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

passion, Alex,” the girl answered dreamily. “There’s real magic in it, you know — making money out of thin air. You see an item worth one gold to its owner, buy it, then create a different value for the buyer — two or three gold. But it’s the same item, Alex! Get it?”

“What if the owner knows the real value?”

“What is the real value anyway? It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it. What’s a glass of water to you? You can get one free from the well in Tristad. But a traveler lost in the desert would give everything he has for one.”

We started kissing again. But Irita suddenly pulled back and smiled.

“Do you remember that dumbass Justasec? The one who bet me and Underweight that you got a legendary fire phoenix from Crusher? And when he lost, he ran off with a bunch of jewels from one of the merchants.”

“I remember,” I smiled, feeling nostalgia for a time when my biggest problem was my parents’ divorce. Well, and Crag the ganker with his crew.

“He writes to me every day. He’s in love, can you imagine?”

“Unlucky him,” I chuckled, leaning over the girl. “But lucky me!”

As I kissed Irita, I physically felt a crater within me closing up with each passing moment — the one Tissa had left when she betrayed me. I was back to myself again, my lust for life reawakened. I would have happily spent all the time I had until the Demonic Games with Irita. She was so easy to be with. But it all ended suddenly.

Emergency exit activated: external immersion capsule command interface in effect!

 

Exiting in: 3…

 

“Someone activated the emergency exit,” I said quickly, interrupting Irita.

“Again?!”

The girl’s wide eyes were the last things I saw.

As I waited for the intragel to slide off me, I remembered the time I danced with her in the Pig and Whistle — she was still called Overweight back then, — and how I’d been pulled out of Dis just the same way then. Mom had done it, because Tissa had come to see me in tears. Some time later, we founded the Awoken.

The capsule hatch opened and I saw Hairo and Willy, beaten up and in full battle equipment. Soot covered their serious faces. Hairo handed me some gear and spoke while I got dressed:

“We brought Hung out first. Malik told us through him that you weren’t doing anything serious.”

“But sorry all the same if we pulled you away from something important. Or someone,” Willy added, grinning. “We have news…”

I didn’t know if the news could be called good, but it was definitely better than what Maria told me in the vision. Diego Aranzabal had been successfully eliminated. He and his escort, along with the contingent from the United Cartel, had been hit with on-board missiles, then the wild ones landed. They finished off the few survivors. As it turned out, the wild ones had a history with the Cartel.

Against my pleas, Hairo flew to the operation himself.

“We couldn’t risk Yoshi, he’s more important here, and there’s nobody else to pilot the Shark,” he explained. “Willy was flying the Barracuda. Plan B worked.”

The security officers’ initial idea, the result of which I’d already seen in the revelation, involved preventing Diego from meeting with the Cartel at all. That must have been the operation’s downfall: our boys rushed to catch up to Diego and revealed themselves too soon. This time they managed to get it done without hurrying. They calmly flew in stealth mode to the criminals’ meeting place and tore apart the desert island in the Caribbean Sea, transforming it into a mini Hiroshima.

There remained the question of what the Cartel knew. The usually laconic Willy was worked up, which made him talkative.

“I don’t think the Cartel’s people had time to question Diego. If they did learn anything, I doubt they sent it up the chain. We attacked in the first minute of the meeting, when they’d only just finished shaking hands.”

On their return, the security guards had woke up a sleepy and yawning Trixie and interrogated him again. In the end, we got a rough picture of what the United Cartel knew. The inwinova hunchback Trixie knew Scyth. Videos of the legates’ imprisonment had already gone viral, and it was clear there that the Montosaurus was the Threat’s pet. Dinosaurs were unknown in Dis. Monty was the only one, and Trixie had talked about him. In addition, the dwarf had mentioned the undead, until now unknown, and a certain god that he knew personally. The Cartel had used Jess to find Trixie, but also searched for him separately in the non-citizen territories.

There were many cities like Cali Bottom. The non-citizens in them numbered in the billions. Trixie’s hunchback and short stature were identifying features, but they weren’t so rare in our time. There were rumors that the citizenship tests took genetic purity into account first and foremost. In very rare cases, as an exception, citizenship was given to people with poor health and physical deformities when they had outstanding mental faculties.

This meant that finding Trixie in the real world without knowing where he lived was harder than finding the right John Smith online. And the Cartel didn’t even know Trixie’s surname. Which was why they had most likely decided to use their authority to get local kingpins like Diego Aranzabal in on the search.

“Then the question is, what did Diego know?” Hairo said, giving voice to the obvious. “Because last night’s operation didn’t solve our problems; the Cartel will investigate what happened and be sure to question those close to Aranzabal. What do they know?”

It was morning and the security officer had brought not only his own people to the meeting in my quarters, but the leaders of our workers too, Manny and Gyula. Harold Furtado, Trixie’s