Chapter 10
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I could barely crawl out of bed the next morning. My legs were insanely aching, especially my calves. Under a hot shower, I gave myself a massage, which helped a little, so when I went downstairs I didn't look like an invalid anymore. I don't understand why such a difference, the distance is the same, I walk or try to run. But walking doesn't exhaust you and doesn't leave you as tired as running does! Is it just because of the intensity of the exercise? Apparently, that's the point.
"Is it that bad?" When Ten Daas saw me he asked, as cheerful as ever, despite the early hour.
I really wanted to say "yes, it's bad" and not run anywhere today. But instead, I just mumbled: "It's bearable..."
It wasn't so much a matter of curiosity or a desire to see the Runner as it was a matter of self-respect. No one forced me to start running, it was my decision, and giving it up at the first hardship was kind of petty and made me look like a wimp. And if I had been running alone, I could have backed out but now everything was happening in front of my boss...
Compared to yesterday, I probably ran about a third less today. Even just walking after the acceleration was difficult. My calves were hard as a rock, and my thighs were sore as well. It was good that it was still dark, and Daas couldn't see the grimace of misery that seldom left my face.
When I returned to the restaurant, I looked at the clock and was greatly surprised. When I was just walking to the market instead of running, it took me less time to walk than it did today! It turns out I am now running slower than I am walking! A "colossal" success, indeed.
"Is today worse than yesterday?" Judging by the look on Daas' face, he surely knows the answer to his question.
As I look at the boss, who, while putting food on the table, does not let me out of his sight, a very strange feeling comes over me through exorbitant fatigue. I feel like an open book, the pages of which Ten Daas reads without the slightest effort. Now it seems to me that all my plans and desires are not the slightest secret to him. My plan to get to know the Runner - why this premonition that he's guessing about it? And he is amused by these plans of mine.
The feeling is close to that of putting together a complex puzzle consisting of monochrome pieces, agonizing, cursing the person who made it, and suddenly, in one seemingly indistinguishable second, you realize which piece should be put where. And so it is now, only I am not the one doing the puzzle! I, Utis, am rather the piece of the puzzle that one tries to find its place.
"Boss," I sit down on the bar stool and, kneading my calves, turn to my boss. "I need some advice... Can you help me?"
The original plan to go after Rick Deckart is now perceived by me as overly complicated. I could achieve my goal more easily. Yes, I'd have to get over my ego, but why bang my head against the wall when there was a door almost open to me that I could just knock on and ask to come in?
"Tell me." Just like that? I thought he would, as usual, snort and ignore the question. Was I right, and could everything be solved this way?
"You already know that I take the Game very seriously." As I started this conversation on a hunch, I haven't figured out exactly what I should say, and I'm stalling for time, saying general words.
"Battle Arena, right?" This question of his, I feel a falsity in it, and it assures me of the initial guess that I am an open book to him.
"You remembered correctly," I nodded back.
"Do you need advice on the game?" The look of surprise on the boss's face is genuine.
"No." The inner tension of this conversation makes me forget about my aching legs, and I walk over to the sink and start helping to wash the vegetables. "The advice is not about gameplay."
"Talk," Daas puts the food aside and makes himself comfortable as if he were preparing for a long conversation.
"Not long ago I played a very interesting game." How to explain it in terms that are understandable NOT to the player! "At the end of the game, I had a duel with a very high-level player." The boss nods as if he knows what I'm talking about. "It was a very tense duel..." What words should I use?
"You lost and you want to get back at it, so you decided to get in shape and start running and hope for a rematch?" Daas fills the pause in my story by making an assumption. "Do you need advice on training?"
"Not quite..." Kronos, he threw me off balance with his statement. "On the contrary, I won. But... This victory was achieved by a tactical decision, as a player, I am a head weaker than my opponent."
"He figured out you by IP and wants to kick your ass?" That question even made a broccoli slip out of my hands and fall into the sink. How could he even think of such a thing?
"Um... No. On the contrary, I want to find this player." The boss's eyebrows go up like seagulls at the sound of a steamboat.
"What makes you think I can help you with that?" Just now Daas was sitting relaxed, and now he seems like a beast ready to tear anyone to pieces to protect his cubs. I can almost physically feel one careless word from me, and he'll snap my neck, right here, right now. The feeling makes my back sweat. What's wrong with him, why did my question provoke such a reaction?
"You know him..."
You don't know what to say, tell the truth, that's what my father taught me, and I couldn't find a better option than to follow his advice.
"Yes?!" The boss visibly relaxes, going back to cleaning the mackerel again. Did I really think he was ready to strangle me just a few seconds ago? Maybe it's the nerves of fatigue. "I wonder who that is."
"Rick Deckart," I pretend to be more obsessed with choosing a knife to slice tuna fillets with than with the name.
"Runner, is it?" Daas rubs his chin in a brief hesitation.
"Yes."
"Interesting... Why do you want to meet him?"
A simple question that is almost impossible to answer in a way that is understood, because it is a personal desire. Explaining to the other person why you are overcome with curiosity - I didn't think it was that hard!
"It's..."
"It's not easy to explain?" Is he reading my mind?! "Try it." Why does he suddenly have this sympathy for me?
Ten Daas has been a mystery to me since our first conversation. And such a mystery that each time we meet, it does not get any closer to solving it but, on the contrary, only becomes more confusing.
"This game is to me what a professional athlete's sport is to him. It's an important part of my life." I expected a chuckle but I saw a strange sadness in his eyes. Okay, no distractions, my mind is starting to wander! "I'm a good player. If you compare it to professional sports, then before the injury my level was close, by analogy, to a candidate for the national team." I exaggerate a little but if you remember Sensei's words, then what I said is close to the truth.
"Wow, are you that good at this?" It's an empty question, empty because I notice he's not at all surprised by my words.
"Yes," I answered firmly. "I'm good. But Rick Deckart is better. Much better... Before that... In-person... Not online... I've only known two people who definitely played better than me, my varsity coach and Yol Shat, the captain of the varsity team." The boss nods as if inviting me to tell him more. "I've taken a lot from each of those two, and my playing skills have grown..." That's not what I'm saying! "My playing has gotten better." Yeah, that would probably make more sense to him.
I want to continue my explanation, but Daas interrupts me by raising his palm.
"Many years ago I met a man..." The knife in his hands merged into a band of gleaming steel, the speed at which he chopped the onion was beyond belief, and there was some hidden annoyance, even anger, in the action, but it was certainly not directed at me. "I thought I was cool, very cool even..." In about ten seconds he chopped the onions into small pieces and dumped them into the pan. "But the one I met... He was... He was just like your case." The grin on his face was a combination of bitterness and some kind of light from a very pleasant memory. "Stronger, faster, better. He taught me a lot, explained a lot, we went through a lot together. Only..." His knife plunged violently into the cutting board. "Only this encounter has changed my fate very much." A split second, one movement, and he's so close that we touch each other's foreheads. "Turned my life upside down, and I became different. Very different... Aren't you afraid it'll be the same for you?"
What the Tartarus he talking about?! What a stupid idea it was, just asking him! I don't know what to answer, but I try to look straight into his eyes. For about ten seconds he stares at me with a look full of fire, and then he pulls away.
"What am I saying, though? It's your choice. Well... This is fun." That's it, I wash my hands of him and stop trying to understand him; apparently, I lack the commonplace experience of life to figure out what kind of man this Ten Daas is. "It turns out that Rick's rampage, and consequently the request An made the day before yesterday, are directly related to you. Unexpectedly"
I'm silent, now is not the time to interrupt him, he's obviously up to something.
"As they say, two birds with one stone." The corners of the boss's eyes have the characteristic wrinkles of barely contained amusement. "And your request to fulfill and kind of help Anton. Ha! Yeah, I guess I'll introduce you to him."
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"And what do An and Meck mean by calling me a civilian, and do they mean it in a different way than I'm used to?" I took advantage of the fact that Daas was silent in thought, and his mood was obviously rapidly rising and decided to find out this detail as well.
"It's easy: "You didn't go to the Arch, you're not a man," the boss brushed me off, still thinking about something.
"What makes them think I wasn't on a Pilgrimage?"
"Аh?!" Daas's eyes focus on me again. "It's obvious."
"How that?"
"That's how. You see, that's all... You just have to know what to look at," he waves me off again. "Here's the deal. Go to bed and come down at ten, and I'll introduce you. You just go... I'll think about it..."
I still have a lot of questions but there's a limit to everything. So after washing my hands, I leave, leaving my boss in deep thought.
After I went upstairs and took a shower, the clock showed seven forty in the morning, more than two hours before Daas' appointment. Enough time to get some sleep, get some energy. But my aching legs, my general fatigue, and that conversation with my boss that kept going through my head were more reliable than Cerberus at warding off sleep. After twisting on the couch for almost an hour and still not falling asleep, I realized that I would not get any sleep now.
I got up, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat down at the computer, downloading the training modules. The long-standing routine allowed me to calm my nerves, even though today's training results were still without any breakthroughs. Two training cycles took up all my free time. When I had finished them, I put on my jacket, since the weather was still cool, and went downstairs.
Apparently Boss didn't leave the kitchen at all during this time, or at least that's how I got the impression.
"You're punctual," Ten Daas greeted me, glancing down at the restaurant clock, which showed ten without a minute.
In response to this phrase, I simply shrug my shoulders, thus showing the insignificance of such praise. But in fact, of course, I purposely timed my appearance in the hall so precisely.
"I have a question for you," Boss stood up from his chair and came over to me, giving me a long, kind of judgmental look. "Are you sure you're a good player?"
An unexpected question to which a simple "yes" answer seemed inappropriate to me, so I said: "I'm sure of it."
"Okay..." He sounded a little distrustful. "I'll introduce you to the Runner... And even more." As he paused, my mind flashed with several possibilities as to what he meant by "even more". "But I have conditions."
For some reason, from the very beginning, I thought there would be a catch behind Daas's help. So I'm not too surprised by this development, and I nodded calmly outwardly.
"One, try not to be surprised by anything. Second, Rick only agreed to this meeting if you played one-on-one with him. He wants a rematch. Three, you work for me, so don't screw it up!" His fist right under my nose looks very impressive. This gesture on his part is so unexpected that everything I wanted to say in response to his conditions somehow slipped my mind, and all I can do is nod after swallowing an unexpected lump in my throat. "Well... Now that that's settled, let's go."
As this conversation ended, Daas turned and headed toward the back room, beckoning me to follow him. I don't know where he's going. Aren't we going to the Goons? I glanced back at the front door in mild confusion, but Boss was headed in the opposite direction, and I had no choice but to follow him.
After walking down the corridor that connects the various technical rooms of the restaurant, we emerge into the street, into the backyard. This courtyard is small, on one side it is supported by the building itself, on the other by a high brick fence, behind which begins the territory of the former river port. Also, almost all the space in the yard is occupied by garbage cans. As a result, there is barely enough space for a garbage truck to drive in and pick up the bins.
Daas comes to the corner formed by the fence and the wall of the house and opens a small, shabby door. Behind this door is a small room with janitorial tools, brooms, dustpans, sand bins, and, yes, a half-wall firebox.
Boss locks the door behind us and with his cell phone in flashlight mode, he walks to the fire shield. I stumbled over something in the darkness and almost fell, but managed to grab the shovel and thus stay on my feet.
"Don't get rowdy," Daas comments on this excess, simultaneously taking hold of the shield, and then removing it from half of its mounts and sliding it aside. "Let's go."
Behind the retracted fire, the shield is a convenient passageway to the storage area. Pretending that nothing surprises me at all, I follow the boss without any questions. Waiting for me, Daas slides the shield back into place and asks: "What do you think of this?"
We are in a very vast area, fenced off from the rest of the city by a brick fence one and a half meters high. I also notice that the house where I rent an apartment is right next to this place, and on this side, looking at the warehouses, has no windows at all.
"Spacious," keeping the first condition in mind, I limit myself to this neutral definition.
"A hectare and a half, after all," Boss replies calmly, but with a kind of hidden pride.
As soon as he says this, I remember that Daas is the nominal director of Equilibrium 42, which, in addition to the "Jap," owns this territory. So it turns out that all this space is his property! But then why such a complicated passageway, some back rooms, secret doors? I do not understand ...
"That way," the boss's palm points to a huge, abandoned warehouse complex.
This warehouse is as tall as a two-story house. The walls and roof are covered with corrugated metal siding, which clearly knew much better times, and now it's hard to even guess what color it was previously painted. The length of this hangar-like building is just under a hundred meters. And the width of the central gate, filled with garbage, to which the truck trestle approaches, is at least eight meters. To tell the truth, the last time these gates were used was at least five years ago. Now, to simply open it, you would first have to bring a bulldozer and clear the mountains of various junk.
Also located throughout the area are old, literally hanging on by a word of honor, wide sheds under which were stored numerous stacks of empty wooden pallets, almost rotten.
My first impression of what I saw was that this vast space was unclaimed and long and safely forgotten. Only it is unlikely that in this case, the boss would have brought me here, which means that everything is not so simple. Following my boss, I tried to find some detail that would confirm my hunch, but to no avail. No matter how much I looked, I still saw only abandonment, dust, and dense dirt without a single trace. The only place that was more or less clean was the old cobblestone path we were walking on. There were a lot of questions on my tongue, but I found the strength to bite my tongue and walk in silence.
When we reached the hangar, Daas stopped at a barely visible door, which, like the rest of the wall, was lined with shabby siding. Except there was no handle or keyhole on the door, and it was unclear how to open it. But I was the only one who didn't understand it; the boss, with a confident gesture, grabbed the metal, bent it a little to the side, and slipped his other palm under the metal plate. Something clicked in the door, and it opened noiselessly, just barely enough room for me to squeeze through on.
I followed Daas into a small vestibule, barely a meter by a meter. The dim street light barely penetrated through the ajar door, but I could see that the hangar was not as simple as it looked from the outside. Behind the thin outer wall, there was a noise-reducing foam material, almost half a meter thick, separating the outer skin from the inner wall, which was apparently the main material, made of reinforced concrete.
"Open," Ten Daas says to the ceiling.
The front door closed quietly, leaving us in darkness for a second, and then the inner part of the wall slid aside with the sound of hydraulic actuators. Bright light hit my eyes, causing me to close my eyes tightly.
Before I can blink and get used to the bright light, Boss pushes me in the back.
"Don't just stand there, the system will close the entrance in ten seconds."
When my vision adjusted a little, my first thought was, "Here we are! Have I been abducted by aliens?!"
This panic theory was not born out of anything. The room in which we found ourselves was very similar to the inner compartment of a sci-fi spaceship. More precisely, my idea of what the insides of the starships of the future would look like
A futuristic design of broken sharp lines, and lighting that comes from everywhere: from the ceiling, the walls, and even from some arrows on the floor. The material used here is matte and porous, with a slight silver sheen. But when I look closely, I realize it's not the material, but the effect of the paint used to paint the walls and ceiling. The total area of the room is not less than two hundred and fifty meters. The entire space of the hall is divided into sixteen open boxes, separated by a wide aisle, reminiscent of a fragment of the racetrack. And this almost full-fledged asphalt road, starting from the blank wall, constantly slopes downward and goes somewhere underground into a dimly lit tunnel.
All but one of the open boxes are occupied by machinery parked in them.
Where did I get into this?! Who does Ten Daas work for, that they can create such a thing in the city, and completely unnoticed by the people around them? The first panic has passed, and I realize that no one has kidnapped me, it's just a design, made of quite earthly materials, and not some failed spaceship from the future.
"Five years ago I admired Star Trail," Boss said with a slight chuckle, apparently caused by my shock. "And when I bought the land, I decided not to restrict myself..."
That's right! This room is a scaled-down replica of the technical hangar of the Universe Prowler, the main ship of the series. Only one difference: in that hangar, there were walking robots, and here in their place in the boxes were bikes.
What does that mean... a Goon base right here, practically right next door? How could no one have found them before? But when I looked closely at the tunnel entrance, I immediately realized that the bikers didn't come here the way we did. In addition, there is such soundproofing that one could fire from a tank inside, and no one would hear anything!
Stop!
What did Daas just say? "Decided not to restrict myself!" Does that mean no one is behind him? He's the owner of Equilibrium 42?! Somehow my image of Boss doesn't fit with the information I'd just received. He's in his shabby overalls, not wearing a single piece of jewelry, and he's using a last-generation smartphone. He has no car, he travels only by cab, he works in a small, albeit his own, restaurant as a bartender... And he is also an underground millionaire, and the construction of the hall in which we are located is worth at least six zeros. And this is despite the fact that so far I have seen only one room, and judging by the outer dimensions of the hangar, there could fit a dozen more.
My brain made a silent "buzzing" sound and crushed.
"Yeah... You failed my first condition," Ten Daas said with a slap on the shoulder that almost made my knees buckle. If he means 'no surprises,' that's what he means. "Pick your jaw up off the floor, and let's go, they're waiting for us."
I wasn't too surprised when Boss came to the exit of this peculiar technical hangar, pressed a wall panel, and the door slid sideways, letting us through.
The next room resembled the living deck of that same Prowler. Sixteen doors, apparently leading to stylized rooms, in two tiers of eight on each side of the central corridor. If I estimated the room correctly, each of these pseudo-cabins was about twelve square meters square.
The living quarters were followed by the gymnasium, which was divided in two, with a basketball court on the nearer half, and the far half full of all sorts of machines. After passing through the athletic section, we found ourselves in a cabin-like room, equipped with a kitchen, a large semi-circular bar, and a couple of pool tables, and a mini-cinema.
"But how?!" I couldn't hold back any longer and said it out loud.
"Аh? This? It's not as complicated as it may seem," Daas, to my surprise, decides to explain, walking over to the refrigerator and pulling out a carton of juice. "A few years ago, the town council decided to create an entertainment zone on the site of the closed port..." He filled two glasses and handed one of them to me. "A plan that was doomed to fail... Through a dummy company, I won the tender for the construction of the entertainment complex. Then, when the city naturally realized the hopelessness of this venture, or rather, that its implementation requires an order of magnitude more money than they had budgeted, the project collapsed. Everyone who invested in this venture went bankrupt. Then everything is simple, a series of purchases of actually depreciated land through brokers and offshore companies. A little bit of redecoration, and when the construction equipment left, the locals saw that the area had not changed at all... Giving birth to yet another urban legend about another one of the state officials who drank the budget money... Finished the juice? Come to your senses?"
Apparently, he paused to tell me all this just so that my thoughts would stop rushing around like caged animals. Before I answered, I finished the last drops of cherry juice, washed the glass, and put it on the dryer.
"It's not easy, but yes, I'm in control." My sarcasm, even to me, seems unnecessarily fake.
"Are you ready to play?"
"Now?"
"Have you changed your mind and don't want to meet the Runner yet?"
"No, I haven't changed my mind, but..."
"Then stop daydreaming." Daas simply puts his glass in the sink, not even bothering to rinse it out. "As I told you, we're waited..."
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