A Black Market LitRPG

Kyle hated sleep.

Sleep was where a human was the weakest – where his guard was the lowest than at any other point in his day. Kyle had always made it a point to sleep in a well-protected area and to always have a weapon on hand.

Sleep was a small factor in Kyle’s life. In fact, his newfound Arcian physique allowed him to go for long days without requiring sleep, so rest came far and few in between.

Such an inclination stemmed from his former life as a designer baby – where sleep time was also preoccupied with learning, dream immersion in combat scenarios, education about war history and politics, etc. The childhood of a Dynasty kid was never free. Every hour and minute was precious.

It was also the point where Kyle had zero influence over what happened in the real world around him. He hated that. Having no control or no power over events happening. If he had a choice, he would never sleep for the rest of his life if he had the option.

Kyle could hardly recall the last time he had dreamt. His gene package in the Galactic Era ensured his sleep pattern would be as restful as possible, leaving close to no avenue for the brain’s subconscious to disturb his rest.

So, while Kyle knew he was in a dreamlike sequence, he did not bother with trying to wake himself up, instead revelling in the novelty of the lucid nature of his dream. It was a newfound experience for him, only afforded due to his ‘new’ body thanks to his ‘reincarnation’.

He had heard the common saying that it was hard to tell dreams apart from reality said among other humans but could never relate to it. As far as he knew, it was extremely simple to tell them apart—especially this dream.

Because my wife and children would have never been this happy to see me in real life.

It was a weird scene that Kyle had never envisioned before nor experienced in his former life. Here, he was just a simple dad, leaning into a floating chair with his son on his lap as the chair spun around the holo room, the holographic movie playing in a 360 degrees, spanning across the entire dome in a sphere.

The movie imparted only a sense of entertainment to Kyle even as he watched it, though he could not figure out the story, meaning or purpose behind anything he watched. Is this what it is like to dream? The movie plot was completely incoherent, but Kyle felt a weird sense of excitement and contentment, simply letting the absurd scenes wash over him.

Instead, he focused his attention on his son in front of him, who was still laughing and giggling at the holomovie, his small little hands tapping the surface of the chair’s holster to navigate the movie. There was another reason why Kyle knew immediately that this was a dream.

I never saw him till he was eighteen.

Kyle was infertile in the Galactic Era – designer genes meant that any excess biological energy or unnecessary functions were ripped out and removed. He still retained his reproductive organs, but his entire body was geared towards intellect and strength. It was not crucial to Kyle either, as he was trained from a young age to ignore all of that.

He didn’t need to be fertile to have kids as well: gene companies would simply splice a portion of the father’s and mother’s genes to form a new human. A simpler and less messy way of having children, with the bonus of rooting out any mental or health disabilities from the start.

With Kyle’s bearing as a Crime Lord, he could hardly afford to have the kid publicly in the open or next to him. It would weigh him down too much – there was so much more to do, more territory to expand, more enemies to takedown. There was simply no time for him to babysit or protect a kid.

Thus, he had the kid born and trained in a completely different state as a legal orphan, only keeping tabs through companies that served as a front. The best resources were given to his son: education, lodging, training, and internships. Only when he was eighteen was his son then forcibly relocated to Kyle, with Kyle intending to have him take up the reigns on specific parts of the criminal empire.

Kyle assumed the familial bonds would be enough to create trust between him and his son. His father in the Dynasty had done the same thing for him.

He never expected he would have to kill his own son five years later.

“Daddy, daddy! Watch another one!” The innocent, naļve eyes of his son looked up at him with his large hazel eyes, tapping his thighs fervently.

Kyle smiled instinctively at the sight of his son, losing a bit of his lucid control of the dream as his mouth spoke automatically: “Not now, later after lunch, alright? Your mom and sister is just about done cooking.”

“Awww, but there’s still three more minutes to go! And that’s hardly considered cooking – I’ve seen Ancient Earth’s videos to know! Sis won’t know jackshit about it.”

“No swearing! And you can’t even boil a packet of nutri-paste to save your life, you don’t get to say that about your sister.” Kyle lightly smacked his son on the back, earning a ‘Guh!’

The holomovie began to wind down, revealing a pure white enclosed dome now illuminated by lights, with the chair slowly floating to the ground. Kyle’s son leapt off his lap and sprinted off. “Slowpod!” His son taunted as he raced off towards an opening door leading to the rest of the space habitat.

“No running in the dome and the corridors!” Kyle shouted, but he did not give chase, instead slowly walking as he watched his son happily bounce through the low-gravity corridor, barreling through the air.

[Sir, your son is exceeding the speed limits placed in this habitat. Shall I place a restraining field on him?]

“Let him go. Just drop a warning to my wife about a rogue asteroid.”

[Size of a human boy?]

“Sounds about right.”

As Kyle’s body automatically moved towards the dining room, seemingly controlled by the dream, Kyle was reluctant to meet his wife. She never forgave him for killing their son, and their relationship soured for decades, only meeting once every two years after that. He was not afraid of her, but it was that he simply did not have time to deal with such a problem.

Not that was any real love between them either. He only married her because she was competent and was well-to-do as well. Kyle had nearly all emotions neutered, saved for anger and a small bit of happiness. Emotions clouded judgement, and Kyle made an independent decision to undergo surgery to modify them. A crime lord had no time for such mundane feelings that would jeopardise both his empire and the livelihood of the millions that worked for him, or the trillions of humans that lived in his territory.

Now that I have a second life, my emotions are not neutered… It has been barely a year since he woke up in Raktor, and his life has been a complete rollercoaster of events, mostly induced by himself. He was still going through the same old motions, caught up in chasing his old dream. Being the crime lord of a star sector was far from enough, he needed more.

Always more.

Always chasing the top.

“Hey, honey.” The soothing sound of his wife’s voice suddenly distracted him from his train of thought. She smiled gently as she laid out the dining table, serving the food while his daughter struggled to carry the large tray over, fumbling against the lower gravity. At the same time, his son was still rolling about the ceiling, his body bouncing against a child-safe energy field that the A.I was continuously deploying as it kept track.

“I told you to let the A.I do it.” His wife chided as she reached out to grab the tray, but his daughter pulled the tray away, pouting.

“No, I wanna do it!”

“Melissa Yue Jing Yi! You’re going to put down that tray now!”

“NO!”

Kyle smiled instinctively again but was far more focused on what was on the plate than his daughter’s antics. The vegetable was like a tiny potato, except it had twelve tentacle-like vines growing out of its bottom like roots, but much more alive, though they moved in a lethargic method as though it had been drugged. A face shaped like a pig’s was on the main body of the plant – the ‘potato’ – and it had an eerie smiling face as well.

“Is that tentagloo?”

“Oh, I found it at the local trading post today!” His wife grinned in obvious pride. “It’s a delicacy from Athen, one of the planets from your old home state. I thought you would like it. Help you take your mind off work.”

“I love it,” Kyle spoke unnaturally, sitting at the long dining table, ready to eat. The sight completely astounded him. He could hardly recall the last time, nor any time his family had sat down to eat at one table. He had no time to waste in his former life, only sipping on nutri-paste packets while strapped into speed crafts, chasing down errant criminals or fighting against enforcement forces at the border.

They say all dreams have meanings, so what is this dream trying to tell me? The science behind dreams was far from established, though scientists already knew how to block dreams. However, they have yet to figure out how to predict what dreams a human would get each night, remaining one of the unsolvable mysteries of the Galactic Era.

The scene at the dining table unnerved him. As much as this warmed Kyle’s heart, this was not what he wanted. It would be nice to have, but Kyle was never one to sink into mediocrity. To him, being human was all about reaching the pinnacle of power, where you have to answer to no one and fear nothing.

But is having a loving family a sign of being mediocre?

Kyle couldn’t help but think that his subconscious was trying to tell him something. But before he could ponder any further, someone suddenly grabbed him from behind, choking him quickly and stabbing him with a coated blade, the blade piercing right through his heart.

"Enjoying your dinner? Might be your last."

XANIUS!

The shock of the stab woke Kyle right out of the dream sequence, yelling angrily at the top of his lungs. He immediately lunged out of his chair and grabbed the nearest person by the neck, about to punch the face in with his other fist, when he finally stopped as he realised who it was.

Kyle quickly let go of Hayden, who coughed violently as she stumbled backwards, “Why the fuck are you in here? I said I was not to be disturbed for five hours.”

“Ugh… what the hell what happened to you? You also said to inform you if anything happened.”

Taking deep breaths, Kyle purged himself of his lingering emotions from the dream, though he found it harder to do so than before. “And…?”

“Ocra is currently under attack. Raktor soldiers have infiltrated the city once again. They have already breached the outer wall.”

The sudden information flushed any remnants and lingering emotions of the dream out of his head like a cold bucket of water. “How long ago?”

“The fighting started more than three hours ago.”

Kyle already began to regret the decision to sleep. This is what I meant by not having control. If I was awake, I could have responded in an instant.

However, his forces were nowhere near Ocra. ADCON was now spilt up and in charge of suppressing the industrialists, while the bulk of his force was gearing up to assault Utul to flush out Harrison once and for all. Already fortifications and siege trenches were dug up around the city’s perimeter, just out of range of the city defenders. Kyle was ramping up for an assault but was now stuck in a dilemma.

If I retreat now to Ocra and defend, it will take me more than a day to make it. The only ADCON forces he had near Ocra were the recruits and trainees still back at the Keru Forest and Desham, which would be hardly sufficient to break the siege at Ocra. This meant that even Kyle could not make it back in time.

The Versian military was also significantly occupied by the other two Counts, who had become far more brazen, some of them even supporting remnants of the industrialists to destabilise the fronts. It would not be too far of a stretch to say that Versia was the definition of a clusterfuck now, with various competing parties all vying for their own interest.

The only way forward is to utterly eliminate one enemy at a time. Kyle set his eyes on Harrison, the leader of the industrialists. Crushing him would lower the civil unrest of Versia, allowing Kyle to dominate more of the economy and the war.

“We have to accelerate the timeline. Prepare the men for an assault on Utul.”