The immense bone ball, with sharp spikes and skulls jutting out, would have looked like a bizarre piece of decor if it hadn't been rolling in circles, occasionally freezing for a split second before sharply changing direction.
The location boss had sensed us and, picking up speed, rolled toward my dad and me the moment we stepped out of the passage and into the hall.
Two synchronized shots slowed it down a little, killing its momentum, but the spikes all over its body gave it good resistance to being pushed back.
"Dad! They're not spikes! Look, they're flexible; it's using them to push off the floor. They're more like bone tentacles!"
Dad didn't answer, just gave a short nod to show he'd taken in the information, and pressed the stock tighter against his shoulder, keeping up a continuous barrage on the monster.
The boss's bones were much tougher than the chimeras', not to mention the skeletons, which had crumbled just from bumping into walls while they walked. The blasts from the Saiga only slowed the bone ball down, keeping it from getting closer.
"Shot!" I joined my father. A concentrated burst of buckshot hit one of the false spikes and tore it off, leaving a short, wriggling stump. The problem was hitting the same spot twice to try and break through its defenses, since the boss kept rotating on its axis as it moved, exposing different parts of its bony armor to our shots.
"Dad, let's switch. I'll knock it back, and you shoot off its protrusions."
The monster, which had lost speed under the constant barrage and couldn't move forward, flew back a little from my skill, unable to hold onto the floor with its spiky tentacles.
"It's no good! Not enough power! I've only got eighteen percent charge left for thirty-two shots!" Dad yelled back.
I glanced at my own numbers and felt a little calmer: eighty-five percent, at 0.2% per shot, should be enough to grind the bony creature to pieces.
The boss froze, and a bone spike sticking out from the middle of its body trembled strangely and flew toward me. I dodged, leaping aside, and fired back at the creature.
"Maxim," Dad said in a strange voice.
My heart went cold. I turned and saw a bone spike protruding from his stomach, the same one the monster had aimed at me.
"Dima! Get over here!" I yelled to my brother, not stopping my fire on the boss. "Get Dad back into the corridor!"
Holding up our hunched-over dad, my brother pulled him to safety, just inches away from another bone spike that whizzed past.
Now that my hands were free, I ran in a circle around the creature, firing every two seconds. It spun in place, trying to turn to face me and shoot another spike in return. But the buckshot kept throwing off its aim, pushing it back just enough, and several bone spikes simply flew wide.
Finally, I managed to hit the same spot where the armor was already cracked, and the bone shell broke open, revealing pulsating, exposed flesh inside the casing.
"That's it, you piece of garbage!" Another shot, but the boss spun on its axis, hiding the vulnerability. "That won't help you."
"Shot! Shot! Shot!"
The armor started to crack all over the surface of the bone ball, and another shot of buckshot slammed into the now-open wound. The shot passed right through the meaty filling, and under the resulting pressure, pink, pulsating gore squeezed out of all the holes. The result looked a lot like a meat grinder churning out mince, only my skill was the press, repeatedly smashing stone buckshot into the creature.
Without sparing any energy, I fired and fired at the creature, avenging my wounded father. The boss had stopped moving, but since no victory message had appeared, I didn't stop, turning its insides into a uniform mess.
[Location boss, level 6 bone ball, killed. Gained 150 Experience, 200 Experience for location completion, 5 bonus attribute points, 1 skill point]
"Whew!" I wiped the sweat from my brow. "Dad!" I rushed over to him.
Mom was hovering over Dad, examining his injuries, his shirt pulled up as she rummaged through her first-aid kit for a bandage.
"Biometric Analyzer," I commanded the voice assistant. "Rhythm! Scan and display model."
The resulting 3D model of my dad, with a black spot in the liver area and a description of "Penetrating liver wound. Requires emergency medical attention," brought small tears to Mom's eyes, but she wiped them away and took out the first-aid kit.
"Why the hell did you pull the spike out!" Mom asked rhetorically to my pale father, who was lying on the stone floor. "You're not supposed to touch objects in a wound! You're not a little kid anymore!"
She rummaged through the kit, sealed the wound with a patch, and wrapped his torso tightly with a bandage.
"We need to get to an operating room immediately! There's nothing I can do here," Mom started to panic, with my bloodied father in her arms.
"Mom. Please, calm down. Going through the portal will fix everything. I killed the boss," I tried to get the message across to her. "Dima, let's carefully lift Dad and carry him out."
The whimpering dog jumped around, worried about his owner, and occasionally licked his hand, trying to offer comfort in a difficult situation. The portal that had appeared near the boss's corpse hung above the floor, and on a pedestal that had risen from the stone floor, a dog collar lay.
"Mom, take Dad and go into the portal. I have to go last; it'll close behind me."
My brother and mom, with Dad in their arms, stepped into the portal's surface and vanished, heading home. The dog, taking a running start, jumped in after his blood-smelling owner, leaving me alone. I walked over to the reward, gave the collar a quick look, put it in my inventory, and stepped in after them.
Mom was circling the now-standing dad, who was covered in his own blood, and he was swatting her away.
"Mila! Stop! I'm perfectly fine."
"No! Lie down! I have to examine you!"
"I'm telling you, I'm okay."
"Quickly. Lie down. On the floor!" she said, separating each syllable in a terrifying voice.
Dad gave in to Mom's demands and lay down on the floor.
"Dad, just display your biometrics already."
The 3D model that appeared, colored green, didn't calm Mom down, and she didn't stop until she took the bandages off her husband and saw for herself that he was healthy.
"Remember when I said people would kill for the ability to heal?" Dad asked. "Well, you can consider that an understatement. You can't survive that kind of wound without emergency medical attention. And on top of that, I see that all my old aches and pains are gone, leaving my body in a perfectly healthy state. I don't know what this is, whose gift, which gods or demons. But our old life is coming to an end. And who knows, these might be the last peaceful days we have left."
"Okay, stop!" Mom interrupted us. "Everyone take turns taking a shower, then we'll meet for dinner."
I checked the time and saw it was already five in the evening. I remembered the collar and called the dog.
"Timosha. Come here."
The dog, looking at my hands distrustfully since there were no treats, came over nonetheless, sniffed them, and looked back at me reproachfully. I took the collar I'd received as a reward out of my inventory, gave it to Dad, and when he gave me a questioning look, I asked him to put it on the dog.
"Son. A message popped up in my communicator saying I can tame Timosha as a pet, and he'll be bound to me."
"Accept it," I nodded, satisfied that my guess was right. "That's the reward for completing the location. The dog isn't a person, but he must have still gotten experience from that skeleton and didn't go unrewarded."
"Okay, I accepted it, and now I have another skill. 'Pet.' The description talks about an enhancement, but there aren't any specifics."
"Enough talking!" Mom repeated and shooed everyone off to get ready for dinner.
The evening gathering was spent discussing our recent adventure. Even my parents, who had visibly livened up after exiting the portal and shedding their bothersome ailments, sometimes acted like kids, interrupting each other with exclamations like "And I told him!" and "And did you see how I went BOOM, and he went BAM!" My brother and I watched our happy parents and smiled, enjoying the conversation. It was only after a few hours that everyone finally calmed down and went to bed, agreeing to wake up at eight in the morning and sort out the skills and attributes they'd gained.
At one in the morning, I woke up to my alarm and, after a quick glance at my stats, finally set my Constitution to level up. When I finally woke up in the morning, I looked at what I'd achieved in the first eight days of the new year.
[Level: 6]
[Experience Points: 422/630]
[Attributes:]
[Strength: 10]
[Dexterity: 10]
[Constitution: 6]
[Intelligence: 20]
[Wisdom: 7]
[Free Attribute Points: 7]
[Free Skill Points: 1]
I got up, stretched, and noting that it was still almost an hour until our planned breakfast, I added one point to Inventory, bringing it to the second level. I sat down in the armchair by the window, lost in thought.
Just yesterday, I'd noticed I'd gotten much faster and remembered the bone spike I'd dodged on pure reflexes. This raised a logical question: how and on what basis does a communicator user's body change when their attributes increase? If you can stretch the truth and assume that the bracelet forms skills and that the person is just a monkey pressing buttons, that doesn't work for attributes.
Take the maxed-out Intelligence, for example. It means the communicator affects the brain, developing its neuroplasticity, complicating neural networks, and reorganizing them. This is, of course, a basic function of the human brain that allows us to develop from helpless infants to intelligent, self-aware beings. But damn... an increase in attributes several times over essentially completely rebuilds the brain, while leaving the person's identity unchanged. At least, I didn't feel any radical changes that would make me say I had become a different person. I still identified with myself; it was just easier to think.
And what about Strength and Dexterity? I looked at myself in the mirror and didn't notice any significant changes to my physique, but at the same time, I'd become almost twice as strong and fast as I was last year.
Fine, let's say Dexterity is the elasticity of muscles, ligaments, and tendons, and my muscular strength stayed the same, everything just started working in synergy. But what will happen when my Strength reaches twenty units? Khabib's example, who at thirteen Strength units could already easily bench press a hundred and fifty kilograms, completely blew my theory to pieces.
So, I was left with the conclusion that the body really does change under the bracelet's influence. The level of technology being used both scared and amazed me, making me wonder again and again who needed this and for what purpose. And again and again, I got no answer, my mind just tossing these thoughts around on the periphery.
"Max!" my brother knocked on the door. "Are you coming?"
"Yeah, one minute," I said, stopping my pointless reflections, got up, and went to breakfast.
"Alright. Who wants to go first?" Dima asked everyone at the table after we'd had our coffee. "No takers? Then I will. Yesterday, I reached level three and accumulated a whole eleven attribute points, two of which I added to Strength overnight, bringing it to nine. And I just put my second skill point into my axe. I'll add the third tonight when I have the chance," my brother opened his inventory and summoned the weapon to his hand. "As its level grew, it changed a little, moving away from the classic fire axe shape, slightly increasing the blade's length and narrowing the cutting edge."
"So, weapons change visually as their level grows?" I asked the obvious question. "Dad, what about your Saiga?"
"It hasn't changed yet; I used my skill point to tame the dog, and I just put the extra one I got from completing the portal into my weapon now."
"My crossbow," Mom looked at me a little guiltily, remembering whose it really was. "It also changed a little, but mainly, like your dad's, the loading block is no longer detachable. The bolts no longer need to be inserted; they just appear inside the crossbow. It looks like they're being rendered out of thin air. I tried shooting in the backyard this morning, and now we have twenty bolts stuck in the old fir tree. And I just went to check; they're not going anywhere."
"After the technology for quantum portals, inventory, and assembling a crystalline atomic lattice manually in the spell builder, I'm not surprised by anything anymore. It's most likely that a copy of your bolt and Dad's cartridge was digitized into a quantum state and is simply being recreated from it, producing as many copies as needed."
"And your dad and I added our attributes to Dexterity, and the feeling is just amazing. I can run and jump again, just like when I was young. I just have to get rid of my wrinkles, and I can tell everyone I'm thirty years old."
"Mom, seriously… you're already a young stunner," I said what every man should say when a woman asks about her age. "And besides, I have the Biokinesis skill, which I assume can change the body, so age-related problems can probably be solved in different ways. Sooner or later, a skill will appear that lets you rejuvenate yourself, or rejuvenate others."
After discussing what had happened once more, everyone decided to get a little more comfortable with their new skills. My parents and the dog went for a walk; Timosha had started to understand not only commands but also simple human speech much better, reacting to what was happening. My brother decided to go home to wrap up some work issues and try to buy a few more communicators, foreseeing that they would soon become insanely expensive as soon as information about their capabilities got out. As for me, I decided to go back to my armchair, finally figure out Biokinesis, and prepare a new skill, this time a fire one from the Thermokinesis branch.
Once again, I sat down in the comfortable chair, opened Biokinesis, and reread the description. "Ability to control the functions and genetic structure of your body. Self-regeneration and mutational adaptation."
The body's functions are a very broad concept. Thick medical reference books, thousands of pages long, describe the functions of the human body. Every action is controlled by specific organs. For example, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and the sense of balance are all systems for receiving and analyzing information from the outside world. The digestive, respiratory, excretory, muscular, nervous, reproductive… The list could go on, and in essence, a person is a system made up of other systems.
The word "Control" in this context sounds quite comprehensive. If I understand it correctly, I can control my hormonal balance, causing myself any emotion, or change the sharpness of my sensory organs, getting a sense of smell like a dog's if needed, and do dozens of other things I can't even comprehend due to my lack of education.
And if I go down a level and think about genetic structure, things get even more complicated. The simplest example is genetic difference at the DNA level. Any person on the planet differs genetically from another by only one nucleotide out of a thousand, and from a monkey by one in a hundred.
I opened the Biokinesis skill in the spell builder and, seeing the same two empty skill slots, kept going and then stopped. The incredible difficulty of constructing genetic chains and modifying the body might not have scared me off if it weren't for the realization that every action would directly affect my own body. It would be a piece of cake to disrupt a system built over millions of years of evolution that was currently in a state of equilibrium. A simple example is how ordinary radiation affects the body. Radiation damages the DNA structure, changing it and causing uncontrolled mutation, often leading to death. Poking around in such delicate structures without understanding the processes could be much scarier.
To be safe, I closed the spell builder, vowing not to meddle with such fine structures until I had a Ph.D. in medicine and my Intelligence attribute was several hundred points. I looked at the last functions.
Self-regeneration and mutational adaptation. To test it, I took out a knife and carefully scratched my palm, drawing a couple of drops of blood.
"Rhythm! How effective is the self-regeneration function?"
[Based on the scratch, the skin epithelium will heal in two hours. A deeper wound will require more time.]
"What about mutational adaptation?"
[When you sustain damage that critically affects your functions, the body adapts to them, returning to its natural state after the threatening factors disappear. It is possible to permanently save the body modification in a free slot for later.]
"So, if I get burned, my skin will become fire-resistant, and then go back to its natural state?"
[Yes]
"Phew…" I breathed a sigh of relief. My main fears of turning into a monster over time disappeared, and the skill stopped being useless.
It seems the regenerative factor can be boosted by developing the general Biokinesis skill, and the number of slots for useful mutations can be increased.
"And how do I cancel a permanent mutation?"
[At skill level ten, you get the ability to remove it from the slot, with the body gradually changing back to its natural state.]
Hmm… I need to think this through: should I get useful modifications now, or save them for a critical situation where the ability to adapt to a specific type of damage could save my life? I considered the different options and decided to leave them free. Just two slots wouldn't provide a huge advantage, but they might be able to save me in a critical situation.
Deciding to stretch and test myself, I went downstairs, put on a tracksuit, and went out into the yard to the pull-up bar, where I used to hang as a kid, pretending to do pull-ups. I was never particularly athletic growing up and never set any pull-up records.
I walked up to the bar, jumped up, and hung from it. I tried to pull myself up, remembering how it had always been a real struggle, and to my surprise, I easily lifted my body up, pulling my chin over the pipe. Not believing the feeling, I lowered myself and pulled up again. I counted my pull-ups one after another and only felt a slight fatigue on the seventeenth one. I was able to do ten more pull-ups and felt like I could have done a few more sets under certain conditions.
I left the house and started running down the road, setting my communicator to measure my speed. The average speed of a normal person is eight kilometers per hour, for a marathon runner, it's sixteen. According to my bracelet, I was running at twenty, even going uphill, and didn't feel much fatigue, even though I hadn't leveled up my Constitution yet.
After reaching the top of the hill, I did another hundred push-ups, only feeling a pleasant heaviness in my muscles. As a test, I climbed a tree, easily reaching the top. I climbed back down, picked up a stone, and threw it at another tree in the distance, hitting exactly where I'd aimed.
I turned around and ran back home at maximum acceleration. The speed of thirty kilometers per hour, which I was running at, as I later looked up on the internet, was normal for a trained athlete, which I had not been until recently. And now ten points in Strength and Dexterity put me on the level of an all-around physically developed person. Now, I wanted to level all my attributes to at least twenty units even more.
"Holy crap," I said into the emptiness. "I wish Anya could see this…" I stopped without finishing the phrase. Unwanted memories of the betrayer came back into my mind and stuck there. My brain started going in circles again, replaying memories of her kissing someone else, the hurtful words at the cafe, and her attempt to take the dagger.
And despite my twenty Intelligence, I still didn't understand why there was such a problem. We went to a group portal, everyone survived, and we even got a reward, which I didn't claim. But they gave me an ultimatum and, without even trying to solve things peacefully, tried to take it from me. And I couldn't understand that, resisting with my whole being.
Again, the question arose of what to do about work. I didn't plan to return to Moscow anytime soon and wanted to write a letter asking for an unpaid leave of absence for family reasons at the end of the holidays. And I didn't want to go back to a city where I'd recently killed a man, even if he was a criminal.
I didn't feel guilty about what had happened, but I also didn't want to be held responsible for this accident. So, all I could do was make peace with my conscience and just accept the fact that I was now a murderer.
Besides, Dad was right; the world was changing, and it was headed for upheaval and likely a wave of violence. And no one knew whether the institution of state power would hold up or if everything would collapse into the abyss of civil war.