Hero

by Dan Sugralinov

+100% to Self-Control

  +100% to Metabolism

  “How are you feeling, then?” Ilindi asked.

  “Like I’ve just been reborn. How did you do that?”

  She smiled. “Just a heroic ability I have, available to the First Hero.”

  “So you...”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “And Valiadis?”

  “Not him, no. None of the Terrans has done it yet.”

  “But Stace, what does that mean? Who the hell is the First Hero of this particular local segment of our Galaxy?”

  “It means the maximum social status level in the entire history of a race. It’s granted to a person who’s done more than anyone else for their peers. Not for a separate nation, mind you, but for an entire race.”

  “I see... And who is the best on our planet?”

  Ilindi smiled. “How would I know?”

  We kept silent for a while. Unable to contain the energy raging in me, I rose and started pacing the room. “I only have one question left. Why did you have to tell me all this?”

  “Because I liked you.”

  “Oh please. Do me a favor.”

  “I’m serious. You’ve shown the best progress among all the candidates in possession of our version of the interface. I’d have loved to see you standing shoulder to shoulder with my people at the Diagnostics. But to do that, you need to pass the Trial first. And you’re not ready yet.”

  “You’re dead right there,” I said, remembering the acid jelly. “I don’t even know what’s required of me. Am I supposed to fight with somebody and win?”

  “Of course. You need to win. Every Trial wave has its own rules but their essence is the same. It’s an elimination game in which only one of the initial 169 participants can win. You should come prepared. From our combined experience, I can tell you that you’ll be required to show your mastery of each of the stats you already have. You’ll be given several tasks: some can be solved through strength, others through agility or perception, or leadership and negotiation skills. Combat skills are important but even without them, you still have a chance. You’ll know what I mean when you finally face the judges on the Trial grounds.”

  She leaned and kissed me on the lips. For a brief while, I lost control, giving in to desire. Then she shrank back and rose.

  “I need to go. I think I know enough about you now. I’m very happy you didn’t disappoint me. I’m not going back to work, sorry. I’ve already spent too much time on you as it is. But I’ll be around. The day of your second abduction is near, and this time you won’t get another chance. I beg you to concentrate on your progress.”

  “Can I see you to the car?”

  “You should rest now,” she commanded.

  My eyelids felt heavy.

  “I’ve disabled Smitten,” she added. “Sorry I had to use it on you.”

  Despite her order, I saw her to the front door, locked it and returned to the lounge. The office key lay on the coffee table where she’d left it.

  I took my clothes off, switched off the light and headed for the bedroom.

  As I was falling asleep, I decided to run Vicky and myself through that Synergy thing as a married couple.

  In this case, instead of our annual income, the program evaluated both our personal and combined happiness levels. It resulted in an average of 44%. Which meant that Vicky’s presence made me almost three times less happy. And the next year, it dropped even more.

  The program’s prognosis was rather unpromising: another year and a half of living as a couple would put us in the red happiness-wise. And then we’d part ways again, for good this time.

  The gnawing pain in my chest which all these days had intensified every time I’d thought about Vicky now began to ease up. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved her — but faced with the program’s impartial opinion, this feeling began to give way to rational thinking.

  Just out of curiosity I decided to check Yanna too. There, the picture wasn’t much better. Had we renewed our relationship, we might have been happy for a while but would have been forced to split up again within less than a year.

  Ditto for Veronica. But between her and Alik, that was different. 200% Synergy!

  I tried Ilindi but the program kept offering an error message.

  My lips stretched into a smile. When I finally fell asleep, my last flashing thought was that I’d have to grill Martha about everything that had happened to me in my “past lives”...

  Chapter Seventeen. My Fourth Life

  Self-improvement is masturbation, self-destruction is the answer.

  Fight Club

  I AWOKE from an unbearable piercing pain in the back of my head.

  Gasping, I got out of bed, sat up and opened the interface. It was 7.33 a.m., Saturday July 21 2018. It was only twenty-four hours ago that Gleb and I had come back from the poker club where I’d won enough to pay his debts back. And late last night, I’d spoken to Stacy — or Ilindi, rather — here at home.

  But what had I experienced right now? That hadn’t been a dream. I still remembered every detail of it: the fear, the fury, the stench of gas and fire, the taste of earth in my mouth, the sound of gunfire still ringing in my ears. If felt as if it only had just happened.

  This dream — although it wasn’t a dream, really — had forced me to live several days of some other life which was still undoubtedly my own. In that life, I was still with Vicky and had popped out one night to fetch some cat food for Boris.

  That’s when I’d met that girl, Milena, at the mall. She looked lost and tearful. The icon of an active quest hovered over her head. Apparently, she’d lost her little nephew in the crowd.

  His name was Joseph Kogan, six years old.

  I’d just seen him at the parking lot, accompanied by some guy. The boy’s behavior had seemed a little strange to me. He was staggering, his face blank. The man — whose name was Grechkin — had helped him into a car and driven off.

  Now that I’d spoken to Milena, I used the boy’s marker to locate him on the map and offered her my help. We used her car to chase after the abductor and forced him to release the child. When I realized what could have happened to the boy, I gave the guy a good hiding, unable to restrain myself. In the end, he said he’d found the boy at the mall and had decided to take him home to his parents. Milena refused to call the cops, so the guy got off the hook. Still, the quest was duly closed and even added a few nice points to my Insight.

  Valeri Grechkin turned out to be a well-appointed official at the town hall. Apparently, he had a long memory. His associates worked out where I lived. So a few days later, they punched my lights out, threw me in the trunk and took me out of town to Grechkin’s hunting lodge. They were the same two junks who were later responsible for my third death at the casino: Wheezie and Zak.

  They kept me in an underground cellar for two days naked, without food or water. All that time I kept leveling up my physical stats while feeding on earth worms (which are an excellent source of protein) and quenching my thirst with the rainwater dripping from above.

  When they’d finally dragged me out and brought me into the house, making me kneel in front of Grechkin, I recognized the whole bunch of them straight away. Next to him stood none other than Colonel “Dimedrol” complete with his two sidekicks.

  The program must have recalculated my environmental safety index based on all the hardships I’d had to suffer. I won’t bore you with the details, but it had allowed me to activate my Stealth and Vanish heroic ability right in front of all those bloodsuckers. Fifteen seconds of invisibility turned out to have been plenty of time to grab the gun from Wheezie and smoke them all.

  I could also remember dousing the place with gasoline and watch this den of iniquity being razed to the ground.

  And then I’d died.

  “MORNING, PHIL!” I heard Martha’s voice a mere few feet away. “How are you feeling?”

  “Martha? What’s happened?”

  “Before falling asleep,
you told me to restore the memories of your past lives. Your first life ended when you confronted the acid jelly during the first Trial. You didn’t die but in order to avoid the uninstallation of the interface, I had to bring you back to the moment in time when you were driving to the Ultrapak corporate party. That was the night you met Victoria.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Your third life ended 31 hours 23 minutes ago. You were stabbed in the heart by Zachary “Zak” Nikolaev.”

  “I remember that, too.”

  “Consequently, in order to carry out your orders, I had to make you relive your second life, the one ending when Zak shot you dead at Dimedrol’s house. I can’t plant that actual memory into your mind just like I can’t plant knowledge. But I can give you the possibility to relive a certain scenario in your dream. So I showed you the last days of your second life.”

  “But how could I have relived several days in one night’s sleep?”

  “Time flows much faster when you’re asleep. We use this a lot in the future whenever we want to take a break, relive certain happy moments or reinforce a certain skill...”

  “Oh really?” I interrupted her. “Does that mean that nothing of what I’d experienced last night has added to my stats?”

  I opened the interface and heaved a sigh of disappointment. I could have used the Stealth and Vanish skill I’d received in my second life.

  “No, because all you did in your dream was relive a prerecorded scenario without playing an active part in it,” she explained. “You were only an onlooker even though you might have thought you’d taken part in the events because you saw everything in real time without activating your own memories of whatever had happened after the reality had split. For the Phil who was killed that night by Wheezie’s gunshot, it was all for real. But for you as you are now, life took a different turn the night you’d decided to stay at home instead of fetching cat food from the mall. Which means that now...”

  “Now I’ve lost three lives,” I whispered. “Is this my last one?”

  “Yes. Until now, I managed to circumvent the activation requirements because you don’t fulfil them, anyway. But I can’t do it anymore. No idea which one of our alien friends had grassed you up but they seem to have installed a patch on your interface. It’s nothing serious except that I don’t have access to blocked abilities anymore.”

  “I see,” I said pensively. Then I remembered my dream. “I can remember the other Phil change the environmental safety index. Mind telling me more about it? I never got around to it.”

  She went on explaining that the program could evaluate the user’s environment and bestow additional stat points on him provided his or her social status level was above average within a certain local segment of our Galaxy. The more dangerous the environment and the higher the user’s importance, the cooler the freebies.

  That was really important to know. I really had to try and do the same in this life, too.

  I unsummoned Martha. When she’d disappeared, I’d spent a long time trying to get my head around it by superimposing my dual memories. In order to do that, I had to insert a few fragments from my second life — namely, when Vicky had had a bad premonition and come back home to me from her parents’.

  I had a lot to grasp: the constantly changing environmental safety index with its perks; the Stealth and Vanish heroic ability, incredible in its coolness, which I’d rejected in favor of Lie Detection; the possibility of leveling Insight by doing social quests... I still had to give all this some thought in order to use it in my real-life leveling.

  Gradually, the picture came into focus.

  The other Phil had gone to fetch some cat food for Boris. Stacy, a.k.a. Ilindi the Rhoa, had been Milena in this Phil’s life. He'd joined a different boxing group: not the one with Mohammed and Kostya but the one with Yuri and the Tatar guy — the group that practiced Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The other Phil had leveled up faster than I did... by the same token, he’d also died much quicker than the third one.

  And here I was, the fourth Phil. The fourth and the last.

  Both my gaming past and the months spent with the interface had allowed me to take the news relatively lightly. What made me furious was the anger, the hate and the malice that I felt toward Wheezie and Zak — the two junks who’d killed me twice already, — as well as their corrupt boss “Dimedrol” and especially that pedophile Grechkin. The fact that I’d managed to turn him in in this life was some consolation because by doing so, I must have saved little Joseph again.

  My phone vibrated on the bedside table. It was Kostya texting me that he expected me at the school stadium in half an hour.

  As I got ready, I kept thinking about all the things that still needed to be done. We had to grow the company; I had to level up real-life skills and abilities and prepare for my next abduction and the following Trial. Also, I would have loved to hire Cyril, Marina and Greg, seeing as we already needed some savvy salespeople.

  As I walked out of the house, I realized something very important. You couldn’t defeat the likes of Dimedrol and his sidekicks by combat skills alone. If you punished them, others would simply take their place. So if I had to choose between Batman and Superman, I’d prefer Bruce Wayne but with Superman’s skills.

  * * *

  “HAVE YOU GOT your gloves?” Kostya asked.

  The rising sun was shining in our eyes. He crouched down on the running track by his gym bag, squinting at me from under his eyebrows. You wouldn’t say he was only twenty-one. He was economical with both his words and movements like an arthritic old man calculating his every move.

  Still, I could hardly have called him a “young man with an old man’s eyes”, the way they describe someone who’s experienced a lot in their few years of life. His eyes were young and full of life.

  It was just that he didn’t speak much and practically never smiled. The reason for this was standing right next to him: his four-year-old sister Julie. As today was the weekend, he’d brought her along to the training session.

  The girl seemed to have some rare children’s disease. I didn’t know any details. She looked like any other girl, only very skinny and pale, almost translucent. Her dark-blond hair was clumsily braided into two plaits — probably, one of Kostya’s jobs.

  “Uncle Phil! Kostya’s asking you if you’ve brought the gloves!” the girl’s voice was remarkably bright and her diction clear.

  “Yes, I’ve got them,” I replied with a smile.

  “Fancy some sparring?” Kostya banged his gloves together.

  We’d already finished training, so his offer had come as a surprise.

  “Aren’t you in a hurry?” I asked, surprised.

  “Where to? I don’t need to take her to the kindergarten today. Am I right, Juls? Once we’re done, we can go for a walk. She keeps asking me to take her to see this cartoon, so we might go to the flicks.”

  “The flicks! Yes!” the girl twirled around on the spot, pressing her favorite doll to her chest. I noticed she was slightly limping. Something wasn’t right with her hip.

  “What do the doctors say?” I asked Kostya, nodding at the girl.

  “We need to have her operated on before she turns six. But our surgeons won’t take the risk. We need to go abroad,” he walked over to me. “Come on, put ’em up!”

  As we exchanged blows, Julie kept chanting, supporting her brother,

  “Kostya! Kostya!”

  But as soon as I’d missed a number of rather painful jabs, she changed camp and started to support me instead. It must be our national trait to root for an underdog. At a certain point, Kostya relaxed and missed my right hook. He recoiled, gesturing to me to stop.

  I waited for him to come round. My hook had been a beauty!

  Congratulations! You’ve received a new skill level!

  Skill name: Boxing

  Current level: 6

  XP received: 500

  “Not bad,” he said, holding his jaw, then added with a d
isarming smile, “Serves me right for dropping my guard. It’s all right, Sis, don’t you worry!”

  Julie stood next to him, clinging to his leg. She could support me all she wanted but blood was thicker than water.

  “How about we stop for today?” I asked.

  “Sure. I’m not in good shape today. I’m not saying you’re gonna win the championship,” he laughed at the absurdity of the idea, “but you might get through a few rounds.”

  “You mean the championship that Matov invited us to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you enroll yourself?”

  He shrugged and nodded surreptitiously at Julie.

  “Sorry, I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What’s there not to understand? Didn’t you hear me when I said I couldn’t afford it? At the moment, every penny counts. I’m saving... you know what I mean?”

  “How about we go for a run?” I turned to the girl. “Do you mind waiting here while your brother and I jog a little? What’s your doll’s name?”

  “It’s Angelique.”

  “You and Angelique wait here, okay?”

  She nodded and stepped away from her brother, perching herself on a bench next to his bag. Kostya and I set off at a trot.

  “So what’s with the tournament?” I asked.

  “They’re a bit greedy with the entry fee.”

  “What, ten thousand rubles?”

  “Ten thousand! Ten thousand rubles can last us two a month! I earn thirty grand as a trainee and I set some of it aside for her surgery, then we live off the rest. Are you suggesting I dip into her money? Let them get stuffed!” he spat in disgust. “Matov grabs what he can from it all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got some kind of shady business with them. He sends his fighters to clandestine matches. There’re several coaches like him there. If a normal coach trains his athletes for legitimate competitions, these bastards...” he lowered his voice, “they only think about their bank accounts. The other boys told me a few things about them.”