New Eden Royale

by Deck Davis

  “It’s not letting me, partner. You sure you did it right?”

  I quickly set his permission distance to three meters away.

  “Ah, there we go,” said Rynk.

  Then I moved the distance back to 0.15 meters.

  “It’s gone again,” said Rynk.

  “This is a shitty VBR map,” I said. “Their code’s probably decades old and full of more holes than…something that has lots of holes in it. Let’s stop screwing around. Come and have a look. I need to get back to my team.”

  Rynk walked forward with his katana by his side. He crossed the room until he reached my inventory bag. He smiled.

  “Let’s see what’s in daddy’s bag,” he said.

  I put his strange choice of nickname for me to one side. I guessed that, right now, in front of him, a holographic image of my inventory would be displayed. I couldn’t see it, since it was impossible to see another person’s holo-interface, but from the way his eyes looked left to right at the thin air in front of him, I knew he wasn’t paying attention to me.

  That was when I raised my iron sword and thrust forward, aiming at his belly.

  The tip of my blade hit an invisible wall just an inch away from Rynk’s tender stomach. It made a metallic sound like it a hammer striking a nail, and a whoosh of light indicated that I’d hit a shield.

  Damage dealt: 95 HP

  [-105 shield armor]

  Total damage: -10HP

  Rynk backflipped away from me. It seemed a little extravagant to tell you the truth; he could have just moved back, but he’d backflipped instead. He raised his katana and spoke through clenched teeth.

  “You tricked me.”

  “This is a VBR,” I said, “not a market stall. What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know, a little professional courtesy? You made me waste my rune,” he said, rolling up his red shirt sleeve and tapping a circular coin imbedded in his wrist.

  I saw that Rynk had three round gouges in his arm, two filled with runes and an empty one. He must have had one that protected him from surprise attacks. Given his complaints that I’d made him waste it, it was obviously a single-use rune. Those were the most powerful kind. I had a single-use rune at home, but mine had belonged to my dad, and it was possibly the most useless single-use one in existence. Named the Rune of Lesser Healing, all it did was restore between fifty and seventy hitpoints, once per battle. That was it. I only wore it in battle sometimes out of sentimentality.

  I had three gouges on my wrist too. You could have five in total, and the only way to unlock more slots was to compete in more VBRs to level up your avatar. This concept was what confused a lot of newcomers to VBRs.

  They couldn’t wrap their heads around the duo-level system; there was the overall levelling system that you carried out of the game and that allowed you to unlock rune slots and purchase runes, and there was an in-game VBR levelling system that unlocked different spells and skills within a match, but that reset to zero upon each new VBR.

  There were runes out there for everything. Some cost an incredible amount of bits, whereas others could be bought for pocket change. I had a decent rune collection, and I liked to swap and change before each battle depending on what my strategy was. Today, I’d emphasized speed and stamina.

  Rune Slot 1 – Hear Evil, Speak Evil [Increase noise and movement detection]

  Rune Slot 2 – Wind Dash [5% movement speed increase]

  Rune Slot 3 – Copy Cat [Create a copy of yourself]

  Returning my focus to Rynk, I decided to use a rune of my own. I gripped my sword and then parried forward with it, but just before I reached full thrust I tapped the first rune on my list; a silver one with the logo of two stick men on it.

  Copy Cat activated

  An image leapt out before me. It was a duplication of me. It looked like me and even moved like me. It completed the parry movement that I had started, while I stayed back. It even flicked its wrist in the dorky little way that I did.

  Man, I look like a goon when I attack.

  I was glad to see that I knew something Rynk didn’t; when my copy thrust forward, Rynk moved to the side, away from it. He must not have seen a rune effect like this before, and he was under the impression it could hurt him.

  This was not so. It was a copy of me, made entirely of digital light, the same as the effect produced by the entire VBR system we were currently in.

  Rynk looked surprised when I stepped to the side, going around my now-evaporating copy image and getting close to him. I activated my second avatar skill, Tornado Strike, and the room began to whir around me as my body spun and spun and spun. The glint of my iron sword rotated so quickly that it was like a circular saw.

  Rynk had no time at all to avoid my attack. Before long I was close to him, hitting him again and again as I spun around too quickly for him to avoid.

  Damage dealt: 15HP

  Damage dealt: 10HP

  Damage dealt: 8HP

  Damage dealt: 16HP

  Damage dealt: 5HP

  On and on it went, slice after slice after slice. It was death by a thousand cuts, and as the room spun around me and I heard Rynk shout in pain, I knew I had him.

  Warning: Mana 25%!

  It was an alert I’d set up earlier, and it would have been stupid to ignore it. I swiveled away from Rynk, slowing down until I was barely spinning at all, before stopping completely.

  A shock of dizziness shook me for a millisecond, before I got my bearings. That was the drawback to the Tornado Strike; the first few times you used it, it gave you unbearable travel sickness. Of course, I was almost accustomed to it by now.

  Damage notifications off, I commanded. I usually did this before landing on a map, but I’d been too busy going over our strategy with the other guys. Now, though, I didn’t need to know the exact amount of HP I took off every enemy. As long as they died, I was happy.

  “Goddamn spinning clown,” said Rynk.

  He backed away from me. His red shirt was ripped across both sleeves, and there were scratches down his metal armor from the dozens of blows I’d struck while in tornado mode. If I’d had a better sword, I would have cut him to ribbons, but I was content to have injured him. Through the tears in his sleeves I could see red welts of wounds, from which blood tricked until it met at his wrists and then dribbled down his fingers.

  We sure as hell weren’t in a PG-rated arena. Of course, I’d known that the pain and gore meters would be turned up here in Bernli. This was the kind of backwater VBR map that would have gotten zero viewers were it not for the local overseers’ willingness to ramp up the agony and blood (all within regulated and legally-approved metrics, of course).

  It was all done for the audience’s benefit. I knew that if I looked out of the window of the cottage to the overgrown plains filled with abandoned vehicles and decrepit houses, and if I focused on the edges of my vision, I’d be able to see the spectators who were watching the battle live.

  They wouldn’t really be there. Not for me, anyway, since my physical body was strapped into a sensory capsule, with a pincered data cable in my neck to stream the digital VBR light in. They wouldn’t really be seeing me, either. They’d be watching a 56K stadium-scale hologram of the entire VBR. They were real people watching a digital battle, and I was a real person fighting a digital battle, and few of us would ever meet in real life.

  I had met some of the fighters on the circuit. Most of us low-levels knew each other. I had even seen Rynk in a player’s lounge a few weeks earlier, where he was cheating a few other VBRers in a card game. Of course, his face wasn’t rotten outside of the game. He looked pretty much normal.

  This was not so much the case now. His metal armor was scratched, his clothes torn, his fingertips covered in blood. And yet, he still had the ability to surprise me.

  As I walked toward him, Rynk leapt straight upward, pivoted in midair, and stuck to the ceiling by his hands and feet.

  Okay. He wasn’t going down easily. He had me
beat on speed and agility, and he technically had the higher ground. Well, he literally had the higher ground, given he was stuck to the ceiling. So, I needed to think. What avatar class was he? What classes could stick to walls like that?

  Spiderwalker…Was that a class? It sounded something like that. Arachno-pod, maybe?

  Damn it. I couldn’t remember. It must have been some obscure class that I hadn’t seen much. I’d studied as many as I could, but there were hundreds of classes. As diligent as I tried to be, my memory wasn’t the greatest.

  I was just going to have to go with a tactic that had served me well over the years. Good old ‘screw the consequences’ attack mode.

  While staring at Rynk, I raised my hands. I looked around to see if there was anything in the hallway that I could use. There was a table with a lamp on it by the wall, a pile of shoes near the stairway, and an old, oblong vacuum cleaner that looked like it had come from the 2000s.

  As it was better than nothing. I focused on the vacuum and activated my Wind Hand skill, and with one swipe of my arm a gust of wind shot out of me. It gathered underneath the vacuum like a mini hurricane and lifted it. I felt my mana start to drain, and with every second I lifted the vacuum, it fell further.

  With one quick gesture, I flung the vacuum at Rynk without even touching it.

  The machine smashed into his face hard enough that I couldn’t help wincing.

  Rynk dropped to the floor. He grunted and pushed himself to his feet. I had to give this guy some credit. He just wouldn’t stay down.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he grunted.

  “What? We’re in a VBR. Of course it had to be like this. Where is your team, anyway?”

  “Them? A bunch of useless jerks.”

  “You have a better chance of placing in a bit position if you work together.”

  “They’ll be dead before the first wave even comes. I’m better off without them. I was gonna hide out until I was top five, then see where I could go. Anywhere in the top five, and I break even. I didn’t expect to see you fooling around in this part of the map.”

  I wished that was the case for me. My team and I had a hell of a lot more riding on this VBR than just finishing top five. We’d staked so much on it that it hurt to think about the possibility of not winning. The worrying thing was that we were odds-on favorite to go out first.

  This was a silver ladder match, and we, Team Wolfhound, were a lower-bronze level team. We’d barely earned a promotion from the coal leagues. Every single team in this VBR was ranked higher than us, which meant they’d likely have better runes. Some of them would even have coaches and tactical strategists on their payroll. Me? I wrote my tactics on a napkin and got the team to memorize them before the match.

  Well, usually. Not today. On this fine day, we had a plan. And my little encounter with Rynk was interfering with it.

  Rynk straightened up. His health couldn’t have been above 10%, but he didn’t show much discomfort. He gripped his katana with bloodied fingers. He let his inventory bag fall to the floor. He unclasped his armor, and it hit the floorboards with a thud. The veins on his neck began to light up amber, and the color spread through his body until all his skin glowed like heated coal.

  Was this an avatar skill? Or was it a rune effect? Some kind of low-HP, last-stand type of deal? Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  “You should have just traded with me,” said Rynk. “We both could have walked away happy. Sure, we’d have had to fight later, but at least we’d have been getting paid. Now, it seems that one of us has to die. It’s come to this. One last stand. A final fight, partner, where one lives, and one falls. Who will be the”

  Without giving him chance to finish his speech, I cast Wind Hands on the table by the wall and flung it at Rynk’s head.

  One of the table legs caught him straight in his left eye. He screamed and fell into the wall.

  The amber from his skin seemed to heat the old plaster, and a crackle of flame spread across the daisy-patterned wallpaper and scorched it, before it died out.

  Rynk slumped down, and the glow on his skin faded. Finally, my map showed that I was well and truly alone.

  Chapter Two

  25% EXP gained!

  Level up to Level 3!

  [Choose new skill or upgrade existing]

  I leaned against the wall behind me and caught my breath. With my level-up, both my HP and mana bars filled. I brought up my skill list.

  Storm Knight – Level 3

  Wind Hands – 1/5

  Tornado Strike – 1/5

  Gale Rush – 1/5

  Mana Swirl – 0/5

  Storm knight was a hokey name for an avatar class, but it didn’t get much better with other classes. Avatar names reminded me of old Japanese RPGs, where the original script would be in Japanese and then translated over to English in a way that didn’t quite work. Words would be out of context, and things would be all too happy-sounding and named in ridiculously literal ways.

  There was one skill still left for me to unlock in this VBR - Mana Swirl. Swirl was the most important skill for a Storm Knight by my reckoning. Other people didn’t agree.

  I’d hung out with other Storm Knights in virtual forums to try and get different perspectives on how they played the class. I was always looking for tips, new information, and anything that could give me even the slightest advantage. One thing I did find out was that Swirl was criminally undervalued.

  It wasn’t a flashy spell and didn’t deal direct damage, so people tended to level it up last. But here was the thing: Swirl sucked precious mana from every person and creature within a certain radius, and that radius increased every time you levelled the skill. Given that Tornado Strike, Wind Hands and Gale Dash all ran on mana, that made Swirl pretty damn important. If you wanted your engine to work, you needed juice.

  The only problem was that Swirl wasn’t an offensive spell. So, if I wanted to survive the first ten minutes in a battle, I had to level up my attacking skills before unlocking Mana Swirl.

  So, did I upgrade one of my other skills, or unlock Mana Swirl?

  I made my choice.

  Mana Swirl [1/5] unlocked!

  With that done, I checked each room of the upper floor of the cottage, which was what I had originally come here to do. There was a master bedroom, evidently designed to reflect the lifestyle of a middle -aged married couple, judging by the multitude of cotton cardigans in the wardrobe.

  Man, even the crummy VBR maps like this one were ridiculously detailed. I should have known, though. After all, this map in particular had been designed by my dad, whose obsession over detail was so strong that I was sure he was on the autistic spectrum. A little of his love for specifics had carried over to me, but I’d also inherited a dash of my mom’s carelessness. Nobody’s perfect.

  After checking the master bedroom and the spare bedroom that I’d stood in when Rynk had first approached, I came up empty.

  Incoming message – Unknown contact [Ryan Nu-Kent]

  Ryan Kent? Who was that? It certainly wasn’t one of my team members. It must have been someone from outside the game, but I’d never heard of anyone called Ryan Kent.

  Hang on.

  Ryan Nu-kent?

  Ry Nuk

  Rynk!

  What the hell did he want? I quickly opened the message.

  [Good job killing me, partner. I was getting bored, anyway. At least I got to the bar early. But something tells me you better leave that cottage pronto…]

  I closed the message screen and went to the window. There was only one oval-shaped window on the upper floor of the cottage, and it looked out onto the east area of the game map. This VBR map, hosted in a town called Bernli, had been cutting edge at one point, but now it was old.

  The map spread out in a twenty-mile circumference, though the first wave would lessen that by five miles or so. Waves usually hit after the first 5% of VBR time or when a certain number of people died. A wave had the effect of shrinking the
game map, and if you were caught inside wave territory, you’d gradually lose HP until you reached a safe zone. The reason they did this was to shrink the game map and encourage more fights, rather than having people hiding on remote sections of the map and trying to win without seeing any action. Pacifism was boring, and it didn’t play well with the crowds.

  Some maps were modelled on olden-days cities like New York and London, while others were shaped to be fantasy lands. The VBR map of Bernli, designed by my father, was an autumn land filled with golden leaves barely clinging to trees, yellow sunlight hitting murky pools of water, and weed-infested metal vehicles turning brass-colored as they rusted.

  It was a steam punk world where nature had started to claim back what belonged to it. It was a map that summed up Dad neatly, to be honest. When he was my age, he’d been obsessed with technology, but the older he got, the more he’d gone back to nature. He always took me camping with him when we were growing up, and it was on those trips that I made my fondest memories of him. Man, I missed him.