“Was he not supposed to be immortal?”
“Of course!” Kiran ground his teeth. “But Nergal made his summons to destroy the temple of the Sleepers! The Supreme Legate encountered the player army and could not survive.”
“And Sheppard was the one who activated the Sleepers,” Bellamy said darkly.
“He is getting stronger,” Kiran said, sighing. “Fortune protects him, he has a tamed beast god, he’s almost finished building the second temple in the desert and he’s getting ready to erect a third — a third! — on Terrastera! But that isn’t the worst of it!”
“What is the worst?” Menfil asked, his voice kindly, but with a sharp edge of menace.
“The Sleeping God has given him a quest. To put an end the Destroying Plague.”
“And? Is that even possible?”
“The AIs that control the gods compete for the world. Remember, they believe themselves to be real gods, with no suspicion of their true nature. The Celestial Arbitration — the group of AIs that controls Dis, — has no influence on the fabric of the world. Like an overseer, it merely ensures that the actions of the inhabitants conform to the laws of creation. For them, balance is top priority. All is connected. If even Nergal can be lowered to the level of a protoplasm by depriving him of Faith… The Sleeping God that Sheppard brought to the Nucleus hacked the code of the Destroying Plague and identified a game object that can be used to break the connection between the Nucleus and the Nether, from which the Destroying Plague takes its strength. That will destroy the undead faction. And Sheppard is going after that object — Concentrated Life Essence.
“The prize for winning the Demonic Games,” Bellamy clarified for Menfil. “If Scyth wins, then all he has to do is reach the Nucleus and use the essence. Without the Nucleus, all the undead will disincarnate.”
“And no, we can’t just take him out of the equation,” Kiran said, seeing where Menfil was going. “Unfortunately, eliminating Alex Sheppard himself will achieve nothing. There is a very high probability that his character will continue playing, under the control of his patron god’s AI. In addition, someone upstairs is favorable to Scyth, for some reason. It’s strange…”
“Right,” Arto Menfil agreed. “I have information that our projects aren’t the only secret ones. The founding fathers came up with something else twenty years ago, but I don’t have access to it. Just scraps of information. What about the player legates?”
“That reminds me, regarding Mogwai,” Chloe interjected. “Fen Xiaoguang has written an open letter. He’s raging, demanding that we solve the problem of his illegal imprisonment! He’s threatening to sue and wants us to give his lost levels back!”
“He’s just playing to the crowd, it’s all part of the gameplay,” Kiran noted.
“All the same,” Menfil frowned. “Is there any way to free them?”
“Convince Hinterleaf to let Mogwai go, he’ll summon the others,” Bellamy answered. “But there’s no point just yet — the legates won’t be any use during the Demonic Games. They can’t infect anyone. And while they languish in prison, they’ll save up some righteous anger…”
“What do we have on Hinterleaf?” Menfil asked.
“Apart from the fact that he isn’t Otto Hinterleaf? Nothing. If we pressure him or offer him…”
“What for?” Chloe interrupted. “Mogwai isn’t the Supreme Legate anymore!”
Looking around with a smile on her face, she declared:
“Eileen Waters, leader of the Widowmakers, has overtaken Mogwai’s level. The Nucleus promoted her to Supreme Legate! I only just found out.”
“Good!” Menfil nodded. “As I understand it, Waters has a serious grudge against Sheppard. That can only be to our advantage. But if she and the other legates can’t handle it… Then it is critical that Scyth be neutralized!”
“Removing him from the picture may not be an option,” Kiran mused, glancing at the others. “But no citizenship means no Threat. The boy has his citizenship tests in a month!”
A furious discussion began. The idea was welcomed; it solved all their problems. Only skeptical Menfil quietly asked Kiran:
“Are you sure he won’t finish off the Nucleus in a month?”
“First he has to win the Demonic Games, which he will fail to do. More than that, he won’t even show up there. When the scenario of the Destroying Plague was originally written, this option was considered for neutralizing the initiator of the undead invasion.” Kiran paused and whispered: “The Celestial Arbitration. No, we won’t influence its decisions, but it can’t fail to intervene. The one who brings the undead into the lands of the living will be sent into Banishment forever!”
Menfil closed his eyes for a moment, showing that he understood. He rose from his wheelchair, rapped his fingers on a tray taken from a nearby drone and shouted:
“Colleagues! We will be taking a short break, and then we’ll be getting down to the details!”
The room livened up. All those present had touched the corporation’s secrets, which naturally boosted their self-esteem, but after the break, they would finally stop playing the role of listeners and get to work.
Arto Menfil took Kiran Jackson by the arm and whispered:
“Let’s take a walk.”
They disappeared through the door of the relaxation room. With a barely perceptible smile, Menfil watched as Kiran read a message that just came in:
My dear, I’m afraid we aren’t a good match for each other. Irma. P.S. Sorry, but you’re going to have to get a new head of security. Farkhad tripped and broke his neck.
“Irma…” Menfil said dreamily. “How do you like her, Jackson? Good squeeze? But listen, you have to be nicer to girls like that, don’t you agree?”
“How do you..?”
“Doesn’t matter how! Let me give you some advice. Never order the assassination of someone you know nothing about. You might get return fire.”
For the next few moments, Kiran felt as if he was looking into the eyes of death. Menfil’s eyes drilled into him, then the man gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder:
“Don’t fret. Solve the Sheppard problem and it’ll all be in the past.”
“And if I don’t solve it?” Kiran dared ask.
Menfil didn’t answer. Just limped back to the hall, whistling all the way.
Chapter 26. No Joke
“THEY’RE ALL DEAD… All of them! Get up, we have to run!” Maria repeated, then growled, grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled hard…
The world swam, blurred. I screwed up my eyes reflexively…
A cold wind whipped my cheek and I swayed. Hairo stood before me, looking straight at me. Alive. Sergei Yuferov stood nearby, shivering and hopping from foot to foot. I was back on the roof again. I pulled in air, trying to wrap my mind around what had happened. What was that? Divine Revelation? But how? Back on Alaska, it had captured mere seconds of reality, and I’d almost convinced myself that it was just exhaustion, that I’d dreamed up who knows what, but now? No, I needed to corner Behemoth and find out how the hell this was possible!
While I was thinking, my memories of what I’d seen faded, almost disappeared. Now they seemed like a flashing thought, a trick of the imagination. I shook my head to get a grip on reality, suddenly got dizzy and lost my balance. Roj held me up.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. Thanks. It’s all this training of yours!”
“Complaint noted and disregarded,” Hairo chuckled, then frowned. “Anyway, this is the only way we can deal with Furtado, Alex. He stays locked up while we take care of the Cartel problem. You realize we all could have been killed because of him, right? Back on Alaska.”
I felt deja vu. Again.
“This is how they found us!” Morales exclaimed. “The Darant brothels are controlled by…”
“Hairo!” I interrupted, suddenly getting the picture. “Mr. Morales! The brothel where Trixie met Jess is controlled by the Cartel! Diego Aranzabal is flying to meet
with his people. If he mentions us, it’s over. That’s what you were about to tell me, right?”
The security officer’s eyes widened in surprise. He nodded silently and I continued:
“Before you decide anything, cancel the operation and don’t even think of flying. Somehow I know that’s exactly what you’re planning, and you’re going to take Roj with you too. You can’t! You’ll all be killed.”
The security officers exchanged glances, then stared at me.
“Mr. Morales, this is no joke, no dumb prank! Remember, this happened back on Alaska too, and back then I was right!”
Hairo sat me down for a formal debriefing to get every last detail of what I’d learned from Divine Revelation this time. Neither he nor Roj understood how it was possible, but they took my story seriously with surprising ease. After learning all he wanted, Hairo clapped me on the shoulder.
“I’m going to keep all this in mind. Go downstairs and stay in your rooms. Roj, go keep an eye on him, make sure the kid doesn’t do anything stupid.”
As I descended from the roof, I remembered that I’d promised Rita a date. Berating myself, I rushed to my apartment and climbed into my capsule. The spot where I’d been training with Oyama was empty, and I didn’t bother staying there — I jumped straight to Mengoza.
I found Irita in the Bone and Fossil. The girl was working: epic and legendary items appeared in her hands, then disappeared. At the next table, Infect was engrossed in digging through a pile of pots and bones from his excavations.
“Bomb’s fishing, Crawler’s asleep. I’m leveling up Archeology. I want to get it done before the Games,” the bard rattled off when he noticed me, then got back to work.
Irita got up to meet me. Her face brightened, she took a step and then stopped, hesitating.
“We’ll need to agree on a more specific time next time, Alex. ‘Tonight’ is too vague,” she smiled.
“Sorry…” I thought for a moment, but decided not to lie. “I was with an Unarmed Combat trainer all day, then I logged out to have dinner, laid down for just a minute and fell asleep. Then we had a kind of emergency.”
I sat down at her table and told her of Trixie’s unfortunate love affair and what his naivety might have led to. I said nothing about Diego Aranzabal and the Cartel; no need to scare her. All I said was that another problem had come up, that it wasn’t solved yet and I had to log out again.
“I understand,” Irita said. “Don’t worry, it’s fine.”
“Believe me, I do want to spend time with you…”
“I know! It’s just that right now you don’t even belong to yourself. Apologies are no use to me, but instead I’ll take…” She made as if she was thinking. “…a kiss.”
“I can do that,” I nodded and, as the few workers left in the tavern after midnight whistled their approval, I pulled the girl toward me…
My brain must have switched off; two hours passed before I came back to reality. Irita and I were lying on a sandy beach on one of the small islands near Kharinza, taking turns to drink wine straight out of the bottle, talking about everything, staring at the starry sky. Storm wheeled high above us, her sparkling silhouette like a moving constellation.
“You know, my brother Chris… Well, he’s a lady’s man, you know? Never lets a skirt pass him by,” Irita said. “He came to Dis because the girls are so accessible. I don’t mean in that way… I just mean that all the senior female students of our district were in the same sandbox, so there was more choice. Do you know why he decided to get into trading with me? Because he could see them all without leaving Tristad!”
“What got you into trading?”
“Oh, it’s my passion, Alex,” the girl answered dreamily. “There’s real magic in it, you know — making money out of thin air. You see an item worth one gold to its owner, buy it, then create a different value for the buyer — two or three gold. But it’s the same item, Alex! Get it?”
“What if the owner knows the real value?”
“What is the real value anyway? It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it. What’s a glass of water to you? You can get one free from the well in Tristad. But a traveler lost in the desert would give everything he has for one.”
We started kissing again. But Irita suddenly pulled back and smiled.
“Do you remember that dumbass Justasec? The one who bet me and Underweight that you got a legendary fire phoenix from Crusher? And when he lost, he ran off with a bunch of jewels from one of the merchants.”
“I remember,” I smiled, feeling nostalgia for a time when my biggest problem was my parents’ divorce. Well, and Crag the ganker with his crew.
“He writes to me every day. He’s in love, can you imagine?”
“Unlucky him,” I chuckled, leaning over the girl. “But lucky me!”
As I kissed Irita, I physically felt a crater within me closing up with each passing moment — the one Tissa had left when she betrayed me. I was back to myself again, my lust for life reawakened. I would have happily spent all the time I had until the Demonic Games with Irita. She was so easy to be with. But it all ended suddenly.
Emergency exit activated: external immersion capsule command interface in effect!
Exiting in: 3…
“Someone activated the emergency exit,” I said quickly, interrupting Irita.
“Again?!”
The girl’s wide eyes were the last things I saw.
As I waited for the intragel to slide off me, I remembered the time I danced with her in the Pig and Whistle — she was still called Overweight back then, — and how I’d been pulled out of Dis just the same way then. Mom had done it, because Tissa had come to see me in tears. Some time later, we founded the Awoken.
The capsule hatch opened and I saw Hairo and Willy, beaten up and in full battle equipment. Soot covered their serious faces. Hairo handed me some gear and spoke while I got dressed:
“We brought Hung out first. Malik told us through him that you weren’t doing anything serious.”
“But sorry all the same if we pulled you away from something important. Or someone,” Willy added, grinning. “We have news…”
I didn’t know if the news could be called good, but it was definitely better than what Maria told me in the vision. Diego Aranzabal had been successfully eliminated. He and his escort, along with the contingent from the United Cartel, had been hit with on-board missiles, then the wild ones landed. They finished off the few survivors. As it turned out, the wild ones had a history with the Cartel.
Against my pleas, Hairo flew to the operation himself.
“We couldn’t risk Yoshi, he’s more important here, and there’s nobody else to pilot the Shark,” he explained. “Willy was flying the Barracuda. Plan B worked.”
The security officers’ initial idea, the result of which I’d already seen in the revelation, involved preventing Diego from meeting with the Cartel at all. That must have been the operation’s downfall: our boys rushed to catch up to Diego and revealed themselves too soon. This time they managed to get it done without hurrying. They calmly flew in stealth mode to the criminals’ meeting place and tore apart the desert island in the Caribbean Sea, transforming it into a mini Hiroshima.
There remained the question of what the Cartel knew. The usually laconic Willy was worked up, which made him talkative.
“I don’t think the Cartel’s people had time to question Diego. If they did learn anything, I doubt they sent it up the chain. We attacked in the first minute of the meeting, when they’d only just finished shaking hands.”
On their return, the security guards had woke up a sleepy and yawning Trixie and interrogated him again. In the end, we got a rough picture of what the United Cartel knew. The inwinova hunchback Trixie knew Scyth. Videos of the legates’ imprisonment had already gone viral, and it was clear there that the Montosaurus was the Threat’s pet. Dinosaurs were unknown in Dis. Monty was the only one, and Trixie had talked about him. In addition, the dwarf had mentioned the un
dead, until now unknown, and a certain god that he knew personally. The Cartel had used Jess to find Trixie, but also searched for him separately in the non-citizen territories.
There were many cities like Cali Bottom. The non-citizens in them numbered in the billions. Trixie’s hunchback and short stature were identifying features, but they weren’t so rare in our time. There were rumors that the citizenship tests took genetic purity into account first and foremost. In very rare cases, as an exception, citizenship was given to people with poor health and physical deformities when they had outstanding mental faculties.
Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series Page 27