Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series, Dan Sugralinov [the reader ebook .TXT] 📗

I looked around slowly to confirm the Taipan leader’s words. The castle yard wasn’t exploding with a slew of opening portals; no clan warriors rushed out to attack. He’d even pulled the guards from the fortress walls. A slight rain had begun to fall, making Pecheneg turn his face to the sky and close his eyes in pleasure.

“How do you know what I’m thinking, Sergei? Or was your name a lie too?”

“You’ll get all your answers, Scyth,” Hinterleaf said. “But first, we have to go somewhere more…”

The gnome was still smiling when I flew straight at him and grabbed him by the wrist. The next second, I did the same with Pecheneg and then shot out beyond the castle walls as fast as a bullet. A defensive bubble surrounded Hinterleaf, but that was all — neither man protested. The mage didn’t even try to escape with Blink. Maybe we wouldn’t have to fight, and could stick to just words.

Overcoming the urge to drop them from a deadly height, I descended over a grassy ravine and unceremoniously let them go, keeping myself in the air. The leaders of Taipan and Modus went tumbling down to the bottom of the ravine, groaning with age and losing health. I summoned Sharkon, landed on the edge and sat down cross-legged. The earth sagged beneath the Underground Terror’s immense weight.

Sit, Sharkon. Defend,” I ordered my pet. Then I turned to the old men, although big Pecheneg the barbarian didn’t look it. “Now I need answers.”

“A healthy… beast!” Hinterleaf said, looking at Sharkon in glee. “And living too, I see. And yet… Oh, the youth! Rude and straight to business… No respect for seniority.”

The gnome stood and cast Blink, teleporting beside me.

“Easier to talk without craning our necks, right, Scyth?”

Pecheneg had to climb out himself. The gnome watched him with a smile.

“Before you start asking questions, let me tell you the story of a great hoax. Those few who know the truth are bound by both mental contract and Arbiter oath. I am in no position to demand the same from you, but a simple promise will suffice. Would you indulge an old man his whims, young Sheppard?”

“You aren’t the first to play that card, Mr. Hinterleaf. Yeah, I’m still a teenager, and when you call me young, it’s like you’re belittling me or my ability to think.”

“Oh, Alex, I speak only of life experience,” he sighed. “You can’t level that up any faster, no matter how you try. Lived years aren’t always an advantage. Old errors and knowledge often limit our view, keeping us from seeing things from a fresh perspective. But in all times, one thing has remained unchanged: the ability to keep your word says more about you than anything else. In my day, it was said of such people that their word was stronger than oak. This capital cannot be multiplied, only preserved. Now…”

Hinterleaf fell silent, but Pecheneg finished climbing up to us and continued:

“Now no word is worth more than the value gained from breaking it. People have forgotten honor and decency. All can be bought and sold. But he can be trusted,” he said, nodding at the gnome.

Then Hinterleaf turned to Pecheneg and said something very strange indeed:

“That’s rich coming from you, Otto.”

Pecheneg chuckled and Hinterleaf looked at me again. The little gnome’s eyes were serious:

“Now promise me that you won’t tell anyone what you learn about me, Scyth. I do not demand, I ask.”

“You want an Arbiter?”

“That is not necessary. I have studied you enough to trust your word.”

“I promise I won’t tell anyone what I learn of you.”

The gray-haired gnome nodded in satisfaction:

“Then listen. Otto Hinterleaf, as the whole world knows him, does not exist…”

From his story, interrupted with unrelated tangents and recollections from Pecheneg, I learned that Otto Hinterleaf was one person with two faces.

A Russian oligarch named Sergei really did found Modus and move all his assets to Dis. Except that his surname wasn’t Polotsky, but he had never claimed it was real. Sergei created an account with the game nick ‘Pecheneg’ and founded the clan Modus, but he practically never played himself; he was busy with real-life business. His aide Otto Hinterleaf dealt with the Dis side of things, controlling a mage with the same name.

A couple of years later, when Sergei moved all his assets to the clan account, Otto thought he could do without his former boss and kicked Pecheneg from Modus. I’d already heard this part of the story, but what happened afterwards was a far cry from what I was told at Distival by the man who called himself Polotsky.

Otto may have achieved superiority in the game, but in real life, he was still the same old careful, easily frightened fat man. He was far from Sergei’s level of influence, and naturally, the oligarch didn’t stand on ceremony with his former aide. Sergei didn’t even have to get his criminal connections involved, although they were what Otto feared most. Once Otto was surrounded on all sides, he himself regretted what he had done. Especially since returning everything would be no simple matter. The procedure for changing the leader of a clan that possessed billions of gold would have raised questions from all sides: the game community, Snowstorm, the financial services, the security agencies.

“Imagine that the leader of the UN suddenly invited in a man off the street who had already been kicked out of the organization, and declared. ‘He’s the boss now. I’m leaving’,” Hinterleaf told me. “Nonsense!”

“So what did you do?”

“Otto gave me his account. Don’t look so shocked; at the dawn of Dis, Snowstorm still allowed that sort of thing. Then the machinations began, and the commercial character leveling market flourished, so the practice was banned. That happened in the third year of