I popped into the bank on my way and put the money on my account. It would have been stupid to arrive at a potential drunken party with so much cash in my pocket. I only kept a few notes as well as the twenty grand I owed to my old friend Gleb.
The bar was busy and loud as it always was on a Friday night. Gleb was already sitting at the table I’d reserved, drinking a dark unfiltered beer.
He looked depressed. His hair was disheveled, his clothes unkempt. He'd never been a sharp dresser but he’d always taken good care of himself. His hair had always been slickly parted. Judging by his stats, his Mood left a lot to be desired. Even the bar’s inadequate lighting couldn’t conceal the gray strands in his hair. His temples were completely white.
“Gleb!” I said, approaching him. “It’s been a while!”
“Phil! Great to see you, man!” he gave me a bear hug.
His joy seemed sincere. No amount of game playing could replace real-life contact. Physical hugs seemed to charge you up with something warm and positive. Because we’re social animals. We need it.
For a while, we maintained a rather formal conversation, asking each other about the usual aspects of our lives: families, children, etc. etc.
We’d been friends since junior high. That was when he’d first appeared at our school. He'd been rather average in everything. A B-student with no particular talents, he wasn’t funny or popular, neither a nerd nor a hooligan. Still, at the time he’d given me the impression of being solid and reliable. It just so happened that we shared a desk[36]. Then we went to the same college. Our friendship continued — right until the moment I’d let him down.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” I said. “Here you are.”
I laid the money on the table in front of him. “This includes all the inflation and late payment charges.”
Grinding his teeth, he stared at the money without touching it. “Too late,” he whispered. “Way too late. I needed it for my mother’s surgery. Don’t you understand? We sold everything! Everything we had, you understand? We scraped together just enough to take her to Israel for treatment. She needed a bone marrow transplant. We found a matched donor for her. That was incredibly lucky. She had a very rare blood group.”
“I’m so sorry... I didn’t know. Why didn’t you say?”
“I didn’t want any fake sympathy. From you or anyone else. That money wouldn’t have saved her, anyway. It was peanuts compared to the bill we got from the clinic. It was just that everything seemed to happen at the same time. I was so desperate for that money and you just took it and blew it in that wretched casino. I didn’t want to give it to you, you remember that, don’t you? A year later, our father left us. My brother got married and fled the nest. And I...”
He was getting drunk before my very eyes. No idea how much he’d already drunk before I’d arrived but his speech was already slurred. Finally, he spilled some beer over the money and took it. He blotted the notes with a napkin and put them neatly away in his tattered old wallet.
Task Status: Pay my casino debt back to my friend Gleb Kolosov
Task completed!
XP received: 500 pt.
+10% to Satisfaction
After an hour, I realized it was time for me to call it a day. Gleb was already drunk as a skunk.
Much to my disappointment, nobody else had turned up. Not even Sergei Rezvei, one of my best friends who’d agreed to see me without ado. That was so not like him. Still, the program had closed the task and even rewarded me with some XP. I had 630 pt. until my next level.
I put Gleb in a taxi. First I tried to get his address out of him, intending to send him off alone. Then I realized it wasn’t such a good idea. He was drunk and he had money on him.
So I jumped in the taxi with him and took him home myself. It took me quite some effort to haul him up to the fifth floor where I handed him over to his wife: grim, plain and old before her time. I told her I was happy to meet her and explained that Gleb and I were school friends.
I really should meet up with him again sometime and find out what his problems were.
The next morning I pumped myself full with energy drinks and had a double gym session. My boxing coach handed me a pair of gloves and made me punch the bag, encouraging me with his constant “That’s good! Good! Again! Faster! Harder! Harder! Faster!” which sounded almost like the soundtrack from an adult movie. Having finished with him, I headed for the weights room.
I didn’t need a coach there. I’d already jotted down a workout schedule and marked down the weights I’d planned to use. And seeing as I had nowhere to hurry to, I spent another half-hour on the treadmill.
Totally spent, I basked under a hot and cold shower for a while, got dressed, had a protein shake and walked home.
I gave my sister a ring to find out when we were going to see our parents. She was all hyped up as usual. She started by threatening me with a gastronomical apocalypse, then told me to buy some fruit and a cream cake. By the end of our conversation, she was already doubting my ability to choose the right cake or fruit so she just told me she’d buy everything herself. All I had to do was turn up on time on my own accord because she “had better things to do than driving every young dickhead around town”.
Already when I was approaching my house, I got a funny feeling I’d missed something. I turned around and saw a familiar figure sitting on the bench. How the hell?
“Mr. Panikoff?” I called to my first quest giver in disbelief.
“That’s me!” the old man grinned. “Phil, if I remember rightly?”
“Exactly! May I ask you what brings you here?”
“I live here. We moved not long ago. Everything’s all right with you? You look tired.”
“That’s because I’ve just been training. If the truth were known, I can barely move. Does that mean we’re neighbors now?”
“It certainly looks that way,” he feigned surprise. “Oh well. It’s been nice to see you again.”
“Likewise,” I said.
“Oh, and by the way,” his voice changed ever so slightly. He stopped lisping. His words had a metallic ring to them. “You don’t think you spend too much time helping your new friends, do you? All those Aliks, Fatsoes and Glebs? They’re the true dregs of society. When are you going to start leveling up properly, may I ask? Or are you waiting for Khphor to come whistling round the mountain?”
He must have verbally critted me because his words had a shocking effect on me. I was floored. Flabbergasted even. It felt as if he’d whacked me with a baseball bat.
“Answer my question!” he demanded.
“How do you know?” my voice failed me.
“We,” he stressed the word, “we know everything about you. So just answer the question. What’s you current Insight level?”
“Two.”
“So Valiadis was right about you, then. You still have the program. Shame. Very well. Now I know everything I need to know. You can go now.”
“So what’s gonna happen next?”
“In what respect?” he asked me.
“With me and with the program.”
“Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” the old man replied in the his old shaky and lispy voice. “You sure you all right? You look worn out.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
He picked up the newspaper which was lying in his lap, opened it and began reading, shielding himself with it.
For a while, I stood next to him studying his stats. There was nothing unusual about them. He was still the same 83-year-old pensioner with a social level of 27.
“Mr. Panikoff,” I made another attempt.
He put his paper down. “Yes, Phil? What is it?”
“What number apartment are you at? Seeing as we’re neighbors now...”
“Oh yes, of course! At number thirty-seven. Please drop in sometime.”
“With pleasure,” I said, heading for the door.
Back home, I finished reading y
et another book. I still had about an hour left until meeting with my parents.
That’s when I made another decision.
It had nothing to do with Valiadis or my leveling, not even with the weird Mr. Panikoff, my dear old-age pensioner. You didn’t find this type of task in the logs. There was no quest in the world which could issue it.
That was something I desired with all my heart.
I looked at the map. She was at home. I left the house and went to see her.
I had to ring the bell several times before the door finally opened.
Vicky stood in the doorway wrapped in a towel. Her wet hair hung loose. A drop of water made its way down her face.
She stared at me in surprise. Without saying a word, she let me in. I shut the door and took a long look at her. And she, at me. She appeared so vulnerable — young even — that my heart clenched.
“My daughter is with my parents again,” she finally broke the silence. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I replied, forcing the sounds out of my dry throat. “And I’m about to go and see my own parents now. Would you like to come with me?”
“Actually, I would.”
End of Book One
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About the Author
DAN SUGRALINOV grew up in a small working-class town on the Russian border with Kazakhstan. It’s a miracle he survived his childhood games of hide-and-seek in the surrounding building sites complete with perilous rebar structures and flooded foundation pits.
Ever since he learned to read at the age of five, he couldn’t put a book down. Reluctant to earn himself the name of a conceited nerd, he concentrated on playing soccer which allowed him to become friends with the town’s toughest kids.
In 1995, he graduated with honors, entering the St Petersburg Academy of Engineering and Economics where he studied business creation. He must have done something right because in the years that followed, he first worked on TV and radio just to get the taste of it, then opened his first successful business followed by several more. In between, he started writing and playing video games, winning the St Petersburg Mortal Kombat championship and becoming runner-up for Starcraft and Warcraft 3. He is a 14-times champion in Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 as well as the world’s ex-#1 in the World of Warcraft.
In 2004, he wrote his first motivational novella The Bricks which to date has garnered him over 3,000,000 readers online alone.
In 2014, Russia’s leading publishers of business literature Mann, Ivanov & Ferber published a revised and extended edition of his book, The Bricks 2.0.
In 2015, Dan discovered the existence of LitRPG. He devoured everything that had been written in that genre until he finally decided he too could write similar books.
In summer 2017, he published his first book in the subgenre of RealRPG: Level Up.
Dan Sugralinov is a consummate gamer, a multiple MMORPG champion and the world’s ex-#1 in the World of Warcraft. He is also a successful businessman and author of books on marketing and business organization. His first LitRPG series Level Up took Russia by storm in 2017. The English translation of the series is about to be released on Amazon in its entirety.
* * *
[1] An excerpt from the song Signs of Life by a leading Russian rapper Oxxxymiron
[2] “Happiness for everybody, free! No one will go away unsatisfied!”— Phil borrows a suitable line from The Roadside Picnic, the benchmark first-contact novel by the two leading Russian science fiction authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
[3] The official retirement age for Russian men was 60 at the time of writing
[4] Track pants and a leather jacket: a typical attire of a low-class Russian gangster
[5] Victor Chernomyrdin: a prominent 1990s Russian politician notorious for his inappropriate and ungrammatical statements
[6] 20,000 Russian rubles is about $350 at the time of writing
[7] Pasta Navy style: a simple pasta dish with ground beef and onions which used to be a staple in the Soviet Navy
[8] Vladimir Zhirinovsky: a Russian extreme right-wing politician notorious for his antics and controversial statements.
[9] Six hundred rubles is about $10 at the time of writing
[10] Blennophobia: the fear of slime and mucus
[11] 20,000 rubles is about $350 at the time of writing
[12] Russian drinking customs prescribe to stick to only one type of alcoholic drink throughout a party. Doing so prevents a reveler from getting drunk prematurely. Together with another Russian custom of always chasing a drink down with some food, this is the “secret�
�� behind the Russians’ alleged ability to drink a lot without getting drunk.
[13] Olivier: a Russian potato salad
[14] Another Russian drinking habit prescribes to always accompany every drink with an appropriate toast. It’s considered bad manners in Russia to sip one’s drink alone when in company: you’re supposed to only drink in unison with everybody else after a toast has been pronounced.
[15] VK: VKontakte.ru, a Russian social media network similar to Facebook. Marina is being sarcastic, mocking Cyril’s ignorance of social media.
[16] The Russian adaptation of the American game show
[17] Although smoking is still widespread in Russia, it’s considered rude to smoke at home, especially in households with children. Family smokers usually go outside in order to have a smoke.
[18] Due to rather harsh weather conditions with copious amounts of snow, slush or mud in the streets, it’s common practice in Russia to remove street footwear in the hallway of private homes and wear slippers inside. Every Russian household has a few extra pairs of slippers for any guests who often bring their own indoor shoes to wear even at parties. Similar practices exist in other countries with harsh climates such as Japan or Finland.
[19] Another Russian drinking tradition warns against the dangers of drinking weaker alcohol after stronger spirits (like drinking beer or wine after vodka) because doing so can knock a drinker off his feet in no time.
Restart (Level Up Book #1) LitRPG Series Page 43
