World of the changed 3 Noa in the flesh

by Vasily Mahanenko

  Chapter 5

  THE ENORMOUS PROCESSION accompanying the transporter did nothing if not inspire awe. It was an actual army made up of all things crawling, running, riding, and flying. Monsters, players, and machines — they were all there. There was even a gigantic machine flying over the transporter and casting some kind of field, presumably for protection. Worried about kicking up a fuss, I decided against sending Drone in for a closer look.

  Osier’s group disappeared into the procession like a bubbling pill into a glass of water. There were so many of the beasts that another three hundred barely moved the needle.

  But even that wasn’t what stunned me the most. From my position lying in the locator, I stared in shock at the thirty little stars shining so brightly that their light beat its way through protection and metal like it was nothing. I could see noa. There was no way for me to summon it the way I did my phone, but just the fact that I could see it was great news. The absorber rank had finally given me something positive to go along with all the headaches.

  It took everything in me to sit still. Thirty units of noa was enough to last me for a month, the exact amount of time World of the Changed had held sway on Earth, and that was enough for me to wreak some serious havoc. For example, I could clear the hexagon completely. And why not? There were worse ideas.

  “Move out!” Osier had taken on the mantle of command, and the entire army headed toward the generals location. The locator, almost as if on purpose, moved over to be right next to the transporter. I couldn't just see the noa; I could feel it. The warmth, the inner flows of energy, the dancing colors, all of it was right there for me. As I dug into my inner feelings, I lost track of time, something I couldn't have been happier about. Lying bent over as I was and doing nothing wasn’t all that enjoyable. On the other hand, it didn’t last too long — Osier decided to call a halt ten hours later.

  That wasn’t the kind of news I was looking for. They say time is money, but it was slightly different for me. Time was everything. Any delay meant risking my life.

  I needed to get them going again. And a quick circle with Drone told me exactly how I could do that.

  A small squad of players had separated from the main ground and headed into a village we were passing by. Kicking out the disgruntled inferior and superior monsters who called the place home, the players got to work looting. I was interested to see what could possibly grab their attention — there weren't going to be any game items there. Surprisingly, the aliens went after jewelry, as banal as that was. Going one by one to each of the buildings and apartments, they scanned them using some kind of unprepossessing device, only jumping in with a happy cry when something showed up. If we’d been friends, I would have told them they’d picked the wrong village to go looking for diamonds in. But friends we were not, and it gave me no qualms to activate Drone’s automatic pistol. As soon as one of the players started scanning a building, I shot it from the rear. Its head exploded in a cloud of blood, and my flying pillow’s arm shot forward to grab the player’s phone from its belt. And since nobody saw Drone, I was able to get it invisible and into cloud cover almost immediately. Let s see if Osier gets the message.

  It looked like he had.

  The quiet night erupted with the howl of a siren, and the players started dashing out of their tents in order to repel an attack from that most fearsome of enemies — me. Even the monsters woke up. They rubbed their eyes, unsure of what was going on.

  “Report!” I heard Osier bark over the commotion.

  “Mark killed a player!”

  “Do we have confirmation that it was Mark?”

  “Well...who else would it be?”

  “You idiots, did you check the logs? Where’s the player’s phone? Three, what does the game say?”

  “Mark didn't kill the player with his own two hands.” The general's third spawn stepped out of the flying base, which looked like a hangar. It looked something like the missing link between Two's humanoid form and the irons the older versions looked like. Basically, it was an iron with arms and legs. There was a useless head, too.

  “In that case, it wasn’t Mark! Probably just friendly fire.”

  “I don’t know how, but Mark had something to do with it. Directly,” Three replied. “None of its partners was involved.”

  “How could it be both Mark and not Mark?” Osier asked angrily. “What’s with the riddles?”

  Just then, Drone found another player who’d ventured out on its own. We weren't far from the river, and an alien had decided to take a dip, presumably one that came from some sort of watery w^orld judging by its look and scales. Drone hovered above the surface waiting for the scaled head to pop out. And as soon as it did, a small fish pinned between sharp teeth, Drone took a single shot. Yet again, the arm shot out, that time dipping into the water. The alien’s phone had been latched to its belt.

  The siren, which had fallen silent, rang out again with renewed

  vigor.

  “Again?!” Osier clearly had no idea what wras going on. “Three?!”

  “Another player was killed, this time on the other side. Mark Derwin was involved somehow yet again. He's taking out loners.”

  Damn it! I hate smart robots.

  “New base-wide policy: no movement allowed unless as part of a group of at least five!” Osier boomed out, and three players appeared as if out of nowhere. Drone’s scanner didn't pick them up — that told me a lot.

  “Current status?” one asked. I recognized the voice — Elhar Gee. It turned out to be a four-armed monster with three legs. Oh, wait, that’s tivo legs and a thick tail. Everything was enclosed in armor, so it was hard to make out the details. It was dark, too. Next to it were two similarlooking creatures, apparently yet another group of mega-killers. Three handed something to Elhar, which meant I didn't get to hear what the status was.

  “Mark was involved in the kill?” Elhar said thoughtfully. “Explosions? Traps?”

  “Probably,” Osier replied. “Nobody got through the net, and the locator didn't sound the alarm. If — ”

  “I’m not sure why you’re here and not checking everything personally,” Elhar jumped in threateningly. “Go make sure they were traps!”

  I couldn’t react before an entire forest of blasters appeared suddenly around Osier. All three hundred of its fighters had been hidden around the transporter, and I hadn't had any idea. Good thing I didn't fry to sneak over and filch the noa...

  “Don’t you think you’re overstepping just a tad?” The venom in Osier’s voice was on par with anything the hungriest and craziest of the monsters could have cooked up. “My job is to secure the transporter and locator, not run around at the beck and call of some demons! If you want to look into it, be my guest. I have enough on my plate.”

  Elhar said nothing, though its fighters threw protective fields over themselves. I’d never seen any like theirs. Generally speaking, protection extended a few millimeters outside the armor, though theirs formed a kind of cocoon well away from their bodies. I needed to figure out what they were — they looked impressive.

  “We’re free to move between hexagons, Osier,” Elhar said coolly, unmoved by the three hundred blasters aimed at it. “Sooner or later, the owner is going to let us all go, and the release isn’t going to be over any time soon.”

  “Let’s do without your threats! Have you found Mark Derwin yet? Or do we need to handle that, too? Just do your job, demon! It’s fine, everyone. Elhar just remembered some important things that came up.”

  Turning aw7ay pointedly, Osier walked off, leaving its troops to turn their camouflage back on. It was so perfect, in fact, that even knowing where the detachment was, Drone wasn’t letting me pick them out visually. And since my device control would only have reached half of them, it wasn't a risk worth taking. I was afraid some of them might have had a way of telling them they were being hacked.

  Instead, I flew around the area in search of my next victim, though the commander’s order was bein
g carried out to the letter. Drone finally came around to hover above the army and track its movements. Honestly, I had no idea why everyone had stopped. Osier had mentioned something about how they weren't going to be getting any sleep, and then it had up and laid out a picnic.

  But my confusion wasn’t long-lived. About half an hour later, Osier headed over toward the transporter, checked something on its phone, and drooped suddenly as if a heavy weight had been lifted from its shoulders. The general murmur of the camp was broken by its amplified voice.

  “General assembly! Up and out, meeting guests!”

  Guests? New dots appeared on Drone’s scanner. It was another transporter. The army accompanying it was just as big as ours, and I felt a twitter in my stomach when the big machine came to a halt right next to the one we were guarding. It had noa inside, too. Another thirty units.

  Several minutes went by as everyone joined the assembly, and we then all began moving firmly toward our destination. The general’s location was just three hundred kilometers away, or six locations, and if nothing else changed, we were going to be there in five hours.

  It was time to get my head in the game. How can I fool the scanner without getting out of my game clothes? As soon as I took it off, the aliens were going to lose their minds — I would show up on the ranking. But if I didn’t take it off, they would catch me on their scanners. After mulling the problem over for a couple hours, I realized I was practically stumped. I even thought about disemboweling one of the transporters by creeping up under cover of my invisibility, grabbing the noa, and making off while I still had the chance. But that didn’t do the trick. I needed to get to the general.

  The only question was how.

  Even if I took everything but Fartira off, they were still going to catch me. The scanners picked up game equipment, and Fartira, which hid me, couldn’t hide itself. But what if they have something that scans for biological substances, too? The general was nobody’s fool — it knew I could ride into the location inside something. The last thing I wanted to do was underestimate my opponent.

  My head started hurting from the stress. What am I going to do? I needed a way to disappear from reality for a couple minutes, wait for the scan to be over, and then —

  Disappear from I'eality... Wait a second, I know how to do that!

  The trial functionality welcomed me with open arms. Seeing the usual stand and tablet asking me to pick my perversion and decide how long I wanted to enjoy it, I refrained from making a selection. Waiting a couple minutes to check out my theory was far more important. From everything I understood about the trials, they were something similar to the dungeons — a virtual reality couched inside the real world. When you stepped into a dungeon, you disappeared out of reality, finding yourself somewhere else, in another world, where the rules were completely different. The same was true of the trials. In that moment, my body was no longer in the locator. If anyone had peeked inside, they wouldn’t have seen me — that was how I thought it worked, at least.

  But I needed to make sure.

  The first thing I checked was where I’d be dropped when I returned from the trials. I wasn’t sure what coordinates I was linked to, whether it was the locator or the ground. Was I going to pop up back in the machine or be hovering above the ground in the exact spot where I'd disappeared? Just in case, I took two minutes to make sure the mass of players would be gone if I didn’t appear back in the locator.

  I just about shouted for joy when I left the trials. Showing up in the locator, I looked around and found that the procession had covered a good bit of ground in the time I’d been gone. That meant the seconds kept ticking away. Perfect!

  Then came the next test.

  A level one drone cost a measly 120 thousand, and I threw in a camera I hooked up to my second device and turned on myself. What else was I going to do? Pm a vain son of a bitch. Stepping back into the trial, I noted the time. Exactly two minutes later, I stepped back out and immediately pulled up the video from the drone I’d just bought.

  Excellent! My body really had disappeared the same way it did with dungeons. Time inside matched time outside perfectly, as the creator had played right into my hands by keeping things simple. The drone was returned to the store, and I grunted. I knew how I was going to get into the closed location. I also knew I didn't need to be inside the locator, as I was sure the same principles would hold true outside it.

  The rest of the time passed by fairly quickly. After swallowing a noa sphere to reset my clock to twenty-four hours, I waited patiently for the procession to get to where we were going. The general had built up some powerful defenses. We were only permitted into the location next to the general’s one by one, with each player, monster, and even machine carefully checked. That was the first time I jumped into the trials and stayed there for a whole hour before venturing back out.

  The locator was inside the zone, but we weren’t going anywhere. The guards were still checking away. Also, from what I could tell, it looked like they were going around for a second time. Players and monsters both, even the ones in the transporter, were stepping out of the location before coming back in one by one through an enormous arch. It was presumably the scanner to end all scanners. Guards were crawling all over the transporter and locator, waring some kind of device back and forth. Realizing there was nothing for me to do there, I jumped back into the trials for another hour.

  When I came back out, I cursed. We hadn't gone anywhere, though the rest of the army was already inside the location. I wasn’t about to send Drone in — I didn’t like the way the energy field was pulsing vaguely. It was coming from firing machines that looked like leaning towers of Pisa pulled straight from the earth. Drone even calculated the distance between them to be about ten kilometers, and they ringed the whole location. The next one over, too. And that told me Drone wasn’t getting in.

  That's a problem.

  “Are you kidding me?!” I heard Osier yell. “This is ridiculous! What else do you have to do?”

  “General’s orders,” replied the implacable robot in charge of the inspectors. “We suspect that Mark Derwin got into the location. You’re the only ones who came in, so he has to be somewhere mixed in with you.”

  “Why don’t you just take the noa and let us go?” Osier asked. “Leave the transporters, kick everyone else out. Does that work?”

  I tensed up. If the locator wasn’t heading in, I was in trouble. Things were going to get dicey.

  “We can’t let transporters in without escorts,” the robot said. “We don’t have the resources to keep them secure.”

  “So, let the escorts in!” Osier was furious. “We’ve already lost so much time that the general is going to dock our pay. Just tell it that — either we deliver the goods here, or we turn around and deliver it to one of the next hexagons over. The generals over there aren't so paranoid.”

  “Approval was granted for you to come in,” the robot replied briskly. Wait a second, can we get a little more detail there? Was there some kind of competition going on between the generals to see who could collect the most noa? The concentration plants don’t belong to them? The procession moved out, and I had Drone hover at its maximum altitude. The feed held steady for a while, though it eventually got too far away even with the high-resolution camera.

  The location we made our way through turned out to be deserted. There were neither humans nor aliens, with even the trees torn down. It looked like the space had been bulldozed and paved over with something like concrete. Even the rivers were enclosed in pipes or something pipelike. There were mines everywhere, too. As a demolitions expert, I was practically blinded by the variety of hidden explosives. If it had all gone off, the entire army would have been done in — I didn’t think the location would have survived as a single entity. What is the general so aft'aid of?

  We zigzagged ahead as if following a drunk rabbit. I didn’t even try to memorize the path we were taking, though we crossed a few security checkpoints equippe
d with scanner arches. They were so big, in fact, that both the transporters and the locator were able to fit through easily. Just in case, I ducked into the trials, unwilling to test my mettle against the machines.

  Half an hour in another dimension, and I was once again part of the long trip to the next checkpoint. I wonder how they have the air covered. Could there be some sort of incredibly powerful air defense system? From what I’d been able to see with Drone, none of the players or monsters had even tried to fly through the location. And that was presumably for a reason.

  “You can head back — the transporters will be going ahead on their own,” I heard a lifeless voice say. “Your mission is complete. The locator will be sent off for repairs, and I d recommend tearing off the limbs of wThoever tried to repair it the first time. You can’t treat machines like that.”

  If I hadn’t knowm what the robot was saying, I would have assumed it was some kind of grumpy old woman.

  “All right, One.” I could have sworn Osier even bowed. “Will that be

  all?”

  “Find Mark, and father will give you the kind of reward that will last several releases.”

  Oh, wow! It was the very same One who hadn’t been able to make it into the southern location so long as I wras there. It wrould have been interesting to get a good look at it, though its next wrords made me tense up.

  “Take the vehicles in for repairs. Complete disintegration. Let’s see wrho’s hiding in them.”

  “But what about the noa?” someone asked. From what I could tell, Osier had already beaten a retreat.

  “The noa... Okay, let’s head toward the storage. Bring the disintegrator with us and cover both transporters and the locator with a blocking dome. I don’t want anything living getting out.”

  I even got an itch in my crotch. Somehow, I hadn’t thought the machines would enjoy that level of scrutiny. Given that I wasn’t interested in being there for the procedure, I decided to jump into the trials and stay there as long as the game would let me.