Holy War Read online

  Summary of Previous Books

  Earth, 2074. After World War III, a single world government rules the planet—the UN.

  The planet’s population now exceeds twenty billion, at least a third of which are noncitizens, people declared useless to the community, which means they have no rights to the benefits of civilization. Citizenship is divided into categories; from A with the highest status, the social elite, to L—the lowest.

  At the recommendation of the UN Department of Education, every teenager between ages fourteen and sixteen must spend at least one hour per day in Disgardium. This is considered an essential part of a well-rounded education to give teenagers the social skills they need and prepare them for adult life.

  The student Alex Sheppard takes the in-game nickname Scyth. After making his character wrong and having trouble leveling up, he quickly loses interest in the game. For over a year, he just spends his mandatory hours in the sandbox, sitting on a bench outside the tavern.

  His parents are planning to divorce, which will lower their citizenship class and income, and they won’t be able to pay for Alex’s education to fulfill his dream of becoming a space guide. The colonization of Mars has begun, and plans are in the works to correct Venus’ orbit.

  Half a year before school ends, Alex is forced to start playing Disgardium for real to earn enough for his studies.

  To maintain balance, the game’s developer company Snowstorm initially introduced the policy of ’Threats’ to knock out imbalanced players. Any player-threat identified by an artifact of the True Flame can be thrown out of the game permanently with the help of a simple ritual. The eliminator receives rewards based on the Threat’s potential, and the Threat is also rewarded: the higher its level, the greater the compensation, but the harder it is to defeat. If the Threat’s status reaches extreme highs, it can be tough to eliminate. This means that the eliminators (or ‘preventers,’ as they call themselves) gain more by eliminating Threats before they power up.

  The Threats themselves need to hide and level up. Their reward after elimination comes not from their potential, but from their current status level, where A is the highest and Z is the lowest.

  Scyth becomes a Threat with potential A after a series of unlikely events converge. The NPC Patrick O’Gradv (the first human whose consciousness was successfully transferred to the game) curses him, and another NPC, a lich dungeon boss, turns out to be under the control of the real-life noncitizen player Clayton, who contacts Alex. Clayton was the pilot of an interstellar cargo shuttle before he crashed and lost his citizenship. Seeing Scyth’s stubbornness as he dies over and over without giving up, he surrenders, letting Scyth kill him.

  Scyth gets Mark of the Destroying Plague from killing the final boss of the instance. The Mark lets him withstand any damage without dying. Alongside Patrick’s curse, this allows Scyth to reach uninhabitable territory in the Mire, slumbering place of the dying avatar of the Sleeping God Behemoth, one of five ancient gods.

  Scyth makes friends with the ‘Dementors’—his classmates Ed ‘Crawler’ Rodriguez, Hung ‘Bomber’ Lee, Melissa ’Tissa’ Schafer and Malik leader of Axiom, the top clan in the Tristad sandbox. They create their own clan—the Awoken.

  The Awoken achieves victory in the yearly Junior Arena. To do that, they have to build a temple dedicated to the Sleeping Gods on the deserted island of Kharinza. They are aided by noncitizens from Cali Bottom, who Scyth met when he stood up for the miner Manny. The builder Gyula is among them. After erecting a temple, he begins to build the Awoken clan fort.

  Having achieved victory in the Arena, Scyth and his friends draw the attention of recruiters from the Alliance of Preventers, ten of the strongest clans in Disgardium.

  After their victory in the Arena, the school bans the Awoken from playing for eight weeks, which makes Scyth fail a quest from the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague. In his absence, the Destroying Plague finds a new emissary—Big Po. When Scyth returns to the game, Big Po opens a portal for the Destroying Plague to capture Tristad. With the help of his friends, Scyth fights off the undead assault and eliminates the Threat Big Po.

  They’re joined by Crag the warrior, aka Tobias Asser, a former unsuccessful ganker turned chosen one of Nergal the Radiant. Crag’s status as a Threat is revealed, and he is forced to hide not only in the game, but in real life too.

  Tobias asks Scyth for help, and Scyth accepts him into the ranks of the Awoken.

  Scyth and Crag leave the sandbox together. In Darant, the preventers check all newcomers that arrive, and Crag is identified as a

  Threat. Scyth manages to save his clanmate from the Modus clan castle and delivers him to the distant island of Kharinza, where the Awoken have built a fort.

  Fearing the preventers’ pursuit in the real world, the Awoken discuss a future haven. Manny and Gyula suggest buying three floors of a new apartment building in Cali Bottom and hiding out there.

  By using the Portal Key he got for eliminating Big Po the Threat, Scyth finds himself in the Treasury of the First Mage. There he acquires allies—the treasury guardians Flaygray the satyr, Nega the succubus, Ripta the raptor and Anf the insectoid.

  With their help, Scyth, Crag, Crawler and Bomber try to repel an attack from the lich Shazz, an emissary of the Destroying Plague, but in the end are defeated. Behemoth’s temple is destroyed, and Scyth is turned undead.

  Led by the Shazz the lich, he goes to a dungeon on Holdest, the lair of the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague, and gets a quest: to build a Stronghold of the Destroying Plague in the Lakharian Desert. The Nucleus also asks that he find the cult of Morena, the goddess of death, and recruit her.

  The Nucleus makes puppets of its legates, but Behemoth, who Scyth took with him, protects his consciousness. The god himself stays behind in the lair, to study the Destroying Plague’s power source.

  Using the abilities gifted by the Nucleus, Scyth turns his clanmates and noncitizen friends undead.

  The undead are immune to weather debuffs, which allows Scyth to quickly level up his character in the desert. There he learns a new ability—

  Plague Fury. With its help, Scyth reaches a place of power where he can begin to build a temple of the Sleeping Gods. The noncitizen builders help him build a temple in the Lakharian Desert dedicated to Tiamat, one of the five Sleeping Gods. According to Behemoth, she is the only one that can remove Scyth’s curse of the Destroying Plague.

  A day before the temple is finished, Scyth captures the beast-god Apophis, the White Snake. He does this to keep his promise to the first priest to Apophis, Yemi, leader of the dark African clan Yoruba. They try to kill Scyth, tearing his heart out, but in vain. Scyth kills them all. After reviving, Yemi, who is also a Threat, shouts to him that he and his clan will be ready to fight on Scyth’s side as soon as he says the word.

  Seeing the incarnation of the Sleeping Gods through Crag’s eyes, Nergal the Radiant, the god of light, declares a holy crusade to destroy Tiamat’s temple. The god promises full immunity from the heat of the Lakharian Desert to all his crusaders.

  DisgardiunTs developer company Snowstorm throws its yearly Distival, a kind of Comic Con for all the games fans. Anyone can visit it, but there is a separate private event for a chosen few.

  The Awoken, as winners of the Junior Arena, visit Distival in Dubai. There, Alex walks into his hotel room only to find Kiran Jackson, a director of Snowstorm, already in it. He tries to convince Alex to forget the Sleeping Gods and pursue the storyline of the new game faction—the undead. Kiran suggests involving the cultists of Morena in the event, to scale it up.

  According to Kiran, all the game gods of Dis are just AIs limited by the Faith resource. The more followers, the more Faith, and this generates competition among the AIs. As for the Sleepers—the
y’re particularly powerful AIs loaded into the game’s kernel just in a critical mass of errors builds up. Then the Sleeping Gods ‘wake up’ and reload the world, destroying everything within it.

  At Distival, Alex meets twenty-two-year-old Piper, member of the Modus clan’s junior wing. The girl takes him to seventy-year-old Sergei Polotsky, former oligarch whose money was used to found Modus. His game nickname was Pecheneg. The old man tells his tale, claiming that it was he who financed Modus from his business, but he was later kicked out by Otto Hinterleaf, now the clan’s leader. Polotsky also said Scyth was under close observation; Modus was certain he was the Threat. Now the clan is afraid of scaring Alex away and doesn’t want the other preventers to learn of him. Polotsky lost almost all his life savings in Modus. Taipan, Pecheneg’s clan, survives thanks to a captured vein of Corrupted Adamantite.

  At Distival, Mogwai, the number one player in the world, declares that he is returning to the game and founding a clan called Elite alongside his friend Criterror.

  By now, Alex is in need of a lot of money. His parents have failed a project and have to pay a fine. Hairo Morales, a security services officer from the Excommunicado clan, has been blackmailing him. He needs to buy a game capsule for Gyula so he can build the Stronghold of the Destroying Plague. Big Po has deduced that Scyth is the Threat and demands money and an imitation to the Awoken.

  After Distival, Alex gives an interview to Ian Mitchell, a journalist in similarly dire straits. In exchange, he gets a large sum of money and agrees to an ongoing collaboration with Mitchell.

  Using an achievement reward, he increases his reputation with the Goblin League and gains access to Kinema, the capital of Bakabba. There he puts up for auction two top legendary armor items and sells them for over ten million gold. That means he can solve his parents’ problems and buy the copper bar for a million gold from Hairo Morales, the blackmailer threatening to reveal the identity of the Threat among the Awoken. Scyth leaves a note saying he wants to discuss the possibility of working together with Hairo.

  In Kinema, Scyth visits the temple of Fortune, Goddess of Luck. She is one of the Old Gods, but has made a place among the New. Fortune wants help to return her former influence. And that means she needs Spheres of Serendipity— orbs containing the unspent luck of sentient beings. After death, the luck goes to the New Gods responsible for death, or to the demons of the Inferno. Fortune considers this unfair. Now Scyth sees Spheres of Serendipity on corpses and can pick them up.

  In the Lakharian Desert, Scyth encounters Ervigot the Ravager, giving him a chance to level up his resilience and unarmed combat.

  An explorer, Kitty from the Dangerous Game Hunters, shows up in the desert as if from nowhere and tells Scyth where to find the cultists of Morena.

  On Shad’Erung, continent of the dark ones, Scyth finds the cultists and asks them to set up a meeting with Morena, the goddess of death among the Old Gods. She recognizes the divine marks on him and says she remembers the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague by another name—Reaper, the Old God. In ancient times, Morena and Reaper walked hand-in-hand, but when the New Gods appeared, they lost followers, which meant they lost power too. Morena summons all her adepts to help Scyth.

  She gives him Reapers Scythes, a divine weapon that can level up by devouring the souls of the enemies it kills.

  Scyth also summons the Yoruba clan, the snake worshipers whose leader, the mage Yemi, promised Scyth that he would answer a call to arms.

  To use the Yoruba for sabotage, Scyth decides to become a scribe. He learns the craft and quickly levels it up. Now he can create scrolls that unleash the destruction of his Plague Fury spell.

  Crag leaves the Awoken clan without telling anyone.

  Scyth and his friends use the Portal Key to Holdest, confident that the mobs there should be higher level than in the Lakharian Desert. But the continent disappoints them: the few mobs that lived there were low level. Moreover, the place of power where they had a chance to build a new temple to the Sleeping Gods was almost at the South Pole, and Storm, Scyth’s dragoness, couldn’t fly the long distance—a frost debuff damaged her. It would take Scyth weeks to get there on foot. He decides to sell the Poi’tal Key at the goblin auction house.

  Gyula the builder erects the Stronghold of the Destroying Plague just in time for the NergaTs Summons event to begin.

  In a conversation with Scyth, Gyula mentions a series of strange deaths in Cali Bottom. Humans are dying from the Doom virus, which causes sudden death from strokes and heart attacks. All the victims had given up mining to work in Dis at one point or another. Hank, Manny’s brother, who Scyth met in the form of a dungeon boss in the instance Tristad City Jail, has gone mad and been taken away by Snowstorm.

  Scyth hands in his quest to build the Stronghold of the Destroying

  Plague and gets new abilities; now he can infect players with the Destroying Plague. He picks up Behemoth. The Sleeper, seeing that his Initial is changing, gives him a lesson: Alex temporarily loses control of his character and loses his legendary armor set, thrown off by the AI now in control of Scyth. The Nucleus gives him task of turning the cultists of Morena undead, to use them as vessels for the ‘departed’ legates of the Destroying Plague. They were once nine, but now only the lich Shazz and Scyth the player-legate remain.

  Shazz’s undead army passes through a Plague Portal and grows in strength as it farms high-level desert mobs. The cultists of Morena appear there too, those that the Nucleus had ordered turned undead. Scyth decides not to turn them, and sends the cultists to Kharinza instead.

  While leveling up Fishing on Kharinza, Hung encounters the huge kraken Orthokon. The warrior throw’s his catch to the kraken in fear, increasing his reputation with the beast god and becoming a Threat himself.

  The Montosaurus returns to the island and unwittingly helps Scyth. The beast god deals insane damage, allowing Scyth to quickly refill his plague energy and pour it into Plague Fury scrolls. Later, Scyth gives those scrolls to Yemi as weapons of sabotage.

  Scyth then goes to meet Pecheneg in his castle. The old man introduces him to Blackberry, an analyst and officer from Modus. She’s working for Polotsky. Summoning an Arbiter to register a trade, Blackberry gives Scyth the right to use her image, which allows him to fool tests with the fire of the True Flame. She also talks about Nergal the Radiant’s Great Portable Altar, which the preventers carry with them as a respawn point.

  Several thousand high-level players invade the Lakharian Desert and move toward the temple. The Alliance of Preventers is in a hurry to get there before the huge mass of ordinary players. It wants to be the first to complete Nergal’s quest.

  Scyth attacks the altar and destroys it. Immediately afterwards, he infiltrates the preventers’ headquarters under the guise of Blackberry and kills them all. Among them he encounters Crag, now a partner of Modus. As it turns out, the destroyed altar was a fake.

  Yoruba detonates a series of explosions around the temples of Nergal the Radiant during mass blessings. The high priests survive and ask their god for protection against Plague Fury.

  Nergal promises to protect all who answer his summons.

  The Continents of Disgardium

  Latteria

  The largest continent in the world, separated from Shad’Erung by the Thunder Strait. The Commonwealth occupies the western half, with the neutral races in the northeast and the Lakharian Desert stretching across the southeast. Latteria is home to Tristad (Scyth’s sandbox), the capital Darant, and frontier towns. Mob levels: 0-500+.

  Shad’Erung

  The continent of the dark ones. Almost fully belongs to the Empire, although roughly a third is covered in the uninhabitable Ursai Jungle. The Empire’s capital is Shak. This is where Scyth found the cultists of Morena. Mob levels: 0-500+.

  Bakabba

  A small continent in the southern hemisphere. Belongs entirely to the Goblin League. Mob levels: 200-300+.

  Holdest

  A snowy continent on the
South Pole. Uninhabited although its depths shelter the barely-alive Reaper, who went there to hide away from the New Gods and eventually became the Nucleus of the Destroying Plague. Mob levels: o-???

  Meaz

  A small continent slightly larger than Bakabba. Located on the equator to the east of Latteria. Covered with an impenetrable magical field, so nobody has settled it. Mob levels:???-???

  Terrastera

  A dwarf continent to the south of Shad’Erung. Has active volcanoes that cover the whole continent in lava, ash clouds and acid rain. Uninhabited. Mob levels:???-???

  Prologue: Hairo

  FORTY-YEAR-OLD Hairo Morales has been working in the Excommunicado security sendee for the past three years. A former peacekeeper and veteran of the Third World War and local conflicts in the Middle East, northern China and Africa, he struggled to find activities that suited him in retirement. He’d been a special operative in the army and tried to find something similar in civilian life. Sure, it gave him gray hairs faster, but he was too late to change now.

  The rain had been crashing down since dawm. Clouds of flint hung over the city. They seemed endless, divulging an eternal downpour. That bothered Morales. The rain brought phantom pains and he gritted his teeth. It was on a gloomy day like this that he lost his leg, burnt off by a plasma mine in one of the Central American Zones. Only his life-support system saved him, built into every peacekeeper exoskeleton.

  The army provided him with new bionic limbs. Better than before! the doc said, with exaggerated enthusiasm. At least they won’t smell, Hairo! Haha! Morales had laughed, but he was far from happy. He’d been pushed out of the army despite his service. The least they could have done was waive his treatment bill.

  Who would have thought he’d find himself in the company of Caesar, younger brother of drug baron Ishmael Calderone? Hairo had once been in a raid to capture him. It had failed, and maybe that was for the best. In any case, Caesar, when he accepted Hairo into the Excommunicado security sendees, had no issue with him.