Level Up- The Knockout

by Dan Sugralinov

  Peter shook his head.

  “I don’t care about money much. I want to see Mike free. And at any rate, isn’t there any chance of doing without black... without settlements? Just get Mikey out?”

  Riggs looked surprised. “Why would you refuse the chance to make a few bucks doing a good thing? Also, when you ask for money people tend to take you seriously. Alexa Hepworth is just the kind of person to imagine that we’ll go to enormous lengths for monetary gain.”

  “OK, you’ve made your case. How will it help Mikey?”

  “Without Goretsky’s suit he shouldn’t be in for more than five months. Two if he’s on his best behavior.”

  “Hey, there’s more,” Peter added excitedly. “He can serve the rest of his sentence in a low security prison. They can transfer him to the local slammer, right?”

  “Exactly. And I have lots of connections there. It would be like a holiday for him.”

  “How do I fit into the plan?”

  “Talk to that asshole of an attorney who’d defended Mike Hagen.”

  “What is he supposed to tell me?”

  “The truth.”

  “How do I make him do that?”

  Riggs finished his beer, set his mug down with a clinking sound, and chuckled. “You’ve been in the army. You, of all people, should know that sometimes there’s only one way to find out the truth.”

  Peter Hagen clenched his fist and gave Riggs a quizzical look.

  “Hell yeah,” the ex-cop nodded. “That’s the very way. It’s just that I can’t get involved in that shit myself.”

  “Why do you think I can?”

  “You have to. He’s your nephew.”

  Peter didn’t reply. Riggs must have thought his silence was a sign of doubt because he tried to up the ante.

  “You’ve gotten through worse shit on behalf of our country. Surely you can deal with one miserable worm of an attorney the hard way.”

  “That’s not what bothers me. It’s just that it will slow me down. I’d been planning to pay Mike a visit.”

  “That’s great. This way you can pay him a visit and give him some good news.”

  * * *

  HAGEN WAS LYING on his bunk staring at the ceiling. Roman was doing the same. The cellmates were both lost in thought.

  Back in the corridor, Mike had almost passed out and prepared to be done in when the gangsters suddenly stopped kicking him. He heard a voice heralding his continued survival.

  “Hey, let him go! Are you nuts, comrades? Don’t you know Fino and Ford will cut your balls off if they find out you’d fucked him up?”

  “We don’t give a shit what they might say!”

  “Oh yeah? Would you say the same to me in person, hijo de puta?”

  It was Fino himself.

  As Fino was showing off his skill in Spanish expletives, Roman helped Hagen up and made him lean against the wall. Mike saw a few Pirus Brothers members standing in front of the gangsters from the Sureños Familia. They wore their uniform tops tied around their waist, too, but made a bow on the side to distinguish themselves from their rivals.

  Ford was there too, with a bone to pick.

  “Fino, your jackals nearly took out someone we need. Have you forgotten what these IT guys are working on?”

  “You’re a jackal yourself,” Fino retorted.

  But he didn’t have anything to counter it with. Ford had been right.

  Fino approached Hagen and took him by the chin. “You’re alive, eh? Sorry, my boys were in the wrong. This won’t happen again.”

  Hagen didn’t remember whether he’d nodded to accept the apology or just dropped his head onto his chest. Roman took Hagen to his cell, wiping off the blood and making Mike’s clothes look less disheveled lest they attract the guards’ attention.

  Fino approached Ricardo who could barely move, and prodded him with his foot. “Yeah. There’s no reason for you to go to the wooden ring now. Blueeyes has already kicked the shit out of you big time.”

  Hagen’s mind cleared once they got to the cell. Immediately Roman started to make fun of him.

  “Comrade, you’ve only been here a few days and you’ve beaten up half the local gangsters. Have you always been this badass or do you have a secret? Could it have something to do with all those “stats” and talk of “stopping time” in your sleep, eh? Might you be a superhero?”

  “You know I get pummeled a lot too. Does that ever happen to superheroes? If it wasn’t for you, they’d have killed me.”

  “That’s true, comrade,” Roman agreed. “Don’t forget to stay grateful to me all your life.”

  “Spa-see-bow[2],” Hagen decided to show off his linguistic prowess.

  “But I’d also be grateful to you if you managed to stay alive until we install the server. Once we’re done, you can do whatever you want, including smashing your head against a wall. On the other hand... If you get to the finals of the wooden ring tournament, that’s exactly what will happen to you.”

  “Come again?” Hagen rose on his bunk for a moment. “What do you mean?”

  “Some inmate nicknamed Constrictor has been the wooden ring champion for three years in a row. I haven’t seen him myself. They keep him in the other block with the others doing life without parole for serious crimes. I don’t know where Blinky Palermo found this comrade. There are rumors he’d specifically asked for him to be transferred here from another prison in exchange for some favors.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Constrictor hates everybody with a prospect of getting out of jail once they serve their time, so he delights in crippling them in the ring just to make sure they don’t walk free. It’s good for Blinky, too—he keeps his word, in a way. But no one’s managed to defeat the Constrictor in the last three years.”

  Hagen frowned. “But Palermo will keep his word if I win, won’t he?”

  “Of course he will. But I’m telling you, he’d found himself an invincible fighter to stop letting winners walk free. And Constrictor is the kind of winner who’ll never be set free. Not in the next three hundred years, anyway.”

  Hagen pondered this for a while. He’d have to find out more about this Constrictor. What was his fighting style? What would he need to level up for a sure win?

  “Constrictor or no constrictor, but I’ll leave here a winner,” Hagen said gruffly.

  “Sure. Good luck with that, comrade. Just make sure you assemble me the server first.”

  This Russian guy was anything but simple. First he’d been denying any knowledge of the wooden ring, only to come gushing with information later on. Should he ask him a few questions? Hagen realized, though, that Roman wouldn’t tell him anything he didn’t want to.

  As Hagen waited for the lights to go out, he ended up grabbing one of the brochures from the shelf over the toilet bowl. There was something about helping the imprisoned on the cover. The legend read,

  Your body might be in prison, but your spirit is free.

  Hagen started reading it and didn’t even notice how he’d gotten into the text.

  He would stop for a few times to check the cover. If he hadn’t known St. Ian for a two-faced liar using faith as a means of lining his pockets, he’d have gotten the impression they were the words of a wise man.

  Hagen started to get restless, and then gave the brochure to Roman, telling him a few things about Ian’s biography.

  “How is this even possible? He’s an absolute bastard, but if you read his sermons, you believe what he says. His ideas make a lot of sense.”

  Roman browsed through the first sermon, then leafed through the rest of the brochure, and tossed it back to Hagen.

  “Of course they make a lot of sense. It’s a compilation with zero original ideas. He borrowed a few sayings of famous philosophers and filled in the rest with quotes from books on personal development. He even stole a few metaphors from some presidents’ speeches. It’s good enough for his flock to swallow, anyway.”

  “Are you sure?”
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  “Comrade, don’t waste your time on dodgy secondhand surrogates. It would be much better for you to study the sources at the prison library. Reading might make you less interested in smashing other people’s faces.”

  Having given this advice, Roman turned away, signaling that the conversation was over.

  However, Hagen had something other than library books to read.

  Chapter 24. The Loot

  Do I get my $200 back now, or after I’ve killed you?

  Red Dead Redemption

  THE DAYS WENT BY in tedious monotony.

  Once Hagen’s initial stress had worn off, he got used to prison life. Things weren’t so scary, after all—the inmates would eat, sleep, work, walk or train in the yard, read, play chess or cards, as well as watch TV.

  Television was a pretty monotonous means of entertainment, too. There were two TVs on either wall of the recreation room. One was occupied by the blacks, and the other, by the Latinos. Latinos watched all kinds of South American series in Spanish and Portuguese. The blacks had their TV tuned in to a music channel playing nothing but hip-hop.

  The rival gangs of TV watchers would occasionally try to shut each other down, cranking the volume all the way up. However, this would usually result in the arrival of the guards and everybody getting a taste of truncheon, so confrontations like that didn’t happen often.

  Hagen couldn’t help noting how much a prison guard’s job resembled that of a bouncer. It didn’t matter who’d been right or wrong. What did matter was restoring order. There was a difference, though—each one of Blinky Palermo’s patrons would be overjoyed if the prison bosses threw the guard out.

  Mike didn’t watch much TV, anyway. He’d gotten himself a library card and would read whenever he wasn’t working or training. He decided to start with the United States Military Academy list. Few of the books mentioned there were available at the prison library, but the librarian, a former journalist serving time for trying to blackmail some politician, appreciated Hagen’s interest and managed to get hold of them.

  The magnificent world of military knowledge opened itself to him. On the one hand, the purpose of the exercise was death and suffering. On the other side, one couldn’t help admiring the precision of the science behind one army’s victory over another.

  Many tactical maneuvers could also be used in the wooden ring—just like warfare, it had no rules. Eventually, Hagen had to learn to fight dirty. He would kick his opponents in the groin and grab them by the face—in other words, do everything that would get him disqualified in professional sport. Here though, corresponding moves and skills would even become unlocked as a result. His only excuse was that he’d never used them as often as the rest of the fighters; nor did he use any ability points on any of those less-than-gentlemanly moves.

  Another thing Hagen took pride in was having taught everyone to begin a fight with a greeting. Now his every opponent would respectfully bump his gloved fists with his. At least he managed to bring some element of honest fighting into this world of pell-mell brawling.

  Finally, the tournament with freedom as the first prize began.

  Fights between inmates took place two or three times a week. It might not have seemed like much, but Hagen would need to withstand several fights in the course of a single session. In the past, he’d never needed a reminder from the system to recall each and every fight he’d ever been in, but by now he simply had had too many under his belt.

  More fights meant more XP points. Besides, the system must have picked up the insane rhythm of the wooden ring, adding a quest to every fight, which would give him even more points.

  Hagen used to count every point meticulously. These days he’d allocate them to his characteristics almost without thinking: he’d have enough for everything, with plenty left. His point distribution didn’t rely on any strategy: his sheer ability to consume enough calories to level up was all that mattered.

  Hagen would receive his daily wages for toiling at the workshop and instantly spend all his money on food. Once he’d gotten access to the prison shop, he’d found out they even carried sport nutrition. After that, he’d splurge all his money on protein shakes and the like.

  It would still be insufficient for steady nourishment, though. When it wasn’t hunger, the confined conditions of the cell would get in the way.

  Roman had been watching Hagen go to bed distributing his points for a while now, and in quite a suspicious manner, too.

  “Comrade... It sometimes feels that when you go to sleep like that, you wake up bigger in the morning. Or maybe taller. Damn, both, actually! And then, your face. It keeps changing in some inexplicable way. I bet if someone compared you to one of your photographs before prison...”

  Hagen could but shrug. “Prison changes people.”

  Indeed, he’d done a lot of fighting. The bouts were beginning to get tedious. Not all of them, of course, but most. Fighting someone was no longer anything out of the ordinary.

  It was much better this way—he’d get more of an opportunity to work on his style and level up the skills that he hadn’t paid much attention to. When facing a weaker enemy, he could practice his new skills on human punch bags.

  Hagen also learned to lose to opponents way stronger than him and taking minimum damage, although it wasn’t recommended to lose in the wooden ring—one might never see another fight, after all. So he strove to win at any effort or cost.

  Blinky “Cloudy Eye” Palermo felt particularly entertained by looking at someone finding enough in him to tear the victory from the hands of his opponent, going at it tooth and nail. Hagen’s interface made him the very kind of fighter who would always surprise the audience by knocking out the other man when everything seemed lost.

  The opponents were matched against each other randomly—no one associated with the wooden ring bothered about weighing fighters or separating them into categories. The fighters’ experience wasn’t taken into consideration, either. Sometimes Hagen’s opposite number would be so weak and awkward he’d prolong the fight, almost mockingly, to level up his own skills.

  However, sometimes he’d encounter trained athletes a couple of levels higher than him. The “couple” could stretch to ten in some cases. Obviously enough, the fight would then become an ordeal where one had to focus on survival rather than victory.

  Most often, the fighters were equal to Hagen: some a little stronger, others a little weaker.

  He still couldn’t make heads or tails of the selection principle. General, who’d been responsible for the List, didn’t say much about the system behind the process. Hagen suspected there never was any in the first place. General would just write down stuff randomly. Inmates would fight in just the way Blinky “Cloudy Eye” Palermo wanted them to.

  However, there was a screening of some sort. Gradually, a few groups of the strongest and most effective fighters began to form. Hagen was in one of them. Moreover, he was the obvious leader. This was the first group in his life where he’d found himself in the forefront, and not hiding behind the back of someone more successful.

  These groups would compete for their prize of freedom. Hagen encountered no third-raters or weaklings who’d nearly piss themselves at the sight of him anymore. Fights were now held between opponents of roughly equal levels.

  The further into the tournament, the clearer and the stricter the rules for the standings would get. Hagen soon saw his name on the list of those who were about to compete for the main prize—namely, freedom. But his ultimate nemesis known as the Constrictor didn’t stand a chance of ever being set free.

  Hagen was also irritated by the fact that Palermo would hold bouts with Constrictor’s participation whenever Hagen wasn’t around. That must have been deliberate. The warden was cunning enough to realize that Hagen might glean a lot about his potential opponent’s fighting style watching him fight.

  Hagen tried to ask other fighters about the mystery man, but they couldn’t tell him anything of substance, either. They w
ould just groan and grunt vaguely.

  “So... like... he just ripped me apart in the ring, man.”

  “Bro, I nearly died.”

  Or,

  “This Constrictor is a beast. A freaking monster!”

  “If I’d only known that steamroller devil would be there, I’d have kept well away from the wooden ring.”

  The only thing Mike managed to find out is that the nickname Constrictor came from the man’s penchant for strangleholds. So at least he had an inkling of what to expect from a fight with someone who’d amount to a level boss guarding the exit from the prison dungeon.

  * * *

  HOWEVER, HAGEN’S days weren’t all about fighting and cabinet hardware. Prison life with its strict discipline and measured routine left a mark on Mike Björnstad Hagen. He became more collected. A lot more so than he’d ever been outside.

  The rhythm of his routine itself helped him distribute his time more productively and get his priorities straight. Prior to prison, Hagen would often lose focus and start acting chaotically, not knowing for sure whether he’d need to learn the kick or the head butt. Would he have to find a job or perform some other task—out of about a dozen?

  He didn’t have any such choice in prison—inmates could spend their “free time” after 5 PM any way they pleased.

  Hagen focused on training and self-education.

  Reading didn’t just open the world of military science to him—within it were the keys to the world itself. Mike was now embarrassed by having admired a sermon of St. Ian’s he’d browsed through by chance once. He realized the old fraud hadn’t just been conning his followers but also stealing the ideas of many distinguished thinkers who’d never been so much as aware of his existence.

  No matter how much Hagen would avoid politics, reading up on military science made him face it directly. Apart from that, he’d realized that every war was just the final round of a political bout. After the war, the defeated party would often nullify all of its earlier achievements while the winners would get all kinds of bonuses and level up their armies.