by Arthur Stone
Their driver was already hit. He could tell because their maneuvers were no longer well considered but rather sporadic. After all, the first and longest volley had struck the driver side door. It had been spread wide, so the driver had not died immediately, but no one in good health handled a steering wheel like this.
How could he raise his rifle? He wouldn’t be able to use his hands to hold on to the side of the truck then. Soon, the pickup would likely start to roll. That would only marginally hurt his chances of remaining steady. Plus, even with his newfound frugality, the gunner would have enough time to turn the truck into a sieve in moments. His firing was now measured and precise. This wasn’t a fight. It was a shooting gallery. Despite the desperation of Clown and Cheater’s position, the enemy’s invisibility persisted. They did not mind spending the extra mana for the sake of maintaining their cover, even though, in their minds, they had already won. How could either of them hit an invisible foe? Nothing, however, was stopping Cheater from seeing them with his Flash of Omniscience. Still, how could he raise his gun? Even if he shot with his pistol, he didn’t know where to shoot, and doubted his pumped Accuracy would help when there wasn’t even a target.
In seconds, they would be respawning. Unless he acted.
He knew he could not go for his weapon. Other options passed through the scales of his mind. Perhaps he could use Smile of Fortune. The enemy’s tire might blow, or his gun jam. Nothing else seemed to make sense. They were too far to hit with Tranquility, apparently. Nor would he be able to summon Tranquility on patches of air or asphalt they would pass through. He tried three times, in fact. Nothing. The detailed description for the ability suggested it was best used on objects which were not “part of the scenery.” The System often declined to go into detail, but it was enough of a hint.
The pavement and the air were certainly scenery. So the ability simply refused to activate when targeting atmosphere. Right now, the bullets were the only visible thing that was not “part of the scenery,” and the ability could not target them. His Reaction simply wasn’t good enough for that kind of aiming, even with tracer rounds. Nor would the ability target the road. Sadly, it was a good road. If there were potholes or cracks, they might be significant enough to target. His experiments with Tranquility ended quickly.
Luck was his last resort.
But the situation was changing rapidly. An instant before Cheater activated Smile of Fortune, something fortuitous happened. He could have thrown an object towards the enemy.
That much became painfully obvious when the enemy did it to himself. A volley hit the truck body. Clown screamed, and Cheater felt like his thigh had been hit with a sledgehammer. His vision began to blur. But he saw it well enough.
The bullets broke the nuts securing the spare tire, and said tire proceeded to bounce back out of the wavering pickup.
It was positioned right between the pursuers and their prey.
There was no time left for consideration. Instead of Smile of Fortune, Cheater used Tranquility.
The tire stopped suspended two feet above the pavement. An instant later, their pursuers’ front bumper hit the same place.
Cheater finally got a glimpse of their car. The camouflage was shaken away. It was a pickup similar to theirs, though smaller and nearly unmodified. When it collided with the indestructible obstacle, it not only received a bashed-in front bumper; its rear end was hurled up into the air, brutally throwing the machine gunner out of the truck like a performer from a carnival cannon.
It was a beautiful sight. The next moment, either their driver died, or their pickup’s tires grew weary of clinging to the road.
The truck turned over.
Despite the injury he had just received, Cheater had enough Reaction and Agility to hurl himself out of the overturning truck. He rolled two dozen paces, the “smooth” roadway tearing his clothes and skin as he went. He leaped to his feet.
If shock was coming, he had to act before it arrived. Now was not the time for rest. No victory message had been displayed by the system.
Raising his sword, which had thankfully landed near his feet, Cheater charged the enemy vehicle. It looked bad. Not only was its front end utterly destroyed—it had turned over several times, before landing once more on its wheels. Those inside could still be alive. Players were tenacious beings. These ones could return to their senses any second.
He could not allow that.
The machine gunner slammed into the pavement. Her limbs were bent in unnatural directions, and her long hair grew dark with blood. But her broken left arm was moving, trying to push her body up from the road.
Cheater silenced her with Choppa, as he ran by.
That’s one.
He reached the car and looked in through where the door had once been. The passenger sat, restrained by his seat belt. One eye looked blindly forward. The other looked nowhere, for a steel bar which had been part of the windshield’s armor now was a part of his eye socket. Omniscience showed Cheater that the metal had punched deep into his brain, nearly to his occipital bone.
That’s two.
The driver was alive and conscious, but pinned into his seat by the crumpled vehicle. After all that he had experienced, he was clearly deeply confused.
Cheater pressed the barrel of his pistol to the man’s head. “Are you alone?”
“Wh—what?” the driver muttered, blood gurgling from his mouth. “The... what? You... Who are you? Thought you were... Devils... Why did you... attack us?”
“Devils!?” Cheater yelled. “I’m just a regular guy, traveling east, trying not to get killed by worthless bandits. Damned highway robbers like you!”
The driver's eyes flickered with coherent thought. He understood. “I... we fucked up... we didn’t know...”
“Well, now you do.”
Cheater’s finger twitched.
And that’s three.
As he turned to face his own vehicle once more, Cheater’s strength gave out, and he dropped to all fours, screaming as agony shot through his thigh.
Nothing to worry about. Merely a scratch. The bone seemed to be intact, so he would not have to crawl, at least. Muscle regenerated quickly on a player, especially since he had a core in him. Golden regen cores healed nearly everything within three days. In addition, Cheater had also gained a wild buff that would last a hundred hours, and then some, plus 150 Stamina. Its effect was supernaturally powerful. If healthy, you could run all day and not even become short of breath. Even the most severe pain became like a distant echo.
Clown had received a similar buff, but as far as Cheater could see, his companion had taken a bullet to the stomach. Or bullets. The golden core would cope with that, but it was certainly a more difficult process.
Both cars were totaled, and their driver seemed beyond hope. They themselves were crippled. And there were still ten miles to the border of the cluster they needed to reach.
Indeed, this was wholesome fun all around.
Chapter 5
Life Nine. Change of Scene
The final miles took them all night. In normal conditions, a player could cover that distance in three hours, tops. And that would be with less-than-ideal terrain and a bulky backpack crammed with heavy items. Cheater, however, was suffering greatly from his thigh wound. The huge buff to his Stamina did not help nearly as much as the beginner brochures suggested it would. Plus, he basically had to carry Clown. The man was heavy, and he could only move on his own for short stretches, and slowly.. A blow to the liver like that would kill a normal man outright, but the golden medicine could heal it all, except, perhaps, where one’s head was torn right off.
Seeing that Clown had not died at the scene, he would now likely make it.
The scent of their blood covered the entire country around. Several times, they caught ghouls following them, and at one point some beasts leaped at them from the front. Not even Darkvision warned Cheater; he heard the grumbling first, before he could see them. Thankfully, young rafflers
were the worst they had to encounter. His sword dealt with them quickly and easily.
The monsters frequently appearing from behind suggested that more were likely tracking them. For some reason, there were many of them wandering through here. Perhaps they were heading to the rebooting cluster where March was due to appear, as was their habit.
Or, there might have been other reasons for the grumblers’ appearance. One never knew.
The last stretch was the hardest, and not due to the beasts. It was the kind of place the ghouls hated. Thick black clusters. Even healthy, strong players grew tired and ill within a couple of hours in the dark lands.
Cheater dragged himself to the finish line. His legs felt like boiling vegetables. It took his last bit of Stamina just to realize that entering a cluster which was just about to reboot was not the best idea. Entering just after the reboot would be terrible, too—they would track their smell halfway across a land where infecteds were pouring in for the new spoils.
Had the reboot already happened? March’s icon was inactive, so either he had not respawned yet, or he was beyond the black. The latter was improbable.
He wouldn’t have had the time.
They took a break a dozen paces from the cluster border, at the edge of a garbage dump. The outlines of mountains of rubbish darkened the dawn and irritated their noses and ears with multitudinous odors, and with the incessant rustling of rats and other vermin poking about for food waste.
Clown took a sip of lifejuice and passed out so quickly that he didn’t even screw the cap back on. Cheater courageously tried to keep watch, but as soon as the first rays of sun came up, he was out, too.
Sleeping at the edge of a cluster about to hit reset was reckless, especially without a sentinel. But his body would not be refused its rest.
* * *
Cheater woke soon after. A terrible nightmare provoked the Sandman to vomit him up. In his dream, the rats from the landfill had surrounded them on all sides and proceeded to gnaw into their noses, ears, fingers, and other parts.
Cheater barely resisted the urge to brush the fictitious beasts away as he leaped to his feet. As often happened, the dream and reality embraced one another for a moment after his waking.
But everything was fine. There were no rats, and no gnawed off body parts.
His heart began to settle down—and then leaped up into his throat again.
Clown was gone.
Just four hours ago he had been lying nearby, on a debris-strewn patch of withered grass. Now, he was nowhere to be seen. Hadn’t his insides been shot up? He couldn’t have just walked away!
Cheater shook his head, but he was experienced enough to open the chat window. Clown’s icon blinked with a new message.
Clown: Don't shake your head like that. I’m here.
Cheater did not bother asking exactly where “here” was. He was awake enough to find it out on his own. The location of any party member could be determined on the map.
He opened it and went to maximum zoom, then found Clown. Closing the map, he turned slowly, looked up, and squinted. There he was. On top of the largest pile of garbage in the whole region. To disguise himself, he had even put a shredded plastic bag over his head, which made Cheater snort.
Cheater: What are you doing up there?
Clown: Come see for yourself.
Cheater really, really hated the idea of climbing such a tall and unstable hill, but climb he did. Just in case, he hit the mound with Flash of Omniscience. He winced as he saw dozens of illuminated rats hiding in the rubbish. He sighed and began his ascent.
One minute later, he crouched down next to Clown. “Couldn’t you have picked a smaller hill? I felt like I was going to fall right into the goo.”
“Nope. This one’s got the view. Plus, better to smell like trash than blood. You managed to leave our spare clothes in the vehicle, so we don’t have anything to change into.”
“I had to carry my pack, and you. With a shot leg. Plus, we had to get out of there fast, before ghouls came calling for the source of the noise.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t hold it against you.”
“How did you even get up here?” Cheater doubted. “Last I saw you, you were in such bad shape you couldn’t even moan, never mind move.”
“I used my legs. Sometimes my arms helped out. The regen is still active, so my gut is all patched up. Still a scar there, but I bet that’ll be gone by tomorrow.”
“Does it still hurt?” Cheater pressed.
“Of course it does. Anything more than a half-breath would make me double over. But it’s bearable, on the whole. Doesn’t feel like a knife blade is sawing at my insides anymore.”
“You could have, you know, stayed down below.”
“You’re so boring.”
“Why?”
“Look at this view. It’s beautiful.”
Cheater did not think that “beautiful” was the right word. In one cardinal direction, black clusters stretched out towards the horizon, and two other directions offered only mountains of trash. The final direction might, if your vision was sufficiently blurred, be considered somewhat less wretched. Mining structures and heaps of rock shared the landscape with massive chimneyed factories. So dull and gray it was that Cheater suppressed a minor urge to leap to his death down below.
“Beautiful?”
“You don’t think so?” Clown replied.
“For a fan of brutalist architecture who’s also colorblind—or better yet, fully blind—perhaps. It looks like the outskirts of a city. An old, poor, Soviet city. With record-breaking rates of depression and suicide.”
“Perhaps,” his comrade nodded, “but you’re missing the beautiful part. Ten minutes ago, an elite ran by on that road there, with eight beasts behind him. None of them weak. Each one a trampler or better. Now, look over there. See that? Runners. Hurrying off somewhere. They’re all going in the same direction, even though the groups can’t see each other. So, why do you think they’re going that way? They’re not about to head towards the black lands, of course. In order to escape this cluster’s reset, they’re heading that way, towards the next standard cluster.”
“So it’s about to begin,” Cheater concluded.
“I’d assume so. But we wouldn’t know otherwise. Usually there’s a fog, the deathveil, before the cluster is reborn. Along with a sour smell. All of the smells currently wafting through our nasal passages can be explained by this garbage. The ghouls, however, are behaving very suspiciously. I don’t think we’ll have to wait for long. We could only have a couple of hours left. Or less.”
“So why are we climbing trash mounds? We have to leave!” Cheater insisted.
“No, hang on. We’ve still got some time. The ghouls haven’t exited the cluster yet, and they’re rarely wrong about these things, if ever. They have to cross the whole cluster to reach the next border, since they won’t head into the black. Well, they won’t when there’s an alternative, anyway. You and I, on the other hand, don’t mind hanging out in the dark for a bit. So relax. Enjoy the sights and smells a little more.”
Cheater gazed at the bleak industrial landscape in the distance, then at the piles of rubbish, then at the road between the two, sprinkled with bones here and there.
His question seemed a reasonable one. “What sights?”
“The sights of an utterly dead world which is about to come alive. Everything will be transformed in the reboot. Everything will suddenly look very different. It’s one of the greatest wonders of the Continent. It’s beautiful.”
“Clown, I’m pretty sure that even a full reboot can’t help this place. Give it a hundred reboots, if you want. It’s a garbage dump now, and it’ll be a garbage dump after the reset. Same with the rest of it.”
“You’re still dull sometimes, Cheater. ‘Beautiful’ doesn’t have the meaning it used to.”
“Well, what’s it mean now, then?”
“You know how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure? This dump, f
or example. Some types would be overjoyed to find it. Now, you’re right, I’m not one of those types. These are just mountains of shit, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s hard to find beauty in shit. But consider this: have you ever thought about what would happen if we stayed in the cluster at the moment of reset?”
