Since the Killer was constantly moving, it was easy enough to catch him. I roughly estimated the trajectory of his movement and chose a rock near the crevice, on which I began to place mushrooms so that the Sword could not see them. And when the mushrooms had accumulated as much as possible, I picked up a small stone from the floor and threw it beside the trap, and I did this at a moment when no one saw the flight of the stone itself, but only heard the sound of its fall. The Sword Conquering Heaven rushed to the sound, and he naturally fell into the mushroom's range. Before he knew it, the 'swarm of mushrooms' tore him to pieces.

Of course, Zinovia immediately rushed to the place of my trap and started firing a machine gun in all directions, but I trivially hid in the portal out of the darkness and came back out only after a couple of minutes, when the 'blonde' realized that no one was around. After that, all I had to do was to cautiously climb out of the crevice and rush out of that cave at full speed. On the way, I managed to avoid a couple of traps set by Sniper. After all, when I know that I am in danger, it is very difficult to catch me.

Once I got to safety, I sent to Zinovia an invitation to be friends. Surprisingly, she thought about something for almost a minute before she accepted it.

“Hi. Are you still guarding me? Ha ha! Do you really hope to win this game?” - I wrote a private message to her. This kind of communication was only available to friends, which required me to send an invitation.

“Who are you?” - A wary reply came.

“Ha ha. Couldn't you have guessed? I'm the one who rescued you from the deepest ass of the universe.”

“Atman?!!”

“I am.”

“Why do you have a different name in the game?”

“Ask the Being. It's his trick.” - Following that message, I immediately sent another one. – “So how does it feel to be a sheep sent to the slaughter?”

“What slaughter?” - Zinovia didn't understand my quip. Not surprisingly, though. She considered herself invincible. With her ninety-nine wins in a row.

“This whole game is a trap, because only I can win it. Ha ha! The Being set you free only to destroy you completely. Or do you think that Yog-Sothoth has forgiven you for your threats?”

Silence was the answer. It looked like I had just shaken the mind of my rival by putting fear in her soul. And that was exactly what I wanted.

“I was completely justified in the trial.” - Even in the words in the chat I could sense the anxiety and panic that was gnawing at her.

“Ha ha! Tell that to Yog-Sothoth before they send you to hell. All right, I gotta go. It was good to see you. And don't forget that you promised to give yourself to me when you get the chance.”

“I WILL KILL YOU!!!” - A message came to me, written in capital letters.

“Ha ha, hands are short. :R ===>O:”

At this point I dropped Zinovia from my list of friends and closed the chat window. Well, mission accomplished. And now I can complete the quest.

After visiting the last scout hideout, I completed the mission and headed to the NPC to complete the quest. In the safe zone next to him I found Zinovia. First, I reached the NPC under invisibility and reported the completion of the mission, then came out of invisibility, waved cheekily at my future concubine, and began using the teleport spell to the City of Crab. Since it was a peaceful zone, no one could stop me, although Zinovia tried. In the end she cursed me in various ways and promised a cruel and painful death. Humorist, however.

After returning to the city, I went to look for another safe house of the Order of Assassins, where I finally became a Hypnotist. Phew, this epic is finally over, and now I have the relatively simple task of becoming the strongest player on the server. The meeting with Zinovia literally opened my eyes to the true state of the situation. Now my 'benchmark' of an advanced player was completely different than before. It seems that I need to make full use of all my abilities in order to become more powerful in the shortest possible time. That's something I've been telling myself for a dozen times now.

The first thing I had to do was to achieve a high level of damage. And secondly, I needed to increase my survivability. In fact, both of these problems were common for the druid and the hypnotist. Warriors had the most health. The people of the other two professions had to walk on a knife edge, waiting for an assassin, sniper, or destroyer to kill them in one hit. My damage was even worse. Hypnotist couldn't boast any skills that dealt direct damage. But the druid's main source of damage was... Pet.

Yes, yes, not spells, not even plants, but a single tamed beast. It could function as a tank and even as a riding animal. In other words, I needed the coolest, strongest, most fashionable pet I could find. I rented a hotel room, laid down on my bed, and began to 'scan' the system for information on Druid pets. I wasn't interested in the contents of manuals or descriptions of someone's accomplishments, only theoretically possible pets that could be obtained in the game.

There were a lot of options. Moreover, they were all different, plus the same pet could be developed differently, so the end result was different. I finished the search only at night, when darkness fell on the game world. The leader in all categories was the Deadly Chaos Scolopendra. It had an unimaginable amount of health, extreme 'bite' damage, could be a riding animal and could move at three time the speed of the player, and most importantly, while I was a 'rider' I was protected by its passive 'Flesh Shield' ability, which made impossible to deal damage to me while my pet was alive.

In the history of the game, no one has ever tamed this monster. No one has even seen this monster alive. I got the information about this monster from the game servers' databases. Even the chances of this monster appearing were indistinguishable from zero. But since I was firmly resolved that I needed this particular pet, the world around me had no choice but to bend under me.

I jumped out of bed and went to do the quest that would get me from Crab Island to the mainland. However, an obstacle immediately appeared in front of me. The permission to use the portal was given by the King of Crab Island, but I had been at odds with him since I killed the 'crab inspector'. As a result, I had to literally 'cut through' a crowd of NPC's to get to the portal and activate it myself.

When I got to the continent, I immediately ran to do a chain of quests that rewarded me with a non-combat pet taming spell. This spell was a 'gold' level, which gave me a chance to tame a pet of appropriate quality. There was even a small chance to seize control of a diamond-quality pet, which included the scolopendra.

Next, I went to the Auction, where I bought Chaos Shards with all my hundreds of gold pieces. This resource was dropped from the monsters of the Element of Air. I bought two hundred thousand Chaos Shards for six hundred gold. Then I went to the 'secret' Temple of the Element of Air, where I was able to merge all those shards into one item, the Divine Essence of Chaos.

Elemental essences could be used to open a portal to 'elemental worlds'. These were special locations inhabited by rare monsters of the corresponding element. It was in these locations that the rarest and most valuable game items could be found. And only in the location opened by the essence of the divine level could I meet the desired pet. Of course, the chances of that were slim, but... I tinkered a little bit with the probabilities.

When I got out into the deserted area, I began to use the Rainmushroom spell, shifting the energy of the place toward the element of air. After about an hour, I was standing in the center of the area with an Air shift of 12. After that I used the Divine Essence of Chaos, and a few seconds later a 'portal to another world' opened up in front of me. I immediately jumped into it and found myself in a rather strange area.

This location looked like a pile of flying rocks and islands. The islands were home to various rare plants, minerals, and, of course, dangerous monsters. Thanks to my interference, on one of the islands lay the Chaos Mortal Scolopendra that I needed. It was an animal of the elements of Air, which was perfect for me.

To get to my future pet, I had to hop from one island to another, using the flying stones as 'waypoints'. I even had to intervene in the 'random' trajectories of these rocks to avoid encountering strong bosses that I definitely would not have been able to kill with my equipment.

Finally, when I got to the Scolopendra, I used the learned pet taming spell, and even though the chances were one out of a million, the taming was successful. Generally speaking, considering the difficulty of obtaining this pet, it's fair to say that the game developers never assumed that anyone would be able to tame it. Rather, it was reserved as a possible reward for some unique quest of epic difficulty level.

I immediately called the pet to me, gave the command to guard me, and went deeper into the study of its properties. Right now it was hard to call this wordless animal as ‘heaven-shaking’. It was just a strong pet. The scolopendra was ten meters long and as tall as my waist. After making a 'lap of honor,' the pet froze in front of me, flashing its eyes piteously. It was like a kitten begging for a sausage. I even knew what the scolopendra wanted.

I reached out and took the Soul of the Devil Hydra out of the bag and fed it to the pet. It was exactly the kind of soul it needed to evolve. I got this soul almost for free, but in fact it was an extremely rare item that I could only get because I had set an unreal record. In order for the scolopendra to 'enter the force', I had to feed it a hundred souls of 'golden' quality.

It would be impossible for an ordinary player to obtain such a quantity of these rare and very valuable resources. Even the strongest guild could only hope to get a couple or two in a month. And it would have been far more profitable to use those souls as consumables to make weapons than to feed a pet. But my 'luck' simply could not be described in words or numbers. If there existed even the slightest chance of the desired item being dropped, I could make that chance equal to 100%.

I opened the window with the pet's characteristics, gave it a new name, and then turned to the satisfied animal.

“So, Holy Fuc**** Fox, let's go eat bosses?”

The fox immediately understood me and headed in the direction of the nearest elite raid boss. I wouldn't have been able to take down an opponent of that level, but my pet was now an elite raid boss himself, so with my help and a little luck, victory was assured.

After about a week, I killed another boss, took the Soul of a High Elemental, and fed it to the Fox. It was the hundredth soul eaten by my pet, so now his stats were at the absolute maximum achievable in the game for pets. Opening the stats window, I marveled at the numbers in the window. 10,000,000 HP. 100,000 damage per bite. Attack speed is three bites per second. Two percent health regeneration per second. And most importantly, my pet has my physical damage absorption bonus of up to 5% per hit.

In other words, attacks less than 500,000 damage simply couldn't hurt me. Of course, this doesn't apply to fire, electricity, or poison damage, but in general, this made physical attacks against me completely useless. Even hitting me with 500,000 damage a hundred times a second wouldn't take a single unit of health away from Fox.

I spent the whole week in the same world. After taming the scolopendra, there were four 'super-elite' bosses that revived every six hours. Considering the effort I had to put in to get to this place, it was better to wait and kill the bosses here than to go elsewhere. Aside from those bosses, there were also easier opponents, and my Fox had been continuously 'farming' them all this week, obtaining the rarest resources in the game. At the same time, my fortune was quite 'lucky' to get stones with the rarest spells for the druid and hypnotist, which I was going to use to create talismans.

By far the most 'heart-warming' characteristic of my pet was its ability to carry items in its personal 'backpack. Without that, my bag would not hold all of the fabulous treasures I had accumulated. During this week I was so bored with endless farming that I couldn't even look at the process. In fact, my pet could clean up dungeons without any intervention from me. He was not only killing monsters, but also collecting loot himself, filtering out all sorts of useless garbage.

Because of my impatience, I didn't wait another six hours to beat the superbosses out of anything other than souls, but headed straight for the portal that would take me back to the continent. As I passed through it, I commanded Fox to run to the capital, while I watched the effect of my presence on the world around me from a rider's seat.

During that week, unbelievable things had been happening around me. Bosses were constantly dropping items whose chances of appearing were in the millions of fractions of a percent. Of course, this kind of luck couldn't escape the attention of the artificial intelligence that controls the game. The artificial intelligence immediately began to check the correctness of the calculations, the integrity of the data, the immutability of the program code, and the distribution of values in the random number generators.

In general, the AI tried to check and monitor everything it could, including the operation parameters of my capsule. But no matter how much it tried, not the slightest deviation from the game logic was registered. In order to fully control all of my actions, a dedicated personal AI had been assigned, which conducted all imaginable and unimaginable checks at all levels.

It got to the point where all the signals from my capsule went through this artificial intelligence and only reached the game server after thorough examination and investigation. But none of this could help the computer figure out what the hell was going on around me. It even tried to use random value generators located on the other side of the planet and even on satellites in orbit, but for my psionics the distance to the equipment and the complexity of the program processing made no difference, because I subconsciously just saw the lines of events that I needed and adjusted events to them. In terms of theory, I did not need to 'calculate' anything. It was enough just to measure the indicators and bring them into accordance with the 'reference line of probability', while the cause-effect relations would be established automatically.

Since the game world around me was constantly monitored by a powerful AI, the data gathered in this area received the highest level of reliability. Moreover, to completely eliminate the influence of 'extraneous noise', the AI switched every operation requiring 'random' values to the most trusted random number generators. The fluctuations of each leaf of grass next to me only depended on the logic of the game and the ‘completely random values’.

Due to the fact that this AI had reserved a large part of the physical random number generators for its needs, they became insufficient for other calculations. So the AI came up with a 'genius' idea. Since all events around me are 'random', it makes sense to use them as a source of random numbers. It could be compared to the logic that if you take a random number and divide it by two, the result would still be a random number, just with a slightly smaller number of possible values. But since all the events around me were 'maximally random', those events could be used as a 'data source' to calculate many other events.

As a result, a zone of manifestation of Chaos appeared naturally around me. Any 'flap of a butterfly's wing' had an immediate effect on important events around the world. And accordingly, by changing the trajectory of a leaf of grass next to me, I could influence what would fall out when killing a boss on the other side of the world. Overall, the effect was quite interesting and fun, so I was wondering how I could use it. However, it was all speculation on distracted topics.

Right now I was sprinting toward the capital of the continent. But as I approached it, several players tried to attack me. I was so distracted that I only noticed the attack after it was over. My pet, after the first blow it received, rushed to the enemies and trivially 'gored' them, killing each of them in one bite. What's more, the Fox picked up all the loot that fell from the players and put them in his backpack. This is what I call a pet. I could tell he was a hamster at heart.

The aggressors were not satisfied with the result and called for help. They were all members of the same guild, and apparently thought they had the right to attack anyone anywhere. Particularly against me on my way to the capital. As soon as I was in the suburbs, two raids with a total of fifty men came out against me.

While I was pondering whether I should attack directly or move away, my pet first attacked my opponents, charging into the crowd at once. To my surprise, some of the players weren't dying from a single bite, but from two or even three. So they were clearly not mere mortals in front of me. I concentrated and began to look at the characteristics of my surroundings and my options of the future.

Surprisingly, the combined damage of fifty level 11 players was enough to start reducing my pet's health. It is true that all significant damage came only from mages and assassins. I ordered to kill them first, ignoring those who dealt simple physical damage. My Resistance was still at 100, and my Resistance to control also applied to my pet. As a result, he was simply unstoppable. In a mere 15 seconds, the Fox devoured half of the attackers. During that time, his health was reduced by only a third.

When the attackers realized that they were losing, they decided to scatter in different directions. The only thing was that the speed of the scolopendra was three times faster than the speed of running, so only those who were invisible could escape. At the moment I didn't have a skill that allowed me to see invisible people, but I was going to fix that in the near future. I could use psionics to detect all the fugitives, but that would reveal my violation of the game's restrictions too clearly. The invisible ones that could be detected by the footprints on the ground had been mopped up by my pet already. The smartest ones managed to survive, but there were only three

After finishing off the last of the attackers, I moved on, and after a couple of minutes I entered the gates of the city. There was a peaceful area here, so I temporarily put the attackers out of my mind and went... to sleep. After all, I hadn't slept for a single night this week, following the 'folk wisdom' that while you sleep, the enemy is boosting.