by Max Lagno
I returned to my messages.
There were lots of them, so they automatically grouped into categories that displayed all my achievements at once:
KILLS:
Level 1-10 spiderbots: 7, +7 XP.
Level 1-10 humans: 43, +430 XP.
Level 1-10 bosses: Three Bucks, +25 XP.
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Achievement complete: Headhunter.
Earned: +50 XP.
+1 skill point.
Achievement unlocked: Headhunter II.
Perform 50 headshots in a row.
Completed: 7/50.
Completion reward:
+100 ХР.
+1 skill point.
Achievement unlocked: Bombardier.
Kill five enemies using explosives.
Completed: 9/5.
Earned: +25 XP.
Achievement unlocked: Bombardier II.
Kill 50 enemies using explosives.
Completed: 9/50.
Completion reward:
+100 ХР.
+1 point to Explosives skill.
Achievement completed: Road Menace.
Kill five enemies in overland transport.
Completed: 6/5.
Earned: +25 XP.
Achievement unlocked: Road Menace II.
Kill 50 enemies in overland transport.
Completed: 6/50.
Completion reward:
+100 ХР.
SKILLS:
Explosives skill learned.
Earned: +10 XP.
Keep blowing stuff up to blow stuff up even harder!
High Climber skill learned.
Earned: +10 XP.
Like climbing high? The higher you go, the harder you fall! Keep improving the High Climber skill by obtaining the corresponding equipment.
Automatic Weapons skill increased: +20 XP.
Night Vision skill increased: +20 XP.
Eagle Eye skill increased: +20 XP.
Eagle Eye skill increased to level 2.
You now see even more, even farther and clearer. The main thing is — keep your eyes open!
Congratulations, Leonarm, you leveled up!
Your current level: 10.
You have unlocked one free transfer to Rim One.
Attention: please ensure that you have finished all your business in Rim Zero. There will be no way back.
Attention: you have unused stat points (7) and skill points (1). Spend them wisely!
Phew, I’d barely made it through this sea of achievements. What a mission! From level three to level ten. Although, why was I celebrating? Olga and I used to compete to see who could powerlevel new characters the fastest. My personal record for getting out of Rim Zero was forty-four minutes. In comparison, my two days now wasn’t much of an achievement. More of an abysmal embarrassment.
* * *
Vildana sat on the seat in front of me and skimmed through her tome. Spirals of light occasionally separated from the book’s pages and surrounded her body. The girl cried out in joy and shivered from time to time. She was distributing her points too.
She caught me looking at her, especially at her thighs under her short skirt and her full breasts.
“What’re you staring at?”
“It’s just... It’s my second day in Adam Online and I still haven’t...”
“Put your tongue away, thirsty boy, you ain’t my type.”
“Hey, I’m taller than Three Bucks.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have his charisma.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re a soft one. Can’t do what he can do.”
“What, Three Bucks had some special skills?”
Vildana just rolled her eyes in response, as if to say I wouldn’t understand.
“Alright. Guess I’ll level up my muscles and buy some assless leather pants.”
“Sure, then we’ll talk. I’m heading to Rim One as well. Nothing left to do here. That little fight of ours took me up to level twelve. I won’t get enough XP for kills here.”
“With your passion for a shitty Reputation, I doubt you’ll live to admire my leather pants.”
Vildana opened her tome and showed me a page where an old flourishing script showed that her Reputation was at minus nineteen.
That’s still a lot, you’ll have a hard time in Rim One.
“Don’t you get it yet? Challenge and pain is what I love.”
Another voice spoke. The driver’s wife. I’d forgotten she was there.
“Thank you for saving us.”
Damn, could she say anything except that? I returned to my tablet and distributed my new points.
+3 Knowledge.
+2 Health.
+2 Luck.
I put one skill point into Eagle Eye, increasing it to level three. My vision blurred for a moment and then refocused with a clarity I wasn’t used to. Vildana sat on the seat in front of me, but now, from where I was sitting, I could make out all the details of the patterns on the 3buck$ amulet reflected in the dusty rear-view mirror.
It was incredibly beautiful.
Chapter 38. Cool_Name
THE GRENIKA’S three engines roared as it climbed vertically into the sky at Mach twenty.
At that moment, LeCube’s software configuration seemed more like a missile than a military flying machine. The blue sky quickly darkened, turning into a grey depth with the blackness of space showing through. All the clouds in the flying machine’s path were first torn apart, then burned to nothing by the plasma from the engine.
From above, Rim Three looked just like it did on the neurointerface map. The scale decreased rapidly. Grisha’s increased Perception allowed him to still see his guildmates’ markers on the ground, along with the coalition troops, highlighted red. The Black Wave was under the cover of the defensive fortifications in the Langoliers’ former base. The guild took control of it after Grisha’s crushing victory when he first bought LeCube.
Fortunado even left the base’s name as it was. It showed up on the maps as the Langoliers’ home base, although the symbol had changed to the chevron of the Black Wave. Fortunado considered this a small, but effective dig at the enemy.
The base was one of the largest in Rim Zero (the largest user location there was Dimension X). A dozen gigantic bizoid nests, an infinite source of water, mines with valuable minerals and components... There was even a qualia mine. It produced up to three grams of the rare material per day. And all of it was within the base, which made it highly valuable.
The coalition troops surrounded the base and gradually tightened the circle. They were likely taken aback by the powerful Tesla towers generously spread out along the approach to the base. The Langoliers themselves placed them there when they owned it.
A mountain range could also be seen through the scraps of cloud. At its center was Dimension X. All that could be seen of it was the anomaly that protected Nika from aerial attacks. The location of the hangars and defensive armament was hidden. Nika poured hundreds of thousands of energy units into camouflaging the zone. She allowed no uninvited guests and kept her respawn tower to herself.
On land it seemed as if Dimension X was far away, the path to it winding through Brooklyn Forest and a mined proving ground peppered with artillery shots from Dimension X. Now it was clear that Nika wasn’t that far from the Langoliers’ former home base.
The view got smaller with each passing second. The markers disappeared. Grisha’s Perception had exceeded its capabilities. To track the movement of players and NPCs from orbit, you had to have the Space Explorer skill.
Before the start of the battle, Grisha put his available points into just two parameters. His Maximum Altitude now allowed him to move into a low near-earth orbit, and his Maximum Speed let him do it in a very short time indeed. In addition, the Quick Start piloting skill, which Grisha himself had, gave him a fifty percent increase in Speed for his first minute of flight. Mach thirty! If Grisha had been a human or a bizoid, he’d need to have suf
ficient Strength and Health to survive those forces.
Incidentally, that limitation didn’t extend to certain classes of supers: they could move at almost the same speeds and altitudes without using flying transportation. They were supers, after all. A race that seemed as if it was created specially for arrogant dipshits.
One of those supers, a player by the name of Camper from the Golden Horde, followed Grisha nearly a mile behind. His red cloak stretched out behind him like a plank at these massive speeds, and a defensive dome against the heat formed around his body, starting at the head and stretching down to the super’s legs. Holding his fist ahead of him, Camper slowly but surely closed the distance to the Grenika.
Two MiGs rose two miles below the MiG. Even lower were a dozen or more coalition jets. For now, Grisha was unconcerned about them. In comparison to the Grenika, the super and the suborbital MiGs, they were low-speed planes that would take a long time to get into low orbit. As for the two MiGs, Grisha had a surprise prepared: the new Second Skin configuration program. Nika let him use it for free for seven days.
“We need to test it in battle. In exchange, you’ll provide me with all your battle logs.”
Although Nika veiled it under financial interest, Grisha understood: she wanted to help him in the war without admitting it to herself. He was touched and he signed the agreement.
* * *
It was Camper who represented the greatest danger to Grisha. He was a superhuman of the Superman class. Grisha already had experience of fighting with him. It had happened during the assault on Londinium.
The Black Wave needed to stock up on nutrition supplies for their bizoids. Fortunado assigned Grisha and two Slug-class bizoids to the mission. They were gigantic sacks of skin full of hundreds of different types of venoms for poisoning other bizoids. The slugs had special organs for storing alkaline acid that could eat through metal, destroying mechanodestructors and vehicles. Streams of liquid full of bacteria fell from the slugs’ mouths. It infected people, fallen angels and some types of supers with rapid onset illnesses.
The coalition set up an ambush next to one of the nutrition sales stations in the Londinium suburbs. They probably hadn’t known that the Black Wave was headed there, they were just arranging small squads around all the important resource stations. The squad consisted of one Superman-class superhuman and two strong mages. Grisha wasn’t certain of their subclasses.
The superman Camper attacked LeCube immediately using Kinesthetic Telekinesis. The skill was far weaker than the magical Phantom Explosion that the mages of the coalition used to successfully hit Grisha. But the slugs took out the mages in no time, covering them with an immobilizing jelly. In theory, the mages were supposed to dissolve in the jelly within half a minute, turning into food for the bizoids, but they had good regeneration. From time to time the mages cast a Restore Life spell on themselves, returning their drained Health.
The mages couldn’t break through the jelly. Stuck in the stinking semi-transparent and snot-like mass, all they could do was watch the battle between Grisha and Camper. The bizoids couldn’t help Grisha, since they had to constantly maintain the jelly entrapping the mages.
The superman had to touch Grisha to affect the material of which LeCube was made. Camper had put so many points into his Agility that Grisha’s Perception had a hard time keeping up with his Time Slow, so the superman often reached LeCube, reducing its durability with each touch. Some of the kinesthetic telekinetic attacks ignored Grisha’s defenses and hit him, taking away big chunks of Health.
Of course, Grisha responded to the attacks. Sometimes he hit Camper almost by accident, but it took a long time of trying to kill a Superman. Grisha changed his software configurations, transforming into everything he could, but the kinesthetic telekinesis inexorably did its job. Its influence was particularly strong during the transformation time, when LeCube became defenseless. Grisha realized that he was only making things harder for himself. He returned to his base form and stopped his counterattacks.
Camper’s telekinetic bites took LeCube’s Durability down to forty three out of a hundred. There was no sense in retreating. Camper didn’t have to worry about enemies running away from him: he could nip at their heels with telekinesis all the way back to the respawn point. And the two bizoids couldn’t let the mages go: they would have finished Grisha off with a double Phantom Explosion.
The last time Grisha was in such danger was during the fight with Ozerg. Just as he was preparing to die and lose LeCube, help arrived: four medium-level mages who Fortunado had sent after Grisha and the bizoids, with orders to stay out of the way and not give away their presence. Of course, he didn’t warn his brother about this. Damn strategist.
The Superman class had low magic resistance. Plasma guns had no effect on Camper, but magic fireballs dealt medium damage to him.
The mages first cast a Slow spell on the super, then Detection to prevent him from using invisibility. Next came the fireballs, enriched with ice and lightning.
Gathering the remainder of his strength, Camper broke away from the ambush and flew off, his red cloak flapping. He’d left his comrades alone to solve the problem of surviving for themselves. His mages immediately offered a ransom. Grisha decided to take it. More gold meant more component nanomass. Unlike money, he never had enough of that.
Another fight with Camper awaited him. This time he was unlikely to receive help. All the Black Wave’s troops were busy defending the base.
* * *
The Grenika climbed into orbit and turned toward Camper. Grisha turned LeCube into its base configuration, the simple black cube, and surrounded it with a visible forcefield.
Camper floated five hundred yards off. For some reason his red cloak fluttered in space as if from the wind.
Camper hailed him. “I thought you’d keep running and I’d have to follow you to the moon.”
“And I thought supermen had stopped wearing their underpants over their tights.”
“They aren’t tights!” Camper spat. “This is super-durable legwear with an invulnerability aura!”
“Hmm, looks to me like ordinary underpants over tights.”
“Look who’s talking, some black square?”
“It’s a cube, not a square.”
Grisha switched off the link. He didn’t want to get into a verbal duel; two enemy MiGs had already left the atmosphere and were quickly approaching.
Adam Online’s surface didn’t look the same as the planet Earth from space. After all, the world wasn’t round, but flat, adjoining another flat plain. However high you went, the horizon remained an even line. At the same time, the moon and other accessible planets existed as spheres.
You could move from Rim to Rim through space, but getting into orbit was a high-level skill. Mechanodestructors needed special skills and frames to do it. Mages would have to spend a lot of mana to open a portal in orbit, and they had no need of it. They’d die without oxygen. The skill of using spacesuits was entirely non-magical, and powerful mages simply created portals directly to wherever they needed to go. Flying machines capable of spaceflight used up an immense amount of energy. It would be cheaper to pay for passage.
And naturally, the space above Rim Six was wreathed in anomalies and black holes through which none had yet found a path. The brave souls who had tried had died and lost their characters. The only known place to get through was at Jamilla’s Tomb, which was on land and under the control of the Black Wave.
Grisha brought up his available software configurations on the screen. Some of them still had numbered titles, but Nika had started giving her new configurations names, as Grisha had asked. True, Nika didn’t apply much imagination to her config names. She’d called them “Name” or “Cool_Name” or “Damn_What_a_Cool_Config_Name”.
Grisha chose a configuration called Second Skin. It sounded good. This was the only time he could congratulate Nika on a config well named.
Second Skin software configuration activated.
Grisha selected both MiGs one after another.
Targets confirmed.
Requires: 25,000+25,000+25,000 CN.
Available in storage: 230,000 CN.
Use?
Grisha confirmed. Two identical clumps of component nanomass separated from LeCube’s sides and rushed toward the airplanes. The clumps were as black as LeCube itself, so they blended in perfectly with the background of space. But the both the super and the MiGs had upgrades that could help them see this incomprehensible crud flying toward them.
The MiGs responded by firing their plasma guns, and Camper used Kinesthetic Telekinesis again. The energy beams flew through the clumps, burning away some of their CN. But since Grisha was controlling their flight, he maneuvered the mass to avoid great losses.
His neurointerface lit up:
Damage taken: -15,200.
Health: 104,800/120,000.
Right. This part of the component nanomass was still a part of LeCube, a part of Grisha himself, which was the only reason he could control these parts like LeCube itself. That meant that losing some of it meant losing Health, and his defenses couldn’t protect him.
But the separated chunks of component nanomass flew inexorably onward. Dispersing into tiny particles, they overpowered the MiGs’ forcefields and engulfed the airplanes from nose to tail. The airplanes were covered in black. Their engines spluttered, their forcefields deactivated. The jets tumbled helplessly, weaving and spinning.
Grisha could tell that the mechanodestructors in the MiGs were trying to shake off Second Skin. It blocked the airplane’s external functions: they couldn’t shoot or talk over the radio. They couldn’t even eject the core to escape the immobilized frame.