HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS
©2021 SHIRTALOON
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the authors.
Aethon Books supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact editor@aethonbooks.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Aethon Books
www.aethonbooks.com
Print and eBook formatting by Steve Beaulieu.
Published by Aethon Books LLC.
Aethon Books is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead is coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Contents
ALSO IN SERIES
1. Strange Business
2. Of Course Magic is a Thing
3. Local Cuisine
4. Cannibals and Spelunking
5. Wizard
6. Potent Potable
7. Spoils
8. Dark Magic
9. Escape
10. The Evil Pit of Evil
11. Dashing Heroics
12. Sanguine Horror
13. This is the Part Where We Step Back
14. Worlds Apart
15. Outworlder
16. Rescue Party
17. A Conservative Pillage
18. One of Us
19. I Want a Lava Cannon
20. By the Power of Grayskull
21. I Have the Power
22. Apocalypse Stone
23. I May have Made a Huge Mistake
24. Astral Space
25. Blasphemy is Kind of My Thing
26. Waterfall
27. Water, Fall
28. How Did You All Fit In There?
29. That’s What Adventurers Do
30. Closing the Door Too Hard
31. Taming the Beast
32. Monster Hunting For Beginners
33. Mistrun River
34. Waving the Flag For Secular Morality
35. Greenstone
36. The Island
37. A Good Adventurer and a Great One
38. Just Another Adventurer
39. Training
40. Eyebeams and the Ethics of Adventuring
41. Vulnerable and Exposed
42. This is the Pits
43. Nightingale
44. Complimentary Ointment
45. So Much For Atheism
46. Blatant Manipulation
47. Mirage Chamber
48. An Endless, Inescapable Nightmare
49. A Voice From Home
50. The Full Keanu
51. Song of the Nightingale
52. Pain
53. Nightlife
54. Field Assessment
55. Rune Tortoise
56. Gary’s Gift
57. Rainbow Smoke
58. A Man of Malevolent Intellect
59. Falling Short
60. Making Music
61. Trade Hall
62. Have Some Damn Adventures
63. Sunk-Cost Fallacy
64. Take My Wife, Please
65. Curious Urges
66. A Stronger Weapon Than the One in Your Hand
67. This is What it Means to Fight Me
68. Good News For Clive
69. Dumpling Soup
70. Rewards
71. A Bit of Poo
72. Rat Race
73. A Grim Sword to Live By
74. Doing Better
75. Progress
76. Preparations
77. Group Cohesion
78. Jason Has the Good Biscuits
79. Sand Everywhere
80. It’s Not Work if You Love What You Do
81. Crazy Desperation Move
82. Choices
83. It Makes No Difference to the Ant
84. Injury & Death
85. Because I’m an Adventurer
86. Some Kind of Secret
87. Can’t Lose
88. The Nature of Absolution
89. Anti-Pirate Operations
90. The Path to Bronze
91. Life & Death
92. Unusual Contract
93. Truth
94. Consequences
95. Punishment
96. You Don’t Get a Third
97. Integrity is Sexy
98. The Point of Money and Power
99. Someone Else’s Game
100. Legwork
101. Fantasy World Goodness
102. You Fight Like Me
103. Silver Hair
104. An Outcome That Satisfies
105. You Aren’t in Control of What Happens Next
106. Something Shady
107. All the Good People We Can Get
108. You Don’t Have the Strength
109. The Tyranny of Rank
110. Help Arrives
111. Strange Star
112. The Accumulation of a Life
113. You Need to Work on Making Enemies
FROM THE PUBLISHER
ALSO IN SERIES
LitRPG
LitRPG
ALSO IN SERIES
HE WHO FIGHTS WITH MONSTERS
1
Strange Business
Jason woke up naked, face down in the grass. That was not how he expected to wake up, since he had gone to sleep in his own bed and his own Darth Vader boxer shorts. From the feel of cool grass on his unmentionables, he had been removed from his bed and shorts both. The last thing he recalled was doing what he did most nights: playing video games until he got tired and then fumbling his way into bed.
The grass he woke up on was weirdly comfortable; a dense bed of lush green softness. It wasn’t like any grass he had encountered before, which was a little unusual. His father was a landscape architect, and Jason had grown up learning more about grass than he ever wanted to know. Mostly because it was the only escape from his mother’s Japanese lessons.
Jason rolled himself over and sat up. He was feeling odd, beyond just the unusual circumstances. It wasn’t a bad sensation, more like waking up after a really long sleep. There was the lingering sopor, but also a feeling of refreshed energy. He ran a hand over his head, only to be startled when he realised his hair was missing.
“Uh…”
He felt about his head with both hands, but his head was balloon smooth. He made a quick check with his eyes and hands, realising there was no hair anywhere on his body. No eyebrows, nothing on his chest, or arms, or… other places.
“I thought it was meant to look bigger when you trimmed.”
He pushed himself to his feet and started assessing his environment. Casting his gaze to the sky, he saw that the sun was high and the air was warm. The sky was unbroken blue, the blazing orb burning away so much as the merest hint of cloud. Sunburn, more than cold, was likely to threaten his exposed extremities.
Looking around, he saw that he was boxed in between two long, tall hedges. Glancing up and down the dead-straight lane, side-junctions headed off at sharp right angles in either direction. The lane itself was wide and grassy, with plenty of room for unconscious sprawling. The hedge walls were meticulously trimmed.
After an unhappy glance down at his bald, naked body, he set off at random to explore. He quickly discovered he was in a hedge maze, the living walls cultivated to almost twice Jason’s height. Jason’s first thought was to climb one to get a better sense of his location, but a closer examination of the hedges changed his mind. Instead of the usual boxwood, the hedges were something very prickly, and he was very naked. He looked up and down the path he was on, with neither direction looking any better than the other.