by Arthur Stone
These were just like them. He couldn't see their stats, either—only their names. What could that mean? Most likely, that their levels were above 150. That was the very level where Ros was guaranteed to detect a number of the most important stats. There was a chance of finding out something even about level 200 characters, but those cases were exceptional.
NPCs weren't people, but the game mechanics gave them virtually the same rights. Those creatures could feel joy or fury; they could also bear a grudge. One shouldn't prod them into any negative emotions if one didn't want to get on their bad side.
It would be rather stupid to antagonize twelve high-level NPCs, so Ros smiled and said in as friendly a tone as he could,
"I salute you, oh warriors of the Great Emperor of the West."
One of the armored knights raised his hand in turn. His voice sounded muffled, coming from underneath his helmet,
"Greetings to you, too, stranger."
The knight lowered his hand. There was no more conversation; nobody so much as made a move.
Those NPCs looked weird. On the other hand…
He recollected a hot topic in the forum section dealing with the latest events in Rallia. There was a discussion of single NPCs as well as groups of them one could encounter in the invasion area. Some of them actively waged war against the wild hordes; however, there were others who looked rather slow as compared to the former kind. Some players reported cases of armored knights standing for hours in blazing heat, without any chance of ever encountering the enemy. Or a pack of mob would pass in a few feet without any reaction from the part of the NPCs.
There were many opinions expressed in this respect, but Ros liked the version that the game mechanics did not expect the kind of events that took place in the province. There was an improbable coincidence concerning the actions of the players who had caused an error. In particular, it affected some of the characters' ability to think logically. Incidents like this were reported to have happened before, but it was hard to bring Second World out of balance—things would usually return back to normal quickly enough.
Ros must have run into a party of those very "slowpokes" discussed at the forum with such fervor.
There was no time to get surprised. He had to get away—he was still being followed, after all. The armored knights would probably turn out quite useless. There was a chance they would altogether fail to notice the mobs they were supposed to fight. So he shouldn't get his hopes up if he wanted to find some protection.
He'd still have to rely on his feet, weary as they were, to save him.
Ros no longer paid any attention to the strange NPCs. He descended the sheer slope in a jiffy and was about to make a detour around the warriors, when one of them suddenly came to his senses and rode his horse towards Ros, blocking his path. Then he asked,
"Would you tell me if you have seen any of those accursed creatures from the Locked Lands? We've been looking for a chance to fight them in an honest battle for days, and would be most grateful if you could provide any useful information."
"Captain Fierre Darbis is offering you a quest: Valuable Information. Quest type: general, easy. Quest duration: 5 minutes. Reward: Friendly attitude from the part of Captain Fierre Darbis. A chance of getting an extra quest from Captain Fierre Darbis. Accept the quest? Yes/No."
At that very moment the thing that worried Ros the most was the fact that the enemy archer kept getting ever closer, and the arrows shot by the mob were enormous. However, getting into an argument with a high-level NPC (and one that seemed strangely slow, to boot) could take a long time. It would be easier to comply in hopes they would go away sooner.
He chose "Yes" without thinking twice about it, and blurted out everything he had known at once,
"There are eleven wild horde warriors behind me. They are followed by a few more—smaller ones that had fallen behind. Will that information be useful to you?"
The captain fell into a stupor for around ten seconds, as if paralyzed. Then he suddenly shook himself awake and bellowed boisterously,
"It surely will! Our swords will be crimson with the blood of our enemies! May the Great Emperor be praised!"
Other warriors shouted something of a vaguely encouraging nature and started moving, looking nothing like the statues they had resembled earlier. If it hadn't been for those special icons over their heads, they could pass for actual players—they behaved with absolute realism.
"Stranger, we are the Imperial Guard, and we never forget those who help us. Should you run into any trouble, feel free to call upon us anytime, and we'll try to help with whatever it is. To arms!"
Hot damn! So it was the Imperial Guard, after all! Those were elite NPCs with levels that even Asian players would find hard to reach at this point. Most leveled around 250, which wasn't all that much, but there were others aplenty, too. Some claimed you could encounter level 500 characters among them, and others claim there are NPCs of an even higher level, but the only certain thing is that no one has managed to discover the stats of the most impressive specimens of these destruction machines. Such fighters were the very reason why different nations that existed in the game could more or least successfully deal with various menaces and restrain the ceaselessly aggressive players.
Ros, who was planning to make tracks only recently, changed his mind at once. The wild hordes were powerful due to their sheer numbers as opposed to the mobs' individual abilities as fighters. They would include a few fighter bosses occasionally. But those pursuing Ros were standard cannon fodder.
Therefore, the guardsmen were certain to make short work of the mobs.
High-level monsters could be good news in this context. Among other things, they could drop valuable loot.
NPCs are just the same as players in terms of looting the bodies of their slain enemies. In other words, they can take anything they please. There were even NPC guilds specializing in killing monsters and selling all the stuff they would drop.
However, NPCs were not the same as players. Some stuffed their bags with everything they could lay their hands on, without bothering to cherry-pick; others only picked up a specific class of items (such as weapons), while others still believed themselves to be above something as base as searching the corpses of the accursed vermin. The guards belonged to the latter category. Each of them had enough pride for ten, and they wouldn't even dream of looting corpses. The forum mentioned cases when these elite warriors took part in fighting particularly dangerous bosses capable of dropping expensive items. But the armored knights would stay true to themselves even in face of such temptations.
As for Ros, he never sneered at picking up anything he could to further his cause. Money would always be useful. He'll need so much it might take him dozens of years before he manages to gather enough.
He also wanted to make sure the pursuit would be defeated.
The guards had really good horses. They shot out of the arroyo like stones from a catapult. Ros barely managed to make it up the slope when he heard the sounds of metal hitting metal, followed by screams of pain and rage.
He never got to see the actual battle. As he got away, he saw the shiny figures of the knights riding away, leaving eleven motionless bodies behind them. They must have remembered what he'd said about the mobs trailing behind, so those giants didn't have long to live, either.
Once Ros started searching the body, he was disappointed to find out that the Guard were incredibly powerful. High-level mobs were ripped apart like chewing toys in the jaws of Spike, your psycho neighbor's pit-bull. Given the level difference, the loot suffered as well—he didn't get anything of value. Nothing but bits and pieces of items, most of which were completely useless. After all, no one would be interested in an item with a description running along the following lines, "Broken Lizard-Chewer Talon. The item received permanent damage in a battle with a strong opponent." Something like that was as useless on its own as it was for crafting objects. The only way in which such junk might be useful was an alchemic
al component, powdered.
His wish to follow the guards back and search the remaining mobs that they would have killed by then disappeared instantly. Ros might have gotten greedy at times, but never so much that he would walk unsafe terrain in search of useless garbage.
He had important business to attend to, after all. And someone was expecting him. He turned around and resolutely headed in the same direction—toward the village.
* * *
The Tower was a term that never had to be explained to anyone related to the corporation that had become famous after producing a globally-played computer game, and it had a special meaning to them. That was the name given by the employees and anyone to the main administrative building that stood much taller than any other skyscraper downtown.
It was built as part of a complex of other structures, and had a specific purpose, since the tower was surrounded by the company's data centers, research labs, and even residential buildings for the kind of employees that needed to be at hand on a 24/7 basis, their actual work schedule notwithstanding.
Michael Silber lived in the Tower's penthouse. He had a security system that could withstand a missile attack, and a dedicated bodyguard detail at the security center serving the interests of just a single person living behind walls of steel—someone who had mentioned cheating death his main goal in one of his early interviews.
And it needed to be said that the reaper never got to the Old Man, even though he was a very likely customer. He could have taken a look at him during one of those rare moments when he expressed a desire to move to a room with windows at best. But the bony guy would have no chance even in that scenario—the glass was six-inch-thick, with an integrated nanobot protection system, so Silber felt safe enough.
The Old Man spent most of his time in his inner sanctum. Few were aware of those being something more than just a set of small rooms. It was a real armored fortress with a dedicated security system—a citadel within a citadel. If the walls of the first one failed to contain the menace, his private rooms would all the way down the vertical elevator shaft that used up a substantial portion of the Tower's central part. After a few hundred feet, the capsule's built-in braking system would kick in, and it would land gently onto a transportation device concealed underground, which would instantly take Silber's lair away through another shaft, a horizontal one this time. There was a sizable underground shelter at the other end, with enough resources to keep the guy with the scythe at bay for quite a while.
The designers of the Old Man's citadel had all left this world due to a strange coincidence, but not even the most careful investigation would see anything suspicious about their demise. The same concerned a large number of workers and others who'd had the bad luck of knowing too much.
Some coincidences could get pretty weird.
No one familiar with all the secrets concealed in Silber's lair had lived to tell the tale. Eric Coleman knew just how many ICBMs were ready for launch and how many thermonuclear warheads were carried by state-of-the-art Pittsburgh class submarines. He even knew the color of the socks the POTUS would look up today, and the exact identity of the guy that the FLOTUS would cheat on him with later today.
Coleman knew many things, but he remained ignorant of the number of rooms in the Old Man's armored lair.
He had surely never visited this one. It was as small as other hideaways in the capsule, which was hardly spacious, and it had a particularly elongated shape. Most of the space was taken by the machinery related to the centralized life-support system that kept feeding the Old Man a multitude of special liquids as he sat on his hi-tech chair that must have cost around as much as one of the most advanced fighter jets. A mechanized spider of sorts, with wheels instead of legs.
The rest of the space was occupied by Silber and a virtual reality capsule (initially known to the company's researchers as a Personal Deep Immersion Module. It was obviously nothing like the mass-produced models that only cost a few hundred; a cheap plastic fake was the last thing one would expect to find here. Silber may have been indifferent to how much space he had at his disposal, but he cared deeply about what had filled it. He seemed to have gone as far as using ivory, whereas the latest wildlife protection laws were so strict that even well-heeled citizens wouldn't normally see any of it outside of a museum.
"So, Eric, what do you say? Do you like what you see?"
"This isn't the capsule you normally use. Did you get a new one?"
"It isn't new, as a matter of fact. It is… something slightly different from what you may have expected. This is no mere capsule. It is more of a remote-control device. A personal one. The tests finished today, and every single thing was perfectly functional. Which means it still works. This concerns our previous conversation about Rostovtsev."
"The time we spoke last?"
"Exactly. You may recollect me mentioning the ultimate solution to the Rostovtsev problem."
"I get it."
"Time waits for no man, Eric, as well you should know. This heart… the last one I got… It's damaged. Good for nothing."
"I remember you telling me as much."
"I wish you knew what this felt like… When you're absolutely incapacitated… Well, I shouldn't digress, time is indeed at a premium."
A hologram flashed up in the space between Coleman and the Old Man. The 3D model of the unidentifiable hideous creature hanging in the air was not so much scary as reasonably repulsive. It had too many tentacles, looking grossly whitish and squishy—just like maggots. There was a definite excess of slime, too—it could start dripping anytime. Differently-sized reddish eyes scattered all across the jellyfish-like elongated body didn't make it look any better, either.
"Have you ever heard any scary stories about Object 114-5-0-2-8, Eric?"
Coleman shook his head.
"I don’t think I have, unless it refers to Project 114."
"Nah, this has got nothing to do with the satellite industry. It's an in-game object."
"I spend time in the game just like the rest of us, but I've never heard of this object."
"This name isn't known to anyone, which is why it has a different alias. The players have called it Bug, and it appears to have accepted it. The name is significant, since it normally refers to software errors. Have you never heard any scary stories about a huge yellow smiley face fond of eating players alive, which is impossible to kill whatever you do?"
"Oh, so that's what you're talking about. I had to take care of the mess with the Russians because of that thing back in the day. They used to call it a funny name—Kolobok. As far as I know, it stands for an ancient type of fried bread that hails from Russia."
"Yeah, that's what the Russkies call it."
"I even got the impression that they express a certain kind of sympathy when they talk about this yellow piece of trash."
"Well, the Russkies are weird. But we're not talking about them now. Haven't you ever mused on the fact that a universe as balanced as the Second World should tolerate as egregious an error for so long?"
"Pardon my ignorance, but my profession does not imply in-depth knowledge of game mechanics. I didn't think it was an error."
"You should have given it some thought. Second World can have no indestructible characters, after all. That goes against the main laws of game mechanics."
"I get it. It's a bug, after all. But that wasn't what you wanted to tell me, was it now?"
"Eric, you really need to learn to see the larger scheme of things. Even if you only manage to become vaguely aware of it. The Bug is not an error. There are no errors in the Second World. It's ideal—much better than ours, in fact; otherwise, all this hullabaloo wouldn't have made any sense. One's consciousness is always oriented toward the ideal, and that is precisely what we're betting on. I see that you're a bit confused about the whole thing. Anyway, Object 114-5-0-2-8 was created under my direct supervision; I gave all the orders. And yet I couldn't place it in Second World. Its control system would immediately reco
gnize a critical error and look for a way to correct it. However, I'm as good as any silicon brain, so I can do all the correction I need personally. Take a closer look at this. What do you see?" The Old Man pointed toward the hologram.
Coleman shrugged.
"I have no idea, but it's the most repulsive thing I've seen to date. I assume it's a representative of the Second World fauna. A particularly unpleasant monster—possibly a boss. Another in-game object, and there's an abundance of those."
"You're right. What you see is Object 114-5-0-2-9, but I prefer to call this beauty The Annihilator. Unlike the Bug, it isn't known to the general public, but it doesn't make it less interesting. The Bug is an indestructible object, and its existence goes against the laws of the Second World. So, if you somehow manage to allow the creation of such an object, you need to add the condition that the indestructible can yet be destroyed to the game mechanics before the AI control system gets a chance to react. That was how the Annihilator came into existence."
"You mean this slug can destroy the Bug?"
"Well, according to the official taxonomy, this isn't a slug. It's a terrestrial phosphorus squid. But, yeah, you're right. The Annihilator is the only character that can destroy the Bug. However, it has plenty of other features. The Bug's defenses are manifold; one would need to launch an attack from every direction to overcome it, so the AI control system can occasionally fail to run it through its logic circuits. However, the Annihilator is controlled by a dedicated AI programmed in a specific manner, without any capacity for in-depth analysis, so there are no ambiguities, as much as it's concerned. The monster only has two skills. One allows it to appear anywhere in the world, and the other is used in battle. It burns up all of its mana as it deals damage to a single target. This target is destroyed completely and erased from the game world irretrievably—this is what we call annihilation."