A Jump into the Unknown (Reality Benders Book #5) LitRPG Series

by Michael Atamanov

  “Yes, my players are still quite low level, seventeen on average. And in fact, as was justly noted here, only eleven of the H25 Faction players can be said to belong to combat classes. Even that takes some stretching. But we were created as a scientific and medical taskforce, not some band of cutthroats! The NPC Orcs are very numerous and more powerful than us. But still I’m sure we can get our second node back. We just have to prepare better this time!”

  I took a closer look at the screen, which was showing the map as known to the Human-25 Faction. One level-one node on the shore of a very large river. They had lumber and clay harvesting operations, and two sewn fields. But by all appearances, the H25 faction players hadn’t so much as set foot on the other side of the river, and knew little about what was there. In fact, they didn’t know much about the game world at all, restricted to just the five neighboring nodes, two of which were impassable and mountainous. In the neighboring node to the north, there was a symbol marking a destroyed fort. That must have been what they were discussing.

  Hmm... If I understood this correctly, the H25 Faction was in hot water. After all, there was nothing to stop the NPC Orcs from attacking the only remaining node and wiping their level-one fort off the map, taking their last remaining claim with it. If I were in the Orcs’ place, I would have done just that and eleven players of middling level would not have been able to stand in my way.

  Meanwhile, the middle-aged soldier with major patches hosting the session addressed the room:

  “Okay then, thank you Valentina for your first report and we wish the Human-25 Faction a future full of growth and blossoming. Does anyone have any questions for her?”

  For whatever reason, they all kept quiet as if they couldn’t see the imminent catastrophe. Maybe they really didn’t? I had no choice but to raise my hand:

  “Unfortunately, I missed a large portion of the speech, and perhaps you covered this. Valentina, can you tell me the coordinates of your game node?”

  “337-218,” she immediately reacted.

  “Umm...” I tried to mentally conjure a map of the virtual Earth, which I had recently composed by scan from orbit and subsequently studied in depth. “The Geckho spaceport is at 57-478. Nodes are eleven miles across... that means you’re about thirty-seven hundred miles from the space port on the big continent. The nearest seacoast is five or six nodes to your south-east... And I think... Yes, that river flows directly into the ocean...”

  “What good is all that pointless information to her?” Ivan Lozovsky interrupted me impatiently, not hiding his annoyance.

  “Well, Ivan, I will be using that information to direct a Geckho ferry to her territory. In two or three days’ time, expect a shipment to come up the river with essential goods. Building materials, provisions and seeds, vehicles, weaponry. And a Relict Faction squadron consisting of three hundred men: two hundred high-level soldiers and one hundred Engineers and Builders. I’ll send a couple assault antigravs as well so the Orcs won’t be able to destroy the Human-25 Faction’s only base.”

  I was expecting words of gratitude, but instead my offer was followed by an active exchange of whispers in the darkness, which quickly grew into a buzz of dismay. The host told me the common opinion:

  “We are nowhere near sure that the Human-25 Faction should accept your offer of help. As everyone in this room knows, the game opens up truly limitless possibilities in the spheres of medical treatment and pharmacology, and the H25 Faction was created for the express purpose of conducting medical experiments. Much of their research is top-secret, as are their results. And absolutely none of it can be allowed to leak! For that reason, it is extremely undesirable to have players from the parallel world in our territory. Furthermore, the Dark Faction has proven itself dangerous on a number of occasions, and no matter what they’re calling themselves now, they’re still a threat. Three hundred troops could easily take down the small fortress’s garrison and destroy the fledgling H25 Faction. We cannot allow that!”

  Holy crap! The Dome project curators didn’t even consider my Relict Faction an ally or friend. In fact, they looked on me as a potential enemy! And meanwhile, the distress on Valentina’s face was so potent that it hurt to look at her. The leader of the Human-25 Faction was desperately hoping for help, and was perhaps in a critical situation on the verge of destruction. But here they simply flatly stated she could get no support.

  “The antigravs will come no matter what these stool pigeons say,” I mentally told her, and she shuddered in fear. “But they can only carry a limited amount of cargo, so they’ll only be bringing the absolute essentials: tools, firearms, and a detailed map of your continent showing your nearest human neighbors. The NPC Orcs that have been bothering you, you show my troops where their settlement is and they’ll take care of them. Our Sio-Mi-Dori flying assault vehicles will grind them into dust. Right after completing that task, my troops will fly back and not even enter the H25 Faction’s base, so you don’t have to worry about keeping your secrets safe. And as for ferries and additional support, I’ll leave that up to you. No one knows the situation better than you do. Should I send them? Or are you afraid to anger the curators? No need to say anything out loud. Just nod if the situation is critical and your faction truly needs help.”

  Valentina turned her head toward the darkened room, spent a few minutes looking pensively into the darkness, then shook her head “no.” Either I was mistaken and the Human-25 Faction wasn’t really in such a grave state, or its leader was afraid to cross the curators. In any case, a refusal is a refusal. I wasn’t going to impose my help.

  And meanwhile, the time had come for the Human-3 Faction to make its report. And I was in for a bigtime jolt. When the gray major conducting the council session asked the leader of the Human-3 Faction to please begin his speech, up stood... Igor Tarasov!!! What was going on??? Fortunately, the host quickly explained:

  “As our first speaker already said, the Human-23 Faction has met another very strong and successful group in the game, the American Human-12 Faction. This is a very important and promising contact, and we made the decision to transfer our high-level and high-profile Diplomat Gerd Ivan Lozovsky to the Human-23 Faction to help us get things off on the right foot. And in Lozovsky’s place, we appointed Leng Tarasov new leader of the Human-3 Faction.”

  Wait a second! Tarasov had become a Leng? It seemed to me the order of events here must have been a bit different than the host was saying. Leader of the First Legion Igor Tarasov was the highest-level and most respected player under the Dome and, by the looks of things, he was the first high-profile player in our faction to achieve high enough Authority and Fame to progress to the next rank. After that, the game algorithms would have automatically made him leader of the Human-3 Faction, taking Ivan Lozovsky’s post. To the careerist diplomat, that was a dead end, and Lozovsky probably asked the curators to transfer him to a different Russian faction. Then his request was approved because they found an easy excuse: the important contact with the American faction required an experienced diplomat. That was most likely how it all went down.

  I was only half listening to Igor Tarasov’s speech, because I already knew most of the information. The only thing that really freaked me out was that he made no differentiation between the Relict, La-Fin and La-Varrez Factions, lumping them all together under the entrenched label of “Dark Faction.” And none of the curators made any remarks to the new Human-3 head about the incorrect terminology. For my part, I was just itching to ask Tarasov and all the others:

  “The Germans are part of the Relict Faction, along with some former H3 Faction players. By your logic are they also part of this so-called ‘Dark Faction?’“

  But I held it together and kept silent. I was already able to sense a wary and even negative opinion of me from a few of the men in the room, so I was trying not to exacerbate things.

  And Meanwhile Igor Tarasov, initially somewhat skittish in front of high-level leadership, quickly calmed down and conducted his repo
rt with a good deal of confidence. The Human-3 Faction’s numbers were growing steadily and getting very near to reaching two and a half thousand players. The defensive structures in the Karelia node which were destroyed in the last war with the Dark Faction had been rebuilt. A new defensive line had been constructed to the south, where they now had a border with the Dark Faction between the Rainforest and Tropics nodes. Pieces of a Miyelonian starship that fell into the bay (I suspected they were referring to armor panel fragments from the crashed cloaked frigate I allowed Gerd Ustinov to collect) had been sent to the Prometheus laboratories for study.

  From there, the faction head talked about some new problems:

  “The speed of road building in the southern nodes has fallen by sixty percent and is continuing to go down because the NPC Centaurs and Minotaurs are leaving en masse, upset at their compensation. The usual rate of one Geckho crystal per day for three plus grub and beer is no longer good enough for the NPC’s. All attempts to talk sense into them through chief Centaur mare Phylira have not ended in success. And our attempts to pressure Phylira...” Igor Tarasov cast a gaze of displeasure at Diplomat Ivan Lozovsky, “lead to the Centaur Matriarch reneging on agreements she made previously with the Human-3 Faction. We will not be receiving further territories from the NPC Antiquity Faction.”

  Now that was interesting! I shuddered because it was news to me.

  “And how much do the NPC builders want then?” came a question from the room. He replied with a sour look:

  “They want no less than their fellow tribesmen are getting for the construction of the port in the Tropics node. The rich Dark Faction pays generously, four crystals a day for each Centaur, while the stronger Minotaurs are earning a whole six crystals a day. Unfortunately, we do not have that kind of money. So I’m afraid that soon all three thousand NPC’s that used to work for us will pick up and cross the border to help build Leng Gnat’s port.”

  For some reason, they all looked at me. And I could read clear disapproval in their gazes as if it was my fault the Human-3 Faction was low on space currency. Meanwhile, Igor Tarasov continued his speech. And the more he told me about the faction’s plans for continued development and expansion, the further my eyes crawled into my forehead in surprise. The leader of the Human-3 Faction was proposing spooking or even in fact attacking the NPC Centaurs in order to expand to the south then, circumventing the two coastal nodes belonging to the Dark Faction, to unite with the territories of the Human-6 Faction!!! To hear him tell it, they needed a direct road to their German allies that would not be blocked by the Dark Faction in case things got heated so their shipments of titanium concentrate wouldn’t be cut off. What the crap?! I couldn’t hold back and, stopping him midword, stood up and grabbed the microphone:

  “I’m getting the impression that you never even look at the political map of the virtual world. Otherwise how else can I explain the sheer mind-boggling nonsense you are currently discussing with such utter sincerity?!”

  I heard resentful outbursts. The curators were decidedly opposed to my brash words.

  “Kirill, you’re forgetting your place!” Vasily Filippov tried to stop me, afraid at where my antics could lead. But I didn’t listen and continued:

  “Well, how else do you explain what you said about the Human-6 Faction??? That faction hasn’t existed for a while now! The German players all joined the Relict Faction. Their leader Leng Thomas Müller became my deputy and advisor for political affairs. And anyway, how many times can you confuse the names of your neighbors, lumping them all under one banner into this mythical, nonexistent ‘Dark Faction?’“

  “Mythical? Nonexistent?” Igor Tarasov, leader of the Human-3 Faction objected sincerely and very emotionally. “Gnat, my First Legion was spilling blood in pitched battles with the Dark Faction before you ever entered the game!!!”

  “No, you were fighting against the La-Fin Faction of the magocratic world,” I corrected the decorated veteran. “There has never been any group by the name ‘Dark Faction!’ There are several groups in the game from the magocratic world: La-Fin, La-Shin, La-Varrez and another ten or so others, but they aren’t connected and are in fact often hostile to one another. The name ‘Dark Faction’ came from a poor understanding of the politics of the parallel world and, I suspect, low Intelligence of the player who made first contact with them, which kept them from being able to properly identify our new neighbors.”

  And although I was using a normal tone with Tarasov with no scolding or insulting language, for some reason they didn’t let me finish. The microphone in my hands was simply switched off. The gray-haired major conducting the council session announced:

  “For speaking out of turn and making provocative statements impeding the course of the meeting, I hereby revoke Kirill Ignatiev’s speaking privileges!”

  I was simply burning in indignation, but still I set the inactive microphone aside and sat back in my seat. Vasily Filippov was to the left of me and whispered:

  “Kirill, don’t go looking for trouble. I beg you. Don’t turn the curators against you. They have been invested with great power, and a great amount depends on their opinion of you!”

  Human-3 Faction security director Alexander Antipov tried to whisper approximately the same thing from the right. And I didn’t argue, though I did not think I much depended on any of the people in this room anymore. The only thing they could do was to forbid me from entering a virt pod and lock me in the real world. As soon as I got into the virtual world, they had no hold over me.

  Near the end of his speech, Tarasov turned to his opinions of a potential war with the Dark Faction. He said their neighbors were restless and he didn’t know what to expect out of them. Fully serious the whole time, they were arguing, making various points, even discussing a very strange idea from one of the generals in the room to attack preemptively. In his words, the best defense is a strong offense! I was trying not to show how I felt about all that, but their level of ignorance of the true state of affairs and their idiocy (there’s no other way to call it) were at times off the charts.

  The next speaker was head scientist Valentin Ustinov, and it just bored me. They were still the blueprints of starships, vehicles, long-distance space communication devices and planetary shield generators that Gnat brought them. Rapid progress was not expected in any area. What was more, while carrying out laboratory tests on the hyperdrive I brought them, they accidentally broke it. Fixing it was going to be problematic, but still they were trying. Studying living tissue samples from Miyelonians and Geckho at the Prometheus. A few graphs, complicated chemical formulas. A decision was made to transfer the biological samples and results to the Human-25 Faction because that was more their profile. Then they repurposed that laboratory for studying the composite materials that made up the armor plates from the downed Miyelonian frigate.

  Having learned my bitter lesson, I didn’t try and give advice or suggestions even though it would have been no problem to pick up a cheap hyperdrive on Kasti-Utsh III to replace the broken one, along with a full set of technical documentation about the long-distance Miyelonian scout frigate Tikon-Mra V. And that would include the makeup of their armor plates and even the technology to produce them. Overall, I was just very bored. My microphone was switched off and my right to participate in the discussions had been revoked after they decided I was bothering everyone and talking out of turn. However, I was coming more and more under the impression that I’d outgrown this discussion.

  Finally it came my turn to make a report and my microphone was turned back on.

  “Kirill, I beg you. Go as light as possible, be open and no stupid stuff.” Vasily Filippov whispered and I promised to restrain myself.

  However, the first question about the affairs of the island-based Relict Faction made me give a predatory smile. They were so far behind the times! I was not going to hide the truth, or smooth over the sharp edges, so it was easily possible many of them wouldn’t like my responses. Seemingly, the curators of
the Dome project, who’d grown accustomed to feeling omniscient and omnipotent, were in for a real shock. Oh, just you wait and see!

  Chapter Twenty. Forsaken, but not Broken

  “ISLAND FACTION? With all due respect, uh... Major Kudryavtsev, your information is badly out of date. The Relict Faction is currently in control of eighteen game nodes – on the west, north and east shores of the bay as well as Rocky Island – and contains more than ten thousand players. To be more accurate, ten thousand four hundred seven at the time I left the game. And my current maximum is almost seventeen thousand, so we have a very solid footing to build on. Plus, if you consider the fact that our capital hexagon will be the first territory on the virtual Earth to reach development level six in about a week’s time, our limit will go up another fourteen thousand, making our potential to take on new players truly limitless. We have it on good authority from Geckho Viceroy Kosta Dykhsh that Relict is already the largest of all factions on the virtual Earth and, in ten days, we will triple our numbers at the very least.”

  In point of fact, Kosta Dykhsh actually said that about the La-Fin Faction. But given that faction had joined mine in its entirety, I wasn’t bending the truth one bit. And meanwhile, a dismayed buzz kicked up in the room again. Seemingly, the fact that Human-3 had a faction four times larger than it right at their doorstep came as an unpleasant surprise to the curators. I also made a clear demonstration of my psionic abilities, which made a definite impression. I saw that at least three of the people in the room hurried to don dark glasses. Naive. As if that would help.

  “So, where did the Relict Faction get that many players?” the very same gray Major Kudryavtsev asked his next question, absolutely drenched in flagrant mistrust. “After all, as far as I know, just five days ago your faction contained no more than 87 players – the limit for a level-one node.”