by Deck Davis
With my level-up and skill decisions made, it was time to get back to the guys and show them the weapons. I couldn’t wait to see their faces. I’d been nervous about the plan. As much as I’d tried to hide it, doubt had lurked in my mind, whispering things like, ‘what if it goes wrong? They’ll lose all their money, and it’ll be your fault.’
As I started to leave, a message appeared.
Incoming message – Unknown contact [Ryan Nu-Kent]
What the heck is that sword? You hacking? You know the folks on the feeds are goin’ crazy out here, right?
I dismissed his message and left the house. As soon as I got outside I was greeted with the oncoming rush of a blue wave of energy that was like water but lighter, almost see through.
It was the wave. There was nothing to do now but to try and outrun it. If you got stuck in a wave it didn’t kill you instantly, but it drained your HP at a consistent rate until you either succumbed to it, outran it, or were picked off by wave surfers, which was the name given to players who stalked the boundaries of waves and picked off the fighters who fled it.
I opened my map as I ran, and I headed true north at first to put as much distance as possible between me and the wave. When I’d widened the gap a little, I turned east. I set a marker on my team so that I could see them using a tiny navigation wheel at the top of my vision, rather than having the map open all the time while I ran. After three minutes of running at a full sprint and another two at a half-sprint while my stamina regenerated, I reached them. In a square of the map with the gridlines M7, I came to an industrial area of Autumn Steampunk. Here, there were no trees and no grass. Nature had long-since given way to the encroachment of man’s cold metal and grey stone.
The other members of my team were in an old warehouse just to my right. When I got inside, I saw a wide-open workshop floor with various cutting and molding machines. Above each machine, there was a complex series of cogs and gears, not unlike in the car engines I’d seen on the road. The machines were covered by a film of dust. Way across the room, far enough away for a decent kick of a football, there was an office with a raised table which likely would have belonged to the workshop foreman if this were a real factory. A grime-smothered sign behind the desk read, ‘Days since accident: 0.’
Rickety metal stairs led to the level above me, which was high enough that falling from it would break a few bones. Rust-smothered metal cargo boxes were inexplicably suspended from the roof by steel cables, and they twisted slightly in the breeze. Sunlight strained in through gaps in the roof where metal sheets had been pried off. Dust mites floated wherever the sunrays hit. It was nice to see raw sunlight without worrying about a prot-layer.
It wasn’t that I wanted to live without prot-layers. I wasn’t stupid. They were the key to everything. They were the barrier that stopped humanity from plummeting off a cliff. I used to think that the best way to describe the world would have been as a pre-apocalyptic one. I’d seen movies and read books about post-apocalyptic societies where people dealt with the results of a nuclear fallout or disaster. We, on the other hand, had managed to push back the tide of an apocalypse just before it struck. Our prot-layers were holding back the sun like a finger pressed against the hole in a leaky dam. We were pre-apocalyptic, and despite the optimism blasted at us from newscasters every day, more and more of us were concerned that we’d lose the ‘pre’ part of this title someday.
Standing in the warehouse, it was easy to imagine that this wasn’t just part of a VBR map. It looked too real. I could almost hear the hum of the machinery, the click-clacks of the cogs, and the whine from gears that needed oiling. I imagined the sounds of the foreman’s boots pounding on the floor and felt the workers’ dread as they wondered which one of them he was going to shout at.
There was no sign of my team. The only sound was that of the wind testing the windows on the walls either side of me, seeing if it could break through them, and the faint rattle of the steel roof above as the gale found crevices and nooks to latch onto.
Where was Sera? Vorm? Clyde? My map showed that they were here. Their little green dots were not far in front of me, to my right.
“Guys?” I said. My words echoed across the factory floor, losing weight along the way until they became ‘uys, uys, ys’. I took a deep breath, and smelled rust in the air. In front of me and to my right, from the shadows next to what looked like a large machine press, I heard a whisper.
“Think he’s found us,” said a voice.
As my team-mates walked out of the shadows, I checked their stats.
Sera [Night Blade – Level 4]
HP: 270 / 270
Stamina: 80/172
Mana: 204 / 314
Vorm [Arcane Bowman – Level 3]
HP: 312 / 312
Stamina: 148 / 160
Mana: 40 / 155
Clyde [Battlemaster – Level 5]
HP: 376 / 389
Stamina: 230 / 290
Mana: 60/122
Trust Clyde to have levelled up more than anyone else. The guy knew every VBR trick there was. Ever the professional, he walked out of their hiding place with a stony face. Vorm was laughing, and even Sera smirked.
It was a running joke of theirs, to hide from me in VBR battles. God knows what spectators thought if they were tuned into our team feed. We must have looked like a set of dorks.
“Gets funnier every time,” I said.
“What took you so long?” asked Clyde.
“Nothing to worry about. Just a thirty-foot serpent smashing the crap out of a house while I tried to find the weapons.”
“And…?” said Vorm. He was trying to keep an even tone, but I could tell he was on edge. After all, he had a lot riding on this. I decided that given the stress of the situation, I could forgive him for playing the hide-and-seek joke on me for the fiftieth time.
I held my inventory bag in the air. The level-two rucksack was almost bursting, with the golden weapons taking up all my inventory space. I’d had to toss a couple of spare sword hilts that I’d found just to make them all fit.
Vorm breathed out in relief. “Hell, am I glad to see that. Rachelle is watching at home, y’know. She told me that if this went wrong, she was gonna have my balls.”
“She’s got them already,” said Sera. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”
“You should have let me come with you,” said Clyde. “A plan like this…you going out on your own…Too much riding on it.”
I dropped the rucksack to the floor. “I was safer on my own. If we’d gone as team, we’d have attracted more players. We couldn’t afford to fight near the weapons, in case someone else got them. As it happens, I did run into a little trouble, but nothing that I couldn’t handle.”
“Who’d you see?” asked Vorm.
“Ever heard of Rynk?”
Sera sighed. “Guy asked me on a date last year. Remember when we were in Esperg? Promised me he’d take me to a restaurant in New Eden.”
“You should have taken him up on it,” I said. “I heard it’s impossible to get a table if you’re not a New Edener. Bet the stuff they serve in the city is better than the chow we eat.”
Clyde approached the bag. His footsteps pounded on the floor as he walked. Stealth wasn’t Clyde’s preferred playing style. After all, it would have been pretty much impossible for him to sneak around, given he’d paid 500 bits to change his avatar into a giant bear.
I thought he was batshit crazy when he did that, but Clyde had his reasons. He did a lot of studying, since it was his dream to climb the VBR rank, and he knew that the New Eden Tronix preferred players who took a more physical combat stance. The giant bear avatar didn’t add to Clyde’s physical stats, but he always said “Half the battle is in the mind. Get your opponent scared, and you’ve already won.” I had to admit he had a point there; what was scarier than a giant bear wielding blue pulse discs?
While Clyde handed out the weapons, I watched Sera. There was something a little off about her today. She s
eemed colder than usual. It wasn’t the way she looked, since she always kept her avatar the same; green skin with half her head shaved and the other half long. She was agile as hell and always had her twin daggers tucked into her belt when she wasn’t using them to stab someone full of holes.
No, it was her behavior. It was almost like she was a uncomfortable around me today. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was; feelings and stuff were never my strong point. If she had a problem I knew she’d have no problem telling me later. Until then, we had a VBR to win.
The guys clapped each other on the back and joked around as they divided the loot. I already knew from hacking the serpent’s head off with a golden sword that these weapons were every bit as special as I’d expected. Of course, finding them meant that the secret was out now. After the battle, when we had won the VBR in a spectacular underdog victory, the other teams and their coaches would pour through battle footage. They’d see me finding the secret weapon cache. From then on, any VBR fought in Autumn Steampunk would be a race to get the golden cache.
Either that, or the overseers would alter the code. They had that power. Every place that hosted VBRs had at least one overseer who was responsible for a multitude of things, such as upholding VBR rules, altering weather patterns and monster numbers to make things interesting, and initiating waves. The overseers were referees, in a way, but they were also responsible for turning a profit on each VBR. Every overseer had a unique way of doing things. Here in Bernli, Overseer Jonathan liked to ramp up the pain and blood meters. It was a crude way of drawing in spectators, but it worked. People loved to see blood spilled so long as it was virtual. I had a theory that, deep-down, people liked violence even if was real, and that virtual battles gave them a reason to watch it whilst keeping their moral high ground.
Vorm picked up a golden battle axe and hefted it on his shoulder. He grinned so wide I thought his lips were going to spread off his face. “I feel like I could carve through a mountain with this thing!”
“Pity it’s mine,” said Clyde. “You’re a bowman, remember? This is too heavy for you.”
“I’m keeping it,” said Vorm, staring at the weapon as though he was in love. I knew what this was building up to. Vorm was starting to get blood lust. Talk to Vorm about his kids, and he was the most sensible guy on earth, but put him in a gel-capsule and send him into a VBR and he’d lose his mind. His avatar appearance suited his battle temperament, too. He was bare-chested and covered in tattoos, with a round belly. He always chomped on a cigar. He’d bought it for five bits in an avatar store when we’d gotten second place in the Old Orole VBR a few years back. It was the only time I’d ever seen him waste money.
I waited to see what would happen between Vorm and Clyde. Clyde was right; the battle axe was more suited to his class, but given that there wasn’t a golden bow here, Vorm was going to need something he could use.
Clyde held his hands up. “We don’t have time for fooling. Take what you want, and let’s stop gabbing.”
I smiled. You could always rely on Clyde’s professionalism to win out. He took VBRs so seriously that he never let his emotions cloud his decision-making. It was a skill that I was jealous of. As much as I tried to stay rational, sometimes things got my goat.
“I thought you guys ran into trouble?” I said. “What was all the shouting about?”
Clyde held up his left arm. When I saw what he was showing me, a momentary feeling of sickness prodded my stomach. The sleeve of his forearm was damp with blood. In the middle, there was a patch even darker than the rest. A jagged white bone protruded from it.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” asked Clyde. “Caught Team Bassinger prowling around. We had a fight but we didn’t manage to nail any of them. No idea where they ran to.”
“I told you, be careful with that, Clyde. It’s gonna do you serious damage when this is over,” said Sera. “And if it does, you can pay to heal your own damn avatar.”
She was right. Although you felt pain and your avatar took injuries in some VBR systems, it didn’t hurt you physically. Even though your physical body was fine, the wounds your avatar sustained didn’t just magically erase after the fight. The overseers needed to use every money spinner available to them. After a fight, you had to connect your avatar to the mainnet and check the damage, and then you had to pay a certain number of bits to ‘heal’ your avatar. If you didn’t have the bits, you had to wait for it to heal ‘naturally,’ which meant that your avatar was out of use for a while.
Judging by his arm, Clyde was looking at paying at least 700 bits to heal (or two months out of the game) to heal.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“A scratch.”
“Take some bits out of the injury fund,” I told him.
Whenever we won prize money, we put five per cent into a team injury fund for situations like this. Other teams, ones in the silver, gold and diamond leagues, paid copious sums to their managers and coaches who, as part of their jobs, took charge of healing. On the other side of the scale were coal-rated teams who couldn’t afford to heal, and one bad injury could see a player on their roster sidelined for months at a time.
I looked at the jagged bone on Clyde’s arm and the flap of torn skin next to it. My stomach felt light. Clyde didn’t seem to give a damn, but I knew that he’d purposefully spent time in masochistic agony lounges to get himself used to taking different levels of pain. It was all part of his training to join the New Eden Tronix. If there was anything at all that could give Clyde an advantage, he’d take it.
Me, well, I hadn’t taken VBR all that seriously until my parents died. Growing up, I used to watch my brother Bill and my Dad training with one another in Dad’s studio. On one of the walls there was a gel TV that was spread from the ceiling to the floor and showed a livestream of their fights. I’d watch it sometimes, but, in all honesty, it didn’t interest me. It was mainly sibling rivalry that made me stay while they battled. Just ask any little brother or sister; the idea that your sibling is getting parental attention and you aren’t is a powerful driver.
Not only was VBR not my thing, but I had other dreams. Ever since I was out of diapers, I’d wanted to join the Expanse Charter and head out to the places where they didn’t have prot-layers. It was said that after we weakened the ozone so much that the sun turned from our ally into our enemy, there were some places that hadn’t been able to afford prot-layers. The government just didn’t have the resources to roll them out everywhere for free.
You’d think that a place getting smashed by unfiltered sunlight would be its downfall, but the ozone holes weren’t a sudden problem. They happened slowly, like cancer rotting a bowel. Some places, knowing they weren’t important enough for the government to install prot-layers over them, took matters into their own hands. They blew holes in mountains, sheltered themselves inside caves, and dug subterranean vaults to live in. Not everyone succumbed to the golden cancer rays.
Now, of course, prot-layers were a little more affordable. Technology had advanced to the point where and individual house could afford a prot-layer, if they were wealthy enough. That was when the government decided to venture east again and make contact with the forgotten cities and towns and see what became of them decades after the Ozone croaked.
That was what I always wanted to do. There was something about exploration that got me going. Maybe I was attracted to the idea of bringing hope to the people that the government had left behind, as well as seeing new places and meeting new people.
Man, thinking back to what I was like back then really brought it home how much I’d changed. Now, I avoided company at all costs. If it weren’t for Sera, Vorm and Clyde, I’d be a hermit.
By the time Mum, Dad, and Bill had their accident, I was old enough to realize that I couldn’t abandon everything and venture east. With my family gone, responsibility for everything - the house, the animals, Dylan – fell onto me. That was when I decided that I needed money. VBR was something that I knew. It was as simple a
s that.
Now, in the cogwork warehouse, I looked at my team, and I wondered who was the same as me. Who was in it for passion, and who just wanted bits? Clyde lived VBR. It pumped in his veins. It infected his dreams. Vorm, well there were times when he got swept away by it all, but at the end of the day, he was here to earn bits for his kids, and, as a level one ex-convict, his other job options were limited.
With Sera…I had no clue. The girl was a closed book - a friendly one and a jokey one, but closed nonetheless. If her life, her motives, and her background were a 500-page volume, she’d only chosen to show us the introduction.
I nodded at Clyde’s broken arm. “We got anything we can use on that? A sling? Bandages? Health potions?”
“Already used ‘em,” said Vorm, swinging his new axe in midair and pretending to decapitate someone.
A bell sounded in my ear. Knowing what it meant, I brought up my map to find a new line drawn on it, marking where the next wave would reach. It was going to wash over our current position and end a half mile north of us, shrinking the VBR map to just a fifth of its original size. With only four teams left in, the overseers were drawing us closer to the final confrontation between all the contestants.
