Merchant

Merchant of Death: A LitRPG Adventure Series (Eternal War Online Book 1)

After a mission gone awry, secret operative John Taggart’s identity is compromised. He needs to go into hiding until he can afford the surgery to get a new face. All the cash he had left, he invested to buy a hacked virtual reality collar off the black market. For a wanted man such as himself, this is the only way to make any kind of money without further jeopardizing his location and identity.

There’s a problem though. When he first logs into Eternal War Online and chooses his faction, the network detects his unauthorized device and generates a bunch of critical errors. Immediately, there’s a hotfix that is applied and which erases all his selections. John is sent into the Eternal Battlefield, the highest level PvP area of the game—obviously, with no chance of survival.

Limited to one character by collar, John finds himself in a dire situation. With no faction to back him up, he’s a free target for everyone. And with no fighting skills and no gear (except for a pair of cotton briefs), he’s no match for any of the players. 

John will keep dying and respawning in that impossible location. But as he tries to keep to the shadows and stay alive, he will soon find that his strange predicament is not without benefits. For one, his lack of ties to any faction allows him to loot every corpse—which will lead him to unlock secret classes, like: Salvager and Smuggler. Secondly, while every faction has its own language that prevents players from different groups from talking to each other, he’s not restricted by that constraint and can understand everyone.

Unable to join the fight, as every blow sustained results in his instadeath, John will discover that his only chance to start earning some cash will be to partner up with the criminal underworld in the game and set up a salvaging operation. For a fee, he will loot you and return your soul-bound items—allowing you to skip the 6 hour waiting period before they materialize back in your inventory. Also, he will experiment with crafting and creating weapons and enchantments that will start to shake things up in the game.

Obviously, not everyone will take kindly to his bold moves and John will attract the wrath of a few powerful players. But then, you can’t expect to please everyone when you’re making a name for yourself as a Merchant of Death!

HereAfter: Dragons Rising

Nash Evers has never played a video game in his life…he didn’t intend to start after death.

These days, most people have their minds uploaded to HereAfter when they die and keep living into eternity. For Nash this means infinite opportunities to grow his wealth and power. A perfect death.

That is, until he gets drawn into a game he can't escape, with rules he doesn't understand, and stakes he never imagined.

Dragons Rising is the name of the game and the humble HereAfter citizens fill the role of NPCs in wealthy gamers' VRMMO experience.

The experience points are real, the magic is real, and death—for NPCs like Nash— is real.

Nash teams up with his hacker son to try to survive and bring down the corrupt organization that started all of this. But it's going to take more than a few potions and some grinding to teach this old dog new tricks. Nash has destroyed men and corporations, even conquered entire nations—but he's never faced anything like Dragons Rising.