Everything was over before Ping was able to collect his thoughts. He stopped the arm of the rascals who wanted to slap the woman. Ping merely aimed to talk some sense into him but the guy had absolutely no interest in talking. When the guy lunged out, Ping's hand moved from alone to the guys armpit and pressed upwards. Then someone approached him from behind. Ping still pressing upwards, pivoted and made rascal one headbutt into rascal two.
Number three, who was about to angrily shout something, catched a backhand fingerslap with his throat. The fourth guy, that was about to rugby-tackle him, had his feet in a perfect position, some millimeters above the ground, when a foot sweep helped him to learn a split.
Ping executed these actions in a fluid motion and finished them with the shoulder throw of rascal one - everything happend in a split second.
Before he could even curse, the devastating conclusion of the fight were two guys gasping for breath like fish out of water, one that tried to illustrate how much blood a human can lose through his nose, silently sitting on the ground, and another, squeaking like a pig, who now had a bad leg day. The fifth guy demonstrated his stamina and made a run for it.
His mobile vibrated and he could envision what was written on the display.
The crowd looked silently at him. The wife had her mouth agape. There was no thankfulness in her eyes - he was now the dumbass who walloped the other dumbasses in a fashion far exceeding self-defence. Stupid! Just seconds ago he judged someone because of a punch without warning. On top of that he had to show off his fancy martial arts moves which would surely get him into trouble when the police arrived.
He decided to take the fifth guy as his role model and made a quick getaway.
Fortunately, no overeager citizen followed him to report his whereabouts to the police. He wondered if he should take the side street to enter 'The Brick' from a corner that could not be seen from the city railway station, but decided against it. There were cameras on the station anyway, he just hoped that the police wouldn't ask if no one complained.
Anyway, the guys he had given a hands-on combat lesson did not look like people who would typically file charges. He would probably never see them again. At least it was the first time he had seen them in this district.
He abandoned his plan to buy breakfast for himself and his sister and ran up the stairs. In the middle he stopped briefly to catch his breath and decided to take a quick look at his mobile phone, which confirmed that he had completed two quests.
"Oh, you're early." A familiar voice greeted him when he arrived on his floor.
"Ai, good morning. Are you going to the self-study center this early?" She studied there every weekend with other classmates. As for himself, Sam and Wheezy, they could only be found there during the exam phase.
"Yes, my friends can't pick me up. Yesterday there was a commotion on the mountain and someone set the parked motorcycles and scooters on fire. Her's was there too."
"Oops."
"Unbelievable right?"
At least now he knew what the policeman had been talking about, there was only one mountain she could mean.
When he entered his apartment, his sister was already sitting at his desk. She had made breakfast and he wondered for a second where she had got the ingredients from. His refrigerator was definitely empty so she had either taken advantage of her friendship to Ai or had already gone shopping. The apartment smelled intensely of food even though the window was open. The small apartment only had one window and there was not the slightest draft when you opened it, in the hot summer days the standing fan didn't help either.
"Did you fight with the other housewives at the bargain counter over this outfit?" She was sitting there in a much too big sweater, slipper and pants from the last century. "Can't you just say good morning? These are yours by the way, my clothes smell like an ashtray." She spoke with her mouth full and hardly seemed to mind his words.
He decided against asking why she did not bring spare clothes. Instead, he took it as a sign that it was time to weed out his wardrobe.
"Did you mess with my PC?" The PC was still running and revealed that she did, even without her answering. "Yeah, I was bored. Where have you been all night anyway?" He wanted to avoid this question if possible, so he followed up. "Thought you were sleeping soundly in my bed. I didn't feel like sleeping on the floor."
She rolled her eyes. "Don't be such a crybaby. I had a stomachache and went to the pharmacy early." A moment later she tried to console him. "And you get breakfast for your hospitality too."
He couldn't say no to that. After washing his face and changing his shirt, he first drank a whole liter of water and then sat down next to her to stuff the remains of the food into himself like a starving animal. During training he hadn't noticed how hungry he had become.
"Where's the cute little game console? I wanted to play the quiz you showed me." She looked like she was seriously considering leaving him food money here, which was totally uncharacteristic for her.
The game console was buried right next to the next motorway service station. "Did you search my room?" He asked instead.
The answer came promptly. "Didn't find any dirty magazines, I'm so proud of you."
After breakfast together, the two of them spent a short while together, then his sister announced that she would take the next train home, which went about every hour. He kept her from accidently leaving the apartment with his house slippers and then said goodbye to her and his old clothes. He was already used to his sister's dress fetish and if she wanted to travel by train disguised as a sofa he wouldn't stop her.
Bickering with his sister helped him to calm down. As soon as she left the apartment, the curtains were drawn and Ping looked at his cell phone with wet eyes. The display, which used to be a simple white background with nothing more than the system's messages and occasionally an input field, had been expanded to include a footer with several buttons.
The buttons included symbols of a pin, a lens, a person, a gear, and a box. A row of three symbols were visible at the same time and it was possible to navigate to the next or previous symbol using two arrow symbols or a swipe motion. Next to the box was an exclamation mark that didn't seem to belong there.
"System, what are these buttons?"
>> The tabs 'map', 'camera', 'character' and 'configuration' were activated by setting up the time capsules. <<
>> The desired view 'inventory' was designed as a quest reward and is available with a severly limited functionality. <<
The exclamation mark probably marked the quest reward. He would take a closer look at that in a moment.
"You mentioned needing a bigger display or something, right?" He remembered the warning in the car and didn't want to trigger a time limited mission by carelessly starting the new functions.
>> The USB extension can be attached to screen units as a peripheral device, then the current hardware unit will be used as a remote control. <<
The USB stick could not be found. Yesterday when he was hard-pressed for time he had probably just put it in a box with the other tools. Now he didn't have the nerve to thoroughly look for it.
"Can you also connect to the streaming adapter on my monitor?" The device was originally intended as a gift for his mother, so that she could finally watch videos and photos from her tablet on the bigger TV. In the end she was not able to operate the device and it went back to him. Now it was, for most of the time, a useless attachment on his monitor.
When the LED of the streaming adapter changed color, Ping changed the input source to HDMI-2. His screen turned white and showed the status bar at the top of the screen, that highlighted the current date with a fault tolerance of 79 years.
The mobile phone enlarged the buttons, which were now all simultaneously displayed in a grid view. The character tab, with the symbol of a person, was active and a quite unspectacularly view that he had seen before was displayed on the monitor:
* Name: Atari Ping *
* Level: 1 *
* Title: Untalented user with karma points *
On this occasion he wondered if he had also received additional karma points. Wasn't it a good deed to bash up the thugs at the city railway station?
He would need to remind the system to improve this view with additional information. And where the heck was the tab for quests anyway?
Before he could press one of the buttons or ask further questions, a dialog appeared:
>> Start tutorial? <<