by Deck Davis
Rynk smiled. “Don’t kid yourself, gal. We broke up because I had places to be, people to see, things to—” A sharp prod and an even sharper stare from Glora forced him to shut up.
I needed to do something here. The battle hadn’t even started, and we were already fighting each other. At this rate, we’d end up killing each other before we hit the ground. We needed a plan. First, I had to calm them down. “There’s something in what Rynk said,” I told Glora. She glared at me, so I added, “Think about it. If he had sold us a map knowing it was wrong, he would also have known that we’d find out as soon as the zeppelin crossed the sea.”
“I’m tellin’ you, Harry, don’t trust him.”
“I wouldn’t have, but you vouched for him,” I said. “Remember? You bought the map from him.”
“And it turns out ‘fool me twice, shame on you,’ isn’t right when it comes to me,” said Glora. “How many times have I gotta make a mistake with this piece of crap?”
“C’mon, guys. Focus. Actions now, recriminations later. Rynk, where did you get the map from?” I said.
Rynk leaned back against the railing, seemingly oblivious to the gut-wrenching fall to the ground behind him. He stretched his legs out and crossed his feet in a pose of utter relaxation. “I know a girl who can get into Overseer Jericho’s assistant’s computer,” he said.
Overseer Jericho was a New Eden VBR overseer. The trio was made up of him, Sternbuck, and Lucas.
“Is your contact a hacker?”
“She has other means of getting access,” said Rynk. “She gets access by giving access, if you catch my drift.”
“I’m not with you,” said Eddie.
“I mean, she—”
“That’s enough. Eddie, I’ll explain the ways of the world later. So, Rynk, you got the map from this woman. It must have come from Jericho’s assistant’s computer. So…why is it the wrong one?”
“Maybe it was right at the time,” said Glora, with resignation in her voice. “If I have to give Rynk benefit of the doubt… Maybe the overseers swapped the map. They can do that within an hour of the battle; they aren’t required to inform any of the fighters where they’ll be battling. They just have to allow enough time for the gel-techs to get to work.”
I nodded. “Sounds plausible. The overseers chose one map, then swapped it at the last minute. But why?”
“Call me suspicious,” said Eddie. “But aren’t you enemies with a certain Overseer Lucas?”
I considered what Eddie said. I considered it so deeply I could feel my eyebrow arching. “How could he have known that we’d gotten a copy of the map?”
“Someone could have told him,” said Eddie.
I didn’t know what to say to that; neither did Rynk or Glora. The implication was that someone had informed Overseer Lucas that Team Perlshaw had gotten a copy of the battle map. But who would do it? Who could have done it? When we’d looked at the map, we’d kept the dorm room door shut. Although the girl with access to the map had sold it to Rynk, she wouldn’t have known who he was going to sell it to.
That left a worryingly small list of people who knew: me, Eddie, Rynk, Glora, and Wolfy. Was this all a coincidence, or was someone a traitor?
“We’re near halfway across the map,” said Eddie.
I shook my thoughts away. This was an important stage of the game, and I couldn’t waste it. I brought up my map and saw that the little icon of our zeppelin was getting close to the middle of the map. Dozens of fighters had already leaped from the zeppelin. Briefly glancing away from the map and into the murky sky, I saw the faint outlines of fighters free-falling toward the ground, with their arms spread out and their heads trucked forward to aid propulsion. Further down, cream-canvas parachutes billowed in the wind.
‘Okay,’ I told myself. ‘Just treat it like any other VBR where you don’t know the map.’ Glancing back at the map, I started to take stock. At the beginning of every battle, there were strategic points where you could choose to land. We just had to pick the right one. Some people liked to parachute down onto the outskirts of the map, where they would be able to loot any nearby buildings for weapons, relatively unhindered by other players. The drawback here was that when the first wave struck, and the game map began to shrink, you could easily find yourself on the wrong half of the map, miles away from where it was shrinking to. This would result in a mad dash to the safe zone, and a mad-dash usually prompted careless mistakes and left you open to wave surfers picking you off. Many other fighters liked to parachute into the center of the map. Here, buildings (and, thus, loot) were plentiful, but so were other players. You were much more likely to run into a fight in the more populated areas of the map. If you ran into someone who had filled up on loot before you or who had leveled up a skill or two already, you could find yourself eliminated before you’d had time to scratch your ass.
Beside me, the team was discussing where to land.
“Stick to the coast,” said Eddie. “Grab our blades and armor and stuff. Somethin’ real shiny. Then, there are bound to be vehicles of some kind. Hell, I’d even take horses. We can outride the wave if we’re careful.”
“That’s the way everyone thinks,” said Glora. “Since the common advice is to avoid parachuting into towns and stuff, everyone goes for the quiet places. And ya know what happens then? Those remote little lodges and hamlets become the new warzones.”
“And because everyone knows that everyone else knows that coasts and hamlets become war zones, they avoid them—which, my friend, makes the coast safer than Overseer Lucas’s virginity.”
“This is getting confusing,” said Glora.
“Whatever we do, we need to avoid a CQB,” said Rynk.
CQB meant close quarters battle, and he was right. This was true for early on, at least. As a coal-rated team with no coaches or strategists and only a few runes, we were underdogs in this VBR. If we were to survive, we needed to loot early on and then level up our skills while avoiding other fighters for the first wave or two.
Getting back to the map, I saw that it was shaped vaguely like an anvil. It was divided into four quadrants, with each one home to a different type of terrain. One was a sand dune, another was an Amazonian jungle, the third was some kind of snowy tundra, and the fourth sector was so shadowed that I couldn’t make out what it was. Bold text overlaid on the shadow quadrant said: “QUADRANT LOCKED”.
Right now, we were crossing the middle, which acted as a dividing line for all four sections. “Let’s head for the jungle,” I told the others. “The trees should give us cover. It’ll be a good place to loot and just hold out for a little. If we stay near the middle dividing line, we’ll be sitting pretty when the first wave hits.” I stuck a purple pin on my map. I knew that the pin would appear on my teammates’ maps too. “We all good?”
“Ready,” said Eddie.
“Even readier,” said Rynk.
Glora just nodded.
With our landing point set, I walked across the zeppelin to where the metal barrier had been opened. I stood on the edge. I reached up and tapped the edge of the parachute on my back, just to reassure myself it was there, and then I looked down onto the map. Ugh. Big mistake. The ground was worryingly far away. Would I ever get used to this part of the battle? Probably not. With the wind whipping at my face, I shook all my doubting thoughts away. I forced my mind to clear. And then I jumped. The rushing gales of wind hit me like a brick wall. I was away from the safety of the zeppelin now. It was just me and a big expanse of sky, so much of it that I felt like it would swallow me up. I felt my breath leave my lungs as if sucked out by a vacuum. The air was freezing cold, and I couldn’t wait for the heat of the Amazonian jungle.
With my map open and focusing on my purple pin, I moved my position so that the little compass-like icon of myself on my map pointed true north. I ducked my head down and felt my free-fall begin to speed up. The sound of the rushing wind was deafening.
Eddie, Glora, and Rynk joined me now, and then all fo
ur of us began our carefully-controlled plummets.
“And now I’m freeeeeeeeeeeee… Free fallin’!” sang Rynk, in the tune of the Tom Petty song.
Our icons displayed on the map. Eddie’s was blue, Glora’s was yellow, and Rynk’s was red. We were clustered together, and our pins floated along the map terrain at a dizzying speed.
‘Not long,’ I told myself. ‘And then? Then I can open my chute and float down. Down to solid land. Hope I don’t get stuck in a tree or something.’
A dark shape appeared in the sky to my left. At first, I thought it was a drifting rain cloud, heavy with a storm that it was desperate to give birth to. Then, I realized that this was no cloud. Whatever this was, it was moving toward me. Clouds sure as hell didn’t do that.
“What the hell?” I said. The dark shape began to take on definition. To my shock, I saw that it was a creature of some kind. A long, snake-like beast with feathery wings sprouting from its thick body. It had the head of an eagle, but it was ten times the size of a normal bird. Its beak was pronounced and looked sharp enough to tear through steel. This isn’t right. Whoever heard of NPC monsters in the sky? Maybe it was just part of the map design. A harmless feature put there to add a little depth to the map. It couldn’t hurt us. Then, creature slithered in our direction, gliding through the sky with incredible speed. It was heading right toward me, I realized. Its oil-black eyes were focused on me, and me alone. The worst thing was that I couldn’t avoid it. Although I could change direction by rotating my body, my movements were clumsy, whereas this snake-eagle thing, whatever it was, looked at home in the sky.
In a desperate attempted to avoid it, I pivoted ninety degrees, altering my direction away from the purple team pin that marked our designated landing spot. I just needed to avoid this monster, and then I could correct myself.
The beast rushed at me. I ducked my head and felt my altitude lower at a speed that spread my lips and made my skin wobble. I held my breath. Here it comes… The creature missed me by inches. I felt a rush of wind as it glided above me. Phew.
No sooner had I sighed in relief, had the curled tail of the eagle-snake smashed into my chest.
20 HP Lost! [80/100]
Monsters in the air? Ones that can attack you before you even landed? What is this? It must have been the overseer’s doing, maybe in an attempt to thin the numbers; one-hundred-twenty teams was a ridiculously high number for a team VBR. Perhaps they wanted to ramp up the excitement early on for the crowds watching in the stadium and at home.
I tried to turn my head to see where it was. The sixty-miles-per-hour winds made the slightest movement difficult, but I gradually turned until I could look behind me. I did it just in time to see the hawk-snake smash into Eddie and Glora with one sweep of its body. The blow was strong enough that it scattered them in the sky, knocking them dangerously off-course. This wasn’t good. If it didn’t kill us before we even touched the ground, then it was surely going to weaken us, and then, if we landed near a team who’d already managed to loot weapons, we’d be easy prey.
I tried to think of something, anything, we could do. It was futile. We had no weapons, and, as humans, we weren’t exactly made for sky maneuvers. Land was our friend, not endless depths of nothing but air.
The hawk rounded now, slipping and sliding through the air, correcting its position to come for another swipe. Who would it go for? Me? Eddie? Even one of the team members dying right now would be an unmitigated disaster.
“Need some advice, cap’n!” shouted Eddie. Luckily, TeamSpeak made it possible for us to hear each other amidst the lashing sky storm of wind. I needed to make a quick decision. There were times in battle where split decisions decided your fate, and this was one of them. Any kind of delay weakened you. I just had to choose correctly.
“The only way to hit the landing point with any accuracy is to fall as slowly as possible,” I said, “Evidently, the overseers don’t want us to do that. Just duck your heads and get to the ground. Right now, it doesn’t matter where you land, as long as we get away from this god-damned sky serpent. It’s the only way.”
“It’s coming back!” shouted Glora.
“And I’m freeeeee…free fallin’!” sang Rynk.
“Get to the ground as soon as you can, and we’ll meet up in the jungle,” I said.
With the order given, I ducked my head. I positioned myself so that I faced toward the ground and my legs were in the air. I made myself as compact as possible so that I was like an arrow gliding down through the sky. The altitude-meter on my holoface began to plummet, showing that I was rapidly falling out of the sky. The jungle terrain became larger, clearer. I saw the tops of vine-strewn trees, a dark blue river cutting through the dense jungle, Mud, bracken, and fallen logs.
“Crap!” shouted Eddie.
“You okay?” I said.
“Caught me with its tail. Lost ten HP.”
“Just keep falling!”
“And I’m freeeeeeeee…”
I had no time to turn around and see where my teammates were in the sky. I couldn’t even afford to keep my map open, as I needed to focus on the rapidly-emerging jungle. Instead, I quickly scouted the jungle I was dropping toward. I needed somewhere safe to land. There. I saw a patch of jungle terrain that looked relatively clear. That was what I had to aim for; the last thing I needed was to get stuck in a tree.
I waited until the last possible second, and then I opened my parachute, praying that the hawk wouldn’t come for another attack, I glided down, down, down. Finally, with my entire body tensed and my lungs completely out of breath, I hit solid land.
You have entered the Jungle Quadrant.
Chapter Five
119 Teams Remaining
I was in the northeast part of the map, in the Amazonian quadrant. I was weaponless, I’d already lost twenty hitpoints, and I was alone. Great start. Still, according to the game stats on my holo-face, one unlucky team had already been eliminated, so it could have been worse.
The jungle around me was a sharp contrast to the chilly air. The trees seemed to radiate heat, almost as if they throbbed with it. I’d managed to land in one of the rare flat parts of the jungle; the rest of it was packed with trees. It was a dense maze of flora, with the trees arcing way overhead, adorned with different-sized leaves, from the dark green leaves that were curved to catch water, to small ones lined with thorns. Vines wrapped around tree trunks like sleeping snakes. The air was alive with nature; the shrill calls of birds, the chirps and ribbits of frogs. I assumed that most of the critters around here would be multi-colored and highly poisonous. After all, the overseers had dark minds. If they could do something to trouble, hurt, or hinder a player, they’d do it. That was what the audience wanted, after all. They wanted to see blood and gore, but only in a politically-correct setting. They wanted to let their visceral, primal natures run free without having to leave their sofa.
My map showed that, way out west from my position, there was a thick river that cut all the way through the jungle and led to the sand dune quadrant in the northeast. Among the thick network of trees were various stone buildings. I could see the vague outline of one north of me; a grey stone building covered in green moss. It looked like some forgotten tribal relic, a temple or home of some sort that some long-gone culture of people had abandoned.
The most important markers on my map right now were the red, blue, and yellow pins that were moving at a slow pace. They represented Eddie, Glora, and Rynk. I needed to get to them before I ran into any other players. There was safety in numbers, after all.
“How you guys holding up?” I said, over TeamSpeak.
“A bit bruised, but fine,” said Glora.
“Right as rain, partner,” answered Rynk.
“Uh, guys?” said Eddie. “I’m stuck in a tree. Seriously. I can’t… Woah!”
I heard the sound of crashing over my in-game microphone, followed by the sound of Eddie groaning.
“Problem solved,” he said.
&
nbsp; I lowered my voice in case anyone else was around.
“We need to meet up. See the big stone building out east? A few kilometers away from the sand dunes?”
“Yup,” answered Glora.
“I’ll see you there in ten. Just don’t get into trouble. Don’t start fights.”
“Got it, partner.”
Eddie groaned again. “Damn trees. See ya there, Har.”
This wasn’t how it should have been. The plan was to land in the same place, level up a little, strap a few blades to our sheaths, and then head somewhere safe while keeping an eye out for the first wave. Now, we had to worry about getting together as a team before we got picked off one by one. Only then could we think about our game strategy.
‘First thing’s first,’ I told myself. I set off. The jungle was a difficult terrain to walk through, I found. I had to climb over felled trees that were as tall as my chest, even when they were on their sides. I came across a few boggy marshes that were either too deep or too dangerous-looking to walk through. Ten minutes turned into twenty, but finally, my map showed that I was almost there. It was then that I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye. To the left of me, something disturbed the waters of a pool of pond water. The surface, thick with algae, rippled once, then again. Finally, a spray of water sloshed upwards. An oval-shaped, black insect crawled out. It pulled itself up onto the mud, and then looked around with its little antennae twisting from side to side. It looked like a mutated black beetle, like the insectoid aftermath of a nuclear fallout. Thin rays of sunlight sneaked through the gaps in the leaves overhead and shone down on its coal-black skin. On the left side of its shell, there was a small, red splotch.
