The Way of the Shaman [06] Shaman's Revenge
Page 40
“You promised me immunity,” I managed to say before a pair of Hadjeis appeared behind each of us.
“Yes, but not to anyone else,” Geranika countered. He waved his hand and a dozen tentacles wrapped around Clutzer. The Rogue’s HP began to fall and the current status of our party changed. We were in combat. “I do not forgive.”
“You need a minute?” Clutzer wheezed, turning to me. “You shall have it!”
“Anastaria, how did you like our trial arena?” Geranika asked Anastaria, paying no attention to the Rogue. At his words, Stacey shuddered noticeably and, most surprisingly, took my hand utterly reflexively. As though seeking support.
“It seems not very much. You surrendered! The great Anastaria surrendered!”
Geranika was relishing every passing moment, every word he spoke, every second of Clutzer’s torment and Anastaria’s terror—it was as if he wasn’t being controlled by an Imitator at all, but by a real person, a cruel person. Had his recent loss warped some of his algorithms, increasing his levels of aggression by orders of magnitude? Or was it my presence that was making him respond so oddly?
Forty seconds remained.
“You promised me immunity,” I reminded him again. “But now you’re breaking your oath!”
“I’m not breaking anything, Shaman! This world shall be mine! You were constantly getting underfoot and now that your friends are in my hands, I will do everything in my power to bring them an unforgettable pleasure. The trial arena that Anastaria managed to escape from will seem like paradise in comparison.”
Anastaria clenched my hand even harder. The girl was beginning to shake from terror, yet the Paladin in her did justice to her class. She remained standing and despite the evident desire to exit to reality, awaited my order. I don’t know what had happened in that trial arena, but Stacey had clearly suffered a great deal there.
“Geranika, before you destroy my friends,” I decided to stall for time, “tell me, why do you need to do all this? Why do you want to be the master of this world?”
Ten seconds left.
“Because it is mine! Because this world is weak and must be ruled by the strong! Because there is no one in Barliona stronger than me! Only the Creator’s oath limits me from seizing power, but the time will come when my armies…”
“Stacey, cast the bubble!” I yelled, activating five scrolls of Armageddon at once. “Good bye, Dark Shaman!”
Level gained!
Level gained!
Level gained!
In the flash and ensuing blindness, the only thing I saw the same line repeated again and again:
Level gained…
I tried to count my new levels, but I gave up on the first hundred. The promotions were rushing in endlessly and I had nothing better to do than to swipe them aside, clearing my vision.
You have killed a Hadjei. Reward: +1000 Reputation with all factions of Malabar and Kartoss.
You have killed a Hadjei. Reward: +1000 Reputation with all factions of Malabar and Kartoss.
The new level notifications were followed by twenty notifications about the Hadjeis I’d killed. Geranika’d never see those fellows again. I even feel a bit bad for him.
“You cannot defeat me!” Through the bright light blinding my eyes, I heard Geranika’s voice. He’d survived! Five scrolls of Armageddon hadn’t been enough to kill this boss! What a monster the devs had created!
“We’ll see about that.” James still hadn’t appeared, so I aimed at Geranika’s voice and summoned my Spirits. I couldn’t aim at the Lord of Shadow directly, so I did the simplest thing I could—I summoned a Spirit of Mass Destruction. “We shall see…”
Level gained…
You have killed Geranika, the Lord of Shadow. Reward: ???.
The blindness dissipated and realizing where I was, I collapsed to my knees. Not a trace remained of the Armard palace. In fact, nothing at all remained in a radius of two hundred meters—with the exception of the Lord of Shadow’s alabaster throne. At its foot, prone on the ground, lay the mangled body of the Lord of Shadow himself. The arms and legs were gone. His clothes had burned off with his skin. Several spikes had impaled his torso and yet Geranika had by some miracle survived the explosion…Survived to be finished off by just about the weakest Spirit I could have summoned.
“Okay, you did it,” a calm voice sounded behind my back. “But why?”
I turned and encountered Clutzer’s eyes. He was alive and in one piece, wearing the same clothes.
“Who are you?” I asked, stunned.
“Deputy head of the internal security service of the Barliona Corporation—Major General Alex Hermann. I will repeat my question—why did you blow up Geranika?”
“I need help. Save me…” I managed to get out before the surrounding world began spinning, surged, narrowed into one point of light and vanished. Before losing consciousness, I managed to see a blinking red light and the closed lid of a cocoon a few centimeters before my face. My chest heaved with a sharp pain and all I wanted was a breath…
I had been disconnected from Barliona.
* * *
“…How is he?”
“His condition is stabilizing, vital signs are reaching nominal. His brain’s what worries me—Daniel didn’t sleep for over nine months.”
“Try to pull him out. We need him.”
“We’re doing everything we can. Maria, why is he moving? Did you forget to administer the injection…?”
* * *
Forty-two developers, thirteen administrators, six operatives from information security, including my former mentor, two scenario designers, thirty-two freelancers—the scale of the operation that Donotpunnik had organized was terrifying. Hellfire, Exodus, seven ‘Uns’ from the Azure Dragons, including Donotpunnik himself—everyone ended up in the defendants’ dock. Every conspirator save two—Mirida the Farsighted and me.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to her in time,” Alex Hermann explained to me at the hospital. “After the crystals were activated, Donotpunnik had no use for her and she was deemed obsolete. As for you, the Corporation has no issues with you. You were acting within the game’s rules. I mean, we could of course find some issue to pursue, but we won’t.”
“How did they manage to trap me in virtual reality?” I asked just about the biggest question I had. My entire plan was based on a single postulate—some hacker had done the impossible. But the longer I thought about it, the less likely this seemed to me. A breach of such scale was simply impossible!
“Back in Dolma you entered the technical portal and were sent out to reality, remember? Constantine, one of the technicians working on the capsules, had been paid off by Donnotpunnik, and therefore instead of a standard prisoner’s capsule, you were immersed in a version modified by several hackers. They could monitor you, control you, even disconnect you if they needed to. When it became clear that you’d end up in reality, they disconnected you, cooked up a virtual subspace and then had you wake up in it. Since Donotpunnik never anticipated this would happen and the work was done hastily, the end result had several bugs. As I understand it, they were the reason you realized what was happening.”
“Why were you in Dolma?”
“I wasn’t in Dolma. When you entered the portal, we received a message that someone was adjusting the codebase. The code changed twice in your vicinity within a short amount of time—the portal and the teleportation to Beatwick—so we conducted a probe, which ended up giving birth to the Clutzer you knew. We recommended the original prisoner be released. If it matters to you, half a year ago he ended up in Barliona again—for theft, again. At the moment he’s gathering grass. Meanwhile, we began to monitor your capsule and, as soon as you were disconnected, we pulled you out.”
“I drowned!”
“There were risks involved, I won’t argue with that. However, we had to not only identify the circle of conspirators, but also obtain ironclad evidence that they intended to commit murder. We’d never find Marina
after she was disconnected—her body was cremated, so we waited long enough for Donotpunnik to kill you. We’re working closely with the police, so we had to amass the evidence they needed.”
“Using my life,” I said grimly.
“Among other things. But yes, using your life too.”
“So what’s next?”
“Nothing. Barliona’s been offline for a week now. The Corporation is suffering immense losses, but Mr. Johnson has made it clear that we must identify everyone involved before re-launching the game. No one has ever infiltrated our organization so deeply. The intruders breached our IT security through and through.”
“Why are you telling me all this? Isn’t this a secret?”
“Daniel, I like you very much as a person. You have something that people in today’s day and age tend to lack—a faith in other people. First you believe in a person, then in everything good and kind about them and finally you’re disappointed when they betray you. This is a very unique quality for a grown man—in fact, it’s more common to children. As for confidentiality and secrets…One more secret won’t kill you, will it? Now, get yourself ready. We need to stop by the police and lodge a request to have your case reexamined. In Marina’s apartment we discovered irrefutable evidence that you were framed. We’ll head to court immediately after stopping by the station. As of today, you are a witness…”
It took the court one and a half days to read the sentence. Donnotpunnik received a life sentence in the mines without possibility of parole. My former mentor got twenty years with eligibility for parole in ten. Hellfire and Exodus got ten years each. All the other conspirators, whose names I didn’t know, got between two and eight years. My case was reexamined. I was declared not guilty and compensated all the money I had spent paying for my release. My hundred million was returned to me, yet the Corporation insisted that I void my contract with Ehkiller for the Tears. I didn’t mind. A hundred million would be enough for a carefree old age. However, the damages that the Corporation had to pay Ehkiller did not end there. It turned out that the head of Phoenix had mortgaged a majority of his in-game assets for close to nothing in order to amass the collateral for the bank loan. Meanwhile, during the time that Phoenix’s players had spent incapacitated, they had violated hundreds of contracts, the damages for which were withdrawn from the clan treasury. The Corporation had to compensate all of this, covering Phoenix’s losses over and over again. And yet the largest damages were paid for Anastaria. As I understood it, at the end of the battle in the Dragon Dungeon, she had been sent to a closed-off level and blocked from communicating with the outside world, even with me. They had turned off her sensory filter and started to kill her again and again. In a particularly violent way. Stacey had no way of getting out—the trial arena did not allow the player to leave the capsule. I can’t even imagine how much money Mr. Johnson had to pay Ehkiller, but the sum certainly had a tail of ten zeros at least.
“Daniel!” called Victor Zv---ky, as I was descending the stairs of the court building. That’s was it! The case was closed, all the Barliona data had been reset, the scenarios had been rewritten, and most importantly, Geranika had returned to Barliona. Without a third Empire, the Corporation didn’t see how to develop our continent further. I was promised fantastical sums in compensation for adjusting my character’s data, and yet I’d only see it in a few days when Barliona was re-launched. “Allow me to have a word with you!”
“I’m listening!” Anastaria’s father was an ordinary person in reality. You’d never pick one of the wealthiest (and in light of the recent compensation, the wealthiest) players in Barliona out of a crowd of ordinary citizens.
“Let’s take a walk.” Victor—or as I was used to thinking of him, Ehkiller—nodded at the boardwalk running past the courthouse. “I have to beg your forgiveness. Until the very last moment, I believed that you were mixed up in this thing. Were it not for Anastaria’s faith in you, I don’t even know how it would’ve all worked out.”
Ehkiller’s security detail shadowed a few steps behind us, but I paid them no attention.
“You see,” Ehkiller began to explain when he understood that I wasn’t going to say anything. “My clan and its position in the game have been targets for a long time. I knew that Exodus was spying on us, but I didn’t realize that the rot had penetrated so deeply. Even Hellfire…I was happy when you showed up with your Chess Set: Finally, we would be able to enter the Tomb of the Creator. And yet, it quickly became apparent that the Tomb was a trap. It contained something that would radically lower the stats of our characters. That was when it became clear that you’re either the unwitting instrument of Donotpunnik (although I didn’t know I was dealing with him then)—or that you were the enemy himself. We developed a plan according to which Anastaria would infiltrate your clan—but then the unexpected happened: She fell in love with you. No need to look at me like that. I know my daughter! Your actions showed that you were nothing but an instrument, which meant you had to be manipulated carefully. Stacey developed a new plan—the one that we ended up putting into action on the plateau before the Tomb. We had to make it so that you would leave the game and returning to reality, ruin the plans of your puppet master. But here was where the most surprising thing happened—you never appeared in the rehabilitation center. All our data suggested that you would be at the highest dependence level, and yet you were nowhere to be found. And I mean that in the physical sense, since the documentation stated that you had successfully completed your rehabilitation and returned home. It goes without saying that you never appeared at your house either, and that’s when we understood that you had been abducted and that your kidnappers were planning on using you further. So we had to adjust our plans yet again. Against her best instincts, Stacey worked to irritate you—to make you aware of your emotions so that you would realize the artificial nature of the world you’d been locked in. In the end, she accomplished this. Your emotions allowed you to create the ring and save yourself. I won’t tell you why we couldn’t warn you about the danger you were in, or why we avoided conversations about reality—that’s all immaterial now. I only want to ask you to do one thing: Give Stacey a second chance. Even though she worked to destroy your relationship, she loves you. Please trust this old man. I can’t make you understand me, or to understand her. I’m simply asking. Just give her a chance…”
Ehkiller sighed heavily, turned and slowly, like he had aged a great deal, walked to the car that had been trailing us. The father had done everything he could for his daughter. It was now the kids’ job to figure out what they wanted.
Epilogue
Several days later, the doorbell in my apartment rang. Barliona had gone live again, but I had absolutely no desire to revisit its marvelous world. It was like a portion of me had been extracted and discarded like some useless piece of waste. A small portion—but an important portion! I slowly walked to my door and opened it without even checking to see who it was. If it was some maniac, well, he could make himself at home!
Instead, Anastaria stood at the door, nervously fidgeting with a small purse in her hands.
“May I come in?” Stacey asked. Unlike in Barliona, in reality her voice was a bit hoarse, making the girl ‘realer’ and all the more desirable. It made her that little portion of me that I had been missing. Shaking my head to dispel the thoughts racing through my mind, I stepped aside to let Stacey pass and said:
“Come in. Would you like some tea?”
End of Book Six
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The Way of the Shaman LitRPG Series:
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The Secret of the Dark Forest (The Way of the Shaman: Book #3)
The Phantom Castle (The Way of the Shaman: Book #4)
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