The Renegades Read online

  “I never enjoyed alcohol that much. I tried it back when I was a teenager but didn’t really feel much of an effect. It was all the same baggage as when I’m sober, only with dizziness and nausea. After that I saw plenty of my buddies drinking,” I nodded at Beast, “and kind of developed a steadfast dislike for premeditated self-stupefaction. As Pythagoras used to say, drunkenness is an exercise in madness.”

  “Indeed—life is unpredictable. I never imagined that I would meet a sober rocker,” Pasha drawled with surprise, propping up his chin with his fist and staring blankly at the wall.

  “Nothing is impossible,” I winked at Chip and yawned widely.

  “Okay, why don’t we start heading to bed bit by bit? They’ll come by in the morning to change my cartridges, and I doubt Herr Doktor and his retinue will allow you to get much sleep. We just need to prod the Beast there—what is he sleeping in his clothes for?”

  “Forget it,” I shrugged. “When he sleeps it off, he’ll wash up and change. He’s not a kid. All right. Good night to you.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Edilberto cleaned up and set out to the mountain with his new drinking buddy. I really hoped that they would continue their celebration of nature and avoid getting into a fight—the two were ornery enough. The doctor showed up a little later and, learning of my wish to help out, instantly put me in charge of changing the cartridges in the regenerative devices, paying no attention to Pasha’s protests. Pasha was immobilized during the procedure and I should say, it was quite the sight. Even the time we had to call an ambulance for Beast, his crumpled face bore no resemblance to the sorry condition of the mutilated body. To be perfectly honest, at one point I felt nauseous from the sight and the smell and had to make an effort to control myself.

  Aside from the nauseating sight of the mutilated flesh, servicing the regenerative devices was simple enough. Having made sure that I knew how to swap the cartridges and deposit the used ones into a special container, the doctor made some note on his tablet and left, leaving us alone.

  “Sorry,” panted Pasha, struggling to get up from his bed. “I didn’t want you to see that…”

  “Come on now. Found yourself a muslin lady,” My voice was so unnaturally glib that I didn’t believe myself too much. “Shall we enter Barliona? I wanted to read the local legends. Maybe I’ll find something for my new song.”

  Pasha nodded gloomily and we went to our rooms where the capsules had been installed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Nothing had changed in Barliona: The training ground which had become our prison stood empty as before. This time around I decided to forgo any further torments in the obstacle course.

  “I’d rather read some books and gather some material than jump around that devil’s playground.”

  “Well I’m going to stretch and warm up,” said Chip and hurried to the obstacle course almost skipping from joy. No wonder that, considering the trouble he had moving out in meatspace.

  The book I picked up was full of tedious prose, so I didn’t last too long.

  “Come on and take a break. Let’s explore the training ground!”

  Chip responded enthusiastically to my offer and we spent the next several hours exploring. Contrary to our hopes, we found neither a secret passage nor any secret areas in our new location. Maybe we had to be rogues to do so or have the relevant skills—or maybe they simply didn’t exist. But at least we discovered a spring, some patches of plants and four more ore lodes. Chip tried out the forge and the carpenter’s workbench and I tried my mettle at mining one more time.

  “What…sadist…came…up…with…this…profession?” I wondered amid swings of my pickaxe. “And…what…kind…of…masochists…choose…it?”

  “Oh come off it!” Chip guffawed and moving me aside, let the lode have it with the pickaxe. With his strength, the lode yielded its fruits much faster. “Just imagine yourself as a character in a Jack London novel—a prospector during the gold rush. We’re just like Smoke and Junior, don’t you think?”

  “I’m feeling more and more like a convict, to be honest,” I shared my impression and took a swig from a bottle of water. My depleted Stamina instantly surged back to its maximum level. “I’m better off providing you with musical accompaniment.”

  The soundtrack made his work go faster, though it wasn’t really my talent so much as a new spell that did the trick:

  You have unlocked a new ability: ‘Support.’

  Your performance supports your companions, increasing the speed at which they harvest resources by (Fame + 0.5)%, but no more than (30 + Composition)%. Chance of finding a rare ingredient increased by (Composition)%. You may simultaneously target (Charisma) targets with Support. The effect duration is equal to the duration of the performance. Cost of performance: None. Range: Variable. The target must be able to hear your performance.

  For the sake of curiosity, I riffled through my book of skills and discovered that Composition influenced a variety of spells I had.

  Because you have unlocked the Composition stat, the Magic Missile spell has been altered and changed to the Magic Missiles spell.

  Magic Missiles: Using performance, you cast a barrage of magic missiles at your enemy: Each missile has its own type of damage that is different from the preceding one.

  Quantity of missiles available: (Composition +1) missiles.

  The damage done depends on your Intellect stat. Time to cast: (Composition + 3) seconds. The first missile is cast three seconds after the performance begins. Subsequent missiles are cast every second thereafter. Cost: (Character Level × 4) + Composition MP. Damage: (Intellect × 3). Range: Fame + 20 meters.

  Because you have the Charisma stat and Song of Healing, this spell has been altered.

  Song of Healing: Your Performance heals the chosen target as long as your Performance lasts. You may target (Charisma) targets. HP healed depends on your Intellect stat. This spell is channeled. Cost: (Character Level × 2) MP per second. Healing rate: (Intellect × 2) HP per second.

  Song of Weakness: -(1 + Charisma + Fame)% to all enemies that hear your performance, not to exceed (Composition + 50)%. Effect duration: (Intellect × 5) seconds. Casting time: 4 seconds. Cost of performance: (Character Level × 10) MP. Range: 30 meters.

  Song of Courage: Your performance increases the physical and magical damage of all party members by (1 + Charisma + Fame)%, not to exceed (100 + Composition)%. Effect duration: (1 + Charisma + Fame) hours, not to exceed (48 + Composition) hours. Casting time: One minute. Cost of performance: (Character Level × 7) MP. Range: (20 + Charisma meters).

  Inspiration: Your performance inspires your audience, increasing the chance of crafting a more valuable item by (0.2 × Fame)%, not to exceed (30 + Composition)%. You may simultaneously target (Charisma) targets with Inspiration. The effect duration is equal to the duration of the performance. Cost of performance: None. Range: Variable. The target must be able to hear your performance.

  The rest of the spells remained the same, but even this was enough. It looked like, when it came to Barliona, Composition really expanded my horizons as it were. It seemed to affect the status effects inflicted by my spells, as well as crafting coefficients. I was very happy to discover that I now had more missiles available to me and I quickly tried out the spell on a nearby target.

  “Check it out, I’m like a machine gun. I can shoot full-auto,” I told Chip, selected a training dummy and played a classic Hendrix lick:

  Machine gun

  Tearing my body all apart

  Machine gun

  Tearing my body all apart…

  Three seconds later, instead of a rainbow arrow, my lute emitted a bolt of lightning and then a fireball. Seeing the fire, Chip jerked noticeably. Damn…Using fire magic around him might not be the best idea. I should check whether I can control the missiles’ elementals…

  “That’s more like burst,” the pirc replied, smiling nervously.

  “I’m still working on it,” I mutt
ered, riffling through the various game guides.

  I found nothing intelligible and was forced to leave full-immersion and start combing the fora. I posed my search query one way and another, but could find nothing substantial among the faqs, guides and ads. All I could glean from a heated exchange that at times devolved to outright flaming, was that the sequence of elementals cast by the improved magic missile spell was random and could not be controlled by the bards. The most curious thing was that the discussion utterly ignored questions by other players about how they could acquire this strengthened spell. It seemed that no one wanted to share any in-game secrets. Everyone wanted to be special and secretive.

  Chip took another crack at the obstacle course. With every attempt he looked more and more like some dirty, furry hedgehog. His very appearance inspired me to do something as far removed from physical activity as possible, so I returned to my exploration of my updated arsenal. A little experimentation verified the fora’s information. Each magic missile had a different, random type of damage and the sequence had no determined order whatsoever. In addition to the basic elementals, I also noticed the bursts of dark energy that the necromancers would cast, as well as the priestly glow of holiness, the druidic green shimmering and even another type of magic I had never seen before. According to the detailed combat logs, the magic missiles did shadow, holy, elemental, chaos and even blood magic damage. The last was probably wielded by some particularly evil sub-classes of necromancers or NPCs such as vampires.

  The next puzzle turned out to be how to combine the effects of several songs into one. Simply playing and activating two spells at once didn’t work. Activating them one after the other didn’t do anything either. And, to be honest, at this point my imagination was at a loss. The option of composing a new song every time to combine effects was unrealistic—there were too many possible permutations and doing this would be too complicated. There had to be something simpler, something fairly obvious…

  The most obvious solution was to ask Coleus about it, but for several reasons my instructor was unavailable and I was forced to leave full immersion, call up Reed and Charsky and ask them to ask their instructors about it. They promised to do so, and I calmly tossed this issue out of my mind.

  In general, our imprisonment was going by with tangible effect: Under the pirc’s careful and at times outright sadistic guidance, I managed to increase my Constitution by 4 points, my Agility by an entire 10 and my Strength by another 3. Members of other races might scoff at such paltry progress, but to me, the increase seemed epic. At least I didn’t have any complaints about my Intellect. Even though with every new point this stat grew slower and slower, the grinding process was incredibly simple: Simply spend all your mana again and again and enjoy watching your Intellect counter tick up.

  Chip was in the exact opposite situation: His Strength, Constitution and Agility grew with barely any effort, while his Intellect hardly budged at all. The upside was that Pasha had been sent to the training ground still in his druid class, which allowed him to grind this stat in the same way as I did—the problem was that he hardly had any mana. He literally had enough for two spells, and given the glacial pace at which his mana regenerated, he could barely earn one point a day.

  “Listen, why are you even bothering with Intellect?” I asked at one point.

  “Everything can come in handy,” Chip replied enigmatically, casting another healing spell on himself and going back to his mining.

  He had also fashioned some of the ore we’d gotten into, well…I have no idea what the things were called, but now my shoes were protected by iron pieces on their soles, toes and heels. In addition to feeling like a horseshod mare, walking and running now cost me twice as much Stamina.

  “At least it’ll protect you from the thorns,” Chip explained, trying to justify the new difficulty I had walking. There was nowhere to buy new shoes and neither of us knew how to craft them from scratch, so all I could do was hope that these little tanks would encounter no problem in the blighted part of the forest.

  Back in reality, life settled into a well-worn groove as well. In the mornings I would change Pasha’s cartridges (the doctor was happy to charge me with this task, leaving only monitoring to himself), after that we ate breakfast, then, if the elevator worked, Chip would get in his wheelchair and I would wheel him out for a stroll. Sometimes Alex would join us, turning our stroll into traveling show—he hadn’t a mote of seriousness about him. I couldn’t even believe that this comedian actually served in the rangers and two decades at that. Although, maybe, he would simply infiltrate the enemy camp in the guise of a clown? This was the most believable theory in my opinion.

  After the stroll, as a rule, we would have a cup of tea at Chip’s place and then climb into our capsules. Or, rather, Chip and I would climb into our capsules, while Sasha (if he was around) would head off on his business. As I understood it, one of his and Chip’s friends was about to get married and Sasha was helping arrange the event. I hoped that the young people knew what they were doing—if I were them, I wouldn’t trust this goofball with his dark humor to arrange my dishes, let alone my wedding. He was the kind who would plant some surprise ‘just for shits and giggles.’

  “So why did you drop the curtain on your last Othello?” Pasha asked an entirely expected question as we were drinking tea. We had just begun talking about various family matters.

  “How come you think that I dumped him instead of him me?” I asked, surprised by such confidence.

  “What? Am I wrong?” The two defenders of the fatherland exclaimed in unison.

  I shrugged my shoulders, grabbed another cookie and bit off a sizable piece. It was my first time baking cookies on my own—under Pavel’s close and strict supervision and without any autocooks whatsoever. They really did come out better than when the robots made them. Or did I simply imagine this?

  “You know, I have difficulties saying one way or another myself. He went to the capital to do his postdoc and started going out with a classmate out there—which I heard about through the grapevine. I asked Simon whether it was true but he denied it. So I called the classmate. She was taken aback at first but then she reexamined her relationship with Simon and broke down in tears. It turned out that her boyfriend had left her that same day. He had been courting another girl for a long time and stringing her along as a backup. And here she suddenly realized that she was in the same exact situation but with the roles reversed. So we had a chat, commiserated and both decided to send him to the pasta devil. So, technically, I dumped him…but in actual fact…”

  I spread my arms akimbo.

  “What a cretin,” Pasha concluded.

  “Why’d you get a divorce?” I asked, returning the favor and watching Sasha assemble another ‘Bunker Buster’ sandwich.

  “Ah,” Pasha smiled unhappily. “I was away on assignment. The dame was at home where her parents were more than happy to chatter on about how poor of a choice she had made. I was pretty unpalatable to them—they had hoped for a prince on a herd of white horses. So they kept harping on how I’d eventually bite the dust in my line of work—and she’d be left a widow. And what the hell did she want with a glorified taxi driver anyway? So she left. I come home one day—and home’s empty…Not an uncommon story, really.”

  “Buncha crap,” Sasha grinned crookedly. “Everyone wants a general. But could you handle that kind of life? To see your husband once every three months and jump every time someone rings the doorbell?”

  I sipped my tepid tea and considered it:

  “Who the hell knows…You can praise swan-like fidelity as much as you like, but I personally have had it with long-distance relationships. Although, if my career works out the way I want it, I’ll be touring for months at a time myself. And then there’ll be all kinds of jealous scenes…”

  “Well, it’s a bit easier for you guys,” Pasha didn’t agree. “Just look up how many rockers tour with their entire families. Like Ozzy—his wife was beside him all t
he way.”

  “Sure,” I nodded. “There’s a metric million of guys who are ready to abandon their jobs and vocations and spend their lives touring with their wives. What the hell do I need a woodpecker like that for anyway?”

  “That depends on the woodpecker in question,” Sasha cast a predatory glance over the table looking for the next sacrifice to his gastronomic altar. “If he’s got brains, he’ll take over the business. He’ll become your manager or whatever it is musicians have. Artists are by and large all the same anyway—they all want nothing short of empyrean heights. Oh and where have you been hiding, my lovely piece of cheese?”

  “You’re not going to burst and bespatter us with your viscera, are you?” Pasha asked cautiously.

  “I can’t hear you. Lean a little closer, dearie,” the other rejoined, placing the cheese on the salami and crowning his construction with a slice of tomato.

  “So you’re suggesting I court our Toad?” I managed to ask before this Edible Tower of Pisa busted Sasha’s bunker.

  “Well…” he pretended to think. “It’s a worthy idea: The guys’s clearly a crafty fellow, brings his work home again and again, and as for his appearance—you wouldn’t exactly put him on the podium. So what’s the big deal, just give it a good thought.” He giggled revoltingly and ducked the hand towel I launched at him.

  “Also you should bear in mind that a kiss of love turns the toad into a handsome prince,” Pasha added weightily and received a look of immolation in return.

  “I don’t hit persons of disability,” I decided and raised my cup of tea. “A toast! To the life of the bachelorette!”

  “Dreimal hoch heil!” Sasha saluted.