Free Inferno (Play to Live: Book # 4) by D. Rus Page B

anyone.
    Their service wasn't that hard. They enjoyed excellent living quarters, five-star buffet meals and a constant variety of tasks. The next day, for instance, their group was supposed to join the Vets over at the field of Gigantic Fly-Traps to defend the farmers who harvested it — and, most importantly, do their own bit of leveling while mopping it up. The clan took good care of their combat section and their growth in game. Also, mini raids like that one allowed one to keep virtually all of the loot, provided the player paid the inevitable 10% clan tax. How cool was that? Free chow and a place to hunt with guaranteed support from clan buffers, an anti-PK team and on-call clerics ready to resurrect any casualties. And later in the evening, free entertainment and a soft bed in your own palace quarters. Too good for words.
    The post's functions were merely administrative which might explain why the sentries treated their job with a certain lack of fervor.
    One of them made himself comfortable by the bonfire, busy leveling two professions at once: cooking — by churning out jerboa hamburgers that no one could look at anymore — and alchemy, obsessively producing vial after vial of Fish Breath, the cheapest albeit the most boring way of leveling the skill. It only had one side effect: whenever the chemicals from his Small Camp Alchemy Kit failed to react properly, they produced a foul green cloud reeking of old fish.
    The second guard was reading some sci fi. From time to time he startled and sat up, casting anxious looks around. Recently, Russian politicians had passed a law banning the use of any non-Russian operation systems on personal computers — apparently, in order to support the country's economy and protect its citizens from foreign spies. Strangely enough, they came up with quite a decent alternative: the OS PolarBear 1.0. It was fast, easy to use and register, and not too buggy. Those guys could do it when they wanted to!
    Still, everyone celebrated a little too soon. The polar teddy came with a small secret. For the first six months, the new OS did its job ratting on everybody to the secret services, leaking any illegal contents of their computers to the federal servers, complete with any relevant logs, search queries and screenshots using a special built-in camera.
    Then it all came to a head. Thousands of arrests began on a daily basis, starting from the very top of the Internet illegal network: the owners of pirate libraries and trackers, the most notorious releasers and warez sites. Everyone had reasons to be fearful — after all, we all sin in good company. Especially when the wave of arrests and court cases began to reach deeper, trapping even the smallest fry into the net of copyright fines and dues.
    This guard too, a perma with nothing to lose, was now trying to catch up on everything he'd missed out IRL. Oh well — some yearn for freedom even when it's little more than anarchy.
    The third guard, who'd just lost two extra watch rotas in a poker game, stood guard, peering deliberately in front of himself while in fact flirting in a chat with one very curvaceous Elfa. He had no idea that the only reason she had deigned to accept an X-rated conversation with a greenhorn was her own old age. This ancient lady who had gone perma in an attempt to cheat her own death just couldn't break the ice and go the whole hog, giving her rusty libido a warmup via chat boxes.
    The radar's paranoid whining awoke the guards to the sight of an enormous ogre clomping down the road. He was marked neutral blue on the mini map — like most vendors, guards and all sorts of quest NPCs.
    The guards stood up and unhurriedly checked their weapons. Switching over to service and combat tabs, they walked out to meet the new visitor. Their job description didn't include the need to fight to the bitter end like the three hundred Spartans had done at the narrow mountain pass (which, if the truth were known, had in fact been