Upon reflection, I had to agree with him. I contacted my auto buy and ordered it to monitor the market and buy up the precious elixir at a price of up to twenty thousand gold. Yeah, you could call me sleazy, I suppose.

The officer went on, "As you probably know, a class-five castle allows us to hire NPCs up to level 100 for the sum of 2% of the refund value using the following formula: 200-(category*20). In our case it results in sixty-eight thousand a month. Ninety percent of it was spent on the guards, mainly archers and ballista operators. The good news is, if we hire them through the castle interface, the prices are one-tenth of what independent mercs charge. The remaining funds were spent on service and maintenance staff. Mr. Simonov insists we lower alert levels clan-wide as quickly as possible in order to relieve two-thirds of the guards. At the moment, the upkeep of all four castles costs us over two hundred thousand. We could consider some alternative solutions, I suppose, like raising the clan tax from five to ten percent of the loot. I would also like to attract your attention to the fact that the numbers of new clan members grow significantly slower than its territories and the real estate it controls. All this forces us to spread the existing human resources very thinly. The analytics department recommends stopping any further expansion and concentrating on seeking out new perma players. More than that, we strongly recommend reviewing our hiring practices switching our attention from individuals with combat background to those with gaming experience. Actually, this is the chief of the security section's opinion so I suggest we hear him out."

Frag glared at Dan. "Speak up, then, Major."

Dan rose and opened his mouth to speak when a teleport popped open, letting in the White Winnie. He cast a look around as if he owned the place, grabbed at the chair closest to him and dragged it toward the fireplace.

"You piece of shit!" Dan roared like a wounded bear. In one lightning-fast motion, he drew a knife and threw it at the creature's furry back.

Bang!Boom! Equally as fast, Winnie had used a micro portal to teleport himself behind the chair. The knife sank deep between the lacquered scrolls on the chair's back.

That didn't stop Dan. "You furry-eared rat! Just when I hoped I'd never see you again! How I look forward to seeing your stuffed head over my mantelpiece!"

"Belay that!" the General rose, revealing his enormous height. "You, there, Winnie or whatever your name is! Listen up!"

A black-nosed white head peeked from behind the chair, baring its teeth. I selected it as target, just in case: Destructive Touch never missed. Five hundred hits was plenty to instill the fear of God into anyone.

In the meantime, the General continued, "Now. If we're to live under one roof, I'm afraid you'll have to conform to our social order. Rule number one. You disappear at the first request."

Winnie growled warningly, baring needle-sharp white teeth.

"Stop scowling! Rule number two... I'll tell you later. I haven't thought about it yet. You ask, what are the alternatives? Well, we'll make sure we'll be killing you at every opportunity which is basically non-stop. You can respawn all you want, every minute if you wish. Your whole life will consist of You've died in battle! alerts or whatever you NPCs have. I'm not asking your opinion. I'm informing you. I expect you out of here in thirty seconds. If you need a fireplace, the one in the Trophy Hall will always be kept alight for you."

The General smiled at his own words and rang the bell, ordering a servant to start a fire in the Trophy Hall using the best birch wood. Winnie switched his angry glare from one officer to the next, then growled something that in his language had to be akin to an f-word. With a pop, he reappeared on the desk, right in front of Dan. Three things happened at once: Winnie clawed the steaming coffee pot, Dan cursed, a new teleport popped open. Winnie was gone. Our gun-boat diplomacy had once again proven its worth. Dan was wiping his face with a napkin, threatening to nail someone's ears over his bed.

This Winnie was an interesting type. Not that I was losing any sleep over him—he was a Vets' headache. At the moment, I experienced an eerie sensation of loneliness. Just a minute earlier, I had received the Drow Bank's confirmation of the transfer of one million two hundred forty thousand gold into my account. No less. My inner greedy pig was unconscious, prostrated on the pile of virtual gold while I kept detracting one zero from the amount, visualizing the sum of a hundred-plus thousand bucks. That was the price of a one-bed flat in a nice suburb! Especially because between the crisis, the new Draconian wealth taxes and the new rise in utility bills, Moscow real estate prices had slumped somewhat. Having said that... those few square feet of Moscow bricks-and-mortar were of no use to me any more. This money could still buy me a nice little mansion somewhere in either Original City or the City of Light. Having given it some thought, I decided to secure Mom and myself from real-life bailiffs and sent the bank a request to cash thirty thousand gold. That would be enough to pay off a couple months' credits, and then we'd have to give it another think.

I also made a mental note to buy some boost elixirs. It was high time I started investing in myself and upgraded my gear as befitted my new status. A quick bit of math showed that seven and a half grand every five days would give me an extra talent point and five free characteristics. How's that for tough as nails? Paladin Fuckyall, eat your heart out!

By then, Dan had smoothed his rumpled feathers and went on, "Now. First, a few facts. We seem to be lagging behind in our armaments race with the Top 10 clans. Our increase in force structure is considerably slower. Besides, the average warrior's level in our combat section is lower than that in other clans. You may have noticed that virtually all mercs were slightly above us. Not even to mention the Camos. The problem being that we seem to simply bask around in our second lifespan in this world, enjoying our freedom, our youth and the health we had never even hoped for. We waste our time frequenting our chosen haunts, philandering, fighting in the arena and tinkering with diplomacy. True, we keep leveling our newbs and doing a bit of farming—about three hours a day or so. And in the meantime, what's the output of every schoolkid perma player or, God forbid, some hardcore nerd who spends his whole life in and out of dungeons? Now that they finally have the opportunity of playing till they drop, they try to prove their value to the world doing the only thing that they can do well: leveling. What does it leave us with?—a bunch of level-200 Fuckyall-type sixteen-year-olds. Our analysts' estimations show that long term, the situation will improve allowing our clan to remain in the Top 10 thanks to our discipline, in-depth planning, clear-cut hierarchy and a powerful inner structure. But in the meantime, our ratings have started to sag. We need to double the leveling times for our leading soldiers and lay our hands on a few multi-level dungeons which would give us some relatively safe level-up locations.

He looked around, catching his breath. Everyone went quiet, appreciating the seriousness of the problem. The frowning General drummed his fingers on the desk.

"That's one thing," Dan went on. "Secondly, we're not flexible enough. We're often too slow and unwilling to part with what often hinders us the most: our real-life experience. Take my recent blunder when I dived flat on the floor on hearing that imitation pulse grenade. My reflexes kicked in before I had time to realize there was nowhere for a grenade to come from, let alone remember my own immortality. In the meantime, the prisoner could have escaped. Same goes for our combat skills as the night attack clearly demonstrated. What we lack is flexibility and thinking out of the box. We still tend to confine our thinking within the limits of the physical world and classic combat strategy. Did you see how elegantly they outplayed us by pulling the prisoners from right under our noses? This is sword and sorcery—the world of a thousand unanticipated opportunities. Things like having a numerical advantage, troop deployment, action coordination and coming up with twenty development scenarios are not enough to secure a victory and achieve our objective. Way not enough! What we need is fresh blood, veterans of online battles—people with a different way of thinking! On average, our soldiers have only two months of real-life action experience. Then their column comes under fire or they get blown up by a land mine—and there we have him, a crippled waste of space. Why would he be better than a twenty-year-old student who's never seen a gun in his life but who's spent the last five years fighting in various MMORPGs? Teach him some discipline and put a little fear of God into him—and you'll have an excellent soldier who'll become a good investment for the clan. Would you say that the Steel Visors or Horned Helmets are easy opponents? You wouldn't, I can see that. Good. But did you know that the most of them are under seventeen? That should give you some food for thought. That's all from me on this subject."