Volper Read online

  -I understand everything, but can we get down to business? Will you buy this corpse from me? Or should I make a delicious dish or something out of it?

  - Hmm ... really, you need to do an analysis of the soft tissues to see if it’s edible, and if the results of the test are positive...

  -"I'm still here," - I interrupted him again; maybe I’ve encountered another psycho in here….

  - Oh yes, excuse me. Well, considering the fact that the meat-eater has never before been delivered to us practically untouched, and it’s even a mature species ... If we count all the organs and take into account their uniqueness, plus the age of the species, in total, we can give you six thousand credits. In addition, we’ll provide you with a regeneration capsule to heal your wound, as an added bonus. What do you think of this proposal?

  - I'm quite happy with it. Honestly, I don’t know the price list for mutants, but that amount is quite impressive to me right now, and I’ll even be healed as a bonus.

  -"Then, please, follow the lady called Alika," he pointed to one of the girls, "and while you're recovering, I'll transfer the money to your account."

  CHAPTER IV: THE RAID STARTS…

  Alika took me to another room on the third floor. There were a lot of medical devices inside the room, along the walls. Wires, coming out of these devices, led to the regeneration capsule standing in the middle of the room. There was a locker to the left of the entrance, into which I placed all my things. While I was getting into the regenerator, two system messages popped up in my view:

  6,000 credits have been transferred to your account.

  Sender: Research Center of Outpost No. 5-17-23.

  Re: Payment for samples of mutated fauna.

  You are credited with 810 experience points.

  Reason: Providing samples of mutated fauna for the scientific laboratories of the research center of outpost No. 5-17-23.

  - “Has something happened?” – Alika asked me.

  "No, I was just distracted by the messages of the interface," I reassured her and lay down in the regenerator.

  -"Judging by the preliminary analysis, the regeneration will take about an hour," I heard her tell me through the closed lid, "now you can relax and rest a bit."

  Once you have the free time, you need to deal with plenty of system messages, and, if possible, plan your next steps. First of all, I called up the logs from the battle, because I was interested to know how the battle had gone down.

  You dealt 2 points of penetrating damage to the Meat-eater.

  You dealt 5 points of kinetic damage to the Meat-eater.

  You didn’t hit the Meat-eater.

  You missed the Meat-eater.

  You didn’t hit the Meat-eater.

  You dealt 2 points of penetrating damage to the Meat-eater.

  You dealt 5 points of kinetic damage to the Meat-eater.

  ...

  ...

  The Meat-eater dealt 32 points of penetrating damage to you.

  The Meat-eater inflicted a trauma called "Lacerated wound of the shoulder" upon you.

  ...

  ...

  You dealt a critical 9 points of kinetic damage and killed the Meat-eater.

  760 experience points were obtained.

  This all seemed like nonsense to me… At such distances, and in battles like these: the dispersion of bullets should’ve been no more than five or, at a maximum, seven centimeters, since the distance to the target hadn’t exceed twenty meters. Okay, what else has the system given us?

  For killing an opponent of a much higher level than you without anyone’s help, you get bonus experience, with each level of difference between you increasing the amount of the reward.

  Received: 4,180 experience

  Quickly looking at the statistics of the character, I found I was now level four, and another 719 points of experience into level five. Quite a lot just for one fight, although, if you recall those three players, they’ve already reached level 10, which means that the sky is the limit and you can achieve a lot. So, what are these other messages?

  You have acquired the skill of using pistols-machine guns.

  You have acquired the skill of using one-handed pistols

  You have acquired the ability to dress wounds in the field.

  You have acquired the skill of quickly reloading a hand-held automatic weapon.

  Only four skills, but if you take into account how quickly the battle ended, then I can’t really expect more. Carefully reviewing the statistics of my character, I didn’t find these skills, and only after a couple of minutes of brainstorming, I tried to open the menu item "Skills". That's where I found the desired skills, alongside a small description of them.

  Skills acquired:

  Handling of firearms: one-handed pistols - 1%

  The indicator for your level of expertise at handling such types of weapons is displayed as a percentage of the effectiveness in use, based on the technical attributes of the weapon.

  Handling of firearms: pistols-machine guns - 4%

  The indicator for your level of expertise at handling such types of weapons is displayed as a percentage of the effectiveness in use, based on the technical attributes of the weapon.

  Dressing wounds in the field - 2%

  The indicator for the speed, accuracy and correctness of dressing wounds in the field

  Quick reloading of manual and automatic weapons - 1%

  The indicator, which affects the speed at which you swap out ammunition for this type of weapon, is shown as a percentage; it increases your speed above the baseline average.

  To be honest, I was already fed up with all of these complicated descriptions. I understood everything about the wound dressing after one read, but I had to re-read the other three skills’ descriptions several times. And then re-read them again. I was then able to puzzle some things out. First of all, it was now clear to me why I’d missed the mark so many times – it was because I’d been using only four percent of all my abilities. Secondly, your level doesn’t play a special role in here; the main thing is how well your skills are developed. Finally, I was very lucky not to have died with only starter skills at my disposal.

  And now for the flip side of the coin. There were a lot of questions left and plenty of small discrepancies. First, why do levels exist at all, if they don’t influence the game? Of course, I suspect that they’ll matter sometime in the future, but I don’t yet see the actual application of these levels. Second, where are the mutants? I’ve seen people, I’ve even noticed a couple of cyborgs, but there’ve been no mutants, although you could choose to be a mutant at the start. The only theory I could come up with was based on Lita’s words: she’d mentioned mutant people, who are hiding from the government.

  I suspect that there’s a different starting location and, possibly, we are on different sides of the trenches. Third, why could I feel such hellish pain in the game? Yeah, almost every game has some sort of pain effect, but not even close to realistic. At some points, while pulling my trophy back to the base camp, I’d had a feeling that the pain was even more intense than it would be in reality. I can’t comprehend that. Fourth, where are the fucking drops? In absolutely every other game world there are drops, which either immediately drop from the monster, or are obtained by accessing the system. Here you had to do everything by yourself.

  If you want to get the heart of a meat-eater, go ahead and open its chest, cut the blood vessels and you’ll have a freshly cut out, still beating heart in your hand, along with a pool of blood, guts and viscera. Adding to that, quests, as I know them, are not available here. Even near the store, where I’d been shopping, several players had discussed how they’d received a lot of tasks, but the system hadn’t highlighted any of them, or, as they say, remembered them by heart.

  There are already a lot of strange things in this game: from awkward players to the absence of quests. As for the quests themselves, it’s all very questionable, especially if you consider the notification I’d
received upon completing the task of connecting to the interface. Beyond that, there’s also my strange behavior. Having basically lived out my entire, humble life, I’ve learned how to behave perfectly in different situations, which has saved my life more than once, and yet here I was behaving like a 14-year-old boy: first flirting with Lita, then beating up that scientist.

  And finally: why the hell did the devs create such a hardcore battle in the very beginning? Also, it’s forbidden to invest real money into your account during the first month. I don’t care, I can’t do that anyway, but why on earth can’t the other players do that? That is, like, one of the main sources of income for game developers, I think. Okay, we'll sort it out later, but for now, it would be better to take a nap – oh, my fatigue has reached up to forty units.

  …I was woken up by the sound of the regenerator's door opening. I examined my left shoulder immediately and didn’t even find a scar. Getting out of the capsule, I saw no one in the room but me. I’d just started mentally criticizing the employees here when I found out there were several cameras, positioned all around the room. Without a second thought, I got dressed and, having gathered all my belongings, I left the regeneration room. I had a burning desire to try to get quests in the research center. But while I’d been dreaming, my mind had already thought up a plan for my progress.

  Quickly getting to the store, where the queue was already small and, waiting for my turn, I did some shopping. Six thousand credits aren’t much: I barely managed to get together the bare minimum to implement my idea. And I planned to leave for a week, somewhere far, far away. Listening to my paranoid instincts, I didn’t sell my previous weapons, but on the contrary, I bought some new, additional weapons. I hid my old ammunition in my room, just in case of an unforeseen death, so that I could at least have some kind of weapon. After inspecting and checking my equipment twice, I got undressed and lay down in the replicator – it was my bed. I mustn’t forget to pay for the room in the morning. This was the last thought I had before I fell into the arms of Morpheus.

  **************************************************************

  A directed explosion destroyed the doors of the room - two grenades were thrown in: an electromagnetic one with a small radius and a fragmentation bomb. After two explosions, an assault group with short-barreled pulse rifles designed for close combat immediately broke into it. After making sure it was safe enough to enter, I aimed my gun at the windows of the second floor. The first floor would have to be cleared by the fighters without me covering them, because all the windows are obstructed by all kinds of garbage, excluding the possibility of not only storming through them but even shooting through.

  Noticing some movement, I turned my gaze toward the balcony, on which stood a mutant, formerly an ordinary man, but now with a disproportionately large head and several rows of sharpened teeth, a big acid gland in the Adam's apple region and three-fingered hands; the rest of the body was hidden by civilian clothes. Aiming at his head through the sight, I softly pulled the trigger. The resulting small poke to his shoulder meant I’d missed the mark initially. A moment later, the mutant's head cracked, splashing a brownish-green liquid all over the wall.

  - Covering group, this is Falcon, an acid mutant on the balcony near the entrance has been eliminated, the acid could drip down, keep off the balcony.

  "Understood, Falcon, we’re going around the balcony."

  Aiming through the windows accessible to me and not finding any targets, I picked up the rifle and, accelerating, jumped onto the next roof, correcting the landing with my gravity compensators. Moving to the top, I took up a new position on the fifth roof.

  -"Assault group, this is Falcon, report" - I whispered into the coms, trying to catch my breath.

  - Falcon, this is Bison, the first floor is almost clear, we found something fucking horrific down here.

  - Bison, what the fuck are you doing down there? What did you find?

  - Vovka, you won’t believe it, but we found what must be the remains of hundreds of people the mutants have eaten. We barely avoided puking.

  If Bison was calling me by my real name over the radio, then things were going really poorly. After considering the situation for a few moments, I made a decision.

  - “Cover group, this is Falcon, remain on alert!” - immediately after that, I sent another message on the radio – “Bison, this is Falcon, you’ll be escorted - on the way out, clean up the ground floor and take up a defensive position, I'm joining you.”

  - “Falcon, this is Black, received!” - said the commander of the outer ring of cover.

  - Falcon, this is Karp, received! - And the inner ring commander responded as well.

  - Falcon, this is Bison, waiting on you!

  After spending a couple of minutes checking the second floor through the electronic optics, I eliminated two more targets along the way. I reached over my shoulder and groped for the handle of the short-barreled power machine. The grips that held the machine released right after my hand gripped the hilt of the machine. Folding the end on the rifle and switching the barrel over into marching mode, I threw it onto the vacant seat. Then I jumped off the roof with the automatic device, activated the gravity compensators literally a meter from the ground and, not sparing the battery’s charge, rushed to the site of clearing, pushing the suit for all it could give.

  Bison was waiting for me near the entrance. At my questioning look, he simply nodded, inviting me to follow him. After passing a couple of rooms, he stopped before a turn at the end of the corridor, which led to the last room, and let me go forward, obviously not wanting to go back in there again. Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, I went into the room. If I’d understood correctly, the mutants had been dining here: there were pieces of meat everywhere, bones, and the half-decomposed corpses of people. Mutants were believed to have been people in the past, until they fell into the hands of a crazy scientist who began testing various mutagens on them. After such cruel experiments, the mutants didn’t even have a grain of reason or humanity left, only some basic instincts remained.

  The Intelligence Service had obtained information about him and had decided to seize him, so he could be transferred to the Supreme Court to face charges of crimes against humanity. This room seems to be where he kept the results of his experiments. At the same time, unsuccessful copies and people who were simply unsuitable, he simply fed to his creatures. I could hardly stop myself from vomiting into my helmet. And then I noticed, in one of the far corners, a small hand clutching a puppet. Something clicked inside of me, my eyes darkened and my mind just turned off. From somewhere deep within my core, a primordial roar broke free.

  **************************************************************

  I woke up in a state close to madness, ready to tear apart anyone who came close to me. After taking a few deep breaths and exhaling, I calmed down a little. Of course, I’d heard that when I sleep in the virtual world, the brain starts bringing out my old memories in the form of a dream, but, according to statistics, these were such rare cases that I hadn’t even imagined that this could ever happen to me. I was glad that, according to those same statistics, the same person hasn’t had more than one or two such dreams happen. It seemed that I’d completely forgotten that operation for a long time, but my subconscious had managed to dredge up this memory from the deepest recesses of my mind.

  After some morning exercises, I was able to completely calm down and was ready for a new day of development and farming. After breakfast, I began to put on my outfit and, tightening up all the dangling elements, according to my old habit, jumped a couple of times, checking to see if the ammunition was loose. Satisfied, I opened the statistics of my character with a chuckle:

  Name: Volper

  Level: 4

  Experience: 719/4862

  ...

  ...

  ...

  Skills:

  Handling firearms: one-handed pistols - 1%

  Handling firearms: pis
tols-machine guns - 4%

  Dressing wounds in the field- 2%

  Quick reloading of a manual automatic weapon - 1%

  Professions: -

  Personal account: 1,124 credits

  Having stopped at the item "Personal account", I felt my mood worsening. There were still a little more than a thousand credits left, and I’d have to pay for the room. But there was nowhere to go, if everything went well with the raid, then I'd be back, probably in about a week, and the free accommodation period was going to expire in six days. I’m glad that I’d managed to buy all sorts of things: dry soup, a couple of additional jars for water, a sleeping bag, a large backpack with a fifty-liter capacity, and a bunch of other things necessary for a long expedition.

  My clothes, in general, resembled the old stuff, only there were inserts with aramid fiber, which strengthened the material, and the elbow pads and knees had polymer reinforcement. I took pride in my new weapons, into which I’d invested most of my money - a small-caliber machine gun pistol, the "Corsair", two "Recon" pistols, one of which I’d placed on the left hip, and the second one was in the operational holster. On the shoulder strap of the holster was also a knife with the handle pointed down. Lovingly touching my Corsair, I again opened up the window with the attributes of my weapons and ammunition: