Tree of Fear (Loner Book #5): LitRPG Series, page 18
“Okay,” I said, calming down a little. “But are you sure it’s worth the trade?”
“Well, yes,” the little God spat, adding sarcastically: “Although I guess you’re quite a sociable guy, aren’t you? And you have tons and tons of friends outside the game, too. If you didn’t have this curse, you’d probably be waltzing around laughing it up with a crowd of friends and you’d definitely end up founding your own clan at some point. Think about it — how many contacts do you have in Arktania?”
For some reason, I was embarrassed.
“Uh... Eight.”
“You know how many contacts an average player has after two weeks of play? Over a hundred. And that’s not even counting the separate clan chat, where there are always a few hundred players hanging around. Or are you trying to tell me that you’d definitely have joined a clan if you’d been able to?”
I wish I could’ve lied, but my conscience just wouldn’t let me.
“Probably not.”
“Well, there we have it!” The little God thundered. “So how about you stop whining about your miserable lot in life? How about instead, you listen to what you’re going to need to do in the name of our Goddess?”
“Another quest?” I asked with a heavy sigh. “I don’t even have enough time to find the sword, and now you want to make my life even harder? And speaking of — could you turn me rightside-up already?!”
“Yes, it is a quest,” said Hotei, completely ignoring my request. “But this time, it’s in your world, the “real” world.”
This made me a little tense. Actually, more than just a little, to be honest. Between burglarizing the laboratory and the whole unpleasant incident under the bridge, I’d had more than my fill of adventure already.
“So what do I need to do?”
“Catch some Gremlins.”
“Any Gremlins, or some specific ones?” I asked, and only then did it dawn on me to add: “Gremlins?! In the real world?!”
Hotei set his hands on his hips.
“What’s so weird about that? You call your world the “real” world, as if all of us here are somehow not real. That has a whiff of dirty, low-down, unfounded discrimination about it. But that’s not the issue right now. The Gremlins have gone into the Chaos, and most of them have settled inside mechanisms within Arktania. But a couple of the little green bastards have clambered over into your world. The power outages, for example? That’s them. They could potentially inflict a whole lot of harm, since you out there are completely unprepared for an encounter with creatures like this. So we need to catch them as quickly as we possibly can.”
It took me a little time to digest what he’d just told me.
“Let’s say they actually have made it into our world,” I said after thinking for a little while. “Even if we know that, how would I catch them? I mean, the Gremlins have... I don’t even know how to say it, really... Manifested as the Chaos? I have no idea how that might look, but I’m guessing it’s definitely going to be something that isn’t material.”
“Lightning,” Hotei explained. “You can use electricity to knock them out of the technology they’ve inhabited. To catch them and bring them back to Arktania, you’ll have to use a phone, tablet, or laptop. You’ll just need to snatch a Gremlin using lightning and send them into any piece of technology that’s connected to the internet. From there, I’ll intercept it, tear it out of the Chaos, and send it back into Arktania.
“Somehow, it sounds completely unrealistic,” I said with a frown. “Catching them with lightning — is that something like Pinky’s electric lasso? I haven’t leveled that up at all.”
“Have you ever seen attribute points or an icon for an abilities menu anywhere in your world?”
“Uh... No, but... I think the menu has popped up…”
“Arktania operates on a specific set of rules. In some ways, they also apply in your world, but they operate more flexibly. For example, if you rack your brain a little bit, you’ll surely be able to come up with some way to alter the form your lightning takes. Not in a huge way, but enough to allow you to catch a Gremlin.”
“Fine,” I concurred hesitantly. “But where, and how, will I find them? And how am I going to get onto the grounds of the power hub, even if I somehow happen to know that there are Gremlins there?”
“For that, you’ll have a comrade in arms. He’ll be the senior partner in your partnership. Your job will be to catch Gremlins, and he’ll answer for everything else.”
Now this was interesting.
“Partner? Who?!”
“You’ll see,” the God declined to give me a straight answer. “As an incentive to get this done quickly, I’ll promise you a special reward for completing this task.”
“A “Slider” ability?” I asked, not feeling especially hopeful. “I still don’t know what differentiates my class from a regular Electromage. Maybe it’s time to share that valuable little tidbit of info with me?”
“It is,” Hotei agreed, quite unexpectedly. “The most valuable thing a person can possess is information. But I’m going to offer you something more interesting: either information on the people who attacked you and almost killed you in the “real” world, or information about this lovely place and how one can get out of it.”
“I think the task sounds difficult enough that I’m gonna ask for both pieces of info in exchange for completing it,” I insisted. “Especially since it’s also in your interest to keep me alive, and help me get back to finding the remaining swords as quickly as possible. Actually, thinking about it logically, you should really be sharing everything you know with me without charging me for it at all!”
“Yeah, keep dreaming,” Hotei scoffed. “But alright — I’ll meet you halfway.”
You’ve been offered the task “Springtime Gremlin Hunt.”
Task Requirements: send 5 Gremlins back into Arktania.
Reward: some extremely important information from the great and wise God Hotei.
Well, you know what they say: if you don’t sing your own praises, nobody else is going to do it for you.
“The reward somehow sounds too abstract,” I noted; somehow, I wasn’t in any particular hurry to accept the quest.
“Man, you’re a drag,” the little God frowned.
You’ve been offered the task “Springtime Gremlin Hunt.”
Task Requirements: send 5 Gremlins back into Arktania.
Reward: detailed information about the “Tree of Fear,” information about the people who committed the attack on the Emissaries of Arktania.
Naturally, I accepted the quest. But then, thinking about it a little more, I wondered whether this might all be a big setup. What were the chances that the little God had been planning to tell me what I needed to know anyway, but he’d tricked me into having to work for the info? Even if so, though, the task requirements alone had been a pretty nice gift of information from Hotei — for example, they included the name of the place where I now found myself. And I also knew for sure that the people who’d attacked me weren’t connected either to Boris’ dad or to Naumov.
“Well then, it’s a deal.” Hotei slapped me on the shoulder again. “And now, your best move would be to get mentally prepared to be eaten.”
“What?!” I was outraged. “Why? I mean, you can freeze time, for God’s sake — just move me somewhere safe!”
“Hey — saving you isn’t in my job description,” the little god objected. “Plus, I already told you that we can’t get directly involved anyway. This was just a pause, and now things are going to follow the course they should’ve followed from the beginning.”
I would’ve liked to object, and try to convince the little God not to turn me over to the worm to be eaten, but I didn’t have time. The world started moving again, and I plummeted down into the worm’s mass of spinning teeth. And then came the pain.
Chapter 2
THE RESPAWN POINT MET ME with the same heat and the same scorching sun. The desert was so monotonous that I couldn’t even tell whether I was now closer to the tree or further from it. But there was a plus, too: here, I was completely safe, and wasn’t even losing life points because of the Infernal Sun.
So it’s the Tree of Fear, I thought as I looked over at the enormous monolith. Well, this will make it a whole lot easier for Boris to find the info I need. I don’t know whether Hotei let this info slip into the task description on purpose or not, but I’m grateful to him either way.
I quickly sent Boris a message about the Tree of Fear, adding a request for info on Transparisteel for good measure. I had no idea what this material might be, but it was obviously rare and unusual. You never know — I might end up being able to make a fortune off of it.
Since there was no damage from the Infernal Sun in the respawn zone, I found that I had some time to sit back and message all my acquaintances, to let them know that I’d been dragged off to some mysterious location from which there appeared to be no escape. Having warned Ne-Tarok and Pinky, I also messaged Artyom to tell him that I’d definitely be getting in touch with him from an anonymous account sometime that evening. I definitely didn’t want to use my own phone, although actually Hotei could easily ensure that my calls would be secure that way. I guess I just didn’t want to ask for his help with anything so trivial as that.
“Exit.”
Before I climbed out of my capsule, I checked my pain setting. 96%! I was now extremely close to the maximum, of course, but what would happen after that was known only to... Well, the Gods, I guess? The virtual ones, of course. There had to be some endpoint to the process of the parameter increasing and increasing, right? Maybe I’d just end up getting transferred into the game entirely? Or maybe it’d be the opposite — maybe the interface would become fully accessible in the real world? Mind you, what was the point of worrying about it when there was absolutely nothing I could do to influence the result? Come what may, I’d still be fighting for my life and trying to somehow derive some sort of pleasure from this whole engrossing process.
I crawled out of the capsule, feeling thrown off and as depleted as a lemon that had just been through a juicer. That might well have been the most tense session that I’d ever been through in the game. It occurred to me that Hotei might have been right about one thing: responsibility for people other than just myself had created a lot more headache for me than any opponent ever had. While I wasn’t the worst tactician in the world (especially when I had to go into battle alone or in a very small group), I was obviously pretty hopeless as a strategist. I’d never been a fan of strategy games, ever since childhood. And I’d never learned how to order people around as an adult, either. Nor did I have the slightest desire to do so.
I’d already removed the sim card from my phone to keep my number under wraps, but nevertheless I took the risk of using the Wifi in the apartment. I felt safe enough about this, though, since the username and password were lying on the table next to my capsule. Boris still hadn’t added himself as one of my contacts, which meant that he hadn’t found anything yet, and Artyom was absent online for the time being. All things considered, therefore, I could afford to take a little breather.
And that’s when I realized that I owed a big thank-you to whoever had prepared this apartment. Automatic coffeemaker, some baked goods, frozen meals — the place was stocked with everything you’d need to live comfortably. I took a shower, heated up a big pile of food, and took a seat in front of the TV. Yes, yes — there was a TV, and it turned out to be connected to a good old-fashioned antenna. To be honest, I’d already gotten pretty unaccustomed to watching normal TV, and I spent the first five minutes flicking lazily through the channels and pondering which dish I preferred: carbonara or fettuccine Alfredo. For some reason, all these contemplations resulted in me choosing Alfredo lasagna as my favorite. I was honestly doing my best to turn off the part of my memory that was connected to Arktania and all its problems, at least for a little bit. But I only succeeded in doing so until I switched over to a news channel. There, I found a constant feed of problems that had resulted from the sudden, unexpected electricity outages: car accidents, problems in hospitals and government institutions. Even airports were feeling the pain, and that was genuinely scary.
All this finally made me realize that the problem with the Gremlins needed to be sorted out, and very quickly indeed. And I still didn’t know who my partner in the whole enterprise was going to be, or when they’d be making their appearance. Obviously it would be one of these Emissaries of the Virtual Gods, but what abilities would they have?
It was clear that Hotei would give my address to whoever my Gremlin-hunting buddy was going to be, and that all I could really do was await their arrival. Thinking about it, this wasn’t entirely a bad thing; after all, I could use the time to practice with my lightning a little bit. And I was going to need to do that if I wanted to catch any Gremlins. As it was, I couldn’t even make an electric lasso. This would also be a good chance to test out the rest of my skills at their new, higher levels.
I shut all the blinds, laid a few objects out in the middle of the room, sat down on the floor in front of them, and then paused for a second. So it wasn’t going to be enough just to cast lightning — I had to shape it into something like a lasso. And how was I going to do that? Usually, using my in-game abilities was pretty simple: I knew how their application looked and felt within the game. But where the electric lasso was concerned, I’d only ever seen Pinky using it, which meant that I was going to have to improvise on my own.
First, I’d need to keep in mind that lightning in my hands didn’t have the power it had in nature — I wouldn’t be able to blow trees apart or kill people with it. If I’d had an amplimeter, I definitely would have measured the strength of the current and figured out the specific correlation between the in-game and out-of-game manifestations of my ability. But my assumption was that since my lightning was weaker than my Electric Shock, it might be possible to knock somebody out using it, but it definitely wouldn’t be able to kill anybody. And maybe that was for the best, since I wasn’t really planning to kill anyone in the real world anyway.
As far as possible, I’d made sure to choose items that were composed of different materials: a plastic jar, a paper bag that had contained a bottle of milk, some cups, pillows, and spoons. First, I tried out my Magnetism a little bit and discovered that I could attract and repel the spoons at a distance of about fifteen feet. A long way to go to “Magneto,” maybe, but not bad for a start. Especially since the item was so light, which meant that I could launch it at a speed that would turn it into a pretty dangerous projectile. My lightning was effective up to about the same distance. Hitting the paper bag, I blew it to pieces with a little “pop” sound. After this, I decided not to try the same thing with the pillows. The cups, on the other hand, turned out to be a lot tougher, since ceramic was a great dielectric. With these, I was able to start experimenting with moving things around. Nothing whatsoever came of this, though, until I decided to try adding some gesturing to the process. It turned out that there was a good reason that people in movies always waved their hands around crazily while casting spells. Turns out it really helps! Of course, I wasn’t waving my arms around all that crazily, but moving the hand that had loosed the lightning was making things a lot easier.
About an hour and a half later, I’d pretty much mastered the art of grabbing a cup with my lightning and pulling it toward myself. At a certain point, something clicked in my head; it felt just like gaining an ability in the game, and afterward, manipulating lightning was no longer complicated in the least. But the most surprising thing was that a system communication unexpectedly popped up:
You’ve acquired the ability “Electric Lasso.”
“This ability allows you to create lassoes from lightning, which can pull opponents and objects toward you while simultaneously inflicting electrical damage on them. Lasso power depends on your Intelligence attribute; range depends on Wisdom attribute.”
Seriously?! A system communication in the real world?!
I immediately tried to pull up my character info, and even (just imagine it!) my inventory, but no luck. It seemed that these game messages were popping up on some selective basis, and weren’t something that could be controlled. Otherwise, it would’ve been awesome to pull up my inventory and take out a weapon, or summon Spin (which would have been much more surprising).
I was pulled away from these daydreams by a sudden ring at my doorbell. Of course, Hotei had told me that my partner in the whole Gremlin-catching enterprise would find me themselves, and I’d been expecting someone to show up sooner or later, but still — the suddenness of the sound almost gave me a heart attack. Given that the apartment was in an elite luxury residential complex, there was a full-on camera with a monitor instead of a peephole, so I could get a good look at my guest before I opened the door.
