by Ivan Shaman
“Yeah, we should. But you know I’m not much of a runner, and you don’t have any weapons.” Jack looked back at the Cannibal. “Actually, don’t worry about it. I’ll do it myself.”
Running through the knee-deep snow wasn’t much faster than walking. Demon stretched out with his consciousness into the building, catching a first-leveler with his ‘Connection’. His vision blurred, and then he saw a small boy, only about ten years old, shooting his brothers at close range. On the left hand of the boy stood a huge beast, a hybrid of a bear and a tiger. Alex had never seen such a creature. Then the ‘Connection’ broke.
“What?” The Goliath asked, breathing hard. “What have you seen?”
“It’s bullshit. There’s a young boy and a beast inside.” Demon grew silent; his ‘Connection’ was recharging. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Was it big?” Jack asked with puzzlement. “Maybe, it’s a dog?”
“It’s as big as you are, maybe even bigger,” Demon replied calmly.
“Damn. No, there are no such dogs.” The Goliath was upset. “I don’t want to fight with such a creature. I’ll kill it, but it’s surely innocent.”
As they spoke, two men and a chimera ran onto the roof of the library. There was a deafening explosion, and then dust obstructed the library from view for a few seconds. When it was all blown aside by the wind, Demon realized with horror that almost all the brothers inside the building, including the newly-made Luminary, were now buried under a pile of debris. The roof sagged, partially collapsed to the ground.
“Hold him,” Jack said, putting the awakening Lex next to Demon.
The Goliath rushed forward, following the technocrats, crawling the walls in a futile attempt to destroy their enemies. Now it was clear that these were their enemies. There were three of them: a woman and two technocrats. Demon lacked the perception to reach out and see their statuses.
They desperately fired back as the Goliath approached, and Demon noticed with involuntary admiration that the boy clearly had a ‘Shooter’ ability above the second level. Almost every one of his shots hit cyborg heads. The woman was also very masterful. By the time Jack reached the building, the boy had run out of cartridges, and he rushed to the backpacks.
Well, that’s all, Demon thought with relief. Suddenly a grenade hit the Goliath. The boy seemed to see what was hidden behind the walls. Fortunately, Jack caught the grenade and in one movement pulled out the fuse, which exploded in his fist. Having activated his ‘Strongman’ ability, the Goliath leapt onto the roof.
He was much more effective than the hundreds of low-levelers, and he quickly pushed back their enemies. It had to end in seconds, and Demon sighed with relief when the boy, growling wildly, rushed to the Goliath’s back and clutched his neck with his claws. Jack threw the boy down, but blood was now pouring from his neck, from the place where the implant should be. Covering his bloody neck with his hand, the Goliath missed a throw of the chimera and he fell down, his throat torn.
“Form a circle!” The recovering Luminary commanded. “I’m going to crush them with the power of my ‘Intelligence’.” Demon and the low-levelers sat at Lex’s feet, who now began to sing. This song wasn’t like any of his previous ones. It seemed that his very lifeblood was being sucked out. He saw everything with the others’ eyes, but he stayed put, passing on his skills ‘Jerk’ and ‘Reinforcement’ to the attackers as they coordinated things. They were winning.
Peering into the faces of their three opponents with dozens of his brothers’ eyes, he could see their fatigue, feel their muffled breath, and smell their sweat. The enemies almost surrendered. There were no more than five minutes left, and then they would win!
The ‘Connection’ was suddenly cut off. Lex put his hands out, and the brothers stood in front of him like a living wall. The next moment, seven of them were killed by a single shot.
Demon stood absolutely discouraged, and the Luminary redirected the low-levelers, shielding them from the shooter.
“Demon, we should take him alive!” Lex shouted. “Something has been done to him, but he’ll be very useful on our side.”
The boy, like a kamikaze, rushed at the Luminary. Having descended from the roof, he aimed at him, but he was constantly disturbed. Deciding not to be outdone, Demon also rushed into the melee. Jerk! He almost reached the boy with his claws. It was easy to say, ‘take him alive’. Now, being only a few yards away, he was able to see clearly the boy’s status.
Max, Artillerist Lord, level 64, hostile
His stats and skills were hidden, but it was clear that the boy had a lot of ‘Dexterity’, ‘Strength’ and ‘Intelligence’.
Jerk! Demon rushed the boy as he tried to jump out of the encirclement made by his brothers and sisters. The boy, clearly using the ‘Strongman’ ability, threw one of them over his head, and in this moment, an opportunity appeared. Punch! The blade punctured him deeply in the side, and the boy cried and jumped back.
He was simultaneously attacked by several technocrats, all controlled by Lex, and then it was over. Demon came closer to them to take the boy down, if necessary. At this moment, there was not a shot but something closer to an explosion. Five low-levelers turned into a bloody mess. The boy calmly jumped out of the encirclement and rushed the Luminary once again.
Demon didn’t see anything, but he felt Lex reinforcing himself, pulling the computing powers which they usually distributed from the surrounding cyborgs. The feeling was most unpleasant, as if Demon hadn’t slept for several days. The effect was now visible to the naked eye, and the Luminary seemed to have grown, his movements had become smoother, much faster, and they seemed to be even more devastating.
With quick movements, Lex began to push the boy away, deflecting all of his attacks. Lex’s skills hadn’t improved, but at this rate, it wouldn’t matter. He just guessed all the boy’s blows in advance. Then, seizing the moment, the Luminary successfully kicked his enemy and grabbed him by the head. The eyes of both cyborgs rolled up, and the low-leveled brothers fell down.
Demon sighed with relief, but it was too soon. The huge beast, which had bitten Jack’s head, rushed at him over the dead bodies that littered the floor. It was covered in bloody wounds, but it would be no less deadly. Demon ducked and jumped aside, hoping to hit it in the side with a ‘Punch’. A moment later, he was lying on the ground, overturned by a blow that threw him more than five yards away. Jerk! Strongman! He hit the chimera, connecting with the bottom of its jaw, but he failed to activate the ‘Punch’ ability. The force of his own blow knocked him back. Lights faded.
Light, where are you? Demon was hovering over the Sun, which seemed to be so close that he could almost touch it with his hand, yet it was a false sense. Yes, the Light saw them, but it didn’t warm them, because it wasn’t omnipotent – it needed a helping hand. Millions of cyborgs required its attention, and they, on Sakhalin, were clearly not a priority. At least, not after the fall of the TPS.
A deep breath burnt his lungs with cold air. The black sky was decorated with amazingly bright stars. Demon tried to move, but a sharp pain spread throughout his body. The chimera seemed to have broken his neck. At least, he couldn’t turn his head. It’s night. Suddenly, he understood, and the battle took place during the day. How long has passed?
His heart and lungs worked, but the rest of his body didn’t seem to be able to move. He tried to look around, beveling his eyes to the side – grey walls, snow and the sky.
Where is Lex? He couldn’t leave him here.
“Lex, are you here? Hey, somebody!” Demon called out with difficulty. Only a low-leveler came up to him and bent over to look at him closer. “Get out,” Demon said, but when he saw a dialog box, he changed his mind. “Oh, wait.”
Connection! Control! Now he saw from within the brother’s eyes, forcing him to turn back and look over a horrifying picture. The Luminary was lying in the blood-red snow, surrounded by the bodies of his brothers.
How long will it take f
or my neck to heal? A day? A week? No, I can’t wait so long. Open the skills.
Available skill points:
15
Available skills: ‘Training’, ‘Master’ 3, ‘Shooter’ 2, ‘Melee’ 2, ‘Horn armor’, ‘Connection’ 2, ‘Ninja’, ‘Sniper’
Choose: ‘Horn armor’. Confirm
‘Regeneration’ 2. Confirm
‘Hard skull’ 2. Confirm
‘Regeneration’ 3. Confirm
Oh, shit, it hurts badly. Now there were only seven skill points left. It wasn’t enough for the fourth level. He didn’t lose consciousness, and therefore, he felt excruciating pain as his vertebrae began to snap back into place. Then his spinal cord recovered, and he yelled from the ache that rattled his entire body. It looked like the chimera hadn’t just beaten him, it had also taken a huge bite. His ribs were broken, and one lung was filled with blood, but, by some miracle, he was still alive.
The regeneration skill upgrade was in full swing, and he could feel millions of microscopic nanomachines speeding through his body. They healed vessels and tissue, put the bones back together like puzzles, and carried his blood to the cells most in need. All he could do was lie there staring up at the beautiful starry sky above.
After a few hours, the first signs of the arrival of dawn appeared. The low-levelers ran off somewhere, and he was left alone to look at the brightening sky. The stars gradually began to fade, and the black was being replaced by the bright blue. When the sun rose from the horizon, he tried to sit up.
The picture was even more monstrous in the clear light of day. The destruction, left by four enemies, only two of whom were technocrats, was more like the result of a tank attack. Gently rising, Demon approached Lex’s body with slow, faltering steps.
There was not a single wound on the Luminary’s body, but he was surely dead. Demon didn’t know how it was possible. Lex had just stopped living. His heart had stopped, and the nanomachines no longer moved within him. His brain had been dead for several hours.
Remembering yesterday’s fight, he swore. Well, the boy was a sixty-fourth-leveler, Lord, and Artillerist with a rail gun. He was a thirtieth-leveler, and to become a thirty-first-leveler he had to absorb the nanomachines of hundreds of dead low-levelers.
Or just one. He looked at Lex carefully.
“Sorry, mentor. It seems that I am to keep going, just stepping over your corpse on my way.” Demon gently turned the Luminary’s head to one side and touched the extraction-button. There was no power in the implant.
You need to apply power to the implant. Touch the ‘MedCorp’ emblem on the implant with the index finger of your right hand
So, only twenty percent could be extracted – as it had been in the morgue. Well, let it be so. Extract!
The nanomachines slowly stirred in Lex’s body, then they flowed from the implant directly into Demon’s hand. A thin stream of black and purple sand was absorbed by his skin, and his experience was rapidly filling, jumping from one level to another faster than he could believe.
Congratulations on achieving level 40
Available stat points:
200
Available skills:
19
Available talent points:
35
Chapter 17. Absorber
Lex’s body was covered with a thin layer of hoarfrost, his skin became gray, and his pupils turned black.
“I’m sorry, Luminary,” Demon said, building up his courage and closing the cyborg’s eyelids. “We all will be there one day.”
He sat down beside the body and opened his skills. After reaching the fortieth level, he discovered it was now possible to get the ‘Devourer’ ability. There were still twenty levels to go until he reached ‘Absorber’.
‘Devourer’ allows you to assimilate dormant nanomachines much more efficiently, increasing the absorption rate to thirty percent; providing access to the skills ‘Probe’, ‘Nutrition’, and ‘Nutritionist’
Since he had already decided to walk this path, he had no choice.
Choose ‘Devourer’. Confirm
His left hand cramped, and his index finger hurt badly. It became thicker, and the first phalanx blackened. In a dumb daze, Demon watched the nanorobots crawling under his thin, translucent skin. Knowing that there were thousands of nanomachines living in him was vastly different to actually seeing them work.
For a few seconds, he struggled with the urge to shake them off his finger, but then he calmed down. Even if he threw off these nanorobots, his body was full of another twenty thousand of these ‘babies’.
His finger stopped hurting and looked almost the same as a minute ago. Only now, on closer inspection, it was encircled by several strange rings, one per phalanx. Looking closer still, he saw that the small rings were moving at a high speed and small purple bursts of lightning glittered inside them.
Now it was necessary to deal with the other skills.
‘Probe’ creates a shunt probe, which reactivates and collects nanomachines along a victim’s body, increasing the total absorption percentage to forty.
‘Nutrition’ temporarily starts the implant of a victim, which significantly reduces the processing time.
‘Nutritionist’ increases the probability of recovery of nanomachines, increasing the total number of assimilated nanomachines by ten percent.
Yeah, eat and level-up. It reminded him of something, but that sounded more like ‘be fruitful and multiply’. Their motto was the opposite. Demon consecutively pumped all three skills up. He was very sick for a few minutes, and it seemed as though worms had crawled inside his stomach, but then the feeling passed as quickly as it came.
He put his hand back to the Luminary’s implant and saw small sparks spurting from his index finger. Hearing a faint crackle, something only millimeter-sized descended into Lex’s vein. It’s the ‘Probe’, he understood.
A minute later, an inscription appeared in front of his eyes:
Extraction is finished. Get nanomachines
Demon put his finger to Lex’s implant and a long black rod came out of it, falling apart into hundreds of thousands of nanomachines in his hand. His experience panel rapidly counted the levels one after another as they flew by. Five… ten… thirteen.
Congratulations on achieving level 53
Available stat points:
451
Available skills:
35
Available talent points:
48
Just like that. For one sixty-first-leveler he had received almost twenty-four levels. Of course, to get each next level was harder than the previous one. However, it meant that when he pumped up to the sixtieth level, he would return to Lex’s body and absorb it to the very last drop.
The easiest way to get the sixtieth level was to find Jack’s and Antony’s bodies. Slowly walking through the debris of the library’s roof, he stumbled upon the Goliath’s remains, lying on the heap of stones. His head was almost completely severed from his body and rested on a solitary flap of skin. The giant’s dead eyes were astonished.
With a habitual movement, Demon put his finger to the implant and, only when he felt a blood clot, realized that it wasn’t there. That half-ton chimera had probably bitten it along with a big chunk of Jack’s neck. The cyborg froze in indecision: he had never encountered this before.
Before this, all of the experience he’d received had come from the implants. At first, he had eaten them, then he had twisted them free, and now he took nanorobots from them. What if there was no implant at all? Remembering Jane’s story about the Emperor, he stuck the claw of his index finger in Jack’s neck vein. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then a dialog box appeared over the mutilated body.
Extract nanomachines?
Oh, Light, of course!
Yes
The ‘Probe’ dutifully penetrated the Goliath’s frozen blood. Demon saw the giant’s vessels expanding as it moved. The muscles sagged slightly, becoming more pink and natural, a
nd the claws got blunt and gray instead of their previous obsidian-black. Even the black scaly armor had cracked and crumbled.
Attention!
Make yourself ready to absorb nanomachines
Demon didn’t immediately understand why he had to get ready. However, seeing the black and purple sand that began pouring from the giant’s neck, he hastily framed his hands.
His experience bar was rapidly filling up, passing level fifty-eight as it did so, though he didn’t reach the sixtieth level. Demon tried to calculate how many first-levelers or ordinary people he needed to reach his goal. It was a little more than twenty thousand. From this sudden realization, he sat on the floor and paused.
Lex and Jack couldn’t possibly have extracted and absorbed as many as that. Suddenly, his gaze fell upon a broken library shelf. On it, covered with a thick layer of concrete rubble and dust, there was a book with the telling title ‘Sakhalin Island in illustrations’, the 2075 edition. Having looked through the table of contents, he opened the Chapter entitled ‘Population’ and read that at the end of 2074 the island, which had become a logistics and cultural center after the construction of the bridge from Japan to mainland Russia, had a population of more than seventeen million people.
Wow! Although the island wasn’t small, and Sakhalin stretched from sea to sea, Demon could never have imagined that it was inhabited by so many people. From ‘The Composition of the Population’ it soon became clear that Russians made up more than fifty percent of the population. The rest were the North and South Koreans, Chinese and Japanese living compactly in the territories allocated for them.
In general, it appeared that the number of both living and dead people were enough on the island – more than a million technocrats, of which about seventeen thousand were intelligent, and then there would be about a hundred thousand people scattered along the coast. By his rough calculations, that would mean about thirty living people or cyborgs per square mile. It was a huge figure, however, to have accumulated such a number of nanomachines without the help of the ‘Cannibal’ ability – neither Lex, nor Jack, nor Caesar had been able to do so. This didn’t add up. How had they leveled?