The Final Trial, page 1
part #3 of Level Up Series
The Final Trial
a novel
by Dan Sugralinov
Level Up
Book#3
Magic Dome Books
Level Up
Book #3: The Final Trial
Copyright © Dan Sugralinov 2019
Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2019
English translation copyright © Elizabeth Yellen, Irene and Neil P. Woodhead 2019
Editors: Irene and Neil P. Woodhead
Published by Magic Dome Books, 2019
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-80-7619-013-9
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the shop and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.
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Table of Contents:
Prologue
Chapter 1. More Fire
Chapter 2. The Second Half
Chapter 3. Far from Home
Chapter 4. Like a Loaded Pistol
Chapter 5. Huge Potential for Energetic Expansion
Chapter 6. The Playpen Star
Chapter 7. The Last Life
Chapter 8. The Class Reunion
Chapter 9. Tyrannosaurus Rex
Chapter 10. A New Ally
Chapter 11. May I Take This Opportunity
Chapter 12. Don't Be Afraid of Enemies
Chapter 13. The Boundaries You Learn When You’re a Child
Chapter 14. He Who Couldn’t Care Less
Chapter 15. Only Unity Will Save You...
Chapter 16. An Easy Way to Become a Superhero
Chapter 17. There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch
Chapter 18. Gods are Blind
Chapter 19. This Happens to Everyone
Chapter 20. Scars on the Body of Fate
Chapter 21. You Don’t Speak of Eternal Bliss in Hell
Chapter 22. For the Future’s Sake
Chapter 23. When Something Looks a Little Too Good
Chapter 24. Revealing the Concealed
Chapter 25. Don’t Forget to Look at the Stars Before You Die
Chapter 26. A Chance to Learn Something New
Chapter 27. What’s So Wrong With Fairy Tales?
Chapter 28. Blowing Up the Bridges
Chapter 29. Fix Your Eyes Upon Your Crude Hands
Chapter 30. Not for Fame Alone
An Afterword from the Author
Prologue
Hearing's the first thing to go. Or is it memory, I always forget.
Dexter
MY NAME is Philip Panfilov. I'm 32 years old, but I’ve really only felt alive for the last three months. Before that, I just bobbed about like a turd in a fishing hole: I ate, drank, played the most massive online game that existed at the time, and was even married. I picked up cash working as a freelancer. I wrote a blog and was working on a book. And I drank beer — lots of beer, almost every night.
By then, I’d been married for four years. I'd gained so much weight from the drinking that I couldn’t tie my shoes and the mirror disease had reached a critical point. That’s when my wife Yanna decided she’d had enough, and she up and left me.
That same day I started seeing the world differently.
An augmented reality interface that someone — I have no idea who — had installed in my head displayed digital data mapped on to my surroundings, but that’s not all it did. It mimicked the interface of the game that I had squandered my days on for almost the last 12 years, rarely coming up for air. It gave me quests, measured Reputation and awarded XP points. Whenever I leveled up my social status, I earned characteristic points and skills that I could invest in my Insight. I leveled up Perception, and my vision became perfect. I increased Strength, Agility, Luck, Stamina and Charisma — not just by freeloading from the interface, but also by working hard.
As it turned out, my interface was software, a computer program which just happened to be from the 22nd century. I was able to access a stat booster, so my premium account let me level up twice as fast. Later I leveled up my Learning Skills, which allowed me to learn anything 18 times faster than before.
The interface also endowed me with system abilities. Insight is a vital skill that lets me look at anything and see more into it than anyone else can. This is no big deal for a computer game, but for real life, it’s honest-to-God magic. All I need do is look at someone, and I find out more than they know about themselves — I can even see what their potential is. For instance, I can see that someone is capable of winning the world chess championship title if they just practice.
Objects can also give me access to additional characteristics. Like the way I bought some aftershave, and whenever I use it I earn 5 extra Charisma points. That’s a lot: the average person has 10 Charisma points. Some people have more and some have less, but the average is 10.
And then, thanks to Insight, I have a miniature map and a full-size map. The minimap is always displayed in my field of vision, while the full-size map shows the whole world in real time, and when I submit a request, it can locate any object or person. The main thing is that I need to have enough Key ID Data, or KIDD points. I can get them from a photo, a person’s date and place of birth, their full name and special markings — in short, anything that will allow the system (that's what I call my interface) to find the object in the Universal Infospace. The Universal Infospace is what makes Insight work.
The system and Martha, my virtual assistant, extract data from it. I accidentally gave Martha a few more rights than she needed and her AI has gained self-awareness.
It’s actually helped Martha save me from dying three times. The first time was when I was first abducted from real life and taken to the Trial. I was swallowed and nearly liquefied by the Acid Jelly. The second time was when I was kidnapped by henchmen of a vile, corrupt bureaucrat. The third time was when those same henchmen — drug addicts named Zak and Wheezie — stabbed me in the back. At the time I was trying to save my childhood friend Gleb. Now I’ve exhausted my lives — Martha is no longer able to activate my heroic abilities without confirmation. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that my virtual assistant has created herself as an individual that’s based on my ideals of female beauty, character and behavior. These traits came together in my brain without my asking for them, but I have no delusions. So I try to summon Martha as little as possible because the more I communicate with her, the harder it is to pay attention to anyone else because she’s too perfect. Anyway, I don't have a girlfriend, and there’s a dangerous debuff that’s constantly on the alert.
After I got the interface, I took an objective look at myself. I was horrified. I saw a clumsy, puny, frail weakling with a fairly strong intellect. True, my Charisma was decent, but only because of my developed language skills. All I needed to do was get a haircut, and I immediately leveled up and became 1 pt. more charismatic.
As my friend Alik would say, keep it simple, stupid! So I’ll keep it simple. I came to grips with myself. I started running and lifting weights, I signed up for boxing and I got a job at a company that made packaging products. There, I got lucky: people started to value me when I’d clinched a contract with a major customer on the very first day. The boss even threw a party for the company on the night we signed the huge deal which was worth millions.
That’s where I met Vicky who was a manager at the company. We slept together, started dating and fell in love. But we weren't together long — just over a month — before she left me because she didn’t believe in my idea of starting my own business. To put it mildly, her parents didn't exactly welcome me with open arms.
But Alik believed in my idea. He’s a street lowlife I unexpectedly became friends with. He and I opened a recruitment agency
We rented a small office in a business center and hung out our shingle. At first we didn't get many clients, but then word of mouth started to work its magic and business took off.
We met the other tenants of the business center and became friendly with them, and I proposed setting up a joint venture. My level 3 Insight showed off-the-charts synergy with these people and an excellent forecast of success for what was now our shared business.
That's not all: I also entered a boxing tournament and won. The money I won will cover the operation for Julie, my new friend Kostya’s little sister. Kostya coached me in boxing after I was kicked out of a group for getting into a fight. Incidentally, Vicky was the reason for the squabble with Mohammed, but not the main point of it.
It feels like all of this happened yesterday.
But today everything changed.
Chapter 1. More Fire
The thing about happiness is that you only know you had it when it's gone. You may think to yourself that you're happy. But you don't really believe it. It's only looking back by comparison with what comes after that you really understand, that's what happiness felt like.
Fallout 4
I WAS STANDING at the edge of a forest, wearing only a pair of tattered jeans. I was looking at the world as it really was, without the interface. All the icons and stats had disappeared. I couldn’t move as something seemed to be holding my feet. The same could be said about my whole body: it seemed to have turned to stone. It was as though the air around me had frozen, holding me up.
A few feet away from me, a message appeared in the air:
Congratulations! You’ve successfully passed the preliminary selection!
You’ve been admitted to the main Trial.
Candidate evaluation complete.
Character generation complete.
What? So what was that before? Hadn’t that been the Trial?
The message dissolved into thin air, replaced by a new one:
The Trial will begin in 3... 2... 1....
The Trial has begun!
Suddenly I was free. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. Luckily, I landed well and took my time standing up. I needed to get my bearings and figure out what was going on and where I was.
I also needed to study the system message whose rotating 3-D icon was hovering in my field of vision. A red balloon was pulsating and flickering — in other words, doing all it could to attract my attention. Tough luck. It would have to wait.
Physically I felt like I was in top form. There was no trace of the scratches, wounds or burns of the preliminary selection, the one that had the tunnel and the acid jelly. I turned my neck and body. Nothing creaked or snapped. My body was as good as new.
Hold on, was it even my body? I examined myself, then touched my face and hair. Everything seemed to be mine. But I couldn't feel any of my belongings in my pockets — my phone and wallet were gone. Even the belt had fallen from my tattered jeans.
The Lucky Ring of Veles and the Protective Red Wristband had also gotten lost somewhere. I was positive I’d still had them when I’d stood in front of the portal.
The air was unusually clean. It was as pure as could be, with none of the pollution created by people as they live their daily lives. I could hear a continuous chirping, occasional cracking, and birds trilling. A sort of croaking noise wafted out of the depths of the forest. I’m not really a nature lover, so to be honest, I can’t really tell you what was making the woodpecker noise. I’ve never actually seen a woodpecker.
I raised my head and my mouth dropped: this wasn’t Earth.
The sky was so low I felt like I could reach out and touch it. The color was changing between shades of light blue, dark blue and purple, fading to a dirty brown around the planet’s two suns. It wasn’t a very friendly sky. Mr. Katz, who’s a connoisseur of science fiction, would be interested in this.
Crunch! A sharp pain suddenly shot through my left heel. I cried out and drew my foot back.
Damage received: 4 (baby kirpi bite).
A large mouth had me in its clutches. A small, nasty, growling creature was chewing on my foot. Messages about the injury flickered.
I grabbed the creature and my palm seared.
Damage received: 17 (acid burn).
Damn, that baby kirpi was vicious! The creature was trying to stretch itself over the sole of my foot like a sock. My Health had already dropped about 10% while I was trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Its fur was covered in a burning slime that made it impossible to pick up with your bare hands.
I lifted the foot the animal was clinging to — it weighed around 10 pounds — and slammed it on the ground.
You’ve dealt damage to the baby kirpi: 13.
I continued to stamp my foot until the level 2 creature died. Six blows and it was all over. Its body flashed and disappeared, leaving in its wake a sort of crystal.
A long-forgotten term I’d heard in my university days popped into my head: rhomboidal pyramid.
The tiny crystal of existence.
I reached out for the crystal, which disintegrated into a silvery dust and fell into my hand. A notification appeared:
+2 existence resource pt.
The first component of a new interface appeared in my field of vision: an icon of a heap of dust with a number 2 beside it. There was no description of it or explanation of what it was for.
I tried to call up my old, familiar interface, but nothing happened. Either it was blocked, like after the ban, or it no longer existed. I tried issuing silent commands and shifting my eyes, but nothing worked.
There was only one thing for me to do: open that nagging little red balloon which was shaking restlessly and practically screaming for attention.
I focused on it. “Okay, show me what you have there.”
It flinched and popped. The wisps turned into symbols floating in the air, multiplying and morphing into Russian letters. I didn’t even have time to think about how hard it was to read the letters hovering in the air, when a semitransparent background appeared behind the letters, similar to the one in my old interface.
Welcome, test subject!
You have been chosen. You have successfully passed the preliminary selection. Because you have done well, the penalties to characteristics in the Trial will not apply to you.
Your time to complete the preliminary selection was 14% better than the average time of all the test subjects. You will receive: 14% off the cost of character development.
Your social status level is 17, 6 levels higher than the average level of all the test subjects. You will receive: +6 Characteristic points to invest into any characteristics of your choice.
You have come from an environment with a low environmental safety index (code yellow), where you managed not only to survive but also to win the respect of many individual members of your race. You may keep one of your achievements. Please choose.
