Dungeon Lord: Nightmare Kingdom (The Wraith's Haunt - A litRPG series Book 5) by Hugo Huesca

Author:Hugo Huesca [Huesca, Hugo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Josiah Davis
Published: 2024-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

404

It was yet another day alone in the office. Francis, Duke of IT in the Kingdom of Pantheon, was a stout man in his mid-twenties, and the reason the entire damn company even functioned most of the time. That was the reason he, unlike the other corporate grunts cramped in cardboard cubicles like hamsters in their cages, got a whole-ass closet-sized room to himself. Sure, there were no windows, and the heat coming off of the ever-running servers meant that his portable fan could barely keep the sweat stains from his Hatsune Miku t-shirts, but it was a small price to pay for privacy.

Overworked, underpaid, invisible to everyone except when they needed him to fix their printer or Wi-Fi, there were a few things that made the everyday commute to Pantheon’s offices worthwhile.

For one, Francis had leisure time. Because no one cared about his job unless some database somewhere got scrambled up, he quite literally got paid for spending about eight hours a day playing games on his laptop.

Privacy was another. Few people visited the Duchy of IT, which meant he only had to deal with annoying coworkers if he chose to venture into the no man’s land that was the dreaded rec room, a daunting journey he only undertook if there was a chance he’d meet Audrey, the intern from Finance.

There was the aura of mystique surrounding Pantheon. The company had a secret sordid story it quite wished to keep to itself, so they’d employed a bunch of dusty lawyers with mannerisms so stiff and archaic it oftentimes seemed as if they belonged to an ancient age, as if they hailed from a different world altogether. There was also an inordinate degree of workplace risk. Just last week, security had caught five people trying to break in! It had even been on the news.

Finally, there was whatever the hell was going on in the server room. Most of the machines there were exactly as they seemed—sturdy steel blocks that had been cutting edge a decade ago—but the ones at the very back, the ones surrounded by those alluring silver engravings and the “DANGER KEEP OUT” signs… well, Francis had only been authorized to take a close look at one of them under the supervision of Pantheon’s lawyers and security personnel.

Whoever had spent a fortune to design custom, working steampunk servers with active vacuum tubes, Tesla coils, and wheezing gyroscopes, well, that person didn’t come from Finance, that was for sure, and they had clearly taken the whole Ivalis Online aesthetic to heart.

Francis, who had proudly been identifying as a geek since way before it was cool, couldn’t help but flock to a place like Pantheon like a moth to the proverbial flame, even if it was clearly in decline.

In the times of his predecessor, Francis had heard Pantheon had employed a solid amount of programmers, software engineers, writers, designers, and other generally tech-savvy people. That was way back during the MMO craze, when every investor and their mothers

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