The arm had almost reached my body when I activated my ability. Of course, I wanted to say something special, something grandiose, but I didn’t want to end up an antihero in a dime novel. Spending half an hour pontificating only to die spectacularly wasn’t for me.
You sacrificed the general in hexagon 118 using the absorber’s sacrificial offering quality.
The game creator appreciated your sacrifice.
All data regarding the sacrificed creature was removed
from the game.
Information about the kill and its consequences was sent to all players and release creatures.
All the general’s obligations were transferred to the
release owner.
You can collect l named item in the store.
Level +200 (1645).
2000 free attribute points received.
***
You destroyed a general and became the head of the safe zone in hexagon 118. All hexagon monsters are your captives.
You are a natural release player, so your captives have been transformed back. Hexagon 118 has been pulled out of release 3R32-221 and can only be returned after your death. All natural players in the release have been sent information about
the zone.
***
Non-natural release players as well as larva-level creatures are required to leave the zone within 6 hours and can no longer remain in it without your permission. The game functionality itself provides for the location’s safety.
You destroyed a general.
Valkyrie, Fang, Ulbaron, Raptor, Zelda, Fartira, and Shulma levels increased by l (41).
***
You’re the first natural release player to kill a general.
2000 free attribute points received.
The field holding me disappeared, as did the brain floating in the retort. Sacrificial offering had turned it into a tiny black dot. There was a scraping and crashing noise as the transporters hauling cocoons up to the vault stopped and jammed in place, and I felt the tower wobble. It was linked to the general and shaken to its foundation when the latter was killed. But it still held firm. In fact, everything was so commonplace that it felt like a letdown. A monster that strong, and such a wimpy end.
I looked the desk over with interest. It wTas clear the boss had used it to manage its holdings, and I really wanted to dig into the innards of the local system. Making sure nobody was close enough to give me problems, I took a few steps forward and placed my hand on its surface.
Device control activated and...
I froze, overwhelmed by the avalanche of information.
The general had controlled everything. Literally everything. Even-detail, every mechanism, eveiy changed in the hexagon — it had access to it all. Things weren't great with the latter, as the inferior and superior monsters were turning back into people. Meanwhile, the larvae and a dozen other kinds of monsters, some of which I'd never heard of, were making a beeline out of the hexagon. Shrews, locators, destroyers, diggers, seekers, and more. There was no way for me to stop them, unfortunately, as they were no longer being controlled by the general. But honestly, I didn't even want to. There was too much going on for me to worry about a trifle like that.
One thing I appreciated was that my brain kept up with the streams of information, filtering out wiiat I didn’t need to know7. Managing the buildings and little robots was marked as unnecessary. I needed to figure out what was most important, and I thought I did a good job — there w7ere about a hundred thousand humans being held in different enclosures and prisons around the hexagon. In one fell swoop, I opened all the doors and other devices keeping them there, releasing them all into the wild. They wrere going to have to take care of themselves.
Next, I found a report from the digger telling me it had almost gotten through the layer of noa to the dragon's blood. It was estimating there w7as just less than a ton of the valuable substance. Verloven took me for a ride, that bastard. I made a mental note to bring that up with him later.
What else was important? Access to the storages, resources, and machinery. And I had plenty of that. I even found an estimated value for the city — a hundred trillion coins, which was just the buildings. The number didn't cover the contents of the storages. All I wanted to do was sell it all, but I held back. There were lots of prisoners being held aboveground, and if I’d sold everything, they would have dropped like a whole bunch of rocks.
I needed to wait just a bit.
The owner reacted to the changes quickly — almost all the different sections in the store were blocked. That was disappointing, as I’d been looking forward to buying what I needed to get my named equipment up to level sixty. At that point, no other players would have been able to stand in my way. I would have been free to go owner-hunting.
But it was not to be. As I paged through the settings, I found a list labeled defenses, one I assumed was fairly important. For whatever reason, the label was blinking to grab my attention. I decided it wouldn't be bothering me without needing to, so I pulled up the menu and stared at the simple message:
3 large nuclear missiles launched. Target: main hexagon location. After the death of the general, the air defense no longer works. Time to impact: 20 seconds.
***
The owner blocked the store. You can contest its decision.
Wait, so it’s working with the troops? Unbelievable! I turned in a panic, trying to think of where I could hide, but there was nowhere to be found. Instead, I began undressing and throwing my named equipment into virtual reality. It wouldn’t have been great to leave them there when I died.
The crushing wall of fire hit me just as Ulbaron, the last of my items, disappeared. It’s impossible to explain how the blow fell — it was deafeningly loud. All I could do was dive under the desk, grabbing the legs and cables. That was the best protection I could find.
What happened next can only be described using one word: hell. The tower I was in was demolished. The table I was hiding under was shattered, and I was supposed to be, too, only my body refused to give in. It was certainly battered, however. The shock wave drove me down into the ground and mixed me up in the cables. And that was when the main blast hit.
The huge vat was carried off somewhere I didn’t see. Fire, pieces of wall, and fire again flew overhead. Thanks to the first wave and the ground, the only thing that hit me was the temperature, which I barely even felt. My body could withstand five thousand degrees, after all. Plus, I was lucky in that none of the three detonations were near the main towTer. All of them had been aimed around the edges of the location. Since the troops didn’t know7 wThat to target, they’d fired at random in an attempt to cover as much as they could.
All I could do was lie there and curse. Before heading off to see Lirkun, I was going to have to fly north and have a long talk with General Maximov. Generals seem to be a problem for me...
The problem I found myself facing a couple minutes later was an interesting one: how to get out of the hole I’d been buried in. The crumpled metal and jumbled cables had cooled, and it took quite an effort to push my way out. When I was finally successful, albeit with cut and bruised skin, I looked out over a landscape of complete desolation.
There was nothing left of the location. The city had been wiped off the map. Even the doors that had so laughed in the face of danger were gone, and it was hot, if tolerably so. The surrounding area was just under five thousand degrees. The radiation mattered nothing to me — my regeneration was more than it could handle. At a loss, I turned around, though the scenery in that direction was no better. Also, there was no oxygen. My lungs told me that almost immediately. Knowing my body, I had about fifteen minutes until I lost consciousness, which meant I had to find somewiiere cool enough to pull Ulbaron out and grab a couple breaths. If I were an eleinental...
Wait a second!
My body heated up, acclimating to the temperature of the air around me, and I no longer felt the need to breathe. Elementals didn’t need air. T
he ground beneath me began to melt, and I floated forward in the hopes of finding something I could sell. Sadly, there wras nothing. Off in the distance, I saw the remains of towers swept awray by the blast,
though I couldn’t zoom in without Ulbaron. Maybe, they aren't towers.
The protective dome was gone, and I could see a blue sky through the fiery-red glare above us. At least, it was kind of blue. Rain began falling. Radioactive. And I had a whole hexagon full of humans returning to form. They didn’t have food, water, or clothes, and they were going to have to deal with radiation on top of that. It was the perfect way to die a miserable death spent cursing Mark Derwin. After all, I was the one who had turned them from strong monsters into weak humans.
I needed people who were capable of gathering the remains of the changed and somehow organizing them, and there was only one place I knew of to find them. The troops in the north. Well... Fate was making it abundantly clear what I needed to do next. I’d learned howT to deal with the aliens; it was time to learn how to deal with humans.
And that seemed to me to be a much harder job.
Chapter 18
PICKING MY WAY out from between the epicenters of three nuclear explosions turned out to be a challenge. Even for me, a fire elemental who could just plow straight on ahead, it was tricky. At least, all I had to do was fly up to an obstacle for it to melt away. But the potholes and ditches I came across forced me to change back into my human form — the makeshift bridges that had fallen across them also melted out from under me as soon as I got close.
And that was how I made it twenty kilometers. Forging ahead until I got to a hole in the ground, changing into a human and holding my breath, running quickly over to the other side, and changing back into an elemental. But while that took forever, I didn’t want to damage Ulbaron.
I decided to stop by where the inverted pyramid had once stood. The warehouse beckoned me with its 243 stones, the ones the aliens still had after I d taken the rest. But the warehouse, aliens, and noa were all gone. The explosion had wiped the wiiole mess out or carried it off somewhere. And no matter how hard I tried to sense the stones, which I assumed were buried somewiiere nearby, I came up empty. There was nothing within the 41-meter detection range I had for concentrated noa.
After giving the ground a frustrated kick with the part of my body that passed for legs, I kept going. It was a tough blow that was definitely going to cost me down the road. But there was nothing I could do. Once I learn how to fly, III come back to look around. Everything was going to have cooled off by then, too.
It took me six hours to get out of the impact zone. In that same timeframe, the players should all have left the hexagon, and I sincerely hoped some of them hadn’t had enough time. Fewer for me to take out. But without Raptor, I couldn’t get a report, not to mention requests to access the hexagon. I was sure the aliens were going to be sending them at all hours of the day.
Finding a gully to hide in where the temperature was cooler, I turned back into a human and climbed into my named equipment. My guess had been right on the money — I’d gotten over a million requests for access to the hexagon. But that time, I didn’t think twice, just turning them over to be processed automatically. Refused permanently. I didn’t even want to see who or what was trying to get into my area. There was no room for aliens, and humans didn’t care in the least where they were.
That done, I set out a mountain of noa and a dragon’s tear in front of me, sighed deeply, and began filling my stomach with the spheres. It was time to level-up.
Absorber +1 (4).
Ulbaron selected. Choose a quality: good eye, flight,
protection, hermetic seal, support.
My jaw dropped when it hit me how important Ulbaron was. And that doesn't even cover everything it does! Those functions were only the ones selected as absorber qualities, and it looked like I was going to be chowing down on quite a bit of noa to get them all.
Good eye and flight made sense, and I didn’t really need more information on them, though I did want to go through the other options. Judging by the description, protection formed a field around me that ray guns couldn’t penetrate. It linked up with Ulbaron’s defenses, the most important part being that the opponent’s weapon level didn’t matter. Even Lirkun with its named items that were better than mine couldn’t get through. Definitely takuig that!
The hermetic seal let me breathe under water as well as in a number of other situations where there wasn’t enough oxygen by generating the gas out of thin air and pumping it right into my lungs. That was useful, too — I didn’t always have the opportunity to turn into an elemental.
But support was even more useful. It wasn’t just the air conditioning aspect, which I loved, but also the regeneration syringe that could give me control back over my body. Of course, I needed another quality to use the syringes themselves, but that was a minor detail. I'll take that, too.
As I looked over the dragon’s tears I had, it was clear what I was going to spend them on. Five were for Ulbaron qualities. One was for syringes — the regenerator for Shulma. Two were for concealment for Fartira (location and hexagon), though I had to get the named item for the latter from the store. And finally, there was scanner for Raptor. Nothing was going to be able to hide from me within a radius of 410 meters no matter how high their concealment was. And that was the end of my tears, though I was happy as a clam. The upgrades were excellent. Pulling up my status table to see where I was, however, I paused. More changes needed to be made.
I had 41 billion coins in my account. An enormous sum, I wanted to spend it all on myself. Not all my named items could be turned into qualities, and so I was going to need to be ready for when my named equipment hit level 50. After all, I had eight explosions on me, and taking out another general would have tipped me over the edge. I need to be ready now.
It didn’t take that much money to get all my skills and attributes to level 190 — just 23.5 billion. But I didn’t stop there. The four responsible for hacking other mechanisms got an immediate boost to level 220. Finally, nothing on Earth was going to be able to stand up to me. Of course, I was down to just four billion coins, but that was fine. I was happy with my progress.
The table was long, but there weren’t any attributes or skills I could have done without. And I wasn’t about to go locking in levels — four hundred of them were earmarked for other people.
Speaking of which, there are some people I forgot about!
The troops were expecting me. At least, they didn’t know it, but they were. Or rather, a dozen hard slaps that would teach them to think twice about throwing around nuclear warheads in the future. Deciding to see how I was able to fly as the absorber, I thought about taking off and...
I just about shit my pants in terror. It wasn’t every spaceship that was capable of flying off as fast I did in that moment, and it was a good thing I hadn't climbed out of Ulbaron for the experiment. When the fear overwhelmed my consciousness and I stopped my upward acceleration, I was able to just hover in midair. Several kilometers above the ground, in fact.
The whole thing was as unusual as it was scary. And it took a while for the fear to recede, its stick}7 fingers loathe to let go of my brain. When it hit me that I was going to have to learn how to fly all over again, I carefully eased myself down to the ground using Ulbaron. Once there, I caught my breath, filled my blood with oxygen, and gave it one more try. The thought in my mind was to fly up just a couple meters.
Again, there was the acceleration, but it was quickly replaced by equally sudden deceleration. My body groaned under the strain. Even during the nuclear explosion, I hadn’t gotten hit as hard, which meant I wras going to have to start thinking about braking and flying itself in addition to just taking off. And it was all going to have to be in advance, otherwise my acceleration would squash me into a pulp.
It took me a couple hours to learn how to use my new body — flying, approaches, and the hermetic seal. Underwater movement turned out
to be key. I really had taken things to a new level, and I wasn't sure if I even wanted to go back to my named equipment. Taking Ulbaron and Raptor off, I shot through the length of a major river at mind-boggling speeds. My flight quality worked equally well underwater as it did in the air. And as my body shot forward like a runaway freight train, pushing the water aside, I noticed that my newlv-acquired protection quality7 made sure I stayed safe. The scanner quality7 kept me from running into underwater obstacles. They integrated with my brain much faster than my own consciousness, which meant my body decided for itself when it was time to turn or dodge. All I had to do wTas set the direction. There was no need to worn7 about the minutiae of control.
Once I'd had my fill of fun, I flew up into the air and looked back at the havoc wrought by my trip through the water. Camouflage was a lost cause. The river had overwhelmed its banks, as I’d pushed the water to each side so quickly it hadn’t had time to reform. The result was a minor tsunami. Lots of buildings standing on the banks had been wiped out, fields were flooded, and my self-esteem couldn’t have been higher. It was good to be Superman! And there was no kryptonite that could stand in my way, with the possible exception of the owner itself. But that was okay — it was the main bad guy.
I checked w7here I was, decided there wasn’t any point in turning myself back into an all-purpose tool, and flew7 off, stretching my arms out in front of me and letting my flight take over. Comparing it to Ulbaron, the first takeaway was that I was faster by an order of magnitude. To be honest, I wasn’t able to reach my top speed — every time I tried, I chickened out. But I assumed there wasn’t actually a ceiling, much like the way it worked with the other absorber qualities.
The north hurtled ever closer. Drone fell so far behind I had to stop and wait a couple times so it didn’t slip out of the control range. Finally, I got so annoyed I grabbed the rainbow pearl and hid the thing in my inventory. That freed me to really get serious, and I traded alien territory in for human lands just two hours later.
World of the changed 3 Noa in the flesh Page 22
