Chapter 10:

Everyone sat around a circular table, silently staring at me. The atmosphere was so tense it felt like you could cut it with a knife.

Anya brushed past me, her shoulder bumping mine, and walked to the center of the room.

“I've gathered you all here to share some information. The portal only opens once every three days, and as you all remember, another five thousand communicators were recently stolen, burying our advantage as testers. And this is a problem because soon there will be thousands like us, and we'll lose our uniqueness. But I know how to fix it.”

The girl pointed a finger at me, and I cursed the moment I decided to share that information with her.

“Maxim has a special item with its own charge time that also allows him to open a portal. Everyone remembers the reward for the group portal: an additional attribute point, and you've already had time to use them, significantly strengthening yourselves. To not lose our edge, we need to go further, making the most of the opportunities that come our way.”

I stood under the gaze of the entire group, arms crossed, waiting for my opponent's next move. How quickly she had turned from a loving girlfriend into a creature selfishly using people for her own gain. I should have abandoned her in that first portal and left alone. That would have been more honest.

“Maxim? Is that true?” Pyotr asked. “If so, you should hand over that item for the common good.”

“And what if it is?” The statement infuriated me. “I'm not asking what reward you got for your first run. You earned the right to own it with your own blood and sweat, and I don't see why I should have to give up my things. You, Petya, have a very strange earring hanging from your ear. I don't remember you having it before. Aren't you going to share what makes it so unique? Don't you want to turn it in for the common good? And what about you, Khabib? What's with the flashy gold chain around your neck?” I looked around at everyone, and most of them awkwardly averted their eyes.

“Fine!” Anna agreed with what I said, surprisingly easily. “But I think you've forgotten who was with you in that portal.”

“Oh! I perfectly remember the scared girl who huddled in a blanket and was afraid to move. So you can't lay claim to my reward. You did absolutely nothing to earn it.”

The heat of the argument began to escalate, and threats were thrown into the mix.

“If you don't make concessions, we'll take it by force,” Nikolay joined the conversation.

“Ha!” I laughed in their faces. “And how will you force me to open my Inventory? And how will you get something out of it?”

“We'll just take your bracelet, and you'll lose the ability to get stronger,” the security guard continued. “And by the time new communicators are released to the public and you get one, you'll be hopelessly left behind.”

Khabib stood up and, walking around me, demonstratively blocked the exit from the room with his body.

“It seems you're all in on this and have been for a while,” I figured out the obvious. “Besides, the experience would be better divided among nine than among ten. Or have you already picked another victim, or even several? After all, the experience is even better divided among five, and you'll be able to level up your attributes even faster.”

The testers started looking at each other suspiciously, distrusting one another. In less than a week of knowing each other, no one had gotten to know anyone else well, and now they suspected their neighbors of the worst—that they might be the next ones to be left behind.

Khabib took a step forward and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Brother, listen. Just give us the dagger and leave. No one will touch you; you can just live your life peacefully.”

I shrugged off his hand and replied, looking around at those present:

“No. I think our paths diverge here.”

The mountaineer tried to grab me again, but an Ice Blade that shot from my finger and embedded itself in the wall cooled his ardor.

“I strongly advise you not to try and stop me.”

I slammed the door and, enraged by the meeting, walked down the street, trying to calm down. I saw a trio of men emerge from a dark alleyway too late. They came right up to me and, without a word, grabbed me by the arms and dragged me into the darkness.

A powerful blow to my face made me woozy, and I helplessly watched as they turned my pockets inside out in search of valuables. Thank goodness for the Inventory, where it was so convenient to store all my things without having to bother putting them in my pockets. And now the robbers, disappointed by the lack of a reward for their labors, decided to take it out on my body. They knocked me onto the snow-dusted asphalt and started kicking me, trying to hit my head.

“Bro! Check out what I can do,” a raspy voice from one of the attackers said, and he ran up and jumped with both feet on me, crashing into my shoulder and falling next to me.

“You bastard! He hit Treschina!” More blows rained down all over my body, and I started to feel my consciousness slowly slip away. I tried to protect myself from the blows, curling into a ball and covering my head with my hands, but the flashing blue color of the communicator on my wrist only attracted attention.

“Bury, look! This loser has the new model; I saw them in an ad. They haven't even been released yet. We can sell it for a few hundred, at least.”

The robber began to pull it off my wrist, and a cold sweat broke out. If he took the communicator off me, I would lose everything, including the things in my Inventory. The threat from my comrades became real from hypothetical, and I panicked. Even if I found a new communicator, what was the guarantee that the Inventory was linked to me and not to the device?

The attacker trying to pull the bracelet off me gasped, clutched his chest, and fell onto the asphalt next to me. His friends looked at me in confusion, then at their comrade again, and seeing the spreading puddle of blood under him, they simultaneously took off running without a word, abandoning him.

I struggled to my feet, wincing from the pain in my beaten body, and walked over to the lying robber. His eyes were glassy, and he wasn't breathing. The Ice Blade had unfortunately pierced his chest and hit him right in the heart, killing him instantly. To my surprise, I didn't feel any particular regret about being the cause of the attacker's death. He had found his death in a dirty, disgusting alley, and he had chosen his own path by deciding to attack a passerby.

I opened my Inventory, looked at the newly charged quantum effector, and, taking out my dagger, opened a portal.

[Portal to location Level 4. Rat Lair]

Very symbolic. I struggled to lift the body and threw it into the portal. I looked at the puddle of blood and, using the Cold Sphere twice, turned it into red ice cubes. I picked them up and threw them in there as well, leaving only a small pinkish stain on the asphalt and flattened snow at the murder scene. I tried to close the portal, but it remained hanging in the air.

“Damn it! What a day,” I looked around and, not noticing any observers, I also stepped into it, finding myself in a cave lit by the bluish light of fluorescent crystals on the ceiling.

The body of the unlucky robber had already been claimed by huge rats, knee-high to me, who were hastily gnawing on his face. Some particularly brazen rat had gotten under his clothes, and a wiggling lump was poking out in the chest area, biting into the open wound. I flinched, but seeing that they weren't paying attention to me, I calmly launched my freezer, wincing internally at the need to shout “Eat this!” Of course, that was a special situation, and I didn't have time to come up with a better name, but still.

A few seconds later, the rats smelled that it was getting cold and scurried away, but the temperature was dropping not only in the air but also in the bodies of the creatures, significantly slowing them down. Not having time to escape, the rats turned into frozen meat carcasses, enriching me with experience.

[Young Rat Level 3 killed. 4 experience points received]

[Young Rat Level 3 killed. 4 experience points received]

Y[oung Rat Level 3 killed. 4 experience points received]

[Young Rat Level 3 killed. 4 experience points received]

[Experience points: 372/51]

Anger flared up in my soul, and I cursed. It was all that blonde monster's fault! If it weren't for her, I would have been sleeping peacefully at home, then I would have woken up, had breakfast, taken a taxi to the airport, and after a nine-hour flight, I would have been walking out of the Vladivostok airport to my joyfully greeting relatives.

And now I had to fight again, primarily with my beaten body. The only thing that made me happy was that rats were warm-blooded creatures that, firstly, were easily pierced by Ice Blades, and secondly, would freeze and obediently become rat corpses.

I had to finish up here quickly and go home, go to bed, and then leave this unfriendly city.

I walked through the cave, shooting rats from a distance. Usually, one hit was enough to tear a rat into two pieces, and the places I passed through looked more like a slaughterhouse. There was blood everywhere, scattered guts, and body parts of the dead tailed creatures. Compared to the previous two portals, it was just an easy walk. Was this how the sacrifice I had made to the portal before entering had affected it?

I encountered a bipedal rat, the height of a short child, with a bone spear in its hands, which first lost the paw with the weapon, and then, when it shrieked and rushed at me, its head, which rolled on the cave floor until I stopped it with my foot. A slightly elongated muzzle with a mouth full of sharp, small teeth, and a long, thin tongue hanging out. By the way, kobolds were prettier than these rat-people.

[Rat-person Level 5 killed. 6 experience points received]

I walked over to the corpse and picked up the spear that the torn-off paw was holding tightly. The weapon was made of many thin rat bones, firmly connected to each other. I tried to pry one of the bones off with the tip of my dagger, but it didn't work. It felt as if they were simply fused together, with one bone penetrating another. I wouldn't be surprised if they also had shamans who specialized in bone tissue manipulation and created weapons.

I wouldn't want anything so unnatural to happen to my bones, so I think I'll be preemptively shooting at any suspicious rat-people with staffs in their hands.

Remembering that I had a longer-range and more accurate weapon than the Ice Blades, and one that also didn't require energy consumption, I took out my crossbow and, seeing another fat rat from a distance, shot it. The composite bolt went straight through its body and pinned it to the rock it was sitting on.

I looked at the weapon with respect; the salesperson at the hunting store who knew his stuff had advised it. With this, I could probably hunt bigger game. I used five bolts on three more rats, missing a few times.

The optical sight and comfortable tactical grip made the process of shooting feel like a game. You put the crosshairs on the target, press the trigger, and watch the rat hanging from the bolt shaft. Sometimes it would twitch and squeak, but more often than not, it would be instantly killed. I pulled the bolt out of the rock and looked at the almost undamaged tip, mentally thanking the same salesperson who had recommended the slightly more expensive crossbow bolts.

A few minutes later, I stopped and looked in bewilderment at a fork in the road in front of me. There were three completely identical passages and no distinguishing marks by which I could make a choice. This hadn't happened before; I would just walk straight ahead, occasionally turning to the side, until I got to the end of the location. I got the feeling that the system was evolving and the dungeons were becoming more complex and rich.

I turned into the left passage and ran into a rat-person sitting in an ambush. The spear whistled past my head, and I, reflexively leaning to the side, grabbed the enemy's weapon by the shaft and pulled it toward me. The light body flew to the floor, but in mid-air, it twisted and bit me with its paw, leaving bleeding scratches on my face. A kick to the fallen creature threw it to the side, and two crossbow bolts followed.

Not only were the locations evolving, but the monsters in them were, too. A new wave of communicator users would be in for a very unpleasant surprise. There would definitely be fatalities, people missing in the portals, and inconsolable relatives looking for their lost loved ones. And if you took into account that the Symb 1.0 was very often given to girls as a gift, just like another version of a popular phone used to be, then the first models released for mass production would mostly go to girls whose only merits were their external beauty without any inner substance. And their lack of combat skills would lead to the world being less populated with artificial beauties who were so eager for new things.

I looked at the time, added another attribute point to Intelligence, bringing it up to seventeen, and set an alarm so that I could allocate the next one as soon as I had the chance. I still had a full thirteen points in reserve, three of which I planned to put into Intelligence to bring it to twenty, and the remaining ten it was time to add to Dexterity to finally raise it from a shameful five to a decent value of ten points, and use the rest to raise Strength. Then I wouldn't have needed to kill the attacker, and I would have been able to fight back.

Although, I would still complete this location, and another five bonus attribute points would be added, so I would be able to bring up my Strength to ten, and I'd still have four left to put into Constitution.

Alright, I had a plan. All I had to do was quickly get through the rat lair, then get home, pack my things, and fly peacefully to my parents, leveling up my attributes along the way.

The left passage ended in a dead end, at the end of which another rat-person was waiting for me, sitting with its back to me and engrossed in something at the wall. I took aim and killed the opponent with a single arrow; it fell forward, its head hitting the wall.

“What were you doing there, my young friend?” I walked over to the body and pushed it aside. Judging by the bloody muzzle and the remains of a rat lying in front of me, the monster had been engrossed in eating a younger relative, not shying away from cannibalism. And since I hadn't been here before, it meant he had killed the rat himself and was feasting to gain strength. Although, if I remember the last dungeon with the trees, the main boss there also fed on its subordinates and grew stronger from them.

I went back to the fork and chose the middle path. History repeated itself as if on a template; again, a rat-person was sitting in ambush and didn't have time to react and got two bolts at once. The only difference was that later on, I ran into another one, with a rat circling nearby. But their behavior suggested that it was a hunter with his hunting dog, which meant that in the previous passage, the owner had eaten his pet.

And once again, I was at a fork in the road. If two of the three passages ended in a dead end, then the third one must lead to the exit. I came to this logical conclusion and headed into it. This time there were no ambushes at the entrance, and the passage, occasionally twisting, went on further.

I started to think. What if the dungeons were evolving? If so, traps could also appear. Pressure plates, crumbling pits, arrows from the walls, poison clouds.

I guess I'd have to remember to look more carefully in the future. It doesn't take much to inflict a fatal wound on a fragile human body. The corpse of the failed robber lying at the entrance would have confirmed it if he could speak.

Getting lost in my thoughts, I turned at another corner and ran into a wall.

“Huh?”

For the next three hours, I wandered around the cave, looking for an exit. I went back to the corpse at the entrance, explored every corner of this cursed cave, and even tried to pry off a glowing crystal on the ceiling. A piece broke off and continued to glow in my hands, so I rolled up my sleeves and broke off a few more stones, putting them in my backpack. The last passage, which had no monsters, was bothering me, and most likely, I had missed something.

I returned to the fork and, carefully examining all the surfaces, began to explore the corridor. Unlike the other passages, this one ended in a smooth wall, which implied that it was artificial, but there were no pressure plates, holes, or levers.

I decided to recheck the passages and returned to the first fork, where the rat-person had recently been finishing off his pet. I dragged his corpse to the side and froze, seeing a detail sticking out.

Among the bloody remains of the rat, a strange square-shaped bloody pool was visible. I put on the protective gloves I had received for completing the location and scooped out the scraps of meat and blood. I poked it with my finger, and the tile caved in, opening a round hole. I took the monster's spear, looked at it, and, realizing that the diameter of the shaft was a perfect fit, stuck the supportive part into it, hearing a muffled stone grinding sound with satisfaction.

In the second passage, I predictably found the same mechanism; another rumbling of stone, and I ran into the third passage at full speed. Fortunately, the wall I had been unsuccessfully banging against for several hours was gone, and after running past the spot where it had been, I stopped, out of breath from the run. I probably needed to reconsider my priorities and add more Constitution. Just a few minutes of running, and I could be taken with bare hands. And judging by the increasing difficulty of the trials, it would only get harder from here, and since the team didn't work out, I'd have to compensate for quantity with quality.

The cave, with a ceiling that disappeared into the darkness and, for variety, glowing crystals growing on the walls, greeted me with the gaze of dozens of rat heads. I noted the corpse of a rat-person lying in the center, which looked as if it had been chewed by a pack of hungry dogs, and I ran in the opposite direction, using "dehydration" every two seconds.

A wave of rats, jumping over each other, rushed after me through the corridors, stumbling and getting tangled in a squealing ball at the rare turns. After ten seconds, silence fell, and when I turned around, I only saw the lying rat corpses. The ones closest to me looked like dried-up concentration camp prisoners. Just in case, I poked them with my dagger for good measure.

I returned to the hall and walked over to the dead rat-person who had become a victim of its own pack. The corpse was taller than the ones I had encountered before and had a key difference: a wooden staff in its paws. So this was the shaman and, at the same time, the location's boss, who, fortunately, hadn't shared the opportunity to finish me off with the other inhabitants. I remembered what the bone spears made of fused rat bones looked like, and I didn't want the same thing to happen to my bones. So it was for the best.

I picked up its staff, put it in my Inventory, and looked at the description.

[Rat-person Shaman Staff]

A rather laconic description. Maybe if I level up my Inventory, the description will change, too?

[Portal completed. 50 experience points received for completing the portal, 2 bonus attribute points]

[Level 6 reached]

“Hey! What's the deal? Where are my attribute and skill points?” I asked the void. “The damn rats killed my boss, for which I should have been given a ton of rewards,” I had already forgotten that I had just recently not wanted to meet the boss and was only regretting the missed opportunities.

I looked around but didn't find anything else interesting. The damn rats ruined the whole run. I opened my Inventory, took out my winter jacket, put it on, and stepped into the portal's surface, colliding with a man who was urinating in the alleyway.

“Hey! What are you doing, kid?” The man, zipping up his fly with one hand, tried to push me with the other. But his alcohol intoxication and impaired coordination prevented him from not only thinking straight but also from acting.

“Go to hell, you damn drunk! Go piss somewhere else!” I shouted at him and, pulling my jacket hood tighter over my head, went home.

It was already five in the morning, and by the time I got home, the hands were approaching six. I quickly took a shower, packed my things, put them in my backpack, and put the backpack into my Inventory. I added one point to Intelligence, bringing it up to eighteen, set Pangeokinesis to learn, and turned on a reminder that as soon as I landed from the plane, I would need to learn level two of Thermokinesis and put the remaining skill point into Biokinesis, laying the groundwork for the future.

I had a couple of ideas about how to use it in the future, too. I called a taxi again and, without a word, drove silently to the airport and even gave the driver five stars for the pleasant conversation. I checked in and went to the waiting area.

It turned out to be very convenient to travel without luggage. I had already been trying to fly light recently, taking only a backpack with the minimum necessary things. But the feeling of having nothing even in my pockets was quite unusual. It felt like I was just going for a walk. People with huge bags and suitcases were walking around, small children were screaming, and in the middle of this chaos, I was calmly strolling, looking at the very expensive goods in the shops.

I went, had a ridiculously expensive breakfast at an airport restaurant, and then continued to wander aimlessly while waiting for boarding. At ten in the morning, they announced that my flight was delayed, but on long-haul flights, this was a completely normal thing, and I didn't worry about it. And indeed, thirty minutes later, they announced boarding, and soon I was sitting by the window, looking at a receding Moscow.

I opened my status and looked at my achievements.

[Level 6]

[Experience points: 10/630]

[Attributes:]

[Strength: 7]

[Dexterity: 5]

[Constitution: 5]

I[ntelligence: 18]

[Wisdom: 7]

[Free Attribute Points: 13]

[Skills: Inventory Level 1, Thermokinesis Level 1, Hydrokinesis Level 1, Aerokinesis Level 1, Pangeokinesis Level 1 (3 free skill points)]

January sixth, five portals completed in six days, and level six with a ton of attributes. I doubt anyone else will have a start like this. At least not from our group of ten. It's possible, of course, that we aren't the first testers and there are fifty-level monsters walking around the planet, but all I need is time, and otherwise, I will not only catch up but also overtake absolutely anyone.