Wrath

by Nicholas Knight

  A little ding sounded off. Congrats, said Mr. Australian. You hit level 2. Care to review your stats?

  That actually did kind of interest me. I was curious about how much stronger or faster my kaiju would become. How much bigger? Mr. Fish-bear had been freaking huge. That had to be because he was higher level than me. More levels had to equate with a bigger size. Very “giant monster genre” appropriate.

  Before I could say anything though, a sound drew my attention. I whirled around to find another kaiju coming toward me. Unlike the first one though, it moved slowly, and its clawed hands were held up in the universal sign of “I’m not here to fight.”

  As weird as my kaiju was, and the piranha-bear had been, this thing was even weirder.

  It was bipedal and serpentine, with a head that put me in mind of a rooster with a red comb and vicious beak. It was covered in black feathers that had a yellowish sheen to them, like they were coated in venom. Its limbs were avian and scaly with hooked claws and the feathers covered it all the way from its bird head to the end of its long, reptilian tail. A pair of scaly, segmented appendages rose up from its shoulders with feathers sticking out from odd places, like a mockery of wings. Their tips were equipped with wicked-looking stingers.

  When it spoke, the let out a sibilant hissing noise punctuated with shrill chirps. “That was a hell of a show,” it said, the voice masculine beneath the kaiju calls. “Ursivore’s level five. You’re what, level three?”

  Ursivore must have been the asshole I’d just bisected. I couldn’t help the smirk that crawled into my voice. “One. Killing him brought me up to level two just now.”

  The rooster-headed kaiju did a doubletake. “Level two? How long have you been playing?”

  I grinned and felt my kaju’s beak open, baring her fangs. “First time since the slime monster.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “Damn. Did you deliberately go for a PVP build or was that a happy accident?”

  “A what?” He sounded like a mechanic talking about a car part using that acronym.

  “Player versus player,” he clarified, and it sounded like he was smiling. “You don’t do much gaming, do you?”

  “I’ve never seen the point,” I admitted. “There’s always been enough to do without wasting my time. Got to admit though, this is pretty fucking fantastic.”

  He laughed. Harder than the comment warranted. I think my swearing both caught him off guard and amused him. That was something. It was the first time a guy had ever had a positive reaction to me spouting off obscenities. It did something to me. I couldn’t say what, but it crossed my mind that it might be nice to have a friend outside of Isabella who I didn’t have always be on guard with.

  Who in the game would know who I was? Here, we were monsters, and I was good at being a monster.

  I may not have been a gamer, but I knew that you didn’t just pick up a game and your first time out eviscerate a player five times your level. I’m smart. Always have been, but I had to work my ass off to keep at the top of the class and maintain my perfect GPA. Playing this game, being a monster, it all came so naturally to me. After a few weeks in Oxford, it felt like I’d come home. That’s exactly what this game felt like. I’d come home. I’d been freed to be my real self.

  Maybe, just maybe, this was the real outlet Dr. Warden’s people were trying to offer us. After all, if these other players were here, that meant that they had to have the same implants. Which they wouldn’t have been given if they didn’t also have anger-management issues. Here, we could be who we really were. Angry, powerful monsters with an entire world of cities to destroy at our leisure.

  “My kaiju’s name is Keuketon,” the newcomer said. “What’s yours?”

  I was about to tell him that I didn’t know yet when something grabbed me by the shoulders. The feeling was wrong. So very, very wrong. It made me feel fragile and soft, everything my kaiju wasn’t. I twisted about, lashing out with my talons, trying to slash whatever was attacking me.

  My fingers found something soft and warm. I was rewarded with the sound of a female voice swearing.

  Music blared in some kind of alert, and then I was in my bed. My kaiju, Keuketon, and the ruined city were gone, and I was left staring up at Isabella, who was shaking me by the shoulders.

  “What the hell, Isabella?” I demanded. My shoulders hurt from how hard she’d been squeezing me. I spotted red on her arm and realized she was bleeding. Had I done that? Damn, my head hurt. Probably because she’d been using me as her personal ragdoll for who knew how long. “You couldn’t just knock on the door like a normal person?”

  Isabella said something in Spanish that sounded like a lot of cursing. I’d managed to pick up a word or two from her and recognized a few words that made me want to punch her. Not that I was dumb enough to do so. Not just because she’s my friend, or because Daddy would kill me if he found out. Isabella could kick my ass without breaking a sweat. Fighting was what she did for a living. She literally locked herself in a cage with another woman, and they got paid to beat the ever living shit out of one another.

  Her tirade finally switched over to English. “Bitch, I’ve been knocking! I texted you. I called you. I came home ‘cause I got worried and knocked on your door. I shouted through your door. You know what I heard?”

  I had a feeling I was about to find out.

  “You! Snarling and growling and thrashing around like you’re on drugs.” She reached down and pried open one of my eyes wide. “Shit, you’re not on drugs, are you?”

  “No!” I slapped at her hand, and she let me go.

  “You sure?” she said. “Okay, good, then we need to get you to a hospital.”

  “A hospital? Why?”

  “Did you not just hear me?” she said, cursing some more in Spanish. “Chica, you were having some kind of seizure. Thrashing on your bed and trying to bite something. It was like the devil was on you or some shit.”

  She thought I was possessed? Right. Clearly, she was losing it. “All I was doing was playing a videogame,” I said. “You remember, the one I had to get the chip for?”

  “God, that was stupid,” Isabella said. “Who the hell gets surgery so they can play a videogame?”

  “It’s a new anger management device,” I said. “The game is just a feature. A tool to give me a release.”

  Isabella crossed her arms and leaned back away from me. “Look, you don’t want to tell me what’s going on, that’s your business. Just don’t lie to me about it.”

  Lie to her? Red suffused my cheeks. Anger rose inside of me, but…it wasn’t the raging tide I usually had to direct all my willpower toward controlling. It was still there, but it was just a part of me, rather than trying to take over me.

  “I’m not lying.” I held up my phone. “I was playing my game on the phone.”

  Isabella gave me a pointed look. “And you didn’t answer my calls or texts?”

  I glanced at my screen and saw the notifications. There were a lot of them. “You were really worried about me.”

  “Damn right, I was,” she said, then pinched the bridge of her nose. “Lu, your screen was blank when I came in.”

  I stared at her, not comprehending. “What do you mean?”

  She pointed at my phone. “The phone was dark. There was nothing on the screen. You were just staring at it and having a fit.”

  Could she be wrong? I looked at my phone. If I’d really been playing a game on it, then it should have been interrupted by her calls and texts, right? Phones were communication devices before anything else. I glanced down from the phone to the small scar at the base of my palm. What kind of game required surgery?

  I dropped the phone.

  I hadn’t been this scared when Dr. Warden showed up in my therapist’s office. Nervous, maybe. More angry than anything else. I hadn’t even been afraid when they were putting the chip in my hand.

  I was scared then.

  It swelled inside
my belly like an icy undertow, crashing against my insides and leaving me chilled. “Shit.”

  I could be impulsive. Oh, who am I kidding, I am impulsive. It’s a wonder I hadn’t caused a scandal for Daddy before now. Maybe even a wonder I was alive when you get down to it. That stunt I’d pulled with Irwin’s Ferrari could have gone so wrong.

  Now, I had a chip in my hand that was making me have seizures and see things that weren’t there. Holy shit, no wonder the game had felt so real. What all was that chip doing to me?

  For a moment, I was tempted to try cutting it out. We had knives in the kitchen. Sharp ones for cooking. I could dig this thing right out of my flesh.

  It wasn’t the thought of the blood or the pain that made me dismiss the idea. It was the thought of the scandal that would follow. If the media got hold of that they’d have a field day. I could see it now: Senator’s Daughter Attempts to Perform Home Surgery. Or they might take it as a suicide attempt. Wouldn’t that just take the cake?

  Fuck. What did it say about my life that I was more concerned about what people would think about me trying to get this chip out than the hallucinations it induced?

  Chapter Six

  The following week sucked.

  I was an irrational bitch, and the worst part was I knew it. I could feel myself getting angry for no reason over little things, feel the heat swelling in my chest, reverberating in my thoughts. Little things escalated into full on mental rants in my head where I’d imagine tearing into someone over a perceived slight. Not my usual murderous fantasies, either.

  I managed to keep myself smiling and presentable in public. I couldn’t have Daddy’s spies thinking anything was less than idyllic, but that was about all I was capable of. In the privacy of our rented home, I was cantankerous, moody, and snapped at the drop of a hat. In class, I couldn’t focus. It took everything I had not to slip into a resting bitch face.

  The whole time, all I wanted to do was pick up my phone, curl up in my room, and dive back into the game. I obsessed over the feelings it had elicited in me. The freedom and sense of power—everything I didn’t have. Everything I wanted. I’d catch myself daydreaming about my monster, my kaiju. Was she her own creature, or was she an extension of myself? I couldn’t kid myself into believing the whole of her existence was nothing more than a collection of data inside an implant or server. There was something too real about her and the experience of being her.

  I named her Halira. I spent way more time coming up with it than I should have. Enough so that it nearly made me late with homework. It was a mixture of the scientific name for rock salt and Latin for wrath. It seemed fitting, and I was pleased with it. Realizing I’d finally found a name for my monstrous angel was the best I’d felt that whole week.

  Isabella was a saint for the first few days before I drove her crazy and she started avoiding me. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t want to be around me either. I didn’t want to be me. I wanted to be Halira. I wanted to destroy everything around me. I wanted to be anything other than myself.

  The truth is, I never liked who I was as a person. I never liked myself period. Everything that was recognizably good about me was inevitably turned on me. It was why I worked my ass off for my scholarships, and why I’d selected the majors that I had. Freedom. Capability. Power. It would all come to that.

  That goal had been enough to sustain me before. It suddenly wasn’t, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. The need to play the game ate away at me. Consumed my focus and undermined me. The worst part was how easy I knew it would be to play again. Every time I looked at the screen of my phone, the game’s app was there, begging to be activated.

  You can’t function in today’s day and age, let alone as a modern college girl, without a phone. You just can’t. They practically rule our lives. I swear the movies have it all wrong about the robot uprising. It won’t be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator come to take us over, it will be our phones mind controlling us. I guess I was already there in a way with my implant.

  The week managed to both crawl and shoot by so that I was left wondering how it was already Thursday when my professor took me aside after class. She was being a good educator, had noticed that I hadn’t paid attention on Tuesday or today to her lecture, and wanted to know if anything was wrong. I wanted to scream at her. Despite my efforts, heat rose up into my neck and cheeks at her words, fueled by a mingling of shame and resentment.

  I didn’t need her help, and I was fucking fine. I was the best student in her class. I asked more questions than anyone else, got my assignments in on time, and maintained the highest grade. Where did she get off asking me if I was okay just because I hadn’t been participating as much in her last two classes?

  My phone chimed before I could say something stupid, and I glanced down, expecting to find a text from Isabella. There wasn’t one. In fact, there was nothing on any of my regular messaging mediums, but Kaiju Wars was there, front and center, with a little red circle in the corner, indicating an update.

  I hadn’t realized the game could do that sort of thing. Maybe I should have.

  I dragged my attention away from the phone and met the professor’s eyes. It was all I could do not to sound like a blithering idiot as I spoke. The red notification wormed its way into the fore of my mind. I willed myself not to glance down at my phone and managed to make some excuse that I’m sure the professor had heard a thousand times before from other students and ducked out of the building as quickly as I could with any measure of decorum.

  Once outside, I was able to stroll along with my phone out and not look any different than the countless other students with their attention glued to their devices. Even if it would have made me stand out, I don’t know if it would have made a difference. The red circle beckoned.

  I pressed my thumb to the app icon and a message popped up on my screen.

  Good morning Lusitania Church,

  I hope this message finds you well. It has been almost seven days since you last logged in to Kaiju Wars. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of our agreement. My backers would like to gently remind you of your potential earnings playing our game.

  There is a special mission waiting for you. Complete the objective, and you will be rewarded.

  The message went on to list an unreasonably large sum of money to pay someone for playing a game. Holy. Shit. Really? My mouth went dry.

  Then my stomach clenched into a knot. If that amount appeared in my bank account, there was no way Daddy wouldn’t see it. To say there’d be questions was putting it mildly. It could ruin everything.

  On the other hand, I understood the threat Dr. Warden was levelling against me. Satisfied with my continued freedom—the fucking blackmailing bastard. It would probably be even worse now if what I’d done to Irwin got out because it would look like Daddy had been the one to hide it. He’d be furious with me.

  Daddy didn’t get angry, really angry, very often. He was terrifying when he did.

  Not enough to stop me from doing what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to be under his thumb forever. I wouldn’t be some trapped little damsel waiting in his fucking tower for some knight errant to come and rescue me. Besides, in a way, I kind of had my own dragon now.

  I gritted my teeth for a moment before I caught myself and affixed my smiling, vapid mask back in place. Fine. The game wasn’t a game. The implant probably did a hell of a lot more than they’d told me it would do. Whatever. I needed to do what I needed to and that was all there was to it. Or so I told myself.

  I remember the emotions of my walk home more than the walk itself. I was angry, determined, and the walk seemed to stretch on forever. Despite that, I was home in record time. I called out when I walked in, but Isabella wasn’t there. Relief washed over me, followed quickly by shame for being relieved. I had nothing to be relieved about. Isabella was my friend, but she didn’t control me or determine what I could or couldn’t do. I’d had enough of that from
Daddy without handing that kind of power over to a friend. Her disapproval over the game didn’t change anything. Whether she was here or not, I had to take care of my obligation to play.

  I made my way to my room, got comfortable on my bed with a stack of pillows, and logged in.

  The main menu greeted me as soon as my thumb pressed the icon on my screen and Mr. Australia said, Welcome back, Miss Church. You have one friend request waiting for you in the HUB and Halira’s adjusted stats are ready for your viewing.

  It took me a moment to realize that Mr. Australia had called my kaiju by the name I’d given her in my head. I’d never logged back in to assign my monster her name. The game simply knew. Disturbing…but also kind of cool. Creepy as it was to have the implant monitoring my thoughts, it made me feel more connected to Halira, like she was more a part of me than not. That sense of connection made me happier than I’d been all week. It was like my chest swelled with the feeling, and I swear, I was a hair’s breadth away from feeling butterflies in my stomach.

  The friend request could wait, first I needed to check on my baby.

  She’d gotten bigger. If I hadn’t been obsessing over her so much, I don’t think I would have noticed, but she’d grown when she’d leveled up. That made sense. I’d googled “kaiju” and watched a clip from Pacific Rim on YouTube. They were supposed to be enormous monsters. My girl was big, but she wasn’t on the scale of the monsters from the movie. I felt myself grinning. Not yet. How big could I get her? I wanted to find out.

  I swear, Halira seemed to preen under my attention, twisting to better show off her crystals and talons. Look at me, she seemed to say, I’m beautiful and lethal and I’d love to wreck some shit with you again. That had to be how people who obsess over their dogs felt. My baby was perfect, and I couldn’t wait to take her out again.

  First though, I wanted to see what else had changed. I directed my attention toward her stats.

  Halira