“The monsters are devious!” I called out, motioning to the loot I’d gathered. “They’ll do anything they have to in order to get you out of this location, stooping to nothing. Make sure you level-up your willpower so you can stand up to their hypnosis.”
“What about Father Dread?” I heard someone call in a nervous voice.
“He’ll wake up soon. A powerful opponent had his mind under a spell, using him to get to you.”
“Are you sure he’s free of the spell? Or would it be better to shoot him?” That was a different voice. It belonged to the suspicious creature that had slipped into the shadows when the monsters had transformed back into humans, and he was asking an excellent question. Dread was lying motionless, though I doubted he was using the time to boost his willpower, and so it was possible he was still being controlled.
“I don’t know,” I replied frankly. “We’ll need time to see. But I do know that he’ll be free as soon as the creature who took his mind captive is destroyed.”
“Then, get to it! Look at the crowd — half of them are in the same condition, and the soldiers don’t look normal, either. We should probably tie them up.”
Seriously. Part of the crowd was frozen with glassy eyes staring straight ahead, the old man I’d left in charge included.
“Take care of them,” I said as I pulled out Dread’s phone. It wasn’t hard to hack it. The lanky guy lived a hundred kilometers away, in a small village with a name that seemed somehow familiar. I just couldn’t figure out why. His initiation had happened there, and he’d started his travels there, too. Judging by the map, he’d been thrown around quite a bit, heading through forests, living by a creek, and a few times making his way back to the village, but never able to force himself to actually enter it. But then, everything changed. Something happened to him in the heart of the forest — his wanderings gave way to a straight line heading through the monster-littered villages and cities. Once he got to a certain point, he turned sharply and headed toward our location. Again, on a straight line. That told me he’d been under someone’s control the whole time. He was being jerked around like a marionette, first pushing the troops to the edge of my location, then setting up the battle with the Tsarter fighter that I hadn’t gotten a named item for, and finally catching me. But when it turned out I’d gotten away, plan B was activated. He was supposed to use all the hypnotic equipment he had with him to pull everyone out of the location and hand them over to the monsters to be eaten. It wasn’t a bad plan — I’d almost bought in. Having me take off my helmet and distracting me from Raptor had been an especially good move. Those sly dogs!
“Nicely done,” I said when I saw Gardine’s work. He was the strange player. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”
“I’m a veterinarian. For us, it’s simple — you learn how to tie the animals up, or you deal with cuts and bites all over your arms. Hey, let’s exchange contact information. I won’t let them go until you give me a call even if they wake up and tell me their fine. That’s an old trick. There are plenty of them in all the games.”
“Wait, you’re a player, too? Then why…” I stopped, not sure how to ask why Gardine wasn’t a player.
“I couldn’t give myself the shot,” he replied with a guilty expression on his face. “The first thing they teach you at vet school is to never use medicine you’re not familiar with. Not on the animals, not on yourself.”
“But then why…”
“Why did I hide? I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I’m not the type to jump into anything first.”
“Okay, wait here. I won’t be long,” I said unwillingly before taking off into the air. I always hated the moments where your conscious pokes its head up and refuses to let you leave people to their fate. I didn’t owe them anything; they didn’t owe me anything. The best thing to do would have been to put a shot through Dread’s head and be done with it, maybe even the soldiers, too. I was positive that would’ve brought everyone back. But that would have left the hypnotic beast still out there, and it would have found someone else sooner or later. Also, we were coming up on the next monster upgrade. I wasn’t sure I’d still be able to take it out once that happened.
It was time to play the hero once again, risking my life for strangers. When am I going to start using my head?
I had to fly quite a distance. Turning on invisibility and forgetting my fear, I pushed Ulbaron to the limit — almost 110 of the maximum 150 kilometers an hour.
You called Squirrel Derwin. User unavailable. Would you like to wake the person currently holding the phone?
Wake him up? He’s sleeping while I’m out here working? You bet I would!
“What do you want?” Wart’s voice really was sleepy and even starting to sound inhuman. “Did you find the pearl?”
“That’s not as simple as you think. I need to know how you got your hands on the one in the prerelease.”
Silence was my only answer.
“Wart, this isn’t easy without information! Do you want to live, or do you want to play games? How did you find it?”
“I wasn’t the one who found it,” he finally replied. “I attacked the guy who did, though I lost.”
“But how did you hear about it?”
“There was a group of us running around together. I was held up at work, and they went into the dungeon without me. Of the ten players who went in, only one came back out. He was boasting about what he found — I saw the description. I know what it can do. I wanted to take it from him, though it didn’t work.”
“Do you know how he got it? What did he do?”
“He killed them! That’s all I know. I was on my way to his work to bash his face in when all this happened — he took out our whole group!”
“Excellent! Now I know where to find that damn pearl. Okay, over and out.”
The whole process suddenly made sense, including the number of victims you needed to get a pearl. Nine units of personified noa to get the dungeon to unheard-of levels. That was the only way I could get what I was looking for, the only way to save my sister. The only question was what would happen to my victims. What will happen to them in the database?
Shartun Po was sacrificed and received a penalty covering the next 4 releases.
You can collect 4 items at your maximum available level (current equipment level: 6).
Level +5 (147).
***
You killed a player from the owner’s personal guard.
You can collect 1 named item in the store.
Level +20 (167).
10 free attribute points received.
Oh, wow, so Fang turned out to be stronger than the game magic? The creature’s regeneration apparently hadn’t been enough to handle the necrotic energy. Whatever the case, it was good news — the fewer mercenaries there were, the easier it was going to be for me to survive. Of the seven in the group, four had already been sent off to miss the next four releases, leaving just three. The only problem was that Tsarter definitely knew how I was killing them. They’ll probably think up something.
I could see from a ways off where Father Dread had been captured. It was hard not to notice the trampled field in the middle of the thick forest. Fallen trees had been turned to wood chips as though something heavy had been dropped down on them. Per the location data, there weren’t any players around, neither alien nor human. Still, I had no doubt the beast was local. It had tracked the clergyman, jumped down on him, and subjugated his mind. I sent Flyer around in a circle, widening the radius with each rotation. My targets were big monsters, champion-level or higher.
Almost immediately, I found what I was looking for. An odd creature was living in the village Dread was from. Suddenly, I remembered why the name was familiar — it was home to the biggest church in the country. What I didn’t remember, certainly, was why it had been built in such a remote location far away from the nearest cities, though I was positive it had been built ten years before. All of Christianity came there on pilgrimages.
The logical assumption was that the beast had settled in the church. A crowd of superior monsters and champions were hauling loot inside, and it took me a second to realize it was metal and electronics rather than live creatures or meat. Everything that could transmit electricity was being carried inside. Just in case, I had Flyer do a few more circles around the location, but nothing else fit the bill. That was the only powerful monster around.
Flyer came back toward me, though I started losing control as it neared the church. The feed began rippling, the drone glitched in and out of control, a second-long lag appeared, and one time it almost went into a steep dive. I was forced to pull it away and observe the church from a distance. Suddenly, it dawned on me — I had no idea what kind of creature was in there. The scanner showed me there was a monster, though I didn’t know what type of monster it was. Neither the class nor the level showed up on the screen.
Ah, a bomber with a few blockbusters would sure be nice right about now. But I didn’t have access to the troops in the north, and their only local representatives were dead weight in my location. It was going to have to be the tried and true: get inside and blow it all to bits. Ten thermal mines could work wonders.
But before heading over, I went through two trials, deciding to bet the minimum fifty levels both times. Of course, I could have started saving them up and ended up the first player on Earth at level 300, but that wouldn’t have been any more than a check mark in my list of achievements. Survival was more important than medals.
You locked in 25 levels. 25 levels were discarded in favor of the game.
Current level: 142 (67).
Impenetrable skin +3 (3).
***
You locked in 26 levels. 24 levels were discarded in favor of the game.
Current level: 118 (93).
Impenetrable skin +2 (5).
I was able to hold out for quite a while that time as the torture chamber went to work on me. Sure, I yelled and screamed as it literally chopped me up, emptying my bowels and bladder, but I stood tall. It was only when my skin was slowly stripped back, something acidic and far worse than salt being poured into the wounds, that I gave in. But twenty-five and twenty-six seconds was a great result, I thought.
My skin was different. It was more elastic, smoother, glossier. My entire body went bald, including my head, though that was actually good news. I didn’t always have time to keep myself clean. And when I tried to pinch myself, I grunted — it wasn’t easy. Breaking off a branch and sharpening the tip, I tried to stab my hand. I grunted again when it didn’t even hurt. The wood snapped when I leaned into it, almost as though it was up against a steel plate. But my skin stayed just as silky smooth as before. Interesting. Of course, I thought better of seeing what Fang could do, as Shartun had proven that the game wasn’t capable of standing up to the ritual knife. Valkyrie, on the other hand, easily penetrated my leg. I’ll have to keep going. What was interesting in that case, however, was that the wound began closing before my eyes — reinforced internal organs, impenetrable skin, and regeneration had me looking something like the Tsarter mercenaries. Obviously, they’d defended all 538 of their levels, getting themselves to unheard-of heights, and I was only starting, but I was looking forward to becoming an absolute terror over the next couple weeks. I’ll go with this for now, though.
The issue at hand was the unusual monster in the church. It was time to smoke it out, so I turned on my invisibility and flew over to where Flyer was waiting. I was going to have to figure out what to do on the spot.
Chapter 10
THE FIRST ISSUES started cropping up a couple hundred meters from the church. The closer I got, the worse the drone feed became, to the point that I started just getting a bunch of nonsense. Numbers, illegible phrases, blurred pictures. The mines were next to let me down — they turned into useless chunks of metal. And to top things off, the camouflage field hanging on my belt got hotter and hotter until it dripped off onto the ground. The mines followed suit. Instead of detonating, they just melted, something I noticed too late to avoid losing them. It was just a good thing Ulbaron didn’t heat up.
It turned out that there was a field around the church that destroyed game items without the “can’t be blocked in the game world” attribute. In other words, everything besides named items. The field didn’t let game signals in — when I got to the walls of the church, I found that my contact with Flyer had been lost completely. The drone was hovering helplessly above the treetops. Heading back, I dropped it into my virtual storage.
But the monsters around the church felt fine, and they were busy hauling over Earthling technology. There were guards at the doors: two mage champions who carefully inspected every piece of equipment. The monster who got lucky squealed happily and headed inside with their burdens; the ones who didn’t carried their finds away with a guilty expression on their face. Dumping the electronics on a huge pile not far away, they headed off in search of something better.
I spent a while watching the entrance in an attempt to figure out how I could get inside. But it was to no avail. There was another pair behind the champions, and those two were using their large frames to block the entrance. They only stood aside to let laden monsters through. It would have been impossible to get in, and I wasn’t ready for a frontal attack. If all the monsters in the area had run over, they would have buried me with sheer volume. No, I needed to use stealth.
Ulbaron didn’t have a problem flying around inside the invisible field. Keeping one hand on the wall, I eased my way upward toward the belfry. I’d been there once for a tour, and so I knew there was a way down into the church from there. And my memory served me well — there was, indeed, only with one obstacle. A champion. The monster was taking up the whole area, filling the space with its enormous body.
I flew a circle around the church, though I was foiled again. The windows were all boarded up, and monsters were standing guard everywhere. Then, Zelda started blinking to tell me I had just a minute of invisibility left. Realizing that the front door just wasn’t an option, I headed back up to the belfry. That way in looked most promising. Of course, I had to wait for a while as Zelda recharged, but I was soon ready to figure out my next move.
The champion wasn’t humanoid. Actually, it looked more like an overgrown Alturian, as it could squeeze its way into the tiniest of recesses just like the jellyfish, keeping itself out of sight. Alternatively, as was the case there, it could fill the whole space to make sure nobody got through. Looking at the monster from a meter away, I couldn’t find any weak points. But Raptor told me there wasn’t anyone else on the roof, so I decided to make my move. Fang appeared in my hand, I took a step forward, and —
And I froze. My gaze had been arrested by the cross atop the church dome. I’d noticed previously that something about it was off, though it was only then that I saw the light vibration, not to mention the field it was generating. My perception pointed out several thick wires leading to iy. Carefully moving away from the champion, I used the last of my invisibility to fly up to the dome and find a perch next to the cross. It was buzzing away like some kind of transformer box. At the base, someone had added thick chunks of rubber to absorb most of the vibrations and keep the cross isolated from the rest of the building, though I jerked back as soon as I held Fang up to the construction. A powerful surge of static electricity swept through Ulbaron, just about turning me into a well-done steak. And while I’d never been big on religion, I certainly wasn’t a fan of what the monsters had done with the symbol of our faith. As soon as I got to the cupola the wires were coming from, I sliced clean through them. Fang felt neither resistance nor a shock, and I got what I was looking for. The cross stopped buzzing. Suddenly, I realized my head wasn’t hurting. Of course, at the same time, it occurred to me that it had actually been hurting, though that was just a minor detail.
The creatures below perked up. Superior monsters ran around, whimpering as they went. And a few seconds later, the champion block
ing the way down into the church moved aside to let some repairmen up. Yes, the church apparently had repairmen. Dragging long ladders behind them, the humans climbed out of the belfry onto the dome, their glassy eyes and herky-jerky motions telling me they weren’t acting at all of their own accord. And that just made me wonder even more about the creature inside. But regardless of the fact that the cross was no longer buzzing, Raptor’s scanner was still glitching. The signal was having a hard time breaking through the protective field, and that made me awfully thankful for the time I’d spent at university. If the cross wasn’t there for protection, it was a transmitter. The creature somewhere below me had to be using it to remotely control people.
Pearl of the South (World of the Changed Book #2): LitRPG Series Page 13