Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4)

by D. Rus

  This was the skill:

  Cast Time: 0

  Mana Expenditure: 0

  By using this skill, you can split your summoned pet into a certain number of controlled creatures (the number corresponding to the Skill's current level). Their levels will equal that of the initial creature divided by the number of new pets. The split creature's maximum level cannot exceed that of the caster.

  It was as clear as mud but you could still work it out. The skill offered two growth scenarios. The first one was by increasing the number of controlled creatures. Now the second one... that was the interesting bit. Every point you invested raised the micro pets two levels. In theory, it was enough to invest 80 points in order to rush the split micro pet 160 levels — as much as the skill allowed. And the funny thing was, I already had the points. You still don’t think it's cheating?

  I kept fiddling with the config generator, gingerly shifting points between columns. This was how the final version looked like:

  12 points into the number of creatures;

  74 points into their level boost.

  This way I could have thirteen level-160 pets. Jesus Christ, who was I now? I gave a mental knock on wood and pressed Enter.

  I couldn't wait to try it! I had about a dozen old stones, plenty to experiment with. I gingerly crawled from under Lizzie who stirred unhappily, then cast a look around. I definitely didn't need thirteen zombies to crowd out the room. I still remembered my indoor attempt to summon Hummungus. How could I ever forget!

  I activated the portal to the Altar and was transported several floors down, accompanied by Lizzie's indignant yelp.

  The empty hall met me with a solemn silence and the flickering light of the eternal torches. The restrained mana flow buzzed dangerously over the Altar.

  Plenty of space here!

  First I had to summon a normal pet. I clenched a nondescript stone and clicked an icon on the quick cast panel. Through the flickering of visual effects I glimpsed the surprised expression of a hell hound that happened to trot past.

  A zombie hippo broke out through the marble floor, compliments of the Oasis where I'd fought my last solo combat backed up by Zena's team.

  The fragments of stone tiles crushed under the monster's foot. I heard Lurch's indignant rambling. Shit.

  "Sorry, dude," I said to him. "It'll be as good as new. Actually, when are you going to upgrade our Graveyard to a Cemetery? I signed the order yesterday! I expect it to be done tomorrow. It's not a good thing, making our warriors wait for their graves in the City of Light of all places. The Fallen One my witness, one of these days they might get into trouble."

  There! Offence is the best defense.

  I turned toward the hell hound warily sniffing the air. "Say cheese!"

  Biting my lip impatiently, I pressed Splitting.

  Dozens of marble tiles cracked, crumbling. Lurch wailed like a banshee. The corridors echoed with the pattering of the scared hound's paws. I forced my way through the enormous cold beasts crowding the temple and jumped onto the Altar's pedestal, taking in my army.

  This was some fine body of men! Or hippos, as the case may be. Thirteen controlled monsters, my very own pocket zombie squad. No, wait. What was that, for crissakes?

  The bulk of them shuffled their feet happily below, squeaking, glaring and pushing each other as they awaited my orders. A few paces away, however, four listless creatures stood apart from the rest, swaying and drooling, staring blindly at the radiant Altar.

  Excuse me? Who were these cripples? I played around with a few basic commands, like Sit! Guard! Meditate! Nine of the hippos were happily running around, obediently dropping belly down onto the floor and seating their fat backsides in the lotus position, supposedly restoring their hits and mana. But the four sick ones still stood there like stage scenery, slobbering the First Temple with their drool.

  A bad premonition clenched at my heart. Nine live ones and the nine stones I'd had left in my pocket — was it a coincidence? I reached into the inventory — empty! Dammit! It looked as if AlterWorld had indeed obeyed the cheat skill creating a bunch of zombies but it didn't bother to find souls for them, taking the path of least resistance. If I was the one who summoned them, apparently it was my job to provide souls for them.

  The low-level stones were fine with me but the skill had also used two of my most treasured level-300 and especially level-340 stones. I'd wasted them on summoning freakin' zombies! And those who hadn't got a soul had turned into brainless rubber dolls. So it wasn't such a freebie, after all. Fourteen Soul Stones for each summoning was a lot: this was what you could farm in one session, solo or in a very tiny group.

  What a waste! My precious top stones! All I had left in my pockets was magic dust from all the low-level stones I'd destroyed last night with these very hands, leaving only a few to experiment with! I absolutely had to get a few dozen Soul Stones. What kind of a super-duper pet controller was I without them?

  Skidding round a dark corridor corner, Spark the Hell Hound dashed into the hall and screeched to a halt. Following her, the corridors echoed with the pattering of many feet as the whole pack hurried to my rescue. Master had been attacked by the gigantic stinky Roundbutts!

  Seeing that everything was under control, Spark came over to me and gave me a reproachful nudge in the belly with her large head.

  "Sorry, babe. False alarm. You don't happen to know where I could find a few mobs levels 150 and beyond within walking distance? I need to try this bunch in action and farm a few stones. Oh really, you can show me? And help me too? Good doggie!"

  The Temple's doors swung open, letting out first the pack of hounds, then myself followed by a herd of glossy hippos. The nighttime chatter and laughter in the temple's courtyard was immediately cut short by the sounds of swords being drawn and bows being strung. I threw up a warning hand.

  "Quiet! These are my little hippos. Can't you check your radars to see they're marked as friendly?"

  Someone finally found his voice, "Er, Sir, dammit! Are they all yours?"

  I gave a nonchalant shrug. "Just some special priestly magic. Now! Enjoy your time off duty, just don't forget tomorrow's the Parents Day. I expect everyone to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed — and don't forget your manners!"

  Then I drove my stomping herd past the speechless crowd as if it was the most natural thing in the world, crooning, "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas..."

  Half an hour later I was already calling the world and its developers every name under the sun — and that included one particular Death Knight who was too smart for his own good. The hell hounds sat around me and listened, cocking their heads from side to side. Spark was stretching her lips in a very peculiar way, trying to repeat a word that was actually quite easy for a canine to say. It sounded very close to deeckhead.

  Indeed, the skill that had only recently seemed so deceptively easy, was rapidly becoming immobilizingly awkward.

  Firstly and secondly, the location had looked good for our farming purposes. It was a crater about three hundred feet wide — hopefully not from some ancient nuke as the greenish glow surrounding it would suggest. And still I needed a team of five hell hounds to pull the mobs fast enough. Who was going to do this for me if I went solo?

  Once we'd mopped up all the mutants, my little hippos got bored: the local mobs' respawn times were too slow for their voracious appetites.

  The third problem arose when they tried to smoke the micro boss. The eight zombies crowded each other out, pushing and shoving each other out of their target's way. And I still had four dimwits left in the Temple.

  Finally and mainly — I was the deeckhead to end all dickheads. The three points I'd at the time invested into the passive Intellectual skill kept giving the pets 15% of the mobs' xp. Each! The grand total of my little op was some loot and zero xp.

  All in all, this Splitting skill proved to be prohibitively expensive and utterly useless for leveling purposes. Having said that, I wasn't that bothered about going s
olo any more. I'd apparently grown out of roaming the woods smoking wild pigs and admiring the xp bar's unhurried growth. As a capitalist shark in the making, I was now quite capable of calling up a thousand-strong raid, making the players' day by porting them to Inferno or somewhere similar, showering them with loot and enjoying my own energetic climb in levels.

  If I only had time! Give me a year, and I'd lead ten thousand level-300 Children of Night into battle! Only I didn't have a year. I might not have a week even.

  Never mind. We had what we had. You could say that I'd just added twelve more clan members to our ranks — admittedly rather useless but eager to shield their First Priest with their bodies or become the last decisive reserve in a local scuffle. So in the grand scale of things I was pleased.

  I patted the pooches behind the ears. "We're done! Off you go home now."

  I put the pets to rest. The last thing I needed was a herd of self-learning self-leveling feral hippos roaming around. There was only one Bagheera and so it would remain.

  I ported back to the temple and took the steps upstairs to my suite. I wasn't in a hurry. A team of female Ear Cutters stood guard by my door, habitually poking fun at a towering troll bodyguard. His face was black with effort as his elephantine mind tried to cope with the girls' sharp tongues.

  "Belay that chatter on duty!" I snapped in mocking anger, giving the troll an inconspicuous wink. He sprang to attention, his glare gleaming with gratitude. I would call him Silent Sam.

  Lizzie was sitting in the soft chair, her silk shirt tantalizingly short, her long sun-kissed legs thrown over the table. Her gun belt lay within reach. She was busy honing a throwing knife on a whetstone.

  I grinned at this well-calculated image of inaccessible beauty. Women and their games!

  The duty channel of the castle guards pinged. "Sir? The Remote Post got a visitor for you. A certain Bug, a level-90 rogue of the OMON clan, member of the Toddler Alliance and of Interception I. We attach the link to his profile. Please advise."

  Bug a cop? Never! "Transfer authorized. I'm in my room."

  It took him a few minutes to clear all the security systems: the initial transfer to the Portal Hall bunker, a rapid-fire interrogation session in the presence of my canine lie detector, followed by a transfer to the castle's guest quarters. Finally, I heard a cautious knock on the door.

  "Come in!" I slammed shut my copy of Sun Tzu's enthralling Art of War and hurried to meet him.

  My memory of Bug was firmly associated with my first days in the game when no one viewed me as a First Priest. We'd had fun slaughtering gnolls, counting coppers and carefully picking up the trash loot. How simple had the world been back then, shrunken by our blissful ignorance to the size of a few square miles!

  The door swung open. The guards let in a beaming Bug. Against my will, my face lit up in a smile. We gave each other a hug and a hearty slap on the back. I had to crouch to accommodate his five-foot frame.

  "Howdy, dude!"

  "Hi, Nec!"

  I grinned. I'd never made it to a Necro, after all. "You hungry? Fancy a bit of a BBQ?"

  He spread his arms wide, as if opening imaginary wardrobe doors like he'd done all that time ago, and opened his mouth in an impersonation of a top shelf.

  "All ssset! Load me up!" he said with a familiar lisp.

  We laughed. I dictated an order via the castle charm while Bug squinted at Lizzie who hadn't bothered to change her pose, spinning the throwing knife between her fingers and watching us from under her half-lowered eyelashes.

  "We could talk while we eat," Bug added meaningfully.

  I wasn't stupid. "Liz?" I nodded at the door. "Would you please leave us?"

  She didn't move, only raised a sarcastic eyebrow. She'd learned that from me, dammit! I had to add some metal to my voice, "Corporal Mona Lisa, vacate the premises! Now!"

  She snorted and picked up her gear. Flashing her seductive backside, she sashayed over to the door.

  There was no way Bug was seventeen. His face didn't even twitch when she walked past. He was too busy watching my own face as I told her off. My reaction to a potential conflict and her attempt at domineering apparently were more important to him than her Elven assets flashing under the frivolous silk.

  Her mane of black hair swung indignantly one last time. The door slammed shut.

  "Is that your girlfriend?" Bug asked indifferently.

  I shrugged. "More like a cat — purring, cuddly and independent. The kind that walks by herself. She doesn't need a master," I paused and asked the question that now worried me the most. "Bug? How old are you?"

  He gave me a satisfied nod. "You've changed a lot since I last saw you. If the truth were known, I doubted our leaders' decision to bet on you. Only a month ago you used to be this run-of-the-mill noob — lucky and generous but definitely not leader material."

  I waded through all the fuzz, concentrating on the main thing. "The leaders. Of the OMON? How on earth did you end up there?"

  He shook his head. "It's not about the OMON. Watch the alliance tag."

  His stare clouded as he focused on his mental interface. The alliances' tags faded as he switched them off. A new one lit up instead. I'd never seen this one before.

  The Grumblers clan. Their logo was a five-petal carnation. "What's the catch?"

  "Read the first three letters."

  "G-R-U? The military intelligence?" I shook my head in dismay. Bug an intelligence agent undercover? I brought my emotions back in check and spoke slowly,

  "I was expecting officials to contact me at some point. But why the GRU? Why not the FSB or whoever handles the virtual worlds? Surely the government couldn't have missed their slice of the pie? Or could it?”

  He smiled. "This is why. According to your psychological profile, you're not a big fan of our government. You can't stand the police, you don't trust the secret service — but you do have a certain amount of respect for the military and intelligence. All this cloak-and-dagger spying shit."

  "You aren't too respectful to your employers, are you?" I asked warily. "Is this how you recruit new agents these days?"

  "Cut it out," he waved my question away. "It's not even about their instructions to contact you with 'ultimate sincerity'. I don't need our staff nerds to understand that. It's just our country makes me feel so frustrated sometimes. You were right: they've pissed AlterWorld away by betting on Eve4."

  "Never a truer word spoken. I could use a couple of Titans hovering in the sky."

  He nodded. "That's what they think, too. Contacting you was my shop's private initiative. Even though I seem to be drifting further away from them with every day. Like all permas, I suppose. I have nothing that keeps me in the real world, only my duty and my word as an officer. The GRU believe the battle for the First Temple to be the turning point that might radically change AlterWorld's power dynamics. My job is to warn you: you seem to underestimate the enemy's numbers a lot. Really a lot."

  "Oh. What kind of a lot? And how can you help me?"

  He gave me a guilty smile. "Sorry, Max. The only thing your country can give you now is a word of wisdom. Just hang on in there. Enemy at the gates, your country needs you, that sort of thing. You need to understand that it's only recently that AlterWorld has come into my office's sights. You never know with them, if push comes to shove they may stick a whole special-ops cadet school into FIVR capsules, but what good would those noobs be to you? That's why all the practical help you're getting now is information."

  I nodded. "Better than nothing, I suppose. So how many bastards should I expect to arrive at our walls? Five thousand? Ten?

  "A hundred," he said quietly. "At least. And only because they believe this number to be sufficient enough. Their backstage puppeteers are quite capable of bringing a million if needs be. They have plenty of experience tweaking public opinion and staging flower revolutions."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Moscow. A low-scale block of flats in one of the dormitory suburbs.

&n
bsp; A disheveled man paced his cluttered lounge. His bachelor pad had seen better days, judging by the windowsills lined with withered potted violets, by hand-knitted lacy doilies and dusty toys piled up on shelves.

  "A miracle... what a miracle..." he kept mumbling as he circled the room, mechanically approaching the fridge.

  He froze as his willpower fought an already-lost battle, then shrugged and opened the fridge. Its door creaked. He reached for a misted bottle in the empty freezer. It clanked against the glass as he fidgeted, measuring out a double shot. With a practiced hand he threw the thick icy liquid down his throat and chased it by sniffing an old slice of rye bread left on the table.

  He heaved a sigh of relief. The nervous tension seemed to be releasing him. He filled another glass, more expertly this time, and checked the fridge. He should have something to eat too, really, lest he got legless. And today he really wanted to stay sober.

  A harsh ring at the door cut through his reverie. He shrank, then rearranged his crumpled necktie and hurried to answer it.

  "Oleg Yurievich, how are you? I'm the hospice representative. Our coordinator called you earlier today."

  "Oh yes, he did, he did! He said my Sasha was alive and well! Isn't that a miracle? What a shame my dear Nonna won't see it... You know, she said to me she didn't want to outlive him... Right from this very window here she stepped out..."

  The lanky visitor winced from the heavy odor of liquor. "Mind if I come in?"

  "Absolutely not! You'll have to excuse me. I must be going out of my mind, keeping such a guest standing there on the doorstep!"

  "Bring it in," the visitor snapped over his shoulder as he nudged the man toward the wall.

  Two workers wearing white overalls with a vaguely familiar logo rolled through the door a massive six-foot shipping container.

  "But... but what's this for?"

  "Aren't you going to see your son today?"