The Awoken take two First Kills on Holdest and tame the Montosaurus, which loses its divine nature, but becomes a battle avatar of Scyth.
Apophis, summoned by Yemi, refuses Scyth outright at first. Then Scyth summons the Montosaurus. The ancient dinosaur serves as proof that the young man is capable of going toe to toe with the ancient snake. Apophis decides not to test this and fulfills the request.
Once on Terrastera, Scyth tests out the artifact Isis’ Blessing. For a day, it creates perfect weather conditions within a fifty yard radius, without the acid rain debuffs of the toxic continent. Once certain that his living friends would not die there and could safely level up, Scyth brings in not only the Awoken, but also the three priests from Yoruba.
He hands in the quest to build a second temple to Tiamat and earns two new divine abilities: Sleeping Justice, which increases Scyth’s stats if he is attacked first, and Assistance of the Sleepers, which restores health, mana and vindication for killing an enemy.
The orc Sarronos, chief of the Broken Axe, is eager to defend Tiamat’s temple. Morena’s cultists and the troggs want to do the same, impressed by the taming of the Montosaurus. The goblin woman Kusalarix responds to Scyth’s request to help move several thousand sentients to Tiamat’s temple and gives him a portal beacon and two coins that activate one-hour portals. Scyth appoints Kusalarix as a priestess of the Sleepers. In response, the goblin agrees to send a thousand of her best mercenaries and Arena gladiators to protect the temple, and to help the Awoken build a castle on Kharinza.
Grinding on Terrastera exceeds all expectations: Yemi, Babangida, Francesca, Crawler, Infect and Bomber reach level four hundred and sixty. Gyula gets to level four hundred. Irita, who just emerged from the sandbox, reaches level three hundred along with Patrick. In addition, they make a First Kill and get Dalezma Egg, which Scyth gives to Infect, and he cracks the egg at the place of power.
The army of Light begins its attack on Tiamat’s temple, news of which Nega the succubus relays to Scyth. The Awoken teleport to the temple.
Tiamat creates an oasis for a mile around, allowing the living to survive in the desert without Nergal’s blessing. She removes the undead curse from Scyth and his friends, along with the guardians and all the non-citizen workers. They are alive again. In addition, Tiamat restores Sharkon, the undead Underground Terror, back to life, along with Crusher, the undead wolf from Gloomwood. The fates of these creatures are inseparably linked to Scyth, and they become his battle pets.
The orcs of the Broken Axe, the sewer troggs and Morena’s cultists portal in to protect Tiamat’s temple. They are joined by mercenaries and Arena gladiators from the Green League, sent by the goblin Kusalarix.
Apart from a hundred thousand players, the temple is also besieged by King Bastion’s soldiers and Emperor Kragosh’s legions, the high priests of Nergal and Marduk, and the immortal Aspects of Light and Colossi of Darkness.
With great losses, Scyth manages to hold the temple. The guardians, the orcs of the Broken Axe, the troggs and Patrick O’Grady all die permanently in the battle.
Gyula reports that one of the workers tried to contact him, but the builder couldn’t answer in the heat of battle, and now there is silence from the fort on Kharinza. Feeling that something is amiss, Scyth teleports there and finds the fort destroyed, Behemoth’s temple captured by the Destroying Plague, and the kobolds and non-citizens turned undead. Scyth encounters Mogwai, who is certain that he can now kill the former legate alone and eliminate the Threat.
At that moment, the emergency exit procedure from his capsule is activated by an unknown man. Scyth realizes that his nightmare is coming true in real life, but at that moment everything disappears, and he finds himself in the Lakharian Desert again, at the beginning of the battle. Everything that happened over this time was a manifestation of Divine Revelation.
Scyth decides to sacrifice the temple so that his allies can stay alive, defend the fort and have time to leave their shelter in Alaska in case Divine Revelation had, through some miracle, shown what would happen even in the real world. The temple is left undefended, but Scyth not only manages to defend the fort — which, as it turns out, Mogwai reached with Tissa’s help, — but also succeeds in taking Mogwai to a magical cell in the basement of the former Widowmakers castle, where Eileen had kept Scyth prisoner. The castle now belongs to the Green League, but Kusalarix has agreed to help.
Alex, Hung and the security officers hurry to leave the house in Alaska and fly away to Cali Bottom. Ed, Malik and Willy are headed there too. On the way, they check the news: Tiamat’s temple has been destroyed, Nergal’s event is over, and the Destroying Plague faction, now joined by several dark gods, has become officially available to players.
Racking his brains to figure out how Tissa, who was in the sandbox, could have met with Mogwai, Alex remembers another former emissary of the Destroying Plague, Polynucleotide, Big Po, and decides to meet with him.
Prologue: Fen
FIRST MOGWAI’S GLORY echoed throughout the world, and then the fifteen-year-old boy behind the character, Fen Xiaoguang, became a household name.
In the battles of the Junior Arena of 2063, a druid animalist in the Azure Dragons stood out. He was blasted with fireballs, frozen with ice, cut with swords, pierced with arrows, torn with teeth, but he remained alive for an astounding length of time and the spells did nothing but slow him down a little. It seemed nothing bothered him, the Unbreakable Bear, as the battle commentators dubbed him then. Mogwai was declared the tournament’s most valuable player. That is where his impressive rise began.
Much later, he gained new achievements: victory on the Battlefields, now in the main team of the Azure Dragons; first place in the Demonic Games; and another victory in the Arena — this time as an adult. Fen achieved all this before the young age of twenty-two. His smiling face frequently lit up magazine covers and billboards. Sony, Snowstorm, Tesla, Nike, Mercedes, Google, Apple — the biggest brands queued up to offer him advertising contracts for tens of millions of phoenixes. If not for his talent for throwing money away, Fen would have become one of the thousand richest people in the world.
From the outside, his path looked easy. The Japanese contingent of fans called Mogwai Kintaro, meaning Golden Boy, a reference either to the limitless support of Glyph, leader of the Azure Dragons, who Mogwai called his second father, or to the druid’s mystical powers in the form of his maxed-out Resilience. That stat wasn’t easy to level up even for the best tanks of the time — equal-level mobs gave only a tiny progress increase, and healers couldn’t keep up with very strong mobs, which caused tanks to die, losing valuable experience.
That said, Fen’s path to victory in the Arena could be called all sorts of things, but certainly not easy. He grew up in a poor family of refugees from North China. After the nukes landed, the city of Harbin was within the radioactive zone. Fen’s parents lost almost everything, and the peacekeepers took away what little they managed to save. Sirens screaming constantly in the night, searchlights beaming through the clouds, explosions, machine guns growling like the hounds of Death, mechatank silhouettes crawling one after the other in the darkness — that’s all Fen remembered, and even that was disconnected, fragmented, though he was already six years old then.
Having survived a grueling evacuation in which three quarters of the refugees died of hunger, infection and cold, Fen’s family reached Shenzhen. For a long time they lived in the poorest places, eking out a living as day laborers — one day carrying goods, the next day cleaning. Sometimes they had enough work to feed themselves, but more often they had to go hungry.
Then Fen’s father began to sell drinking water on the street.
In the store, an eighteen-ounce bottle cost five phoenixes. A fourteen-gallon canister of primitively cleansed municipal water cost thirty, and retailed at a quarter of a phoenix per glass. A local criminal gang took a third of the profits, but a few years later, Fen’s parents still managed to save up enough for their own hov
el in the slums of Shenzhen. The boy was thirteen then, but malnourished, so nobody thought him older than ten.
Fen was a sickly child, but he helped his parents where he could. Soon his father bought some industrial filters and stopped buying up water from others. The boy’s task became to carry canisters of purified water from the house to his parents as they wandered the busy streets in search of thirsty souls. Two canisters, two gallons each.
Every day on the street, he was forced to defend his right to be there. He was beaten, insulted and demeaned, called son of a whore, Mongol monster and mutant — due to the radioactive desert that North China had become. Fen patiently took the beatings, apologized, smiled, asked forgiveness, quelled the anger accumulating in his soul, and most of all, kept his hold on the canisters. “Slippery like an eel,” the locals said, amazed at how staunchly the ‘mutant’ withstood pain. “And treacherous as a wicked demon. A real mogwai.” The nickname stuck.
It was a day like many others. Evening approached. Fen was almost home, just one long road to walk down and a street to cross…
But Yi Yun ran out to meet him with a long switch in hand.
“There you are!”
He whistled loud and other boys came out like a pack of hounds. Six in all. There were usually three or four, but sometimes more than seven.
“Mutant!” the smallest one said, grinning and stamping. “Run!”
“He won’t run,” Yi Yun shook his head.
“Then let’s help him. Get off our land, maggot!”
Better do what they say, Fen thought, picking up his canisters and tramping back where he came from.
Whistles, curses and small stones flew at his back.
“Run, don’t crawl! Go on!”
Fen rushed home to jeers and whistles. If nobody stood in his way, he had a chance to close the door behind him and avoid a beating at least for today. It had rained recently; Fen treaded on something slippery and fell right into a puddle, twisting his ankle. He jumped up and checked the canisters right away, sighed with relief.
“I said get out of here!”
Yi Yun struck first, with the switch. Fen curled up right in the puddle, covered his head with his arms. Strikes rained down on him, and then a voice suddenly spoke with authority:
“Disappear.”
And the bullies scattered without a moment’s hesitation. Then the stranger addressed Fen:
“Get up.”
The boy raised himself out of the puddle, hiding the canisters behind his back. The man, leaning on a titanium cane, handed him a plastic bottle of UNB ration and spoke through his teeth, cigarette clenched between them:
“I see them beating you every day through my window. You haven’t once tried to run or fight back. Why?”
Fen was starving, so first, without dropping the canisters, he contrived to gulp down the contents of the bottle before answering.
“If I run,” he said, “they’ll just find me and beat me anyway. Why delay the inevitable? They never beat me twice in one day, it’s too boring for them. If I fight back, then I’ll lose anyway, because there are more of them and they’re older. But they’ll beat me a lot harder. And it’ll be more fun for them that way. If they like it, they’ll start doing it more.”
The stranger seemed surprised by such a reasonable response. Although Fen was filthy from head to toe, the man stretched out his hand:
“My name is Du Mochou. But everyone calls me Du Crooked Tooth.”
Hiding his smile, Du watched as the boy tried to keep hold of the canister under his elbow. Finally, Fen gave up and put the container on the ground to shake Du’s hand. It was narrow and childlike, but his handshake was strong.
“My name’s Fen Xiaoguang. But everyone apart from my parents calls me Mogwai.”
“Your parents are refugees?” Du asked, already knowing the answer. “How old are you?”
Fen nodded:
“Yes, we’re from Harbin. I turned fourteen a month ago.”
“Fourteen?” Du Mochou echoed in surprise. “I never would have thought. Well… That changes things. Where is your father? I must speak with him.”
“That way,” the boy said, pointing the way and explaining how to find his father.
Crooked Tooth mussed Fen’s hair, shaking out some dried mud, then left. Fen’s ribs hurt and his arms were bruised, but the conversation with the stranger still put him in a good mood. Mr. Mochou was the first person apart from his mom and dad to show any interest in him, and he didn’t even yell.
That evening, at an unusually filling dinner, his parents were happy and looked at their son lovingly. They had met with Crooked Tooth. The father didn’t say what he and Du had spoken about, but from that day, the boys stopped beating Fen. Later he learned that his father no longer had to pay ‘taxes’ to the local crime boss, who, as it turned out, was called Du Mochou.
The next morning, four gruff men brought an immersion capsule to the Xiaoguang family hovel. A stooping technician connected it, configured it and left. The boy had to figure everything else out himself. But the capsule, although old, dented and worn, with intragel long overdue for replacement, unveiled a new world to Fen.
He figured out Du’s motives several years later. Crooked Tooth, who had had his eye on dominion over the virtual spaces for some time, approached everything from the foundations. No, he didn’t play the game and he had no plans even to create his own clan, but Du knew for certain: there was money in Dis. A lot of it. Far more than could be collected in protection money from the inwinova and the low-class citizens and their sorry excuses for businesses.
Du crafted his own street gang, took away teenagers and children and raised them so that they, as adults, never even thought of betraying him. They all owed Crooked Tooth, and terrible things happened to those who tried to leave him. The chicks could fly the nest and go all the way to Mars, but they must never forget who gave them their wings. And spare a share of their profits for Mr. Mochou, because for many of them, he had become a second father. Or just replaced the first.
Crooked Tooth had decided to apply the same method to the new territory of Disgardium. The method required investing in equipment, but that wasn’t a problem. Debtors paid Du Mochou not only in phoenixes, but in whatever they had. Capsules, for example.
The one given to Fen was not only old, it also didn’t function correctly. The pain filter didn’t work and the old intragel made his skin itch, but Fen was still overjoyed. With Mr. Mochou’s blessing, Fen’s parents let him play as much as he wanted. Fen took full advantage with no sense of moderation. Sometimes, after exiting the game, he fell asleep right in his capsule, curled up into a ball, and after waking up, he quickly wolfed down some UNBs and went straight back into Dis.
Mogwai discovered the Resilience skill on his very first day. He was no stranger to pain, and to tell the truth, had even come to enjoy it. At first, the boy didn’t seek to level up or complete quests. Quests were obligations, and Mogwai liked freedom: the ability to roam where he wanted and do what he wanted. But, feeling a strange pleasure from all kinds of pain, for the first weeks he just explored the sandbox and deliberately subjected himself to the attacks of various mobs, from toothy rabbits to nightmarish ghouls. The former bit him with their small teeth and scratched him, the latter emitted the cold of the grave and slowly strangled him. In the end, Mogwai always died, but when he revived, he continued his experiments.
His Resilience grew with every hour he spent in Dis. Mogwai remained at level 1, but through experimenting and exploring the sandbox, he had reached its edges with the strongest mobs, at level 27. Stealth helped there.
After a giant level 21 tarantula failed to finish off the daring noob with one bite, Mogwai suddenly realized something. Unlike in real life, it was advantageous to be killed in Dis: it made him stronger. Harder. Recognizing that he could, in addition to just letting the mobs hit him, fight back in order to level up his combat skills, Mogwai armed himself with a Rusty Knife with 1-2 damage, taken fro
m a mob’s corpse that someone had forgotten to loot. Ninety-nine strikes out of a hundred missed, but the hundredth leveled up the skill.
Players laughed at him then too, seeing how he was already months in and still not above level 1, but Mogwai just smiled to himself in response. The greater the difference between him and the mob dealing damage to him, the faster his Resilience grew. Reaching level two under these conditions only meant slowing his progress toward eventual superiority over those foolish players. And he was more than used to mockery and insult.
In the ninth month of his life in the sandbox, this level 1 scrub surprised them all. Mogwai showed up at the Goose and Gosling tavern and registered for the mini-arena tournament in the back yard. His hand steady, he put down his hundred gold entry fee (it was incredibly easy to borrow money from Crooked Tooth, although the interest was criminal), waited his turn, then went to fight — in canvas trousers and shirt, Rusty Knife in hand. He was up against a level 10 thug.
Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series Page 3
