by Simon Archer
“That’s awesome, man!” The third soldier slapped me on the arm as a sign of respect. “You don’t see a lot of people trying to help out the youth these days.”
“Man, if I had a quality youth center where I grew up, maybe I wouldn’t be in the military, you know?” The second soldier chimed in. “My parents weren’t always around, and I just needed a steady paycheck and a place to sleep. Maybe if I knew how to get a job someplace else, my life’d be different.”
“See? That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” I mentally scrapped the idea of breaking a window. These things were probably reinforced and bulletproof. Another plan “The youth of our country need someone on their side, and I think it would help uplift the whole community if we cared about its future.”
“And it might just reduce the crime rate, right?” The first soldier commented. “A lot of people resort to stealing simply because they don’t think they have any other options growing up. A youth center could really change things for them.”
“Do you guys really think this would have been a good idea?” I asked. “It seems silly, now that most of the town’s destroyed, but now that we’re here, I was really hoping that we could make it part of the reconstruction.”
“Hey, maybe!” The second soldier tried to encourage me. “You never know! I say you should try to talk to the mayor soon! Before all of this blows over and the city’s back on its feet. This youth center’s gotta be a thing!”
“What did I tell you, hubby? You worry too much!” Kate gave me a big kiss on the cheek. “You’ve got dreams worth dreaming about! Didn’t Mama Maruush say that you should trust your gut more? Didn’t she?”
“Maybe we should visit that gypsy more often,” I chuckled, “she’s been good luck for the two of us so far. Sorry for doubting her, dear.”
“Hey, we’re coming up on the safe zone!” The driver called back to us. “Once we drop them off, we’re heading right back into the city to finish cleaning up, so lock and load.”
Thank you, sweet merciful heaven. By the skin of our teeth, we’d made it to the edge of the city with enough robots to keep the militia occupied. As the vehicle stopped itself, I saw a set of military tents set up at the outskirts of the highway connecting the city. Civilians from all over were being ferried on military transports into it, dropping off their cargo, and moving back into the city. We were just another load to be dropped off.
I hated having to rely on luck so much for this whole operation. It made me feel like a fool for not having this more tightly planned out, the contingencies more properly thought through. There was no way that I’d have gotten this lucky every time I needed to complete a mission that was above my abilities, and I needed to remove the chances that I’d fail completely with the next mission. Well, luckily, the next phase of the plan was practically a shoo-in after this.
“Anyway, it was good talking to you, man.” The first soldier got me caught up in some kind of elaborate handshake just as I tried to leave the transport. “Don’t ever doubt yourself, man. You’ve got some big things going for you.”
“I guess I do.” I barely managed to keep up with the handshake, successfully avoiding looking like a jive fool in front of everyone. “Good luck with your soldier work. We’re all counting on you.”
“Will do!” He got back into the vehicle as the rest of the soldiers waved us off. “Good luck with those kids!”
Moving towards the tents, we still had the problem of trying to get out of the camp without drawing too much attention to ourselves. There were guards everywhere protecting the bystanders they’d collected, and they might have noticed if a couple of us tried to run away from their protection. With this many soldiers, it would really be a miracle for us to not get found out and shot on the spot, and with their levels, it’d be a death sentence.
That’s when I began to notice the absence of static in my ear. The comm links were back up now that we’d made it to the edge of town, and I could contact Yomura again. However, I couldn’t just start talking to my people, especially with so many eyes and ears around to notice my suspicious behavior. Contacting them would be a strange thing, but I would have to make something work if I was going to ask for their help. While even I was getting sick of all the times, I kept thinking to myself that we needed distractions at every turn, but now was probably the most crucial time that we needed some kind of distraction--
An explosion, as sudden as it was loud, destroyed the transport vehicle that I was just on, throwing the soldiers around the place like ragdolls. Thanks to their high levels, they were all perfectly fine, a bit scuffed up, but they didn’t expect to be flying by way of a disappearing vehicle beneath them any more than I did.
Just like that, all the soldiers in the immediate area were on high alert, moving out from the tents and other guard positions to swarm and sweep the immediate area, searching for whoever had just attacked them. The civilians had been whipped into a frenzy, running around like chickens with their heads cut off to create chaos that even the soldiers were having trouble working around. Conveniently, I noticed that the back end of the camp had been stripped of its wall of eyes, providing the perfect window for Kate and me to slip out the door.
“You’ll want to start running as soon as possible, my dude,” FrickaFresh called in from the commlink. “I’d rather not have these assholes chasing after us out of the city.”
Taking the hint, Kate and I already slipped away through the chaos of people and made it out the back. Grabbing onto Kate’s waist, I grappled us away from the chaos and down the abandoned highway, putting considerable distance between us and the city with every shot as I dodged between the cars.
Just as we’d made it down the road a way, a giant smog cloud descending onto the road greeted us, blocking out way. Unlike regular smog clouds, this one was equipped with a metal ramp poking out the bottom that perfectly caught us as we slid into it and into the interior of the cloud. Instead of the regular insides of a smog cloud, we had crashed into the insides of my stealth plane, crewed by Minou at the helm, Natasha sitting in the middle, Joe and Cane helping us into the plane, and FrickaFresh with his rifle pointed out the exit.
“You’re welcome,” Kate said as Joe’s big gorilla hands helped her up.
“You did this?” I asked as I stood up myself. “I couldn’t contact anyone once the army showed up. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with an escape plan.”
“Luckily for you, I already had one in the works just after I regained consciousness.” Kate bragged. “I asked them to keep FrickaFresh’s eyes on us as soon as they could from outside the city, and they’d been tailing us ever since. I guess you’re not the only one who can make plans.”
“Good thing, too.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek, looking at the whole crew. “Excellent work, everyone. We’ve officially taken down another member of the Ghoul.”
“What happens now?” Joe asked. “You went through all this trouble to get the city destroyed. What’s gonna happen to it once the national army’s done with it?”
“Well, the army’s gonna leave soon after they finish cleaning up the city,” I explained. “As soon as they do, we’ll just waltz in unopposed and conquer the city ourselves with our troops, now having no mobster goons to worry about.”
After a hard day’s work, I rested my eyes for a bit, leaning against one of the sides of the plane as Minou moved us back to the base we’d established just for this operation, waiting for the moment to step right back into the city and restart the invasion all over again.
18
The ensuing invasion was so damn easy, it wasn’t even worth mentioning. As soon as the army left, we steamrolled over the rubble-covered city and just took over everything in a flash. I forced the mayor, having no backing from Don Perignon or his mafia, to agree to all of my terms unconditionally, and the army couldn’t have returned to the city to stop me if their travel time had been one fourth what it was before.
What was worth talking about wa
s all the new perks we got from conquering this latest city. Rebuilding the city took some time, but everything was back to normal before anyone was the wiser. Thankfully, the Don was a bit of a stickler for having heroes in his city, so no one could have their main base of operations for their guilds within New Carmanelo. Because of that, there wasn’t an immediate response from any of the guilds when I attacked the first time, and the guild halls were destroyed in the battle, meaning they didn’t have any footholds within my newest city to start mucking things about.
And the money wasn’t anything to sneeze at, either. With the Don gone, I was free to pilfer everything I wanted from the remains of his operation. And boy, did he have a whole lot leftover from his operations. The cash alone was in the hundreds of billions, and the economic upturn from adding another city to the empire never hurt, but the real prize was the superpowered bodies that the national militia was so kind to leave around for me and my next wave of invasion to pick up.
They were all higher level than I was, especially Don John himself, and the research cost reductions from processing their corpses were so high that I was able to buy a level in all of my research fields. It didn’t sound like much, but that was a big deal. Any one level opened up a world of upgrades, augmentations, and other things for all of my minions with those specific enhancements, as well as all of my own enhancements. As it stood now, I was sitting pretty at some high levels in each field:
Research Skills
Biology: Lvl 7, 120b
Computers: Lvl 8, 95b
Gadgets: Lvl 9, 90b
Occultism: Lvl 8, 150b
Compared to my character level, those levels seemed pretty low, but they were two different systems. Instead of little increments of increased power, research skills worked in magnitudes, being several times more powerful than the previous level before it. Every last level shook things up, even more so at these high levels. They also capped out at level ten, so I was getting close to maxing out all the possible stuff I was able to do with them. And those numbers at the end marked with the ‘b’ represented how many billions of dollars I needed to get to the next level. Yeah, I was close to the cash flow of the richest person in the real world, and I still didn’t have the proper funds to buy everything I wanted.
Didn’t matter how many cities you conquered, that shit was a lot of money per upgrade, and I had other things to purchase on top of everything. The more powerful upgrades unlocked with the research upgrades were way more expensive to purchase, and the costs became exponential when I wanted to make it a standard release for an army. Being a villain was expensive, and a tyrant even more so. But, with another Ghoul in the pocket, and their resources now working as my own, I had gotten most of the upgrades I wanted for my people. Being superhuman was now the bare minimum that each of my minions had, from the lowliest footsoldier to the top brass.
Leaving a few of the mobsters alive turned out to work in my favor, as they wanted to join up with me in the battle’s aftermath. Since I wasn’t allowed to be a lower level than anyone who worked under me, I’d been able to raise the minimum level of my whole syndicate to fifty-five, and we sorely needed the power boost. These boosts never came in time to make the fights I got them from easier, but I still loved getting them. If I fought against Don John now, I was more than confident to say that I could have handled him alone. Not unscarred, but I’d have come out on top in the end.
In the middle of that thought, as I lounged around one of the offices I kept in one of my hidden compounds, I got an update from the system:
Congratulations! You’ve become a greater threat to the world!
+2 Raid Boss assignments
+10 Menace
+10 levels of Iniquity, Notoriety, and Influence
Oh, damn, straight up raid bosses! Previously, I had to upgrade my girls from raid mini-bosses to raid bosses using a lot of money and experience. I thought I might have gone into the red getting all three up to power, but the stat boosts were more than worth it. They were each crazy powerful now, as Kate had proven by tanking Don John so well by herself. This update was just letting me assign two raid bosses right out the gate, though. Fuck yeah.
Who to give them to? Nick and Yomura. No question. Not only are their jobs fairly location specific, keeping them at their boosted raid boss stats at all times, but it would help protect them from raids that might compromise them. Those two were essential to the whole operation, and I couldn’t put enough protection on them. Opening up my character display, I went into my inventory to find the two Raid Boss assignments, with a little icon avatar shaped like a glowing ball of light, and moved them over to Nick and Yomura’s inventories. Woot! Ten percent increase to their stats, and another twenty percent on top of that whenever they were in their territories, which would be all the time.
Before I could check on those sweet numbers, another update showed up in front of me that I’d never seen before:
Employee Count Exceeds Management Structure
Current Employees: 500,000
Standby Recruits: 750,000
Holy shit, that was a lot of employees! Last I checked, I had about half that many on the payroll. And what was that about ‘standby recruits’? Given that I’d exceeded my management structure limitations, apparently, were those people that wanted to join up with me, but I just didn’t have room for them? Fuck, they more than doubled the number of employees that had already doubled from before. I almost had more people than the army had soldiers.
But what the hell was I supposed to do about all of this? Trying to wave away the update in my face, I found another one coming up with a big text box to explain:
As the only manager of the organization, you cannot manage more than the allotted amount of employees, or the syndicate will be doomed to fracture under its own weight. You must upgrade your management by assigning managers to help you properly utilize the resources available.
Now that was interesting. I was completely unaware that I had a management structure to upgrade at all. Maybe they could have phrased it a bit differently to make it not sound like I was barrelling towards disaster, but I still liked the idea of more upgrades to throw on. Hey, if they were just going to give me different ways to hand out powerups to my people, I was going to take them. They could have said, ‘Hey, shithead, here’s your free nuke,’ and I’d have responded with a ‘Thank you, sir, can I have some more?’
I didn’t need dignity when I could just get it later with a display of power.
I did have to admit that the update screens did have a point. This last excursion basically transformed the whole syndicate in seconds, growing larger than I was capable of running in the current format, that format being just me telling everyone what to do. Even with the number of cities that I’d taken under my wing, I had some capacity to juggle them all up until. I couldn’t just micromanage everyone at every possible opportunity anymore; I had to distribute the leadership loads amongst my own people.
Fortunately for me, my employer’s system had another update on my screen for me:
Assign Management?
[Yes] [No]
You know, if this was going where I think it was going, then I had to admit to being more than a little miffed. I’d been giving out managerial duties to my subordinates already, having them streamline and organize on my behalf, way before this. Knowing that the game was giving me a mechanic that specifically did this for me boiled my blood. What bonuses was I missing out on by not having managers assigned by the system from the get-go? Well, no time like the present for getting whatever benefits the new management system was going to yield for me. I clicked ‘yes.’
Please proceed to the Character Display
Wow, this was the most direct order these updates had given me. That pinged an instinctual buzz in the back of my head, telling me that something was off. What had changed for them to demand that I have managers, especially when I had something of a management system already without the mechanic?
It wasn�
��t like they hadn’t thrown mechanics at me before with updates, but they were always discoveries, things that I stumbled upon myself just by exploring and playing the game. From what I understood, that was how they wanted our working relationship to continue, so that I could perform to the best of my abilities. They’d made such a stink about preserving my brain and leaving me to my own devices so I could do everything they wanted me to do, and now suddenly they wanted to micromanage my syndicate?
Had I grown more powerful than they anticipated, and they wanted to rein me in with this? That was what they paid me to do, grow as powerful as possible as quickly as possible. I was just doing what they asked! If anything, I deserved my full pay, plus a bonus. They should have been giving me a cool billion dollars for all the extra work I was putting into this.
Man, I really had put in way more than I bargained for into my ‘mission’ for this game. It really wasn’t about the money anymore. I’d become invested in everything I’d built in this game. What with the legion of underlings, the superpowers, the luxurious lifestyle, and the girls, I’d come to enjoy the shit out of this world. Even from just a gaming point of view, this was the most challenging and rewarding experience of my career, let alone all the perks along with it. Plus, in Forge of Heroism, I was several times richer than the measly six hundred million they offered me for the real world.
That was when I made the decision that may have affected the whole gaming world. I honestly hadn’t thought about all of this until now, but the choice was obvious. It meant a lot more work on my end to make it happen, and I didn’t know how I was going to even begin, but I was determined.