exposed shoulder. All six of her eyes were closed under her inky black hair.

  Roy was almost asleep when Halcyon’s voice hit his ear like a hammer. “Holy shit, Roy.”

  Toxy moaned.

  Tails popped up, tails flaming on.

  “Holy fucking shit, guys!” Halcyon cursed so much because she was a bad copy of Roy’s old friend and business associate, Joyce Halcyon. Now? She was mostly made up of porn.

  “What is it?” Roy asked.

  The A.I.’s answer was less than great. “Arra and Nida are awake. Not crying. But I’m pretty sure they both have full diapers.”

  Toxy sat upright, blinking all six eyes. “This is an emergency, darling. Arra’s diaper rash was just getting better.” The spider queen was being serious. She had the accent of a British duchess who was used to servants and high tea.

  Roy squinted. “You woke us up for that?”

  Halcyon cursed more. “No, fuck, that’s not...sorry. I’m a little distracted. The gate in the UGR just opened”

  Roy was off the bed in a second. That damn mystery gate had been strange from the very beginning—a twenty-foot metal circle in the floor, closed up tight and sealed with Magnetic Charge Lock technology. Impenetrable.

  Tails was stunned. She blinked, completely surprised. “I thought we were calling it the UGM?”

  The UGR was more accurate, since they had dubbed the strange room the Underground Gate Room on the tenth sublevel of the Molten Rock Labs. Somehow, it had become UGM. No one could get it right.

  “I fucking hate acronyms,” Roy growled. “Tails, come on.”

  “Uh, we have bigger problems than a mysterious gate opening,” Halcyon said. “We have some bogies headed toward our wall. The Fair Avenue entrance.”

  “Bogies?” Roy wondered aloud.

  “Sorry,” Halcyon said. “Uh, possible enemies.”

  Roy started down the stairs, not being quiet, because the babies were already awake. Their cooing led to squawking.

  “Mommy is coming, my little darlings!” Toxy called out. “Roy, I’ll be along once I get my babies. We need to make sure the wall is secure. I will take my niddies with me since they’re awake anyway.”

  “No!” Tails was at the top of the steps.

  Roy whirled to see the spider queen come out of their room. She was in full spider queen mode, eyes black and mouth full of fangs, dripping poison. “Do you dare raise your voice to me, minion?”

  Roy didn’t have time to referee a fight.

  The hellfox tilted her head to the side. “No, your highness. I’m your little minion, and I will take the risk. You stay here like the queen you are.”

  Toxy’s eyes turned from black to various colors. “Well, I suppose I can let my minions fight for me this night. But be careful, okay?”

  Halcyon’s holographic image flickered on in the living room below thanks to an in-house emitter. “Outside the wall, there are some weird fucking people, but so far they’re merely scratching at the metal. But I don’t like the looks of them. They move strangely, and they are, well, glowing.”

  Roy took charge. “Halcyon, keep us posted. Tails, you take the wall. I’ll take the gate room.”

  The A.I. raised a hand. “Hold up. Nothing is coming out of the gate. It just...opened...so. Shit. Get to the wall. Some old guy just sparked up a cutting torch.”

  Toxy disappeared into the nursery. “Why, hello, my darlings. Hello!”

  Roy heard both Arra and Nida cry out with joy at the sight of their mother. He wished he could see the smiles on their faces, but keeping them safe was more important. He and Tails grabbed plasma rifles from the living room and went storming out of the Yellow Home’s front door. Roy barely felt the cold.

  What was attacking them? Had Halcyon mentioned people? Roy hadn’t seen any sign of humans or anything else during his time on the plane
t, only robots and some old video footage of humans. There had been some dead security guards in the lab, but not that many. It seemed all the people had disappeared. Had they returned with cutting torches?

  Tails shifted into her full car-sized fox form, and Roy climbed onto her back. He took a handful of her neck fur and she bounded off, running fast. They’d been practicing this maneuver, and while Roy could’ve run, he liked to ride the hellfox. It was fun, and her heat warmed him like nothing else. Steam rose from the inner fire heating her body.

  Halcyon’s voice broke into Roy’s ear. “Hey, get to the Fair Avenue entrance. You’ll see the sparks from the cutting torch.”

  Roy asked. “What kind of unfriendlies are we talking about?”

  Her response didn’t come through because three drones buzzed loudly overhead, flying over the houses. Gun barrels stuck out on either side of the drones. They screamed through the air and over the wall. Then the fireworks started, blast after blast of plasma fire hitting whatever was on the other side.

  “What did she say?” Roy barked.

  “Couldn’t hear!” Tails yelled. “Hal, what are we facing?”

  Again, the A.I.’s words were blocked out by the war raging. Something exploded. And something from the ground returned fire, taking out one of the drones.

  Roy did a quick check of his stats because while he’d been growing in power, the coming fight would probably level him up.

  <<< VEM_START >>>

  Roy Boss

  Vitalogical Effexium Matrix

  Race: Human Base with S-Class Augmentations

  Fertility Flag: 0

  Current Effexium Level: 5

  Current /Max Vitalogy: 500/500

  Base Strength/With Modifiers: 18/36

  Base Agility/With Modifiers: 18/18

  Effexium Abilities (Autonomic):

  Lower Limb Modifications (Defensive)

  Upper Limb Modifications (Defensive)

  Effexium Abilities (Manual Activation Mode):

  Cellular Modifications Metal

  Exponential Velocity Increase

  UEQ: Pending

  <<< VEM_END >>>

  At fifth level, he had basically five abilities: two automatic defensive capabilities for his upper and lower body, super strength, super speed, , and he could shift his skin to metal. With every level, he got a new skill, though it was based on the template provided by his monster girls, so as long as they had it, he had access to it as well.

  He was trying to decide if at sixth level he wanted his fox girl’s fire abilities or if he wanted to adopt one of Toxy’s Effexium abilities. The spider queen was a buffet of skills: venom, acid, and webs.

  Effexium—the name was still kind of funny. It had been designed to add special effects to the monsters at Roy’s Dungeon Core III world. However, the Effexium had revolutionized his entire life.

  Tails reached the wall where something finally cut a man-sized shape in the metal. A big plate of steel fell onto the asphalt of Fair Avenue, clanking down as the edges of the metal glowed.

  And then shambled in the first of the animated corpses.

  “Holy shit!” Tails yelled. “Well, we were wondering where the people were. There’s a person. Kind of.”

  Calling it a person was generous. The dead man’s clothes—slacks and a button-up—were dirty rags, rotted away, as was the thing’s top layer of skin. Underneath the decayed flesh were glowing blue sinews that reminded Roy of the enhancements his enemy Ennis Tolliver had made to his body. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill zombie, but an enhanced cyborg.

  The man coming through had a beard that was gray with rot. His eyes were gone, but blue cameras winked from the ragged eye sockets. His left hand had been replaced with syringes. Glass-tube fingers glowed with a blue liquid. The dead man’s right hand was now a cutting torch spitting sparks.

  Roy slipped off the hellfox’s back. He knelt, took aim, and put enough holes in the zombie to cut through his cybernetic enhancements. The zombie stumbled forward and fell.

  A rotting woman shambled forward. Whatever tech was inside the zombies wasn’t working very well. This woman wore a ragged dress, probably from the Pax Americana, but she had rifles for arms. Like the cutter, her eyes gleamed with a blue light.

  Before the rifle-armed woman could shoot at them, Tails bounded forward and breathed fire onto her. Her skin caught, her dress caught, and she burned like a torch, giving them plenty of light. The bonfire woman also helped with the chill.

  Arms reached through the hole in the wall. There were so many undead cyborg things trying to come in, they were getting in each other’s way. Roy fired into the hole, driving the horde back, while Tails sliced off the legs of the torch woman. The hellfox’s Effexium made her fireproof.

  Tails transformed into her very naked human form but kept her other foxy aspects. Behind her clanked up Bruce, the headless butler robot that Hal used as her helper. Bruce had a crate of Effexium in his three-fingered metal hands.

  Roy slung his rifle over his shoulder and started clambering up the wall on rungs set into the metal. The metal was cold, but shifting his hands into steel helped him deal with the freeze. Below him, Tails was already putting the container in place so Halcyon could repair the hole in the wall.

  When Roy reached the top, he looked down to see hundreds of the zombies. Their own technology lit up the entire street on the other side. Some were crawling on top of each other, trying to climb up the smooth side of their metal rampart.

  Other undead with cutting torches were slicing into the metal, creating handholds for others to use to come crawling up. Some had the glowing syringe fingers, others had the rifles, and others had huge steel claws. They were ascending slowly, using the holes made by the cutters.

  Roy took aim and started shooting off their arms—hard to climb with one arm, and given their already dead state, he didn’t think head shots mattered. But he could try. He blew a couple of their rotted heads off, but that didn’t stop them climbing.

  Rifle blasts struck the wall near him, but these zombies couldn’t aim very well.

  One of Halcyon’s drones swung around and wiped out a dozen of the zombies in a barrage of bright plasma fire that reduced the undead to pieces.

  “Hal,” Roy called out. “Tell me about the open gate in the UGR. Anything coming through?”

  “Not a fucking thing,” came the reply. “It’s weird, Boss man, but I can’t imagine it’s by accident. And, yeah, cyborg zombies, and I’m thinking they are connected to some wireless controller.”

  Roy stalked along the top of the wall, picking off zombies trying to either cut holes into the metal or make the climb.

  The fox girl’s voice hit them. “The breach is sealed. I’m climbing up now.”

  Roy didn’t try to stop her because she’d want to see what they were facing. However, once she got to the top, she wouldn’t see very much. Most of the fight would be over by then.

  Another drone was blown out of the sky by a lucky shot. The remaining drone cut down dozens of the zombies until all Roy had to do was sit and watch. It was very cathartic watching the undead being destroyed by the heavy gunfire of the drone.

  A few, missing arms, legs, or heads, still tried to crawl about. The drone soon put them out of their misery.

  Toxy screamed in his ear. “Is this working? Are you all right, darling? Am I talking to all of you? How does this work?”

  Roy winced. “You don’t have to yell, Tox. We can all hear you. We’re fine. We’ve taken care of the zombies at the wall, but we’ll be heading down to the tenth sublevel to see what might be coming through the gate. Are the niddies okay?”

  “I was able to get Arra and Nida back to sleep. I’m outside. I can see the fire and hear the noise, darling, and I was wondering if you need me. Our girl Hal can keep her eye on the babies.”

  Yes, she could. With her cameras, Halcyon had become the ultimate baby monitor.

  “We’re fine for now,” Roy replied.

  Tails made the climb and ran over to him. She looked down, holding her plasma rifle and frowning. “Well, now, this is a surprise. Nothing for months on end, and suddenly we’re attacked by dead people.”

  “Not them,” Roy countered. “But something running them. It looks like there wasn’t a good factory for making the squid dogs.”