Closure +10 (100).
Introversion +10 (100).
Inner harmony +10 (100).
Hacking protection +40 (100).
Resistance +100 (100).
Resilience +40 (100).
Willpower +30 (100).
I boosted the first three attributes to make it harder for Five to find me. He shouldn’t have mentioned that it had been tough locating me the first time, as that just told me his perception wasn’t so high. The other four were what I needed to make sure I didn’t get hacked. With those done, anyone who did hack me was really going to have to work for it. But that was all I had money for. Even getting to those values cost 2,040 free points, or 4.1 million coins, and the only thing I could have bought with the remaining hundred thousand was a sign telling everyone where I was.
It was almost morning when the monsters stirred. A few players joined the guards by the entrance to the dungeon, scanners sweeping from side to side. Flying monsters swept through the air, and the ground rocked and rolled even harder. Drone told me another shrew had joined the first one. In a word, it was chaos, which certainly made hiding easier. And that’s what I did, getting even deeper into the spot I’d found between the roots. The entire location had turned red — there were monsters everywhere.
“Are you sure he’s inside?” The metallic voice that burst out was impossible to mistake. The giant platform flew up to the dungeon, and all three of Five, Seven, and Eight eased their way down. Eight’s hull was beaten and battered. From the way it was hanging off to the side, it looked like the culprit was right in front of me. Five had forgotten its plans and come back to punish the innocent. It was also there to help with the search — I could see its antennas working wildly. Even my breathing stopped.
A few lights on Seven blinked.
“Yes, sir, that would be the most illogical thing to do. The more I learn about Mark, the more I realize that that’s exactly what he would do. If he’s in the location, but we can’t find him anywhere, he’s inside the dungeon.”
“Yes, I can’t sense him, and he definitely didn’t have any coins he could have used to boost his attributes,” Five replied, which buoyed my spirits. Bingo! The robot’s perception wasn’t any higher than 100. But there was a problem, too: they’d read me like a book. If it hadn’t been for the guards, I would have been exactly where they were expecting me to be.
“In that case, we don’t have a choice.” Seven pointed at the entrance. “He’s in there.”
“You realize what a mistake would mean, right?” Five asked, turning sharply to Seven. “This is the only level two dungeon in the hexagon. If Mark isn’t inside, we won’t be able to use his dagger. We’ll lose this area.”
“I understand, sure, which is why it’s your decision. We’ll do whatever you say.”
A smile crept across my face. The robots may have been bereft of emotion, but their sense of self-preservation worked beautifully. Anything to make sure it isn’t your problem.
“That’s not the answer I’m looking for.” Five wasn’t impressed, either. “I trusted you two with a simple job, and you couldn’t get it done. The general just about demoted me for this.”
“Eight was already punished,” Seven said. “If our brothers were still alive, it would have dropped all the way down to Twelve. But it’s already at the bottom, so all we can do is give advice. We can’t tell you what to do.”
They definitely took rank seriously. I just wish I had some popcorn. It was fun to listen to their bombastic nonsense, uttered as it was with their lifeless metallic voices.
“He can’t be in there. He couldn’t have gotten past the guards,” Eight said suddenly. “I trained them myself — they’re the best champions in the hexagon. If they said nobody got past them, nobody got past them.”
“You don’t get a say in this.”
“Are you sure of your servants?” Five asked, ignoring Seven.
“Completely. Mark Derwin couldn’t have gotten into the dungeon. I’d bet two restarts on it.”
“We’ll all be shelved if we don’t get the pearl for the general.” Five flew over to the entrance. I even had to drop the drone a bit lower to hear what it was muttering. “Finally, a worthy opponent…”
After standing for a while in complete darkness, the robot turned to its underlings.
“We don’t have another option. It’s time to call Tsarter.”
“They’ll destroy him,” Eight and Seven said simultaneously.
“In that case, we need to offer something that will make them forget the owner’s order. We’ll let them in on the excavations.”
“That’s dangerous. We can’t let the blood of the uninitiated be part of the search. That could ruin everything.”
“They’ll be warned of the consequences. I’m sure Tsarter wants a promotion out of our release, a shot at the global database. They won’t turn down an offer like that.”
“We’ll have to put a hold on things in the north.” Seven didn’t sound convinced by its superior’s decision, though it also didn’t want to outright say it.
“I know. This is my decision… Okay, the general wants me to come explain what’s going on in person, so I’ll be gone for a few days. Find Mark, or this is the end of your release. Is the ritual dagger in the storage?”
“Yes, sir. We can’t risk carrying something that valuable around with us.”
“Reinforce the dungeon guard, keep up the search, and report in every hour. Get it done.”
Five took off into the air, and the enormous platform set off a few seconds later. Drone tracked them long enough to see that the robot was heading toward the main location in the hexagon.
Losing interest, I pulled Drone back to the group that had remained. And I was just in time — Seven was talking with a projection. The latter I would have recognized even in a dream, or more specifically, a nightmare. The hologram was of a green, snake-like creature with three eyes and an unpleasantly wide mouth. When it talked, it bared a row of tiny teeth and a long tongue, a mix of lizard, frog, and snake. And judging by the tone and subject matter, I was looking at the head of the Tsarter group. What an honor!
“We accept the general’s terms. The owner gave us orders to destroy Mark Derwin, though there was no deadline, and so we will take care of that after you get your pearl. Where and when can we begin excavation?”
“First, the human, then the excavation,” Seven shot back.
“What’s the point in looking for him? He’ll show up himself. These humans, they’re weak and naïve — do you really not know why he dashed off south? That’s where Olsen sent him. Yes, the function in the safe zone at the center of the hexagon. It’s done some good work in this release, incidentally.”
“Focus.”
“Fine. I had a chat with Olsen and fount out why it sent Mark off to look for the pearl. I mean, how did it even find out that you can get one in our release? It’s simple. As it turns out, Mark knew about pearls before talking with the function — he was already going to go find one.”
“You still haven’t said anything we don’t already know.”
“In that case, let me tell you something you definitely don’t know. Mark didn’t want to find the pearl for himself. Someone close to him needs one. The game sentenced them to death, giving them time to put their affairs in order. Like I said, humans are weak and dependent. If you can’t find Mark, arrange things so he finds himself. You have access to the database. Find out who in the hexagon was sentenced to death, find them, and you’ll have the leverage you need. Mark is a human prone to emotion. He won’t be able to stand by once we start torturing whoever that is, and so he’ll show up himself. Once you find out who it is, let me know, and we’ll start the search. Over and out.”
The conversation was over, the robots already discussing something among themselves. But I wasn’t listening. My head was buzzing, my insides cold. Not that! No, don’t look for anyone — that’s where Squirrel is!
Chapter 13
A blaze of glory was out of the question. A heroic death would have done nothing for Squirrel — Wart would have just killed her regardless. And so, I realized I needed to focus on my abilities as an infiltrator, setting up the kind of local Armageddon that would have the freaks howling in rage and hatred.
My desperate glance fell on the monsters ready to dash off into battle, and the seedling of an idea began to sprout in my head. Champions… The changed… The dungeon… Again, the changed… The location… The larva!
The lightbulb that went off above my head was so bright I was afraid it would give my position away. Happily, there weren’t any creatures there capable of sensing emotions. Digging still deeper into the depths of the tree, I sent Drone off to do some scouting. The first thing I needed to do was figure out which zebra stripe I was on. Black, white, or something in between?
Half the location I was in was taken up by the sea. Just in case, I checked it, too, though the scanner didn’t pick up anything besides some dolphins and endless schools of little fish. But there were plenty of monsters on land. Of course, most of them had been brought in to help with the manhunt, but that didn’t make anything better. Picking my way through them looked to be hopeless.
The three farms were a good distance from each other, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up when I realized how many tubs each had. It was the first time I’d seen that much food being produced for the general. Each farm had between ten and fifteen thousand tubs, each with a motionless woman inside. Without Raptor, I wasn’t able to get more exact than that. The larva worked away with all the feelers it had at its disposal, dashing back and forth between the farms, and the flow of pupae was staggering. A long string of dump trucks lumbered up, only to head off a few minutes later in the direction of the hexagon’s main location. And there were…quite a few trucks. Too many.
The monsters prowling everywhere were accompanied by players, too. And they weren’t just anyone — all of them had cleared level 100, leaving me and my level 159 in just eighth place. Well, look at that! Predictably enough, the seven ahead of me were Eight, Seven, and Five, along with the four Tsarter fighters. They were easy enough to make out thanks to the Po last name and their identical level 541. That’s two higher than it used to be, the bastards. They were taking the search seriously, and the fact that I wasn’t expecting Drone to be able to see them made it all the more surprising when I found the whole group all in one place. Next to the hangar where I’d been held, there was an administrative building. Well defended even before the game had begun, by that point it was looking more like Fort Knox. There were turrets, gun towers, champions around the perimeter, flying creatures, shrews beneath the surface, and a force dome covering the whole thing. That must be their storage. I certainly would have liked a couple hours in there.
But the worst part wasn’t the fact that Tsarter was in the location, or even the three enormous farms. I’d been down both of those roads, and I had a general idea of what to do with them. No, worse than that was the discovery of a safe zone and accompanying function in the middle of the location. It wasn’t that big. In fact, it was just the minimum twenty buildings surrounded by a simple hedge, and there obviously weren’t people inside. But it still threw a wrench in my plans.
In that case, I don’t have a choice.
I pulled out the Tsarter phone I’d hacked into and checked its virtual storage. There weren’t many items inside, though there were a few. The two named items did nothing for me — I dispersed them. The seven level five items, on the other hand, were exactly what I needed. At a base cost of a million coins, taking the store commission into account, I ended up five million coins richer, though that wasn’t the case for long. Forty-five thermal mines began materializing next to me, and I sent them immediately to my virtual storage. That nearly filled it up. But I wasn’t about to stop there — remote controls cost ten grand. For my plan to work, I was going to need one for each mine, or another four hundred and fifty thousand coins. And with no more room in my virtual storage, I decided to just buy ten and keep the rest of the money in reserve. I ended up even poorer than I started.
Zelda kept me invisible for sixteen whole minutes, which I immediately used to get out of cover, away from the alien scanners, and into the forest. Drone hovered above me, telling me ahead of time where the patrols searching the forest were. That let me move out undetected even under the bright southern sun. There weren’t many trees in the location, though there were plenty of boulders and underbrush I was able to use to stay hidden from the riled-up monsters.
There was one instance where I wasn’t able to keep from letting everyone know that I was still in the location.
A crowd of monsters appeared with a champion at its head. Drone showed me a small passageway between stone ridges, and so I dove in to find myself in a small open area. I was surprised to find several tents, only they weren’t game tents; they were made of Earthling cloth. Apparently, it had been a popular spot for travelers, and the abandoned cars with license plates issued in the central provinces just served to confirm that notion. Only, there weren’t people living in the tents. They were Alturians. Four jellyfish were lying out in the sun, two more in one of the tents. The other tent, judging from my device control, was their warehouse. It was loaded with items from level one to level three, everything the creatures had dragged over from the different locations they’d come from. And I would have slipped right on by if it hadn’t been for one thing: they were just finishing a meal. When I figured out how they ate, I almost vomited. The jellyfish swallowed whole what I hoped was a dead human and digested it slowly, bones and clothes included. A hip bone and a few pieces of metal that looked like keys were still inside one of them. With their low level, I had to assume they’d spent the whole time the game had been up and running right there in the open area. Why go anywhere else when there’s plenty of food right here? In a word, their luck had run out. Setting Valkyrie to shoot electricity, I gunned them down with a shot apiece. None of them had any idea what happened. The only thing I stuck around to do was take a picture of the bodies, stuff them into a tent, and set the whole mess on fire. That was the only way I could keep anyone from knowing how I’d killed them and send their bodies back wherever they’d come from. There was no reason to tell Five what kind of weapon I was using.
By the time the hunters arrived on the spot astride their flying platforms, the track was cold. I’d left the trash in the tent be. Selling everything wouldn’t have earned me enough to buy a single thermal mine, and I wasn’t especially intrigued by phones that had just five hundred coins apiece on them. It wasn’t worth working through and spending a couple seconds on each.
Drone showed me the players flying off along the road, doing exactly what I’d been counting on. I’d picked that road in particular and made sure everyone knew where I was. If they drew a straight line from the hangar to that spot, it would lead straight to the edge of the location just ten kilometers away. That would have been the most logical as well as the most illogical play — getting as far away as possible from the monsters and buying time to figure out my next move. And kill any of them I came across on the way. Continue hiding. How was that anything but the plan of a crazed player no longer in his right mind?
An hour later, I was at the first farm. There were lots of small towns in the southern half of the country, and the shelves loaded with their horrific contents were in the middle of one of them. Zelda restored sixteen seconds of invisibility every five minutes. That was enough for me to get into the center of the town, skipping the guards. The larva was busy harvesting and topping up the solution in the tubs. There was also a transporter
ready to haul its valuable cargo away at a moment’s notice, so I quelled the urge to take a selfie and instead crouched by a demolished wall. The larva was going to leave sooner or later.
Mining the farm without Raptor or Ulbaron was a challenge. Nine mines found a new home on the racks, with three more earmarked for the transporter. And it was only when the devices were all in place that the red lights turned green. Even if the giant suddenly up and headed off, it wasn’t going to survive the explosion. But it was right then that the larva returned at the worst possible moment, leaving me caught at the very top of the racks. I was forced to melt into the frame and keep myself from moving a muscle even when the toothless minions started running around my legs.
Pearl of the South (World of the Changed Book #2): LitRPG Series Page 17