Aces High (Reality Benders Book #6) LitRPG Series

by Michael Atamanov

  Before I was even finished, he had already started making a rushed confession:

  “Yeah, yeah. It was me. I asked a good friend who works as a military repairman to plant the bombs. I promised him good pay. Because it wasn’t fair — that Meleyephatian frigate should have been mine! Although... this isn’t all about the frigate. If Gnat the lucky devil lost his ship, my ex-girlfriend Uline Tar would have come back to me and joined my crew. And now this wedding,” the Geckho pointed at the gates and residence of the Viceroy, “would be between me and Uline! And that big whopping silver Kituvaru sitting at the spaceport in all its glory would also belong to me! And it was you Gnat, with your conniving words, that took my Uline Tar away from me! It’s all your fault!”

  Danger Sense skill increased to level one hundred two!

  Well, well! I must admit, I wasn’t expecting the obliterated drunk, who was sitting flat on his rump just a moment ago, to be standing at my side half a second later towering at least three feet above me. Nor was I expecting in that brief moment for a spiked brass knuckle to appear on the paw of the hulking and aggressive Geckho. And... so that’s how the new improvement of my Listener armor suit works!

  I don’t know if I’d have been able to react without all the sophisticated Relict technology. But the big huge fist baring down on the crown of my head stopped abruptly just a few inches away. Seemingly, although the effect was diminished because I didn’t fully meet the requirements, the armor modification had just triggered!

  And though I was surprised, I was able to lean back fast enough for the deadly weapon pass in front of my face. Then I pulled off the same trick another two times, getting a grip on all the ins and outs of the Tachyon Bender. Cool! I’m basically Neo in the Matrix! Just under a second of additional time was not all that much, but it was enough of a head start to feel invulnerable in a fight with Uraz Tukhsh and dodge every one of his blows.

  Just to be clear, he attacked me first. Any of the guards coming out of the gates just then could confirm. So I no longer needed to handle the nutjob drunk with kid gloves.

  “Where’s your respawn point?” I asked in an even tone as the Geckho goon swung his fists right in front of my face to no effect.

  No answer followed. Just a new string of curses and a few more attempted blows. But I didn’t need to hear a thing. I had already read the information in my rival’s thoughts — his respawn point was “in the Kauzi-La system, on my brother’s estate.” That meant Uraz Tukhsh would be respawning on a distant planet five days’ flight from Earth. And so, he wouldn’t be coming back to the wedding and would not be bothering the newlyweds or wedding guests anymore. I took out my Annihilator and shot the loser captain right in the head. “Messed up his face,” as I promised Uline.

  Rifles skill increased to level sixty-seven!

  Sharpshooter skill increased to level fifty-four!

  You have reached level one hundred seven!

  You have received three skill points (total points accumulated: six).

  The Aristocrat’s legs buckled; his headless body splatted with a heavy thud right into a roadside puddle. Spatters of mud flew at me and... the spray of droplets froze in midair. And the full second of delay was easily enough for me to jump out of the way. Wow, really cool! Now the Tachyon Bender was working at full capacity, and I basically felt like a superhero. Looks like I’m ready to take on Fox now! I don’t know what the Morphian could possibly bring into play to hurt me like this!

  I hunched down over the corpse. It felt wrong and even blasphemous that the highest decoration of the Geckho race should be in such unpresentable shape and on top of that lying in a puddle of mud. But my hand went right through it. I see. I wasn’t born yesterday. The purple ribbon did not drop as loot. But the disheveled bouquet did, its white and orange petals already starting to fall off. I picked it up, gave it a skeptical look and walked over to the palace guards, who came out of the gates while Uraz Tukhsh and I scuffled:

  “The uninvited guest is gone now and will not be bothering any more guests. The bride’s former admirer had one last thing he wanted to give to her — this shabby bouquet, so I guess we should probably honor that...” I looked skeptically at the gift again and tried to arrange the flowers a bit neater, but I was not able to give the bouquet a more presentable appearance. The flowers’ only response to my manipulations was to lose even more petals.

  Danger Sense skill increased to level one hundred three!

  Something was wrong with this bouquet. Apparently, it wasn’t sentimentality or old feelings moving Uraz Tukhsh when he stubbornly wished to meet his former girlfriend. Maybe these flowers had some insulting meaning to the Geckho and could cause serious conflicts with the guests and newlyweds. I suddenly reconsidered giving the bouquet to the newlyweds and tossed it into some bushes.

  “No, I guess we shouldn’t. Looking like the thing, it would no longer be a gift but a token of decayed feelings. It would only upset the bride,” I explained to the guards.

  I refused their offer to provide me a shuttle to the spaceport and started walking down the road. I wanted to go on foot so I’d have a chance to think over all the recent news in the evening silence, and at the same time get some air to stave off a sudden bout of dizziness and nausea. Obviously, no matter how I tried to limit myself, I must have overindulged a bit at my best friend’s wedding.

  Chapter Thirty-Three. Three-Barbed Parasites

  I NEVER DID END UP reaching the spaceport on foot. I made it around half a mile before suddenly my legs buckled and I nearly fell to the ground. I was forced to sit and summon a Sio-Mi-Dori to bring me the rest of the way to my ship. And to make matters worse, I was feeling lousier all the time. A wave of nausea rolled over me. I was hoping I didn’t eat some Geckho food that was toxic to humans. After all, the Geckho had good reason to be so reluctant to invite members of other spacefaring races to their festivities. Among other things, we had different metabolisms.

  By the time the silvery antigrav appeared in the sky, I was sitting on the wet grass with no strength at all and a totally drained Endurance Point bar, contemplating a pesky bright red message that just wouldn’t go away:

  ATTENTION!!! Your character is ill. You have received a negative effect: minus two Hitpoints per second.

  And although my high-level character had more than two thousand five hundred hitpoints and could hold out for more than twenty minutes, and I had food and Miyelonian cocktails to refill my life, there was still little to be happy about. And worst of all — I didn’t see any time limit for the negative effect. What now? Would this illness and health loss last until my character died?

  ATTENTION!!! Illness intensifying. Negative effect: minus three Hitpoints per second.

  Damn! The illness wasn’t even thinking about going away. I asked the troopers from the ship to help load me into the aircraft, because I didn’t have the strength to pick myself up. I ordered the pilot to gun it over to Tamara the Paladin and summon the Miyelonian Medic at once. My memory of the Sio-Mi-Dori flight is fuzzy — I grew dizzier and my vision faded. My mind cleared up a bit when I was injected with a few ampules of strong hitpoint-restoring medicine from the standard army first-aid kit because my health bar was going down faster and faster all the time. Then I remember the spaceport field. I was quickly carried somewhere on a stretcher. At that time, my life was falling at a rate of fifteen hitpoints a second.

  “Make way! Let me through to the captain!” I recognized the voice of the Miyelonian Medic Gerd Mauu-La Mya-Ssa and... lost consciousness.

  I CAME TO MY SENSES on a hospital bed in my captain’s berth. Next to me the Medic’s “levitating coffin” hummed quietly with bundles of wires and IV tubes stretching from it to my body. The air smelled of rubbing alcohol and ozone. The disheveled orange Medic pulled back my eyelids one after the next unceremoniously. He even shined a bright flickering light into each of my pupils.

  “Well, Captain Gnat, the worst is behind you,” Gerd Mauu-La Mya-Ssa told me in a perk
y tone when he saw that I was awake.

  I glanced at all my bars in trepidation: health, endurance, mana and satiety. Three of them were at maximum, whereas my endurance bar was flickering worryingly, oscillating between one and two percent.

  “But what the heck was that?” it was hard to talk. My mouth was bone dry, and my scratchy tongue could barely move.

  “I wanted to ask you the same question, captain,” my furry healer chuckled. “How could you possibly have caught three-barbed non-mesogleal parasites on planet Earth? As far as I know, they are not found here naturally.”

  I caught some extraterrestrial parasites? When did that happen? I tried to think back on recent events. Uline’s wedding. The starship. My fight with Uraz Tukhsh. The strange bouquet that set off my Danger Sense. Yes, that must have been it! The strange white and orange flowers, like irises but smaller and with lots of blossoms on every stem.

  “These flowers?” the Miyelonian doctor turned on his palmtop, turned the screen my direction and showed me the image.

  Yes, exactly! They were the very same flowers Uraz Tukhsh wanted to give his former companion. Which I immediately told the Miyelonian. The doctor nodded in satisfaction and eagerly brought me up to speed:

  “A creature from the planet Rho-VII. They aren’t flowers in the sense you earthlings are familiar with. They are a complex predatory organism — both plant and animal at the same time. They can capture light and synthesize organic compounds but will also consume other beings for sustenance if given the opportunity. The bright and fragrant ‘petals’ are its weapon. Dangerous microscopic non-mesogleal parasites, somewhat reminiscent of your coelenterates, live on them at high concentration.”

  “What kind of parasites now?” I latched onto the unfamiliar term.

  Gerd Mauu-La Mya-Ssa seemingly was surprised by my thickness and explained:

  “Non-mesogleal. They’re an intermediary biological class between single- and multicelled organisms. They do not have fully-fledged cell walls or intercellular area. Furthermore, their organelles are capable of migrating between ‘pseudo-cells,’ slipping through the membranes and strengthening the organism wherever needed. On your planet, as far as I know, there are no non-mesogleal organisms. But other galaxies are chalk full of such species. What am I even saying? The advanced spacefaring race the Cyanids just so happens to be such a species. Our physical education instructor Fox the Morphian is one too. How could you not know that?”

  I had to explain to my ship medic that I had never been particularly strong in cytology, much less astrocytology. Gerd Mauu-La shrugged his shoulders, activating the dim screen again and continued his tale of the strange pseudo-flowers from a distant planet:

  “The flowers hunt by dropping petals near potential prey. The microscopic creatures on the petals receive nourishment from plant fibers and juices of their host flower, but also take pleasure in devouring animal life. They exude a highly powerful toxin which kills phytophages from the planet Rho-VII in an instant. The dead organisms serve as food and fertilizer both for the flower and its ‘weapon.’ The toxin has a weaker effect on creatures from other planets. The Crystallids, who first discovered the planet Rho-VII are actually totally immune. They find the creature amusing and call them ‘striptease flowers’ for their ability to destroy the fabric of their clothing.”

  When the Medic said that, it dawned on me. So that was what happened to Uraz Tukhsh’s clothing! But why then didn’t it work on the captain himself? Gerd Mauu-La also had an answer to that question:

  “For Geckho, the parasites have quite a long incubation period. Somewhere around eighty to a hundred ummi. The disease is only expressed after that and ends in a torturous death. For Humans,” the Miyelonian Medic looked at me and ran his clawed fingers over a holographic keyboard that appeared in midair, seemingly entering new data into the reference guide, “contact with ‘striptease flowers’ causes a severe allergic reaction accompanied by high fever and nausea. Without quick intervention and medication, death sets in within a quarter ummi.”

  I closed my eyes and lowered my head onto my pillow. What a scoundrel that Uraz Tukhsh was! If not for Uline Tar’s tough resolve, which stopped her from allowing her former admirer onto the grounds of the Viceroy’s residence despite all his admonishments, the wedding guests would have gone their separate ways without suspecting a thing, carrying the dangerous infection back to their respective home planets. By the way, speaking of infection...

  “Am I infectious right now?” I asked what was probably the most important question. “And will my wife Gerd Minn-O suffer if she enters from the real and lands right in this room?”

  But the experienced Medic seemed offended by my mistrust of his professional abilities and the very implication he could have been so intolerably reckless:

  “No, of course not. I have injected a kind of antibiotics, which are guaranteed to kill these parasites. All individuals who came into contact with you have also undergone prophylactic treatment, as well as the antigrav, stretcher and all parts of Tamara the Paladin you passed through. By the way, that sanitary treatment actually made Fox have to temporarily stay away from our starship — that kind of antibiotics also works to great effect on Morphians. But I warned Fox, and the instructor thanked me for the precaution, asking me just not to go spreading the fact her race was so vulnerable to the substance.”

  “What about my Endurance Points? Why aren’t they coming back?” That bar hadn’t changed during our talk and was still hovering just above zero.

  “A side effect of the powerful antibiotics and other medicines I administered,” the Medic explained, looking at one of the figures he could see on the screen of the flying coffin. “Your microflora has been devastated. The toxins have not yet been fully expelled. Your body is severely weakened. So for the next ummi and a half I recommend bedrest. But after that I advise... no, not even. As your doctor, I PRESCRIBE intense physical exercise. Yes, Captain Gnat, it will be difficult. Especially at first. You may even pass out. But that is the only way we can accelerate your body’s cleansing process and get your Endurance Points going up again. Well... or you could also just die and respawn.”

  I shook my head “no” — even though Gnat had hit level one hundred seven not so long ago, making the experience loss minimal, committing suicide was just not my way of solving problems. So, I voiced my firm decision:

  “As soon as I’m done with bed rest, I will go practice and exercise alongside all the troops of the army of Earth!”

  Authority increased to 110!

  MY CHIEF ADVISOR GERD Mac-Peu Un-Roi was sitting on a spinning armchair next to my bed and recounting recent news. The military draft was going according to schedule, the army of Earth’s troop count was now over thirty-four thousand and rising. In fact, a thousand recruits had just arrived from the H7 Faction — the “second Chinese faction,” which had nodes on the big continent of the virtual planet. Contingents had arrived from twenty-three of the Directories of the magocratic world, while the remaining nine Directories had also signaled their willingness to cooperate and promised to send recruits. The ruler of the Second Directory General Ui-Taka had agreed to lead the unified army of Earth as well and he promised to choose assistants from among the most experienced commanders of both worlds.

  A hundred soldiers had arrived today from the “North American” Human-8 Faction. And from what they said, we realized that the governments of Canada and the USA had decided to close the joint data-center in the Canadian province of New Brunswick and concentrate on their own factions, Human-12 (USA-1), Human-19 (USA-2) and Human-14 (Canada). The main reason was the inconvenient geographic position of the two H8 Faction nodes, distant from the Geckho spaceport and neighbors and hard to expand from due to the impassable mountains in the neighboring nodes. There had also been an overall drop in enthusiasm after their mental enslavement by psionics from the magocratic world. All that led to the decision to close the H8 Faction as an independent political unit, while its players were
suggested to join other factions.

  “Wait, wait...” I stopped my Chief Advisor. “So where does that leave us? The Human-8 Faction will soon be no more, but its troops are at our training camp. Will they not be leaving if they end up in one of the factions of the Terrestrial Coalition?”

  “They will not, Coruler. More than half of the players of the disbanding Human-8 Faction have chosen to apply to join Relict. And that includes the ones at our camp, and even the head of the H8 Faction himself, Arthur McKinley, a level-83 Fisher. I have spoken with him. He says his decision was motivated by his gratitude to our faction for the help liberating them from mental slavery, and he considers us the most advanced Earth faction technologically and militarily. He only asks to keep control of his nodes if possible — too much effort was invested into building breakwaters, tunneling through mountains and shipping fertile soil to the previously barren mountain plateau.”

  “So what’s the holdup? The Relict Faction could use two developed nodes on the opposite side of our little continent. Go talk with Gerd McKinley. Why take their players one at a time if we could just merge the remainder of the H8 Faction into ours along with their remote territories! We then will arrange to deliver goods and essentials to that distant shore. Anything else important?”

  “Yes, my Kung. Our Diplomat Leng Thomas Müller has conducted negotiations with the Chinese faction about the gas deposits. The outcome was positive, our neighbors have agreed to work jointly. They have even made a counterproposal to also work together on a high-speed thoroughfare linking our capital hexagons and passing through the gas node with an offshoot running to the spaceport. They have also expressed an interest in constructing one of the planetary shield generators on their territory. They promise to find the builders and technology for such an important project on their own.”