Read The War (Play to Live: Book #6) for Free Online Page A

less than half a mile away from the breach zone. The enemy’s outer screen clearly has this area under surveillance."
    As if to affirm his words, a quick fight suddenly broke out about thirty paces from us. A ring of ear-choppers stumbled upon an enemy stealther hiding in a bush.
    Adios, pal! He chose a good hiding place, but the skills of the Drow she-elves were through the roof. The rest was a matter of technology. The game radar treacherously showed a scarlet marker and a certain someone ended up with a black blade in their throat.
    Cargo portals opened behind us. The ravine quickly filled with shortish dwarves and short-tempered demons. Both were eager to fight. They had enough drive for three world wars.
    "Move to the side, we need a lot of free space for summoning the basilisks!" I ordered Snowie who was heading a sizable group of guards. We couldn’t have brought a smaller division along. You can’t go to the front line with just one ear-chopper wearing nothing but silk sheets.
    "A lot of free space?" Snowie clarified.
    I pushed my helmet onto my forehead as I pensively scratched the back of my head. "’Bout the size of a steamboat…Let’s move fifty paces away from the portal, that should be enough."
    But it wasn’t enough…
    I should have probably warned the others. I was just worn out. I was trying to get everything done fast, like filling out a form, on reflex response…
    The universe grunted, overstraining its sinews in a harsh labor. Breaking all the laws of physics and biology, a gigantic creature shot out of the tiny space within the egg, rapidly growing to scale. It was like a giant iceberg emerging from the depths of an ocean.
    The Basilisk’s armored side smashed right into our group, turning some warriors into a bloody puree and pushing the luckier ones aside, myself included.
     
     
    Basilisk King spawn alert!
    The terror of the ancient times has come back to reality. The world will never be the same again.
    AlterWorld respectfully bows its head to the King and grants us new abilities.
    Culinary and alchemic recipe lists are being updated…
    …12%…Error…Update server not available…Connection failure…Rolling back update v. 12.8.1…Error…Access denied…
     
    It was probably at that moment that AlterWorld saw its first claimant to a chamber pot filled with gold. Seeing the game spewing out system errors was seriously frightening, possibly making some wet their pants or get gray hair. It was even worse for permas, who did not have the opportunity to reinstall the buggy software.
    To understand what it was like, look up at the sky. Now picture lines of white code running across it, turning the celestial distance into the Blue Screen of Death.
    The game counted our collision with the scabrous monster’s side as a hit. Comparing body masses and multiplying them by the basilisk’s speed, the damage algorithm was shaken up a bit: Where does the comma go?
    Deciding that 300,000 was clearly too much, the algorithm corrected the damage to be 30,000 by using its emergency "verisimilitude" coefficient. Feeling that it had fulfilled its duties, it took away two thirds of my HP.
    Shamefully sitting on my ass and spitting blood, my lungs pierced with shards of my busted ribs, I jerked my head up to look at the gigantic King of Kings. What a party this must have been for the Japanese. They love giants like these…
    The Basilisk, standing nine stories tall and measuring even more than that from head to tail, was slowly turning its huge head. A gold crown sat atop it like a church dome, a diamond the size of a Jeep’s rear wheel glaring in it.
    At the sight of such riches, my greedy pig finally lost it. Grabbing me by the front of my shirt, it squealed, drooling all over me: "I told you! I told you! You must kill it, kill it now!"
    The king inhaled deeply, freezing the astral world and extracting energy from all the places that were within the reach of his will. The monster’s giant accumulators