The Player Plague

by Lucas Flint

  “To study it,” said Atmosfear. “And figure out how to put it to their own use, of course. Don’t look so surprised. It’s pretty much a given that our pals in Washington are always going to be the first to get their hands on whatever the newest and deadliest weapon of the week happens to be.”

  I pursed my lips, but I couldn’t say I disagreed with Atmosfear. It made sense that the government would want to get their hands on a biological weapon as powerful as the Z-Virus. Capes Online might not have been reality, but VR games were a huge staple of modern society now, so it made sense that the government would want to be aware of all potential weapons both in the game and out. And not necessarily because they wanted to protect their citizens, either.

  “Assuming you’re telling the truth, where did you get the Z-Virus from specifically?” I asked.

  “Easy,” said Atmosfear. “I got it from my contact in the Department, the guy who put me in here in the first place. He gave me the Z-Virus and told me to spread it as far and widely as I can. I was, of course, more than happy to be of service to my country and do exactly that.”

  I gasped. “But the original Department leaker, James Osaka, is dead. How could he have given you the Z-Virus?”

  “When did I say it was that guy?” said Atmosfear. He laughed. “That guy was framed, by the way. By my contact. Trust me, Nyle, my friend in the Department isn’t some low-level intern who is doing stuff behind his superiors’ back. My contact goes all the way to the top … well, top of the Department, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Are you talking about Director Johnson or someone else?”

  “Not telling,” said Atmosfear, covering his mouth with his hands like he had just told me a bad secret. “If I tell you who my contact is, he threatened to delete me outright. I’m a smart man and I know when to take someone’s threat seriously, even if they’re a stuffy federal government bureaucrat who takes real pleasure in forcing people to obey his orders.”

  I scowled. I should have known that Atmosfear wouldn’t tell me who his contact was, but the information he gave me was useful nonetheless. It meant that he could be tracked after all and that he was still in contact with the rogue agent. I didn’t know if Chuck was watching this scene play out or not, but even if he didn’t, I made a mental note to let Chuck know about this once this situation was over with. Hopefully, Chuck would be able to verify Atmosfear’s claims.

  “Why did your contact tell you to spread the Z-Virus?” I asked. “What is he trying to do?”

  “Again, none of your business,” said Atmosfear. “He just promised me my own eternal army of zombie slaves if I obeyed him. Always wanted a zombie army, so of course I said yes. ‘Course, I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter because of the whole delete my mind forever thing, but I like zombies, too.”

  My hands clenched into fists, but it was clear that Atmosfear was not going to tell me what I wanted to know. “Very well, then. If you’re going to keep your lips tight, then I’ll just have to beat you and give you over to the government. I’m sure the Department of VR would be intrigued to know about who the real leaker behind your presence here in Capes Online is.”

  “I’m sure they would,” said Atmosfear. “Assuming, of course, you can even stop me. Which your friends there might disagree with.”

  Before I could ask Atmosfear what he meant, the metal slab covering the door smashed open. I whirled around just in time to see my Teammates rush through the doorway. I was at first filled with excitement, thinking that reinforcements had finally arrived and that I was going to be saved.

  But then I noticed how pale their skin was … and how each and every one of their Infection bars underneath their names was 100% Infected.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Each one of my Teammates looked awful. At first glance, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary, but if you looked a little more closely, you could see the telltale signs of being a Z-Virus carrier. Their eyes were a deep blood red, while their skin was pale as snow and blood leaked out of the corners of their mouths. Their collective body stink could be smelled even from over here, smelling like rotting flesh and fresh blood. I would have gagged if I wasn’t already used to the stench from the last several Z-Virus carriers I had fought already.

  When my Teammates entered the room, they immediately attacked me. Brawn tackled me to the ground, while Funky and Dillo grabbed my arms and restrained me. Even Recover and Hop kicked me a couple of times in the ribs. I tried to fight them off as best as I was able, but they overwhelmed me with their combined strength and attacks.

  Soon, my Teammates had successfully captured me. Funky even summoned some weird energy chains to put around my wrists, a Power he did not offer an explanation for. Not that I needed one, however. When the chains were clamped around my wrists, I got this notification:

  Debuff added: Power Negator. All Active Powers negated as long as you wear these chains. Duration: N/A.

  My eyes widened in shock when I read that notification. Even if I had recovered enough Energy by now to use a Power, I wouldn’t be able to. I wondered if Power Negator was a status effect available to all Classes or if only Beastmasters like Funky could inflict it. Or maybe Funky was just that special and could get it because he was a Capes Online developer or something.

  In any case, Cy and I were both tied up and forced to kneel on the floor in front of Master Haru and Atmosfear. Atmosfear was leaning against the desk, his arms folded in front of his chest and a big grin on his face, with Giggles standing silently by him. Unlike Atmosfear, Giggles eyed my zombie Teammates carefully, probably because he didn’t trust them not to attack him and Atmosfear.

  “Good job, my loyal subordinates,” said Master Haru. He jumped over the desk and landed in front of me. “You have captured the main threat to our existence. For that, I must thank each and every one of you for your help.”

  My Teammates didn’t say anything in response. That was probably because zombies couldn’t talk. I found myself wondering how this was affecting my Teammates in the real world, though. If their characters were zombified, could my friends still log off or were they stuck in the game like back in the Blackout? If the latter, then the Z-Virus was even more serious than I first thought.

  Master Haru knelt until he was on the same level as me. His piercing blue eyes fixed on mine with the focus of a tiger on the hunt. “Tell me how you feel now, Hero Winter. Your own Teammates have betrayed you after I gave them the gift of immortality.”

  “Gift?” I said. I glanced at the mindless looks on my friends’ faces and snapped at Master Haru, “This isn’t a gift. It’s a curse. You’ve taken away their free will.”

  “And?” said Master Haru, raising an eyebrow. “I have delivered them from death and pain, the two greatest natural evils of the world. I wish to live in a world where no one is in pain or dies. Why else do you think I have all my followers take the Z-Virus and why I have been fervently spreading it as far and wide as I could?”

  “Because you’re a maniac who wants to take over the world,” I said. “That’s why.”

  Master Haru frowned. “You have been listening to Yamamoto, haven’t you? The fool. He is too bound by tradition and so-called honor to care about the future. Under his rule, the Ninja Guild has become hopelessly stagnant. It has no mission, no vision, nothing to guide the organization as a whole. That is why the Stalking Shadows are destined to replace it. My vision of a world where pain and death have finally been conquered shall eliminate any and all rival visions.”

  I bit my lower lip. Master Haru seemed sincere in his desire to rid the world of pain and death, but I wasn’t sure he really meant it. “It’s still wrong. Besides, my friends are players and Sidekicks. We respawn upon death. We don’t need ‘immortality,’ as you define it. Turning them into zombies actually makes them worse.”

  “True,” said Master Haru, stroking his chin. “You Heroes and Villains already have some form of immortality. And you and Atmosfear, in partic
ular, have an even more special form of immortality which is beyond what most players have. But what about us? Those you call ‘NPCs’? When we die, it is over for us.”

  I hesitated. Master Haru was right, however much I didn’t want to admit it. Players always respawned whenever we died, but NPCs couldn’t except for Sidekicks, and even then I was pretty sure that most Sidekicks lost their ability to respawn after they were fired by their player. I hadn’t thought to look at the whole death/respawn issue from the NPC’s perspective before, though.

  “That was my main disagreement with Yamamoto,” said Master Haru, averting his gaze to look down at the snow under our feet. “I saw this as the injustice it was. How just was it that we have to die once, while you Heroes and Villains can die and respawn as much as you want? Yamamoto told me that it was simply the way of the world and there was nothing we could do about it. But I have proved him wrong. I shall prove him wrong, once the Z-Virus has spread throughout the whole world.”

  “But SI Games will just reset the servers again if that happens,” I said. “Like they did the last time the Z-Virus got out of control.”

  Master Haru looked at me again, but this time with a very odd light in his eyes. “It’s clear to me you don’t understand the bigger picture here. Were what you said true, I would not even be attempting this. But the gods of this world are losing their grip over their own creation. Slowly, yes, but surely, as surely as sand falls between the gaps in a person’s fingers.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “This is just a game. How could SI Games be losing control over their own creation? You’re not making any sense.”

  “If you knew what I knew and saw what I saw, then you would not only agree with me but beg to join me,” said Master Haru. “A new world is coming, Hero Winter. One where the differences between us NPCs and you players will no longer exist. There is a new god in the world seeking to establish his order and he desires everyone, player and NPC alike, to join his cause.”

  Master Haru leaned in until only a couple of inches separated our faces. “Do you want to know why we haven’t killed you yet? It is because you are valuable. You defeated Dark Kosmos when no one else could. As the emissary of this new god, I can offer you a spot in his new world, where no one dies and no one feels pain. Do you accept it?”

  Without warning, a notification appeared in my view which read:

  MISSION: Join the New World

  Although Master Haru’s statements are cryptic and strange, you sense he might be telling the truth about this new god in the world seeking to take over Capes Online. The rise of the Stalking Shadows and the return of the Z-Virus is the first sign of change in the world. Will you accept Master Haru’s offer to join the new world being built in this god’s image or will you reject it, knowing you will make yourself a powerful enemy you might not be able to defeat?

  ALIGNMENT: Unaligned

  DIFFICULTY: Easy

  RARITY: Unique+

  SUCCESS: Accept Master Haru’s offer to join the New World

  FAILURE: Reject Master Haru’s offer to join the New World

  REWARDS: Immortality and a high ranked position in the New World that Master Haru’s god is building

  ACCEPT? Y/N

  Yet another mission from a Villain NPC? Maybe the world really was changing after all, just like Master Haru said.

  But I didn’t need to even think about it. I hit ‘N’ and said, “Sorry, Haru, but you’re going to have to try harder than that. I have no interest in joining any world order being built by a god who hires someone like Atmosfear to do his bidding.”

  “Hey, any god who likes me probably has really good taste,” said Atmosfear. “Just saying.”

  Master Haru, however, shook his head sadly. “I suspected you might reject my offer based on what Atmosfear told me about your character and your relationship with him. I thought he might be wrong and you might be more open to reason, but it’s clear to me now that I was gravely mistaken.”

  I smiled. “Well, what are you going to do to me, then? If you kill me, I’ll just respawn in my Base. There’s nothing you can really do to harm me.”

  Master Haru stepped up. “You are correct that there’s nothing I can do to hurt you, but there is something that one person can do to hurt you.”

  Master Haru looked at Funky. “Funky, please open up Winter’s character menu.”

  Without hesitation, Funky raised his hand and my character screen—the same one I had seen Chuck pull up when he enabled Kids Mode for me—popped up.

  “Turn off Kids Mode,” said Master Haru flatly.

  Again, showing no hesitation whatsoever, Funky went down to the button labeled ‘KIDS MODE’ and turned it off.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  As soon as Funky turned off Kids Mode for me, pain unlike any I had felt before wracked my body. I gasped and fell over onto the snow in pain, trying to scream and not scream at the same time as a new notification appeared before me:

  Kids Mode has been disabled. All swearing and violence censors have been turned off and EXP gain is no longer halved.

  Normally, I would have been overjoyed to see that notification, but now it filled me with dread and terror because it meant that there was nothing to stop my Z-Virus Infection from reaching 100% now.

  Even as I lay there thinking those thoughts, I could see the Z-Virus icon in my corner start to rise. 12% … 15% … 20% … 25% … it kept rising higher and higher, rising almost too fast for my eyes to follow. It seemed like the Infection rate was trying to catch up after being suppressed for so long by Kids Mode.

  The pain just got worse the higher the Infection rate went. It felt like someone was stabbing me with needles right in my eyes. My Painless debuff did nothing at all to mitigate it. Breathing became harder and harder. My head felt like it was swelling to twice its size. My fingers and toes became cold and numb. My limbs were rigid and unfeeling. My hair felt like it was on fire.

  But worse than any of that was the thirst—the hunger—growing deep within me. The thirst for human blood I had felt before was almost overwhelming now. I wanted to—needed to—taste human flesh. I found myself licking my lips uncontrollably, trying to stave off the deep desire for human flesh and blood growing within my very soul.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, my Infection rate reached 50% and suddenly slowed to a crawl. I lay on the floor, my face half-buried in snow, panting hard as the pain slowly began to subside, although I could tell it wasn’t going away, not entirely, and perhaps never would.

  “Boss?” said Cy beside me. “Are you okay, boss?”

  With a deep, shuddering breath, I opened my mouth to speak but found it too dry to form words. It took me a couple of seconds before I managed to utter, “It … hurts …”

  “Hmm,” said Master Haru, stroking his chin. “It looks like the Infection rate has stopped at fifty percent. I had assumed enough time had passed that the Infection would go all the way to one hundred percent when Kids Mode was disabled, but it appears I was wrong.”

  “That was freaky,” said Atmosfear. He crouched down and smirked at me. “You were screaming like a little baby there. Very dignified, like the donut you are.”

  I simply glared at Atmosfear, doing my best to communicate my hatred of him without using words. But then I felt a deep rumble inside my stomach and I suddenly wanted to bite his neck. Shaking my head, I realized that the hunger within me was powerful. Not powerful enough to override my sense of self just yet, but it would be soon enough.

  “What should we do with him, Haru?” said Atmosfear as he stood up to his full height again. “Kill him anyway, just to be sure?”

  “No,” said Master Haru, shaking his head. “Instead, I want him locked away somewhere until the Infection is completed. By my estimates, I would say that we need wait only one more day before the Infection has totally consumed his body, mind, and soul. Once that is done, then we can move forward with our plans to create a world without death and pain.”
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br />   Atmosfear snorted. “Sounds boring to me, but whatever. As long as you keep paying me as well as you have, I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Do not worry about that, Atmosfear,” said Master Haru with a slight nod. “I always pay well. After all, if it wasn’t for your chemical insight, then I would never have been able to do this in the first place.”

  “What can I say? I’m smarter than I look,” said Atmosfear with a shrug.

  “What about me?” asked Cy in a terrified voice. “Are you going to kill me, too?”

  Master Haru looked at Cy with a soft expression. “Do not worry, Cyclone. No one has forgotten about you. We will simply Infect you with the Z-Virus as well as your Hero. As I said, I seek to make a world without pain and death. I will not exclude certain individuals simply because they are—or were—my enemy.”

  Master Haru thrust a hand into his pocket and pulled out a vial with a bubbling black substance in it that I recognized, even without using Scan, as a Z-Virus sample. “Luckily for you, I can perform this action right now. I always carry a Z-Virus bottle on me for just these sorts of occasions.”

  Master Haru walked up to Cy. Cy immediately began trying to free himself, but he was being held by Brawn, whose massive, stone-like hands kept Cy in a tight grip that he simply wasn’t strong enough to break on his own. I tried to say something positive to Cy, something to calm him down, but the words caught in my throat. I now understood why so many Z-Virus carriers had a hard time speaking or sounded odd when they did. It seemed like the transformation and Infection messed with your vocal cords somehow. Perhaps they would return to normal once I got better, but somehow I doubted it.

  In any case, I needed to save Cy. I might not be able to save myself, but there was no way in heck I was going to let Cy suffer this same fate. I need to act and act fast, but how? The Power Negator meant I couldn’t use any of my Powers. My Energy had recovered somewhat, but it was still nowhere near full. Most of my Skills were basically useless with my arms bound. It seemed like I had no way to save myself or Cy. I could only watch as Master Haru lifted the bubbling sample of Z-Virus above his head and popped the stopper, which fell onto the snow without making a sound. Cy continued to struggle, but then Funky grabbed Cy’s head and forced his mouth open. The fear in Cy’s eyes made me angry, but I knew there was no way I could save him from my fate.