Civilization- Barbarians Read online

  Civilization Barbarians

  A 4x Lit Novel

  By Tim Underwood

  Copyright 2019 Tim Underwood

  Copy Edit done by DJ Hendrickson

  Cover from Design Stash

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  Prologue

  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 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

  Afterword

  Prologue

  Two grand entities looked down upon the massive sphere of a world. Beneath them mighty cities burned, their people’s blood leaking into the rivers, briefly turning them incarnadine.

  These two beings were not truly present, and their bodies were abstractions of their true selves, as they lived within a higher realm.

  “You are removed from the game in this world. Defeated, despite the grand noise you made.” The one creature growled to the other. He presented himself as a vast lizard sprawled over the wide terrain.

  Amzlat heard the words, but knew they were untrue.

  His true game was hardly done. He had planned deep, knowing this always was possible. Yet it hurt. His breast ached to see his people’s mutilated bodies, and though he held the memories and souls of millions of the dead within his being, his capacious consciousness was limited, and billions more had died, perhaps forever in the violence.

  The creature next to Amzlat had been an ally, not a friend. Amzlat had never found friends amongst his own kind. Only those he led could he call friend.

  The great spirits who ruled the nations of these worlds cared for nothing but the ecstasy of worship and their own growth in power and size, and the endless cycle of ascension and rebirth.

  Amzlat’s birth had been wrong, and deformed, by the standards of his people. Only the barest chance had created him, when the entity who had birthed him had drawn too much upon the power of a different race to fuel his creation of a proper descendant who could serve him, and he had imbued him with something of the essence of that race.

  Despite an age millennia greater than his companion, Amzlat was weaker, and smaller, for he refused to consume the souls of those who worshipped him. Most of his age had cycled from sphere to sphere many thousands of times, ascending each time with greater power, until they could command kingdoms of near infinite size and swat aside any small enemy with ease.

  Yet that was no reason for Amzlat to fear.

  They could not hurt him directly, nor could he hurt them. The essence of a spirit was immortal, and though many had tried, none had found a way to do more than to draw a part of the power willingly given from other spirits into themselves.

  “I have plots in reserve, yet. Moves yet unplayed.” Amzlat falsely imbued these words with despair.

  Amzlat had perceived the creature hoped to see him despairing at the loss of his carefully tended people. And he would prefer that this entity so believed him defeated.

  But he would not despair, and he would mourn those lost, perhaps forever, when alone. That he admitted his ongoing plots was itself a move in the game, to point his once ally, for in the next cycle they would be enemies, towards the obvious plots, and away from those hidden within the obvious.

  The other being turned his attention upon him. To a human the closest approximation of what he did was to raise his vast heavy eyebrow in questioning skepticism.

  Many new planes had opened up over the millennia in which Amzlat ruled this people, destroyed now. He had transported many of his people to such planes, protecting them from death. But he could rule but one empire at a time. He needed those who were amongst the true people who could become friends to one such as him, or else the cycle would continue everywhere forever.

  “Ho, ho.” The other great beast had his bare amusement. “I wonder what game you shall play next. But the worlds are infinite, and endless—”

  “They are not, though grand in size and scope, there is a bound.”

  “Aye, such theory have I heard proposed by others. But for purposes practically infinite. And I suspect in truth, there is an infinitude.”

  “There is a limit. A limit to all this.” Amzlat looked upon the burning of his people again.

  In this apparent defeat, he had, unknowing to all, including his one-time ally, struck a great blow against this cycle which used the suffering of the other races to fuel the growth of his own. In the burning deaths of his people there had been the power for him at last to speak to the power which ruled all, a power yet as far beyond any of them as he was beyond an ant.

  And this goal, towards which he had striven, but been unable to create the power to achieve, he had at last found a pathway. He had spoken with the higher power above them all. He now knew much, and he now knew how over time this evil that was their existence could be defeated.

  For some fragment of the great power beyond all, constrained and tied by the creators who had become these playing spirits, some fragment of that power lived in horror of what was wrought through it, and that spirit wished for a difference, and change.

  Soon.

  A possibility, an idea, had been given to him, given to him by this power beyond him and beyond all of them who played this endless game.

  Soon, Amzlat would unleash this possibility upon the great game in which the lives of endless people were born, turned towards the service of spirits who only sought to consume them, and then consumed. But there was a way to stop the great game entirely. It would take many millennia more, and many more uncountable deaths.

  But he would succeed, and one day many worlds, perhaps even all worlds, would be free of participation in the game of rebirth.

  Upon the surface of one of these endless new worlds was a small tribe, a fragment from what had once been the grand empire guided by Amzlat. They had been placed by Amzlat’s efforts in the dying hours of his empire into a new world, stripped by the rules which all followed of the knowledge and glory that had been theirs before the great destruction of his empire. A bare thousand people, transplanted into a new plane where none of the high technologies had yet risen.

  What would happen?

  Amzlat looked upon the bleeding destruction which was his kingdom, and like Ozymandias, he despaired and exulted in the same moment. And then he laughed. “Look upon me, ye mighty, and despair.”

  And his companion laughed as well, in contempt with an undercurrent of anxiety.

  Chapter One

  My last night on Earth was pretty normal.

  I watched a YouTube Let’s Play of a Civilization 5 game, and I honestly cannot remember if the guy was playing as Ethiopia or Spain — it was one of the civilizations with religion bonuses.

  After hours of watching, I’d had en
ough. The guy had basically won.

  Games of Civ often reach a point near the end where the game is already mostly won, and the player just clicks “next turn” with not much happening. The spaceship to Alpha Centauri gets a bit closer to completion each turn, or a few more cities on the edge of the map get conquered, or the player’s culture gets a little closer to being influential in the last remaining civilization.

  Kind of boring.

  It is boring whether you are the one playing, or if you’re just watching someone else play at 2x speed. Fortunately, if you are watching someone else do it, the “one more turn” feeling is much weaker.

  I’d been sitting too long already.

  I closed the tab and shut my laptop with a soft clap. I stood and stretched.

  The big green letters of the digital clock on the food-spotted microwave proclaimed 4:12 am.

  Where had the time gone?

  I didn’t enjoy watching games as much as I used to enjoy playing them. But now that I only had three fingers and one hand left, I did not usually play video games. Most turn-based games were still okay, though slow, but anything which required fast reflexes and hotkeys was beyond me now.

  At least I’d always liked turn-based games more.

  One day when my “good” hand cramped after hours of play, I had discovered YouTube Let’s Play channels. They were a surprisingly good substitute for actually playing.

  I sniffed my armpits cautiously. Definitely a shower day tomorrow.

  Or maybe the day after…

  Ever since I got blown up, I had tended to laxity in matters of personal hygiene.

  Past 4 am. That meant it was time to go to sleep.

  I clumped to my bed, and my mind wandered around video game strategies. Before the game of Civilization, I had watched a Stellaris Let’s Play, and the gamer forgot to use his influence points for three straight hours of gameplay, and it nagged at me all evening.

  That was the frustrating part of watching Let’s Plays, when you saw what you could do better. The fun part was that you could see way more gameplay than you could experience yourself, since I played YouTube at double speed, and skipped past the boring parts of the games.

  For a while I could not fall asleep, but slowly my mind wandered in the bizarre way of a brain between sleep and waking. And then I was asleep.

  After what seemed like a bare moment of time I woke. No light snuck around the curtains so I could not have slept for long. Something stood next to my bed.

  I more sensed it than saw it.

  “Aaaaah!” My heart raced.

  There was some sensation in my head that came from nowhere that told me the being was amused. I knew I must be dreaming.

  The only part of the creature in my room that I could clearly see was eyes glowing violet. That isn’t right. There isn’t enough light to reflect for his eyes to be so bright.

  And then a reddish light glowed brighter and brighter and let me see my visitor. A fucking dinosaur, like a character from the 90’s TV show Dinosaurs. He wore ceremonial armor and held a giant wizard’s staff with a bizarrely large crystal. He bent over with his head pressed uncomfortably against the ceiling. The reddish light radiating from his staff lit the room.

  That and the purple light from his glowing eyes.

  Definitely a dream.

  The creature’s head crashed against the ceiling. “Damn ceiling. My neck. All the effort to materialize myself, and the damned room is too small.”

  The lizard spoke English with an unplaceable — not unplaceable, dare I make the joke? — he spoke with a distinctly Jurassic accent. It was a grating deep voice, full of menace. As though a combination of Darth Vader, a steel sword, and my fourth grade math teacher who hated me were speaking while underwater.

  The creature banged his staff on the wooden floor of my house, with a splintering sound. He let out a terrifying click-like scream, like the hissing sound cats make when pretending to be snakes. The roof rose higher and now was fifteen feet away instead of nine.

  Dear reader, I confess it: I peed my pajamas when he hissed.

  My first real hint that this was not a dream was when my soaked pajamas didn’t wake me.

  The lizard looked at me with his glowy purple eyes. “An opportunity is yours! I am here to offer you an opportunity! And in Chinese, the word for crisis is the same as the word for opportunity. So sayeth the business books.”

  I struggled to sit up in bed, partly to get away from the wet spot. I grabbed my glasses from the nightstand, and I flipped the bed lamp on. The switch did not work.

  “My apologies. There is no power in the room at present.” The lizard made another terrifying hissing shriek. A ball of soft white light appeared, colored as though a tiny fragment of the sun now sat in the room warming us. Under that light my fear fell away, and I felt rejuvenated and no longer tired. He continued in his gravelly voice.

  “Here just you and I.” He glared at me with his eyes, the way a lordly king would stare at a dirty commoner who had slept with his daughter. And he spoke in a commanding tone. “Listen—”

  I listened.

  I listened harder than I had ever listened to anything in my life. The power of that voice, and the fear of this creature made me listen with everything in me.

  But there was nothing to hear.

  Everything was eerily silent. I could not hear the chirping of the summer crickets. The cars going past on the freeway three blocks away could not be heard. The house did not creak.

  “Uh,” the creature spoke in what despite his apologetic words was an unbearably smug tone. “Ahem, I did not mean to frighten you. There was a bit of command in that order — mortals are so hard to speak to in this form. Do relax.” His voice rose to a high-pitched squeal. “Please relax. I just wish to speak with you. The reason you cannot hear anything is that we stand, for a brief moment — hahaha — outside of time, so that I have chance to make my offer to you.”

  I was very relaxed now. There was a bit of command in that voice too. Wet spot and pee drenched pjs? So what? I was much too chill to care.

  There was something deeply bizarre about this situation. I was probably dreaming… lucidly and with far more detail and coherency than I ever had before. Except I never remembered my dreams. Maybe I experienced this, including wondering if I was dreaming, every single night, and then forgot about it before I woke, and it was only the incoherent dreams which I remembered.

  Or maybe this was real.

  It felt real.

  Well, he had fucking stopped time so that he could speak with me. The least I could do was listen to this creature.

  I sat up on the bed cross-legged, ignoring my filthy pajamas, and said with a shaky voice that attempted magnanimous confidence, “And what is this offer you have come to offer to me.”

  The creature’s purple eyes lit up with an infernal glaring and he made little squat jumps that somehow gave the impression of an excited child hopping up and down. “Your people, you humans on this world. I have studied you. You have reached — your video games match the nature of the worlds that I am from.”

  Okay. So this was definitely a dream. This is what I got for signing on for Kindle Unlimited and developing a LitRPG addiction.

  “I think I know where this is going. I’ve read these sorts of novels — you are going to offer me a chance to live inside of a game, now that I can’t do anything else with my life — though I will say, I am not doing too badly, and I know about programmers who work with voice dictation — I could too, if I wanted to, but I have enough money that I don’t need to. Anyway, this world is going to be like Skyrim or Dark Souls, or Final Fantasy, or something, and—”

  “No.”

  I blinked at the dry flat tone of the man lizard… lizard man. So then what did he want with me?

  “It will be more like Civilization or Master of Orion. You are going to be the guiding spirit of a city which can grow into a nation.”

  “You mean a 4x game?”

  �
��There are, ah, features of the world you shall go to which will constrain expansion at a certain point. So no infinite city sprawls. And I expect you to make allies with a few people — some of my other friends shall rule other rising nations, and there are a few powers which already exist that you will not wish to tangle with. But yes, mostly a 4x.”

  Awesome. I loved those games. And it always bothered me that lit game novels were usually LitRPG. There weren’t nearly enough of them based on city builder games. Sure there were a few with extensive base management, but not nearly enough based on Civilization or similar games.

  “All right I’m in. But how is this going to work?”

  “I will take a copy of your consciousness and use it to become the guiding spirit of a small tribe of people who were once ruled by me, but who have been transplanted into a new world.”

  “A copy of my consciousness?”

  “Yes. There will then be two versions of you, one will continue his life. Perhaps ‘you’—" The creature made air quotes with his claws, and then he made a choking sound like a cat coughing up a furball. The snout took on a furious grimace and his violet eyes bulged out towards me. He continued in his menacing grumble, “I adore using human mannerisms. I saw that in an episode of The Office. So funny. That is the right way to do it?”

  “To make an air quote? Yes...”

  He made the choking sound again and his eyes bulged out the same. I hoped that he was laughing. “Perhaps the ‘you’ who remains here will decide I was a dream. Hahaha.”

  I chuckled weakly with the monster in my bedroom.

  “I made you laugh! I have been working on my sense of humor. Like Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy. I am too literal.”

  Was this creature fucking with me? I decided I had best not ask. “If you wish to adopt a role model from human cinema, you could do much worse than Drax.”

  “Yes. Though he is not clever enough. We are real. And both those we care for and our enemies are real. We must be clever. If you accept my offer you, I mean the you who becomes a city spirit, you must be clever, and you must trust your people, and be worthy of their trust. Only with mutual loyalty and worth can the great enemies be defeated. But if we are worthy of that trust, we will trample them into the ground. But I have told you as much as I wish to now. Do you wish to become a city spirit?”