by Devin Hunter
“Okay, makes sense.” Grey tried to remember how Ben said Tristan always sounded cranky. He wasn’t wrong so far. Grey would just have to take what he was given, but surely it would be better than the pistol he got last game.
“Jumping … now!” Tristan leapt from the plane. Ben and Grey followed right behind. They were high above the island, and the only way that Grey could tell where they were was the minimap. It said they were soaring over a crater called Dusty Divot—he recalled that was a place for tough fights, according to Finn. They released their gliders, and this was when Grey got to see that Ben and Tristan had also earned an umbrella-style glider instead of the default one he had.
That meant they had gotten one “Victory Royale” in their time playing. At least that was what it meant in the normal game.
Salty Springs looked like a neighborhood, one of the nicer ones, with big trees and spacious houses. Grey didn’t live in a place like that, but in a neighborhood with houses all squished together. He suddenly missed his home, realizing it would be a long time before he saw it, at this rate.
Instead of landing on the ground, they landed on the roof of a house, and they began to break it down to get inside. Grey felt a little stupid that he didn’t think of that last game—he’d just landed on the ground. But now that he thought about it, lots of videos he had seen started like this. His friend Finn had used the tactic, too.
“Do you have any practice fighting?” Tristan asked as they fell through the broken roof and landed right on a golden chest.
“Just what we did today,” Grey admitted as they opened it. “Only got to watch friends and streamers before.”
“So you know some basics at least. But we can’t even guess if you’re good at anything.” Tristan picked up the basic AR that popped out of the chest. “Can’t trust you to use it well, even if it’s basic. You can have it if I find better.”
“That’s fair,” Grey had to admit, although it was annoying to hear yet again. He wanted good loot to see what he could do with it, but he understood. If Ben and Tristan had better guns with better aim than he had, they all had a higher chance of surviving longer.
“We gotta move fast,” Ben said as they broke down another floor and escaped the attic. This room had ammo and bandages but no chest. “There’s usually a lot of loot in this house so don’t worry. Keep your eyes out for enemies.”
“Okay.” Grey did just that. He watched their back as the chests were opened and the loot was gathered. He got the “worst” of the gear, but he still had a rifle, pistol, and enough ammo and bandages to feel safer than in his first battle. He also had learned how to loot a house much faster—these guys had definitely memorized where and how to get to the good items.
What was even better, some players had already been eliminated somewhere on the map. That meant Grey already wasn’t the first eliminated. His rank would go up.
“Look over there at that other house,” Ben whispered, as if enemies could hear them. “What do you see?”
Grey peered through the windows, and for a moment he saw nothing. But then he realized there was a gap in the roof where it had been broken.
Just like they had broken in.
“Someone else is over there,” Grey said.
“Exactly.” Ben smiled. “Time to get some kills.”
“Any visual?” Tristan asked as he used one of the traps they’d found to barricade the door. Grey knew the trap would damage anyone who tried to go through the door or break the wall.
“Not yet.” Ben moved to another window, peeking out and moving back to avoid being shot or spotted himself. “Grey, check the other one over there.”
“Okay.” Grey moved to the window at the back of the living room where they had just finished looting the house. There were two windows, and he mimicked what Ben did to check for enemy players. Motion caught his eye. His heart raced faster and he ducked back behind the wall. “One back here! Maybe more.”
“Did they see you?” Tristan asked.
“Don’t think so.”
“Then take a shot!”
“Right.” Grey lifted his weapon and took a deep breath to steady himself. He peeked back outside the window and spotted the player hacking at a tree for materials. The player didn’t seem to be in a group after all. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger.
Numbers appeared above the player, first blue to show shield damage and then white for damage to the character.
Before he knew it, the player fell to the ground and their loot burst out of them.
You eliminated Kiri.
Grey could hardly believe it, but he had just eliminated his first player. He felt bad that it happened to be the girl just above him in the ranks, and yet that was how it had to be. She hadn’t been eliminated first that battle either, so at least they had both done better than before.
“Nice, dude!” Ben said as he came up behind Grey. “Let’s see what she had.”
They moved outside and looked over Kiri’s loot. It made Grey feel bad, but she had a really nice gun that he picked up. “I can have this right? Since I got the kill?”
Tristan took it himself. “No, I get it. You can have the basic AR. We can’t waste this ammo—there isn’t much.”
Grey wanted to argue, but there wasn’t time. He took what Tristan gave, since it was still better than what he had and there was plenty of ammo for it.
“We’ll have to find more,” Ben said. “Hurry, let’s loot the rest of this place and get some mats before this storm shrinks.”
“We’re in a bad position,” Tristan said. “It’ll be dangerous to get to the safe zone.”
Grey looked at the minimap, and sure enough, the indicated zone for the next storm was much further away from them than he’d like. If they got caught in it, they would take damage until they got to a safe area. Maybe they wouldn’t get eliminated right away, but it would leave them weak and vulnerable.
Grey beat down some walls with his new squad, and wood filled his supply slot. He’d never actually built anything, but he knew how important it was to learn how to build well. If you could make a structure fast, you often had the upper hand on your opponents. They also ran through the rest of the houses at Salty Springs, encountering another solo player who almost downed Tristan. Ben eliminated the enemy in time, though, and Tristan used a “chug jug” to fill his shield and life to full.
Before Grey knew it, there were only sixty players left alive on the map. It was a big difference from his last battle, and he was glad this would improve his average.
But the storm timer still counted down, and it felt like maybe they should get going. “How much loot do we need?”
“As much as possible,” Tristan said.
“Retail Row isn’t that far, but we need loot and mats because there are probably people there already,” Ben said.
“Right.” Grey wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was afraid of being caught in the storm. It seemed like a pretty embarrassing way to be eliminated, seeing as all you had to do was pay attention and not be in it.
They had one minute to get to the safe zone.
It didn’t feel like enough time, and as they left Salty Springs and headed for the outskirts of Retail Row, the purple haze of the storm came upon them. Grey began to panic as he took damage, even though it was only one tick of health at a time. All their health dwindled as they ran, which would have been bad enough, but then Grey heard shots fired.
“Ugh!” Ben had taken a lot of damage from the storm, and now he’d lost his shield due to the enemies shooting at them. They tried to take cover, but Ben fell to the ground and could only crawl unless they tried to revive him.
Which would definitely get them all killed.
“I’m done for—hide!” Ben said as his character took another shot and was down permanently, his loot scattered all around his body.
Ben was eliminated by Sandhya.
Grey and Tristan were still in the storm, and the enemies fired on them from the safe
zone. They ducked behind a small hill, and Tristan built a ramp for them to get up a safer way and out of the storm.
But it was too late.
The other players had their location and they shot at them relentlessly. Grey fired back like Tristan did, but the shots they landed weren’t enough when they both had such low health from the storm. Grey went down, and Tristan right after.
Hazel eliminated Grey.
Hazel eliminated Tristan.
Their loot spilled from their bodies, and the victors did a dance before they took what they wanted and moved on. So Hazel was doing as well in this second game as she had in the first. And clearly she had joined someone’s squad.
Grey could only hope he’d someday get payback.
CHAPTER 6
Though Grey was eliminated, it felt a lot better to be at rank 57 for that battle, rather than at 100 like last time. And, what was cooler, a screen popped up in his vision showing him what rewards he’d been given for his new average ranking. With an average rank of 78, he had earned a checkered backpack and blue color for his avatar’s glider. They weren’t as cool as the ones that Ben and Tristan had, but it was something.
Grey appeared in the same place he had been when the battle started—in the practice area with Ben beside him. Nothing had changed about the area around them. The sun was still in the same position, as were the clouds. The only change he could see was that the things people had built in the practice area were gone. The area must have reset between each battle.
Ben had a big grin on his face. “See? We did better together!”
“Yeah.” Grey smiled, too. “That was fun.”
Tristan was still walking ahead of them, and he didn’t come back to comment. Instead, he kept walking back to the practice warehouse.
“Your average rank probably jumped a lot, right? Get any skins?” Ben asked.
“A backpack and a glider color,” Grey said. He couldn’t wait to try them out in the next game.
“Cool. You also get them when you stay in the same ranking average for a certain number of games,” Ben said. “Like, if you’re ranked between 50 and 60 for twenty games, you get new stuff.”
“Nice.” It wouldn’t be easy, but Grey didn’t feel nearly as hopeless about getting home this season as he had after the first game. And he wanted to help Ben and Tristan rank up, too. They had been here so long and deserved to go home. They were nice enough to help him out instead of helping themselves.
“What’s the highest you’ve ever been ranked?” Grey asked.
Ben didn’t look too happy about it when he said, “Yeah, I’ve never gotten much higher than a 50 average. But it’s really hard. We’ve won games before—we’re not, like, that bad—it’s just you have to always get close to winning to get a high average and that’s nearly impossible. Except for Tae Min. That guy … is a god. No one can keep up with him.”
“Tae Min?” Grey hadn’t looked closely at the leader board last time he was by it, only at his own rank and a couple others. But the name was familiar. Grey was pretty sure that was the person who eliminated Hazel in the first game.
“Yeah, he’s a weird dude. He’s been here since the beginning, like me and Tristan, and he gets a ton of Victory Royales and is always the top player for most of the season.” Ben and Grey had arrived back at the practice warehouse, and Ben swapped out new weapons to practice with. “But right at the end, he takes a bunch of losses on purpose—like rank 100 losses—and he ends up not being in the top five. He could have gone home every season, but it’s like he doesn’t want to.”
“Why not?” Grey couldn’t imagine wanting to stay in here for a year. While playing a few games in real virtual reality had been cool, he already missed his home and friends. He also hadn’t seen any food, and it felt like he would be missing that soon, too.
“No one knows. Tae Min sticks to himself.” Ben looked over the wall of weapons, his usual high energy waning. “People try to talk to him once they figure out he’s so good. They ask him to be in a squad, but he always turns everyone down and does it on his own. Me and Tristan asked him way back in our first season, but he said he didn’t need people holding him back. That was the last time I asked, though Tristan has a few more times.”
“Holding him back?” Grey thought that sounded overly confident. “So he’s kind of a jerk.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Ben let out a long sigh and ended up putting all his weapons back. “But I don’t know for sure. He’s not like the people here who make fun of others or trash-talk a lot. Or the people who brag all the time, even though he is better than all of them. He’s just quiet. And every time he tanks his own score …”
“What?” Grey insisted when he realized Ben wasn’t going to finish his sentence.
“Someone you would never think would make it to the top five starts winning every battle and they shoot up.” Ben shrugged. “I can’t prove it, but it’s sorta like Tae Min picks a person to take his spot. Someone he thinks deserves it, though they could never get it on their own. I don’t know how he teaches them to win so fast, but I swear he does. So I can’t really call him a jerk, though maybe he is. He’s just Tae Min.”
Grey nodded. He didn’t know what to make of this new information, but he did know he wasn’t just a noob in Battle Royale.
He was a noob in this virtual world, too. And that seemed just as dangerous.
With only one hundred players always fighting against each other and no one else, things were bound to get complicated outside the battles as well. A lot of these people probably had history with each other. Rivalries. Alliances. Friendships. He thought about how the Admin had said this was a “social experiment.” Grey was starting to see just how true that was.
He also wished Tae Min would pick him. How lucky would that be? If the top player for five seasons helped him, that would be the surest way to get out. But it didn’t sound like Grey could convince Tae Min … it sounded like Tae Min was the one who chose, and no one knew the criteria.
“Okay, enough drama!” Ben declared. “Just how much did you play before you got sucked into the game?”
“It was literally my first time logging on,” Grey admitted. “I’ve watched my buddy Finn play, but my parents wouldn’t let me until the end of the school year.”
“Gotcha. Well, you have decent aim, that’s a good natural skill. Let’s work on trap strategies before the next battle. It can be handy in tight places like those Salty Springs houses.” Ben stood up and grabbed some traps.
Grey did, too. “Sounds good. Where’s Tristan?”
“Probably sulking. Or asking to be in a new squad,” Ben said. “He does that a lot.”
This surprised Grey. “That doesn’t bother you?”
Ben paused before he answered. “A little, but it’s not personal. He really wants to get out. I think he misses Germany a lot more than he’ll ever say out loud. He actually wasn’t much of a gamer—he was a competitive rock climber.”
“Really?” Grey couldn’t picture it, but it was hard to imagine what any of the players did outside the game.
Ben nodded. “He told me one night early on, when he was really homesick. He said he was going to miss the juvenile championship or something, and he was supposed to win.”
“That sucks.” Grey suddenly felt bad for Tristan, even if he hadn’t been very nice so far. Grey’s life was pretty average—it would be horrible to miss something cool like that.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “So sometimes he tries to get in a better group, but squads only recruit when they feel like it, not when others ask. Tristan comes off desperate … he is, and he always comes back without a new squad.”
Grey didn’t know what to say to that.
“He’s not a bad guy, either,” Ben went on. “You gotta realize everyone here wants out. Except maybe Tae Min. We try to be friends, but in the end we’re all fighting each other, you know? I can’t be mad at Tris for wanting to find a better chance at leaving. Sometimes it makes me feel like
crap, but I get it.”
“Why don’t you try to get in a better squad like he does?” Grey asked.
“We just have different ways of thinking.” Ben handed Grey a bunch of traps. “You see, I figure if I practice my butt off and get to be an amazing player, then people will come to me asking me to join them. Maybe I’m just not good enough yet, you know? Tris thinks we’re good enough, but that people are sabotaging us. He tries to work the system. In the end, it’s probably somewhere in the middle. But this is the best I can do, you know?”
Grey thought about this for a moment. “I guess I think more like you. I need a lot of practice, and then I’ll get better and win.”
Ben smiled. “See? I knew that the moment you showed up here. Lots of people think it’s all luck and not practice, so they don’t come here at all. But let’s prove them wrong, okay?”
“Yeah, totally.”
And so they practiced laying traps. Ben showed Grey how, if he looked closely, he could see the borders on the wall or floor. He said enemy traps glowed yellow and friendly ones glowed blue. Lots of new players wouldn’t pay attention, but it could save Grey’s life and ranks. He was glad to learn, because he’d never noticed that about traps before.
Then they played the rest of the games for the day. They didn’t do better than that second game, but they didn’t do terribly, either. Tristan got the most eliminations of everyone and actually had precise aim. He could also build faster than Grey could even think. Grey could tell Tristan had been working hard to get home.
After the fifth and final game of the day, Grey appeared in the main warehouse with the rest of the players. It was odd because he was in a line, not next to Ben or Tristan, but next to people he didn’t know.
No one moved, so he figured he should stay there.
The Admin appeared. “First day battles have ended, and these are your final rankings for the day. Please also see the board for your sleeping quarters assignments, which will be permanent for the season. To maintain fairness, all persons are expected to be in bed at ten and to rise at eight. Anyone found outside their cabins after ten will be penalized by losing rank. Other than that, you are free to mingle and practice until then.”
