by Arthur Stone
Pressing his head into the ground, he turned his head slightly to see Maple. The girl lay on her side, her face splattered with blood, her one good eye gazing blindly into the distance. An unsightly bullet hole had replaced the other.
The gunfire died down as suddenly as it had started. Cheater was starting to panic. First, he was wounded, and badly. As he dove towards the ground, in the enemy’s direction, he had taken the bullet while nearly horizontal. It had entered his shoulder and pushed down along the left side of his body, going through his lung and into his abdominal cavity and then exiting via his upper groin. Along the way, of course, it had hit many important parts of him. He was dying—it was a miracle that he was still alive.
The second reason for concern was that his ears had begun to pick up the hum of engines. This unknown enemy was proceeding towards the scene of the killing. Cheater did not want to meet them, but where could he go? If he showed any sign of life, they would finish him off. It was an open area still, with nowhere to hide.
I cannot die here. He was carrying a bag of mods and loot from the sporesac of the world’s most dangerous elite. How could he let his murderers seize it all?
He had to survive. Cheater had medicine which could take care of the injury.
The golden core of regeneration that he always carried—he could afford it.
But the System’s mockery knew no end. Today was the cooldown day for regeneration cores. He was mere hours away from being able to use the universal healing item. It could cure anything short of decapitation.
Cheater did not have hours. The wound would finish him off very soon.
So he took the only remaining action: retrieving his spec, he tried to move his hand imperceptibly and injected the contents of the syringe into his side.
After a few seconds of delay, the strongest stimulant available on the Continent would make his blood boil alive and give him triple strength. That would provide him about fifteen minutes of ferocity. During this time, he could get to a stable and hide his loot there. After respawn, he would return for it.
The plan was simple and feasible enough. Sadly, the map would not tell him whether there was a stable cluster nearby.
Taking out Maple’s killers would be the first order of business, instead.
The engine noises grew closer and closer. He estimated the car to be fifty yards away, if not less.
Now.
Cheater activated Helping Hand and used a Shard of Invulnerability, thankful that he had held out on using this trump card until this critical moment. Until the blackest day yet.
He had no more reason to hold on to it. The cooldown was a hundred hours, and he would likely spend all of that in darkness. In unconsciousness.
In the place beyond time.
Cheater stood to one knee and raised his heavy rifle, aiming at the enemy. Bots, as he had suspected. They didn’t care about ammunition, so the minigun was a perfectly acceptable weapon to them. The convoy included two lightly armored SUVs with machine guns, one unarmed truck, and a modern tank outfitted with all kinds of gear, metal nets, and reactive armor plating. All of these vehicles were clad in sandy camouflage, as if they had just come from the desert.
If only they would stay in their damned wilderness!
Cheater first took out the first machine gunner. Bullets were fired in response, lightly pattering against his body. He felt their impact, weakly, in his invulnerable state. Direct hits from shells were the only thing to truly fear right now—they could knock him far away.
Once he had emptied his magazine, the cars no longer had machine gunners or drivers, but the shooting continued. Infantrymen had jumped out of the transport vehicle and tuned all of their guns on him. Nearly a dozen bots, with no care to spare ammunition. One of them was bound to get lucky.
Indeed, one of the bullets hit his rifle’s receiver while he was reloading. He might as well throw the gun at them now. Cheater’s main weapon was out of commission.
Tossing the rifle aside, he threw a couple of grenades ahead into the pack of bots, drew Choppa, and charged. The spec had his blood boiling like lava, and the thoughts ran jumbled and hotly through his head.
He wanted to kill. All of them. Over and over.
The face of the nearest bot was indescribable. He was shooting point blank at a rapidly approaching player, and that player was not even stumbling. As he ran past, Cheater casually decapitated the man and then attacked the next.
One hit after the next. A fountain of hot blood hit him in the face, some shooting down his throat. Invulnerability disabled the senses of smell and taste, but the sensation was still unpleasant. Spitting furiously, Cheater chopped and chopped, rushing from one bot to another. They kept firing at him, nothing on their minds but driving more bullets into their target. At least one of them fatally shot a team member. Cheater drew his pistol and shot the bot loading a grenade launcher, then finished off a couple of fleeing submachine gunners. They had finally realized that fighting an invincible target was a terrible idea. Finally realized they were going to die here. All of them. Cheater would not allow any pursuit. No one would find a bag of treasure next to his pile of black dust on the ground.
The tank was moving backward, its turret rotating clumsily, trying to catch his nimble form in its sights. For some reason, the bots inside were not firing the machine guns. As interesting as Clown would have found it to see Cheater catch a shell with his teeth, the swordsman had no plans of doing so. He used Tranquility on the end of the gun’s barrel and rushed the steel monster, sword twirling in his hand.
The tank shot. Or, rather, tried to shoot. The projective reached the sphere of the skill’s effect and stopped. It encountered an indestructible wall. The fuse was not yet active, so the shell did not explode, but the good news for the crew ended there.
Gases had nowhere to go. Their pressure exceeded the strength of the steel, and so the barrel burst beautifully. It exploded into a flower shape of bent steel scraps, as if the Continent were a child’s cartoon.
Cheater reached the tank and dove into the smoke, jumping and swinging with Choppa’s Crushing Blow.
Perhaps the blade’s ability could pierce even the front armor of the tank, but all he needed to cut apart was the hatch.
Once the lock was removed, he pried up the lid with Choppa as his lever, opened it slightly, and threw in his last two grenades, one after the other. He leaped off and activated Flash of Omniscience. The ability didn’t reach far, so Cheater was hardly a full-fledged sensor. But the whole fight had taken only seconds. The enemies had not had time to disperse. He would have no trouble seeing them with his ordinary vision.
No one was in sight. All of the bots, killed within a minute. None only wounded, and none hiding.
Returning to the front vehicle, Cheater kicked out the driver’s corpse and took the wheel. The engine was already running, and he floored the pedal. Spec did not last long. He had to find...
Find what?
His thoughts were all scrambled. That damned spec made his mind unstable.
Oh, right, a stable.
Where should he look?
It seemed he had been heading towards the hills in the east before the shooting began. Perhaps he had been going there for a reason.
* * *
Cheater found no stable in the hills. As he meandered around, the spec’s effects began subsiding.
He had to inject himself again, consequences be damned. Double doses were extremely dangerous. Players with low Endurance would die within two to three minutes, at the most. But Cheater had pretty high Endurance. He might last as long as fifteen minutes.
At which point, death was inevitable, either from his wounds or from overdosing.
He was done for.
The double dose amplified the problems he was having with his head. How did the truck end up here? Why isn’t the engine working? He had driven into a black cluster. The vehicle hadn’t stopped; it continued sliding down the slope, its engine extinguished. Yet its speed
increased.
It all ended with a predictable flight into a black ravine. His brakes refused to work—or Cheater pressed them too late.
The ravine was deep. Perilously deep. Thankfully, his last remaining scrap of reason prompted him to fire off Smile of Fortune. If his five seconds of invulnerability failed to save him, he would hope for a lucky outcome.
The tumble was longer than five seconds, and his consciousness stopped. It was not lost. It stopped working. He remembered nothing, perceived nothing, comprehended nothing. When he came to, he was walking across black grass, spitting blood, dragging his pack of treasure by one strap.
The pack... He needed it for something... Really needed it.
He was supposed to do something with it, but what?
Also, he really wanted to find a stable, but why?
Glimpses of understanding occasionally hit him, but on the whole, he was moving without being conscious of it.
The blackness ended up ahead. Was that a stable beyond? No. There was a highway, and the pavement was pretty new. He saw a burned-out car there. Two of them, in fact. Players or digis or someone had died here. Maybe even the bots he had run into a little bit ago had been the killers.
Straining the last vestiges of his mind with all his might, Cheater realized he was not going to find a stable. He was out of time. He had to do something with the pack right now and hope that the current cluster did not reboot soon. Then, he could return and collect the valuable pack.
A burned-out car seemed like a great place. No one would search the ruined shell of a vehicle for treasure.
It was his only option. He could feel the final seconds counting down.
It was rusty car or nowhere.
The pack was too big, and the Nold turret tied onto it got in the way. The burned-out car was low to the ground, its tires gone, and stuffing a pack underneath while you were dying was not an easy task.
He did it, without realizing it. He even tried not to trample the grass around it too much. It covered the lower part of the car, preventing the cache from being discovered.
He went back into the black, pushed his way through some bushes, and then collapsed. He was done. It was a good place to die. In a black cluster, there were no witnesses, and no one would see him from the road. Players’ corpses disappeared quickly.
The road... Something bothered him about that road.
It wasn’t the road itself, but something else.
Dammit, it was the grass near the cache. It was too tall! The car had burned a long time ago, and then the grass had grown later. This wasn’t a new cluster. It might reset within hours. If it did, everything he just hid would disappear forever. Only the items in his cache and his inventory would survive.
Was there anything he could do? No. Hopefully it would stick around a few more days.
And so, Cheater hoped. And waited to die.
Death was in no hurry to take him. Pain came first, and then receded, and then vanished. Cheater’s limbs stopped feeling anything. His vision began to blur. For some reason, the sky turned black. That wasn’t supposed to happen. His vision was fading.
Lowering his eyelids, he opened the chat menu, opened the chat he wanted, and sent a period. One single dot.
It was the final test communication of his ninth life.
Kitty:
Comma.
Cheater’s organs were failing, but he still could produce some thoughts.
Clearly he was hallucinating. Dying, he was delirious. Why would Kitty send him a word like that, anyway? Except... what had he sent before that? A period?
Answering with “comma” was her style.
Cheater wrote a message, with difficulty.
Is that you Kitty, can you read me?
Yes. That or I’m delirious.
Cheater knew then that the conversation was real. The black strip he had crossed had been the final obstacle.
He was back.
He had done it.
He had to write something. A lot of things. Everything he had wanted to say for months.
No time for that. Death could come at any time.
There was the most important thing, though. The thing he had to say at all costs.
The letters in the chat window were beginning to blur.
I’m no delirium. I’m back.
I can’t believe it!
I promised, and so I’m back. Are you far away?
Can’t you see my marker?
I don’t want to open the map.
Why? And why are you blinking?
I’m dying, Kitty. I don’t want to open the map and be unable to open the chat again. Everything’s starting to glitch out.
Dying? After coming all this way, that’s the first thing you do?
Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon. But please look at the map. Can you see me?
Of course. I’m about 50 miles away.
50 miles? Can you come? Quickly?
It’s 50 miles. Hard to cover fast. But I’ll try. Can you hold on? I have to see you. I’ve got spec, and a black regen. Cheater, dammit, wait for me!
His last conversation with Maple came to mind. “You can’t trust anyone on the Continent. Nobody. You’re the only one like that on the whole Continent. She only needs you to complete a System quest. Once she sees you, it’ll be complete.”
The healer had said too much.
If no one could be trusted at all, why even go on living?
Cheater dismissed Maple’s warnings.
Sorry, but I won’t make it. Pin my marker. Fifty yards away, you’ll find a burned-out car. Only vehicle around. Underneath there’s a backpack filled with stuff. Very valuable things. This is not a stable. A reset will destroy everything. You know what to do.
Get your pack? Got it. I’ll do it right away.
“Trust no one. No one.”
Maple’s voice sounded in his ears.
That was the final sound Cheater perceived in his ninth life.
Epilogue
Life Ten.
...
Choice of location accepted. You will resurrect in Construction Site.
Welcome, Player. You are rejoining the Continent. Revive location: Cluster 58-285-54. Region: West Coast. Current revives remaining: 89 lives (initial value minus 10). Note: You have unlinked bonus lives. You can link them at any time, but only up to the starting limit—and no more than one bonus life every ten days. Active quests: Survive, Search, Learn Secret, Help, Ask Correct Question, Find the Player Kitty. Current status: Game Start. The cluster will reboot in 91 seconds. Enjoy your game.
As he respawns, Cheater makes no hurry to open his eyes. He knows that he will see a rundown construction site building, not a student dormitory. This is what he has chosen. There will be nothing special to look at.
First, he opens his chat. So, so many messages. Some active and flashing. The respawned members of the crossing party are pinging him. He is the last to come back, it seems.
If they’re all back, though, why is the list so short? Someone is missing.
Kitty is missing.
She has left the party.
In disbelief, Cheater frantically flips through the logs. Kitty left almost immediately after their conversation, when he was on the brink of death.
“You can’t trust anyone on the Continent. No one.”
His heart chilled to the temperature of a glacier, Cheater opens a chat with the girl, and accompanied by the drums of his frantically beating heart, he writes.
Why?
Five seconds pass.
Ten.
Twenty.
One hundred.
One hundred fifty.
No answer.
“You can’t trust anyone.”
No one can be—
The chat blinks.
What do you mean, Rocky? Are you okay, or dying again?
The ice cracks, and his heart warms a little.
I stopped being Rocky a long time ago. I’m Cheater. You named me yourself, r
emember? Why did you leave the party?
Why did I leave!? I can’t believe you. You must have traveled the only regions in the Continent that don’t require intelligence to cross. What was I supposed to do? You were dead, and I was left holding a bag of invaluable treasures, as a member of some mysterious party. I saw how you were all killing each other in the logs. How was I supposed to stay in a party like that, so that all of these strangers could see me on the map whenever they wanted? I had to leave. I can always come back. I didn’t answer any questions from your friends, either. How am I supposed to know who’s your friend and who’s not? So I just waited for you to come back.
