As Echo had indicated, this guy - another version of the main character, perhaps? - was not hostile. According to him, he had just arrived on Pandora and wanted to rent a room at a motel (when I asked about the skeleton, he shrugged and said "well, I thought it was a decoration to attract customers..."), and when bandits showed up there, he decided that this was a convenient opportunity to get a gun (which he did, pulling the corpse out from behind the wheel and taking the shotgun off it).

  - What, you arrived on Pandora without weapons? - I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  - Why without weapons? - Brick (damn it... Did his parents work for Vladoff, by any chance?) was surprised. - Here, two of them.

  With these words, he showed me his huge fists the size of a child's head, wrapped in some rags with bolts sticking out of them.

  Well... I must be honest: given what i seen, his hands are really heavy weapons.

  - Brrr - Claptrap shuddered. - Carrying robotic innards is unhygienic. And creepy.

  - You're funny, - Brick remarked, glancing at him.

  - The first five minutes - I agreed. - Then it gets annoying.

  There were no live bandits left in the house; the ones in the buggy were the last. In terms of equipment, and consequently trophies, they were not impressive either - and Brick took everything for himself. Well, fair enough, I suppose... He did all the work.

  I'd rather not argue with him anyway. And I hope Claptrap will still take something out quietly.

  By the way, two of the bandits had ECHOs, but both devices didn't survive the encounter with Brick. In fact, in one case, the cause of the device's destruction - and the death of its owner - was literally a brick thrown with insane force. Seriously, if it weren't for the limited ammo, it would make sense for the Brick to use a throwing weapon instead of a firearm, I suppose. The same SGs are much less deadly.

  Anyway, while the strongman and the robot searched the bandit's lair, I was dismantling the disabled buggies. It's a pity that we can't digitize their turrets, so that we can take them out and use them when needed; they're too big, in fact, they're the same construction as the buggy itself - reactor, frame... Actually, it's a very primitive construction with a minimum of parts. Still, there was something I could forage for spare parts. Shut down the reactors, again.

  When Brick came out of the gate, I realized two things. First, he's definitely the protagonist of this game - at least one of them. Second, the physics of this world is definitely different from what I'm used to at home. Well, and thirdly, it needs to be captured for history.

  The thing is that behind his back was a huge bag... no, just a bundle of loot. Weapons, some tools, furniture... Everything that wasn't pinned to the floor (and, probably, he peeled off what was pinned). A characteristic approach to loot collection inherent in normal players - and MC as our avatars.

  That said, the bag was so large that Brick simply had to topple over. No matter how strong he is, balance is what it is; the center of gravity is shifted backwards, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's something wrong with the physics here...

  - Are you going to carry it like that? - I asked this lawbreaker. Of physics.

  Brick looked back at his load.

  - Well, yes, why? - he inquired.

  - It's far - I noted. - And inconvenient. And if the bandits came again, it would be even more inconvenient to fight them off.

  - ...It is a little, - agreed Brick, glancing behind his shoulders again. He looked at my buggy. - Can you give me a ride somewhere where I can drop all this stuff off?

  - No - I shook my head in the negative, leaving aside the question of how he'd managed to load it all on himself. - But there's a better option. We can try to upload everything through the network right here. I won't even take a cut of the middleman's fee on these pennies.

  - What's in it for you? - Brick asked, pointing his sausage finger in the direction of the holographic interface ECHO created for him.

  I shrugged.

  - I've seen what you can do. I prefer to be friends with promising people, if not friends, then at least maintain a positive balance of relations. I'll help you, and you'll help me in some way... I can give you a ride too, by the way. Those two cars are too fucked up to fix.

  Yeah. Buggy design is very simple and reliable, in fact, it's a killer, but those two were unlucky. Especially since the bandits had been very careless with them before.

  Most of the junk was quickly sold for pennies, without leaving the place; Brick, continuing to fit the role of the protagonist, not so much seeking to earn more, but did not want to leave the loot, which can be collected and sold. I understand him perfectly well, and I'd rather let things serve someone than be lost here. Looting on Pandora is not even a punishable offense. Especially since abandoned items are usually worth next to nothing, thanks to digitalization, they can be easily produced. The main value and the most traded commodity on the planet is, in fact, weapons.

  And that's what the big guy quickly sell through the network was not.

  By the way, there were fewer and fewer large sites engaged in arms trading on the network lately. Marcus fuckin' Kincaid's anti-competition work is very thorough. Definitely need to talk to him, but... it's worth preparing for. Moreover, small batches of weapons that fit in my ECHO, trading was still possible, at least if you have time to find buyers and pad the price. Especially with the help from AI ECHO.

  By the way, the study of my "skill tree" showed that in the future it will be possible to buy the ability to modify weapons. I'm not sure if this will be a license or some kind of exploit, but I'll be able to refine the weapon - possibly replacing parts.

  Just for the record, but it turns out that the weapons here are modular. And in theory you can build your dream weapon from the right parts (even parts from different manufacturers are surprisingly compatible), but in practice it all depends not only on licenses, but also on specialized equipment. It's a shame - I'm quite sure that all the necessary functionality is available in ECHO, but corporations need to sell their equipment and their weapons, so this functionality is blocked in ECHO. Buy specialized equipment and licenses - and they are not available for free sale, they are produced by corporations for their own production needs... It's a shame, yes. Capitalism as it is.

  Anyway, in most cases you have to buy guns from the corps and then resell them to each other as is.

  For better or worse, Pandora is full of already manufactured weapons of all types and quality levels. Surprisingly, even the Vladoff weapons are plentiful, and that's not my fault - I wouldn't have had time to sell that many. Where it came from, given the corporation's minimal presence on the planet, is one of Pandora's mysteries.

  I gave Brick a ride to Yellowrock, where Moxie immediately took him in stride - I think she took one look at the big guy's potential, who was in need of money, so she bought up most of his weapons - all but a couple of the guns he kept - and sent him off on a mission. Not very far, judging by the fact that he went on foot.

  I started looking for a job near the nearest archaeological site, so the trip wouldn't be in vain.

  I found some.

  Basically, the two most common jobs for a mercenary on Pandora are shooting skags and shooting bandits. Pest control, basically. The other two, more specific to me, are repair and construction. In this case, I got a combination of both in one, although with a share of novelty. The owner of an abandoned farm ordered its cleanup and repair of key infrastructure elements. He offered good money and a great gun - a modified Jacobs Deluxe Shotgun.

  The novelty element was that this time the pests were of a new species. Varkids, the local insects.

  Of course, since this was Pandora, they were the size of the average dog. I remembered Mordecai's lecture on Pandoran wildlife.

  - Varkids... - The hunter grumbled. - More of an irritant than a threat, but it's suicidal to underestimate them. Normally they're weak and outnumbered, but they're common. The problem is that there are some unusual ones. Wounded varkids can mutate; getting bigger, faster, stronger. They can be a real problem, so if you see a cocoon, shoot it right away. At least in this state, they're very vulnerable. But when they hatch...

  He wrinkled his nose again and stroked his left hand.

  - ...It's best not to let that happen.

  To take Claptrap with me or not? It was a difficult choice. On the one hand, he could help with the search on the spot. On the other hand, do I have to endure his nonsense for hours on the way?

  ...The choice is obvious.

  Actually, there was no need to choose. There was one of the Hyperion's "Fast Travel Stations" near the archaeological site, so I could get there on my own, activate the exploit, and then bring Claptrap back. There's no way to bring a buggy back to Yellowrock that way, the FTS doesn't move large objects, but there are "rent-a-car"s for transporting cars - digitize it in one, build it in another, no problem. So after grabbing a bite to eat at Moxie's, I immediately set out on the case. Money is money, and it's better not to delay the Vladoff's assignment.

  Pandora's landscapes are infinitely varied, while retaining something elusively common... man, it's almost poetic. Though poetic is probably the last thing one would associate with this planet. And yet, it really was.

  So far, most of what I'd seen of Pandora was a kind of rocky steppe-semi-desert with sparse, crooked vegetation, with packs of skags and bandits roaming about, and for a moment I'd gotten the idea that the entire planet was something like that - though obviously it wasn't. As I progressed northwest, the terrain changed, and changed even faster than I would have guessed. There was more vegetation, less sand; the steppe was turning into... I'd say forest-steppe, but the vegetation didn't look much like trees, and there still wasn't enough of it. What's it look like if not trees? I don't know. It was a mixture of mushrooms, ferns, and corn, I guess. There were several names for this stuff among the Pandorians, so you can't even name it exactly.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  There were, however, more specific vegetation - for example, the "fire melons" mentioned by Mordecai, even identified by ECHO as such. Although they are not really plants, they are closer to corals. Protruding from the ground were hard, stalagmite-like tubes of stems, on which gas bags filled with a mixture of some flammable gases and no less flammable oil vapors were blown up. A strong enough jolt and all this, bursting, throws out in all directions a wave of not napalm, but rather unpleasant fire mixture.

  Pandora, man. Even the vegetation is frankly insane.

  Not that everything on this planet is hostile or dangerous, though. I've seen flowers that look remotely like little sunflowers, I've seen small animals basking in the sun. I saw landscapes that made me stop and take a picture.

  I may have been wrong about the poetic.

  What I saw on the approach to the farm made me frown. The conical termite mounds of varkids were in abundance; far more than I had expected. This was going to be a challenge.

  The first thing I did, obviously, was to find the FTS on the map and use the hack, after which I left the buggy in the wheelbarrow next door and headed for the abandoned farmhouse where I began to find a place to set up the turrets. I'd picked up a set of weapons over the course of my bandit sweeps, and the turrets' performance had improved as well - they even took shotgun rounds into account so they wouldn't hit me, though I still had to be careful with shotguns - and I had plenty of ammo, too, but still, judging by the number of "termite" mounds, there could be problems. Bandit guns were a budget item, and I'd had the unfortunate experience of a skag pack leader not noticing the bullets being put into its hide; I'd only managed to finish it off by fully discharging the shotgun into its open mouth. Despite Mordecai's stories, I had not yet had a chance to evaluate the effectiveness of my weapon against varkids, but I remembered his warning that if you hit one, the whole swarm would fly.

  I chose a small hill a little away from the termite mounds - and the giant insects roaming around, which looked like grasshoppers with a stinger at the end of a relatively flexible abdomen and powerful jaws - and began to set up the turrets. One, two, three...

  The rattle was not loud, but it still made me jerk sharply and without thinking I fired a short burst at the approaching insect. One of its wings flew off, a greenish liquid spurted out, and the bug crashed to the ground.

  The wounds, however, didn't stop it from running very fast along the ground away.

  And then came the reaction of the mass of insects roaming around the farm.

  Fuck.

  The bugs attacked, mostly silently. The rustle of paws on the ground, and the low chatter of the few that flew up - they mostly preferred to move on the ground. However, the total number of sound sources made them quite loud.

  Even more so the sounds of gunshots.

  For the first moment, it seemed like things weren't bad. The varkid shells weren't as tough as I had feared, and were penetrated by Jacobs' pistol bullets, their shotguns, and Vladoff's assault rifle. Maliwan's fire SG worked pretty well, too.

  Unfortunately, there were just too many bugs. Zerg rush as it were...

  I tossed a grenade at a particularly dense bunch of insects. Shit, I should have put the buggy next to me, its turret would come in handy now, and it would be easier to escape... Should I try to break through? But the fucking bugs have the hill surrounded, we need to clear a path first. If only we had more grenades... It'll be hard to escape anyway, the varkids run fast. Faster than they can fly.

  A couple of pulsing red cocoons in the distance; they burst and spilled out in sludge and debris. The odor, surprisingly, was neither nasty nor strong - something spicy, though with a slight rotten note. Another grenade on those who got too close, reload the weapon. Knock down another cocoon, shoot the belly of the varkid clinging to the turret.

  A blow from behind. I almost fell down, but I knocked the varkid caught in the armor plates on my shoulder with the butt of my gun. Shoot the...

  ...shit. In the second it took me to kill him, another bug got caught in my leg.

  Chop with my shovel, machine gun in my other hand, clear the space next to me, moving to cover the turrets. Cover the turrets, switch to shotgun - more effective at swarms, up close. Jacobs' shotgun is powerful enough to kill, and if not kill, then at least kill a few bugs at a time; combined with the turrets' fire, a patch of free space is formed around the swarm... it's hot in both figurative and literal senses - the turrets stink of heat. If you use the rhythm of turret fire, you can reload in time... the last grenade is coming. If I had a singularity modifier...

  A red cocoon that had reappeared in the distance burst before I could fire at it, and a varkid twice the size of the usual ones emerged from it and immediately took off. The buckshot hit it tangentially - and bounced off the shell with sparks.

  At least the black spike it threw in response suffered the same fate, sliding across the armor plate on its shoulder and bouncing off to the side. But the problem remained.

  I switched to the machine gun and fired a short burst, trying to hit the vulnerable belly; then another, and another, and another, until the cartridge block ran out.

  My leg burned with pain, but I was still lucky: two bullets hit the belly. The insect, splattering juices, fell, but it still wasn't dead; more than that, it tried to run toward me. Another bullet between its jaws, however, put an end to it... but while I was dealing with it, the regular varkids come dangerously close. In fact, there were noticeably fewer of them left, the turrets were not wasting ammunition, but there were still too many.

  Shovel, bullets, weapon butt blows - everything was used, including kicking the carcasses of their dead kin into the advancing beetles. It was hard to push the rustling wave back, freeing up some space, but still the doa...

  My other leg burned with pain, and a drop of bubbling and sizzling slurry fell to the ground nearby. I stumbled and fell to my knee; somersaulted across the reclaimed space, letting another volley pass by, and found two more Badass Varkids in the air in front of me.

  Fuck. As I took up the front line, I lost sight of the cocoons growing in the rear, with rapidly maturing and mutating individuals in them.

  A drop of acid shot from the green-colored varkid's belly and shot into the turret, causing it to stutter and then fall silent. (Fuc*+1)^2...

  I tried to cover both of them at once with the shotgun while they were near each other, but the successes were modest - sparks on the shells and seemingly damaged wings, at least one of them landed. And with a jerk from side to side it ran towards me.

  Another volley of shotgun fire, and the ammo block ran out. And then, before I could reload, with another leap, the Badass Varkid was right next to me; the blade blocked its jaws, but the curved belly with the black stinging spike at the end hit me in the chest.

  I tried to take a breath, and couldn't. The world went dark quickly, distorting; everything around me slowed strangely. Poison? And where had the ECHO augmented reality interface disappeared to...?

  In the gloom around the varkids, turrets - everything froze.

  Someone patted me on the shoulder.

  I couldn't move my body or limbs, but my head moved; I turned around.

  - I'VE GOT A LOT TO DO, SO HURRY UP, - said a skeleton in a black robe with blue lights in his eye sockets, pulling out an hourglass that hovered in the air from somewhere in his robes. - I'VE BEEN ASKED TO MAKE A SMALL CONCESSION TO YOU, SO I'M NOT TAKING YOU AWAY - YET. BUT ACCOUNTABILITY IS ACCOUNTABILITY - a bone finger tapped the form, one that followed the clock, the sand in which quickly poured from the upper flask to the lower one. - SO I NEED TO TAKE SOMEONE. ANY REPLACEMENT WILL DO, NO ONE CHECKS ANYWAY, BUT I STILL HAVE BILLIONS OF CLIENTS, SO LET'S DO IT ASAP, I WON'T WAIT LONG.

  This time the finger tapped the clock.

  - Should I kill someone? - I asked. ?Death? nodded, and I felt that I could move again. With some difficulty and sluggishness, but I could.

  The varkids also began to move again, gradually accelerating, but I was faster. I reloaded my shotgun and fired a volley - the first one knocked the varkid which pierce through my chest, ripping the smooth stinger from its wound, the second tore its belly to shreds.

  - IT WILL DO, - Death nodded, snapped his knuckles, and disappeared. The world was back to normal.

  My chest was sore, but the first aid kit had already administered painkillers and a cocktail of other medications; I was able to keep fighting. Changing the weapon to an assault rifle... oh.

  One of the remaining turrets avenged the death of its comrade almost without my help: a few lucky shots and the creature was on its last breath, all I had to do was finish it off.

  "Level up!"

  Just in time... I'm feeling stronger, and even my wounds seem to have healed. Doesn't all these murders count as sacrifices to the "Almighty Bastard", hmmm...?

  Never mind. That's something to think about later, if I don't die now... again.

  The "second breath" from the level up was enough to outlast the remaining varkids, of which there weren't so many anymore. I can't say it was easy, but I did it, and that's what counts.

  I'd have to check and destroy the remaining "terminites" and think about what had happened - really, Death? Or just an act from the Almighty Bastard? - but first I'll retreat to a safe place, take a break, and tend to my wounds.

  Yeah. That's a good idea.