My friends and I hugged. I told them my parents were gone and they could make themselves at home. Hung went right into the kitchen, opened the fridge.
“Want something to eat?” My suggestion was met with widespread appreciation. “Gimme a sec.”
While I messed around with the replicator, Ed sat at the kitchen breakfast bar, flexed his fingers and began to sum up yesterday’s heist.
“Around two hundred legendaries, five hundred epics. Almost all of it broken garbage. The repairs will cost a fortune… Uhm… Gems, including epics—nearly a hundred. And three wagons of other resources—ingredients for cooking, alchemy, smithing and so on. We’ll have plenty of materials for leveling crafts… And we got a bazillion consumables, potions, elixirs. Combat and portal scrolls too. The Alliance has given us a year’s worth of supplies.”
The boys broke into smiles.
“How much is a ‘bazillion’ exactly?” I asked.
“A shit-ton,” Rodriguez grinned. “Would have been too much for us to bring out. And we wouldn’t have had time. Good idea with those haulers!”
I put some plates of sandwiches, eggs and sausages on the table, poured everyone a glass of juice and sat down. Watching the boys as they ate, I started thinking aloud.
“The haulers cost a lot, although Gruzelix gave me a good price. But all the same… I guess we can’t send it all through the mail?”
“No way. Think about it—if you could send any amount of items through the mail instantly, how would the transport guild make any money? There are no haulers in the sandbox, so we used mail there. Here you can only send up to ten items a day. And that’s only if you level up the clan first.”
“So we better level up the clan then! What do we need to do?”
Malik had been bursting to speak the whole time.
“Clan experience is calculated from the total experience of its members, achievements points, level and number of forts and castles, captured lands, victories in in-game events like the Arena and the Demonic Games, the clan’s capital and rating. Every time it levels up, the clan gets different bonuses. Have you ever even looked at the clan tab, Alex?”
“Like hell has he looked,” Hung rumbled, munching a club sandwich. “He doesn’t have the time.”
“Well, I…”
“It’s all good, Alex,” Ed raised his hands for calm. “Just so you know, the clan has reached level two and is well on the way to three. The victory in the Arena helped. And first place in the cooking tournament counted for quite a lot too. So it makes sense for you to keep going.”
“How do you picture that? A walking corpse making a three-course meal? The judges will throw up…”
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” Ed broke into a smile. “But keep it in mind, just in case. We’re doing pretty well ourselves. Bomb is still feeding the kraken…”
“Uh-huh,” Hung said with his mouth full. “Seems to have gotten even bigger. But my rep is going up slowly now. He doesn’t eat everything I bring; twenty or thirty points and then Orthokon leaves. If everything goes well tomorrow, I’ll get to friendly. If nothing changes, I’ll have to keep feeding him until I get to ti’usted, and then we’ll see…”
“What about that instance in the desert? Did you find the key?”
“No,” Malik sighed. “We combed all the surrounding Dig Sites. Nothing. Ancient bones, a broken sword, a rusty ring… A bunch of gray garbage. Couldn’t even sell it to a vendor.”
“I dug for information on Lavack’s Heart,” Ed added. “Didn’t find anything except one mention in an article about the known Old Gods of Dis. There was a wind god called Lavack, and there’s a legendary named after him.”
“What about Holdest?”
“Didn’t have time yesterday, wanted to go today,” Hung answered.
“Yeah,” Ed confirmed. “After the meet with Hairo. If I understand him right, it’s time for us to legalize our incomes. We don’t just need a lot of money, we need a hell of a lot. Gotta fund the base, paychecks, a fullblown structure.”
“Not counting the Portal Key to Holdest, we have loot worth hundreds of millions,” I noted. “We collected it from the strongest players in the game who were participating in the most important event in all the history of Dis. Their items must be the best of the best for their slots, or close to it. And about that. How in the Nether did so many legendaries drop? Don’t they have one-hundred-percent protection against dropping?”
“If you die, everything will drop from you too,” Ed chuckled. “You got a lot of blood on your hands. But actually, there are other factors. Broken gear ahvays drops, for example. The chance also increases when you fight an opposite faction, to encourage interfactional PvP. And maybe this one is only rumor, but they say that you’re far more likely to drop gear in a wipe against a boss too. You know how it is. Snowstorm made everything as tough as possible. Almost twenty years of gameplay, and nobody’s at level four hundred yet!”
“Hey, haven’t they nerfed anything in that time?” Hung asked, scratching the back of his head. “Judge for yourself; Mogwai is twenty-seven, and he’s top #1. Minus a year’s break—that’s twelve years of active play.”
“There was one time,” Malik answered. “A few years after launch, I think. They boosted leveling speed. One of the last changes the devs made. Dis has been evolving on its own since then. As for Mogwai, his Azure Dragons powerleveled him to two hundred. Like any clan levels up its juniors.”
“Yeah,” Malik laughed. “We just leveled up our ‘juniors’ to a hundred in just half a day! Gyula doesn’t know how lucky he is.”
“Neither do you,” Hung noted, nodding at me.
“We’re off-topic,” Ed jabbed at the comm screen and brought up a hologram of a table. “Check out the plan, Alex. The mine is our legal and stable income. With current turnover, it brings in around a
