Soon, both legions were massed around us. Our side covered our squad. The enemies formed a ring around us and tried to break through to me.
By the time I was nearly back to our own Wager, only Lerra and Abducius remained beside me, but even they didn’t last long. The enemy broke through to our standard, a fight broke out. Legatus Philotanus was disincarnated protecting the Wager. I still had ten yards to go, and with every leap a vivid image imprinted on my mind: Lerra shouting and dying, falling into the maw of a hellish dragon, whose rider then threw a paralyzing bomb at me; Abducius covering her with his body, exploding into pieces; Prefect Sargatanas covering me, saving me from a fiery net thrown by the opposing Legatus; Centurion Citri of my cohort charging the legs of the enemy infernal instiga and burning up, giving me the heartbeat I needed for one last jump…
Straining my muscles, I leapt, cut through the dragon in my path with the flag, breaking off his jaw, impaled a rider with the other end of the pole, then landed and thrust the enemy standard into its designated place. I absorbed the chao from the dead dragon at the exact moment the battle ended and the sky lit up blue.
The fighting stopped right away – the demons dropped their weapons and started to scatter, picking up the wounded and taking them back to their own territory.
If the bodies hadn’t dissolved into ash, the valley would have been littered with the corpses of my allies. I stood atop the hill with the flags waving beside me, my left horn adorned with five yellow stars, but I felt no joy in the victory.
Decanus Hakkar’s squad no longer existed, and less than a third of Belial’s Thirteenth Legion remained.
Interlude 2. Tomoshi
TOMOSHI KUROKAWA WAS BORN and raised in Kyoto, which had become the capital of the Japanese District after World War III. Little remained of Tokyo by the end of the war, thanks to the mad generals of the Chinese army.
There was one bedroom in the citizenship category G apartment, for his parents. Tomoshi had to sleep in the living room, which served as a kitchen too. From an early age he dreamed of having his own personal space, couldn’t stand noise and groups of people, and the press of crowds in the streets gave him panic attacks. Put simply, he hated people.
And the feeling was mutual. Tomoshi’s standoffishness, irritability, strangeness and unfriendliness pushed away not only his classmates, but even other hikikomori like him.
The otaku club that Tomoshi signed up to at his parents’ insistence accepted him warmly. The club’s members avoided people just as he did, and lived more in imaginary worlds than in reality. That united them, and should have helped them make friends with Tomoshi. Even he allowed himself to hope, and he was right to: the boy found not only friends, but also love. He found Shika.
Shika was thirteen. Closed-off, quiet, Tomoshi didn’t notice her right away, and no wonder – she was just an ordinary girl, nothing noteworthy about her. At least until someone mentioned Disgardium. That really perked Shika up! Tomoshi saw her joyful smile for the first time, and it drove him nuts. He fell head over heels in love with Shika, and with what the girl liked – Disgardium, although it wasn’t even in the top three most popular virtual worlds in the Japanese District at the time, despite the mandatory time teenagers had to spend in it.
“Mizaki!” Shika sighed as she Tomoshi about the top clan in Tomoshi’s region. “Their leader is Yagami Oba…” She blushed. “He’s sooo cute!”
“How do we get into Mizaki?” Tomoshi asked, not so much out of curiosity as a desire to catch the girl’s eye. “By becoming a good fighter?”
“No matter how skilled a fighter you become, Tomoshi, you still can’t catch up to the best fighters of the clan. The only way to join them is to get good at a craft…”
Tomoshi’s first feelings quickly led to nothing. Shika’s parents, who worked at the Department of Health, were moved to another district, and the young man lost all interest in the otaku club and left it. But the excitement with which Shika spoke of Disgardium stuck with him. The world itself was now clearly associated in Tomoshi’s mind with vivid and uplifting things, like Shika’s smile, which was probably lost to him forever. They both found it hard to talk to people, whether in real life or remotely. They exchanged messages at first, but then Shika stopped answering, apparently occupied with settling into her new place. And he didn’t write again.
Tomoshi’s classless character called Hiros did nothing of note in the sandbox. He completed social quests, went into dungeons with groups, tried to catch rare mobs or get achievements, but without particular zeal, because Tomoshi had decided to become a professional crafter, pave his way into Mizaki and maybe one day meet Shika again.
One question remained: which craft should he level up? Tomoshi liked to work with metal, so he took Blacksmithing and Mining. Since he felt a strange love for flora, Herbalism caught his eye too, which naturally led to Alchemy. He wandered the most dangerous places of the sandbox in search of rare ingredients, which led him to level up Stealth – a skill perfect for attacking first and from behind.
Once, Hiros had to climb a tree to save himself from wolves, and started shooting them with a crossbow he’d found. He reached level 10, after which the system offered him three classes: Miner, Alchemist and… Ninja. He spent an entire sleepless night unable to decide, then finally realized – he liked fighting more than digging up ore and brewing potions. The path of the ninja meant he would never get into Mizaki, but it offered something else in exchange: the guild of mercenaries.
Hiros spent the rest of his time in the sandbox training his combat skills and forgot all about crafting.
He firmly decided to join the guild of mercenaries, seeing in it an ideal solution to all his problems and a promising future. He would try to take on individual contracts that required special skills and stealth instead of brute force – that would lead to a minimum of contact with other players… and non-players. His social phobia extended to all sentients. All the same, he had to talk a lot more in Dis than in real life; to vendors, trainers, quest givers…
His internal conflict resolved itself in a surprising way. At some point, Tomoshi stopped seeing Hiros as himself. The ninja became a kind of mask, a puppet, then an entirely separate personality with nothing in common with the puppetmaster Tomoshi Kurokawa. At first it was subconscious, but the more time he spent in Dis, the more Tomoshi and Hiros differed. The former shivered at the mere thought of risk, the latter went in search of crazy adventures. The player avoided conflict, the ninja lived for it. Tomoshi spoke quietly and with downcast eyes; Hiros spoke confidently, although he too hid his eyes, not wanting to reveal his feelings.
After passing the citizenship tests with category I, Tomoshi left his parents’ crowded apartment. The little room he rented was even smaller, but he was alone! If not for the cardboard walls that let in all sound from outside, Tomoshi would have been happy, but… Those damn walls! Thanks to them, he always knew what was going on in his neighbors’ lives right down to when they went to the toilet.
For the first few days he didn’t log into Dis, just enjoyed the peace and quiet: ate ramen, watched dumb holoseries, slept in until midday. He would have spent his entire life like that if he could, but he needed money: for noodles, holoseries, rent… Mom and dad couldn’t help; the law said that of-age citizens had to live independently from their parents. That meant he had to go back to Dis and give his time over to Hiros the Ninja.
He spent two years leveling up his character (or the character leveled up himself, following his own goals). The human considered it a partnership – after all, Hiros’s successes provided Tomoshi with financial independence, – but the ninja didn’t seem to give a damn about the human; he didn’t concern him in the least with matters of another world – real life.
But that was only how it seemed. For want of his own life, Tomoshi watched Hiros’s actions with interest. The ninja leveled up Stealth to perfection, which helped him explore high-level dungeons, find and open chests right under the bosses’ noses.
Expensive equipment, rare ingredients, materials…
Two years passed. The more Hiros leveled up, the more his confidence grew. The ninja even made some friends. First they called him the fifth in their group, then they invited him to their clan, but he refused. All the same, Hiros’s friends in Dis became Tomoshi’s friends in real life, and one of them, Kamiko – his girlfriend.
The third year in big Dis brought radical change for Hiros – the ninja gained the status of Threat, potential E. He was the first to enter the Astral Rift instance in the northwest of the Lakharian Desert, successfully evading the beasts of the sands to get there. He got no First Kill, and Excommunicado scouts found his dungeon the very next day, but Hiros still managed to squirrel away a treasure; he crept into the dungeon’s final room and found a chest hidden in a secret corridor behind the boss’s back. The chest contained an ancient scroll.
The artifact bestowed the Astral Fury ability, which gave thirty seconds of total invulnerability and invisibility with a one-hour cooldown. Hiros stopped thieving and started clearing instances alone, getting more experience, money and gear. He also became a Threat, which meant he started focusing completely on solo leveling.
Tomoshi’s in-game wallet grew each month, allowing him to rent a nicer apartment and buy a good flyer. Then the differences between the lives of Tomoshi and Hiros played their fateful role – the ninja’s former allies remained Tomoshi’s friends, and he openly shared his – that is, Hiros’s – achievements with them. He took Kamiko out in his flyer and brought her back to his place. His new apartment was in a nice area, with a view of the sea, high glass walls and good furniture. All this made an impression, perhaps too much so.
Kamiko started to suspect something and told her friends, who asked Tomoshi directly at their next meeting:
“Tomoshi-kun, are you a Threat now?”
Tomoshi shook his head:
“No, of course not! I’m the same Tomoshi as ever!”
He wasn’t lying – it wasn’t he who had become a Threat, it was Hiros. But they still didn’t believe him. That said, Tomoshi wasn’t great at recognizing other people’s motives; he thought it was just a harmless question. Hiros, on the other hand, knew perfectly well what was going on. On their next immersion, he dragged the hiding human out for a frank conversation, shouting at him, calling him a cretin and demanding that he evacuate immediately and lay low:
“If you don’t do this, human, then tomorrow you’ll get a home visit from the preventers, or worse, the Triad! They’ll make you, which means me, do something terrible. You have to hide, human Tomoshi!”
“But where? From who? What will Kamiko say? Should I take her with me?”
“You really are an idiot! Kamiko is the one who started all this! She dreams of eliminating a Threat and getting rich! She’ll hand me over… hand us over to the preventers for a share of the reward! To your beloved Mizaki! Or worse, she’ll sell you to the Triad!”
“Kamiko isn’t like that…” Tomoshi argued tentatively.
“If you don’t do what I say, human, then you can say goodbye to me and your life of luxury both! To living at all!”
Like Hiros demanded, Tomoshi went to ground. He got himself an account in dark phoenixes, rented a capsule residence where nobody asked for identification… But he still gave in to weakness – he kept talking to Kamiko via comm.
The girl convinced him to meet her in person. Come on, Tomoshi, let’s go to a cafe! Please? I miss you! I really miss you, Tomoshi… she said with a sigh. You know what I mean? And he gave in. Their relationship was developing slowly and hadn’t yet reached the most exciting level. Tomoshi really hoped this date would change everything.
It did, but not in the way he hoped.
Rough men in black cloaks and dark glasses appeared in the cafe. All the waitresses and all the other customers disappeared in the same moment. Even the droids went somewhere. Distracted and excited by his date with Kamiko, Tomoshi noticed nothing strange at first. When he finally realized who was surrounding their table, he looked at his girlfriend and…
He shivered in comprehension: a cold-blooded killer had been hiding behind the mask of Kamiko. She stared at him with greedy eyes, licked her hungry lips. Her face was still human, still just like any face you could glance at in the street and forget immediately, but her eyes had turned dead, her gaze pitiless, like a vampire thirsting for my blood. This terrible woman had one single desire, but as for when she would feed on the blood, – before or after a polite conversation, – that was another question.
Tomoshi jumped up from the chair at once and bowed. He stood like a statue for the rest of the conversation, keeping his eyes pinned on his feet.
“My name is Mr. Yao,” a man said in a colorless voice. “And you are the Threat Tomoshi Kurokawa.”
The boy bowed:
“I am honored, Yao-sama. But I must object, Yao-sama. Tomoshi Kurokawa is not a Threat, Yao-sama.”
“Perhaps,” the terrible man answered agreeably. “But we must verify that. You will come with us.”
On rigid legs, Tomoshi followed the men to an unremarkable gray flyer. They flew to the continent somewhere. He didn’t find out exactly where, because he lost consciousness on the way. When he woke up, he was back home.
A couple of weeks later, Tomoshi had forgotten the incident as a nightmare. The only reminder was that Kamiko had disappeared off somewhere. The girl wasn’t answering calls. Her parents didn’t know where she was. Their friends all insisted that she was fine, that there was nothing to worry about. Tomoshi paid no attention to the strange tone in their voices.
But Hiros did pay attention. The ninja remembered the terrible man, and the deep mental scan that had been roughly scrubbed from his memory by the Triad’s medics, and the neural programming that had turned Tomoshi into a puppet.
All the same, even Hiros had no idea why they let the human Tomoshi go, so he decided to take control not only of himself, but of the human too. The body and the character alike needed safety. Protection from someone strong, someone with whom even the preventers couldn’t reckon. Someone powerful and smart, capable of standing up against the preventers and hiding successfully from both the United Cartel and the Triad. Hiros knew only one such person: Scyth – Alex Sheppard.
Hiros had no doubt that the top Threat wasn’t alone – he must have a whole organization that could provide protection.
More than a month passed before Hiros, and Tomoshi along with him, found that protection.
* * *
Alex-san was delayed. Tomoshi liked him, and he was even thinking about swapping the -san for the less formal -kun. They were brothers in arms now, after all, especially after the joint mission to send Scyth-san to the Inferno. But ever since the closest person in his life betrayed him, Tomoshi feared to get close to anyone. The only exception he made was for the girls of the clan; they’d been so kind to him, so friendly…
Trying to be himself for the others, he decided not to sit off in the corner, but took a seat at the bar instead, where there were endless rows of alcoholic beverages. He didn’t drink, wanting to keep a clear head and a close eye on the others. Tomoshi had a bad feeling about the party.
Apart from Alex-san, everyone was already gathered in Hung-san’s rooms, including the bald newcomer to the clan, Tobias-san. That one was sitting alone at a dining table set against the wall, chewing away in concentration from a salad bowl, getting coleslaw in his beard. Strange guy, Tomoshi thought. Takes one to know one, Hiros replied.
Malik-san stood in the corner, at the DJ station. Tomoshi had met him in poor circumstances: as soon as Malik-san climbed out of his flyer, he was put in handcuffs and locked in the isolation room along with Trixie-san, another clan member being punished for something. The final fate of both had been delayed until Alex-san’s return from the Demonic Games.
Alex had been angry at first, even Tomoshi could see that, but soon showed his innate goodness by forgiving the treachery of Malik-san and Tissa-chan�
�
“Come on, people!” Malik-san shouted, putting on a fresh cray-jungle track.
Boom! Boom! Boom! The walls shuddered. The floor vibrated in Tomoshi’s jaw, which ached in time to the beat. He squirmed, regretting coming here. The people surrounding him were far from the polite society Tomoshi was used to.
Take the girls, for example, seated at the other end of the lounge. Apart from Tissa-chan and Rita-chan, there was a third with them whom Hiros had only seen before in Dis – Eniko-chan, daughter of Gyula-sempai.
Tissa-chan was telling some story, gesturing and waving her arms. And Rita-chan’s behavior was completely unbecoming of a clan leader – she threw her head back and laughed loudly without even covering her mouth! Eniko-chan was much better, smiling without opening her mouth.
“Hey, Tommy!” Hung-san said, approaching him. “Welcome!”
Edward-san accompanied the big man.
Enemy of the Inferno (Disgardium Book #8): LitRPG Series Page 35