Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  “Not really, no.”

  Vildana sheathed her sword and stepped away, continuing to rummage through the bandits’ corpses.

  “Thank you for saving us,” the driver’s wife said, appearing by my side again.

  I heard the familiar roar of an engine at the entrance to the plant, and the bus stopped. Its doors flew open and the driver shouted out the window.

  “Over here, hurry! The bandits are getting ready to chase!”

  I grabbed his wife and the child stuck to her skirt and ran to the bus. Surprisingly, Vildana joined us.

  “I’m coming with you.” She wasn’t asking, she was telling.

  “We’re going to Town Zero, you can’t go there.”

  “You can drop me off on the way.”

  I entered the bus after the rescues. Then I looked at Vildana from the top of the stairs and moved to the side.

  “Alright, we’ll need help to fight off the pursuers.”

  “Hey, hey!” the driver shouted when he saw the new guest. “We’re trying to escape from the bandits, not invite them in!”

  “Have patience, we’ll drop her off when we get far enough away.”

  “Dammit,” the driver wailed before flooring the gas pedal. “My dear wife, my son, keep away from her. Oh, what’s happening...”

  The bus turned sharply and headed for the gate. We could already hear the roar and see the flashing lights of a crowd of motorcycles behind us. The bandits gave chase.

  I stuck my head out of a window on the left side, swapping my Uzi with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. It was more effective at long range. Vildana swapped her sword for a bow and arrow. She kicked some glass out of a window and stuck her head out as well.

  Hmm, she could have just opened the window. Vildana’s Reputation with the driver would probably go down another point for that kind of behavior. Although it was clear that her low Reputation didn’t bother her — on the contrary, it was a source of pride.

  Chapter 36. My Dear People

  OUR BUS BOUNCED over potholes as if it had a jump upgrade too. Its sole remaining light chaotically lit the outlines of sand dunes, dry trees and road signs in the darkness.

  “God dammit,” the driver continued to mutter. Bending forward and clutching the wheel, he focused on the leaping road ahead. He held his signature cigar in his mouth, puffing away and rolling it between his lips.

  The driver’s wife and child sat on seats, secured by restraints. The wife was anxiously quiet, and the son still held to her by her skirt. Neither the unknown scriptwriter or the CSes had given them any special role except as background characters.

  The bandits careered after us, slowly catching up. I raised my assault rifle.

  “Don’t rush it,” Vildana said. “Let them get closer.”

  Wow, now she thought she was the boss. I knew I had to wait without her telling me.

  Vildana set an arrow in her bow but didn’t draw yet. She wound a small spell scroll around the arrow. The paper shrank, caught fire and melded into the wood of the arrow, giving it illumination.

  “My arrow will be the signal,” she continued.

  “By the way, I have grenades and remote detonation bombs.”

  Vildana nodded. “Start with the grenades.”

  I threw my assault rifle across my back and took a grenade in each hand.

  I don’t know how Vildana managed to not fall out of the window. She came more than halfway out of it without holding onto anything. She shook so hard with each of the bus’s jumps that it seemed as if she’d lose hold of the chair she was gripping with her knees and fly out into the night at any second.

  The bandits began to fire. The occasional bullet hid the bus, but the driver responded to every hit with a complaining “god dammit”. I heard the clear thrum of the bowstring through the racket of the engine and gunshots and the whistle of the wheels. The shining arrow flew toward the horde of bandits. It landed in the ground before them and exploded, tossing men and motorcycles into the air.

  “Don’t snooze, Leonarm!” Vildana shouted.

  I hate people who always rush you. Even if you’re a hundredth of a millisecond late in their view, all is lost. Somehow it gives them the right to shout at you, demand that you hurry up or stop slacking off.

  “Don’t shout,” I answered calmly.

  Falling in with Vildana’s attack, I threw one grenade a little to the left, the second a little to the right, so that they’d both explode between the two groups of bandits trying to avoid the pile of motorcycles destroyed by the arrow.

  “Well done,” Vildana said.

  “Well done to you too,” I answered.

  “But next time be quicker. Don’t slack off.”

  I opened my mouth to answer that I’d thrown the grenades with that delay deliberately, making the shrapnel hit as many enemies as possible... and shut my mouth again. No point trying to explain anything to her.

  The girl loaded and enchanted another arrow. This time the illumination was bright blue.

  * * *

  The bandits backed off, then split into three groups. The first and largest group continued along the road, while the two others split off onto the plains and began to catch up to us, keeping at a distance to our left and right. I put away my grenades. I couldn’t throw them that far. I took out my AK, put it into single-shot mode and began to shoot toward the bandits on our left. After driving them away from that side, I moved to the right side, where the bandit group was getting dangerously close. I quickly took out two and they backed off into the plains again.

  In the meantime, Vildana moved to the end of the bus and kicked out the glass at the rear with her already practiced kick. She aimed and released an arrow. Leaving a shimmering blue trail falling like snow behind it, the arrow shot into the center of the bandit group, which tried to escape the danger. The blue explosion was silent save for the crack of ice. A blue ring of cold radiated from the epicenter, covering the land in an icy crust for hundreds of feet around.

  The bikers that had been close to the epicenter froze instantly into icy statues, and the wheels of their bikes continued to spin within their icy prison. Most of the bikers that were far enough away not to freeze still went down, slipping on the icy crust. Or pierced by the spears of ice that flew in all directions during the explosion.

  The ice shone beautifully in the moonlight.

  Long shadows ran behind the bandits and their motorcycles. The moon was fantastically large and bright. I hadn’t seen much of it in real life. Constant clouds and light pollution in the city made it a rare sight. But when I’d had that vacation on the tropical island... it was smaller and dimmer there than the moon in Adam Online. Everything in reality was worse than in Adam Online.

  The growing ice cover reached us. A cold wind blew in through the broken windows, and I felt my face cover with frost. But it wasn’t as bad for me as for the others — as luck would have it, I had cold protection built into my UniSuit. Vildana cried out: the uncovered parts of her legs and face covered in white spots, and the locks of her dark hair sticking out from her helmet turned into white icicles. Half the bus cabin turned white, covered with a pattern of frost. One of the ice spears pierced the windscreen on the right of the driver.

  “Fuck, hold on!” the driver shouted, spinning the wheel with force.

  The bus shook wildly, throwing Vildana and me around the cabin. Several times I was painfully pinned to the wall, the ceiling and the grab rails. My Light Gravity upgrade didn’t soften anything under those forces.

  The bus itself turned sideways in the road and slid along the ice, leaning ever more to one side. The driver span the wheel without effect: he’d completely lost control on the slippery surface. If we reached the edge of the ice cover in that state, the difference in traction would flip the bus.

  “Spin the wheel, asshole!” Vildana shouted.

  “I am, I am!” the driver shouted. “I’m spinning as much as I can, my dear people.”

  He managed to align
the bus and turn in line with the road.

  * * *

  We crossed the border between ice and asphalt with no catastrophic consequences. But in the meantime, the bandits riding along the plains had managed to catch up to us unchallenged. Some of them stood up on their motorcycles and jumped from their seats onto the bus. The roof thundered and sagged under the weight of their bodies. The bandits crawled from both sides into the broken and open windows, firing their weapons.

  Vildana managed to leap to her feet before me. She held her favorite axe. She cut the head off one bandit, then another... Fountains of blood dramatically sprayed the driver’s wife and child.

  A third bandit managed to get into the cabin and shot Vildana with a shotgun. She was pushed ten feet back, and her axe fell from her hands. The remnants of her armor fell off as she flew.

  Then I got involved: I shot the bandit twice, both times in the head. I hurried to the girl. Was she alive? For some reason, I didn’t want to lose her.

  Vildana was on all fours, swinging from side to side. “Those bastards!”

  Her armor was gone. In its place was the short torn dress she’d been wearing in the cage. On top of that, the thaw began. Melting frost dripped from the ceiling and walls, quickly soaking her dress to the point of erotic transparency. Vildana rose and reached for her bag to change her clothes.

  Leather armor and a short metallic skirt appeared on her in place of the wet dress. A leather shield formed on one arm. She pulled her axe out from behind some seats and held it in the other hand. Then she took out a small scroll and applied it to her shield. She’d enchanted it to draw in projectile weapons again.

  The rumble on the bus’s roof stilled. A skylight opened and the legs of another bandit dropped through. Without letting him jump down, I shot him with my Uzi which I’d swapped for my Kalashnikov. The bandit screamed and fell to the floor.

  The explosive ammunition attachment on the Uzi was powerful enough on its own, but with the one-hundred percent explosive damage boost from ‘Hit #1’, the bandits’ bodies sometimes exploded like soap bubbles full of blood. Blood clots often flew at me after shots like that, sticking to my helmet glass. The bus’s interior quickly turned into a branch of Doctor Cid’s Clinic: guts everywhere, torn-off fingers sticking out of crevices in seats, floods of blood streaming down the walls.

  While I reloaded, another brave bandit climbed down through the hatch, armed with a huge revolver with two magnetic coils at the sides. They made me think that the revolver was a rare laser gun model that didn’t need energy charges but took energy from the surrounding air instead. The air around the revolver shimmered before each shot and small flickers of energy gathered around the magnetic coils. The coils themselves vibrated slightly, then stopped. The drum turned and the shot fired with a muffled click.

  I dodged the shots and retreated deeper into the bus. Vildana took my place, covering herself with her shield. But... if there were no bullets, that meant her spell to draw in projectile weapons wouldn’t work!

  Vildana saw it too late as well. The first shot knocked the shield out of her hand, the second one the axe.

  The bandit aimed the revolver at her. The air shimmered, electricity crackled...

  The girl was literally invincible with her agility. She managed to twist away from the shot, jump onto the bandit’s shoulders, wrap her bare legs around his neck and hammer on his head with her fists.

  “Take THAT, asshole! And THAT,” Vildana’s voice rang out, punctuated by resounding blows.

  Then a transparent sword appeared in her hands for a few seconds, which she plunged into the bandit’s chest. His body dissolved along with the sword.

  “Ugh, I wasted a good spell on that piece of shit!”

  While Vildana victoriously kicked the dead bandit, I admired her slightly full, curvaceous figure. Quite the hellcat! It seemed there was nothing that could withstand her ardor in battle. I was definitely glad we’d made peace. I wasn’t sure I’d have survived a fight with her.

  I took a deep breath. It was a beautiful night. What a coward I’d been when I’d nearly quit the game.

  This... this was life!

  Chapter 37. Last Two Rounds in the Box

  VILDANA PICKED UP her axe and shield. I could still hear footsteps on the roof. We stood by the hatch, ready to welcome our guest. But this bandit was smarter. He didn’t try to climb through the hatch. He sent a grenade instead.

  The grenade bounced off the floor and flew toward Vildana. I jumped back ten feet and hid behind a seat. But Vildana acted differently. She demonstrated yet again what it meant to have points in Agility. She rushed to the hatch like lightning with the grenade in her hand. She threw it back through and didn’t bother hiding — she just closed the hatch. She even had time to say:

  “You dropped something, asshole.”

  The explosion made the roof press down into the cabin. A fiery cloud unfolded into the sky from both sides of the bus, throwing out the screaming bandits that had been on the roof. The bus sagged down as it went, its suspension scraping along the asphalt.

  Vildana and I were thrown around the cabin again like the last two rounds in a box. This time we both fell into a corner — Vildana on top of me. She was big, with bulging shapes. My face was entirely submerged in her chest. She smelled of snow and wintry freshness.

  The explosion had broken something in the bus. The engine spluttered and some sort of rhythmic knocking began to grow in it. The bus’s speed fell. The remaining lights in the cabin went out along with the only headlight. All the lights on the dashboard flickered and died.

  But nobody else was crashing around on the roof. We’d won.

  “Why do you hate this bus so much?” I asked. “First you break all the windows, then freeze it, now you try to blow it up.”

  Vildana laughed and climbed off me. She took a tome in a ratty cover out of her bag, opened it and began to run her fingers through the pages. People who chose a magic class got a tome instead of a tablet. It did the same as the tablet or neurointerface, it just looked like an ancient book.

  “Why’re you lying down?” she asked.

  “No reason. Admiring the view.”

  “Let’s gather the loot, admirer.”

  * * *

  Vildana and I searched the bandits’ bodies, moving toward each other from opposite ends of the bus. I found nothing apart from ammunition, medkits and three thousand gold. All the weaponry was in poor condition, so there was no sense in taking it with us.

  “Shame the bandits left their bikes way back there,” Vildana said when we met. “I’d have ridden away on one.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to the bandit base to cut on the rest of ‘em. I want blood.”

  “Your Reputation has gone up after killing so many bandits.”

  “Yeah? You think I give a shit about Reputation? I’m here to do what I want. And I want to kill or experience pain. You killed my favorite, Three Bucks. You’re lucky I switched to killing the bandits, although... taking out another player is always more fun.”

  I instinctively grabbed for my Uzi.

  Vildana laughed hoarsely. “Why so jumpy? If I wanted to kill you, you’d be lying in that factory now. You’re just not much use. Low level, no money. A noob.”

  “I got killed once when I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Don’t worry. When I decide to kill you, I’ll be sure to send you a notification.”

  I grabbed my tablet, intending to read my achievements. I’d leveled up lots after getting so many kills.

  Vildana grabbed the revolver with the magnetic coils and began to examine it. She held it so inexpertly that it was clearly no weapon for her. I put my tablet aside.

  “Want to give me that revolver? You use magic and medieval weapons, right?”

  “Why should I give you it? I can sell it for a lot of money.”

  “Come on,” I laughed. “Who will buy it from you? You won’t get within a mile of any stores with your Reputa
tion. Unless you sell it to bandits, but they might not pay up, you know that. And nobody needs revolvers in magic zones.”

  “You can buy it.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  “It isn’t worth that, and I don’t have a hundred thousand.”

  “As you wish. I’ll keep it.”

  I grabbed Three Bucks’ amulet and swung it before her face as if trying to hypnotize her. “Wanna trade?”

  An item identification scroll unfolded before Vildana. She read the amulet’s description and nodded eagerly. She grabbed the amulet and handed over the revolver.

  * * *

  Vildana immediately put the amulet on and placed it on her voluptuous breast. I sat down and switched on my tablet. The screen was dappled with messages. Since I hadn’t had a revolver like this before, I decided to read its expanded description.

  Tesla’s Revolver

  An electrifying death to your enemies!

  Weapon type: Energy.

  Ammunition: Not required.

  Damage per shot: 49.

  Optimal range: 10-650 feet.

  Rate of fire: 1.6 seconds.

  Durability: 55/100.

  Weight: 5 lbs.

  Value: 33,000g.

  So much time had passed, but the myth of Tesla and his inventions still roamed the game worlds. Any weapon whose operation was obscure, but somehow linked to electricity, was named after him. There was also a Tesla assault rifle, a Tesla grenade launcher and a Tesla light sword, and even a Tesla machine gun, although it was less a machine and more a device. As for heavy armament, there was a Tesla Tower, which sprouted from under the ground and sting the enemy with energy charges. They all needed ammunition in the form of energy units, while that revolver had an unlimited supply like the alien rifle, but with a low rate of fire to balance it out.

  Well, it must be fate... Or rather, the CS storylines telling me that I shouldn’t neglect energy weapons. Only trouble was, the revolver was almost half broken. I’d need to take it to a We Fix It!.