The Demonic Games (Disgardium Book #7): LitRPG Series, Dan Sugralinov [the read aloud family TXT] 📗

contact with the outside world is allowed. It is seen as an attempt to gain an advantage in the Demonic Games through non-game methods. Accordingly, that is what Miss Hunter was fired for. After all, it was through her that you tried to contact your friends, yes?”

Blood rushed to my face and my dry throat closed up. When I tried to clear it, it felt as if full of sand. The injustice of the accusation made me so angry that I couldn’t help myself; I clenched my fists and raised my arm. All my emotions were aimed right at that self-satisfied rat face.

“Calm yourself, Mr. Sheppard, calm yourself. This is not my decision. Please get dressed. Octius will announce your disqualification after dinner.”

I couldn’t get enough air. I watched Donald go, waited until I was alone, then slid down the wall of my capsule to the floor.

 Interlude 1. Guy Barron

AS A CHILD, Guy Barron Octius had always hated both his first name and his middle name. Both Guy and Barron just rubbed him the wrong way, and he demanded that he be called simply Octi. However, once he grew up, he changed his mind, and Octi became a thing of the past.

Half a century had gone by since he became Mr. Octius. His childhood nickname was long forgotten, as nobody used it anymore. Nobody but one person.

Mr. Guy Barron Octius was a solid, gray-bearded man who didn’t dye his gray hairs, use rejuvenating face cream or try to hide his huge beer gut… His wife of sixty looked like a thirty-year-old track-and-field champion who could run a two-hundred-yard race at any moment, and her husband’s appearance annoyed her endlessly. At first she tried to make her spouse change his ways, but in the end she got tired of fighting and gave up. This is my image, Sylvia, and it’s the one I’m comfortable with, Octius explained to her, and she accepted it eventually. She could argue with her husband about anything else, but not work. Fearing for his health, Sylvia insisted only that her husband not skip those procedures that purified and rejuvenated the body.

Guy Barron ended up at Snowstorm by accident. In his mid-fifties, he produced the Robot Gladiator Superleague, and also commentated its battles. At that time the league was flourishing, but under constant pressure from the community to ban robot duels. The UN had already drawn up laws for robotic rights, and Octius knew it was time to move on.

The offer from Snowstorm came at the perfect time. The company’s founding fathers, still not household names back then, invited him to a private island in the North Sea. Truthfully, they should have been called ‘fathers and mother,’ since there was a woman among them.

Octius didn’t agree right away. The Snowstorm company of that day wasn’t much like the corporation of today. It was only just starting to pick up speed, although there was already talk of their revolutionary game. After the Third World War, people didn’t have much use for entertainment. Captivating robot gladiator battles were one thing — that was simple and understandable entertainment, fun for the lower and upper classes alike. A virtual world with full immersion was something else entirely. Back then, it was seen as a thing of fantasy, and sounded more like a marketing gimmick than something real. Virtual reality suits were already in use, but nobody forgot for a second that they were in a game. The characters repeated the motions of the real body, and perfectly realistic graphics were still a thing of theory…

When he arrived at the island, Guy Barron shivered and regretted turning up. A gust of northern wind hit him in the face, burning his cheeks with frost. Sure, Snowstorm promised mountains of gold, but what were promises worth? The project might take off, or it might die. And if Disgardium didn’t live up to the hopes placed on it, if the game failed, his contract with Snowstorm would be over before it began. And what then? Snowstorm demanded exclusivity — if he signed their contract, Octius would be cut off from all his other projects.

In fact, he had agreed to hear out the company’s founders not for the money, but more out of curiosity.

A swarthy young man met Octius by the landing pad. He introduced himself as Kiran Jackson. Everyone knows Jackson now, but in those days he was just an assistant to one of the founding fathers. All five were still living, back then.

The interested parties met in a humble two-story house. Kiran said he worked for Mr. Anderson. The assistant led Octius to his boss’s office, then quietly left.

Four men and a woman sat waiting for their guest in a spacious room. They looked young. Guy Barron would have guessed their age at no older than thirty.

The house’s owner, a sturdy man of average height, stood up first to greet him and introduced himself:

“Mike Anderson. Thanks for agreeing to meet with us, Mr. Octius.”

“Just Octi, Mr. Anderson,” Guy said, smiling and shaking the man’s strong outstretched arm, thinking to himself: how welcoming these people are that I suddenly remembered my childhood nickname…

“In that case, go ahead and call me Mike,” Anderson answered.

The others rose behind Anderson. They introduced themselves:

“Iovana,” the blonde woman said, offering her hand. Octius kissed it with pleasure.

“Ola,” the stocky black man nodded.

“Manuel,” said a big man of Latin-American origin who looked the oldest in the company.

“Vyacheslav,” a gray-haired athletic man with a beard rumbled. “But call me Slava.”

Only after the meeting did Octius make inquiries and learn that these people weren’t thirty, they were already past fifty and had achieved recognition, but they stayed in the background, avoided publicity.

The house’s owner, Mike Anderson, founded a company specializing in VR games in his twenties. Manuel Fuentes and Vyacheslav Zaitsev joined him a year