by Deck Davis
Douggie glanced at the map, at the thousands of tiny icons that marked the NPC monsters in the sand dunes, and then back at me. “Why the rabbits?” he said.
Why the rabbits? That was a question best tackled in two parts. For that one, I’d need to phone Harry and get him to tell his side of it, and then I’d correct his lies and lay out the truth of the matter. Your honor, I’d like to call Harry Wollenstein to the stand. Get him to tell you what happened to my rabbit.
Harry would tell you it was an accident, of course, that the hounds were locked up, and that my pet rabbit wasn’t. Me? I’d give you a different stack of facts, and then let you go ahead and sift through them how you like and tell me what you gleaned. To my mind, the picture as clear in my perfect memory as if it were playing on a gel-screen.
I see myself. I’m back at the Wollenstein ranch, nine years old. I’d been there a year, and, by this point, I knew what they were really like, that family, how two-faced they were. I specifically remember putting Bert Rabbit in his hutch, which I kept in my room. Although it was supposed to be a non-odor hutch, the smell sometimes crept out and made the room smell like a farm. I checked that the hutch latch was on, and then I cracked the window a few inches and went to sleep. When I awoke, the hutch door was open, and Burt Rabbit was gone. He wasn’t in my room. When I sleepily left and checked the rest of the house, he was nowhere to be seen.
It was only when Harry’s mother, that infernally bad actor, checked on the wolfhounds and let out a shout, that we found him. Poor Burt Rabbit, a little creature who hurt nobody, was on the floor of a new wolfhound, Tiote’s, paddock. The stone floor was smeared with his blood. The mongrel beast’s fur was coated in it. And Burt’s stomach and tender flesh were torn apart.
Would Burt have voluntarily left the safety of his hutch, left my room, crossed the ranch and jumped into the paddock of a wolfhound? Did Christians in Rome leap into lion pits with a smile on their face? No. Harry was responsible. He always hated me. If it wasn’t him, it would have been Bill, the big, I’m-so-cool poser.
I’ll show them, I vowed that night, and I did, in my own way—first, with Bill’s infernal turtle, who I liked to tip onto its shell and laugh as it struggled to correct itself and then, with Harry’s wolfhounds, who started to mysteriously get sick. I was careful to be patient about this, though, To leave time in between sicknesses so that it didn’t arouse suspicion.
Ah, those were the days. Such sweet memories. When Douggie spoke, I was almost sorry to be shaken out of them. “Overseer Lucas?”
I pointed at the thousands of red blips on the sand dune map. “And these are the rabbits, yes?”
Douggie nodded. “Sure as—”
I waved a hand to cut him off. “And you have…coded a surprise?”
“When the battle’s done, I’m gonna go back through the feed and make sure I check out their faces. They’re gonna shit when they see what you did,” said Douggie, smiling.
Douggie covered his mouth. Swearing in front of an overseer wasn’t exactly the most appropriate of things to do. I patted his shoulder and laughed.
“You’re right, Douggie. When they see the rabbits, they will shit indeed. I just hope that Harry realizes the significance.”
Chapter Nine
Eddie was the first to go forward, fueled by his thirst for a foray, a thirst for spilled-blood, and a thirst for the flow of adrenaline that fighting always brought. The rabbits were perfect level-up fodder, he’d insisted, and I agreed with him. Coding something into a VBR map cost bits, and even the rich coffers of New Eden wouldn’t be wasted. If the rabbits were here in such an enormous number, there was a reason for it. And that reason must have been to provide NPCs for fighters to level up on.
“Comin’, Harry?” said Eddie.
He’d walked into the middle of them now so that he was surrounded on each side by slightly-oversized rabbits. They were for sure the cutest thing I’d ever seen on a VBR map. I was used to serpents, crabs, scorpions. Not white balls of fur. Yet, these rabbits reminded me of something.
Eddie held his short sword upright in one hand. He lifted it over his shoulder, ready to bring it down in one sweep on the unsuspecting rabbit to his right.
“Something isn’t right here,” said Glora, behind me.
I nodded. I was getting the same feeling, that something about the sand dunes and the rabbits was off. It wasn’t just the strange presence of fluffy bunnies in a desert, though, or that they were twice the size of a normal rabbit, or that there were thousands of them.
No, it was something in the air—or, as I realized when I listened more carefully, the lack of something. There wasn’t a sound around us. There wasn’t a single bit of wind, and the sand dunes around us were unnaturally still.
“Shall I get started?” said Eddie.
A thought was coming. A realization of something. It was on the tip of my brain but hadn’t quite been processed. It wasn’t quite clear enough yet. Something about the rabbits… Oh, shit.
I was too late. Eddie swung his sword and hit the first rabbit, cleaving its head off in one swipe. Its blood stained the sand crimson, wetting it in a spray and making globules of sand stick together.
Eddie beamed. “Five percent experience for that! Cool, or what? There are thousands here, Har. Let’s do it! Level five, here I come, baby!”
There were thousands of them, alright. But that wasn’t a good thing. I knew why the rabbits were here now. Lucas had always had a thing about his rabbit. Bert, the one he used to keep in his room back on the ranch. What had happened to it?
No time for memories. With one of their number dead, the rest of the rabbits suddenly stood up in unison. The movement was unnaturally precise, almost as if they acted as one. They stood up on their hind legs.
“Holy hell,” said Glora, with equal traces amazement and fear in her voice.
I knew exactly how she felt. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not only were the thousands of rabbits standing upright on their hind legs, in a mocking resemblance of how a person would stand. The worst part was that, when they stood, I could see the front of them, which had been hidden when they were led on the sand. While the bunnies’ backs were coated in beautiful white fur, their fronts were a different story. The fur was gone, replaced by a red mess of organs, guts, tubes, and veins, all slithering around and packed in place by their white bones. It was as though they’d been turned inside out.
“Oh, god, the smell,” said Glora, coughing. “It’s like a slaughterhouse.”
The rabbits looked around. Some looked left, others right, while some focused their stares on us. One by one, the critters discovered who their attackers were. The gazed at us with sickeningly yellow eyes. They were little more than slits on their face, really, and there was something sinister about their expressions. Between the yellow slit eyes and their guts on show, I knew we weren’t dealing with normal bunnies. Normal rabbits, the harmless kind, didn’t stand on two legs and reach up to your stomach.
As I stared at them, I began to receive more text information. I focused on the one nearest Eddie.
Gut Bunny – Level 5
HP: 101 / 101
“Gut Bunnies?” said Glora. “Cute.”
It was only when I really focused on the rabbits, that their significance fully hit me like a hammer to the head. Rabbits. Lucas had a pet rabbit that had gotten loose and wandered into Tiote’s paddock. He’d blamed Mom for it, then me, then Bill. But Dad had checked the footage of the ranch cameras and he’d seen Burt Rabbit hopping his way toward death. It was just an accident, but Lucas had never believed that. This was all for my benefit, I realized.
“Eddie, get the hell away from them, now!” I said.
It was too late. Four of them crowded him. When one opened its mouth, I saw two protruding teeth at the front, long and sharp enough to tear through skin. Eddie didn’t move. He was frozen, and the usual bravado expression he wore was gone. Being surrounded by sharp-toothed rabbits with their guts hanging out had stuck him
to the spot.
This was one of those captain decisions, one of a thousand that would come my way. Yet this one seemed more important than most. What did we do? Stay and fight, or run away? At first glance, running seemed like it would lead to a better state of affairs. After all, the odds of thousands versus four weren’t good, even if we had the gut bunnies beat for height, strength, and weaponry. Yet, the more I looked at them, I realized that not all the bunnies were focused on us. This made sense; NPCs had an aggro field of vision, which meant you had to get within a certain distance of them to trigger them to attack. Only the gut bunnies in our proximity wanted to tear the supple flesh from our bones, and the rest didn’t seem to notice we were there. If Lucas had set this up for me, then he’d be watching. I could just imagine the pleasure it’d give him to watch me run away. Well, I wouldn’t.
“Okay, guys, don’t use attacks that have a long field of range. We don’t want to anger any more bunnies than the ones we’re fighting.”
Eddie touched a circular rune on his wrist, activating his Burst rune. Now, when he moved, it seemed like his speed had doubled. He cleaved the head off one rabbit, while Rynk lopped off another’s arm with one swift strike of his scimitar. This added one rabbit corpse and one rabbit arm to the increasingly blood-drenched sand. Rynk twirled his scimitar in his hand like a baton. It was a signature of his, much like Eddie’s speeches. He thought it made him look cool.
Ah, damn it. Who was I kidding? It did make him look a little cool.
“Got it, partner,” said Rynk.
“Glora, if you use Hexnado, stick to the outskirts,” I said.
“Cool with me.”
“Eddie and Rynk,” I said, “edge toward me. Draw the aggroed rabbits away from the pack, and we’ll take care of them in groups.”
“Aye, aye.”
While Eddie and I drew the rabbits out group by group, Rynk used Blade Float to send his scimitar cutting through their guts; meanwhile, Glora whizzed and whirled, using Hexnado to cut through them. Down they went in a splash of blood and organs, staining the once perfectly-yellow sand with red-wine hued blood. I took a few hits. When a rabbit bit into me, I’d lose between five and seven hitpoints per attack, but it only took one or two cleaves of my axe to fell them. Before long, we’d cut a hefty chunk of their numbers away.
Ten minutes later, I called a halt to the fight. The sand was littered with gut bunny corpses now. I lowered my axe and watched a stream of text alerts.
Level up to level 3!
- HP increased to 175
- Stamina increased to 154
- Mana increased to 230
Level up to level 4!
- HP increased to 199
- Stamina increased to 172
- Mana increased to 261
2 Skill points gained.
[Unlock new skills or upgrade existing]
Judging by the way Eddie and the others were seemingly focused on something in front of them, I guessed that they’d also leveled up.
Now, I needed to choose my skills. I already had Armorer level 1, and I’d need to level it before I could steal a new weapon proficiency from someone. My Abmeleon was also levelled to one.
As well as loading a skill point into armorer to upgrade it, I decided to get one of my other two skills into play so that I was nearly playing with a full deck. With that in mind, I spent my points.
Armorer upgraded! [2/5]
Terrain Drain unlocked! [1/5]
“Man, that felt good,” said Glora. “Nothing like getting a skill.”
“Hear that, darlin’,” said Rynk.
I noticed that Eddie wasn’t saying anything. Instead, he was looking around him. His face was pale. Something about our encounter with the gut bunnies had shaken him. Maybe it was the fact that he’d wandered into the middle of their ranks without thinking, and that his carelessness almost had him surrounded by ferocious beasts.
Rynk walked over to me. I noticed that there was a hole in the right sleeve of his shirt, and he had two gouges in his arm that could only have come from the teeth of a gut bunny. I took a healing potion out of my inventory bag and handed it to him.
“Freshen up,” I told him, holding out the potion. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”
“How much you want for it?”
“It’s free. We’re on the same team. Just take it.” He looked at me strangely, as if getting a health potion from a teammate without being asked for something in return was out of the ordinary. “Just take it,” I said.
We spent the next five minutes skirting around the gut bunnies. We needed to get to the collection of abandoned desert shacks a few thousand meters southeast of us, but it was hard to find a clear path through the still-swarming collection of gut bunnies. The problem was that if we got to close, we’d aggro them. Right now, we needed to loot.
Luckily, with my new-found skills, I had a solution. I cast Terrain Drain. This was a power that let me manipulate the terrain around us. Like Moses from the old stories, I focused on the sand and created a wall of sand on either side of us, giving us a pathway through the gut bunny ranks. The Terrain Drain walls made it so they couldn’t see us as we walked passed.
It sapped a quarter of my mana, but before long, we had reached the first shack. We began looting. One shack was filled with rusted metal drums. When I kicked one, I heard water sloshing. It must have been some kind of water storage, put there for people crossing the dunes. On the floor of the shack, I found lovely, delicious loot.
Regeneration ring – Level 1
A ring that regenerates health at 1 hitpoint per second
Sand Belt
A belt made for desert travelers, granting protection against the elements
[fire resist +1, DEF +2]
Serrated Axe Blade – Level 2
A jagged axe blade, crafted to ensure maximum damage when it meets flesh
[Att +4]
I swapped my bronze belt for the sand belt, and I detached my normal wood felling axe blade and swapped it for the serrated blade. With my new hitpoint regeneration jewelry and my boosted attack and defense, I felt better.
We all left the separate shacks we’d been looting and met in the middle of them. The wind was back now, and it swept over the loose sand. Eddie sported a new metal chest piece, while Rynk’s scimitar blade now had a green pulse of light running up and down it. Glora joined us, adorned with a new helmet that had two horns sprouting from the top.
“Where now?” asked Eddie.
“We better head south,” I answered. “The wave is here in less than fifteen minutes, and it’d be better to be nearer to the middle gridlines.”
So, we headed deeper into the map. The sand dunes seemed never-ending. Our path to the middle of the map took us over sand dune after sand dune, across giant hills of sand so steep they made my calves burn. It seemed that no sooner had we traversed one dune, had another impeded our progress. It felt we’d been walking for hours, yet when I would check my map, the wave was still ten minutes away. We’d only been walking for five minutes, but I felt like I’d seen enough sand to last me five lifetimes.
Before long, we saw something that broke the never-ending sea of sand. Not far away from us, the sunlight shone down and hit a pool of murky-looking water.
“Water in a desert,” said Glora. “Never a good sign.”
“Mirage?” asked Rynk.
I shook my head. “Everything on this map is coded for a reason. The fact there’s water here isn’t an accident. There must be a mega-mon around here somewhere.”
Mega-mons were NPCs that were placed in random parts of a VBR. They were AI beasts like the gut bunnies and other monsters, except that they were hard to find, insanely tough to kill, and granted enormous stat buffs if you were successful. If you were a high enough level and you came across a mega-mon, it was tough to pass up.
The presence of a pool of water in the middle of a sand dune was so unusual, that there had to be a mega-mon here. Looking, though, I
couldn’t see it yet. All I saw was blue water so dark it could have hidden anything beneath its surface. Gangly-trunked trees with sparse plumage lined the sides were sitting just above the water.
“What do you think, guys?” I said. “Do we go into the water and see what we wake up?”
“You’ve always said we’re the underdogs. A kick-ass buff would be pretty damn handy,” said Glora.
I looked at Rynk. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Let’s go for it. Or not. I don’t care either way.”
“Your enthusiasm is contagious,” I said.
Rynk crossed his arms. “You’re the captain. What’s your two bits on it?”
“I don’t like risks…except when they come with big buffs. I’m inclined to give it a try. But if this thing is too tough, it’ll kick the crap out of us.”
Eddie coughed. “Yeah… I don’t know about this.”
