Level Zero

by Jaron Lee Knuth

“Turn,” I say, taking off the goggles.

  Fantom looks at me with panicked confusion. “What are you talking about? There's like, no where to turn.”

  “Turn now!”

  She looks at the cement barrier, blocking us from careening off the raised highway. Then she looks back at me. I give her a single nod of my head. She buckles her seat belt, and I do the same.

  Cyren yells over her shoulder into the back of the truck when she realizes what we're planning to do. “Everyone hang on to something!”

  The truck gets peppered by bullets from the armored vampires, and Fantom cranks the wheel to the left. The tires squeal, and we jump the divider between the four lanes. As soon as we land on the other side, Fantom stomps on the gas pedal.

  “Here we go!” she yells, locking her elbows, and bracing herself against the steering wheel.

  The delivery truck smashes into the short, cement wall. The impact throws me forward, and I watch hunks of gray rock go flying into the air. The view of the ground raises up into the windshield, and I feel us dropping. We're falling fast. We're tilted forward too far, and I know we aren't going to land on our wheels. It only takes a few seconds before we hit the road below us, the front of the truck crushing into itself. The windshield shatters, and I feel the tiny specks of glass fly into my face. With a horrible noise, the truck tips to the right and lands hard, finally coming to a rest, laying on its side.

  I blink a few times, trying to give my brain a moment to stop spinning. I hear moaning all around me. I see Cyren unbuckling Fantom from her seat belt.

  Cyren looks at me and says, “Are you okay? You still with me?”

  I nod.

  “Help me get them out of the truck,” she says. “Those vampires will be on us in no time.”

  I fumble with the latch on my own belt, but I eventually release myself and fall to the side. I crawl over my seat, into the back of the truck. Xen is curled up in the corner, unconscious, but Ekko is gone.

  “Where's the wooden boy?” I groan.

  The backdoor swings open, and I reach for my pistol, expecting a group of vampires to come rushing into the truck. Instead, I see Ekko standing outside.

  “Time to go, kids,” he says.

  “How did you-”

  He looks down, almost ashamed. “My lag. When we were falling, I shifted right through the truck.” He looks up, back toward the overpass we drove off. “We need to go. Now.”

  I grab Xen by his loose, orange wrappings and rattle him around, yelling his name. His bald monk avatar doesn't open its eyes. The thought of his death fills my head, and I'm almost paralyzed by it. I realize my role. I accept my guilt and the responsibility for him being in this world that wants him dead.

  Ekko tries to help me lift Xen off the floor. Cyren and Fantom climb past us and crawl out the back doors.

  “Hurry,” Cyren says, holding the door for me as I drag Xen's body from the truck.

  As soon as I'm in the street, I throw Xen's skinny monk avatar over my shoulder. “Let's move.”

  As we make our way from the truck and the highway, bullets crack the pavement around us. We all spin around and look up toward the overpass, where the barrier is broken from our truck. The squad of armored vampires hold submachine guns to their shoulders, the flare of their muzzles flashing. I feel rounds strike my leg, then my chest.

  “Run!” Fantom screams, using her magic ring to zip toward the gravel road that leads to the mountains.

  I jog with the group, Ekko and Cyren moving faster than me. I feel more rounds strike my back as I run. One hits my ankle and trips me up. My face plows into the ground, and Xen's body tumbles away from me. I roll onto my back, hearing the bullets striking the ground all around me. More hit me in the chest. I try to scramble away, but the bullets rain down, covering the entire area around me.

  Something inside me tells me to close my eyes and wait for the inevitable, but I refuse to listen to it. I keep pushing my heels against the ground, shoving myself away from the gunfire. Rounds continue to pelt my body like a thousand tiny gnats that won't stop biting. I know my armor will only hold up for a few more seconds, then those shots will eat away at my endurance rating. After that, I'll see the red color of impending death.

  Fantom steps over me. She raises her arm, and her energy shield appears over the top of me. Ekko stands next to her, launching grenades in between emptying magazines of bullets at our attackers.

  “Get up,” I hear Cyren say behind me, and I feel her hands hook underneath my armpits.

  The group came back for me. They're all risking their lives to make sure I don't lay down and die. I was reluctant to join them on this suicide mission, and here they are, turning around and running back for me within seconds.

  As soon as Cyren gets me on my feet, she runs to Xen, throwing him over her shoulder. I don't turn toward the vampires to look at them. Instead I follow Cyren up the gravel road, running as fast as I can. I only allow myself to glance backward once, to see if Ekko and Fantom are still with us. Thankfully, they are.

  Ekko is covering our exit with his rifle, but the gunfire from the vampires dies out. I picture in my mind the armored men dropping from the overpass, their undead speed carrying them down the road after us. I imagine being tackled to the ground from behind, teeth sinking into my neck. I imagine the endless dream that is about to become my life, the never-ending unconsciousness that my mind would fall into if my avatar were to die.

  The end of thought.

  The end of me.

  I see Xen's eyes blink a few times as his head bounces against Cyren's back. The jostling wakes him up, but his head turns from side-to-side, trying to take in his surroundings.

  “What, um... where are we?”

  Cyren stops for a second when Xen starts to fidget and sets him down on his feet.

  “Hey,” he says with a smile. “I leveled. A lot.”

  I run up to him and grab him by his orange wrappings, yanking him with me, trying not to slow down.

  “Come on,” I yell. “There's no time for congratulations.”

  And that's when I hear Fantom yell from behind me, and she's yelling the words, that at that moment, I fear the most.

  “They're chasing us, yo!”

  011010

  I can see them, far down the road. Multiple black figures moving fast. Faster than us. They zigzag up the street, changing their formation constantly. They don't fire at us, but they keep closing the gap. I don't have time to stop and look. I keep facing forward and running like everyone else. Running as fast as we can. I can hear the vampires hissing, even from this distance. The noise grows as they gain on us, and it sounds like a swarm of insects descending from the sky.

  “We're not going to make it,” Fantom says, and I think it's the first time I've heard her give up.

  “We have to,” Ekko says through his panting breath.

  “We can't outrun them,” I say, pulling my revolvers from their holsters. “We have to make a stand.”

  “They'll tear us to pieces,” Cyren says. “We can't fight them. It's over.”

  My brain is churning, trying to work out a strategy to stop them. I look at the forest ahead of us, and I wonder if we could lose them in the trees. But it's too far away. They'll be on us before we can reach it. I wonder if one of us was to sacrifice themselves, or if I injured one of the group members, could the others make it while the vampires attacked the one straggler. But there's too many vampires. They outnumber us at least two-to-one. My head swells as I try to force out some kind of plan, any kind of plan, before I die.

  Cyren looks just as panicked, and I can see her mind working as fast as my own. “Xen! What element do you wield?”

  “Fire,” he yells back, his hands bursting with the green flames of his magic.

  Her eyes light up and she points at the vampires, yelling, “Use it!”

  I see him stop running, and I know he's going to die. Even with all of the goblins that we killed, there's no way that Xen even reached
Level 10. I wonder if Cyren is sacrificing my friend for the good of the group, and I wonder if I disagree with her decision.

  “Xen! Run!” Fantom screams, but she's already unsheathing her sword and powering up her shield.

  “Don't worry, I learned a new spell when I hit Level 8.”

  “Your spells are too weak!” I yell, but he's not listening.

  I see the black figures, now only fifty yards from us. They'll cover that distance in seconds. Xen waves his arms out in front of him, raising a wall of green fire from the ground. He points his arms high into the air, and the flames rise with his hands, reaching twenty, then thirty, then forty feet into the air.

  I can barely see the armored vampires through the flickering light. They hiss and back away from the fire. The leader points to the sides, and I wait for them to simply make their way around the wall. Xen twirls his hands in a loop, and the wall of fire curls outward. The edges wrap themselves around the vampires, creating a circle to entrap them. The black-clad figures back themselves into each other, still hissing, but I hear fear in the noises they make.

  “He got that spell at Level 8?” I mumble to myself, looking down at my own revolver. “That's sort of unbalanced.”

  “That fire wouldn't do much to you,” Cyren explains. “But it's a weakness for vampires. They cant touch it, no matter how low the damage rating is.”

  Fantom runs up and hugs Xen, who is smiling and admiring his flaming creation. Ekko gives him a high-five. I think about telling him that I'm glad he chose fire as his elemental spell power, but then I look up and see the tips of the flames lowering, the spell already dieing out.

  “Let's move, people,” I yell as I continue my run up the road, not waiting for them to follow.

  I hear their footsteps behind me, and within minutes we're at the edge of the forest. The gravel road shrinks to nothing more than a wide dirt trail, bumpy and overgrown. I slow when I see a wooden sign with the word “DANGER!” crudely painted on it.

  “We should stay on the trail,” Ekko says, sounding like every other adult.

  I shake my head. “Actually, we need to do the exact opposite.”

  Even Fantom looks at me, confused by my strategy. I let out a heavy breath and try to explain my thought process. “Not only do we need to try and lose those vampires, but the trail is what the designers expect us to follow. That's where all the big, staged encounters are going to be waiting for us. If we wander through the trees and brush, we might move slower, but we'll probably only come across randomly-generated NPCs.”

  Ekko points behind us and says, “But we've already seen that the game isn't following the normal rules anymore, son. We don't know what's going to happen anymore.”

  “At least it's a plan. It's something. Do you have something better to offer?”

  He grits his wooden teeth in frustration with himself instead of anger with me, and says, “No.”

  “Then come on,” I say, stomping my way through the thick grass surrounding the tree line. “We don't have time to argue.”

  Once we get under the canopy of trees, the sun is almost completely blocked out. Thin streams of light break through here and there, but the darkness of the forest is spooky, even as we near midday. We try and stay as quiet as we can, but the brush makes it impossible. The crunching and thrashing of five players is hard to hide.

  I'm not afraid of the sounds we're making. It's the other noises in the forest that worry me. Howls, screams, rattling, clicking, the fluttering of wings, and the gurgling of something unpleasant. It's always off in the distance, a few yards in front of us or behind us. I'm wondering if the sounds are actually coming from NPCs or if it's all part of the programming of the forest. Did the designers add these effects to make the trees seem even more haunted?

  “We're moving too slow,” Fantom says in a hushed tone.

  It's the first thing anyone has said since we entered the forest.

  With a hesitant voice, Ekko says, “If we took the trail-”

  “Then we'd be fighting something right now,” I snap, “instead of moving forward.”

  Fantom's eyes shift around. “At this rate we won't reach the mountains until sundown. And like, the climb will take another day.” She looks at the ground and says, “I don't know if I have that long, yo.”

  “The human body can last weeks without food,” Cyren says. “Dehydration is your biggest worry.”

  The way she says it makes the idea sound cold, like she's reading the information from a medical journal. The look that Xen gives her is his standard disapproving gaze, and everyone else is stunned by her unsympathetic nature. I can see her shrinking away from them, being beaten down by their judgmental looks. She glances at me, to see if the unspoken attack is coming from me as well.

  That's when I realize that I empathize with Cyren more than I sympathize with Fantom. Cyren's stating a fact without getting bogged down in emotion. She's letting Fantom know that all that panic and worry is unfounded. She's using facts instead of pointless clichés about “hanging in there,” or “staying strong.” She's offering Fantom something of true substance.

  “Cyren's right,” I say, deflecting everyone's attention away from her. “Even dehydration will take you longer than a day or two. Your body might feel weak, but in here, that doesn't matter. Keep your mind focused, and you'll be fine.”

  Fantom pauses, considering what I just said, then nods her head and starts trudging through the brush again. Cyren smiles at me.

  “Thank you,” she whispers as she steps past me, her hand strapped with leather, touching my back for the briefest of moments.

  011011

  I'm caught up in thoughts of Cyren. I wonder how alike we are. I remind myself how little I know about her. I try not to fill in the blanks, instead appreciating what I do know. The social anxiety is something I can relate to. We could both use a partner to fight that battle. I feel this urge to pull her next to me and tell her I'll watch her back. I've never felt that way toward another player. I'm a solo player by choice. I watch my own back. And she probably doesn't want me to help her. She probably feels the same way that I do. She doesn't need my help.

  I hear Fantom yell, and I look up from my lost gaze. It isn't a scream of shock or pain, but one of anger and frustration. I run when I see everyone else running. From the back of the group I can't see what's happening. I rush through the overgrowth, pushing branches and leaves out of my way. Cyren is right in front of me, and walking in front of her is Ekko, who is following Xen. We all follow the trail that Fantom is hacking through the brush, clearing a semi-walkable path for all of us. I hear Xen let out a yell. I look past Cyren in time to see Ekko tossed into the air like the gravity just gave out. Cyren crouches down, and without her in front of me, I can see Xen and Fantom are gone as well. I spin on my heels, looking for the source of the attack. I look up, but all I see is movement. Every leaf is rustling and every branch is blowing in the wind.

  Except there is no wind.

  The trees are moving by themselves. As soon as I realize this, a vine shoots down from the canopy of leaves above me and wraps around both of my legs. It pulls to the side and trips me, but the vine is pulling so quickly that before I can slam into the ground, I'm yanked into the air. Branches whack me in the face as I'm hoisted fifty feet up. Leaves surround me, blocking my view, so I yell out.

  “Can anyone hear me?”

  “I'm here,” Ekko responds, sounding like he's only a few feet from me.

  “Me too,” Xen yells, but he sounds higher up and farther away.

  “Cyren?” I call out. “Fantom?”

  There's no reply. The vines are wrapped around my ankles tight, but I sense no other attack. I dangle there, feeling helpless.

  “Can anyone get themselves free?” Xen asks.

  I struggle to pull myself up to my ankles and slide my fingers under the coarse vine. I pull hard, but it won't budge.

  “Right about now, I'm wishing I would have chosen a knife as a weapon,�
� Ekko says.

  “No bayonet upgrade on that monster gun of yours?” I ask with a laugh.

  “I'm going to try and burn this vine,” Xen says.

  “Be careful!” both Ekko and I yell out, but only he follows it up with, “You're really high up, son. You don't want to fall from that height.”

  There's no reply, but over the chirping birds above me, and strange beastly sounds below me, I hear the faint crackle of fire. It only takes a few seconds, and then I hear a crashing sound and the loud yelling of Xen. The sounds of the skinny monk come closer, then pass me by, falling fast. I yell out his name, but it doesn't take long for him to hit the ground with a crash. I wait, saying nothing, holding my breath, trying to listen for any kind of noise coming from him. The seconds stretch on with nothing but silence. Then a faint groan rises from the ground.

  “Xen! Are you okay?”

  There's a long pause, then he says, “Yeah.” Another pause. “I think so.”

  I reach up again and struggle with my own vine, grunting with anger when I can't move them.

  “Arkade?” I hear far off to my right. “Ekko?”

  I recognize the voice as Fantom's, and I'm ashamed by how let down I am that it isn't Cyren's voice instead. The leaves are rustling, but I hear a crashing of branches coming toward me. I brace myself for some kind of attack. I reach for my pistols, but they're gone. My holsters are empty. I must have dropped them when the vines pulled me into the air. I cringe as the sound nears me, almost on top of me.

  And then I see Fantom's face break through the covering of leaves. She's hanging on one branch and her toes are balancing on another. Her sword lashes out with two quick swipes. The first slices the main vine, the second slides between my ankles, cutting me free. I drop, but my Anti-Gravity Belt lets me float back down to the forest floor.

  I look up to say thank you, but Fantom is already gone. I hear her jumping through the leaves toward Ekko. When I land softly on the ground, Xen is resting against a rock, rubbing his legs. He smiles at me when he sees me, and I give him a small wave.