Outcast: A Portal Fantasy Adventure (Shinobi Rising Book 1) Read online

  Shinobi Rising 1

  Outcast

  DB King

  Copyright © 2021 by DB King

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  Free progression Fantasy Novel!

  Contents

  Other Series by DB King

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Free progression Fantasy Novel!

  About the Author

  Other Series by DB King

  Kensei

  Dungeon of Evolution

  The Last Magus

  Chapter 1

  Everything was illuminated in stark, violet-tinged light for a sliver of a second. In that moment, all the chaos had briefly been frozen in place, as if the gods were taking a snapshot of this madness.

  In the air, suspended a fraction of an inch in front of Andy’s face, an arrow hung in mid-flight. The projectile’s savagely barbed tip reflected the vein of lightning that split the sky.

  Just behind the arrow, a steel throwing star gleamed menacingly. A few feet ahead of him, on the castle battlements, angry warriors in leather armor—glossy and painted in hues of black, red, and burgundy—brandished naginata, yari, and wakizashi, their faces twisted into grimaces of murder.

  A hundred feet below, a city sprawled out across a river valley, but there were neither skyscrapers nor overpasses to be seen here. Instead, low buildings with curved tile roofs, bamboo structures, and tens of thousands of paper lanterns dominated this ancient city landscape.

  Thunder crashed, and the dazzling lightning flare gave way to darkness. This brief moment of frozen time lapsed, and everything was moving with urgent speed again.

  Arrows and throwing stars zipped past Andy, their flight paths ending impotently as they bit into the wall behind him. Breathing hard, but charged on the twin fires of adrenalin and combat, Andy raced along the brick battlements. In his right hand a lightning-enchanted nodachi crackled with eager power, while in his left a throwing star, also enchanted, sizzled.

  An enemy warrior howled out a battle cry and came at him with a spear. With a deft flick of his wrist, Andy flung the throwing star. Unlike his adversaries, his aim was true, and the projectile slammed into his enemy’s throat. The warrior dropped his spear, coughing up blood as he staggered back, clutching at his throat. He toppled over the wall, plunging a hundred feet to his doom.

  Like a magician palming cards, three more throwing stars appeared in Andy’s left hand. In a flurry of flicks, he shot these three projectiles into three more enemies’ throats. As he ran, he glanced over his shoulder. A shinobi, dressed in all black, his face covered with a zukin and fukumen—traditional ninja masks and hoods—was hot on his heels.

  This was no enemy, though, for Andy was attired in the same black gear, wearing the same light, flexible armor and black hood and mask. Instead, this black-clad figure was his only ally against the hordes of enemy warriors charging along the walls. Despite the hammering of his heart, Andy felt no fear, no sense that this night would be his last.

  A burly warrior wielding twin tanto burst out from a hidden trapdoor mere yards ahead of Andy. With no more throwing stars, Andy had no choice but to engage in hand-to-hand combat. He charged in eagerly, his nodachi slashing through the air with the deadly speed and force of the forked lightning bolts blazing across the storm-torn sky.

  The warrior was fast, his twin tantos whirling in a blur of vicious speed. Andy, however, was faster. Even though he wielded the big, heavy blade, he was augmented with the strength of multiple beasts. A bear’s wild power coursed through his veins, bolstering his physical strength, while the reflexes and speed of a panther made him faster than any human could ever hope to be.

  Without slowing down, Andy parried his opponent’s attack, flicked his blade, and slashed it in a downward arc with such force that it severed his opponent’s torso from his hips. Andy somersaulted over the grisly mound of split flesh and charged up a flight of stairs, hacking through another two warriors, before reaching the highest point of the battlements, at a corner of the castle.

  His shinobi friend skidded to a halt behind him, and they paused. Warriors in their dozens raced along the battlements both ahead of them and behind them. Short of vaulting over the sheer walls and dropping a hundred feet onto the cobblestones below, there was no escape.

  But still Andy felt no fear.

  And then, as another boom of thunder tore across the heavens, a new enemy appeared. This one was no warrior, but he needed no steel weapons to be far deadlier than any fighter. He wore purple and white robes, like those of a Shinto monk. His face was hidden in black shadow beneath a large straw mushroom-shaped ajirogasa hat. This evil priest came floating up through the air from the darkness below, levitating in mid-air like one of the thousands of gently glowing sky lanterns suspended over the city.

  Andy’s shinobi ally nocked an arrow to his bowstring and took aim at the evil priest. Before he could loose his arrow, the levitating priest gave a soft, almost contemptuous flick of his fingers. A lightning bolt erupted from the black clouds above, striking the shinobi down in an ear-splitting explosion of light, heat, and sound. The bolt hurled the dead shinobi off the battlements and flung his limp body as if booted by the foot of a god.

  Beneath the priest’s ajirogasa, his eyes shone with an eerie violet glow, crackling with lightning. Andy knew the next bolt would be coming for him—but he felt neither fear nor dread. Instead, lightning roared and sizzled in the nodachi in his hands. He aimed the blade at the priest and prepared to unleash its godlike power. The heavens tore open, and a cataclysmic explosion of thunder and lightning shot from Andy’s core…

  And then he sat upright in his bed, panting and sweating, his heart racing. He swallowed slowly, his mouth sticky and dry. Morning light stabbed through his puffy eyelids.

  It hadn’t been the first time he’d had a dream like this, but this had been one of the most vivid. It had felt more real than the reality into which he’d just awoken—achingly, perfectly real. He wanted to close his eyes and return to that mysterious world, but his alarm clock was two minutes away from 4:30 AM, at which point it would flood his crummy studio apartment with its annoying melody.

  Groaning and yawning, he pulled off his covers and stumbled out of bed. He felt almost hungover, but that wasn’t from a boozing session. Rather, it was a simple lack of sleep. Working two jobs tended to have that effect, particularly when combined with time-consuming hobbies that Andy simply refused to give up. A man had to have his hobbies, after all.

  Andy glanced at the date on the calendar, noting that he was mere weeks away from his twenty-fourth birthday.

  “Twenty-four going on fifty,” he muttered as he shuffled over to the bathroom.

  Mr. Tanaka, his godfather who’d raised him after his parents had died, told him once that short of a heavy drug a
ddiction, nothing aged you faster than poverty. After many years of living hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck, and barely scraping by, he could believe this.

  He shaved listlessly, half-asleep, with one toe still dipped in the waters of dreamland. After shaving, he splashed his face with cold water to try to force himself to wake up. The face that stared back at him in the grubby mirror was a relatively good-looking one. He would never grace the covers of any men’s fitness magazines, nor would any Hollywood talent agents ever slip their business cards to him across the checkout counter of the small convenience store where he worked as a clerk, but he’d had no trouble with dating the fairer sex. His tanned skin, shaggy medium-length black hair and piercing blue eyes, as well as his athletic physique, gave him the look of a surfer. In saying that, he’d never once set foot on a surfboard. His build and height—six foot four—and his broad shoulders meant that guys usually gave him a healthy measure of respect. It wasn’t always that way; he’d been a small kid, and the other schoolkids had picked on him, but that’d changed as soon as he hit his growth spurt at fourteen.

  Although plenty of women liked to look at him, most would have quickly changed their opinion of him had they seen the inside of his apartment. To call it cluttered would be like saying the Great Wall of China was a handful of bricks cemented together. However, as Andy wound his way through the piles of bric-a-brac, it was clear that the items were not pieces of junk, and that Andy was no hoarder.

  Here was a homemade automatic repeating crossbow. There a functional flamethrower, constructed from scrap materials. Next to it was a fully working miniature replica of a medieval trebuchet. He stepped over a partially stripped Kawasaki Ninja motor. His large desk—held together with duct tape and wire—was strewn with gears, cogs, pistons, cranks, and all manner of tools, screws, bolts, cables, and other DIY materials.

  After pouring himself a bowl of no-name cornflakes and hastily brewing some instant coffee, Andy navigated his way through the piles of interesting items. He plopped himself down on his ratty sofa, salvaged from a dumpster and stuffed with old clothes, patched liberally with duct tape. He was half-tempted to turn on his Xbox and play for a few minutes, but resisted the temptation, knowing that a few minutes would turn into a few hours. The way things were going at work, he couldn’t afford to be late again. Scattered on the floor next to the Xbox were games like Battletech, Europa Universalis IV, Mutant War Zero: Road to Eden, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and other strategy titles. Maybe a few minutes reading instead? He glanced up at his bookshelves, where there were many dog-eared, moth-eaten books (all from thrift stores, of course), almost exclusively history books.

  As he chewed on his cornflakes, he turned on his phone and checked his messages. There were two voice messages: one from his boss at the convenience store, Ted, and one from his landlord Mr. Stavros. Neither were good options, but he decided to get the most unpleasant one out of the way.

  “Here it goes,” Andy muttered through a mouthful of cornflakes as he played Mr. Stavros’s message.

  “Andy, listen kid, I’ve been generous with you—way too generous. This is the last message I’m sending, after the last six or seven seem to have fallen on deaf ears. I know you’re having a tough time with your finances , but seriously, I’ve given you more than enough leeway now. If the rent isn’t under my door by the end of the week, you’re out next Monday. And yeah, I will get the cops to evict you. I’m sorry, this isn’t exactly pleasant for me either, but I gotta do what I gotta do. Nobody stays in my apartments rent-free. Sorry. Under my door by the end of the week or you’re out on your ass.”

  He wanted to quit listening here, but there was still one more message, even if he really didn’t want to hear it. The previous evening Andy had dumped a Slushie over an unruly, aggressive customer’s head, and although he’d known there would be hell to pay, he simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. With a reluctant sigh, he leaned back and played Ted’s message.

  “Andy you stupid, moronic, idiotic, selfish son of a bitch!” Ted roared, the cheap phone speaker distorting his voice.

  “Sounds pretty metal, Ted,” Andy remarked to himself with a smirk, glancing over at his Black Sabbath, Metallica, and Iron Maiden LPs.

  “I can’t believe you’d do something so, so, so completely brain-dead!” Ted Danzig spat. “Dumping Slushies over customer’s heads?! Are you kidding me, are you actually kidding me?! This is what I have to wake up to this morning?! And yeah, you smart-ass, I watched the security camera footage, and yeah, the guy was being a jerk, yeah, I know, he was harassing our female employees—but this doesn’t give you the right to go be, be, freakin’ Batman with a Slushie or whatever the hell you think you were doing! You ever heard the expression, ‘the customer is always right’, Knight?! The guy’s gonna try to sue me now, you idiot! I should fire your dumb ass! And I would if Sue wasn’t off sick and we had someone else to cover your shift today! Ugh, dammit, you moron, you total moron! This is your last warning, your very last warning! You ever pull a stunt like this, and I mean ever again, you’re out on your ass! This is your last warning! Ever! You’d best keep a low profile today, because if I even see your face, Andy Knight, if I have to look at your face…”

  The message cut off there.

  Andy sighed and shook his head as he got up from the sofa. This was his third so-called “final” warning in as many months, but this time he suspected it really was the final one. Except he wouldn’t hesitate to do exactly the same thing if the situation repeated itself.

  Andy tossed the phone aside, and then dumped his cereal bowl into the sink. He chugged the rest of his instant coffee, and put on his convenience store shirt and some ripped jeans. Stepping over a stack of unpaid bills and late notices near the door, he slipped his feet into his comfy old sneakers, and grabbed his scuffed leather jacket, motorcycle gloves, and a helmet. After shoving his phone and empty wallet into his pockets, he locked up his apartment, jogged down the stairs, and finally started to feel somewhat alive now that the caffeine had kicked in.

  He got to his garage in the parking basement. The space was just as cluttered with stuff—mostly half-stripped motors, dirt bikes, and an old, beat-up Jeep in pieces. He pushed out his only working vehicle: a ’91 Suzuki GSXR1100 crotch rocket, a beast of a motorcycle that Andy had restored from scrap. He hopped onto the bike and started it up. The big motor let out a rumbling roar. He grinned and gave it a few seconds to warm up, then clicked it into gear, spinning the rear wheel with a shriek of skidding rubber and smoke as he sped out of the basement.

  Although he was doing his utmost to avoid thinking about being fired, for real this time, worry gnawed relentlessly at him. Even though he was working two jobs and being as frugal as humanly possible, the bills seemed to grow rather than shrink each month. On top of everything, he was behind on his rent too. It was an uphill battle, and he just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. If Ted followed through on his threats to fire him, Andy would be sleeping on some cardboard in an alley in a week.

  He slowed down and stopped for a red light, muttering to himself inside his helmet about how he was probably going to catch every red light, even though there wasn’t a single other vehicle on the road. He almost felt like blasting through the reds, knowing it would be pretty safe to do so, but figured that with the way his luck usually went, there’d be a cop hiding at every set of traffic lights.

  As the light was about to turn green, a commotion to Andy’s right caught his attention. Half a block from the intersection, near an ATM, two young men were struggling with an elderly man. It took Andy all of two seconds to figure out what was going on: the two young men were mugging the old guy, who had just used the ATM.

  “Not on my watch,” Andy whispered as he kicked out the kickstand and jumped off the bike.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice was telling him that this was going to make him late for work and probably cost him his job, but he didn’t care. Andy Knight was simply incapable of
witnessing an act of injustice and looking the other way. As he sprinted toward the muggers, he tore off his helmet. It wasn’t ideal, but it was hard and heavy and could serve as a vaguely effective weapon.

  The muggers heard him coming and threw the old man to the ground. Both of them were big guys, around Andy’s size. The first turned to flee, but the other, brandishing a large hunting knife, stood his ground. “Turn around and run away, asshole!” the man snarled. “Run away, bitch, or you’re leaving this place in a body bag!”

  Andy didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. Instead, as he got within a couple yards of the mugger with the knife, he made as if to take a swing at the man with his helmet. As the man instinctively twisted to duck under the coming blow, Andy switched his grip on the helmet and threw it in a soft underhand toss to the guy. The mugger’s natural instincts to catch a pass kicked in before his brain could register that this was a trick. He fumbled with his hands, trying to catch the flying helmet as Andy bore down on him.

  While Andy had taken a handful of MMA classes, he was no professional fighter. He knew enough, though, to be able to throw a decent roundhouse kick, which he aimed at the mugger’s right hand, punting the hunting knife out of it. The knife went sailing through the air, and Andy ducked low and football-tackled the disarmed mugger, slamming him into the pavement.

  They struggled on the ground, and Andy managed to get the guy pinned down for some ground-n-pound, smashing his fists into the man’s face. Then, however, a hot slash of pain tore across his left forearm. He yelped and jumped up off the man, spinning around to see the other mugger lunging for him with his knife—with which he’d just slashed a cut across Andy’s arm. The sharp blade had sliced right through his leather jacket.

  Andy dodged a clumsy blow and tried to kick the knife out of the mugger’s hand, but this guy was faster than his friend and managed to dodge the kick. He was about to charge in and stab Andy when the wail of police sirens pierced the chilly morning silence.