I was woken up by a blow to the bars and a police officer's voice.
"Andreev! Get up."
I woke up and started rubbing my eyes, not really understanding where I was. Another blow to the bars and an angry shout.
"What's the matter! You didn't get it? Get up, face the wall, hands on your head. I'll count to three."
Remembering where I was, I quickly jumped up and did as I was told, trying to look around discreetly. There were two guards with rubber batons outside the cell, and one of them was rattling his keys, looking for the right one to open the door. He finally found it and, opening the door, he came inside, pushed me in the back, kicked my legs apart to shoulder width with his boots, and fastened the handcuffs.
"Get going! Outside!"
As I was leaving, I stumbled over the bars, and instead of holding me up, the guard pushed me in the back so hard that I almost rolled head over heels. Got it… They don't treat prisoners very well here.
I walked down the corridor, looking with interest at the peeling gray walls and the inhabitants of the cells we passed. The robbers who had attacked me in that alley seemed like absolute angels compared to some of the inmates. Shirtless men covered in tattoos, most of them scrawny and sickly-looking, watched me with interest and shouted insults. But after my night encounter with the huge boar, they not only didn't scare me at all, but they looked ridiculously pathetic and harmless. I knew that if necessary, I could kill them with a couple of moves, and practically no one would be able to stop me. And if I were in a tight spot, I could always enter the portal and figure out some insanely lethal skill that would always help me escape.
After all the murders, even if they were of monsters, my psyche had changed, showing its plasticity and ability to adapt to new conditions. My civilized veneer was falling away right before my eyes, and I wanted to solve many problems with force, simply because I could solve them that way. And only my innate common sense and, probably, my greatly increased Intelligence stopped me from escalating the conflict.
I knew that if I did that, my normal life would definitely come to an end, and I would be hunted down like a wild animal. But then again, what I understood, less adequate people who got their hands on great power would probably not. Wouldn't widespread banditry begin in every inhabited area? The president, in his speech, essentially gave citizens a direct order to become stronger, consciously going into conflict with the whole world and giving the country a head start to gain strength. And I was sure that many people would want to settle scores with their enemies, remembering all the grievances and injustices.
While I was thinking about the future, they led me to the investigator's office and shoved me inside.
"Have a seat," the officer with the Captain's shoulder boards on his shoulders said, nodding to the chair. "Senior Investigator of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Southern Administrative District, Captain Shapovalov," he introduced himself. "I am handling your case, which is classified under Article 131, a rape report filed by citizen Mezhalova. Do you confirm the act of violence?"
"What violence? We used to date, and she just wants to get revenge on me!" I shouted in a fit of emotion.
"Denies it," the investigator wrote in his papers. "But confirms that he previously had intimate relations with her," he continued to scribble.
"Listen. What the hell is going on? I need a lawyer; I won't say anything without one!"
"So you need a lawyer…" he began in an deliberately soft voice. "You scum!" He jumped up and hit my face with his open hand. "Poor girls like her suffer from psychological trauma their whole lives because of bastards like you!" His nostrils flared wildly, his eyes looked like they would pop out of their sockets, and his voice broke into a hiss. "I will put you in a cell so bad, you freak, that you will be raped yourself there," he continued to yell and hit me on the head, and I tried to shield myself from the blows and struggled to hold myself back from fighting back.
"What the hell are you talking about, rape! I was only there for a few minutes!" I shouted back. "I was in that damn cafe for only a few minutes! Do you hear me?"
"So now you're going to say that my goddaughter is lying?" He suddenly calmed down and sat back down at his desk.
After his slip of the tongue, I understood where this was all coming from. The emergency request to transport me from another region in the shortest possible time, the captain's crazy behavior, the strange interrogation, and the violation of all legal norms. Realizing what was happening, I calmed down, decided to act, and made the decision to involve our neighbor, my parents, lawyers, and everyone I could reach. Uncle Valera, who had practically raised us along with our parents and whose children we had grown up with until they moved to Italy, would clearly be able to find a way to influence this arrogant police officer. After all, the weight classes of a senior officer with the rank of colonel and a junior one are incomparable.
The police officer continued to rave, accusing me of all sins, but I detached myself from his claims and just remained silent, waiting for this waterfall of accusations from his mouth to stop. Suddenly he fell silent and continued in a calm voice:
"Fine... There's no point in talking to you. Take him back," he said to the escorts who were still standing by the door. "Just not to the suite where he slept last night, but to cell seventeen, and whisper that they owe me. They'll give him a warm welcome."
My heart sank, and I was already thinking that I needed to open my inventory, take out my dagger, and run into the portal when the escort who had come up behind me grabbed my hand and, with a single motion, pulled off my communicator.
"Boss. Did you see this? It's a new thing—it's a new communicator with phone functions. I saw one in a Syntech ad campaign. What should I do with it?" He showed him the bracelet. "Can I take it for myself to play with?"
My heart sank at his words.
"Hell no, people are always complaining about you. Throw it over here, and search him more thoroughly, God forbid he starts calling every office he can. And why the hell didn't you take it off him earlier?"
"It was night when he was brought in, and it's still the holidays; we're short-staffed, some people are on vacation, and others are on enhanced patrol; you know how it is. And few people know about this new thing. Maybe they thought it was just jewelry? You know, the kind of fashionable thing young people have."
"Fine, give it to me. I'll keep it for now." The captain took the communicator and threw it into a desk drawer.
I froze in shock and slowly started to panic. Without my abilities and without the portals, I would become an easy target for hardened criminals. I tried to lunge for the bracelet, but the police officers, who had dealt with criminals before, didn't miss a beat and caught me in the lunge, pinning my face to the stone floor. The additional blows to my kidneys took away any desire to resist, and my head was flooded with a blinding haze of pain.
They lifted me by my arms and dragged me down the corridor, scraping me against all the walls and sometimes adding blows to keep me from coming to. In a semi-conscious state, they dragged me to a cell and threw me inside, without even checking if I was alive.
"Hey! Brother, you alright?"
I came to from water being poured on my head from a mug and a light patting on my cheeks. The terrible pain that had pierced me after the blows to my kidneys had practically passed after the initial attack and only slightly echoed in my body, reminding me that it had been several times worse just a moment ago. I groaned and grabbed my side, trying to move as little as possible.
"Why did they do that to you?"
A shirtless inmate was squatting in front of me, with a tattoo of a huge church with domes covering his entire chest. I automatically counted them and noted six domes on his chest. I remembered an article I had read a long time ago about how the number of domes indicates how many times a person has been in prison, and I realized that they had thrown me into a cell with real criminals.
"I banged the local investigator's goddaughter, and he didn't like it, so he cooked up a case and is now trying to pin a charge on me. It feels like he had a thing for her himself," I said, desperately enduring the fading pain, remembering all the rules of behavior in prison cells I had ever read or heard, from the rules of entering to the cons that existed in the prison environment, and building a behavioral model. My brain was working hard, desperately putting its twenty points in Intelligence to use and trying to pull my wayward body out of the trouble it had gotten into. The burst of laughter, more like a piglet's squeal, showed that I was acting correctly.
"Ha-ha-ha… You're a stud, kid. Is it that rotten investigator who has that black thing in his office that looks like a dildo? The one who acts all high and mighty?"
I actually remembered the strange sculpture on the edge of his desk and nodded in satisfaction.
"Well, that guy ruins things for decent dudes. Because of him, so many good guys have ended up in the zone that they've wanted to send him a greeting for a long time, preferably a few centimeters into his liver. Want some tea?" the tattooed man asked sympathetically and held out an old, worn tin mug with a black, tar-like drink.
"Yeah, thanks," I sat down, leaned my back against the wall, took the mug of chifir, and took a tiny sip, almost choking in surprise, but my head immediately cleared, and I felt better. The amount of caffeine in the liquid clearly exceeded all existing norms, simultaneously invigorating my body and ruining it.
"Got anything?" the gangster asked. "Or maybe someone from the outside will drop off some parcels? We're just sitting here with nothing, drinking tea." His sympathetic eyes looked me over and didn't notice any supplies.
"I wish. They practically took me from home in my slippers, snatched me and put me straight on a plane to Moscow."
"Looks like you really stomped on the captain's corns. All right, kid, you seem like a decent guy, but you gotta understand, we have to live here for a few more years, so no hard feelings."
His hand twitched shortly, without a wind-up, and tried to punch me in the face. I dodged on instinct alone, and his fist hit the wall, making him wince in pain.
"Hey, what's up with you? What's going on?"
"You little bastard! What are you waiting for? Grab him."
The three other prisoners, who had been sitting indifferently on their bunks, stood up and shuffled toward us. I splashed hot tea into the eyes of the tattooed man who was still squatting in front of me and pushed him away with my foot, which made him fall backward and scream in pain from his burned eyelids. Before the others could get to me, I managed to get up and look around.
The four bunks at the end of the room clearly indicated that I wasn't meant to live here, since there was no place for a fifth person to sleep. And if I had been more attentive, I would have immediately noticed the absurdity and maybe had time to prepare. There wasn't even a single chair lying around that I could have armed myself with to fight back. And they had taken my communicator; I couldn't even take out my dagger to scare this trash away.
I squared my shoulders, glad that the pain had passed so quickly, let out a short breath, and kicked the knee of the big guy who had come closer, making him lose all his swagger and fall to the floor, wailing in pain from his broken joint.
"Aaaah! That thing broke my knee! Kill him, for god's sake!" the big guy screamed. "Aaaah! It hurts so much!"
The remaining two froze indecisively, exchanged glances, and started to come at me from two sides. I slowly backed away until my back hit the metal door. The small vestibule in front of the entrance played into my hands, narrowing their maneuverability and forcing them to get closer together, not letting them attack from different directions.
"What are you guys doing? Take him down!" the scalded man yelled, and while they were distracted for a fraction of a second by his screams, I stepped forward and with a short, straight punch to the face, broke the nose of the guy on my right, knocking him onto his butt. My ten points in Strength and my greatly increased Dexterity, which had been raised to a full thirteen points during the flight and the rest of the night in prison, gave me a tangible advantage and allowed me to feel quite confident.
The guy who had been hit in the face sat on the floor, stunned and holding the gushing blood, not even making an attempt to get up, leaving me alone with the last prisoner, who no longer looked so confident. I bared my teeth and waved him forward, inviting him to attack, but he backed away uncertainly, bumping into his comrade. The other guy waved him off without looking and pushed him toward me, trying to deal with the gushing blood. Roaring, the inmate who hadn't gotten his lesson yet rushed at me, swinging his arm like a hero, but I ducked and slipped straight and slightly to the left, getting under his swing, and hit him in the liver, making him fold in half and fall to the dirty floor.
I walked up to the guy who had offered me tea and asked, "Well, you ferret, are you going to tell me your name?" And I really noticed that his face with its small teeth resembled a small rodent. "I think I need to share the story with the local guys about who cooperates with the cops and acts as their errand boy."
"Wait, brother, hold on! You misunderstood everything," the tattooed man began to plead, still rubbing his burned eyes. "We just wanted to scare you, it's a tradition. It's how they initiate you into the collective. We would have just shown you who was who in the cell and that would have been it, we'd have gone back to drinking tea."
"Are you taking me for a complete idiot?" I was surprised by his logic.
The inmate with the broken knee, who was still screaming like a banshee, finally attracted attention, and a window in the door opened with a fat face that barely fit.
"What are you screaming about, you moron?" But when he saw what was happening, he slammed it shut and ran down the corridor, calling for help.
"Ha-ha-ha!" the expert on prison traditions laughed. "Well, that fat guy ran for help, and now you can expect the prison special forces. You're fast, of course, but let's see how you handle them."
The stomping in the corridor predicted impending problems, and I tensed up involuntarily. At the end of his speech, the cell door burst open with a crash, and five prison staff in full gear, with bulletproof vests and rubber batons, ran inside. After giving a couple of preventive blows to the prisoners closest to them, they all piled on me, not even bothering to talk or ask me to surrender. Sensibly reasoning that resistance would only bring more problems, I didn't fight back, and, cornered, I covered my vulnerable spots with my hands and silently took the blows from the batons, protecting my head and my long-suffering kidneys.
The solitary confinement cell was a narrow stone room without any furniture, but with a hole in the floor that was supposed to be used as a toilet. Before they dragged me in there and threw me down, I noticed them carrying out a narrow plank bed, which was probably meant to be used as a cot at night.
I leaned against the rough wall and carefully felt my body, looking for the places where it was most sensitive to pain. But to my surprise, I felt almost normal after playing the role of a punching bag for a few minutes, taking blows without retaliation from the guards who had gone wild. My forearms, which had taken most of the blows I used to protect my sides and head, were slightly sore, and a cheekbone where a precise guard had hit me was a little swollen, but otherwise it was acceptable. I had sometimes felt worse from a hangover after a wild student party than I did now in prison. And if I thought about it, I hadn't had time to level up my Constitution, and the only option left was with Biokinesis and its adaptive mutation.
I crossed my fingers, hoping not to jinx it, and said, "Skills."
No holographic window unfolded, but I simply became aware that I knew what Attributes and skills I had learned. And I was right; in Biokinesis, in one of the unlearned slots, there was a passive regeneration skill that had synergized with the self-regeneration from the skill itself.
Remembering the description that everything returns to normal after the threat is eliminated, I desperately tried to use my willpower to remember this necessary and useful skill. My brain was boiling, unable to handle the load, and I strained, probably looking strange from the outside as I mentally gave myself hundreds of commands.
"Damn it! How do I memorize you?!" My body's condition was improving with every second; even the swelling on my face was no longer felt, and I could literally feel the last seconds of the regeneration's work slipping away.
"Whew…" I exhaled, calming down. "I made it at the very last second, damn it."
The passive Regeneration skill was successfully fixed and now occupied an honorable first place in the slot. And only then did it dawn on me that for it to appear, it couldn't have just been a light fight; I had to have been seriously injured and in real danger to my health, which meant that those scumbags were purposefully trying to cripple me.
I sat down in the center of the cell, cross-legged, and tried to feel what else was available to me without the communicator.
*********
In the corridor of the White House, a man in a pencil skirt that clung to his obese body was running in huge high heels and screaming at the top of his lungs.
"Sir! Those bracelets from the Russians are very dangerous! You can't use them! Sir!" The head of security for the President of the United States of America, Steve Croucher, an openly transgender woman, was running toward her boss, the ninety-year-old ruler of the country who, in recent years, had even forgotten to get dressed when he went out in public, but she was absolutely too late.
"Huh? What?" the old man asked, talking to the air. "Yes, of course, sweetie," the elderly man waved his hand with the communicator on his wrist at an invisible interlocutor, and fell into the portal that had opened beneath him.
"Damn it! This is a disaster!" The security chief stopped and, with manicured nails, dialed a number on a secure phone and screamed hysterically into the receiver. "Michelle! The president fell into that damn portal! Launch his plane according to the 'Fish Dinner' plan and shoot it down over the Pacific Ocean."
A man's voice on the other end of the line asked, "Steve? Are you sure? What if he gets out of there like that damn Russian leader and gets abilities too?"
"Are you kidding me? He hasn't even been able to go to the bathroom on his own for the last five years, there have been so many embarrassing incidents in public. It was long past time to replace the old senile man with a younger politician."
"Okay, I understand. I'm starting."
The elderly man, who had appeared in a huge earthen burrow, looked around in confusion, undressed, carefully folded his expensive suit from America's best tailors, and walked down the passage stark naked. Squinting myopically and unaware of the reality around him, he walked, humming a children's song from his distant childhood. He didn't even notice the slowly crawling mouse skeleton trying to attack him and stepped on it with his bare heel, brushing off the inscriptions that appeared as if they were unimportant things.
Suddenly stopping, he looked around, began to whine, spun in place, and went on, periodically crushing the little skeletons that crawled toward him. Tired of walking and covered in clay, the old man sat on the ground and, hugging his knees, rocked slowly from side to side until he fell asleep.
Another rodent corpse that had crawled up to him bit him on the bare heel, and the man woke up, crying in pain, and hit the bone with his hand.
"Mom! A mouse bit me! Mom! Help!"
The old man whimpered and continued to call for his mom, who never came to save her little Jeremy. Gathering his strength, he got up and went on, muttering under his breath that he would show those damn mice and the cat that wasn't doing its job. Then his laments turned into how the housekeeper, little black Miles, would get it for leaving the master unattended, and now Jeremy had to hunt for the mice himself.
The bizarrely mixed-up reality in the president's head, however, allowed him to successfully move forward, destroying the crawling undead one by one. He answered the holographic interface prompts at random, immediately brushing off the notifications, and after crushing another mouse skeleton, he fell to the floor, falling into a deep sleep that was more like a fainting spell. When he woke up, the old man looked more like a starving vegetarian who hadn't seen meat in decades. His sunken face, protruding ribs, and severe dehydration did not bode well for the ninety-year-old man's well-being. With difficulty, he got to his feet and, still lost in his thoughts of his distant childhood, he continued to move, driven by the desire to prove to his mommy that he was a big and independent boy now.
Another dead mouse that bit his big toe offended him so much that he pointed at it and screamed:
"Die, you monster!"
The bone skeleton was lifted into the air, spun, and torn into small pieces, leaving not even dust behind. From then on, he walked and entertained himself by pointing at enemies and destroying them with a single word.
"Mom, mommy! Look what I can do now! Will you praise me now, Mom?"
The boss of the location he encountered, a half-meter-tall rat skeleton encased in bone armor, did not escape the fate of the other inhabitants of the location and also flew up ignominiously, unable to resist the old man's skill, and after spinning, it disintegrated into fine bone dust that completely disappeared into the air.
He also brushed off the next inscriptions that appeared before his eyes, looked at the portal that appeared nearby without interest, and sat down on his haunches, rocking from side to side again.
"Mommy, I did it, I killed all the mice. Please, Mom, where are you? When will you come?"
Ignoring the exit, the old man continued to sit on the earthen floor, in his own world, until he fell on his side and lost consciousness from exhaustion, this time never waking up, and quietly died a step away from salvation, finally going to his long-awaited rest.