Project Battle Royale: A Gamelit Survival Book

by L. S. Halloway

  “Oh, you meant that shack.”

  “Just get over here already.”

  I popped my head up from cover, glancing over the rock. Somehow, they did not know where I was, but it was only a matter of seconds before they finished looting the shack and headed down the hill.

  “They’re in the shack. I don’t think they saw me,” I said. I got brave, sat up on knee and aimed the Revolver.

  Goemon must have seen me. “Don’t you do it,” he said. “Gimme two seconds.”

  I counted to two and fired down the sights, nailing my target with my first shot and missing the next two. The rival duo did not come out guns blazing, opting instead to hunker down in their miserable excuse for a fort. Goemon crouched a short distance away, using the angle of the hill as his only defense.

  “Well, they know we’re here now,” he said.

  “Yeah, but I shot one of them. Shoot that one. Besides, they don’t know you’re there. I’ll distract them.”

  I took a couple more potshots through the empty wall, not really expecting to hit anything. The Revolver was not much good unless I could score a headshot, but I figured I could at least keep them pinned down or at the very least nervous under a steady stream of fire. The biggest problem was my wonky angle. They had no clear shot at me, but that meant I had no clear shot at them, either. What we needed was a fresh plan.

  “I’m going to back up a little bit, try and draw them out,” I said while I reloaded a six pack. I was eating up bullets like Halloween candy, even though I had pretty much nothing in reserve storage. A short sprint behind me was another rock about the same size. It would not make my pistol any more effective, but I figured my opponents would think the same thing and they might feel emboldened to come after me. I turned and ran a zigzag pattern, hoping that the fact I did not see any long barreled rifles on them might keep me alive.

  The buckshot hitting my feet told me two crucial things. One of them had a shotgun, not a rifle. It also told me that he took the bait. He must have been either bloodthirsty or not very smart, because a shotgun at that range, especially one without a choke, would have as good a chance taking me down as I did passing Physics without cheating. I’ll give the player this, he did manage to hit me with a few pellets. The damage resulted in nothing more than a sliver off of my health bar.

  While the shotgunner bounded and fired after me, Goemon prepared to spring into action. I dipped behind the rock to the soundtrack of lead pellets raining on stone. “His buddy is coming down to help. Better make it quick,” I called out.

  Right on time, Goemon let the Uzi loose. By the time the shotgunner knew he had been flanked, he was already downed by the rapid fire of the micro SMG. A knocked player could no longer attack, but they could still move around, albeit about as a fast as a peglegged tortoise. Getting knocked down also earned you something of a death clock. If your partner fails to pick you back up before your health bar ticks down to zero, that’s it- the round is over for you. The more times you go down, the faster that death clock moves. Getting shot in that state pretty much ends the timer altogether.

  Meanwhile I trained the Revolver’s sights on the other guy running down the hill. Again I landed the first shot. Unfortunately, the mule kick of the Revolver threw off my aim again and my next few shots went wide. Recoil control had yet to become one of my strong suits.

  Fortunately, Goemon and his Uzi were there to pick up the slack. This time his target was not distracted, and he had an SMG of his own. They both unloaded their magazines on each other, each scoring their own fair share of hits. I resisted the urge to take free shots at the downed shotgunner, who was currently crawling a futile escape into the empty field behind us. Instead, I decided to be a bigger man, put kill counts and scoreboards aside and focus on the immediate threat. I did this because I’m selfless, a real team player.

  I softened the attacker with one more round and let Goemon finish him off. Just in time, too, because Goemon himself would have been knocked by one more bullet. The deed finished, both enemy players fell limp to the ground. A wooden crate- aka the loot box- appeared over both corpses. The loot box served two main functions: tombstone and treasure chest. PBR represented the idea that one man’s misfortune was another man’s gain better than just about any simulation in history.

  “Get just absolutely destroyed,” Goemon said. He was fired up, and for good reason. Early kills were crucial for a successful round. It was simple probability. If I did not shoot by the time we got down to the top 25 still standing- meaning I survived by hiding in a corner the whole round- I knew I would not shoot the whole game. It was simple probability: the less I fired, the more likely I was to get shot in the face by some sniper a mile away that I would never even see. On the flip side, getting kills early had a lovely snowball effect, in no small part due to the boost that it had on confidence.

  We both knew that we had to loot quickly. Just because we won that engagement did not mean that we had the luxury of taking our time. Even the comparatively soft shots of the pint size SMG would have echoed loud enough off of the hills to be heard by nearby duos, either from Atlantis behind us or any other nearby town we had yet to visit. That included The Spot up ahead.

  I opted to loot the shotgunner, both because he was close and because the shotgun was my preferred weapon of choice. I played it loose and fast and that usually only worked out at close range, so a shotgun made sense. It was a pump action, too, complete with a speed loader and enough shells to get me started. Turns out Goemon planned ahead with his aim, and opted against any shots higher than chest level. The body armor in the loot crate was Swiss cheese, but the helmet shined like a brand new car. I decided to take it for a spin.

  “Got any first aid or anything?” Goemon asked.

  “I got some bandages, and a pump shotgun. And a level one helmet. You find anything good?”

  “Heck yeah. I got an Uzi stock and extended mag. This baby’s fully kitted.”

  The Uzi only held three attachments, so the goal of “fully kitting” it could be achieved with relative ease. It got even easier when another player found the gear for you, and then you just took it off their body. That being said, PBR either failed to disclose, or specifically chose not to, explain what the exact advantages gun modifications provided. The Uzi existed solely to dump as many bullets as quickly and in the smallest area possible, and the mods Goemon picked up would further that goal.

  “We better move,” Goemon said, and whether or not he saw something I did not I knew he was right.

  3

  The Spot

  “Shouldn't we heal first? You, I mean. I’m golden,” I said.

  “That’s probably a good idea, but not here.”

  “To the shack!”

  We had already spent too much time playing sitting duck in the middle of the plain. At least we had a decent excuse. The first kill of the round, especially when it was both members of a duo that got taken down, was always in the running for sweetest. Sure, Goemon did the heavy lifting, but it was my elite battlefield strategy that made it all possible. Not to mention landing those crucial shots with the Revolver.

  The shack provided cover from our unseen enemies to the south. I pretended to stand watch in the other direction, but the knowledge that my shotgun would be useless at any kind of range made it tough to take my job too seriously. The grass probably offered more protection than I could.

  I tossed the bandages over to Goemon and he began fumbling with them. “Need a little help?”

  “It’s not my fault. The game is glitching out.”

  Bandages work great so long as you have the time to apply them and enough to get the job done. At the moment we had plenty of both. A first aid kit healed you almost to full and in only a couple of seconds. One bandage healed about an eighth of your total HP, and each one took a few seconds to apply. They did not work so great in the middle of a firefight, but worked well enough during hard-earned downtime. After all, we won our first engagement and had the for
tune of landing inside the first phase of the Safety Circle- the survival zone of PBR, the element of the game that kept players from just camping in one spot, designated as an unassuming white circle on the map.

  Sooner or later the Circle would shrink, effectively dooming everyone that ended up outside of it to a painful, fiery demise in the zone we knew colloquially as “The Blue Wall of Death.” As far as we both knew the Circle placement was entirely random, the result of some unseen algorithm placed by the devs to almost always screw us over. The size of the Safety Circle shrank exponentially over the course of the round. During the drop phase, the entire First Island map is open for business. The first appearance of the Circle does not happen for at least a few minutes after landing. Although, neither Goemon nor I had ever kept track- we were always too busy looting and dodging bullets to notice the timer in the beginning. The first Circle rarely proved to be much of a problem unless it appeared on a corner of the map and half the surface area took a useless residence in the ocean.

  But we did not have to worry about the unprejudiced will of the Circle until later. The great clock in the sky had a few more minutes to go before it shrank the playable area. For the moment, the only thing on our minds was getting some long range weaponry, and maybe whether any duos were currently staring at us from the woods.

  “Alright, I’m good to go. You need any?” Goemon asked.

  “Nah, I was too fast for that joker. By the way, you’re welcome.”

  “For what?”

  “I let you have those kills. I could have taken them down with the pistol, but…”

  “Oh, I bet.”

  “I just wanted you to get a confidence boost. It’s important for the rest of the round.”

  “How bout you take the next one.”

  According to the map, a road cut through the hills and dead-ended at The Spot. The problem with roads is they get you where you want to go a little bit quicker but they also get you dead even quicker than that. Everyone playing the game looks for the poor saps lost enough, new enough, or both to just blindly follow the pavement. Plus, roads do more than just make you easy to spot. They conveniently leave out anywhere to hide, making anyone brazen or stupid enough to stay on one for long into a big, fat target.

  We trekked up and over low, rolling hills. With no major settlements to explore on our chosen route, we stopped only to loot a couple of more shacks along the way. The shacks were nice enough to meet our low expectations, coughing up nothing but a smoke grenade and a grip modification for a rifle that neither of us owned. At least we found even less trouble along the way than we did loot.

  In the distance a couple of naked trees and half of a chain link fence formed the boundary of The Spot. The town, if it could even be called that, consisted of two one story buildings, one three story, and one double decker as well as a low, wooden guard tower in the middle. There were other, smaller settlements or landmarks that had the honor of being given an actual written name on the map. For some reason The Spot did not make the cut and remained nameless and usually hidden to the masses. We labeled it The Spot both because of the reputation it developed in our playthroughs as “the spot” where the loot is often decent, and “the spot” we most often landed at when jumping out of the plane at the beginning of rounds. Because The Spot had no designated name on the map, and because it happened to be positioned in a relative dead zone, other players did not drop there much.

  I could see only closed doors from my vantage point. That meant the place was untouched. Maybe I had the bad idea to land somewhere different at the start of the match, but things were looking up. We managed to get back to The Spot unscathed and the location itself was still untouched. I ran into the smaller of the one stories, and Goemon ran into the double decker just on the other side of a waist-high broken wall.

  Looting turned into a mad dash like always. I felt like a fat kid at a cleared out buffet, grabbing anything still available but keeping an eye out for some hidden treasure overlooked by everyone else. A pistol and a few modifications sat on the lone table in the place. I equipped the silencer, more out of habit than actual necessity. A pistol silencer never made the difference between a win and a loss, but it did look cool. The M9 next to the gear held twice as many bullets than my Revolver but it packed less of a punch and was not worth the effort of swapping out the mods and the different kind of ammo. I checked on Goemon to see if he was faring any better.

  “How you making out?”

  “Level one helmet in here, level one vest...nothing good yet. You?”

  “Tons of stuff. For a pistol.”

  “Not even worth picking it up...oh, and someone left a level two vest on top of this toilet. Must have been an intense trip to the bathroom.”

  A level two Kevlar vest functioned the same as its little brother but could soak up something like double the bullets. The extra protection weighed about twice as much as a result but it was well worth the price. Besides, the extra size gave you more storage slots as an added bonus. Gotta have somewhere to store all the gun mods that we would probably never get a chance to use.

  After hearing Goemon’s good news I checked the bathroom in my building. The door opened the same as all the others: way too loud. Every door in the entire First Island map rested on rusted out hinges, or at least sounded that way. This made it so that entering a building and shutting the door behind you to stop the cold air from running out was the sound equivalent of firing a flaregun into the air. Anyone close by would hear it, anyone upstairs in the same building would definitely hear it, and it became quite easy to tell if someone was coming or going just by the sound of creaky hinges and heavy footsteps. As a matter of fact, I could hear Goemon stomping around, opening and closing the doors of his building next door as clear as if he were in the same room as me.

  “I found an AK,” he shouted. A great find, and just what we needed. The AK-47 was the workhorse of the game. You could not upgrade it much- it accepted nothing but a new magazine, a scope or sight and something for the muzzle. The rifle boasted sheer firepower to make up for its slow rate of fire and bucking bronco kick. It worked fine at close range, able to tear through walls and vests with ease thanks to the 7.62mm rounds, especially since the recoil on the thing made it impossible to get off accurate bursts- anyone caught in a hallway staring down a fully automatic AK was going to have a bad time. Fortunately, the first bullet fired was so precise even at range that it could hold its own against other, more modern rifles provided you had enough self-control to fire one shot at a time. Goemon had that control, and I did not, so I was glad he was the one to pick it up.

  My bathroom came up empty, so I turned around to inspect the kitchen one more time. Unfortunately, nothing new magically appeared in the ten seconds since I last checked it and I had no use for dirty dishes. There was just one more room in the place and I needed it to come up big. I busted open the door like there was some poor girl inside that needed rescuing, and then I saw her. She was right next to the bed, shining and pretty and surrounded by boxes and boxes of ammo that I unfortunately just realized I had no way to carry thanks to my lack of a backpack.

  “Don’t worry, I got an UMP.” I picked it up and loaded it with one 25-round magazine. The rest of the ammo would have to wait until I found something suitable to carry it in. I slapped the red dot sight on top and a vertical grip that I picked up earlier- essentially just a fitted handlebar- under the barrel, so I could aim and control recoil more effectively. The UMP, pronounced ump by people that knew what they were doing and you-em-pee by troglodytes, worked pretty good as a stopgap weapon until you found the right rifle. It was head of the SMG class, able to be fully modded with sight, grip, barrel, and mag mods, and I was already halfway there.

  Then, Goemon jumped out a window and shattered glass rained two stories down into the turf. Reflexes raised my UMP in the direction of the noise and I was embarrassed at my lack of cool. I needed to relax.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” Goemon
said.

  “What do you mean? You’re the one jumping out these windows, all reckless. Throwing caution to the wind.”

  “Ha ha, very funny. Seriously though if anyone is remotely close by they definitely know we’re here now.”

  “You didn’t jump out that window?”

  “No.”

  “Well it wasn’t me. If it wasn’t you then-”

  “Wait, shh.”

  I froze in place and listened for any noise- some clue as to what was going on. I heard hard footsteps- coming from inside a building. “Stop moving,” I whispered.

  “I’m not. They’re coming from next door.”

  4

  Company

  “Don’t move. Maybe they don’t know we’re here,” I whispered over the intercom. Goemon was one building over, and the separation between us might as well have been the river running through the whole map. Had it been later in the game, with a smaller Safety Circle and a smaller playing area, I would have employed the buddy system. I would have ensured if one of us went inside a building then we both did. But this was still the first phase of the round. We should have been all alone.

  The footsteps ceased. I sat crouched in a kind of pretzel ball underneath the window facing the noise and considered the most opportune time to peek out. I wanted some trace of the intruders before I exposed my own hiding spot.

  “They definitely know we’re here,” Goemon said. He was probably right, and they were doing the exact same thing we were: waiting for the enemy to move, to reload a magazine, or open a door, any of which might as well have been a flashing neon sign pointing out their exact location.

  After a few long seconds I said: “Maybe they left. They did jump out the window.”