Project Daily Grind (Mirror World Book #1) (19 page)

I invested the last of my strength into the swing. Then I tensed my back, expecting to turn into a shapeless lump of flesh. The sharp edge of my pick dug into the rock.

You’ve received a resource: Gray Crystal.

Your tool slipped as you picked at the slab of dark rock.

You’ve received a resource: Twilight Crystal.

You’ve received +1 to your skill.

Congratulations! Your professional level has grown! You're an Experienced Digger now!

We’re sorry to inform you that the game rules don’t allow you to remain a group member.

Reason: the profession level of the group’s leader has to be equal to or above yours.

You’ve received a fine! You are removed from the group and will now be transported to your chosen resurrection point.

With any questions or complaints, please contact Support. Thank you.

Chapter Nineteen

S
cientists say that a dream is a sequence of images drawn from our memory. Apparently, we don’t realize we’re asleep and believe the dream to be part of real life.

I’m not sure if being chased by gigantic spiders clad in rusty armor can qualify as part of real life. It was the bit with a girl in a wheelchair that had bothered me most in my dream: she was someone I’d been trying hard to remember—and couldn’t.

Then at a certain point everything had disappeared: both the girl and the spiders, replaced by tranquility. I dreamed of our old country cottage and the times when Sveta and I had just got married. Her, sitting on the river bank with a bamboo fishing rod. Me, lying on the soft grass watching her inconspicuously. Her small nose, her intense stare; her wavy hair pulled into a nice little ponytail. Me, smiling; calling her
my little angler
. She seemed to love it. Finally, sensing my stare on the back of her head, she turned around and made a face at me, bringing a warning finger to her lips. As in,
be quiet, I’m about to catch a huge one!

I was happy. I knew it was only a dream and still I was happy. I lowered my eyelids with pleasure, then heard Sveta’s voice,

“Wake up, sleepy head! The fish are biting! Wake up now!”

A hand on my shoulder. A strange voice. “Wake up! Please wake up!”

“No,” I croaked with my eyes shut. “Why couldn’t you have woken me up when I was dreaming all sorts of crap...”

“I can see you’ve decided to move to the clinic permanently,” somebody else said.

I knew this voice. “Not my fault,” I wheezed. “The credit is all yours, Mr. Shantarsky, sir.”

“Please don’t say that,” Shantarsky’s voice kept urging. “What have I got to do with that? On the contrary—my workers keep me informed that you seem to be bent on working yourself into an early grave.”

I opened my eyes. I lay on a bed in a spacious single hospital room. Medical equipment beeped next to my headrest. Shantarsky sat on a chair in the far corner with his arms crossed, looking respectable and dignified as usual. He reeked of an expensive aftershave. His gold watch and cufflinks glistened in the sunlight.

A man in a lab coat was busy with the equipment. A doctor, probably—who else? Then again, nothing would surprise me after the trick Slayer had played on me.

I suppressed a sarcastic grin. Yeah, right. Talk about paranoid.

Apparently, Shantarsky misinterpreted my smirk. “Did I say something funny?”

“Oh no, not at all. Must be nerves.”

“I understand.”

“Do you really?”

Shantarsky must have picked up on the sarcasm in my voice. He winced. “Dear Oleg, you’re the last person I’d expect to lose his cool.”

“That’s because you didn’t have to prance around the cave in the company of jumbo spiders,” I blurted out.

The doctor—or whoever he was—finished whatever he was doing and left without a word. Once the door closed behind him, Shantarsky spoke apologetically,

“You have to believe me: I’m really, really sorry about what happened.”

I felt the blood pulsing in my face. My jaws clenched. I had to watch out not to tell him everything I thought about him. And about his scumbag son. And that motherfucker Slayer. Wait a sec... What was he going on about?

“I have to admit,” Shantarsky said, deliberately ignoring my mental state, “that you’ve found a very elegant solution to the problem. Bravo! Can you imagine the amazement of my men when they discovered there was virtually nothing left of you?”

“What do you mean, nothing?” I asked coldly.

“
Virtually
nothing. The moment I heard about my son’s escapades, I sent a rescue group to get you out. They promptly mopped up the instance—but by the time they’d reached level 7 they only discovered a few pieces of your gear. I had to pay them extra by way of apology for wasting their time—for my failing to let them know your group leader had already discarded you.”

He rubbed his clean-shaven chin, pensive. “The only problem is,” he said softly, “I had to lie to my employees. And that, as you can well imagine, is not the most pleasant thing in the world.”

Our eyes met. He knew everything, I could see that. But I could also see one other thing: the duel between keeping my secret and claiming compensation for damages was about to end in the former’s victory.

I heaved a sigh and leaned back against the pillows. “Before we go on,” I began, all businesslike, “I need to make sure that none of the other group members have been hurt. I need to know where I am and contact my family and my brother. I suppose, your little son will come out of it smelling of roses. So it would be pointless to demand that justice be done. The other group members must have already been sufficiently warned off, I suppose. I just hope they’re all right. That’s all I have to say. So what is it you want?”

He flashed a smile. “You’re remarkably quick on the uptake. I didn’t even say anything.”

I just shrugged. For a while, he waited for me to continue.

“Very well,” he finally said. “If that’s how you want it. Your friends are fine. They’ve even been transferred to another job in a different cluster. Once they received compensation and found out that you had no claims against them, they shut up.”

“Did they?” I asked with a crooked smile.

“Oh, yes,” he hadn’t noticed my sarcasm. “Why not?”

I kept grinning. “Indeed, why not?”

“And as for where you are... You’re in my personal capsule center. As you can imagine, it’s considerably more comfortable that the ones you had to use before.”

“I was comfortable enough there.”

“Don’t speak too soon. You’ll see tomorrow.”

“You and I, do we
have
a tomorrow?”

“Absolutely,” he smiled. “Most definitely. Now, your family. As soon as we finish talking, you’ll be able to speak to them.”

“Can’t we do it now?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Am I your prisoner?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you? It’s only because if you speak to them now, we might not be able to have a constructive discussion later. Which is only in your own interests, mind you.”

“Only mine?”

“And ours too.”

“
Ours
?”

“Yes. I speak not only of myself now.”

“It’s getting interesting. So what is it you want?”

Shantarsky rearranged the right cufflink. “We need an Expert Digger.”

It took me some effort to suppress a gasp.

“I thought you’d be surprised,” he continued. “Or did you really think your secret would be safe for much longer? Mirror World is just one big village. Every high level player, be he a warrior or an honest laborer, immediately comes to the attention of the stronger clans.”

“So what’s that got to do with me?”

He shook his head. “Please. I thought we had an understanding.”

I heaved a sigh and waved to him to get on with it.

“Very well,” he continued. “I’ve weighed up all the options and come to the conclusion that your character is in possession of some unique abilities. You’ve only been in the game for a month and you’re already an Experienced Digger!”

‘So what? I didn’t break the rules, did I?”

He smiled again. “Oleg, please don’t get so het up.”

He had a really creepy smile.

“It’s only that I,” Shantarsky continued, “have the necessary power to offer you an opportunity to make full use of these abilities of yours.”

In other words, to work me into an early grave. “Providing that this full use of me doesn’t include me popping my clogs in your service,” I said.

“Oh no, we can’t make that happen. You’re too valuable to us.”

“Us? Who do you mean?”

“The administration of the alliance that unites the strongest clans of Light.”

I whistled with surprise. “So!”

“What did you think I was talking about?”

“Well, I suppose I thought you’d come to apologize for your son and his actions,” I said.

He sat back and grinned again. “Now that you’ve mentioned him, my stance in his respect is quite clear. My son’s too young and too quick off the mark. Power is the only language he understands. For him, you’re nothing. There’s no way to convince him otherwise. You might say you’re a human being—which should be enough. Well, you might be right in your own way. But this philosophy doesn’t sit well with him. So I’m not going to discipline him, no. Why should I? I’ve been raising him a leader, proud and strong. I’ve taught him to never bow his head to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Are you angry? That’s good. But I don’t care what you think. I’ll tell you something else: you’ll have to swallow your pride. You’ll have to do what you’re told. And you know the funny thing about it? I’m going to tell you now so we can laugh together: strangely enough, you’ll be only too eager to obey my orders.”

I was furious.

“No need to blow a fuse,” he continued in a calm voice. “Keep your hair on. You’re only slowing up your own recovery. As for Slayer—you might be happy to know that he’s been fired. Not because of you, actually. In your case he was only following my son’s orders. And he’s done an excellent job, I have to admit. No; it was his drug habit that was his undoing. We found out too late. Our clan has no place for drug abuse. But you know something? He seems to think it’s because of you. He blames it on you, heh! Talking of which, I know it may sound stupid but you have to thank this little incident in the Spider Grotto for your being able to stay in Mirror World at all. Surprised? I’ll explain it to you in a minute. Such a meteoric rise through levels couldn’t have remained unnoticed for much longer. Sooner or later, other players would have started asking questions. Or even filing complaints against you. I’m pretty sure that in less than a month, the admins would have been forced to delete your account. You’d have never been able to keep your abilities under wraps. Impossible. Those in the know would have found out. Just like I did.”

“What do you want?” I asked icily, shaking with fury.

Shantarsky raised a surprised eyebrow. “You can’t have already forgotten, surely! Didn’t I just tell you? We’re looking for an Expert Digger. Granted you’re only Experienced, but I can offer you every opportunity to level up.”

“And what if I refuse?”

“You sure you need it? We’re not forcing you to work with us. But you’re going to do your best anyway.”

“Why should I?”

He gave me a friendly smile. “We’ve signed a contract, haven’t we? Or did you think we’d use you as slave labor?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Nothing to understand, really. Your contract with me is still valid. All we‘ll do, we’ll extend it and tweak it in a few places. You have your daughter’s medical bills to pay, don’t you? That’s why you applied for a loan, right? The paperwork is on the table over there. Once we sign it, my bank will wire the money to Germany. All your problems will be solved with one stroke of a pen.”

I tensed; I even craned my neck, looking for the ominous contract. So this was my ticket into slavery? It couldn’t be. I could smell a rat there somewhere. I was only an ordinary Grinder. There were hundreds of thousands of them in Mirror World. True, Pierrot had endowed me with a few so-called cheat skills, but my experience had already taught me that his gifts were treacherously short-lived.

Plus Shantarsky had been threatening me with publicity. He’d said they might delete my account. But was it really possible? Publicity yes, why not—even though neither of us profited from it. But deleting my account? I’d signed a user’s agreement. I’d broken no rules. I’d chosen a character based on the characteristics offered to me by the system. There was no problem there.

Yes, I needed the loan. Or rather, I needed to raise the money for Christina’s hospital treatment. If it involved a stretch of slavery, so be it. Humiliation was nothing. I was quite prepared to eat shit if it helped. My pride had died with my daughter’s first heart.

Still, there was something else I had to consider. I had a funny feeling that this contract was going to differ from the generic ones quite a bit. I was pretty sure it was stuffed with all sorts of restrictive conditions.
I wasn’t a slave
, yeah right! Had this snake spoken to me in the presence of my brother and and in somewhere neutral—maybe. Oh no siree, instead you’d kidnapped me and hadn’t allowed me to contact my family. Judging by the way my head was spinning, you might have even plied me with some nasty substances while I’d lain here unconscious. No, this was no way to conduct business.

There was also another argument against it, something that had kept bugging me since my flight to Germany. At first I’d tried not to even think of it, but little by little I’d forced myself to face it. The thing was... what if Christina’s body rejected the Japanese heart? What then? No one had promised us a 100% success rate. The odds were indeed very high, but still not a 100%. Been there. So what if this heart died too? And I’d be stuck here in Shantar’s mines working off the loan with my hands tied? Someone might say, never mind, I could always apply for another loan even if it meant selling myself down the river and becoming Shantar’s property. But what if my child’s body rejected this second heart too... and the third one... and the fourth one... What then? Sooner or later, I’d just choke on it all. Not because I’d give up—no, I just wouldn’t be in a position to help her anymore.