I opened my mouth, but before I could say something, Cooper beat me to it. “Keep quiet for a while. We’re close.”
He was right. Only one hundred or so yards separated us from the skyscraper already. The high-rise building loomed over us. I felt nervous. I wasn’t very fond of getting croaked before I learned how to get in touch with Desert Wanderers.
The numerous windows gaped at us from above. Any might spit out sudden death. I activated Shield, feeling on edge.
We were not a few yards from the wide open door now. I had to resist the urge to dash inside. Who knew what the snipers were up to now. For all I knew, they had stationed an ambush near the entrance door inside the building.
Finally, we got to the building. Cooper walked through the doorway, his rifle at the ready. I waited outside until the player gestured for me to hurry inside.
“Clear,” He informed me.
We checked the first floor but after finding nobody, we jogged up the stairwell and got to the second floor. Checked all the rooms. Found nobody again. Reached the next floor. Still no sign of the snipers.
We checked one floor after another but failed to meet the snipers. Aside from Cooper’s heavy boots pounding on the ground, it was all quiet. Most rooms were completely empty. Others contained a few tumbledown cabinets where we found some resources or food. Cooper left all the loot alone, letting me pick it up.
Eventually, we reached the top floor.
“Looks like they gotten outta here when they saw us approaching the building,” Cooper conjectured. “Guess they haven’t gotten too far away. They may be somewhere nearby.”
He leaped toward one window and peered out. The player then brought his rifle up and looked through the scope, scanning the streets below.
I walked over to the nearby window as well. Seen from so far above, the whole city was on display.
“Stay back from the windows,” Cooper suddenly warned me, a sharp edge to his voice.
I jumped backward.
“If they know that we were heading for the building, they may be observing it now,” Cooper explained.
Since I had nothing to do, I checked all the cabinets on this floor and picked up everything useful.
Cooper suddenly squeezed the trigger. The sound of the thundering gunshot echoed off the walls. The spent casing shell clinked to the floor.
I glanced back. Cooper was still at the window, sighting someone far below. Then he fired again. After two or three seconds, the player dashed to another window and brought his weapon up. The rifle barked once more.
When he fired for the fifth time, Cooper exclaimed excitedly, “Got him! One down two to go!”
I said nothing.
“There two more of them,” Cooper said after some time passed. “Level 57 and level 45. And I’ve just killed a level 50 player.”
He continued to survey the streets but didn’t discharge his gun anymore.
“Guess they won’t get in the open now that I whacked one of them,” Cooper finally said. “All right, wait here!”
He slung his rifle across his shoulders and to my sincere amazement vaulted out the window and disappeared from view. I darted toward the window.
Contrary to my expectation, he wasn’t dropping down like a proverbial rock but gliding through the air like Iron Man. I watched him for a few moments, then remembered to heed his warnings and hurried away from the window.
I just stood still, straining to hear for a while. There was a lot of shooting going on in the city. It occurred to me that if the snipers returned to the skyscraper while Cooper was absent, I’d get in a jam.
It was quiet inside the building. I moved across the room toward the stairwell and looked down.
After a while, muffled pads on the concrete floor reached me from lower floors. Judging from the sounds, only one person was ascending flights of stairs.
Finally, he showed up. It was such a relief to see him.
“Did they get away?” I inquired.
“Not a clue,” Cooper shrugged. “Didn’t find them. Perhaps they got outta here. Or holed up somewhere. Let’s go.”
We jogged down the stairs in silence. After some time the player asked me, “How long have those snipers been around, mowing down novices?”
“Beats me. Been playing the game for a couple of days only. They’ve already been here.”
“Okay. Then I’ll tell my friends from the clan about those morons. We’ll chase them down and make them regret roughing novices up.”
“So you don’t like player killing,” I said selecting my words carefully.
“Yep.”
“How come you got your nickname red then?”
Cooper glanced at me and grinned. “It was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“Yeah.”
And he told me what had happened when he just got in this location a few hours earlier. A few mantises pounced on him, wounding the player slightly. Some novice was peering out cover, watching Cooper deal with the winged creatures. The novice thought that the player was badly wounded. He jumped out of cover, blasting his pistol on Cooper. Due to his fighting with the mantises, the player was slightly on edge, so when he heard the gunshots, he instantly whipped around and discharged his rifle before he could catch himself. The slug penetrated the novice’s body, killing him instantly. Sure, it was him who started the gunfight, but all the bullets leaped from his crappy pistol missed the mark, so the game considered Cooper to be the initiator of the shootout and painted his nickname red.
“That’s how I accidentally became a PK,” Cooper said with a sad smile on his face. “That’s a shame. I feel sorry for the novice. I should’ve been more careful. Now I have to wait for a few days before my nickname turns white again.”
Finally, we got outside. Looked around. Nobody was nearby.
“Okay,” Cooper said. “Those morons can be somewhere nearby. If you want, I can escort you to a safe place in case you bump into those morons and––”
He suddenly shut up and looked to the east. Perhaps his Intuition kicked in. I looked in that direction and saw three players. One of them had level 57, the second one 45, and the third, whom Cooper had recently whacked, 49. They trained their weapons on us. I guessed the threesome imagined that they could dispose of Cooper if they attacked all at once.
“Get in cover,” he said calmly, unslinging his rifle and pressing the stock to his shoulder.
I barreled for the nearest cover, activating Shield as I ran. Gunshots cracked. Yet none of them smacked against the power dome. The three players weren’t paying me any attention. It was Cooper who posed a threat to them.
I dived into the nearest doorway and dashed over to a window to peer out.
At first, it seemed as though Cooper’s chances of dealing with the three PKs were slim. The players blasted away at him, the rounds smacking against his armor constantly, denting and scratching it.
Moreover, two of the players played as Engineers. They created a freaking swarm of small round robots that circled Cooper and raked him with automatic fire. The earth around the player erupted with fountains of dirt as bullets hit it.
Then I realized that Cooper’s armor was extremely tough. No bullet perforated it yet.
Attached to his right shoulder was a small turret gun that opened up on the flying drones. The robots exploded one after another as the bullets slammed into them. It took only a couple of minutes for the turret to get rid of all the robots.
Cooper’s rifle had a low rate of fire, yet it packed quite a punch. The PKs managed to avoid being hit by constantly moving around. But luck didn’t smile on them for long.
One of the bullets punched a huge hole in the chest of the level 45 player. The guy was flung backward and smacked against a wall of the nearby building, dead. A few items dropped beside him, one of them highlighted in blue.
The two others did double take when they saw the third getting killed. Cooper took
advantage of their brief hesitation and fired again. The slug perforated the armor of one player, blood gushing from the hole like from a faucet.
The player turned around and staggered away, removing a stimulator from a pocket on his vest and administering it to himself. Yet it didn’t stanch the flow of blood.
Being left one on one with Cooper had the level 57 player thrown in a state of panic. He darted this way, that that, trying to pose less of a target.
It didn’t do him much good. One of the shots Cooper fired caught the player right between his eyes, the back of his head erupting in a geyser of blood and cranial fluid.
He dropped a few items. Among them lay a few ones highlighted in blue and another one in purple.
Cooper headed due north, the direction in which the wounded player had gone. I waited and watched, my ears straining. No gunshots followed.
I risked leaving the building and jogging in the direction Cooper had disappeared in. After turning around a corner, I saw him reloading his rifle. On hearing my footsteps, he tensed but instantly relaxed once he saw me.
“Did the last guy get away?” I wanted to know.
“Nope,” He replied and gestured to the side. I turned following the direction of his gaze and saw a body of the last player splayed across the sidewalk.
“How come he couldn’t heal himself?” I quizzed. “Saw hum using a stimulator.”
Cooper chuckled. “It was next to impossible for him to patch himself up. My “purple” rifle has good special qualities. One of them can place a debuff called Bleeding on a player. That debuff is pretty harmful and there’s a thirty percent chance that a wounded player will have the debuff placed on him or her. So if you were unfortunate enough to get that debuff, it’s not all that easy to stanch the flow of blood while it’s active.”
Cooper looked around and noticed a “purple” shotgun lying not two feet from the dead player.
“I’ll take it if you don’t mind.”
I sure didn’t mind. Cooper had just whacked three PKs all on his own so he had the right to pick up all the loot. However, Cooper took only the shotgun.
“I don’t need anything else,” He said to me. “Feel free to gather the rest of the loot if you like.”
There weren’t many items to pick up though. The three players dropped only high-level armor and weapons. As I gathered up ammo, stimulators, and food, a thought crossed my mind that high-level, experienced players carried as fewer items as possible on them in case they got iced. They certainly kept their resources and spare items in the sheds or garages they built to store their stuff.
I leaned over to take a shotgun and assault rifle, as well as the PK’s armor from the ground to sell the items later on.
“Let’s go,” Cooper said. “I’ll escort you to the nearby vending machine lest those guys charge you if we meet them.”
After selling all the items, I looked Cooper in the eye and said, “Listen, there’s something I want to ask you about.”
“What’s that?”
Keeping in mind Crayne’s having freaked out over my story, I said, selecting my words carefully, “I can’t seem to leave this game. Y’know, when I want to press the Quit button, something––”
I shut up as I saw his polite smile die and the look in his face harden.
“Before you continue, let me clear this up,” He snapped. “I’m well aware that virtual games are very addictive. But I don’t care about the players who can’t stop playing them. First, because I can’t help such a player. And second, more importantly, because I don’t want to talk about real life. So no more mentions about it, all right?”
I simply clammed up. Cooper’s sudden reaction so dumbfounded me that I didn’t know what to say.
The player seemed to snap out of it and his angry expression softened.
“Look, I’m sorry for that childish temper tantrum. I just really don’t like real life, okay? I play virtual games because they’re so escapist and help me forget about the real world. So if you got a problem related to the game itself, I’ll be glad to help you out. Otherwise try to get Desert Wanderers to lend you a hand.”
He hated real life for some reason. He hated it so bad even a mention about it caused him to flip out.
“Okay, how do I get in touch with them?”
“Let’s go, I’ll show you.”
He led me to a dilapidated building and got inside. A flat panel display hung from one wall.
“It’s a mailbox,” Cooper said when we went over to the computer. “You can use it to send a letter to any player or clan. You can also send items via a mailbox.”
I nodded understanding, looking at the display. I should write to Christine to inform her that I was willing to return her car to her. Then I could write Stan and Guard. It might be a good idea to keep in touch with them. But first things first.
I had barely started to write a message when I remembered something. I looked at Cooper and asked, “What about your friend? You said that you came to this location to help him get the hang of the game, right? Suppose he connects to the game, how would you learn about that? By means of a mailbox?”
He shook his head. “No. He’s in my Friend List. You can add a player to Friend List to communicate with him or her without using a mailbox. Moreover, once your friend’s online, you get a notification. But if you want to write to a player who’s not in your Friend List or send an item to someone, you have to use a mailbox.”
“Got it.”
I started to type in a letter to the Desert Wanderers clan, “Greetings! I’m a novice who’s been playing the game for three days. I got a problem, which seemed like some kind of a glitch. I literally can’t leave the game. When I look at the Quit button, trying to push it, nothing happens. In other words, I’m trapped in the game. I know that only the very first virtual games had such issues. Yet I’m stuck in here. I asked around, but no player I met knew how to fix the problem. I’d like to reach out to the developers but don’t know how to do it. Maybe you know how to fix the problem? If no, could you reach out to the developers and pass on the word to them, please? I’d be glad of any of your help. Thanks for your time!”
I tapped a button to send the message and turned around. Cooper stood at my side, but he didn’t look in the direction of the computer. He wasn’t interested in the letter I’d just written at all, because, as he knew, it dealt with real life he hated so much.
“You done?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. My friend’s just written to me. He’s online. Let’s go meet him.”
We got together with his friend named Morgan and went for a walk around the city, slaying mobs that attacked us. Morgan asked a lot of questions about the game. How to earn money? How to craft a vehicle? How to get a good weapon?
Morgan went on and on asking endless how-to questions. Cooper patiently explained everything to his friend. I already knew much of this, so I wasn’t particularly interested in their conversation.
After some time, I got tired of listening to Morgan. After thanking Cooper for all the assistance he rendered to me, I walked away from them.
I was eager to drop by the mailbox to learn if someone from the clan had already responded to my letter. As soon as I walked up to the computer, a message popped up on the display, “You have no new messages.”
I went out. The sun began to set. It was time to get prepared for the impending invasion of night mutants. I had enough resources but had to unlock some skills. In order to do it, I had to get a few levels.
I set out.
Chapter four
There were a lot of players online. Hence mobs were scarce. It took me a few hours to level up to 13. I assigned one skill point to Twins, upgrading it to max level.
I decided to put off assigning the remaining skill points until a later time. Then I started looking for a house in which I’d be holding out tonight.
It started to get darker. To save some time I had t
o resort to Christine’s car. The gas tank was half empty. I’d learned a lot from Cooper, so now I knew that fuel canisters spawned near or inside gas stations. Also, due to my having been exploring the location for three days already, I knew the whereabouts of gas stations.
Finally, I laid my hands on one fuel canister and topped the car off with gas. Since the canister still had some fuel, I stowed it away in the trunk.
I couldn’t help but drop by the mailbox once. When I approached it, a notification popped up on the display. “You’ve got 1 unread message.”
It was the reply from Desert Wanderers.
“Hey, Max Calm! If you state that you’re trapped in the game, we have no reasons not to believe you. This game is still in Early Access, so it’s bound to have a lot of various glitches to be fixed. We don’t know how to help you out, but we sure can reach out to the developers. In fact, we’ve already done it and told them about your problem. If this befell you, it can befall any player. This glitch must be fixed as soon as possible. So once the developers tell us what you need to do to quit the game, we’ll immediately pass on their message to you. Hang in there! P.S. While your predicament is sure unpleasant and troublesome, some of us would be glad to be in your shoes. Real life sucks LOL”
After reading the letter, I breathed a sigh of relief. Seemed like I finally was able to set the wheels in motion.
I wondered how long it would take the developers to fix the problem. Unfortunately, there was no telling. For the time being, I had to concentrate on surviving the impending invasion of night monsters.
I wrote a letter to Christine to inform her that I was willing to return her car back to her. After that, I also sent brief messages to Stan and Guard, saying that I’d be glad to get together again sometime.
Then I got out. The sun hovered just above the rooftops to the west. The air was getting chillier. There wasn’t much time left for preparing for the invasion of night mutants.
I hurried to my car, dived inside, drove onto the road, and tore off.
Finally, one house caught my attention. It was a one-story building with a garage next to it. After pulling the car inside, I entered the building and familiarized myself with the layout. The house was suitable for holding out.
Glitch Boxset Page 27
