Kai gasped for air and was glad that his avatar didn’t have the ability to blush. At least not in a shooter. There were games and simulations specialized in human interactions which could simulate much more than that.
“Um… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to–”
“Shut up, I’m just messing with you.” She was clearly amused.
Kai had to admit that she looked pretty hot in her cyborg state, but so did everyone.
“Look,” she pointed toward a massive building in front of them.
It had the architecture of a shopping mall, being rectangular and five or six stories high. As was typical for such buildings, it had no windows on the outside. Huge cracks in the facade were visible in many places and the plastering was crumbling everywhere. The setting looked like something straight out of a post-apocalyptic scenario and stood in stark contrast to the shiny city of lights in which most of the former games took place. ‘Peachtree Mall’ was still painted above the barricaded main entrance of the massive building. The letters were faded and only readable due to Kai’s enhanced vision.
“If you turn on scan mode, you should see the snipers on the roof,” Claudia continued. Kai did as he was told and could clearly see two red-highlighted figures on the roof. Those two were completely different to the thugs he had encountered earlier. They were highly augmented human killing machines.
Hostile Cyborg
Faction: Wasps
Role: Sharpshooter
Status: Excellent
Danger: Very high
Kai wondered why he couldn’t see any more hostiles on his scan.
“Are there supposed to be only two of them?” he asked. “Or is my scanner acting up again?”
“Your scanner’s fine. There are more than two dozen of them here, but most are in stealth mode. We only notice them when they attack.”
“Oh crap.”
“Yeah, but luckily we have plenty of NPCs with us as cannon fodder. We would hear the whole story chatter all the time, but Viktor has turned it off. The main characters are kinda talkative in this game. Anyway, I have a sniper rifle and will take them out as soon as we’re in range. You cover me.”
“Copy that.”
Claudia moved forward and he followed her, trying to be as stealthy as possible. Apparently they weren’t going in full Rambo this time. At least, not yet. Black shadows moved in close proximity to them, matching their speed and stealth. The friendly NPCs.
The front side of the target structure was almost entirely dominated by a huge parking lot, which was empty but for some demolished and burned-out car wrecks. Approaching from there would be suicidal, which was why they sneaked up from the flank, using some structures that appeared to have been smaller stores and restaurants in their heyday as cover. On the mini-map, Kai could see the position of their other two squad members, Marco and Josh. Their life stats showed 100% in the group section of Kai’s HUD. So far so good.
Viktor and Francois had stayed behind and were following the co-op team at a distance. Since they weren’t part of that team, Kai wondered if they could even be spotted and attacked by the hostile NPCs.
“How’s it going over there?” Marco asked over the team com channel.
“We’re in position,” Claudia replied. “I’m ready to snipe out the sharpshooters on the roof and Kai is covering me.”
“Splendid!” Marco said, mimicking Topher’s way of speaking. “We’re ready for all hell to break loose on us, too.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Only seconds later, all hell did indeed break loose around them.
Claudia grabbed the massive rifle which she was wearing strapped to her back and took aim, focusing. After a second, Kai heard two consecutive, muffled shots.
The two highlighted figures on the roof collapsed.
“Great shots!” he complimented Claudia.
“Thanks. I’ve played this before, you know,” she said in an amused voice, then turned serious. “Get ready!”
The NPC closest to them let out a scream of agony as a shimmering blade appeared out of nowhere and impaled him from behind. The cyborg next to him literally lost his head as another phantom appeared right next to him and decapitated him. Blood sprayed from the stump that used to be his neck like a fountain as the body collapsed.
Kai activated his Angelblades and charged the invisible attackers, hacking where he suspected the assassin that had decapitated the NPC to be. He was lucky. In an extremely realistic way, he felt how his swords hit flesh as he chopped through the hostile cyborg’s body.
The figure appeared right in front of him, losing his stealth, and he could now see the Wasp’s stats.
Critical hit!
710/1000
Holy shit, that’s a tough son of a bitch!
The hostile turned around and counterattacked. His face was hidden under a black helmet with a yellow visor which gave his appearance something menacing.
Just in time, Kai parried an attack aimed at his face and kicked the masked figure away to gain some room. The hostile was attacked by another NPC and turned his attention toward him. This gave Kai the opportunity to attack the Wasp from behind. Instead of trying to melee him, Kai drew his pistol and fired multiple shots into the enemy unit’s head. Sparks flew through the night as red numbers flashed above the Wasp, indicating his health was dropping rapidly. Finally his head exploded, hit by one last bullet from Kai’s pistol.
“Not bad!” he heard Claudia from next to him, where she was melee attacking another enemy who had lost his invisibility. “Be careful. There’s two more of them coming from behind. Parry!”
Kai reacted faster than he could even think. He spun on his heels and lifted his arms with the integrated blades defensively in front of his face and chest.
Sparks flew once more as an invisible sword hit him, yet without causing damage.
“Focus your scanner on sound!” Claudia called out. “It’s the only way to spot them when they’re cloaked!”
“And you’re telling me this only now?” Kai asked, fending off another potentially deadly strike.
“Sorry…” Claudia chuckled, skillfully evading the attack of two uncloaked hostile cyborgs.
“You ok over there?” they heard Marco ask over the com channel.
“Of course!” Claudia replied. “We’re gonna have our side cleaned up long before you!”
“Pah!”
Kai focused his scanner on sound as Claudia had instructed and saw soundwaves sparkling in the bluish air when the hostile NPCs moved.
Quickly, he opened his weapon inventory and grabbed the assault rifle instead of the pistol. He aimed vaguely at the soundwaves in front of him. A muffled scream pierced the night as his salvo of high-caliber bullets riddled the torso of an opponent. From this short distance, the weapon outright devastated the hostile’s body. Blood sprayed in his face but quickly vanished from his vision, as so often in games of this kind.
“Yes!”
But his triumph lasted only for a second.
A sharp pain pierced through his side as an assassin’s blade ripped his flesh open.
Kai tumbled to the side and cried out in pain.
What the hell was this? It felt way too intense!
Warning! Severe damage in biological tissue detected!
You can say that again, he thought, clenching his teeth while his life energy dropped below 50%.
Kai was so distracted by the sudden heavy damage he had taken that he didn’t even notice the soundwaves approaching him at high speed. But instead of landing the final blow, the assassin’s head exploded right in front of him, covering him in goo.
Still overwhelmed by what had just happened, Kai saw Claudia lowering her rifle.
“Thanks,” he said, straightening up. His HUD indicated that his health was still diminishing. The attack had caused bleeding damage.
“That should be all of them for now,” she said. “The rest are hiding inside the building. Are you ok?”
“Not sure,” Ka
i said. “That hurt as hell! Is that normal?”
Claudia summoned a med kit out of her inventory and approached him.
“Here, let me fix you up before you bleed to death, rookie,” she said, spraying a white mist over his wound.
The effect was immediate. Kai’s life stats quickly rose again until the bar stopped at 75%.
“On hard mode, you won’t get your full health back and will lose up to 25% with every critical hit,” Claudia said, then spoke into the group channel. “Control, Kai took a heavy hit here. The intensity might need to be recalibrated.”
“Nah, we’re all good,” they heard Lex’s voice. “We’re running hard mode on highest intensity. It might hurt a little more than usual, but Kai’s fine. Your body is still in one piece, kiddo.”
She laughed.
“Good to know,” Kai said, still a bit shaken.
“Other than that, everything ran smoothly on our side,” Claudia reported.
“All good on our side, too,” Marco confirmed.
“Code looks clean, I can’t see anything out of the ordinary,” Viktor added in his bored voice.
“Splendid!” Topher said. “You better proceed then. You’ve got only seven minutes and ten seconds left until the big bang.”
“Ok, we group up inside, same place as always,” Marco said.
Claudia tapped Kai’s shoulder. “Come on, we need to hurry.”
She ran off, followed by the remaining friendly NPCs. After the ambush, they only had three left. Kai followed them quickly and reloaded his weapons on the run, as every experienced shooter player did. They took cover behind the ruined base buildings flanking the mall, which loomed dark and menacing in front of them.
“I’ve never felt such intense pain in a game,” he told his partner, catching up with her.
“I know, it sucks at times, but you get used to it.”
“Are you serious?’
“Yeah. Remember, it’s not real. It’s a trick played on your brain.”
If that’s so, why are we wearing the gimp suits which are supposed to protect our bodies? he thought, but he bit his tongue instead of saying it out loud.
“Someone has to test the maximum intensity to make sure people playing the game later don’t get hurt, if they think they need to play it with the intensity turned all the way up. And that someone is us,” Claudia said, not slowing down.
“Makes sense.”
The bright moonlight cast long shadows on everything around them. An old dumpster, a corroded car wreck, a burned tree.
If the others hadn’t told him that the rest of the hostiles were inside, Kai would have expected another attack any second. Every moving shadow could be a cloaked hostile, ready to strike. The level designers had done an excellent job here. Kai could feel how his body was producing adrenaline, whether he liked it or not. More than ever now that he knew how painful a direct hit could be.
“Yeah, this job is for people with masochistic tendencies,” Claudia said with a chuckle. “But, of course, HR don’t tell you that.”
“No, they definitely don’t.”
They had arrived at the side of the mall and at an entrance that said ‘Employees only’.
“But don’t worry,” Claudia continued. “We rarely test on highest intensity. Most of the time it’s not necessary. Sometimes we even use god mode. Ok, we’ll send the NPCs in first. They’ll be ambushed and slaughtered by two hostiles hiding by the door. We rush in and take them out, then regroup with the others in the atrium.”
She used the inhuman strength of her cyborg body to kick in the door, then she and Kai took cover at the sides while the three NPCs rushed in first.
All of them were shredded within seconds. It made it easy to determine the hostiles’ position. When they stormed in, Claudia took on the assassin on the right, while Kai turned left. The two hostile killer cyborgs were dead within seconds.
A long, dark corridor led them straight into the main area of the shopping center. A view of morbid beauty opened before Kai. Some parts of the vast hall were demolished, and one arm of the building had collapsed and was blocked by rubble. Other parts, however, appeared as if the people who had been working and shopping in the many little stores had just left for a lunch break – never to return again. The remains of clothes still hung displayed behind the windows. Other stores advertised outdated electronics, covered by thick layers of dust. Shattered glass covered the floor and reflected the moonlight shining in through the destroyed dome. One escalator was still standing upright, seemingly waiting for shoppers to take them to the upper area of the building. The other one next to it had collapsed, and its remains decorated the ground like a giant’s broken spine. Dust particles hovered in the air, shining in the moonlight. It was clear to Kai the instant he entered the hall that this was a place where some huge shit would soon go down.
The other four were already waiting at a fountain that hadn’t seen any water for decades and was instead filled with dried dirt.
“There you are,” Marco said, grinning. “Just in case you didn’t know, there’s a ticking nuclear bomb here somewhere.”
Claudia narrowed her cyborg eyes and flipped him off.
“Let’s just finish it quickly, ok?” Francois said. “I hate it when that thing blows off. It gives me the creeps.”
“Any issues with the AI so far?” Viktor asked, not looking up from the code rushing over his virtual screen.
“Nope,” Claudia said. “Friendly and hostile NPCs worked according to parameters on our side.”
“On ours, too,” Marco nodded.
“Seems like the pathfinding and trigger behavior works flawlessly. Who would have thought they’d fix that for the new build?” Josh said.
“Ok, let’s do this,” Marco said. “The hostiles are guarding their precious little bomb way back behind the food court on the second floor. We take the escalator and go in full frontal. We can test the sneak approach on the next run.”
They rushed up the escalator. It creaked dangerously and big clouds of dust hovered off it, slowly sinking to the ground. Kai followed right behind Marco and Claudia and was happy when they reached the top without the thing crashing down under their heavy semi-machine bodies. Although he trusted that the others knew what they were doing – after all, they kept repeating laconically that they’d played this game before – he had still expected the escalator to collapse at any second. No doubt that was the level designers’ intention.
Upstairs, many of the shop windows were shattered, and glass crunched under their heavy combat boots as they made their way toward the food court. With its scattered tables and chairs and only very dim lighting, the area had something eerie and deeply unsettling about it.
“Four minutes,” Viktor said in a tone that suggested he was talking about nothing more concerning than a microwave timer.
Something caught Kai’s attention. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a strange shimmer, as if light was shining through the dust-covered marble floor a few feet away from him.
Following the instinctive curiosity of a gamer, he decided to take a closer look without slowing down and losing the others. Experienced gamers knew that such things never appeared coincidentally in a game. If level designers illuminated an area in a slightly different way than the rest, then it usually meant that something was hidden there.
He hadn’t gone more than five steps away from the party when something he never would have expected happened.
Suddenly, he fell through the floor. Less than six feet away from the shining light, his boots hit thin air. An invisible trap door. The floor looked perfectly normal, yet there was nothing physical there to step on.
Kai let out a surprised scream as he fell into a world completely different from the game above. Gray and blue beams surrounded him as he plunged by geometrical figures, vectors and numbers. He fell at least 50 feet, but he couldn’t tell for sure as his head began to spin and he lost orientation. After a couple of seconds – or minutes, he couldn
’t really tell – he crashed into a construct of triangles that could never have existed in the physical world. He got stuck in a hellishly uncomfortable position with one leg splayed out at an impossible angle and his arms stuck in the geometrical shapes.
To his surprise, his avatar hadn’t taken any damage and his limbs didn’t hurt, even though his leg surely would have been at least fractured in real life or a realistic game.
“What the fuck…” he whispered.
“Kai, are you ok?” Claudia asked over the group channel.
“Yeah,” he answered, looking around. “I somehow fell through the floor. I don’t know where I am.”
“Dude, you fell out of the game,” Marco said. “Control, we have a massive clipping glitch here.”
“I see it,” Lex replied. “Kai, my boy, it’s only your first day here and you’re already trying to escape the Matrix?”
“I… um…” Kai looked around.
Whatever this was, it seemed to be endless. The geometrical figures spread out in all directions. Lights flickered erratically and below his stuck body opened an abyss that appeared to have no ground. The atmosphere had something utterly surreal about it.
Of course, he knew what clipping bugs were. They appeared quite frequently in a variety of games. Mostly, however, clipping issues concerned NPCs who could get stuck in the walls or fall through the floor when killed. In MMOs, players sometimes got stuck in objects and had to reload to free themselves. But Kai had never experienced anything like this before.
“Can you move?” Claudia asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty much stuck, but even if I could, I’d just fall into the abyss.”
He wondered if it would be dangerous to actually fall into the abyss. What would happen to him if he did?
“Guys, you plowed through this whole map multiple times. How come you missed a clipping bug of such proportions?” Topher asked.
“Maybe because it wasn’t there the last time?” Marco replied.
“It’s possible it came up with the latest build,” Lex agreed. “You know how game devs are. They fix one thing and break another.”
“Viktor, activate secure dev mode and try to get him out of there,” Topher said. “If it doesn’t work then we reset the whole campaign.”
Cyber Squad - Level 1: A Gamelit/LitRPG Lite Cyberpunk Adventure Page 15
