Literature / Everybody Loves Large Chests

The Chestiest Chest That Ever Chested

"The irony of a genderless creature with zero sex drive somehow surrounding itself with all manner of lewd women was so thick that one would probably need to dig through it with a pickaxe."

The story of a Chest Monster that starts out dumb, but slowly gets smarter.

Everybody Loves Large Chests, by Neven Iliev, a.k.a. Exterminatus, is a LitRPG web fiction available online free.

Eleven books have also been published on Amazon with the primary titles, followed by the series name and volume number:

1. Morningwood
2. Fizzlesprocket
3. Vortena
4. Morgana
5. Teresa
6. Mortimer
7. Goroth
8. Stain
9. Jackson
10. Law
11. Tol-Saroth

The audiobooks narrated by Jeff Hays (with some sound effects).

Please proceed with caution while reading the page, as there are plenty of twists and turns in this story, and tropes on this page can cause spoilers.

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This fiction provides examples of:

• All There in the Manual: The comments section is a treasure trove of information as the author often answers reader's questions. The Q&A sessions even more.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Boxxy is subject to this trope in either direction, and instinctively knows if another monster is stronger than it or not. It quickly establishes a pecking order with the Ishgar Republic's doppleganger Syndicate for this reason.
  • Boxxy winds up losing its life to another changeling, named Wardrobzilla, who ensnared it by looking like a ridiculously easy target.
• An Adventurer Is You: Part and parcel of a story that is a LitRPG.
• An Aesop: The names of the arcs about the war between the Ishgar Republic and the Lodrak Empire: Those Who Are Right; Those Who Are Left. There are reasons for going to war, but it ultimately boils down to who survives the conflict over actual morality.
• Arc Words: 'A non-zero chance,' a phrase which accurately describes Byron, the God of Irregularities' modus operandi.
• Author Appeal: Exterminatus has stated that Kora is this.
• Bait-and-Switch: Author is fond of this, having used it on multiple occasions. Just have a look at the name, image, summary and then read the first chapter of the story and you will understand.
• Big Red Devil: The fiends and archfiends are a race of generally red-skinned demons.
• Bigger on the Inside: There are certain buildings and item containers that are like this thanks to the miracle of magic.
• Bizarro Country: The Nosferatu country is inhabited by dark elf-like people to whom Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad. One nosferata was abandoned by her parents at birth because she was hideous (jaw droopingly gorgeous by non-nosferatu standards), they use lead for currency because gold is worthless, they are nocturnal, and encourage bullying in children.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Dryads. While they might be able to be persuaded into helping for mutual benefit, they're decidedly not on anyone's side but their own. As an unfortunate Elven capital city learned in the epilogue of volume 4, when the 5 children dryads woke from their slumber and rediscovered how delicious blood is, and promptly forgot Boxxy!Keira's request to not attack the elves in favor of their own childish selfishness.
• Born Lucky: The main character, to an extent. Its luck is so extraordinary that the God of Chaos takes a personal interest in it.
• Broke the Rating Scale: Boxxy made an inventory list cataloguing all of its shinies, listing them by market price, quantity, and of course, how shiny it is. One of its prize possessions, a Masterwork-quality mithril rapier named Feathersting, gets a Shininess rating of 11 out of 10. Fizzy the mithril golem gets a Shininess rating of 15, with a market value of Priceless.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Boxxy prefers women with large chests. Not for the reason you think, since it initially doesn't understand that "large chest" when referring to women meant their breast size; Boxxy thought that they had a large treasure chest or something.
• Cat Girl: Keira Morgana, a spunky red-headed teenager who loves to cuddle.
• Chest Monster: Boxxy T. Morningwood, the main character.
• Combat by Champion: The war between the Ishgar Republic and the Empire ends after the Hero of the Chaos defeats the Hero of the Hammer.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • That woman proudly depicted right in the center of the cover? She's not the protagonist. She appears in a single chapter before being summarily killed off by the actual protagonist. She does get better, but still isn't the main character.
  • The buxom blonde woman on the cover of the Kindle edition? Also not the protagonist. That's actually Xera in her human disguise.
• A Day in the Limelight: This being a series with an omniscient narrator, sometimes characters other than the protagonist get the spotlight for a while. Kora has one while she is in the demon world and Fizzy actually got her own spinoff series.
• Decoy Protagonist: The first adventurer Himell doesn't survive very long.
• De-power: A level 60 Administrative Scribe in this setting is capable of forcibly removing a being's Job(s). This is regarded as a Fate Worse than Death for criminals by the civilized races of the world, because this causes the target to lose all knowledge and stats that the Job grants, along with making the target completely lose all associated powers and strength. This basically leaves the victim severely weakened with a massive void in their brain and soul where the Skills used to be, and is noted to usually drive particularly high-level victims to suicide from the resulting madness or crushing depression.
• Detect Evil: In effect, the Taboo skill. It comes from committing grave sins or willingly going against the will of the Gods. Taboo causes any religiously-aligned mortals to instinctively loathe those with the skill, with the revulsion getting worse with higher ranks.
• Doppelgänger: There's a whole species of monsters who do this, with various sub-species further muddying the waters.
• Dungeon Crawling: Part and parcel of a story that is a LitRPG.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Edward makes some logical yet incorrect deductions regarding Boxxy. Part of this is because he's blatantly looking for excuses to start a war with the elves, but mostly the problem is that Boxxy's life is just so bizarre that it's hard to predict. Not to mention that no one cares about mimics, so there's not much information on them. For example, Edward is completely unaware of Boxxy's Cadaver Absorption skill which is the source of its Warlock job, so he assumes it was taught the job by someone else, leading to a complicated theory about a conspiracy using Boxxy as a weapon.
• Establishing Series Moment: The Prologue, in which our hero Himmel gets lost in the Green Zone dungeon. He discovers a lone chest in the dungeon, goes to open it up and gets eaten by a mimic, and this occurs in the last two sentences of the Prologue. The perspective then shifts to the mimic in Chapter 1.
• Evil Sorcerer: The main character is a warlock that relies on demonic powers to get ahead in life.
• Evolution Power-Up: In this universe, people and monsters can Rank up into a new, more powerful species.
• Fantastic Nuke: Dungeon Cores can become this if certain conditions are met.
  • The destruction of Monotal makes the nuke comparison quite clear; the blast crater around an exploded Core continually degrades all life within a certain radius, much like radioactive fallout. The explosion even made a (permanent) mushroom cloud.
  • When Boxxy gets its second core, it finds out that this was only possible because the God of Chaos overrode a bunch of safeties; normally cores will never absorb more mana than they can safely hold. Edward's attempts to replicate the feat were doomed to failure from the start.
• Fantastic Racism: Most apparent between humans and elves, since their respective civilizations have constantly gone to war with each other. Also happens between succubus and fiends.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The story features a huge variety of fantasy themes and creatures, from cat-girls, shape-shifters, mimics, golems, demons, and more.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: Several divine rules directly deal with proper conduct during war. Perpetrating a knowing and willing breach of any rules will add the "Taboo" skill to the perpetrator's status. The specific war-related crimes listed by deity and domain are the following:
  • Murder (and presumably any mistreatment) of prisoners of war (also presumably noncombatants) — taboo of Axel, the war (and generally conflict) god.
  • Genocide of sapient life — taboo of Solus, the sun god.
  • Ecocide — taboo of Zephyra, the nature and weather goddess.
  • Creation of curses and cursed artifacts (i.e. magical WMDs) — taboo of Lunar, the magic and knowledge goddess.
  • Necromancy / desecration of the dead — taboo of Mortimer, the death and commerce god; however, obtaining prior contractual permissions from volunteers (alive and dead) to be raised to fight again would be acceptable.
  • The Blight treats all these rules as a checklist, which is why every god is united against its forces — it's an omnicidal genocidal ecocidal self-propagating curse-like effect which also uses the dead for construction materials. The artifact factory of the fallen machine god Udar is another multiple offender, as it creates technomagical "seeds" which forcibly turn all sapients into golem soldiers who in turn proceed to wipe out all organic life.
• First-Episode Twist: The blurb on the website, copied here, makes it sound like the protagonist is a new adventurer named Himmel. Sure enough, Himmel is the protagonist... of the prologue, for all of a few minutes, before his carelessness gets him unceremoniously devoured by a Chest Monster. Meet our real main character.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The whole affair began when a particularly curious level 0 monster learned how to pick up a sword without injuring itself. From there the story revolves around watching Boxxy grow into a fully sapient monster with a Horror Hunger to match.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Keira once attacked a large gnoll tribe wearing nothing but a smile, since Boxxy wanted to train its Blade Dancer Job without getting weird holes and stains on "Keira's" equipment.
• Fun with Acronyms: L.I.A.R. (Librarium Infinitus Arcana Refactorium) and D.I.L.D.O. (Direct Impact Lightning Discharge Oscillator). The first one is a deliberate joke by a trickster deity. The second one is accidental, because the device in question was manufactured by a sentient golem, who knew very little about sexual practices of "meatbags".
• Gender Equals Breed: A child will always be born as the same race as their mother, but incorporate a number of traits from their father. For example, Zone is a human like her mother, but has reptilian eyes and an odd, almost Emotionless Girl mindset from her raptor father.
• Giant Spider: Before turning into a doppelganger Boxxy makes spider legs to move around, making it look like a giant square spider.
• Grow Beyond Their Programming: The concept of "sweepers". They're low level monsters who grow to levels too high to safely stay where they were born. If a monster meant to live and die as a level 2 enemy in a dungeon manages to become level 15 or higher, they're considered a sweeper. They're called that because these monsters have a nasty habit of killing anything or anyone that tries to stop them, in effect "sweeping" the dungeon clean of life.
• Healing Potion: Usually used for healing set amounts of HP, and come in a variety of types. They're also mildly toxic; drinking too many at once will hurt you almost as much as they will heal you. The strongest variety, Rejuvenation, can literally regrow entire limbs and instantly bring them back up to full strength, but shave a couple years off of your life expectancy.
• Heroes "R" Us: Demons R Us, a demonic contracting agency that handles mortal summoners' requests for demon familiars.
• Hero of Another Story: Sigmund Law, Teresa's newest champion and head of her inquisition. He's got a huge job ahead of him, cleaning up the Empire and the Clergy, by force of arms if necessary. He even gets to punch the Emperor in the face. But we don't get to hear much about him, since he isn't the chestiest chest that ever chested.
• Horrifying Hero: The protagonist's true form tends to be quite frightening.
• Kryptonite Factor: All monsters have a bane, a specific form of attack such as fire or acid, that will do much more damage to them than normal. For shapeshifters that bane is usually electricity, since their shapeshifting relies on fine muscle and nerve control, and getting electrocuted makes it impossible for them to retain their form.
• I Have Many Names: The God of Chaos, who introduces himself as Bob, has a new name every time he is mentioned in dialog or narration. Her title and gender often change as well.
• Insane Equals Violent: Characters with mental instabilities are always depicted as Ax-Crazy.
• Insatiable Newlyweds: Xera and Kora, after their first time, go at it all the time, including when they are just walking from one place to another.
• Irony: See the quote at the top of the page.
• Just Eat Him: Averted, as the main character does not waste any time gobbling up its victims.
• Literal Genie: When Keira and Boxxy develop into separate personalities in the same bodies, Boxxy tries to use his IOU from Bob to try and get rid of her. Its exact words; “I want to be rid of this liability!” Unfortunately for Boxxy, Bob takes the opportunity to make Keira into a separate individual and give her all the power and status Boxxy had earned as hero of chaos and using Keira's name.
• Literal Metaphor: Tol-Saroth is unable to go against the The Authority of the King.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Boxxy manages to use Xera as a sacrifice because it doesn't understand what "pure" means (it assumed it just meant "clean and without disease"), and it made her grow an external heart to satisfy the requirement for a heart. It should be noted that Boxxy did this on accident; Demons 'R Us lets it get away with the trick because it wasn't trying to trick anything, it was just honestly trying to fulfill the ritual requirements. They make sure it knows it's not allowed to do that again, though.
  • Likewise, several people, Boxxy included, get away with violating Taboos because you have to both willingly and knowingly commit the crime. For example, the Goddess of Fertility forbids sexual relations with monsters or animals. But if you don't know that you're having sex with a shapeshifter, you won't trigger the Taboo. In addition, vows of chastity only cover vaginal intercourse, which results in many nuns being Technical Virgins, while fulfilling their sexual desires through other means.
• Mad God: The God of Chaos seems to have a few screws loose in his pineapple.
• Magic Staff: Spellcaster classes use them and Boxxy has a very powerful one.
• Masquerade: There is a secret society of monsters that have blended into the general populace. Being made up of supernatural beings also means they're really good at being The Syndicate.
• Medieval Stasis: The fantasy world hasn't left the era of swords & sorcery after tens of thousands of years. Gnomes have just started introducing higher technology to the setting through the Arclight Artificer Job, and that is noted to have come about 121 years ago at the time the story is progressing.
• Monster Adventurers: The whole premise of the story is the adventures of a Mimic and its group of assorted monstrosities.
• Mook Horror Show: Occasionally, the narrative perspective shifts to whomever Boxxy and its gang are about to attack, and most of the time the targets are horribly outmatched and provide a sequence of this.
• Never Trust a Title: The story's title can have more than one meaning.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Boxxy notices the suspicious number of monsters with outrageously large boobs, including his arachnoid familiar and other creatures with no sex organs.
• Only Sane Man: Ironically, Boxxy often feels itself in this position as it is often the only being without a sex drive in its party and so never has its judgement clouded by that.
• Operation: [Blank]: Boxxy (with some assistance by Xera) names one of its plans "Operation TASTYCOCK", which stands for "Tasty And Shiny Things Yielded by Chesting Or Cheap Killing". It doesn't understand why others are shocked at hearing the name.
• Organic Bra: A suspicious number of monsters have huge boobs, and many of them have "underwear" made out of their scales, flower petals, carapace, etc.
• Our Elves Are Different: The elf nation possessing inferior military might when compared to its neighbors, in both quantity and quality of troops. The long dead Elf Empire once enslaved most other species and conducted horrible experiments on their fellow enlightened beings.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: Dryads are powerful spirits present in the elven Ishgar Republic. Each one is tied to a mighty, magical Hylt tree, which acts as an extension of their own bodies, and vice-versa. Dryads are seldom seen, if ever, because they spend thousands of years at a time asleep until something rouses them, but once awake they're so powerful that appealing to their wants and needs is a good way to get an eternally protective ally, and angering them is likely to be the last mistake you'll ever make.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: One of the main cast is a 120 cm (4ft) gnome who regularly kills things much larger than herself.
• Power Crystal: The dungeon cores are large crystals. Some spell caster classes can turn their spells into crystals for later use. Boxxy abuses this mechanic to defeat the last boss in a dungeon.
• Planimal: Creepers are a sub-species of doppelganger that can shapeshift their flesh into various plant matter, like bark, timber, or leaves.
• Plot Threads: There are interludes in between most major story arcs that tend to focus on characters other than Boxxy, and are only tangentially related to the main plot.
• Pun-Based Title: The pun actually inspired the series. The "chest" is a treasure chest, or at least something that appeared to be a treasure chest, i.e. a mimic.
• Quantity vs. Quality: The God of Chaos only has about 880 worshipers in the entire known world, making him little more than a cult compared to the fully established religions with millions of followers that other deities like Teresa or Goroth have. However, the God of Chaos regularly keeps in touch with each and every one of his 880 faithful, whereas you'd have to be extremely lucky or exceptional to even get a single once-in-a-lifetime message from a "larger" god or goddess. This is partially why he's so confident he can go from "cult" to Top God in just a couple decades if he really wanted to.
• Random Effect Spell: The chosen Hero of the God of Chaos is prone to causing random magical effects to occur around it. These can be seemingly useless ones like getting a snazzy new hat, beneficial ones like restoring all health and stamina, or bad ones like suddenly bursting into flames.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: Boxxy does this to a city, a village, and a town. Well, maybe not the rape part, but it makes sure to do an extra-tasty job of pillaging and burning.
• Redshirt Army: It's almost guaranteed that any character who gets a point of view will be killed by Boxxy, from beginner adventurers all the way up to Heroes. Most of the time that happens before the end of the chapter.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: This story features game-like windows and stat-boxes, and absolutely everyone in the setting sees them.
• Secret Identity: In the Ishgar Republic, Boxxy maintains multiple secret identities.
• Shout-Out:
  • The succubus is one of those people who "just want to watch the world burn".
  • The fiend wants to "crush [her] enemies. See them driven before [her]. And to hear the lamentations of their women."
  • One level-100 Necromancer has an Ultimate Skill named The Goal of All Life Is Death, which does the exact same thing as Ainz' spell. He also has an entourage of Death Knights accompanying him, and is described as a "Holy Necromancer", wearing what resembles the white and gold robes that Ainz wears at one point in the series.
  • Volume 5 has a reference to Hayato's "Yes lolita! No touch" character.
  • While invoking the spell Inferno, Xera the Witchs chant is almost identical to the lyrics of Slaughter Your World, Richard the Warlock's Villain Song in Looking for Group.
    There's nowhere to hide! There's nowhere to run!
    This village will burn like the heart of the sun!
    With infinite glee, I call upon thee...
  • The Fleshmaiden, a shapeshifting monster resembling an unnaturally pale monster wearing a dress of flesh, was (as per Word of God) inspired by the dress of the same name in Alice: Madness Returns.
  • One of the trigger phrases that force Reggie to obey any command is "Would you kindly..."
  • In Jackson, Nao casts a spell with a scepter using the Green Lantern oath, except he forgets the last line and improvises it with ''something something light."
• Slap-Slap-Kiss:
  • Between Xera and Kora, due to the natural antagonism between succubi and fiends. It gets so bad that Kora decides to fuck Xera into submission. Both of them enjoy it so much that they become fuck buddies.
  • Averted between Xera and Drea. When the stalker says that she is in love with Boxxy, Xera thinks that Drea might be mistaking love and hunger, something normal for her race (stalkers represent the sin of gluttony). Boxxy, angry at their bickering, authorizes them to fight each other. After her victory, Drea decides to eat Xera, because for a long time she had been watching the Boxxy eat the succubus in "The Boxxy Show". While both enjoy the experience, it's not something either are interested in repeating.
• Spinoff: Small Chests Are Fine Too, featuring Fizzy as the protagonist.
• Split-Personality Takeover: When Boxxy starts noticing holes in its memory, this is the cause. Keira is the split personality and she has no idea she's a cover identity for a former Mimic.
• Stockholm Syndrome: The main character turned a kidnapping victim into a fanatically loyal follower.
• Sudden Name Change: Done purposely for the God of Chaos, whose name changes every time he is mentioned.
• Summon Magic: One of the main mechanics of the Warlock class.
• Technical Virgin: Boxxy encounters a nun of the goddess of truth shown as having enthusiastic anal sex with a man she sort-of introduced as her cousin. The narrator explains that many nuns take vows of chastity and use this as a Loophole Abuse to still have sex. Given that they don't get a special debuff from breaking their vows to their gods, the gods accept this. This particular nun and her "cousin" end up paying for that with their lives when Boxxy sneaks up on them (they are facing the same direction, after all) and uses its assassination skill to kill them both.
• That's No Moon: The Palace of the Crystal Maiden isn't a palace. It's an enormous golem.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Prior to the start of the series the god of order went insane and destroyed all life.
• The Fool: Minic, a harmless creature in the shape of an animate jewelry box with teeth, is the embodiment of this trope. Its Luck Stat is so high that it is a literal Game-Breaker.
• The Magic Touch: Boxxy uses the ritual of unholy wealth to create a magical goblet that turns the bones of anyone who drinks it into gold.
• The Unfettered: Word of God states that all monsters are this.
• The Unpronounceable: The vast majority of demons have names that look like someone threw up alphabet soup onto a piece of paper.
  • The audiobook, narrated by Jeff Hays, does a pretty good job of pronouncing "Xerababadubuth L'okrelaila" and "Koralenteprix Khusuuszun Caonthioxxaa".
• Talking Is a Free Action: Averted. During a heated battle, a warlock named Arakawa Shinji recognizes Boxxy and tries to introduce himself in a Large Ham manner and talk to Boxxy. However, Boxxy keeps interrupting him by tossing daggers in his direction, which keep harmlessly bouncing off the warlock's shield. Shinji eventually get annoyed and stops trying to talk. After pinning Boxxy down with his ultimate skill, Shinji starts a speech/rant about this world. Boxxy uses the time to escape and kill the high-ranking talking warlock.
• Time Skip: A two year time skip is introduced through the Life, Luck and Lemonade series.
• Trapped in Another World: Apparently humans showing up out of nowhere and raving about other worlds is a common enough occurrence in the setting to not elicit any fuss from the setting's governments. The otherworlders, as they're known, either get killed by monsters or integrate into one of the civilizations.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Himmel. Without him, Boxxy would have been killed by the much more cautious adventurers who came after him and none of the rest of the story would have even happened.
• Violence is the Only Option: Almost all conflicts in the story are resolved through a vigorous application of lethal force. For monsters and demons, it's the instinctive and preferred response, respectively.
• War Is Hell: What it's like for common soldiers (levels 30-40 usually) to fight in wars alongside and against transcendent beings (level 100+).
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Edward's men fail to extract a dungeon core no matter what spells they use. When Zone suggests just physically hitting it, she is dismissed as crazy. That is, of course, how Boxxy got its cores.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: There's a warlock who is presumably from our world that is Trapped in Another World. He tries to convince Boxxy to bridge the gap between monsters and the Enlightened to stop the endless Cycle of Revenge between monsters and humans. Boxxy kills him and steals his body and loot, because it doesn't care about such untasty things.
• Xenofiction: The main character is a dungeon mimic who eventually evolves into other species.

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