Level Up- The Knockout

by Dan Sugralinov

  The window that appeared featured a topless Hagen in 3D wearing trunks. It was a ridiculous sight. He was thin, all ribs, but the expression on his face was one of pure malice. There was a text bar underneath Hagen. The active tab had two columns. The first one had the following written in it:

  Mike “Crybaby” Hagen

  Age: 29

  Level: 1

  HP: 4000 pt.

  Battles/victories: 0/0

  Weight: 123 lbs

  Height: 5’2”

  Mike read through the text, studying every line. As he focused, he saw pop-ups with prompts explaining the meaning of each of them. There was also some extra info for the first line — his ethnicity, nationality, as well as place of birth and current residence.

  The second prompt explained the process of leveling up. Experience grew in combat, no matter what kind — a street fight or a training match would both count for something. The only condition was that the opponent could not be a minor. One had to have as many victories as one had on the current level to get to the next one. Defeats did not give any XP points, but nor did they take any away. Victory over a stronger opponent made the progress faster, but there were no details on just how much faster.

  The second line appeared to reflect physical stats.

  Main stats:

  Strength: 1

  Agility: 2

  Stamina: 4

  Hagen browsed the entire list, focusing his attention at each item as they came along.

  The Strength stat equals 10% of the overall average for human strength.

  It affects the damage one deals.

  The Agility stat equals 10% of the overall average for human agility.

  It affects the precision of your attacks and your chances to evade those of your opponent.

  The Stamina stat equals 10% of the overall average for human stamina.

  It affects health and its regeneration, as well as the fatigue rate during physical activity.

  All of the above made it clear that Hagen was very weak — ten times weaker than any average human being, five times less agile, and had two and half times less agility. But he’d known this ever since he’d been a snotty kid. Tell me something I don’t know, he thought.

  The most important thing was that in order to get to Level 3, all he needed was a single victory over any opponent. Every level-up gave Hagen an ability point as well as a stat point which could be used to up his Strength, Agility, or Stamina.

  Thus, ability levels could be leveled up in other ways but training, and upping Strength did not necessarily require a gym.

  Once he managed to process that, he switched to the second tab.

  It turned out to be inactive, with a silhouette of an attacking Hagen on it.

  Mike tapped it without thinking and saw a series of icons with different skills depicted on them. They were: Punch, Uppercut, Low Kick, Medium Kick, High Kick, Clinching, and Grappling. All the icons were gray with a lock displayed above them. The only one with color was Punch. It had the number 1 displayed in the bottom right corner over a green icon.

  Hagen focused on it. A prompt bubble popped up over it.

  Punch: Level 1

  Damage: 100

  You have to use the skill more often to level it up

  Below it was a progress bar at 2%.

  Everything had too much detail to be a hallucination caused by an unquiet mind. The periphery of Hagen’s consciousness registered the fact that he would have to see a doctor on Monday for a check. It wouldn’t hurt, at any rate.

  Hagen had a sudden brainwave and assumed what he considered to be a fighter’s stance; then he started throwing punches at the air. His right hand, then his left, then the right, and then the left one again. He tried to imitate shadowboxing, made about a hundred punches, stumbled over a gamepad that lay under his feet, and got sweaty and exhausted as a result. However, it was worth it: the progress bar had reached the 3% mark.

  Hagen kept punching the air until late at night, only making breaks for snacks and visits to the bathroom. His low Stamina stat revealed itself in full — he would get tired easily. In the left corner of his vision, underneath the icon with his face showing his current level (which was 1), he also saw the HP and Vigor stats.

  Vigor was the very thing he kept running out of. He grew so tired he was barely able to raise his fist. HP points were perfectly real, too — Michael found that out for himself as he punched the wall. His hand felt acute pain. The system message below told him he’d taken 100 damage points, and his HP bar had shrunk.

  Hagen leveled his Punch skill up to 2 by midnight. Flame erupted from his fists. It may have been virtual, but it looked terrifyingly real. It made his hands warm, but it didn’t burn, so Mike didn’t even get any time to panic. He was sweating all over and looking at his hands with sheer delight. The flames were gradually dying down.

  Then he saw a system message appear right before his eyes.

  Congratulations! You’ve received a new skill level!

  Skill name: Punch

  Hagen opened the stat window to make sure the skill level had in fact grown.

  Punch: Level 2

  Damage: 200

  You have to use the skill more often to level it up

  Thus, the level-up allowed him to deal more damage.

  That was incredible!

  Mike was as excited as any gamer who’d ever leveled up their character in a video game. The rays of the rising sun were already peeking through the gap between his curtains, and there he stood, punching air obdurately, pissed off by the fact that he’d have to throw a hundred punches more to level up again. Two hundred punches amounted to one percent of his skill growth. The first level had taken just a hundred. The third one would take three times as much.

  However, those weren’t the only features of the System, which was the term Hagen had invented to describe the new guest in his mind. He’d woken up famished in the middle of the night. There were no nutritious items in his fridge, so he’d had to order a takeaway from a pizza joint open 24/7. His starved body was in urgent need of calories, after all. So Mike ordered two Mexicanas at once, and went at them like a cat finding a pot of cream as soon he’d shut the door after the delivery man.

  Once he’d finished his meal (he’d polished off everything there was, including the bits of topping stuck to the bottom of the box, up to the very last slice of olive), the System gave him another notification,

  Calories consumed: 2,536. Proteins: 7.4 oz. Fats: 6 oz. Carbohydrates: 12.6 oz.

  The Hunger debuff that had been hovering somewhere on the upper right of his vision had now disappeared. However, he got a new one: Sleep Deprivation. That lowered his Vigor by 25%.

  By the morning, the Sleep Deprivation debuff reached Level 2, lowering his Vigor by 50%. Mike started to get tired faster, and had to take more breaks to restore himself. By sunrise, when the Punch progress bar reached 67%, Sleep Deprivation suddenly reached Level 4, reducing Vigor by 99% and giving Hagen another debuff by the name of Fatigue. This debuff did not lower any stats. However, it stopped the regeneration of Vigor completely. Thus, he had to go to sleep eventually.

  Hagen wasn’t disappointed too much, at any rate. His whole body hurt, his arms felt numb, and his eyes felt full of sand. He fell asleep the instant his head touched the pillow.

  Chapter 2. Good Afternoon, Mr. Goretsky!

  “The world is full of suffering, then you die.”

  GTA Vice City Stories

  ON MONDAY Hagen went to the clinic to tell the doctor about his inexplicable hallucinations. The doctor hummed and hawed in a bewildered way for a while, and then told him to get an MRI. It didn’t find any pathological symptoms related to Hagen’s brain. Therefore, the doctor’s diagnosis was “stress from overwork.” He prescribed him a course of mild sedatives and recommended him to take a break from work.

  His employers didn’t mind — it was the first vacation Mike had taken in three years, so he suddenly became free for three weeks
. As Hagen was leaving the shop, he saw Mr. Goretsky looking for his notebook and not finding it. “I really wouldn’t advise you to visit any illegal sites within the next three weeks,” he thought with pure Schadenfreude.

  A system message popped up in the air right above Goretsky.

  Greg “Moose” Goretsky

  Age: 38

  Level: 4

  HP: 22000

  Battles/victories: 9/6

  Weight: 251 lbs

  Height: 6’ 3”

  Hell’s bells! was the first thought to cross Mike’s mind. Five times my HP!

  Goretsky’s Stamina equaled 16. However, Hagen didn’t manage to check out any other stats. He tried to open the window with the big man’s profile, but the system kept sending him the same incomprehensible message:

  The current level of your Insight skill is insufficient to access the information you’ve requested!

  He had never come across this skill before but he decided to definitely sort it out later on.

  Mike could already see he didn’t stand a chance against the man. Even given his double damage, he’d have to deal an opponent like this around eighty punches minimum, which was simply a non-option.

  “So there you are, shithead!”

  Hagen was so lost in his thoughts he missed the fact that Mr. Goretsky had finally found him. He loomed over Mike, who had hunched his back by sheer force of habit, grinning at him lopsidedly. “Get your finger out and give my laptop back, you dumbass!”

  Hagen tried to make his face look as friendly as possible.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Goretsky!”

  “If you try my patience for another three minutes, it won’t be as good for you! Get my laptop back at once! This time we’ll examine it carefully to see just how well you fixed it!”

  “I’m on vacation, Mr. Goretsky. Please address one of my colleagues with this issue.”

  Hagen kept thinking about how much he’d have to level up his Punch skill to knock out a giant like the Moose with a single blow. Math had always been a strong suit of Mike’s, so he instantly made the calculation: he’d have to level up to 160, which would take him some ten years of daily twelve-hour practice. However, he was basing his calculations on his current level of Strength, which could be leveled up as well...

  “Hey, you little geek! Did your brain freeze? Do I have to punch your lights out to reboot you, slowpoke?”

  Hagen came back to his senses only to see Goretsky’s face a few inches from his own. He was getting a full load of spittle on his nose alongside the barrage of expletives.

  Hagen wiped his face automatically. Other sales personnel and a few customers came out as they heard the shouting, but no one made any effort to intervene even though they observed the tableau with some concern. Someone called the manager.

  Mike gathered up what remained of his self-esteem and said, his voice quavering with hurt, “I’m sorry, Mr. Goretsky, but you should stop giving me all that verbal abuse. I am technically not a DigiMart employee at the moment, since I am on vacation. Please try another colleague of mine.”

  “Are you that dumb? I don’t give a shit!” Goretsky spat out. “You work at the shop, I gave you my laptop. So you’re the one who’s supposed to fix it, and you’re the one responsible!”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Goretsky,” said Lexie, the senior sales executive. “Allow me to serve you.” She took the Moose by the arm. “Just give me your receipt, and I’ll fetch the appliance in question at once.”

  The Moose looked at Lexie with appreciation and grinned. He was certainly pleased by the replacement.

  “You’re lucky to have such cute girls work at your store, you slug,” were the Moose’s parting words to Hagen.

  Lexa gave Mike a barely noticeable gesture as she turned her head around and led the boorish customer away, allowing him to leave. Mike nodded in response and headed toward the exit, feeling the blood rush to his face and ears.

  “None of this is ever, ever, ever likely to end well,” he kept muttering.

  It was bad luck indeed for the peak of his humiliation to have coincided with the arrival of Lexie — the only co-worker who’d never treated Hagen like a piece of shit. She appreciated him for his ability to find any defect in any computer in a minimum amount of time, and always managed to find a kind word for him, praising him for his work. She was three years younger than him, after all, and already a senior sales executive. Really pretty, too. Such a pity he had no chance with her.

  And still he forgot all about Lexie once he got outside. Hagen now had a goal, digitized and perfectly understandable.

  His greatest desire ever was to learn to fight now — a desire even greater than that he’d felt for Jessie after their first date. Actually, it wasn’t even fighting that he wanted. It would be painful, after all. What he’d ever really wanted was to knock out any opponent with a single punch without letting the fight go on for too long. Just like that Irish Traveler Mickey did in Guy Ritchie’s movie. His endurance wasn’t that great, after all. Hagen imagined Goretsky punching him on the nose and shuddered.

  After the night Mike spent leveling up his Punch skill, he only woke up in the late afternoon. He was completely exhausted, for every muscle in his untrained body ached. His mood, however, was unexpectedly good. He tried to level up the skill, but his body reacted with acute pain. Mike didn’t know what to do, so he kept on studying the interface.

  His eyes rolled maniacally when he noticed another couple of icons he’d not seen before. He stared at them and “dragged and dropped” them onto the panel. One of them had the legend saying “Program Features.” When Hagen opened it, he saw the following.

  Augmented Reality!7.2 Home Edition

  Copyright © First Martian Company, Ltd. 2101-2118

  All rights reserved

  Registered owner: Michael Björnstad Hagen.

  S/N S2L-7702B-1412010

  One-year single user license

  Account type: Premium

  Activation date: 04/24/2018, 09:00

  Expiration date: 04/24/2019, 08:59

  A Google search revealed nothing about either the First Martian Company or the Augmented Reality! Platform. However, it didn’t take Hagen long to figure things out. He’d read too many comics to be surprised by something like this. It was pretty obvious: he’d somehow acquired an augmented reality interface from the future. Just how it had happened didn’t matter at the moment. Mike could easily imagine every Earthling having an interface of this sort in the twenty-second century. Judging by the name of the company that had developed it, every Martian would have them, too.

  The main thing he realized was as follows: time, too, was at a premium. He’d have to make full use of each and every day to make his dream come true.

  He spent about an hour exploring the Settings tab to configure the interface just the way he liked it. There were lots of cool little features, including a built-in alarm clock that would wake you gently during your lightest sleep stage when waking up would be the least stressful, as well as making all sorts of data visible in one’s field of view. The latter included quite a few useful things — the time, one’s heartbeat rate, the temperature outside, calories used up since awakening, and lots more that one could theoretically look up on one’s smartphone, but the augmented reality interface made it so much easier.

  Mike also brought the progress bars of the main stats into his field of vision — namely, Strength, Agility, and Stamina. He spent about half an hour shadowboxing, trying to disregard the pain, and noticed that they had grown as well. Not at the same rate as the Punch skill, but it was something nevertheless.

  He had the most success with Stamina. Hagen noticed that it would build up the most rapidly when he trained when his staying power was at his lowest — when he’d have to gasp for breath, trying to overcome the pain in his chest and the feeling of heaviness in his shoulders.

  There were two more main icons — Check for Updates and Tech Support, but whenever he’d tap on either,
they’d give the following error message:

  Impossible to establish connection with the updates server.

  It appears to be unavailable.

  Please check your Universal Infospace connection settings.

  Universal infospace? For real? A future internet?

  Once Hagen had finished exploring the interface, he got back to his training. He put on a music channel on the TV and went on with kicking seven shades of shit out of his invisible opponent, imagining it to be Goretsky. He kept at it until late night when he reached a state of complete exhaustion. He took a shower and slept through the day; he probably wouldn’t wake even if someone set his bed on fire.

  This was his Sunday. He visited the clinic on Monday, then kept on shadowboxing at home, trying to progress as fast as possible. Tuesday was spent in the exact same manner. Wednesday evening Hagen suddenly had a bright idea and made a discovery.

  He used a pillow from his sofa to form a punch bag of sorts, hanging it on the hook to replace the rather tasteless painting portraying a female gorilla in an evening dress and a hat. The name of the painting was Sunset on the Atlantic Coast, but it was all tacky rectangles in psychedelic colors. Hagen could never see the sunset — just the gorilla.

  It turned out that the skill leveled up much faster if he punched the pillow instead of the air.

  By the end of the same day, Hagen leveled up his Punch skill to Level 8 and became capable of dealing up to 1600 damage points, since his Power finally leveled up as well. That was when he realized that his best bet would be to train at a boxing gym. There was one just downed the street, owned by an old Mexican.