Better now, but still not the most ideal conditions. After all, what was the point of promising not to kill someone, if dying didn’t have terrible and irreversible consequences? Trading my tokens for crypto and selling the H3 Faction’s platinum? Sure, that was intriguing, but first I’d have to beat the owner of the casino, who was the leader of a pride that specialized in gambling and most likely wasn’t called “the Agile Paw” for nothing.
I asked for two or three minutes to think, called Tini over and sent him to get me a drink from the bar, his choice. My throat was parched from all this stress and hot air. I was about to give my kitten some crypto to buy the drink, but the pride leader intervened:
“Tell them it’s on me! And also, boy, bring me a glass of whatever you get your master.”
I didn’t bust my brains over the Miyelonian’s unexpected move. I had plenty to do with the free minutes I just gained. After all, I really needed time to think. I had to prepare. My chances of winning an honest match were very low, zero most likely, so I needed to do something unexpected. For example, learn how to understand his thoughts or even influence them.
So then, the long beckoning Psionic skill. What did it give?
Psionic. This skill confers the ability to read the thoughts of nearby intelligent beings (whether NPC’s or living players) and practice mind control. Minimum statistics: Intelligence 22, Agility 15, Perception 15.
ATTENTION!!! Using Psionic abilities requires Magic Points. If a character has insufficient Magic Points, they cannot use Psionic abilities, and active Psionic effects will be terminated. The total number of Magic Points and their regeneration rate depend on the Mysticism skill. The Mental Fortitude skill determines the power and range of effects, defense against Psionic attacks, and success chance for multiple simultaneous Psionic actions.
ATTENTION!!! Success chance of Psionic actions depends mostly on Psionic skill, but also on the difference in Intelligence between attacker and target. If the attacker is more than 10 Intelligence points above the target, the success chance is 100%. If the target is more than 10 Intelligence points above the attacker, Psionic actions cannot be performed.
Ugh, so complicated... As it turned out, it wasn’t enough to simply take Psionic. I needed other skills for mana points and regain speed. Also for spell power and range... I suspected that a professional Mage specialized in Psionic would have, beyond those three skills, a whole set of others that were also a practical necessity. How nice that I was not a Mage, and these complications were not going to define my gameplay!
Alright, I’d start with the one I couldn’t do without:
You have taken the skill Psionic level 1.
I immediately dumped all six skill points into it, raising the skill to level 7. But I decided not to rush with the two other free slots. Life didn’t revolve around whether I won or lost this specific game, and Gnat might need other skills. What was more, my Scanning ability had just reloaded and, after activating the icon on my mini-map, I saw something interesting. I even zoomed in as far as possible, wanting to see every detail to confirm my initial guesses.
The leader of the Pride of the Agile Paw, beyond all doubt, was a female! What was more, under her free-flowing alabaster garments, she was hiding a big belly, inside of which I could even make out two embryos schematically rendered on my map. Interesting details. I could try to start a conversation with that, no Psionics necessary.
Scanning skill increased to level forty-four!
Cartography skill increased to level forty-seven!
You have reached level fifty-one!
You have received three skill points!
What great timing! I put three more points into Psionic, raising it up to ten! And no less importantly, when I leveled, my Magic Points went up from 172 to 175. It might seem like nothing, but I still chalked it up as a win.
Tini walked up with two identical flasks of a bright orange liquid, which was bubbling and steaming. The leader of the Pride took one first, leaving the second for me. I listened carefully to my feelings but didn’t sense any trepidation. Seemingly, it was all on the up and up. No one was trying to poison me. But still, I looked cautiously and took a sniff of the flask. A thick hot syrup with the aroma of valerian and wormwood. The flavor of the drink was sickly sweet, but also pleasant and tonic. I could only drink it in tiny sips. The beverage restored my Endurance Points just as well as the spicy Geckho vegetable soup, and my Magic Points quickly came back to maximum. Great stuff! I wouldn’t mind taking a sample back home for our chemists!
I handed the empty vessel back to Tini and told my opponent I was ready to play. The leader of the Pride of the Agile Paw didn’t want to spend any time pussyfooting around and told everyone to go, including the Translator and security. At the last second, before the forcefield cut off my vision, I turned to the stands and saw the girl by the name Valeri-Urla. Despite all that time, she hadn’t gone anywhere and was now watching me. Seeing my attention, she hurriedly turned away, as if she had no interest.
“I ordered the forcefield to be made opaque on both sides. I don’t want potential rivals watching and studying my style of play,” my rival told me, activating the table and generating a game field. “You go first.”
“Among my kind, it is common to cede that position to ladies who are with child. What’s more, you’re gonna have twins. They say that’s twice as hard for a future mother.”
My rival squirmed, as if she had been shocked with electricity, then spent a long time looking at me with her eyes wide either in fear or surprise. Now was the perfect time for a mental attack, but I was in no rush. Our pieces were not yet placed, so an attack would have no real purpose.
“Prospector abilities?” the pride leader guessed, and I readily confirmed.
“That’s exactly right. Plus Perception ramped up to the max and a bunch of skills for detecting anything and everything. If I still had analyzers for my Prospector Scanner, I could even tell the sex of your future children, but unfortunately I’m all out.”
“And thank the Great First Female you are! According to our beliefs, knowing the sex of a child in advance can only lead to misfortune!”
The game was on with a vengeance. I thought deeply over every move, desperately hoping to win this game of critical importance. But my rival was barely even looking at the game board, knowing all the opening moves and their nuances to the finest detail and moving her pieces on autopilot. Now was my chance!
“I would like to know why a humble Prospector like me caught the interest of such an important and influential individual. After all, any of your pride’s hustlers could have been sent to teach me a lesson and take my winnings. It really was not necessary for the head of the Pride of the Agile Paw to handle such a small issue personally. And, forgive me for being direct, but I have to say something. You have amazingly pretty eyes! They’re like living emeralds with refined glimmering facets!”
My opponent raised her green eyes to me in surprise, and we met gazes. Now!
“I really shouldn’t have been afraid. He doesn’t know the game at all. That’s immediately apparent. So, there’s no reason to draw things out. I need to end the round fast. I could move my battleship right down the middle, Gnat won’t notice the threat posed by that pirate base...”
Action terminated. Magic Points exhausted.
No, I wasn’t even trying to read the mind of my experienced high-level opponent. I had a different plan: first try to flatter her, as she was not used to praise, then transmit a whole packet of thoughts in one burst, hoping greatly that the lady cat would be thrown off balance by my compliments, and wouldn’t notice the ideas didn’t belong to her.
Psionic skill increased to level eleven!
Psionic skill increased to level twelve!
Psionic skill increased to level thirteen!
My mana was down to zero. I stumbled in a bout of sudden weakness, sitting down hard but still trying to keep a calm look on my face. Meanwhile, the clawed paw in white glov
es, which was reaching for one of the high-level pieces, suddenly changed direction, taking the very largest and most powerful piece in her fleet and placing it in the center of the field.
“Thank you for the nice compliment, Gerd Gnat. Yes, I could have sent any of my subordinates, but I was curious. Helping an opponent win is a very paradoxical move, and I wanted to get to know you better. Crap! I got distracted...”
The bad move was clearly a surprise for the lady cat, and I could see the pupils in her green eyes tense up into tiny little points in fear. Meanwhile I, thinking for around a minute as if considering my obviously strong opponent’s strange move and trying to find a hidden sense in it, eventually activated the pirate base and destroyed the strongest piece of my rival’s fleet.
And with that, the substantive part of the game came to an end. Losing a battleship in Na-Tikh-U was comparable with losing a queen in chess, and even if you were some triple Kasparov, a handicap like that meant near certain victory for any adequate opponent. Three moves later, my opponent surrendered.
I asked her not to turn off the forcefield yet, and said:
“Honorable leader of the Pride of the Agile Paw, I don’t care how much this offends you, but I cannot accept any winnings for this round. You made an obvious mistake, and I don’t get any satisfaction from stupid victories. I suggest we wait for better times and play again when your twins aren’t distracting you so much.”
“A noble act and a courteous speech. Well, Gerd Gnat, I won’t insist. As a return gesture, I suggest we settle accounts right now. I’ll pay real crypto for all your tokens and, after removing the force field, all the spectators will see me taking the pot. The brutes after you will have to give up, assuming you lost it all. Also, my reputation as an unbeatable Na-Tikh-U player will not suffer, which is quite important as well. But I will uphold my promises. Your safety on the station will be guaranteed, and I can provide a captain willing to buy your platinum.”
And we did just that. But when I had already stashed the wallet with fifty-nine thousand five hundred crypto, the pride leader asked unexpectedly:
“Gerd Gnat, please answer, but be honest. I promise that my opinion of you will not fall no matter the answer. My fifth move... the weird one with the battleship... Was that some kind of cheating?”
I kept silent for a bit, but then decided to answer honestly:
“Yes, it was. I mentally suggested it to you while we were making eye contact.”
She breathed a sigh of relief and calmed down. She was seemingly very upset that she could have made such a stupid mistake. Then the cat added:
“The Meleyephatians are famed for such abilities, but not humans. What’s more, you expect such things from Mages, but never a Prospector. Gerd Gnat, are you sure I couldn’t entice you into joining my Pride? You’d have constant work in the casino. You would bathe in glory and money. And there’s lots of other interesting work for a talented Prospector. Sure, it isn’t always strictly legal, but that doesn’t seem to stop you.”
I laughed, thanked the Pride leader for her praise and trust, but still refused joining the Miyelonian pride. However, I said that I wouldn’t be opposed to working with her clan, just not full membership.
Chapter Seventeen. Housewarming Party
I WAS RUNNING very late to my party, so I hurried my Miyelonian escort along, feeling worried. It would look bad, and my guests might get sick of waiting and leave. But then, finally, I reached my tiny yet safe room in the hotel on the Medu-Ro IV space station. Hurriedly closing the metal curtain and blocking myself off from the rest of the world, I immediately chose “Exit Game.”
Would you like to review your statistics for this game session?
No, I had no time for that. I needed to get into the real world right away! I threw back the lid of the virt pod and, with indescribable joy, discovered friends waiting to meet me. And though I was somewhat expecting to see Anya and Imran next to my virt pod, Dmitry Zheltov was there too. How long had I been waiting to hear from him? What a pleasant surprise!
“Gnat, you’re a whole twenty minutes late!” Anya said with reproach, helping me stand up from the soft bed. “The table is already set in your apartment. The guests have arrived, but you just won’t show!”
“I’m sorry I’m late, friends. If only you knew about my endless day!”
I set my weight on my left leg extremely gingerly and was pleased to discover it was no longer broken. So, I turned down the crutches and hurried to the stairs.
“Tell me everything!” I demanded of the Starship Pilot. “What happened with the Shiamiru? Where have you been so long?”
Dmitry gave a somehow tortured smile and admitted that he had no idea where he had gone. He didn’t know Geckho, so he didn’t understand the crew and couldn’t read the screens either.
“But where we are now is not that important. What matters more is what happened. We were attacked by space pirates!!! Picture this, I load up the game, and there’s a siren wailing on the Shiamiru. The whole crew is armed and wearing spacesuits. I also put on my helmet, take out my gun and run to the captain’s bridge. And there, that furry geezer Uraz Tukhsh is howling away, clicking his nails on the monitor and pointing at three bright orange spots following our ship. Then with gestures, he offers me a seat at the control panel, hurries me along and even shoves me into the chair. Picture this, it’s my fourth day in space, and the captain wants me to drive!”
“And what came next?” Anya asked, intrigued by the copilot’s story.
“Well... I sat at the control panel and tried to gather my thoughts, then remembered my training. I’ll admit, the fear made me forget half of it. I just checked the maneuver drives, added power to the mains, and set the monitor display to something a bit more manageable. Then, it was like I’d been flying a starship my whole life. It seemed easy and even intuitive. Also, everything is setup logically, and all the handles are the perfect size for a human hand!”
“Well, they were probably made for Geckho,” I corrected my friend, but Zheltov answered that it made no difference. They had one butt, two hands, two legs and the rest didn’t matter.
“Then I started feeling confident in my abilities and gunned it!” Clear notes of self-satisfaction slipped through in his voice. “I pushed that rust bucket for all she’s worth and headed for the nearest planet. It’s a cargo shuttle, of course, and not some racer, so the Miyelonian interceptors eventually caught up, but I fought like a lion! I entered the cloudy brown atmosphere of the gas giant Medu-Ro VII, which is a lot like our Saturn. There, I tried to throw them off my trail in the atmospheric clouds. We had to jettison the strapped-on automatic processor right away because, with it, we would have just crashed. But even without external cargo, it was not exactly a fun ride. I couldn’t see a damn thing, and everything was shaking so hard it seemed like the ship was gonna fall apart!”
“But you must have leveled your skills,” I threw out, and the pilot laughed:
“Sure, no way around that! Especially Starship Piloting and Maneuvering. There were system messages flickering in almost constantly. But it was all for nothing. The pirates had good locators, so I didn’t manage to escape. I had to change tactics and go into the ring of ice dust around the planet. I survived there for half an hour cutting curves so tight that, if it weren’t for the gravity compensators, the crew would have ended up splattered on the walls! As it was, it felt like we were hitting around 7 G! My Agility and Constitution went up by one, and I got my character to 48. I made one pirate hit a flying rock. It was great. It didn’t wreck him, but it did cause a ton of damage, and I could see bits of debris on the locator. But then the Shiamiru got caught in some electronic thing, and the engine just shut off. What happened next is obvious...”
Without realizing it, Dmitry pressed his palm to his right side, as if checking his body for wounds and bruises. It was clear that he didn’t particularly want to talk about what happened next. The pirates must have worked over the shuttle crew pretty well. But af
ter a little while, Zheltov found the strength to continue:
“That was the first time I saw Miyelonians. They’re furry creatures as high as a man’s shoulder that look something like leopards. They’re very strong, fast and mean. When their boarding crew entered our ship, they immediately shot Captain Uraz Tukhsh for disobedience, then another four Geckho resisted and met the same fate. They spent a long time questioning me, but I couldn’t understand a damn thing. They beat the crap out of me, and broke my right ribs, and collar bone. They seriously injured my right eye. It was a miracle it didn’t fall out... It’s nothing though, it should pass... I hope. Either that or I’ll have to wait to die and respawn.”
“It’ll definitely pass but go to the Medic! Many wounds in the game can be healed!” Anya assured our friend, herself a Medic by class.
Dmitry Zheltov nodded to her and continued his story about the pirate attack:
“The other crew members were also beaten up by the Miyelonians and locked in their bunks. They were all searched and scanned with some device. I think they were checking the contents of their inventory. For twenty minutes, the pirates dug through everything. They opened the safe in the captain’s chambers and looked at everything in the bunks. They nabbed your geological analyzers and cleaned out half of Uline’s bag. They found your Krechet carbine but didn’t take it. I put it in my inventory after that. I’ll give it back when we meet again... If we ever do, of course...”
External Threat (Reality Benders Book #2) LitRPG Series Page 17
