Released my first novel, any feedback, Review, Tip, Advice, Comment is appreciated.
Links:
Royal Road - Scribble Hub
Title: Gilded Cage [Progression LitRPG]
Synopsis: Five thousand people awaken in an impossible arena ruled by seven mysterious gods. Torn from different eras of history, they are forced into a deadly trial where only five hundred will survive. Altay, a carpenter who trusts what he can measure and build, must survive a world whose rules defy reason. Armed with little more than his practical skills, he faces monsters, ruthless competitors, and a mysterious System that rewards both survival and cruelty, character he wrote speaks inside his head.
Seraphina survives by treating everyone as either a threat or a tool, unaware that the woman who created her is trapped within her. As power grows and the gods' true intentions remain hidden, survival comes at a price. In a world where people become commodities and freedom may be another illusion, the greatest danger may be learning to love the cage.
A dark progression LitRPG death game with a slow-burn romance.
Legends from every era in one arena: Alexander, Jeanne d'Arc, Napoleon and Musashi, Real grief and a found family worth fighting for.
1:Arena Trial - Gilded Cage
The walnut tabletop was still in its clamps when Altay gave up on sleep and went out walking.
Three in the morning. He took his usual loop, past the bakery with the cracked lintel and along the school fence. His left hand counted fence posts. His right stayed in his pocket, closed around a folding brass rule.
Forty-one posts, then the curb.
He stepped off it, and his boot came down on sand.
Something slammed into his back.
"Aagh! Kurwa!"
Altay went down on one knee. A heavy man went down with him, and something soft and wet smacked into his chest.
The man rolled off, wheezing. Early forties, 175 centimeters, over a hundred kilos, thick through the belly and the shoulders. A red, weathered face, a broad nose, gray stubble, small blue eyes squinting out of wind lines.
He wore an orange work vest over a gray T-shirt, canvas work trousers, boots, and an orange hard hat knocked down over one eye. Half a sandwich was in his fist. The other half was on Altay's shirt, mustard and ham smeared across the faded white wolf on the front.
"Sorry, sorry, I was walking, I was just walking down the-" The man shoved his hard hat up and stopped.
Altay stood up and looked where he was looking.
Sand, pale and flat, ran out in every direction until it met a wall, and above the wall rows of stone seats climbed until they went blue with distance, every one of them empty. The sand was full. People were appearing on it out of nothing, in rings that spread from the middle of the floor, ring after ring, hundreds, then thousands. Each ring arrived screaming.
"MAMA! MAMA, WHERE ARE YOU?"
"They had me open! I was on the table, they had my chest open!"
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God..."
"Why is there no signal? WHY IS THERE NO SIGNAL?"
A man in rusted mail knelt in the sand, hauling the mail up to feel his own stomach, over and over. Two women held each other so hard their knuckles went white.
"What is this? What is this, what is this?" The man in the vest had gone high and fast. "I was on my lunch. On my LUNCH! Forty meters up all morning, I come down for one sandwich, one, I step off the ladder and-"
He stared at the half sandwich in his hand.
Altay's hands were shaking. He shoved the right one back into his pocket and gripped the brass rule until the edges bit.
Dad's rule. The only thing of his I didn't sell.
He took it out, unfolded one leaf, and held it at arm's length toward a man standing against the far wall. The man was a millimeter tall on the brass. More than a kilometer away.
He looked for what held the tiers up. Buttresses, piers, anything taking the load. There was nothing.
Above the rim, the sky was the purple and yellow of an old bruise, with no sun and no moon. Seven thrones hung in the air high over the rim, spaced around the whole ring. Each was the size of a house. Nothing held them up either.
He folded the rule and put it away. His hand was still shaking.
The man in the vest whistled through his teeth, long and low. "That's a tall crane."
"It's not a crane."
"Then what's holding it up?"
"Nothing."
"I don't like that." He stamped the sand twice, hard, and his shoulders came down half an inch.
"Ground, though. Ground I trust. Forty meters up all day, you learn. Me and the ground, we're friends."
He wrapped the half sandwich back in its wax paper and tucked it into his vest, beside two more wrapped the same way.
"My girl packs these. She's twelve. She thinks I don't eat." He wiped his palm on his vest and held it out. "Tomasz."
"Altay."
"What do you do, Altay?"
"Wood. Furniture."
"Cranes." Tomasz nodded, satisfied.
An axe blade buried itself in the sand a hand's width from Altay's boot.
Its owner had arrived in the middle of a swing.
He stood two meters, a head over Altay, 125 kilos at least, thick everywhere with fat over it at the belly. His red-blond beard hung in two thick braids. Gray eyes, a nose broken flat more than once, a wool tunic under a leather jerkin, a round shield on his back.
He was still leaning into a blow meant for somebody who wasn't there.
He blinked at the sand. Then his free hand went to his side, under the ribs, and pressed.
"The spear. The spear went in HERE. I felt it come out my back."
He dragged his tunic up. There was nothing under it but old white scars.
"Not a scratch!" He threw his head back and laughed so loud the people nearest him flinched. "HAH! FINALLY! A worthy hall!"
He wrenched the axe out of the sand and shook it at the empty seats. "I am Harald Grímsson! I died with my axe in my hand! Open the doors and pour the mead!"
Nobody poured anything. Harald belched, enormously, and looked pleased with it.
Altay backed away from the axe with Tomasz at his shoulder. His heel caught on something soft, and he sat down hard in the sand.
"Mrrrp?"
He'd tripped over a foot.
It belonged to a girl sitting cross-legged on the sand behind him: twenty or so, 162 centimeters if she ever stood up, soft and chubby, round in the cheeks and middle, heavy at the hips. Brown hair in a tangle. A black hoodie so big her hands had vanished into the sleeves, gray sweatpants, socks and no shoes.
A paperback was stuck in her waistband, its cover bent double: The Duke's Reluctant Bride, a man in a cravat holding a fainting woman.
She wasn't screaming, and she wasn't getting up. Her eyes were big, brown and half shut, and they kept moving: the empty seats, the rings of new people, the wall, the seats again.
"You're on my foot."
Altay stood up. "Sorry."
She leaned to see around him. Her eyes went up toward the thrones, once, and came straight back down. She rubbed the back of her neck through the hood.
"Ooh." Quietly, to herself. "Mass summoning."
He walked the last few steps to the wall and put his back against it. The stone was cool and planed smooth, without a single joint. From here he could see along its length.
Fifty meters down, a woman had her back to the same wall.
She was the only person on the floor standing still.
175 centimeters, broad through the shoulders, with a dense core, wide hips and strong legs. Seventy-five kilos, he guessed, before the steel. She wore a steel breastplate over mail and a torn crimson cloak, and a smoke-gray two-handed sword rode on her back. Her skin was pale, and her wine-red hair was pulled into one braid so tight it had to hurt.
A man ran blind into her shoulder, screaming. She caught him by the collar with one hand and set him aside without looking at him.
Her eyes stayed on the crowd, then went along the wall, looking for a door. There wasn't one. He'd already checked.
Her eyes reached him and stopped. They went over him once, head to boots, the way he checked lumber for knots. Then they moved on.
"Oi! You! Tall one!"
Ten meters out on the sand, a woman in navy scrubs knelt over an old man in striped pajamas. She was Black, mid-thirties, 165 centimeters, solid through the shoulders and forearms from years of lifting other bodies. Hair scraped back hard, brown eyes, hospital clogs, an ID card swinging from a lanyard.
Her hands were locked together on the old man's chest, pumping. He'd have stood 170 centimeters before the stoop, 55 kilos at most, all cord and bone under white hair. His bare feet had gone gray.
Altay. That guy's having a worse day than you.
"Not now."
Tomasz turned his head. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Oi! Are you DEAF?" The woman in scrubs hadn't stopped pumping. "Get OVER here! Can you count?"
He went. Tomasz hovered behind him, crossing himself, praying under his breath. "Zdrowaś Maryjo, łaski pełna, Pan z Tobą..."
"Yeah. I can count."
"Then count with me, out loud. When I say swap, you take over, and you do not stop. Twenty-six, twenty-seven..." On thirty she bent and breathed twice into the old man's mouth. "Swap!"
He knelt and put his hands where hers had been.
"Heel of the hand on the breastbone. Lock your elbows. No, LOCK them. Don't push with your arms, get your whole weight over him. Harder. HARDER!"
He leaned in. Under his palms, the old man's ribs cracked.
Altay jerked his hands back.
"That's GOOD! That's supposed to happen! It means you're deep enough! Get back on him!"
He got back on him.
"Nadia." She went on counting under it, a breath between every word. "A and E nurse. Eighteen, nineteen..."
"Altay."
"Keep going, Altay."
On the fourth round, the air stopped.
The breeze died. A few grains of sand hung a finger above the floor and stayed there.
Then Altay's chest went tight, one notch at a time. Every push on the old man's breastbone cost air he didn't have. His wrists began to ache, then every joint he had.
The screaming across the floor turned to gasping. Thousands of people went down on their knees.
He looked up once. One of the thrones wasn't empty anymore. Something pale sat on it, perfectly still.
Looking at it made his wrists hurt worse. He put his eyes back on his hands and pushed.
Nadia's breath whistled through her teeth. "Don't... stop."
"Not... stopping."
Harald stood straight in the middle of it with his axe raised at the pale throne, laughing through his teeth and spending what breath he had. "If I die here, LET THE GODS WATCH!"
Far away, someone started laughing.
"Ha... haha... HAHAHA..."
It spread across the floor, person to person, and when it reached Altay it came up out of his own chest.
"Hah... hahh..."
Nothing was funny. He was breaking an old man's ribs with no air in his lungs, and he was laughing.
Across from him Nadia was laughing too, tears running down her face, still counting. On a second throne, something flashed every color at once.
In the same breath the laughing turned to sobbing, all across the floor.
Under his hands, the old man coughed.
"Khh! Hukh! HUKH!"
His chest heaved on its own. His eyes flew open.
"There he is!" Nadia grabbed the old man's shoulder. "Altay, off. I need to turn him."
Altay tried to lift his hands. His fingers stayed clamped to the old man's chest, stiff and shaking, and wouldn't open.
"Adrenaline. Happens to everyone their first time. Look at me, not at him."
She peeled his fingers up one at a time and set his hands on his own knees. "Breathe. There you go."
She rolled the old man onto his side. "There he is. There he is, you stubborn old sod. Keep breathing for me."
"I died." The old man's voice was thin. "I was in bed, and I felt it stop. I felt it STOP."
His eyes went past her, searching the sand. "She was meant to be here. Where's my wife? Where's-"
"You're all right, love. You're all right."
Altay pressed his hands between his knees until they quit shaking.
The tightness in his chest let go. The hanging grains of sand dropped.
"HARK!"
The voice came from everywhere at once, out of the sand and the stone. On the rim a kilometer off, a thin rider sat on something shaped like a horse: patchwork armor, a lance held upright, and a bowl on his head for a helmet.
"Hark, and be WELCOME! Welcome, five thousand knights-errant, to the ARENA! Never since the world was young hath such a host been gathered upon a field of honor! Lift up your chins, brave knights, for the Seven are seated, and ye are SEEN!"
"WHERE ARE WE?"
"SEND US HOME!"
"WHO ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU?"
Down the wall, a man in a business suit was trying to climb it, clawing at stone with nothing to grip, sliding down, trying again.
The rider answered none of them.
"Hear now the law of the First Trial! This field is named the DESCENT! Giants and fell beasts shall come upon thee, wave upon wave, and ye shall stand against them! And the trial shall not end until five thousand have become five HUNDRED!"
The whole floor went quiet.
"What happens to the rest?" A woman near the wall, her voice cracking. "What happens to the REST?"
"They shall be REMEMBERED!"
One in ten. Altay did the arithmetic without wanting to.
The table's still in clamps. I promised it by Saturday.
"And hear this, for it is the custom of this field!" The Voice raised his lance. "Thou mayest strike down thy fellow knights! Every rival felled shall add to thy GLORY!"
A gold line drew itself across the top of Altay's vision, and a white panel dropped beneath it, edged in gold.
| [☆☆☆☆ TRIAL 1: THE DESCENT] [Survive the waves.] [The trial ends when 500 participants remain.] [Killing other participants: Permitted. Rewarded.] [Score is tracked. Rewards are given by rank.] |
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It stayed put when he turned his head.
"You see it?"
Tomasz was frowning at the air in front of his own face. "White thing. Gold letters." He swallowed. "I see it."
All over the floor, thousands of heads tipped up to read.
Then everybody moved away from everybody else.
A ring of empty sand opened around every person at once. Tomasz had stepped half a pace back from Altay. He looked down at his own boots, went red, and stepped back in.
"Sorry. Stupid. Sorry."
Altay nodded. He'd leaned away too.
By the wall, the girl in the hoodie hadn't moved at all. Everyone near her had backed off, and she sat in the middle of her own empty ring with her chin on her sleeve, watching them do it. One corner of her mouth had gone up.
"And to the FIRST among ye, and to the four who stand behind the first, gifts FIT FOR YOUR HANDS! What they shall be, not even I may say. The Seven choose them when the field is done, and the Seven choose WELL!"
The panel in Altay's vision changed.
| [Rank rewards: Ranks 1 to 5.] [Chosen at the trial's end.] |
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Nobody cheered. Two lines, and nothing under them.
"Mrrh." The girl in the hoodie had her eyes shut. "Unspecified reward. Retention mechanic."
Tomasz turned to Altay, his face gone blotchy. "What does that mean?"
"It means they're not telling us."
Altay's hand closed on the rule in his pocket.
"And LASTLY, the Seven offer gifts!"
He swept his lance around the rim. "Seven chests, one from each high seat, and no two alike! Whosoever opens one keeps what lies within, a treasure of the EPIC grade! Fight for them, brave knights! FIGHT!"
Each throne let something fall.
Seven dark shapes dropped from the rim. The first hit the sand four hundred meters out.
WHUMP
Sand went up in a column. The floor jumped under Altay's knees.
WHUMP. WHUMP.
The fifth came down sixty meters from the wall, on a man who never looked up. When the sand settled, a chest the size of a car sat in a crater, pale stone banded with white-gold. A pair of legs stuck out from under one corner. They didn't move.
Something changed in the top right corner of his sight: a line of small gold text he hadn't noticed before. Its first number read 4,999.
| [Participants remaining: 4,999] |
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Then half the floor ran at the chests.
A soldier in an old gray uniform, bayonet fixed on his rifle, reached the pale chest first and put both hands on the lid. A man in grease-stained coveralls hit him from behind with a rock.
The soldier turned and drove the bayonet into the man's stomach, twice, fast. The man in coveralls sat down in the sand holding his belly with both hands, and blood came out between his fingers.
Three more people dragged the soldier off the lid by his collar and his legs. Nobody got it open.
"Ho HO!" Harald was already running for another chest, shield off his back and up. "Gifts from the gods! COME AND TAKE IT FROM ME!"
Far down the wall, a chest had landed fifteen meters from the woman with the sword. People streamed past her toward it. She didn't move.
"Should we..." Tomasz had his hard hat off and was turning it in both hands, staring at the pale chest. "Should we maybe..."
"No."
"No. Right." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "No."
Count the thrones, Altay.
Page one of the first notebook. I stopped writing the Hunter four years ago. He never stopped talking.
"No." Quieter, this time.
Nobody else was looking up. Every face on the floor was turned to the chests or to the sand. His own neck didn't want to lift. Something at the back of his skull knew there was weight up there.
Nobody was going to count it. Nobody was even going to look.
"He'd probably count them."
He closed his hand on the brass rule and lifted his head.
One. The pale throne. His breath went short again, and his wrists ached.
Two and three looked empty, but the air around them was wrong.
Four.
At five the laugh tried to come back up his throat. He swallowed it.
Then his left eye went cold.
It stung at first, and the cold settled in behind the eye. On that side everything got brighter: a clean, pale light, blue at the edges, the light of a room under a full moon.
There was no moon. The light was there anyway, in the one eye, and the weight on the back of his neck eased on the left side.
Six.
Seven.
"Seven."
Seven. The Hunter sounded pleased. That's not so many.
"It's plenty."
Gold text slid down across the cold eye.
| [☆☆☆ Predetermined class by past: Moonfall Huntsman · Pending] |
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A second panel opened under it. He hadn't asked for it.
| [STATUS · ALTAY] [Level 1 · Class: Moonfall Huntsman (Pending)] [HP 130/130] [STR 14 · STA 15 · END 13 · MIND 16 · SPD 11 · REF 13] [Skill: Moon-Eye (Active)] [Full status opens when the First Trial ends.] |
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He read the skill line twice.
Moon-Eye. I wrote that word in pencil when I was fourteen. I never showed it to anyone.
DOOOONG
A bell rang somewhere above the rim, so low he felt it in his back teeth. Under his knees, the sand shivered.
hssssssssssss
All across the floor, the sand began to slide toward the middle.
Nadia grabbed his sleeve with one hand. Her other hand had the old man by his pajama collar. She was staring at his face.
"Your eye. It's moving."
DOOOONG
The middle of the floor fell away. The sand poured down into the dark, and it took the chests with it, and everyone still fighting over them.
