Home / Fantasy / How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis / Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

All Chapters of How to Avoid Death on a Daily Basis : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

244 Chapters

161. Dad Talk

I looked upwards, eyes searching the skies. Somewhere up there, giant fish swam through the clouds. If I could tempt them down, maybe they would fight my enemies. Who was I kidding? The first thing they’d do was eat me.The Kraken were a better bet with regards to being helpful (especially if we introduced them to Motown classics) but they had the slight disadvantage of not being able to walk on land. Or maybe they could, very slowly. Either way, as Socrates once said, you don’t bring a lobster to a shark fight. I think it was him. Might have been Plato.Cheng landed in the middle of the arena, both his opponents out cold. He lifted Comfort out of the pool of blue liquid he was lying in and tried to carry him. The difference in size was too great, and Cheng too exhausted, so he had to drag the body out of the arena, back to the palace. A trail of blue trickled behind them.Unscathed rose to his knees, collapsed, and tried again. After a couple more aborted attempts
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

162. Free Your Mind

Once they’d confiscated Phil’s device, the Masters lost interest in us and returned their attention to the fighting below. The combatants were barely visible as clouds of green dust billowed over the arena, emanating from the rotund Master who was mainly a head. Special gas attack?Cheng’s father had his arm around Cheng’s shoulder, proudly claiming him as his own. Despite the method of his victory (or maybe because of it), Cheng was now considered legit. He was worthy of being a Darkholme demon.Cheng turned his neck to give us an apologetic look. Well, I say that, it’s hard to tell what six eyes blinking in sequence is supposed to signify.No one seemed to be forcing us to stay and there weren’t even any snacks, so I didn’t see the point of hanging around.“Is it okay if we go?” I said to the accumulated backs ignoring us. It was a good indicator of just how little threat we posed that despite our magic and powerful devices, we weren’t considered worth loc
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

163. A Winning Plan

“Was there anything in the manual that could help us defeat the Masters?” I asked 288. He’d read it back to front so if there was anything useful in there, he would know. And now that he had seen the light, maybe even tell me. Hallelujah!The mention of the manual made the imp’s beady little eyes gleam. He looked up at me as I leaned over the partitioning wall and said, “The Book is the answer to all questions.”He sounded like a newly baptised religious nut. Just what I needed, a Jehovah’s penis.“That’s great but was there anything in the Book—”  I thought it best to sound as reverential about his new Bible as him “—that could help us against the Masters?”“No,” said 288. “The Masters cannot be defeated.”Well, not with that attitude they couldn’t.“What if all the golems were to attack the Masters? Could they win?”“No,” said 288.“There’s only nine of them,” I pointed out.“All the war golems together wouldn’t be a
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

164. In the Huddle

No plan is perfect. There’s always a chance a great idea will flounder, just as there’s a chance a dumb one will flourish. One thing’s for sure, though — you can’t call a plan successful if you never get to the end of it.If we ended up dead, then I would loop back to the beginning and have to do it all again. If I managed to get back to this point, it would just be the same as before. This is why time travel is so stupid. Nothing matters if everything resets again and again.288 flew off to speak to his fellow converts. I fully expected it to be an established religion a thousand years from now, possibly with me as a saint. St Colin the Irritable, who walked among all creatures and didn’t see them as good or bad, but as equally annoying.I sat down with my back to the stall wall. There had to be a way around the minor obstacle of us getting killed. Hiding was my first thought. Let them all have their big moment while we crawled into a hole and hoped they didn’t fi
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

165. Martyr Dome

It’s tiring having to come up with ways not to die. Lying there with a girl playing with your hair might seem idyllic, but when monsters are waiting outside to eat you, it makes it hard to relax.Somehow I drifted off to sleep. Ideas can sometimes come to you when you stop trying so hard to think of them. Spend hours trying to figure something out and get nowhere. Go off to do something else and the answer pops into your head.Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.I woke up and still had nothing. What had woken me was a breeze in my face. 288 was hovering over me, his wings fanning cool air over me. It was quite nice, if you resisted thinking about what 288 was and where that tangy odour was coming from.“The final fight is about to begin,” he said.I sat up, waking Jenny in the process. She had dozed off leaning against the wall and was now all stiff and stretching. Girls are so obvious. They claim they hate guys eyeing them up, and then they wake
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

166. Betray You, Betray Me

Their plan made sense. If the Masters had no form of food to sustain them through the welding, then no welding today.Of course, they had to sacrifice their own people to achieve their goal. And not just kill them — people didn’t die in Nekromel — they had to be eaten.I had limited sympathy for these idiots who believed the Masters were going to bestow some kind of spiritual enlightenment on them, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch them being slaughtered. It was even harder for the others who hadn’t seen the weretics in action before, at least not in this timeline.Jenny gripped my arm so tightly it hurt. Claire had turned away in horror while Maurice watched slack-jawed. Flossie had her head buried in Dudley’s chest and whimpered while Dudley buried his head in the top of her curly hair, also whimpering.The weretics, grotesquely misshapen and more monstrous in appearance than any of the Masters, waded through the crowd, claws slashing and teeth t
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

167. The Long Way Home

For someone who goes to such great lengths to avoid danger, committing honourable Subaru might seem a little out of character.Just as Claire had suggested, only losing one of our group was a more than reasonable price to pay for surviving a very unpromising situation. Count yourself lucky and move on with your life, would be my advice if someone had asked for it.And yet, I didn’t like it. Claire had almost known things were going to end up like this, she even gave me the long goodbye. It was like she was doing me a favour. It rankled.There’s something about getting an unwanted gift and then being expected to be thankful for it that has never sat right with me. Imagine if you left someone house-sitting while you went on holiday, and when you came back, they had redecorated as a surprise.They didn’t ask you, and the new look was their taste, not yours. Would you thank them?When they got upset at your lack of gratitude for what had taken them a grea
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

168. Roguelike

“Ah, sorry,” I said, “the Loran I’m looking for is a girl. My mistake. Sorry.” I did a quick about turn and walked away.Is Loran a girl’s name? No idea, my only intention was to make a swift exit. Eventually, I would meet Loran as an adult and I didn’t want him to remember me. A stranger knocking on the wrong door when you were a kid wouldn’t make a very strong impression, I hoped.The other boy had to be his brother, Levrik, who would grow up to be a weretic and eat people’s heads. Hopefully, this time, he wouldn’t — although, from my perspective, he already had. Time travel is such a pain.I didn’t dare to look back until I was well down the road. No one was following me or watching from a distance. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but I had an overwhelming urge to not change anything unless I knew it would provide some kind of benefit in the future.There are certain time travel stories that suggest events are fixed. That whatever a time traveller
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

169. Better the Devil You Know

The first thing I thought was, Oh no, I’m going to have to do this shit all over again. A somewhat self-centered way of thinking when you’re watching someone about to be bitten in half, but in my defence, death loses some of its gravitas when you’re going to see the person again in a bit.Not that it didn’t upset me to see Claire die — murder isn’t a very pleasant thing to witness, especially when it involves chewing — but going through all that palaver only to find myself in exactly the same situation was infuriating.It’s like having a save point right before the final boss and realising you’re going to have to go back to the beginning of the level because you missed one item. Annoying.Even though there was no time to reach Claire from where I was standing, or even to shout a warning, every fibre in my body was screaming for her to get down. And she did.Claire’s eyes locked onto mine and she lunged towards the ground. Her body hit the deck and the Levrik
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more

170. Out of the Box

The others were already in the room where naked Yuqi lay in repose and Bao was doing his impression of a ghost coming out of the wall. By the time I got there, they had excavated Bao with Cheng’s help and he lay on the floor, shivering and shaking, covered in dust.His clothes were ripped but his body looked in pretty good shape, all things considered. He was muttering like a madman and his eyes were rolling around like marbles in a goldfish bowl, but at least he wasn’t wall-mounted anymore.“His body will heal in time,” said Cheng, who took up most of the room. “His mind may never recover.”I felt the same could be said about me.The whole time travel thing didn’t make sense on many levels. But what did seem obvious was that Yuqi’s position outside of time allowed her to fuck with everyone else. The solution, or at least the first step, was to drag her out of there and back into the here and now.“Give me your knife,” I whispered to Jenny. She gave m
last updateLast Updated : 2021-09-13
Read more
PREV
1
...
1516171819
...
25
DMCA.com Protection Status