Project Battle Royale: A Gamelit Survival Book

by L. S. Halloway

  “Oh man, if there’s a Para involved, I don’t know,” Goemon said.

  “Yeah but will they be able to use it?” I asked. The M249 Para was my personal best case scenario as a Drop weapon, or really just a PBR weapon at all. It could shoot something like a hundred bullets before needing a reload, and had manageable recoil on top of that. It was the very definition of spray and pray, so long as you had the ammunition- or remembered to load it. I watched the Para guy lean out and shoot with a click. He ducked back down and scrambled to load it.

  “This guy just peeked and forgot to load it. He’s not even the one with the helmet,” I said.

  “Oh no.”

  “Come on, let’s just take these guys down! Just one shot!” I pleaded.

  “What, so both duos can turn and light us up?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Biker duo is about to throw a nade.”

  A well-placed nade was a thing of beauty. Like sinking a three-pointer from downtown in basketball, but with the elegance of chipping in a shot for a birdie in golf. Of course, I had never played either sport but the concept was the same. I ditched the scope for the moment to get the bird’s eye view, just in time to see the motorcycle guy hurl the grenade. It arced high and bounced off the top of the Drop crate, hitting with the exact amount of force it needed to rebound right between the well-armored SUV Duo. The toss was a textbook example of a grenade hurl, a mastery of physics.

  The timing could have used some work though. The canister rolled on the ground for a second or two, enough time for the two teammates to evacuate in opposite directions. The Biker Duo opened fire.

  I peered into the scope again for a closer look. It was a terrible decision. As the SUV Duo fled, the grenade exploded in a blinding white flash. Turns out it was a grenade of the stun variety, not the explosive kind. To be fair they both probably would have blinded me for staring right at them but now I was fairly certain I would never see again.

  I yelped, and Goemon laughed. “Oh wow, look at what they’re doing here,” he said.

  “I’m blind. Permanently!” I yelled. I heard the echoes of gunfire all around, but I saw nothing but white.

  “This is great stuff. The tactics, man. The counter attack.”

  “What? What’s happening?”

  “Well, Biker Duo threw a stun nade, just a great nade. I guess you saw that.”

  “Yeah, jerk.”

  “Oh! Oh man, I can’t believe he pulled that off.”

  “What? What?”

  “Ok so the nade goes down and the Drop Duo scatter, but they’re for sure blind.”

  “Are they still alive?” I asked, but the drumroll of machine gun fire gave me my answer. I could discern maybe just two now, maybe only one firing with an echo.

  “So the one with the Para, he just starts unloading a thousand bullets. I don’t even know if he can see ‘em.”

  “And? And?”

  “And then he- hang on, I have to land this shot.”

  14

  Head’s Up

  The whip crack of the Kar sniper rifle next to me did a number on my ears. It was loud enough to distract me from my temporary blindness. I may have been a little premature with my declaration of permanence on that front. The shapes of the world were starting to take form. A tree branch here, a boulder there. But The Drop and the dueling duos were gone. Oh, wait, I was just facing the wrong direction. Must have turned around while blinded.

  Another bolt of lightning set off a cannonball next to my ear, oh, actually that was just Goemon shooting his rifle again. By that point I could see well enough to join the fray. The only problem being I was clueless as to which players were still kicking down there.

  “Where?” I asked, raising the Mini through the white haze of my vision.

  “Behind the rock. He’s so lit. I shot him but then I missed,” Goemon replied.

  This was the moment I had been training my whole life for. Or at the very least the several months that we had been playing the game. I held my breath and found nothing to shoot but the backside of a boulder. He must have ducked behind it. I sighed out all the air at once, like a deflated balloon. Great.

  “I take it he knows we’re here now.”

  “Oh he knows we’re here. But he’s the last one left.”

  “OK, so we just wait for him to peek and-”

  Goemon fired again. In the upper right corner of the HUD, his name appeared next to the words Kar98 and GroovyChronic. Guess he got him. Don’t get me wrong, part of me was happy but man I wanted some action and that was my shot, literally. Ah, who am I kidding, my teammate deserved it. I had to look at the stupid flash.

  “OK actually now he’s the last one left,” Goemon said as he pulled back the lever on the Kar.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. Maybe I might just get my shot after all.

  “Yeah, yeah, that was just his knocked buddy. I shot him in the toe, it was all I could see.”

  “Ouch. Poor guy.”

  “He was super hurt.”

  A cloud of dust kicked up in front of us, and Goemon rolled behind the safety of his nearby rock. I would do no such thing. With the other player focused on Goemon’s location I had at least a second before the bullets got trained on me. I peered through the scope, happy to have a stationary target, and I forgot to hold my breath this time. I pulled the trigger and it did not matter. A message flashed across the middle of my screen with confirmation the shot was as accurate as it needed to be. I looked up at the action center of the HUD, just to see my name up there. There it was, Field with a headshot from the- what! How was that not a headshot? That is some BS right there. But, at least I got the kill, and it felt real good.

  “I got him!” I yelled out.

  “Dude nice,” Goemon said.

  “That was all of them?”

  “Yeah man. Biker Duo took out one of them that got flashed immediately. But the guy with the Para went crazy, he lit them up. It might have been an accident, I’m pretty sure he was blind.”

  Now that the shot had been fired and the engagement was over, the adrenaline subsided. My vision and hearing returned to normal. I realized that my pulse was firing faster than that light machine gun. The whole experience made me feel a bit numb and the end of the round was still far off.

  I got up out of cover and sprinted for the loot of The Drop and all the fallen players around it. Goemon told me to wait, but there was no time for that. The loot, the loot!

  Every once in a while, some aspect of PBR works out so flawlessly, so perfect, that it makes you feel like you have destiny on your side. I'm talking about The fabled Round of Destiny. Of course, I knew better. Take that encounter, for instance- no luck there. We made our own destiny. The reason we still stood to fight another duo was purely our skill in the game, our tactical knowledge, our intense scrutiny and memorization of all quadrants of the map, and general mastery of game mechanics.

  “Are we the greatest PBR players of all time?” I pondered.

  “No,” Goemon responded.

  It was just like Goemon to try and bring us back down to Earth. I could see his point, eventually, while I was free falling into the cavern. I forgot about the “entrance” to that cavern. A big hole in the side of a mountain, about the size of a swimming pool. The edge was mostly covered by low shrubbery, but you could still see the opening if you were looking for it. I was not looking for it.

  The Cave, we called it. We used to like to drop there, but the towns around it never had anything good so it never seemed worth it. Now it was time to relive our glory days, I guess. I opened up the map to see if there was a glitch that removed it from my screen. Nope, the entrance was there, unmarked with text but nonetheless designated by a dark blue kidney bean.

  Maybe I slipped in my excitement to get to the Para. Maybe the game glitched out- it was not uncommon, after all- and teleported me into the opening of the cave. Maybe it was just lag and I rubber banded in there. Probably I was just an idiot.

&n
bsp; The time spent in midair plummet probably only consisted of a second or two. It was enough time to come to the conclusion that I messed up.

  Fortunately, The Cave was designed to be explored. The underground lake within existed solely to prevent death from falling. You could still die if you hit the shore, but my angle looked good. I hit the water and floated back to the surface, still alive, but now several stories underground.

  The sky, grey as it was, blinded through the gap compared to the darkness of the rest of the cavern. The hole in the ceiling of the cave and floor of the mountain seared its bean visage into my retina. A silhouette stood out on the edge. It was Goemon, no doubt, peering over the side.

  “Get down here! Hurry! I don’t want to die alone,” I yelled up to him.

  “What are you doing down there?” he hollered back.

  “I fell.”

  My eyes readjusted. Goemon looked from side to side, then hopped into the hole. For whatever reason, he usually ended up being the one to hit the rocks of the underground shore. The jump’s trajectory looked sketchy at first but he splashed into the water nonetheless. I swam the couple of meters to the stone shore and figured I would make the best of the situation by looting.

  “What was that you were saying? Before you fell in here?” Goemon asked. I can only assume he was being facetious.

  “I was saying that I planned on dropping down here because I wanted us both to have freshly tailored level 2 vests. Now come grab one of these.”

  Bland grey stone comprised the majority of The Cave. The rest was wood scaffolding and some columns in disrepair. I think it was originally intended to be some sort of archaeological dig site, but the full textures of the place made it look unfinished by the devs. Of course, they would probably come up with some explanation about how IRL work on it had been finished but it was intended to look unfinished in game because the excavators never got a chance to complete it.

  Sometimes there was decent loot down there. But unless you were first to reach it and got lucky with something really good, it put you at a disadvantage strategically. It seems absurd to think that someone would actually shoot fish in a barrel but the very concept applied here. To top it off, there wasn’t exactly a fifty foot wooden ladder stretching out the crack in the mountain. That left only two ways out of the place, a deathtrap of a long tunnel out one side and a waterway out to the river that worked just fine so long as a jet ski happened to spawn in the underground lake.

  “You really do care,” I said to Goemon. To think, after all that work upstairs, he would throw it all away to make sure I was ok.

  “Something like that. You know, I don’t think we were alone up there.”

  “We weren’t. We took those duos down.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  I climbed the scaffolding, looking for a better helmet or something better for the Mini. “You got to be kidding me.”

  “I think I hear somebody.”

  “How, we’re inside of a mountain. Covered in stone.”

  “I don’t know, the sound doesn’t make any sense in this game.”

  I stopped moving and listened hard. The faint echo of footsteps bounced around the roughly dome-shaped interior of The Cave. They got a bit louder and appeared to emanate from The Drop, but it was hard to tell. The sound in PBR was wonky indeed, and directional audio interpretation really broke down when different heights got involved.

  Goemon and I each found a different stone column to duck behind. We looked towards the gateway to the sky.

  “Hey idiots,” a nasally voice called down. The voice carried a bunch of background noise with it. He either had a terrible mic or a lot going on at his house.

  “Ha HA,” the other one said, a bit more clear. The laugh was fake, Muntzian. I had yet to zero in on their silhouettes peering down on us. Perhaps they had yet to lean over.

  “You see them?” I whispered to Goemon.

  “No. Above us, somewhere,” he replied.

  “Wow, you guys are so bad. Holy crap you guys are bad. It’s like what are you even doing playing this game,” the one said out of his nostrils.

  “Yeah, get good,” his partner said.

  “More like get a life,” the nose snorted.

  “Ha HA, good one.”

  They did not see us. Otherwise, they would have opened fire. Goemon tried to shush me but I could no longer resist. “Well which one is it? Get good or get a life.”

  “Get- uh, shut up nerd,” the nose said. He must have been the leader, but it did not take much to overload his brain. “Thanks for clearing out The Drop for us. Even if you didn’t fall down there we would have killed you anyways just so you know.”

  “Just so you know, we jumped down here on purpose,” I continued. I never was much for trash talking. Usually by the time I produced a decent rebuttal the moment was long over.

  “No, you fell. Otherwise you would have got the loot. Which we got, by the way, level 3 vests and everything. We’re so good now.”

  I could not believe they equipped the level three vests. Those things would be shredded after that firefight, probably worse than a fresh level one. These guys were the worst, and we were going to take them down. Goemon got the same idea, nodding his head and pointing to the south corner of the entrance. He readied the Kar98, careful to keep it hidden from view. I did the same with my rifle.

  “We left it on purpose,” I said. Man that was bad. But these guys were stupid. I had to figure out another story. “Left it...because...there was something way better down here.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, you probably never even heard of it. Just got patched into the game.”

  “Let me see,” the kid wheezed. The silhouette emerged, and Goemon and I both fired. He went down immediately, but unfortunately remained above the fold. I could hardly believe the guy took the bait, but we only got one of them. He crawled back out of view as the other began raining bullets down upon us.

  Dirt and stone dust swirled around the onslaught. As long as we stayed behind the columns we could stay alive. The Para was really the perfect weapon to shoot into The Cave, or outside of it, or into a building, or out of a car, or really anywhere. So close to being mine. Always, so, so close, like landing a kickflip for the first time except you just shatter your ankle bones instead.

  “What the (inaudible), Jeffie! Get back here and pick me the (inaudible) up!” the guy yelled. Someone in the background of his microphone chimed in, a feminine voice that sounded angry. She said something about using language under her roof.

  “I’m going to get them,” the one now referred to as Jeffie said.

  “No, they’re my kill, I’m going to die, pick me up. Me!” said the first. It was tough to tell but he might have been fighting back tears.

  “OK,” Jeffie said sadly. He must have had no choice. The hail of bullets stopped.

  15

  Boat Rental

  “We need to bail. We won’t get another shot like that,” Goemon said.

  “But we rekt that guy,” I said.

  “True.” He left his post, still crouched, and hustled toward the tunnel at the mouth of the sunken lake.

  “True, but...”

  “But they know we’re here now so if we peek we’ll get destroyed.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Jet ski?” he asked.

  “Jet ski!” I of course replied.

  This time, Goemon took the reins. It was not so much because he did not trust my driving anymore. We all had accidents, right? Like just because that one time in the Taco Bell drive-thru he plowed into the speaker box I wasn’t just going to stop getting in the van if he was driving. No, this time Goemon got to drive because he got to the jet ski first and that is just how the PBR game engine worked. You could switch from driver to passenger in an SUV or Dosha but spots were set on watercraft for some unknown game logic reason.

  By the time we climbed aboard the two-man boat, really more of the equivalent of a water mot
orcycle, the enemy duo above had opened up the floodgates of destruction again. The machine gun fire tore up our old hiding place first. It only took a second after that for them to spot us. A wake of bullets trailed behind us all the way to the tunnel, but they never quite figured out how to compensate for speed. If they did, they would have aimed ahead. Once we hit the exit tunnel there was nothing the other duo could do.

  The tunnel was a short passage out of the sunken cave. It only took a few seconds' travel by jet ski. Swimming manually rendered the route unusable, though. You swam about as fast as the cool kids walked the mile in protest during freshman year gym class. If you had to swim at all, you might as well drown before the Blue or the bullets got you.

  “Why is this thing made out of wood?” I asked.

  “No idea. Because wood floats?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What would you make it out of?”

  As we rounded the bend of the underpass, the sun basked us in its unassuming hazy glow. Freedom, and once again I felt good. Even if I still feel like we could have taken them.

  “I don’t know, plastic or fiberglass or something, isn’t that what they’re made out of?”

  “I dunno. East or west?”

  “Huh?”

  “Left or right.”

  “Uh.” I pulled out the map. I might have known the roads like the back of my hand. Sometimes. But water navigation required reference. “If we go right we’ll probably get our hair cut by the Para.”

  “Left, then,” Goemon said.

  “Cool. Just beach it over by that hill and we can go to the radio tower.”

  “The radio tower never has anything good.”

  “Ah, but if you already have a sniper rifle it’s not so bad. We should have enough time before the Blue rolls in.”

  “I guess. The super scopes are hard to use.”

  “It’ll be fun. Come on, remember that one time we won the round a long time ago because you had the 8x scope and you shot all the way across two towns to take down the last guy?”