New Eden Royale

by Deck Davis

  “It’s here. I can sense it,” answered Glora.

  “Okay,” I said. “If we can’t see it through the blizzard, then it probably can’t see us. The last thing we need is a fight with something nasty in a place like this. Glora, if we move away from whatever you’re sensing, will the Hexer Senses start to get weaker?”

  “That’s how it works,” she said.

  “Okay. Let’s use the cover of the blizzard and move. Glora, keep me updated on your senses.”

  We headed southeast toward the purple map pin, pushing on through the wind and the ice and snow. Every so often, I asked Glora to tell us what her Hexer Senses were like.

  “They’re not getting stronger,” she said. “But they’re not going away, either.”

  “It’s following us,” said Rynk.

  Sometimes, I’d hear a few thuds and clomps in the snow, and that told me that Rynk was right. Whatever this thing was that Glora had sensed, it was stalking us through the blizzard. I could sense it myself too, or at least I thought I could, just not in the clear way Glora could with her Hexer skill. For me, it was something more instinctual, a call back to the primitive side that was in all of us, somewhere in the part of me that knew when there was a threat to my life nearby. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up even more than the cold winds. It made me feel like I had a dull weight in my stomach. Whatever this was, I could sense that it was dangerous and that it was trailing us.

  We hurried on through the blizzard as quickly as we could before eventually coming within a close distance of the purple pin. Somewhere ahead of us, through the unending falling of snowflakes, there would be a grouping of three buildings. Maybe they would be lodges or research stations; I didn’t know. The crucial point was that they’d have loot inside them and that we’d be able to get into one of them and shut out whatever was following us.

  “I just got a sense warning,” said Glora. “A big one. Damn… Just got another.”

  “It’s getting closer to us, whatever the hell it is,” said Eddie.

  “No. It’s not that. Something else. Oh, shit! Check your maps.”

  I commanded my map to display. There, not far in front of us, I saw something that we really didn’t need right now. Red dots. Other fighters, lying in wait exactly where we were headed. Glora’s Hexer Senses must have marked them on our team map. There weren’t just four of them; there were four dots a few meters east of our purple pin, and then another four west of it. That meant there were two teams. We were heading straight into another ambush.

  “At least we caught this one in time,” said Eddie.

  That was true. With Glora’s Hexer Senses working passively, we’d gotten a heads-up. I was thankful for that because it meant we could change course a little.

  “How about we take ‘em on?” said Rynk.

  “There are eight fighters waiting,” I said.

  “But they’re not working together. Once the fighting starts, they’ll attack each other as well.”

  “So, we just wander into the middle of them, hold up our swords and tell them to come get it?” I said. “And, meanwhile, we get caught in the crossfire while they’re slinging spells and arrows from both sides of us?”

  “We can’t just keep running.”

  “And we won’t,” I said. “After the second wave hits, the numbers will drop even more. That’s when we start picking people off. We’ve gotta be clever about it.”

  That was when I heard something—the sound of enormous feet crunching on the ice. Whatever had been stalking us was getting closer. We were trapped by an unknown, probably monstrous, creature on one side and two teams of VBR fighters on the other.

  I quickly checked my map. There had to be some way out of this.

  “How about we head west?” I said.

  Rynk scratched his chin. “Remember what I said about coincidences? These guys aren’t just waiting in the exact spot we were going for no reason. This ain’t a holiday resort. They’re waiting for us. And think about this, big boy. Why aren’t they attacking each other? They must have seen each other’s dots on their maps, yet they aren’t attacking each other.”

  “Teams don’t buddy up, if that’s what you’re saying,” I said.

  More thuds on the ice behind us. Louder this time. It sounded like the tundra was cracking under the weight of whatever it was.

  “How d’you like your overseers now, Ed?” asked Rynk.

  Eddie didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then, in a resigned voice, he answered, “Maybe you were right after all.”

  ‘Poor kid,’ I thought. He’d just had his belief in the dignity and fairness of overseers ripped apart. It never felt good when something you thought was true was revealed as a lie. We’re not programmed to take the shattering of our beliefs in good humor.

  Now, though, I had more important things to contend with. The problem was that I was mad. I was angry with the idea that the overseers were leading other teams to us and even angrier that, somehow, it looked like they were getting teams to work together against us. This could only be Lucas’s doing. Grand Overseer Sternbuck was no saint, but he wouldn’t mess around like this. Maybe Lucas had paid teams to work against us in the New Eden VBR, just like he’d bribed Team Wolfhound into betraying me. Perhaps he’d done something to our avatars, or perhaps he was messing with the map code so that people knew where we were.

  “No more map pins,” I told the group.

  Thud, thud, thud went the ice behind us. It was coming. I had to work quickly. “We’re going south,” I said, not bothering to keep the tone of anger from my voice, “but I’m not just running. If the teams are waiting for us, I say we send them something that they don’t expect.”

  “Like what?” said Rynk.

  Thud, thud, thud. It was getting louder. Whatever it was, was brave enough to get closer.

  “A surprise.”

  And then, the blizzard stopped. The fall of snowflakes thinned and the wind died down a little. The air around us started to clear. It was as if someone had blindfolded us with a white rag, and now they’d untied it.

  With the clearing of the blizzard, I could see everything now. The grouping of three wooden lodges was two-hundred meters to the north, and behind us, gaining ground, was our stalker.

  “HO-LY shit!” said Eddie.

  When I saw what it was, I couldn’t even find words. Behind us, just fifty meters away, was a bear. It was a polar bear, but not like the kind you’d see on some arctic nature documentary. This was a mutated, spawn-of-hell bear. It was fifteen feet tall. It stood on its hind legs to make itself bigger to intimidate us, and boy did it work. The front of its ice-white fur was stained by a splatter of blood, so much that it looked like someone had thrown a tin of crimson paint over it. Whether it was the blood of some other NPC beast or of a VBR fighter unfortunate enough to get too close, I didn’t know. This was the power of nature, summed up in one hulky beast. Its fur added to its girth, but I sensed that, beneath that insulating hide, was a body packed with muscle and power. True, it wasn’t really nature, since this bear was nothing but a line of code when it came down to it, but, standing there in the snowy tundra where the cold cracked my skin, it felt more real than anything I’d ever seen.

  It was real enough that it sent my body into fight-or-flight mode. I felt my muscles tighten up. My heart drummed in my chest, faster and faster until adrenaline spiked through me. I wanted to run. My brain urged me to.

  Rynk drew his scimitar. He held it in a practiced attacking pose.

  “Lower it,” I said. “We’re not fighting that thing.”

  “I watched a documentary once,” said Eddie. “Polar bears can sprint fast as hell when they’re on the hunt. It was just toying with us until now. If we try and run it’ll catch up and then splatter us on the ice.”

  “We’re not running from it, either,” I said.

  “Then what the hell are we gonna do?”

  I quickly checked my inventory. I had one mana potion�
�not much, but something. This could work. Focusing on the ice behind the polar bear, I activated Terrain Drain. I didn’t want to spend all my mana, so I tried to wield it lightly.

  I concentrated on the ice behind the animal. I willed my skill to take effect. It seemed futile at first, but as the skill began to work and I felt the mana sap out of me, it was as if I was touching the ice. I felt the sharpness of its freezing temperature on my fingertips, and the cold feeling spread over me until it coated my palms and then my wrists. I imagined myself pulling the ice upwards, wrenching a block of it free with a strength that would have been impossible if I were really doing it with my bare hands. The tundra ground cracked.

  The polar bear reared up taller. Its beady eyes looked like they were aflame. This thing was aggroed, no doubt about it. I had to be quicker. I concentrated harder on the blocks. The ice rose higher from the ground behind the polar bear. It was quicker this time, and more of my mana leaked from me. it was still taking too long. Then I realized something. The harder I concentrated and the more mana I allowed to leave me, the quicker it worked. With that in mind, I abandoned my careful control of my mana. Suddenly, the ice behind the polar bear shot up. It formed a wall behind the beast, reaching as high as its neck.

  I smiled. This is working! The polar bear realized that the ice wall had suddenly appeared behind it. It seemed to flinch a little at its touch.

  “Where are you going with this?” said Glora.

  I had no time to explain.

  “Who has mana potions?” I asked.

  “I got two,” said Eddie.

  “Got one here, partner,” said Rynk.

  “Okay, take this one too,” I said, handing my mana potion to Rynk. “Glora, keep an eye on my mana. When it drops to fifty, get them to top me up. I can’t break my concentration, so you’ll have to pour it into my mouth.”

  The polar bear roared. It looped around, ready to spring forward in a ferocious attack.

  “This is the strangest—” began Eddie.

  “Just trust me!”

  And with that, I wielded Terrain Drain and focused harder than I ever had in my life. As the polar bear took a step forward, I broke the tundra ground with my mind and summoned the ice to form a wall on either side of it. The effort drained twenty mana points from me. Despite leaking mana like a pin-pricked water balloon, I knew that this was working. With every step the bear took I created ice walls beside it, hemming it in, and then, as I concentrated even more, I began to summon walls ahead of it, creating an icy passageway that the bear could do nothing but follow.

  I conjured my frozen tunnel along a straight path, fifty meters in front of the polar bear, then seventy-five.

  My head throbbed with the start of a migraine. Exhaustion racked my body.

  “He’s getting low!” said Glora.

  The bear smashed a giant paw against part of the ice tunnel to its left, but the wall held firm. A look of confusion twisted on its features. It tried to turn, but I’d built the walls too tight. There was nowhere for it to go but forward, along the passage I had created for it.

  “Open up, buddy,” said Eddie. “Here comes the medicine.”

  As ridiculous as it was, I opened my mouth. I felt wet mana potion on my lips, and then on my tongue. It tasted like a concentrated dose of cinnamon and turmeric, and it made me splutter when it hit the back of my throat. With my mana bar topped up, I focused on my tunnel. The bear was running along it now, thundering over the icy ground. I sprouted ice walls to its left and right, extending the tunnel further and further. Another fifty meters, then another fifty.

  “Low again!” called Glora.

  Another dose of cinnamon. This hit the back of my throat and then went straight up my nose. It made my eyes water. I held back the cough with all my will, focusing only on completing my snow tunnel. As the walls of my tunnel extended and the polar bear followed it like an enraged, mutated lab rat, it reached where I wanted it to go.

  It was in the center of the three wooden lodges near my purple pin, right in the middle of the two teams who were waiting for us. The bear reached the end of the tunnel. It was on all fours now. The way it shifted from side to side made it clear how tense it felt, how threatened, how dangerous.

  “Now what?” said Eddie.

  I looked at Rynk. “Can you get close enough to use Blade Float?”

  He sucked in the inside of his cheek. “Hmm. Need to be closer.”

  “Do it,” I said. “Stay a safe enough distance away and use Blade Float to hit it with your scimitar. Get the bastard angry. I want him frothing at the mouth.”

  “And then it’ll be enraged, and it’ll look for something to kill,” said Glora, with a tone of voice that suggested an understanding of my plan had dawned on her.

  I nodded. “And our two sets of friends in the lodges are gonna get the shock of their lives when that thing rips one of the doors off its hinges.”

  Rynk ran away from us, his feet crunching lightly on the ice. As I watched him, I suddenly felt an overwhelming tiredness settle on me. I sat on the ground and took a few breaths. My head pounded. I hadn’t focused for that long or so intently on something before in my life. It was if my brain was a muscle, and it was protesting that I’d overworked it.

  Then Eddie put his hand on my shoulder. “Better get ready to go,” he said, with a maturity in his voice that I hadn’t heard from him before.

  Away from us, over near the lodges, I heard the bear howl with a shriek of rage, and then Rynk was running back to us with a grin on his face like that of a naughty schoolboy. When he reached us, he bent over, panting. “The bear’s a little upset,” he said.

  I couldn’t help seeing the funny side of this. Despite the headache, the tiredness, and the cold, I laughed.

  “Ninety-two teams left now,” said Glora. “The wave’s hitting them fast. That, or they’re killing each other.”

  “And wave number two can’t be far off,” I said.

  Just as I finished the final syllable of my words, Eddie spoke.

  “Yeah…you might say that. It’s here now.”

  I looked at him. Surprise must have been written all over my face. “Already? No warning? No grace period so we can move?”

  “Check your map,” he said.

  My map corroborated it, showing a blue line drawn in an arc. The area inside the arc was slowly filling with blue light as the wave washed over it. The overseers had initiated the wave without any warning, which was unusual. They must have wanted to speed things up. The worst thing was, we were caught in the edges of the wave zone.

  “We better run,” I said. “And remember, no purple pins.”

  “Right,” said Eddie. “The overseers are screwing with us.”

  “You believe it now?” I asked.

  “Don’t have a choice. Guess there’s no such thing as fairness in VBR.”

  I nodded. “We need to head south to get out of the wave, then we’ll head east again. We need to stick as close to the Shadow Quadrant as we can, without going into it.”

  “Why not just head straight there?”

  “Because they’re saving it for the final battle. Why else would they leave it so mysterious? And they won’t want us to go in there yet. If you think the overseers are screwing with us now, you don’t wanna see what they’ll conjure up if we ruin the way they want the VBR to go.”

  We ran, the four of us crunching over the ice and slipping in places, sprinting across the tundra with every ounce of energy we still had to avoid the wave that was getting closer. My lungs worked overtime, and my chest started to hurt. Soon, it felt like I was actually breathing shards of ice. Incredibly, the wave seemed to creep on and on as if it had no end, as if the overseers had somehow neglected to give it a finish point and were instead happy to let it wash over the entire map, draining the hitpoints of every fighter until we all withered and died.

  Then, the blizzard hit anew. Snowflakes the size of tennis balls twirled down from the sky. Everything became white: t
he ground, the sky, the air in front of us. It was like running head-on into the beam of an ultra-bright torch.

  “Ninety-one teams left!” called Glora, panting.

  “Think it was the work of our friend the polar bear?” asked Eddie.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  I needed to check on the wave, but since I was running at the front and paving the way for the others, I couldn’t afford the lapse in focus that looking at my map would bring.

  “How’s the wave lookin’?” I asked.

  “It’s still gonna wash over us. We’ve got enough ground for now, but we can’t stop!”

  “Ah, crap. Got a stitch. Feels like my nan’s stuck me with one of her knitting needles,” said Rynk.