Web of Worlds
a novel
by Michael Atamanov
Reality Benders
Book#4
Magic Dome Books
Reality Benders
Book #4: Web of Worlds
Copyright © Michael Atamanov 2019
Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2019
English translation copyright © Andrew Schmitt 2019
Published by Magic Dome Books, 2019
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-80-7619-040-5
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.
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Table of Contents:
Introduction. Point of No Return
Chapter One. A Talk with the Crew
Chapter Two. Unrelenting Hospitality
Chapter Three. Kasti-Utsh III
Chapter Four. Volatile Analyst
Chapter Five. Big-Tail Warmongers
Chapter Six. Moments from Kungdom
Chapter Seven. After the Ball
Chapter Eight. Going Home!
Chapter Nine. A New Scourge
Chapter Ten. Fire from the Sky
Chapter Eleven. Crash Landing
Chapter Twelve. Medicine and Rudeness
Chapter Thirteen. Negotiations, Negotiations...
Chapter Fourteen. Claims Confirmed
Chapter Fifteen. Underground Prison
Chapter Sixteen. Moment of Truth
Chapter Seventeen. Returning Under the Dome
Chapter Eighteen. Round Two
Chapter Nineteen. Future Plans
Chapter Twenty. Woe is Sea…
Chapter Twenty-One. Volcanic Island
Chapter Twenty-Two. Business Partner
Chapter Twenty-Three. Web of Worlds
Chapter Twenty-Four. Closing the Breech.
Chapter Twenty-Five. Big Abi’s Secret
Chapter Twenty-Six. Night Assault
Introduction. Point of No Return
Moscow, Onega-3 Command Center
Russian Ministry of Defense
Small Meeting Hall
IVAN LOZOVSKY WAS very nervous, but he was trying not to show it. For the first time in his nascent term as leader of the Human-3 Faction, the curators of the Dome project had summoned him for a meeting. And although the young diplomat couldn’t see particular reason for leadership to be displeased, it was hard to be optimistic after being yanked out of important in-game negotiations with the allied German faction and urgently flown to Moscow by military helicopter. What could have possibly happened?
Things were going fairly well in the faction recently thanks to the long ceasefire with their dangerous northern neighbors, which had freed up resources for development that otherwise would have gone to military needs. The faction’s population was growing steadily and had just topped two thousand. New nodes had been incorporated. What was more, there was reason to believe that, in the next few days, they would be getting two more nodes to the south of the Yellow Mountains from the Centaurs. All their understandings with Phylira were still in force, and the striped mare was well on track to becoming sole ruler of a unified Centaur herd numbering in the thousands.
Sure, there had been certain snags and setbacks. But for a project as major and wide-scale as this, it was inevitable. How much had we lost to the senseless war the Germans started with the Naiads, for example? And surely they’d noticed the fact that we were three times over our resource budget for building the Karelia base. NPC’s just kept attacking and setting us back. But there hadn’t been any serious mistakes or blunders, and certainly no glaring failures like when Tyulenev defected to the Dark Faction, or when the enemy ambush intercepted our money from the Miyelonian pirate-merchants. The last incident, by the way, cost his predecessor Radugin this very job. So what could have been the reason for today’s emergency meeting?
Ivan Lozovsky gathered his thoughts and walked into the well-familiar small hall, which could hold just thirty people. On the door he saw a warning that wireless communications were blocked inside. The hall itself had no windows, and one whole wall was occupied by a big interactive board, which was now showing the territory of the Human-3 Faction and neighboring nodes. This was the same room where, five months earlier, the curators had instructed Ivan before a space flight to the Geckho homeworld of Shikharsa. He was a complete beginner in the game that bends reality back then, but leadership had pinned enormous hopes on his diplomatic mission. It was assumed that the all-powerful Geckho would share knowledge and technology with their new vassals. And that, they reasoned, would open the floodgates for long-distance spacecraft and, in the not-so-distant future, interplanetary travel would become an everyday occurrence on par with riding the subway.
Hrmph... naive fantasies. And although the faction was fed an official story that the diplomatic mission culminated in a brilliant success, and the Geckho had shared antigravitation technology with their new vassals that was not, in fact, even close to reality. There was no personal meeting with the great and powerful ruler Krong Daveyesh-Pir. And Lozovsky never needed the traditional greeting, which he had practiced and fine-tuned for days with Geckho diplomat Kosta Dykhsh. Instead, along with a large group of three hundred if not more representatives of new vassals, colonies and populations, the lone earthling was herded into a huge circular hall in the Sovereign Palace. And there, standing behind some tall Geckho, he didn’t even catch the briefest glimpse of the extraterrestrial ruler.
The Earth diplomat also didn’t manage to personally convey his gift to the great Krong Daveyesh-Pir, an exact copy of the golden record from the Voyager mission with all its pictures and designs. But the famous message humanity sent into deep space in the twentieth century in hopes of meeting extraterrestrial civilizations seemed pointless if he couldn’t explain its deep m
eaning.
So before returning home, Lozovsky sold the gold disk for scrap, netting enough crystals to purchase an old and very patched up antigrav. When he made it back, it became clear that he’d been scammed by a junk dealer. The craft was of Miyelonian production and thus incompatible with the parts and software that could be obtained in the nearby Geckho spaceport. Nevertheless, the antigrav elicited colossal interest from our scientists and allowed them to understand a few of the working principles and laws of physics behind antigravitation. And that was basically the whole real story of the supposed “gift.”
“Okay, we now have a quorum and can begin,” the amplified voice of a middle-aged soldier with major-general stripes brought Ivan Lozovsky back from his stroll down memory lane.
The diplomat looked around. There were no more unoccupied seats. In fact, it was the same as all the meetings he had been to as Radugin’s deputy. The thirty people, most in military uniform, looked extremely concentrated and stern, awaiting a report from the head of the faction.
The diplomat took out his tablet. He’d had just enough time to copy detailed data on faction affairs over before leaving for Moscow, including resource stockpiles, construction timeframes for important buildings, road maps and the few tight spots in their logistics. There was also a complete class and level breakdown of the players and an attempt at some kind of an average “combat power” statistic, a figure the curators told his predecessor Radugin to work out at the last meeting. It was of course a shame but, for now, it was only in raw formulas, tables and dry numbers, which were hard to interpret at first glance. But Lozovsky hadn’t been planning to give a report today, and there just wasn’t time to make an elegant presentation.
The faction head gave a bow and started looking around for the connectors and cords to his device. But the major general leading today’s meeting stopped him:
“We won’t be needing that, Ivan. Your next scheduled report is still in two weeks. Now we just want answers to a couple questions. First of all, we wanted to discuss the problem with Major Filippov’s character. As faction head, what do you intend to do with this peculiar situation?”
The faction head made an official report on this very recently. As a matter of fact, as soon as he heard the news, he got out of his virt pod to do just that. Still, it was not so much problem as a curiosity. Vasily Filippov was a highly experienced military specialist, who the curators sent under the Dome to work as a Strategist and counterweight to the Dark Faction’s terrifying new General Ui-Taka. The issue was that he was given a very unexpected choice of class when generating his character: Fisher or Bard. Before making his decision, Major Filippov left into the real world to inform his superiors. Nevertheless, the game had already registered him as player number 2018, so there was no going back or replacing him.
Clearly embarrassed, the Major then justified himself by saying that always had adored fishing and singing songs around the campfire. In fact he was a fairly talented guitar player and, in his circle of friends, was even known to play a few songs of his own composition. But he never imagined these hobbies were so close to his heart that they would eclipse all his professional training.
So, what were our options? Well, we could use him as a Strategist anyway and take a serious hit to effectiveness, or lose one faction member forever. As head of the H3 faction, Ivan Lozovsky preferred the former. The faction was in desperate need of manpower, and a Strategist working at half capacity was still better than nothing. Of course, there another possibility Lozovsky was keeping in the back of his mind, just letting Vasily Filippov work as a Fisher or Bard. It seemed better not to mention it directly, but he was trying very cautiously to lead someone else there to the thought:
“I was told Major Filippov is an experienced specialist. As far as I know, he was involved in the extremely difficult liberation of Aleppo. We definitely want someone like him in the faction, and his talents are welcome no matter how this shakes out. In case things get hairy, he at least knows how to hold a weapon. To my eye, whether he’ll level by fishing or playing guitar is a purely technical matter and up for discussion. I would personally prefer a Bard due to the morale and stat bonuses he could give other players. What’s more, our faction has no lakes or large rivers currently and, due to the war with the Naiads, the sea is currently off limits.”
A pause took hold. The lights went dim, leaving just a small area around the podium brightly lit. As far as Lozovsky knew, they did this to exchange opinions in private before a vote. Finally, the chairman spoke up:
“A majority decision has been reached. Major Filippov shall remain in the Human-3 Faction with the class of Bard. We expect the directors to develop an accelerated levelling plan for his character with a slant toward combat skills and providing positive bonuses to others. Strategist skills can be ignored for now. We plan to send another candidate to fill that role shortly.”
Sure, a very logical and rational decision. The diplomat was sincerely happy that he would soon have a decent Strategist, and not have to make do with “neither flesh nor fowl.” All that remained unclear was what to do with the new Bard. Would he still be one of the directors or deputies? Would they relegate him to the ranks of the normal players? But that decision could easily wait. The speaker must have thought so too, because he moved on to a new topic:
“The ceasefire with the Dark Faction has expired, as has the time for General Ui-Taka’s ultimatum. Our impression of the new Dark Faction leader is that he’s a no-nonsense man, someone who doesn’t throw words around willy-nilly. How prepared is the H3 Faction for an escalation in this low-intensity conflict?”
Ivan Lozovsky immediately lit up because he had lots of data about that issue and therefore lots to say. Thankfully, the faction had made significant progress here. The whole chain of fortifications on the border with the Dark Faction had been rebuilt and reinforced. The distant isolated garrisons of the Eastern no longer suffered from supply issues, new roads had been built, and the faction now had plenty of ammunition, explosives and provisions. Layered, staggered defensive lines had been constructed at the most vulnerable parts. We even had true fortresses with strong garrisons and underground storage with enough supplies to keep our defenders shooting for a long time, even when fully surrounded.
Our allies were also better prepared than before. Just yesterday, six hundred of the German H6 Faction’s best soldiers had been brought up an almost-completed road along the sea shore and deposited in the capital node and Eastern Swamp. Phylira said she could provide two thousand muscular Centaurs as well, although the tough and fast NPC’s were going to be used for transportation, not fighting. We had even reached an agreement with the harpies, who were supposedly going to patrol and do recon from the sky. Still, we didn’t put much stock into these unreliable winged allies, whose intentions shifted like the desert sands. But in any case the H3 Faction had fortified the whole border line from Karelia to the Eastern Swamp like never before. Recent tests indicated that our forces could be fully deployed in just eighteen minutes and, at the most critically dangerous points, we could ready enough troops to deflect an attack in just four.
The curators were completely satisfied with that, though there was one retort that a war could not be won by sitting back on defense. Ivan Lozovsky responded to that completely accurate remark by saying the faction had many attack plans under consideration. But each time the military experts came to the same conclusion: given the present balance of forces which was thought to be, in the best-case, two thousand of us against five or six thousand darksiders, going on the attack would be akin to suicide.
At that the Diplomat assured the military men that the situation would be changing for the better soon because we were currently developing and incorporating three southern nodes: Centaur Plateau, Rainforest, and Tropics. And in just a week, given enough resources, all three of the southern territories could be up to level two, which would allow the H3 faction to bring another five hundred twenty-two players into the game. The fact
ion’s main hope then lie in bringing the Jungles and Yellow Mountains nodes up to level three on schedule, within ten days, which would give us another one thousand players. And if, beyond that, peaceful expansion into Centaur territory continued apace, it was easily possible that we would gain two more nodes. So ideally, in ten or eleven days, the Human-3 Faction’s population would be practically doubling.
“The Dark Faction must realize that,” the chair commented almost immediately. “And as long as they aren’t growing faster than us, an attack is inevitable in the next few days.”
“If you look at it that way then of course yes. But there are other factors you aren’t considering...” the Diplomat chose his words carefully because this was quite a slippery topic and he didn’t want to delve into details. “I have already reported on our contacts with Emancipation from Mage Tyranny, a supposed ideological anti-mage liberation organization in the parallel world. No matter who they really are, they did their job and carried out a devastating terror attack at the funeral of Coruler Thumor-Anhu La-Fin, killing or crippling a large number of mourners. Many of the victims used to form the inner circle of the former ruler of the First Directory and were among the strongest Dark Faction players. A few were even in leadership.”
The experienced speaker made a pause, allowing the curators to think over what he’d said, then continued:
“We’ve long known that most Dark Faction players hail from the First Directory, the historical patrimony of the La-Fin dynasty of mages and corulers. So there’s no reason to be surprised that many of the mages killed or injured were subjects of the La-Fin family and part of the faction created by great mage Thumor-Anhu La-Fin. But that means there is a high likelihood the Dark Faction is now paralyzed, as it is basically headless. Many of the strongest mages died or were seriously wounded, and the laws of the parallel world allow only people with magical abilities to occupy leadership positions.”
“But the new head of the Dark Faction is not a mage!” came a justified objection. Lozovsky was eager to confirm that:
Web of Worlds Page 1
