by D. Rus
"So we got our nonagenarian tea party together and there we made up our minds. The rest was paperwork. We couldn't have cared less about all those bodylicious Elfas. Practicality was our primary choice. A smaller surface area is harder to hit with a stabbing weapon!" she mimicked someone, apparently repeating one of their arguments. "Old fools! You should have seen us right after we went perma: a bunch of old goblin hags, hunched and shuffling their feet. But soon the virtual world gave us the works. We stood up straight, our minds rejuvenated, our bodies filling with hormones. We could have lived happily ever after, but now we're stuck inside these wretched clowns!" Zena thumped her own chest in disgust.
I listened to the ex-granny's story in silence. I didn't know what to say that could make her feel better. Actually, she probably didn't want my sympathy. She just needed to get it off her chest.
By then, Zena had already gotten a grip. "I think that we should be about thirty or forty now, each of us, in terms of hormones and physiology. And the process isn't finished yet—quite simply because we don't want it to. When you've one foot in the grave and been offered a cup of immortality potion and another of eternal youth—it's not easy to stop drinking it, you know."
She fell silent. I cautiously squeezed her tiny paw. "Zena. I'm pretty sure we'll work something out. Some kind of magic or a race-changing artifact."
She chuckled, then sniffed her slightly reddened nose. "See if I care," she waved my suggestion away. "Life is good as it is. Goblins aren't that awful, after all. I've got this Mountain King army captain making advances to me now. The other day he brought me a bowlful of Purple Slugs—horribly expensive, mind you, ten gold apiece. You should have seen them all squeaky and squirmy, belching defensive slime, while he was pushing that delicacy on me—he literally grabbed them with his fingers and tried to shove them down my mouth, poor slob."
Those last words sounded affectionate rather than rude. It looked like in another couple of years there would be no xenophobes left in AlterWorld. Personally, I had already stopped reacting to any amounts of green or blue-skinned creatures, pointy Elven ears, disproportionally huge eyes or waggly tails.
"That's the cave!" Whizz called out in front. Always the rogue, she'd been scanning the area since the moment I gave her the location coordinates.
We dismounted. The girls bared their swords and began inspecting the spot, searching for eventual dangers threatening their employer.
I concentrated on my own perceptions. "Is it only me or do you feel the earth shake, too?"
Bomba's face darkened, blushing. "I thought it was the alcocream."
"You're right, dude," Freckles nodded. "Like, I can barely stand on my feet!"
I shrugged, but seeing as we were already there it was a bit late to cancel the whole thing. "Okay, you wait here. I'll keep you posted."
I ducked, taking the uneven steps down into the cave. The earth shook harder with my every step. By the time I reached the end of the stairs, I had to hold on to the walls to stay on my feet.
The cave was barely lit. Grym sat at the table, looking old and drawn—older than when I'd first met him. Mouthing curses, he scribbled something on a piece of yellowed parchment, his other hand covering the candle stump from the sand crumbling overhead.
"Grym?" I asked softly.
The hermit raised his head, squinting his red rheumy eyes. "Ah! There he is!" he exclaimed happily, his glare boiling with a mixture of delight and undiluted hatred. I backed off.
He reached behind his back, feeling for the broom. Holding it like a baseball bat, he went for me. "What's that mess you left in the dungeon? What's with all the shaking?—take that! All the rumbling—take some more! All the wailing—here's a whack on the ass for you!"
He ran after me with the broom in circles, stumbling and complaining, "I can't sleep! I can't eat! I can't work!"
Finally out of breath, he stopped by the wall next to the secret door that led down into the dungeons. Seeing it, he joyfully shouted a command unlocking the passage.
"Down there, now!" he pointed a gnarly finger into the darkness. "And don't you come back up until you've sorted it all out!"
In two unexpectedly youthful leaps he cornered me, his broom steering my back toward the door. One final kick, then the door clanged close, surrounding me with silence. Now I could finally think straight.
Who would have thought! A scraggy old fart—and he had more vigor and panache than the entire Royal cavalry! Very well, so I had to look into it now.
I walked along with a seaman's gait holding on to the walls in order to absorb the crazy quaking until I came to the dungeon's first floor. The first hall was deserted. The next one, ditto. I walked down the empty corridors listening to the approaching sounds of a melee. Someone was having a splendid battle: I could hear spells whizzing and mobs roaring.
Wonder if other players had somehow found a second entrance to the catacombs and were now busy mopping up a new dungeon? In that case, Grym would have to leave. Which was for the better, really: that way he'd be less reluctant to accept my offer.
Finally I started coming across the mobs' bodies. Enormous bulks of some unidentified behemoths blocked the passages, forcing me to cling to the walls, pushing my body through some skin-tight gaps.
Finally, it looked as if I'd reached it. I took a cautious peek into the next hall and froze in disbelief. A panther, huge and furious, chest-high, seemed tiny next to his opponent. A monster, shapeless and horrible, was a mess of various-sized eyes, teeth and thorns. He stood a good twenty feet tall on his fat columnlike legs, waving a dozen long tentacles tipped with razor-sharp claws.
The monsters were battling to their death. The giant slashed the panther with his tentacles and stomped hard, trying to squash his opponent—and this hopping about was causing the micro earthquakes that I'd felt.
The panther was amazing—his every blow reaching the target, critting the terrestrial octopus, burning and poisoning him, ripping out pieces of flesh, making his horrible wounds bleed some more. The panther's eyes shot bolts of lightning as a good dozen auras weakened, poisoned, paralyzed and slowed his quarry all at once.
What an incredible collection of skills! But their levels were even awesomer. The monster's name was highlighted in purple: out of range. I selected the panther as target and read, amazed,
A pet. Name: Bagheera. Level: 289. 14% left till next level.
Life: 72%—31,877 hit points
Mana: 31%—4,133 points
Below, an endless and absolutely unfamiliar list of icons was unfolding: buffs and skills activated.
A pet? Bagheera? Was it my dear little panther that I'd been forced to leave behind in this dungeon after fourteen hours of mopping it out? The one I hadn't had the heart to destroy so I'd just left him there, this sweet, gorgeous feline?
By then, the panther had finished his opponent off with two clever well-directed blows, slicing his bulk into several separate pieces.
"Bagheera?" I mouthed.
He heard me. His large head turned, two rounded ears pricking up. Recognition glistened in his yellow eyes.
The cave filled with a deafening roar. In a smooth imperceptible motion the panther crept over the floor. A jerk, a jump—then the beast went for me in a broken line preventing me from selecting him as target.
I'm toast, I thought as the panther skidded to a halt by my feet. Purring like a tank engine, he shoved his large calf-like head under my ribcage.
Chapter Five
The Frontier. Asian cluster's area of responsibility. The Shui Fong clan's joint slave group.
Suppressing a groan of relief, Oksana dropped her tattered cloak onto the scorching sand and collapsed on top of it. She strained her foot, wriggling it free from the clutches of a thin chain that snaked toward a tall steel stake a dozen feet away. It was installed right in the middle of the desert bandits' camp.
This was a working break. The last round had been easier than usual: the NPCs respawned in the lower levels, producing a
rare quest treasurer instead of a gang boss. From where she sat, she could see Wong's face: their slave driver beamed like a cat who'd got the cream. He was fifth in their group even though he had nothing to do with the farming itself, of course. He just sat there in the impromptu shade receiving free XP, keeping an eye on the slaves and monitoring the battle chat for any potential loot.
Wong was busy smoking some truly mind-blowing herbal mix from a fancy glass vessel. He'd soon start getting the munchies, nutritional as well as carnal. Despite the abundance of choice—three out of the remaining four group members were female—Oksana stood zero chance of avoiding the bastard's attentions.
One of the remaining two, a Polish girl called Bianca, had long been broken. She was now their local rat who grassed up the others for a few perks. She also warmed the bed of Yi, the gang boss—which meant that Wong would never come anywhere near her if his ass was still dear to him.
The other female in the group was Boo, an African girl from some arcane tribe. The idiot FIVR capsule operators responsible for redirecting the generous flow of new digital slaves to the Asian cluster had botched the complicated remote administration settings, digitizing the girl without enhancing her appearance. As a result, even Oksana's bosses—who weren't generally too squeamish—screwed their faces up at the sight of her cut and stretched lower lip fitted with a clay ring, her face covered in ritual scars and crude tattoos, her breasts dangling around her belly.
Wasn't she the lucky one! Also, she spoke some weird African dialect unknown even to the AlterWorld auto translate.
Oksana's appearance hadn't been altered either: something she'd already regretted 94 times. Today could be the 95th. Her slim and curvaceous body drew her bosses to her like a magnet. How stupid had she been! But then again, she'd been only seventeen at the time, after all.
Oksana bit her lip, hating herself. Stupid cow! She should have known better when this swarthy, handsome Italian guy sat at her café table, lavishing her with compliments. She let herself be duped... and doped. An ice-cream and a coffee with "just a taste of brandy"—followed by the cellar of an abandoned cottage after he'd spiked her drink with a knock-out dose of some date rape drug.
She'd seen enough while waiting for her turn to be digitized—enough not to need to have her hair highlighted ever again as the blond streaks in it were in fact gray. The Gypsies—which was the fake Italian macho's true identity—ran their business on a grand scale. She'd seen flocks of screaming babies who'd calmed down soon after meticulously regular shots of vodka. Then a Gypsy woman would sit in the street with an outstretched hand, rocking a constantly sleeping child while making herself a thousand rubles a day. A couple of weeks later she'd be rocking another baby as the old one had already outlived its usefulness. And somewhere a tearful mother was running around sticking posters on lampposts, cursing herself for the wretched moment when she'd taken her eyes off her baby.
They also took care of the thin flow of unlucky ones the area had to offer for digitizing. Even before the perma phenomenon, over a hundred thousand people had gone missing in Russia each year. Now their quantities had predictably grown. It had become so easy to have your own server with your own virtual sex slave—or a group of prisoners busy eighteen hours a day farming loot in one of the more popular virtual worlds. Easy and, most importantly, safe.
The slave drivers, too, found it an easy way of making money. You threw a person into a hacked FIVR capsule and kept them there for five days to digitize them. Then you pumped their comatose body with vodka or drugs and dumped it somewhere in a dark alley. The police hated such cold cases and tried to close them whenever possible, announcing another missing person found with no signs of foul play: and the fact that he or she was apparently a seasoned junkie in a coma couldn't have suited them more.
Oksana sighed. Her own body had to be lying in one of the private medical centers now, withering and degrading. That's if her organs hadn't already been harvested: a business far more lucrative than even arms trafficking. One person contained enough "spare parts" to buy someone a brand new luxury apartment. All they needed to do was sign a death certificate of a still alive hospital patient—or strike a deal with the medical center's owners.
So all those endless hours in the gym and years of denying herself all the tasty morsels had been for nothing, after all. Who had she shaped this perfect body for?
Scumbags.
The unexpected break was nearly over. The mobs would respawn after sixty seconds. As the group's rogue and main puller, Oksana was responsible for time control, serving the others a constant flow of mobs.
Suppressing another groan, she scrambled back to her feet, then made a series of complex hand signs to the other group members. Not that they had much going in the way of conversation. Boo didn't understand a thing she said and as for Bianca, Oksana simply ignored her. Their tank and the only male in the group, a Russian boy going under the moniker of SledgeHammer, was a few screws short of a hardware store. The byproduct of an unsuccessful brain-kill session, he was one of the older players who'd gone perma of their own free will. Once caught, slave traders reduced them to vegetables first, forcing them to change their bind point. You couldn't kill a person in AlterWorld but you sure could fry their brains.
When Oksana had first seen a Russian name in this realm of unpronounceable syllables, she couldn't believe her luck. When they'd been herded into bunkhouses for a brief night's sleep, she'd perched herself on the edge of the boy's plank bed.
"Hi," she'd whispered. "I'm Oksana. Are you Russian? What's your name?"
Since then it had become their little ritual, greeting him at night and in the early morning saying, "What's your name?" He never said anything back, just smiled vaguely staring into space over her right shoulder.
As she'd leveled up during the first few weeks she'd been often moved from one of the clan's dungeons to another. Her bind point was inevitably set up inside, the entrance usually barricaded or demolished: in order to get in, you needed to know the portal's coordinates. The number of blows she received in the evening depended on both the loot she'd have farmed and on the slave drivers' disposition.
After some time, she couldn't level up as fast as before, so she didn't have to change group and location so often. Besides, Oksana had learned to secretly sabotage her own progress. Instead of battle skills, she invested all the available points into the very things that could one day win her her freedom: stealth, lockpicking and thievery. To level up the latter, she had to use it—so she had to practice it on mobs, stealthing upon yet another skeleton and peeking into their inventory trying to swipe something or other. All of this had slowed down the farming process, affecting the loot and weakening her as a team member. The whole group suffered from her penalties but still Oksana wouldn't give up her dreams of freedom. Which was when Bianca grassed her up for the first time.
Now she could barely remember the twenty-four hours she'd spent in the lower-ranking male slaves' bunkhouse she'd been sent to as a punishment. Luckily, she'd discovered the Wiki button built into her interface so she zoomed in on its windows and got busy perusing article after article, purposefully ignoring whatever was happening to her body.
Reading it drew her in, to the point where she sometimes forgot to groan with the supposed pleasure: some of the rapists needed to torture her mind as much as her body so she had to make sure they got what they wanted: the alternative was too bad to even think about. Before sending her to the slaves, Lucky Lee who passed as a sort of head of clan security, had wound her blond tresses onto his fist and dragged her along the flagstones to the castle's inner wall, then pushed her ear against the hot masonry.
"Listen!" he'd hissed, baring his teeth, as he thumped the wall with his fist.
Inside the walls, the bricked-in slaves started crying, groaning, scratching their nails against the stone.
Oksana stirred, shaking off the memory. Just in time: the first couple of bandits had shown up at the camp's furthest boundary.
The rested slaves mopped up the area too fast. Oksana cringed. That way, soon they'd be moved again to one of the unescapable higher-level dungeons with collapsing exits. Once back in the castle, all the returning slaves were sent to the Arena which stripped them of all their possessions while minimizing the threat of any potential rioting. But now—Oksana glared underfoot—it was only this thin chain and a guard that stood in her way to freedom.
"You, Trout! Come here!"
Shit. Talk about the devil. Couldn't have found a better time to indulge in his lust-driven impulses. The slave drivers had nicknamed her Trout for her senseless stare and unresponsive passivity when raped.
Dragging her chained foot, Oksana started out for the lean-to, hearing one of the girls behind her back heave a sigh of both relief and disappointment. On one hand, they'd avoided an ordeal this time; on the other, they still needed to meet the loot and XP quotas—and with the arrival of that Macaria goddess and her sacrificial benefits, all farm teams had to siphon part of their XP off to the clan's elite members. It was a shame though that voluntary death sent you back to your usual bind point and not to some goddess' far-off altar...
Wong fidgeted on top of her, making himself comfortable, smacking and pursing his lips, ratcheting up the mental pressure and promising to plunge her into a heavenly wave of pleasure. Habitually Oksana zoned out; equally habitually she peeked into his conveniently placed inventory. Selecting the slave driver as target, she activated the thieving skill.