by S. W. Clarke
Hard footsteps—running steps—approached. Her fingers closed around the shaft of the arrow and she rolled left of the spot where the player had been. An axe landed there, and the two massive hands that held it now raised it again. That was the sight that Veda would see before her death: the helmeted, squat face, the red eyes, lower incisors jutting between the lips, the green-skinned arms that lifted the axe above her, eyes that didn’t process her as a living, frightened thing—just prey. Prey that raised the arrow in front of its chest, bloodied tip out, a ward or an offering against what was to come. Then the axe cut her clean through the neck.
Veda felt nothing, but she heard the crisp separation. Her health blipped to 0/50. The sky swung up and away, and for a fading moment she spotted the trees and someone running toward her. Then she was in blackness.
Sicora’s voice eased through her mind. “Hello, Veda.”
Hello, Sicora, she thought with strange detachment. I died, didn’t I?
“Yes—you’ve experienced your first death. In this level, you can respawn once more. Resurrection occurs in ten seconds.”
And then the countdown began.
At the end of it, Veda fell to her knees, whole again, her face a rictus of pain. She gasped, hands scrabbling at her neck. She couldn’t get a full breath, her lungs and throat closing off every time she tried. Silverfish appeared at the corners of her vision and her hands were over her chest; her heart struggled like a bird inside her. She sobbed, her voice coming in hiccups until hands closed at either side of her face and someone appeared before her.
“You respawned. You’re okay.” Amy Park’s voice. She had eyes like almonds. “Slow it down—you’re hyperventilating.” She gripped Veda’s shoulders. “You got unlucky and spawned in the field.” Behind Amy’s black hair, Veda saw they knelt near the treeline that had appeared so far away. The field beyond sounded like a charnel house.
“Tell me when you’re ready,” Amy said. “We need to get off the ground.”
Veda’s vision was clearing, her breath slowing. “I watched a player die. I felt the life come out of him.”
Amy nodded. “Won’t be the first time.” Her eyes weren’t unsympathetic, but she pulled Veda to her feet. “Come on—up this tree.”
Veda followed her to a tree trunk where, with quick precision, Amy scaled the bark. Her dark hair was cropped tight to her head, just cresting her ears. She was shorter than Veda thought, her limbs sleek and muscular under the simple cloth she wore. Veda glanced down at her own body, realized that she, too, wore only a cloth chestpiece and pants. Worst of all were her boots: flimsy leather without tread on the soles.
“What are you waiting for?” Amy called down.
Veda had never climbed a tree, but she didn’t have a choice. She set her hands to the trunk—and for the first time, she realized how acute every sensation was, how real and responsive—and began to climb.
It was about as difficult as she’d imagined: her feet slid over the bark and her biceps cried. Once she’d climbed to the first branch, Amy reached down, helped Veda the rest of the way. They sat about six feet off the ground. In the field beyond, the battle continued; Veda had begun to recognize the orcs’ strange, guttural calls.
“Up here,” Amy said, and she helped Veda to another branch. They were now a good twelve feet from the ground, and Amy swung one leg over, leaned forward. Somewhere she had acquired a bow and quiver, brought the wood curve to bear on the scene that lay ahead. One of the orcs had strayed into her view, its back to them. This one was taller than the one that had killed her, a little lankier of build with a topknot of black hair. It was in the process of nocking a fanged bow with the kind of expertise that rose the hairs along Veda’s spine.
Amy’s bow creaked as she pulled the string to her cheek, held her breath, let fly. Her arrow sailed left and high, landed in the grass some three feet short. The orc’s face shot up and he brought the bow around, searching the forest.
“Shit,” Amy whispered, ducking low to the branch. “Get down.”
Veda clung to the tree. A moment later an arrow whistled by, ate into the bark behind her with twanging certainty.
Amy sat up, yanked another arrow from the quiver. The orc eased its way toward the trees, an arrow already set to the curve, waiting. He spotted Amy, and they both dropped low; the arrow lodged in the underside of the branch, set the branch vibrating under Veda’s legs.
“Come on, uggo,” Amy whispered, nocking. The orc edged closer. It stood almost directly beneath them, the vicious arrowhead tipped up toward Veda. That was when Amy angled the bow straight down alongside the branch, and very nearly let the arrow fall into the orc’s mouth. It was a perfect drop, and the creature fell without a noise, the shaft sticking upright from his face.
Veda stared at the orc, lifted her face to Amy. “How did you do that?”
“Orcs are dumb,” Amy said, shifting around on the branch, “that was a gimme shot, even for my just-learned-archery ass.”
“What do you mean, ‘just learned’?”
“I mean I learned the archery skill about ten shots ago,” Amy said. She had just lifted the bow in demonstration when an insect’s buzz sounded. A silver point whisked through the trees, found its home in the soft space where Amy’s shoulder and chest joined. She jerked hard, lost her grip on the branch. Veda reached out, but she was already falling, falling to the forest floor. She landed with a grunt and a cry, the arrow’s dark feathering jutting from her shoulder toward the canopy.
A twin bolt seamed the air, lodged in the branch next to Veda’s face. She lifted her eyes; a second orc stood at the treeline. This one stood shorter, broader, clearly a crackshot with the crossbow in his hands. Veda clung to the branch, glanced down to where Amy and the dead orc lay starfished on the forest floor. The fanged bow had fallen only a foot from the tree.
Six
The orc began his approach, affixing another bolt as he went. He was practiced with those clawed fingers, and Veda had about ten seconds to descend twelve feet. Here, she thought, was her crude introduction to depth perception.
She shimmied off the branch, her shoes sliding over the trunk as she tried at first to climb down but soon ended up raking her way along the tree, bark splintering under her fingers as she briefly caught the lowest branch to slow her fall. It worked: she managed to swing herself off the branch, landed hard on her feet.
A prompt flashed in the corner of her interface:
SKILL GAINED: Climbing, Lvl. 1. Congratulations, tyke! You’ve started exploring the world in 3D. At this level, you can manage what generally passes for upward motion.
She willed the screen away; this wasn’t the time to be managing her notifications—especially not ones with Sicora’s patronizing flavor text.
Another bolt hit the trunk, and bark sprayed from the spot she’d just been. Her hands clawed the ground for traction, shoes slipping over the leaves. She scrambled toward Amy and the dead orc, her hand just landing on the fanged bow when the orc let a guttural laugh—a victorious laugh.
She heard sprinting steps over the leaves, maybe a second orc coming for her. Veda’s eyes flicked up, spied the bolt aimed at her face, heard the depression of the crossbow as the orc loosed his fourth shot. And because she had spent her whole life not seeing, Veda squeezed her eyes shut.
She didn’t die. Someone slid over the ground in front of her, and a hollow thump sounded atop the leaves. The bolt struck wood some five feet away, and Veda’s eyes opened.
“Get the bow.” That voice: soft, low, certain. It was half strange, half familiar. Why did she know that voice? Before her knelt a young black-haired man, his head lowered behind a tall shield he’d driven into the ground. His green eyes were on her. After a moment, his nameplate appeared:
The guardian. Prairie’s closest ally, the one who had died in the third world to save her. And now he had saved Veda.
He hefted the shield with a grunt, started fast and hard toward the orc. Gale
n slammed into the creature and they both went over, the orc sprawling wide, the crossbow dropped. The two commenced a vicious scrabble on the ground. “Shoot him!” Galen yelled. He had pinned the orc beneath his shield, was laid bodily atop him. He clearly weighed less than the orc, and it was only the shield and the element of surprise that had given him a diminishing edge.
Veda’s eyes flicked to Amy, who had just snapped the shaft of the arrow from her bloody shoulder. Veda knelt, grabbed up Amy’s bow. She had no idea how to hold it, how to shoot. Nock, pull, loose. That was what Prairie had told her about archery, and they were the only three words she could keep in her mind. Her hands were full of splinters, throbbing and bleeding, but she managed to slide an arrow from the quiver on Amy’s back and, approaching Galen, nocked with shaking fingers.
She stepped up to them, pulling the string tight by her cheek. The orc’s eyes were red, and it spat something foul into Galen’s face. It had nearly gotten out from under his shield, one clawed hand now grasping the edges of his shirt. The nameplate appeared:
Pull. she thought, bringing the string to her cheek. It felt fat and greasy under her fingers, oiled with use and smatterings of blood, but she held tight. She closed one eye as the bow reached its full tautness.
Loose. Veda let the arrow fly. It sank into one eye, drove the orc’s head straight down with a thud. The green hand reached once more, sank. Only the left leg twitched, twitched, finally went still.
A prompt appeared in her interface:
SKILL GAINED: Archery, Lvl. 1. Welcome to a world of tiny sticks and strings! Hey, you shot an arrow or two. Keep on keeping on, and soon they’ll be good for more than cleaning your fingernails with.
Sicora, Veda thought with gritted patience, please auto-minimize all notifications. And though the AI didn’t respond, Veda knew as soon as the prompt disappeared that she had been understood.
Galen rolled off the orc and onto his back, breathing hard. He’d taken a gash across his forehead, blinked green eyes toward the canopy through the blood that trickled down.
“Good shot, rook,” came the faint voice. That was a dying voice. Amy.
Veda spun, dashed toward her. She slid to her knees, hands hovering over the bleeding shoulder. The bloom had grown large, and it had grown fast; already the blood pooled among the leaves. Probably the arrow had hit an artery. “I’m going to make a tourniquet,” Veda said. She knew simple first aid from her time in formatory. And later, Prairie had learned tourniquets in training. “They’re for tying off blood flow from a wound,” she’d said. “Tie them tight. You can use any cloth.”
She glanced down, one hand going to the sleeve of her own shirt. That would do. She ripped it from the seam, wrapped it around Amy’s shoulder, pulling tight. The girl’s lips had gone pale, and she gazed in a kind of delirium. “I’m dying,” she said, very quiet.
“No—no, no, no,” Veda said, pressing her hands to the wound. But the blood had already seeped through the fresh cloth, and Veda’s fingers squelched with it as she pressed. “How many times have you died?” She tipped Amy’s face toward her. “Is this your first?”
Amy’s eyes had grown vacant. Her face began caving into itself, wasting to pixels. She dissolved into Veda’s hands, which staunched the wound until her fingers dropped all at once to the ground. Even the blood disappeared, the pool of it filtering in dribs and drabs into the air until it was as though she hadn’t bled at all. That fast, Amy was gone. Veda breathed hard, searching the ground like she could find her there. The spot where she had lain was still warm.
“She’ll respawn,” Galen said.
Veda stood, lifting the bow and quiver. She turned to him. “Are you sure?”
He nodded, raising himself onto an elbow. Blood dripped off him. “She would have fought harder if that was her last life.”
She stepped toward him. “What about you?”
Galen set the shield upright to leverage himself to his feet. He swiped his hand across his eye and began working the bolt out of the shield’s front. “45 health. Barely touched me.”
Her eyes unfocused, settled on her own health in her interface: 46/50, probably thanks to that drop from the tree. Veda slung the quiver and bow across her back. When she approached him, she made yank away the remaining sleeve of her own shirt to wrap around his head wound, but he stepped away. “No time,” he said. “We have to get deeper into the forest.”
“What about the others?”
He inspected the head of the bolt he’d removed from his shield, slotted it into the quiver the orc had left. He picked up the crossbow, anchored the tie across his chest and the bow on his back. “What do you mean?”
“The other players. They’re being slaughtered.” As though on cue, a cry rose in the far distance behind Galen, caught short. Another death.
His eyes crinkled through the blood with something like amusement. “You’re an odd one.” He slung the shield over his back. “You’ll die if you go that way.” There was no question in those words.
Veda turned back to the field. Through the trees, the sun’s white light spun the grass to gold. “Amy might have respawned out there.”
“She can handle herself—trust me,” Galen said over his shoulder. “Anyone out there who isn’t making for the trees isn’t going to last long anyway.”
Veda turned, started after him. “If you don’t care about the other players, then why did you help me?” The muscle of his jaw twitched; he kept on. They cut further into the trees, the sounds from the field fading behind them. “Does it have something to do with Ringer?” She avoided saying her sister’s real name after Amy had been so evasive.
Galen, too, was unresponsive, his only reply the crackle of leaves underfoot. He didn’t stop, didn’t acknowledge she had spoken. So he, too, didn’t—or couldn’t, Veda suspected—talk about her. As evidence, he kept his pace. Finally, he said: “They’re a bunch of cutthroats out there. Don’t look back.”
Cutthroats. Amy had used that word. How could they know the hearts of twenty-one people? Veda hardly knew what lay inside her, much less anyone else. But because the memory of her own cleft head still circled her consciousness like a vulture, and Amy had told her that she needed above all else to survive—had died to keep her alive—Veda followed Galen Cole into the forest.
They walked in silence, deep and deeper into the trees, and Veda found precious time to inspect her interface. She had already discovered that it operated according to her impulses, so that when she wanted to see more than the brief stat readout she had been shown on entering the level, an entire character sheet appeared before her—including a tiny, rotating model of herself.
It was the first time Veda had seen her own image. She stared hard at herself in miniature, at the mass of red hair, the long, thin limbs. She had freckles. She’d been told this, but didn’t have any concept of how they actually looked: like crumbs across the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Her eyes were a startling, gem-in-sunlight green, and they stared back at her with unabashed clarity.
Around the model, three gear slots were occupied by Simple Cloth Shirt, Simple Cloth Pants, and Simple Boots. If she inspected her clothes, they showed very little in the way of stats: 1 Armor Class and nothing else.
“What’s armor class?” she said to Galen, her eyes unfocusing from the interface.
“It makes you harder to hit,” he said, his eyes ahead. And when he didn’t offer any other explanation—that kind of brevity didn’t deserve a thanks—she returned to her inspection of her interface.
She had an inventory with ten slots, which—based on the name—she figured operated like storage. And since she had nothing but the three pieces of cloth and the staff, every slot sat wide and empty.
Most interesting of all, when she focused on her vital stats at the top left corner, her full character sheet sat unspooled:
NAME: Veda Powell
CLASS: Unknown
HEALTH: 50/50
MANA: 50/50
AC: 3
STRENGTH: 5
STAMINA: 5
DEXTERITY: 5
INTELLIGENCE: 5
WISDOM: 5
CHARISMA: 5
SPELLS: None.
ABILITIES: None.
SKILLS: None.
PYRO POINTS: 0.
She was broadly familiar with the concepts of strength, stamina, dexterity, and so on. It seemed logical to Veda, for instance, that if her strength was measured on a numeric scale, then by somehow increasing her STR from 5 to 6, she would become incrementally stronger. But there were two stats she was uncertain about: she knew wisdom pertained to being wise, and intelligence to being smart, but she didn’t know how those translated to a game. “Galen, what’s the difference between wisdom and intelligence?”
He seemed put-upon, his fingers inspecting the cut on his forehead. “Basically, wisdom is for healer types, and intelligence is for pure caster types.”
“What are the different types?” she asked.
He flashed surprised eyes on her. “Have you played a game before?”
She shrank, falling back a step. “Not this kind. I’ve mostly just worked with AI.” And by mostly, she meant strictly.
“What kind of AI?”
“Fast food automation,” she said, struggling to keep her eyes off the ground. Why should she be so ashamed, anyway? People loved fast food—she knew she certainly did. And working with their AI wasn’t simple, either. If only Galen knew about 88251 and the line of code she had to fiddle with every day.
Used to fiddle with. She wasn’t a fast food admin anymore, a weird truth that surprised Veda every time she remembered it.
