by D. Rus
She leaned her head back and shook it to pull her unmanageable mane of hair into a ponytail. Struggling to hold all of it in one hand, she reached for a sharp kitchen knife from the shelf. In a few strokes, she shortened her hair into an uneven bob and smiled to her reflection. Dreams demanded sacrifice.
All perma forums insisted on the haircut ritual before the ultimate login. It was a must for every aspiring perma. Some argued that the laws of magic demanded one leave a part of oneself in the old world. Others believed that too much hair inhibited the FIVR capsule's massage functions, encouraging bedsores and hindering brain circulation, reducing one's chances of going digital. Taali hadn't gone into detail, she just followed the communal wisdom.
She donned the bathrobe that Max's mother had lovingly provided her with and walked out of the bathroom, winking to Kostik the bodyguard who immediately zoned out, enveloped by the cloud of her young and fresh body scent. A thought flashed through her mind: wasn't it time to do something truly off the scale? Should she lay the bodyguard, maybe, considering he was already halfway there, bug-eyed. Stupid boy, what kind of professional are you? You're only good to guard supermarket doors. I could stab you with this knife in my own sweet time.
Or should she go back to the mirror, take a nude selfie and post it on every social media site for the benefit of all those who used to drool over her body?
No way, dammit! It was her hormones playing up after a successful mission. Plus the subconscious desire to procrastinate. Leaving the real world to become an unknown perma entity was a bit scary, after all.
"Wake up, soldier!" Taali patted Kostik's cheek and swung round, granting him one final glimpse of her slender thighs through the slit in her bathrobe before stepping into her bedroom.
"So, honey? You're doing it, then?" Max's mom Anastasia Pavlovna asked, busy blacking out the window with a pair of thick heavy curtains.
"I am, Aunt Stacie. Max is waiting for me."
Hearing her son's name, the woman grew quiet. Her face fell, then lit up again. She ought to believe in miracles. Her boy was alive. He kept writing to her, sending her pretty pictures and asking her to come and visit him.
"Of course he is, honey. Give him a kiss from me. Such a shame I can't even send him anything with you..." she turned away, ashamed of her eyes already swollen with tears.
Suppressing disgust, Taali studied the stack of incontinence pads, the catheter's spiraling tube and the pyramid of disposable saline bags.
Clenching her teeth, she stepped forward and tapped in the access code that activated the capsule. Magnet locks snapped. The transparent lid slipped off, inviting her to climb inside onto the soft nanocaoutchouc bed lit by a soft blue light. The bed rocked ever so slightly as it readjusted itself to its user's body parameters installed in its memory. A colorful scattering of status signals blinked impatiently as pictograms switched their colors all to green one by one, reporting successful system tests, connectivity response and hardware control.
Taali slipped out of the bathrobe and left it lying on the floor. She shivered slightly in the chill of the aircon. After a bout of rather tedious preparations, she lay down onto the capsule's supple plastic bed heated to the standard 98.6 F. The locks snapped hungrily, locking the operator inside her transparent sarcophagus. The air return system fans whirred softly. The inside of the lid blinked and lost its transparency, turning into a monitor which offered the girl the choice of immersion parameters. The eye movement control was already on. She didn't have to move at all—only her eyes needed to skim through the messages, her eyelashes single-blinking her chosen commands.
That was it. Now one final ritual the forum users insisted on. Unhesitating, Taali whispered the cult line of the Russian permas' mantra,
"The Deep, the Deep, now I'm yours."[i]
* * *
We had accepted the Belorussian kid into the clan right there on the spot—him being a valuable expert and all that. Now he was fidgeting behind my back, afraid of getting lost or being left behind—just like a cat that senses the family's removal to a new place so he crawls inside his pet carrier and stays put for hours awaiting the big moment.
Two portals popped open within a minute of each other, disgorging the first groups that we'd sent to retrieve the slaves from the nearest locations. The released captives habitually surrendered heavy sackfuls of herbs, ore and other ingredients they'd farmed. Only then did they take a look around in disbelief to make sure that the castle had indeed changed hands. It was now chock full of unknown warriors and their grim ex-owners who lay face down on the floor, bound hand and foot, prompting a few lynching attempts which were half-heartedly contained by the unhurried mercs.
Widowmaker ran over to me, alarmed. "The guys from the long-range recce group report Shui Fong forces closing in."
"How many?"
He shook his head in concern. "A lot. We've sighted three columns approaching from different directions about two hundred-strong each. Their advance times are different but in synch with each other so as to make sure they arrive here all at the same time. They must be planning an impromptu attack. No guarantees though that they're the only ones coming; besides, there're always portals."
Widowmaker paused, poring over the non-stop flow of reports. His face grew ever more anxious. "The healers and buffers in our base camp are reporting some unhealthy activity. The surrounding dunes are bristling. Our men have sighted numerous footprints and the hiding places of at least several observers. A pack of sand wolves has moved further off, and they're very cautious animals. Our guys also report hearing portals popping at some distance. It looks like their location has been compromised. It's possible that the enemy is consolidating in order to attack them. We have to get them out of there. If the enemy gets to their respawn points, there'll be fur flying. We need every raider to change their bind points ASAP. Max, this is no joke. Our permas are in big trouble. We've just made ourselves a very nasty enemy. If it comes to punches, they won't just let us go. They don't give a shit about Terms and Conditions."
Well, well, well. We had about hundred and fifty archers on the walls plus a few dozen warriors. Considering the gates had been broken, the gangsters could easily catch us with our pants down. "Okay to the base camp evacuation. What's with the dome shield?"
"It's working but we have only two accumulating crystals left, both dry as a bone. It's a miracle they haven't disintegrated yet. And charging them up might take a long time—an hour each at least—to say nothing of the strain on our wizards. That's five hundred thousand mana—half a ton, for crissakes!"
Now that was something I could easily help him with. In actual fact, I could start thinking about opening a small filling station: a place where you could pull in, fill up a dozen accumulating crystals, have your windshield wiped for you and off you go. If some kind of brainiac could come up with a portal to such a station from a besieged castle, it would allow the defenders to stay put indefinitely, pulling faces at the attackers from the safety of their castle walls—as long as somebody kept changing the batteries and sending to this new Shell Mana for replacements. Didn't it feel funny sitting on a pipeline like that! I began to understand the colonial empires' desire to civilize the world's oil regions.
"Bring the crystals here, will you," I said. "I'll charge them up in a blink. How much time can they buy us in the case of a well-coordinated attack?"
Widowmaker cringed, unsure. "Ten minutes? Twenty max. The dome shield artifact itself is crap, but it doesn't matter as long as we have one. Its damage absorption is way below par. Had the crystals been in one piece, we might have been able to withstand two or three hours of serious pressure. And after that, time to get stuck in."
"More than likely, their castle defense has been delegated to an elite quick-response group which is basically what we're observing now. We've been here an hour, and their groups are already hemming us in. Normally, these three hundred fighters would have already ported inside. You need to treble the guards on the walls and ch
eck the guild for any groups available for hire, status 0 and 1. I'm going to check the Chinese auctions for any empty batteries to add to the existing ones. Judging by the newsfeed, the Asians have not yet cottoned on to the multi-layered dome idea. Another thing. It looks like we might be stuck here for a while. And if we port the raid to the nearest exit point, we may lose a whole day. What we need to do now is to send a fast-moving group with a wizard to break away and set up as many beacons as they can. The further away we can jump from here, the less we'll have to leg it to our destination. That'll also give us a bigger chance of shaking off the gangsters if they've found out that we keep on plowing ahead instead of fucking off back home."
Widowmaker kept nodding in sync with my orders, copying them into the staff channel. He paused for a second, casting a hopeful glance at the shed's demolished wall,
"And what if we could fit the breakaway group out with golems? Remember that Chinese guy who legged it? No mount could ever catch up with him."
I turned to Gimmick. "Master? Are there any more machines like that in the castle? Actually, what are their performance characteristics?"
The Belorussian kid cheered up. "We really should call them mechanoids. According to the principles of classic magic mechanics..."
"Wait. Make it short, will ya? We've got an enemy at the gates. Cut out the theory, just get right to the point."
He startled, glancing at the breached gates, then hurried, "We were working on an urgent order to create an escort group for the Shui Fong clan leader. He is a real bastard. He loves to show off. A dozen luxury-version Light Rangers with all the trimmings—all gold-plated, engraved and inlaid with mother of pearl. We had assembled eight and had seven more to go. 6K hits, armor at 300, physical damage at just 100, magical at 0. Cruise speed 25 mph with a one-off option of being able to accelerate to 50 mph for thirty seconds in every hour. One-seater, zero cargo capacity. Full regen in twenty-four hours. Field maintenance option available for those who can afford it. The cost of all the consumables for the standard no-frills configuration minus work and the chance of botching the entire recipe, seventy thousand. In gold, naturally. That's it, I think."
"Cool," Widowmaker whispered longingly. "With these things, the sky's the limit."
He turned to me. "May I, Sir? Just to test drive it. If it's worth it, we'll place enough orders with your master to make a whole troop of hobby horses for him."
"Yeah right. You might just as well change your group's name to the Seventh Cavalry. Okay, go ahead and take it for a jog. Just don't set your sights on it and don't forget to check it back in once the mission is over. If you really feel you'd like to see it on the list of your trophies, let me know and we'll think of something. We'll still need to calculate its actual value. Life isn't cheap these days..."
Widowmaker rubbed his hands and began issuing orders, forming a breakaway group. Five extended recon rangers—the elite—slithered toward the precious Golem stable. How's that for being a natural ninja: not a single piece of their armor had clinked, not a single twig had snapped underfoot. No need to spend your life in extended training or sweat over genetic selection. Just invest a point into the skill you need, choose some class-appropriate gear, do a dozen profession quests, then apply your brain and use your hands to mold the resulting dough into a nice little golden crusty pie. You know the type, the one with a surprise in it: the moment your enemy sinks his teeth into it, it bares its own fangs and buries them into his face.
All right, back to reality. I opened a Chinese auction and squinted from the riot of color. They loved their graphics, didn't they? Where the rest of the world went for streamlined functionality, the Asians compensated it with an intense color scheme.
Oh Jesus. I struggled to find the familiar Search and Sort by... buttons while clicking Close on three insistent ads windows promoting premium offers. My eyes watered from all the unusual ethnic armor. Even small details like these could be turned into money: if I didn't have to worry about all those potentially turbulent years ahead, I'd have opened a small shop dealing in kimonos, samurai armor and whatnots for our lovers of all things Asian, very much like those proud owners of T-shirts plastered with mysterious hieroglyphics which probably amounted to, I'm a dumbass because I wear something in a language I don't understand. Yeah, right. Apparently, Russians aren't the only race who like to poke fun at foreigners teaching them f-words when they ask for the Russian version of "thank you".
Judging by the sheer amount of offers in some categories, the auction was enormous—a good ten times larger than the Russian ones. And still, the Mana Accumulators I needed were quite pricey and not in great supply at all. Every vendor wanted forty grand on top of the usual hundred, and their product range was nothing to write home about.
WTF? I took the trouble of checking the sales history and everything became clear. A couple of days ago, somebody too clever for his own shirt and with a wallet to match had gone through the auction with a fine-toothed comb, buying up all the crystals he could lay his hands on. This abnormal demand triggered an immediate response from the vendors: some of them had stashed their wares away until the situation became clearer while others had simply hoicked up their prices.
That was unlucky. Even in our cluster the prices were lower. Actually, I could check that out. I PM'd Cryl hoping he was awake and taking care of a particular castle in his care—or should I say, the menagerie that passed for one.
He replied at once. I detected a hint of hope in his voice as in, aren't you coming back yet? Sorry, dude. I'm afraid we're up to our neck in it.
I described the task labeling it as super ASAP and made a deliberate show of staying on the line waiting for his reply. In less than a minute, I heard what I least expected. All stationary accumulating crystals, of any capacity, had disappeared from the market in their entirety. Oh. Was there something I didn't know, maybe? Or could it be that all of AlterWorld clans' strategists had suddenly realized that the times had changed? That now the time between the opening of a portal and the breaching a castle gate was measured in minutes and not hours or days like before? This fact could have become a serious psychological factor, forcing some people to loosen their purse strings which in turn could have caused demand to soar, creating these man-made shortages.
Oh well. An intelligent person could use any such price fluctuation for fun and profit. I checked out my bank account. Three million give or take. 'xcuse me? I thought I had about a million and a half? I went through the logs, finally discovering that this was my Portal to Inferno auction closing. I had missed the money transfer message in the heat of battle which was somehow understandable. One million three hundred thousand! Wow. The auto broker had worked as promised, accepting the money and withholding its fee, then sending the lot on to the highest bidder. The only thing it couldn't do was answer my questions—of which I had many.
Strangely enough, the highest bidders were the Koreans. They must have been monitoring the biggest clusters' auctions, buying up the nicest goodies or simply profiteering from the difference in prices. Apparently, I wasn't the smartest guy on the block I'd very nearly believed myself to be.
The auto broker flashed with a handful of messages. I couldn't contain my curiosity so I skimmed the subject lines, allowing my eye to pause on the more interesting ones. The thorough Koreans demanded more information about the scroll: instructions on its use, the scroll's lifespan, the channel's traffic capacity, its hidden properties and the actual place where the Portal was supposed to open. What if it led to the bottom of a lava lake or into an active volcano? Sorry, dudes, no idea. Just go and see for yourselves, then drop me a line. If my PM box isn't crammed full of your f-words after that, it means the exit point is safe. And the instructions for use were simple enough, a bit like playing a trumpet: nothing difficult there, just blow hard and press the buttons.
I worded my answer in very much the same vein with a few diplomatic embellishments, offering the Koreans a 10% discount on any further scrolls in exchange f
or their raid's analytic release including the location's maps, the mobs' profiles and any tactical conclusions. Let them sleep on it. Thirteen thousand dollars was nothing to sniff at. Enough to buy an almost new Lada Lyudmila with all options or even a brand-new no-frills Lada Alina.
Actually, to get some first-hand inside information all I needed to do was have an eye-to-eye with Spark. I could even take her with me as a local guide. That would be the gag to end all gags! Even the Admins couldn't expect anything like that: a top NPC giving away all the unique monsters' lairs, all the clever stashes and the mobs' weak points to a raid leader! Almost too good to contemplate. I could actually take the whole pack to visit their homes: they must have plenty of sworn enemies of their own left there, but no one they couldn't easily whip their ass with our help!
I made a mental note to put together a raid to Inferno whenever I had a week to spare. You never know, I might just find a magic sword there capable of slicing through the noose I felt tightening around our necks. But just to lay our claim to those territories would already be a good thing. Couldn't everyone just leave me alone? I had enough plans on the back burner to sink the Titanic, too many for my inner pig to take down!
Among the miscellaneous junk of already-irrelevant mail I came across three letters from less fortunate bidders who hadn't survived the competition with the fat Korean wallet. A couple of independent top clans and one alliance of rather average players were inquiring about any future chance of me auctioning another amazing item such as that. Oh. I glanced at the inventory and counted the unique scrolls. Seven in total. I'd made a habit of crafting two scrolls first thing every morning: a Portal to Inferno and a shield removal one. As for the latter, I just couldn't make them fast enough: I only had one left plus the skill itself which I'd already used for that day.