"Comrade President. The information has been confirmed. People are indeed getting skills and growing stronger with the communicator technology, and most importantly," he paused for a moment, "they are completely healed after passing through the portals." The head of counterintelligence finished his report to the head of state and stood at attention, awaiting his orders.
The President glanced at the communicator, a gift from the Syntech corporation three days ago, and fell into thought. "So, complete healing?" He opened the device's biometric analyzer and looked once more at the black area in his head, which had grown significantly larger in the last two days.
"Yes. According to our calculations, a request to open a portal will appear in two hours, and you will be able to activate it. The gear is prepared, and I await your decision."
"What do the analysts say?" the head of state asked.
"The survival chance is over seventy percent if you go without a weapon. With firearms, it rises to ninety-five percent."
"The doctors' prognosis?"
"The tumor is growing rapidly, and the medications have stopped working. The maximum they give you is a month. After that, it will be impossible to hide the illness, your condition will rapidly deteriorate, and a lethal outcome will follow in another two weeks."
The President stood up and stretched a little, demonstrating that even at eighty years old, he had maintained the flexibility he'd had since his youth. His body certainly didn't obey him as it used to, but his lifelong passion for martial arts had helped him stay in shape even at this age, keeping his joints flexible and his spirit resilient.
"Give the order. I'm going as soon as the opportunity arises."
The counterintelligence officer took out a radio and, pressing the transmit button, issued a series of short commands. Armed men entered the room, carrying a large plastic weapon case, a packed backpack, and other items.
"You're dismissed," he said to the men who had just arrived, then walked over to the crate and opened it.
"The Kalashnikov AK-15 assault rifle. The fifth generation and the pinnacle of the concern's engineering thought. 7.62 caliber ammunition, transcendent reliability, and extreme lethality. A collimator sight, muzzle brake compensator, and an improved ergonomic grip tailored for your shoulder. Inside the backpack, in a case, is an optical sight with a four-power zoom that can be installed in place of the collimator."
"A familiar machine," the President said, taking the rifle into his hands and examining it. "Brings back memories of the glorious days of my youth and the stories about a bullet that could pierce a rail lengthwise."
"Well, lengthwise might not be possible, but right through it with ease. The kit includes three magazines with armor-piercing cartridges. They can penetrate five-centimeter-thick sheet steel," he demonstrated a magazine marked with blue paint. "Another three with armor-piercing incendiary rounds—a slightly modified version of compound number seven, with a burn temperature that melts battleship armor." This time he pulled out and showed a red-painted magazine. "And for taking down living targets, eight loaded magazines with expanding bullets. In tests, these bullets leave holes in a pig carcass large enough for a grown man's hand to pass through, so if you meet an enemy of flesh and blood, they'll be in a world of hurt."
Having finished demonstrating the weapon, the man moved on to the medkit.
"Medication number one. Could raise the dead, give you enhanced endurance, and pain suppression. You can keep going even with a broken leg. Medication number two boosts all bodily functions, awakening hidden reserves, and lasts for thirty minutes." The head of counterintelligence continued the briefing, describing the medkit's contents. "The side effects of each medication will put you in a hospital bed for a long time, but the full healing from the portal should fix everything."
The head of state geared up in a military uniform, put on a lightweight bulletproof vest developed and sewn in the shortest possible time by special order, took his weapon, and slung the backpack with provisions and the rest of his gear over his shoulders.
"If I don't return in three days, activate the legend about my plane exploding over the ocean," he gave his final instructions.
The portal opened under the President's feet, and he fell inside, disappearing from the sight of the many people responsible for his safety for the first time in a long time.
The elderly man appeared in a small cave and looked around. What he first thought was a cave turned out to be an ordinary stone grotto in high, steep cliffs. He peered out and saw a meadow bathed in sunlight, with lush green grass and scattered trees. The niche in the rock face was at a slight elevation, and he had to climb down to get to the ground.
"So the agency didn't lie. I really did get transmigrated."
The summer weather and the change from cold, wintry Moscow to a summer forest left no room for doubt, and the man, taking the rifle off his back, attached the optical sight in place of the collimator. He knelt down near the grotto's entrance, took aim, and surveyed the territory. There were thin-trunked trees, large spreading bushes that could easily hide an entire division, and the intoxicating scent of fresh, clean air that had long since abandoned the urban jungle.
A roar, followed by the dying shriek of an animal, made him tense up slightly, but the reassuring weight of the rifle and his extensive hunting experience gave him confidence. He brought his sight to the source of the sound and saw a huge tiger with long fangs jutting from its jaws, resting on the corpse of an animal, tearing chunks of meat from the body of the deer it had killed.
"Okay… The distance is roughly four hundred meters," the President, dropped far from his own country, confirmed with the rangefinder scale. Seeing that there would be no armored opponents, he equipped a magazine with expanding bullets, once again took aim, held his breath, and squeezed the rifle's trigger. A shot rang out, the rifle gave a soft kick to his shoulder, and the saber-toothed cat was thrown sideways by the powerful impact, a through-and-through wound in its scruff. A shattered spine paralyzed the predator, and a second shot ended its suffering.
[Smilodon, Level 15 killed. 60 experience points gained]
Inhaling the fresh air, the man stood up, took binoculars from his backpack, and surveyed the area. The narrow valley, a few kilometers wide, was squeezed between sheer cliffs, narrowing toward the horizon into a pass that disappeared among the rocks, and that was probably where he needed to go. After scanning the immediate area and making sure there were no dangerous animals nearby, the President began to carefully descend the slope.
After reaching the corpse of the super-predator he had shot, which had been terrorizing the entire neighborhood, and having shot several deer along the way, the man inspected the fallen animal. He took out a hunting knife, first loosened a tooth in the jaw, and then knocked out a huge fang with the blunt end as a trophy. He put it in his backpack and headed for the exit, shooting every living creature that appeared within a five-hundred-meter radius. Most were herbivores, including several small, Level 1 rabbits, but a few small pack predators also fell victim to his automatic weapon.
It was mostly on the remnants of his willpower that, after fifteen hours of travel, the President reached the pass, which turned out to be the entrance to a cave. He made a short stop, giving his tired legs a rest. The thirty-kilometer hikes that used to come so easily to him had become more and more difficult with age, and at eighty-one, one could even say he had performed a feat. Especially since it was one thing to walk lightly on a promenade and another to make his way through the wilderness with full gear, a rifle, a bulletproof vest, and a backpack, periodically shooting down the local inhabitants. He had mostly relied on the meds from his medkit, which maintained his performance, but pharmaceuticals could not prolong the body's function indefinitely, and his strength was running out.
Listening carefully, the man turned on the underbarrel flashlight on his rifle and took his first step into the cave.
Tumbling out of the portal a few hours later, the President of the country, covered in blood and with his uniform in tatters, looked with a slightly dazed expression at the medics from the standby team who were running toward him, waiting for his return in the room, and stopped them with a gesture.
"Where is Mikhail Anatolyevich?" the head of state asked, looking for the head of his counterintelligence apparatus.
"He's already on his way," the senior medic reported briskly. "Comrade President, please let us examine you, you're all bloody."
"No," he cut him off. "You're all dismissed."
The elderly man sat down in a chair, staining it with his own blood and the blood of others that remained on his clothes, and looked at his hand. The wrinkled skin, after repeated use of the 'Cellular Regeneration' skill, began to look noticeably better. The age spots were gone, and even his appearance looked several years younger.
"Comrade President?" the counterintelligence officer who had rushed in stood at attention before the ruler.
"We're activating Plan 'B.' Announce the capabilities of the communicators throughout the country. Organize a press conference; tomorrow I will personally address the nation."
The man opened his communicator's biometric analyzer and smiled, seeing a completely green three-dimensional model that reflected his health.
********
Checking my new capabilities, I returned to the house and began using the spell builder for a new skill, deciding to add fire to my arsenal.
On one hand, my attacking arsenal was already quite extensive. Freezing, Dehydration, and two types of kinetic effects, with stone shrapnel proving to be much more effective than the Ice Blade. But the slimes proved to me that there can be very strange monsters with different methods of defense, and so it's better to have a more diverse arsenal. Besides, the best defense is when you don't get hit. And my leveled-up Dexterity showed me what I should be aiming for. I could just become very fast, and then only area-of-effect skills, like my Dehydration, would pose a danger.
Settling in, I opened the internet and began reading every article I could find about thermal effect spectra. I stumbled upon an interesting idea involving lasers and began to think about it. The main problem with such a weapon is a lack of energy, which was no problem at all for me. I had to delve into the study of the process until I understood what needed to be done.
In general terms, a laser is just a multitude of photons moving and reflecting off a mirrored surface in an active medium, which are then released from one side. And if you increase the number of photons to a certain level, even a child's laser pointer would become an excellent weapon, burning through everything in its path. Of course, until it meets a mirror that it reflects off of.
And Thermokinesis allows me to emulate all these processes at once. I would use mirrored ice, with a more ordered crystalline lattice, as the mirrors and the confining area, and inside, I would launch a thermal reaction to create photons, and with the same skill, cool down the excess thermal energy. As a result, I would remove the ice from the outer side, releasing all the accumulated energy in a single burst.
In the spell builder's emulator, it looked as if an ice structure appeared and disappeared for a fraction of a second in front of my outstretched hand, and then a beam of light erupted from my open palm, calmly burning through a steel plate several centimeters thick in its path. True, the cost was off the charts, taking almost five percent of my capacity for every second of operation. I slightly adjusted the power and focused the beam using a system of ice mirrors, changing it to a continuous five-second operation, resulting in an analogue of the laser beam from comic book heroes' eyes, only launched from my hand.
The good old fire skill didn't work out again, instead bringing an ultimate beam of annihilation. In five seconds, I could melt a tunnel through rock, not to mention destroying slimes or animated trees, but the twenty-five percent cost was outrageous for me.
In the end, I saved the skill to my templates, with the goal of studying it later when the energy question wasn't so critical, and in the spell builder, I started generating a new idea related to flame.
For fire to appear and exist, you need three basic components. Fuel, which actually burns itself, an oxidizer, which allows the process to proceed, and a high temperature. While there was no problem with the oxidizer since the atmosphere would serve that purpose, and I could increase the temperature directly with the Thermokinesis skill, there was a problem with the fuel. This meant that the fire skills of other users, like Nikolay Sokolov's fire arrow, were combined skills where the communicator took care of all the substance interactions, giving the end-user only the result and improving it each time the skill leveled up.
I tried to combine two skills: using Aerokinesis to break down a part of the air into its components, I built up a stream of pure oxygen under pressure, to which I added acetylene, assembling it from two carbon and hydrogen atoms. I defined an area where all of this would not mix, and holding it, I raised the temperature with Thermokinesis at the very beginning of the stream until it ignited. The result was a gas cutter with a five-meter range and a burning temperature of one thousand five hundred to three thousand degrees Celsius, depending on the distance. I ran the skill through the spell builder and was surprised by the cost. A tenth of a percent per second?
Then I understood that, in principle, no special manipulations were being performed. All the gases were taken from the surrounding environment, and the ignition occurred in a single moment, thereafter sustaining itself. The main thing was not to overdo the duration of use and not to burn up all the oxygen in the area beyond the portal, so I would have to buy a gas analyzer to monitor the gas content in the atmosphere, and welding goggles at the same time to protect my eyes.
I took the gloves I had forgotten about out of my inventory and added them to the simulation. The character in the simulation held out his hand in the protective gear under the stream of fire, then pulled it out, and the limb was completely intact, not having heated up a single degree. The strange black material was completely inert to temperature, protecting the contents from heating. At least, the heating to three thousand degrees Celsius performed in the simulation did not cause any burns. At last, I found a use for them: first, they provide excellent protection against strikes, and second, they will protect my hands from high temperatures.
After double-checking everything a few more times, I saved the skill and began to finalize its creation.
I still had one unused skill slot each for Aerokinesis and Pangeokinesis, and next time I needed to try combining three skills to create an even more powerful weapon. I laughed villainously to myself, imagining myself as a powerful mage.
After I finished designing the skill, I leaned back in my chair and opened a news website, deciding to get acquainted with what was happening in the world. Five days had passed since the abduction of the large batch of bracelets, which meant that the owners of the communicators should have returned and had enough time to level up their first skills.
I opened a video portal and hit the jackpot: the very first video I opened at random showed a guy whose hands could grow metallic blades similar to Japanese katanas at will. The second showed a girl floating in the air, and in the third, a man was juggling fireballs. Dozens of videos with various capabilities, and under them, millions of comments with questions, threats, admiration, and even accusations of video editing.
Well, since my parents weren't back yet, it was a good time to study the abilities of potential opponents and maybe pick up an interesting idea for creating my own skill. I settled in comfortably and opened the next video, silently thanking the shortsighted people who were chasing fleeting fame and revealing all their secrets.
Overall, my guesses were confirmed. Absolutely all users, after leveling up their inventory, received random skills fully supported by the system. One girl even read out the descriptions of her attributes, and her Intelligence was responsible for magical damage. And again, the question arose as to why there was such a strong difference in our abilities. I had the manipulation of the physical states of matter, including molecular assembly, and they had magic without a scientific explanation of what was happening.
For a test, some of them removed the communicator and lost their abilities, proving that it was this bracelet that was doing all these incredible things. In a way, it was a test of faith. Online, requests on how to buy the new Symb 2.0 version multiplied, and according to some comments, the lucky ones were bragging about snatching a unit on the black market for several million.
To be honest, I admired my brother, who instantly saw the opportunity and used his connections to get three units for a reasonable price. Today, pulling off such a trick would be impossible, and my parents probably wouldn't have received such ultimate skills.
The automatic gates on the property began to open, and my parents' car drove in. A minute later, a dog's joyful barking and the soft thud of fluffy paws on the stairs rang out. The dog burst into the room and jumped onto my lap, licking my face and, comically meowing, began to tell me about its adventures.
"Timosha, seriously! With those dirty paws!" my mother burst into the room, not having caught up with the dog, and seeing me, she threw up her hands. "Well, now you're all dirty."
I picked up the dog, which hadn't stopped licking my face, and carried it to the bathroom to wash its paws. Realizing where he was being taken, the dog fell silent and made an unsuccessful attempt to break free.
"Too late. You came to me yourself."
The dog, which had stoically endured the procedure, shook itself off and ran to its food bowl, eating away its frustration over its wet paws.
"And where's Dimka?" I asked my mother, who was following me.
"He just called, said he'd be here in ten minutes. I'm going to make dinner; you go help your father. We also stopped by the Chinese market and picked up some camping gear for our new trips."
I nodded shortly, went outside to the car, and helped my father carry the huge bags into the house.
"Dad, seriously. You should have called, and I would have come and helped. Why are you carrying heavy stuff?"
"Ha! After the portal, I feel like I'm thirty years old. Is that really heavy?" Dad replied with a swagger.
My brother arrived just in time to help unpack the gear, and the whole family sat down for dinner, discussing the day that had passed.
"Unfortunately, I couldn't buy any more communicators. The price with my contacts shot up to twenty-three million per unit. And they even tried to pressure me into returning the ones I bought cheaply before," my brother complained. "But I told them where to go with their demands, so you could say the day was a waste."
"I was watching videos online. The first waves have arrived, and a lot of videos about the capabilities have appeared. There's still no mention of healing yet, but I think that just hasn't surfaced to the masses."
Our conversation was interrupted when the kitchen television turned itself on and the voice of an announcer rang out.
"Attention! Attention! This is not a drill! An emergency address from the President of Russia to the citizens of Russia is being broadcast. Please gather at the nearest sources of information. Proceed to the nearest televisions, radio broadcast points, billboards, and information panels. Attention! Attention!" The recording played several more times, and a countdown to the start of the address appeared on the screen.
"Now that's a logical development," my father commented.
The President appeared at the podium, cleared his throat slightly, and turned on the microphone. Previously beginning to falter after thirty years of continuous rule and showing signs of weariness, he now beamed with confidence and resilience. After clearing his throat once more, he began to speak.
"My fellow citizens. Today, the world as we know it has changed. Our homeland has always amazed the entire world with its discoveries, and once again, it has confirmed its glory. Our scientists, programmers, engineers, and designers have always been ahead of the entire planet and once again proved their uniqueness.
"The Syntech corporation, which originated in Moscow and in the last year has become a household name throughout the world, has accomplished the impossible. It has become a world leader in the production of electronic communication devices, having released a communicator with incredible capabilities.
"But the enemy never sleeps! Various attempts were made to intimidate or even physically harm our heroes. But the people working at the company stood firm against attempts to destroy them not only from the outside but also from within. American and Korean companies did not give up, and in an attempt to regain the communications market, they committed terrible atrocities, trying to destroy our people.
"But with the support of the state, they coped and survived, taking a worthy place at the top. They honorably fulfilled and even exceeded the large-scale tasks that stood before them, winning the love of consumers from all over the world. Russians have proven time and again that they can solve complex technical problems, first by sending the first person into space, and now by accomplishing the impossible."
The President raised his left hand, on which the familiar bracelet shone, and continued.
"Before you is the Symb 2.0 version communicator, which is ahead of its time. Some of you have already seen videos on internet portals with capabilities that are stunning to the imagination. And I, as the head of state, declare. All of this is the absolute truth. Syntech has created a device that grants the user incredible powers." The President rose into the air and hung there for a moment. The people in the hall gasped in unison, and a murmur of voices discussing what had happened arose. The head of state carefully surveyed the entire room, raised his hand, and after everyone fell silent, he descended. "These capabilities are not granted just like that. You will have to fight for them and shed your own or someone else's blood, but I believe in the citizens of my country and their strength of spirit." He took a breath and continued. "Today, I spoke with the CEO of the corporation, and in the near future, the sale of communicators will begin in Russia, with a temporary restriction on the release of products abroad. But even that is not the main news."
The President looked intently into the camera and adjusted his tie.
"Complete healing from all diseases is one of the device's functions." He fell silent, giving time for his words to sink in, and displayed a three-dimensional model with his health indicators next to him. "Recently, I was incurably ill. A tumor in my brain was killing me, and I had less than two months to live. But thanks to the developments of our fellow citizens, I have been completely healed. In addition, I received a unique skill." He picked up a utility knife, the camera zoomed in, and the President slashed his palm to the hysterical shrieks of the women present.
"'Regeneration,'" he said, and right before the eyes of the entire country, the wound closed up and disappeared, leaving no trace. The man took a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his palm. "I received this skill as a reward for the fortitude, courage, and personal heroism I showed during the trial. This skill not only heals wounds but also rejuvenates the body. With these capabilities, I will be able to lead the country to prosperity for another ten years," the ruler of the country finished to thunderous applause from the audience.