Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  Luther’s turrets roared to life, the flashes lighting the chasm like fireworks. Their aim was up, but they had no target in sight, and soon, enough of the ceiling came down to break them and quiet their rebellion.

  When it was done, the once-airy chamber was choked with glittering cobalt dust. It would have suffocated me in the real world. Here, it obscured everything, making me wonder if I was crawling toward the edge of the platform or its center. I squinted through the cloud to see the doom that was at hand.

  I cried out for my crew to compose themselves, and I did it in the most uncomposed manner possible, crawling around on my hands and knees as I attempted to dodge toaster-sized chunks of jagged slate that tumbled loose on a delay from above. I felt something grip my left arm hard, and then the right, and recognized Sebastian and Carlyle as the two lifted me up to my feet. The latter was always steady under pressure. He responded to my thankful nod with a smirk as I dusted off my trenchcoat and wiped the dust from my mask.

  Alert: Damon has been killed.

  Sphere Update: 1 Slot Vacated. 15/20 Slots Filled.

  Now that my mind had begun to adjust to the sudden chaos, I prepared to give a more composed set of orders when a ball of fire engulfed the place where Carlyle had been standing. The blast shot me backward, and if I hadn’t slammed into Luther as he attempted to crawl back out through his trapdoor clutching two Shock Spears, I’d have gone over the edge then and there.

  My HP flashed yellow immediately, dropping to 65% in a flash. If I hadn’t known it before, it was now rendered painfully obvious that a full blast from Meteora would immolate me on the spot. Only the threat of her tiering down would stop her doing it via a direct attack.

  Alert: Carlyle has been killed.

  Sphere Update: 1 Slot Vacated. 14/20 Slots Filled.

  The dust cleared, and I propped myself up against the stalagmite, reaching back to help Luther crawl out and stumble back onto the rubble-strewn platform. I looked around and saw that the weapons rack had been crushed, along with most everything else. There was a giant black-stone fang sticking up out of the center of the platform like a macabre monument. Behind it, I marveled to see B5 climbing to his feet in front of the supercomputer, which was cracked but still functioning. The droid’s eyes flickered weakly, and I noticed with shock that one of his arms had been torn off, exposing the ugly wiring beneath. Translucent golden fluid leaked from a slashed tube, and he looked unsteady as he leaned back against the remnants of the keyboard.

  Behind him, the supercomputer played footage that now seemed quaint in comparison to the real thing. Meteora flying through the streets of Titan City, waving at NPC onlookers and players alike. Meteora trashing an alien speeder with one well-placed jet of deep red fire. Meteora facing off against Deadlock and his crew, holding the lot of them off with a fiery maelstrom before Leviathan could make his utterly brilliant, utterly planned last-minute entrance.

  Around my base, I saw limbs poking out from the debris, but I also saw some of my crew pulling themselves out of the rubble, dislodging themselves from fallen slabs and sparking machinery, limping and hopping over small fires that had somehow sprouted amongst the rock and metal.

  We looked up in unison, and now that the dust had cleared, we witnessed Titan Online’s second most powerful hero in all her terrible glory.

  Encounter Imminent

  Meteora

  Tier 1 Hero

  Threat Index: Titan

  Though her powers were similar, this creature of fire could never be mistaken for the righteous golden light of Starshot. Meteora floated in the yawning gap of sky she’d opened, her deep purple suit replete with blood-red accents of resin-based armor muted against the gray clouds at her back. Her hair was wine-colored, and her eyes glowed the color of coals blown back to life after a fire. Her hands were burning, the red flames lapping at her armored forearms and whipping up in a frenzy in the upturned wind. When she locked eyes with me, she smiled.

  She did not seem to be in a merciful mood.

  I knew then that I’d been marked. I ought to have known it from the moment I let my anger get the better of me and killed Prism. Meteora could not kill me outright – not without losing a full tier of power as a hero; but she and Leviathan knew how to get around that. In fact, Meteora was one of the few high-level heroes who had tiered down in the past, before she had learned to take a more patient, tactile approach to her murders.

  Behind her, two black viewer bots trolled the skies, the sounds of their whirring motors lost in the storm. Meteora’s eyebrows twitched in seeming annoyance when they ventured too close. It would be interesting to see how she planned to kill me in full sight of the almighty AI without taking a penalty. Then again, there was a lot of debris still clinging like a crust above, and a convenient abyss below. Accidents happened, after all.

  “Threat…”

  I looked to my right and saw B5 shaking, his exposed circuitry sparking. “Threat Index: Titan Level. Advise… advise retreat…”

  “I know, B,” I said, feeling a pang in my chest at seeing the state of him, and an even more powerful swell of relief that he was still, even now, providing the most analytical advice he could muster.

  But there was nowhere for us to retreat.

  Sebastian’s shadow passed over me as he attempted to shield me from the hero above. His bulk might spare me death from one blast, but not from the next. I tapped him on the shoulder and eased him aside, stepping forward. I snatched one of Luther’s spears from his flaccid grip and made my considered way up onto the small hill of rubble beside the fallen black fang, slamming the butt end of the spear against the top of one of the flatter stones as I went. The tip flashed blue and started to build its mounting charge.

  “So,” Meteora intoned, her voice echoing like a storm railing at a mole hill, “you are—”

  I don’t know what I was thinking. Nothing, I suppose. But I really wasn’t in the mood to listen to one of Leviathan’s sermons prior to being put down, no matter whose mouth it came out of.

  Before Meteora could finish her opening remarks, I brought the spear up, holding it tightly with both hands as I got her in my sights. She stopped speaking as she noticed, and I clicked the small black button in and watched as the tip flashed again and the baseball-sized orb of electricity raced up, aiming to smite Meteora from the skies like a pesky bird.

  Or at least to give her a mild sting of annoyance.

  Encounter Begins

  Despot vs. Meteora

  She almost looked amused as she swatted the spherical bolt aside with the back of one flaming fist, the collision detonating the ball in a pitiful, staticky burst. It hadn’t even been enough to get through her armor.

  “You are Despot.” Meteora expected a response. I thought about shooting at her again, if only to hasten my impending demise. Instead, I let the spear fall from my tired grasp and felt the hearts of my remaining crew sink down with it. “Answer me!”

  There was the passion Meteora was known for. The anger, as misplaced and riotous as it was meant to be righteous.

  I smiled, hoping she could sense it beneath my mask.

  “I am.”

  “You,” she said, floating down lower, until she hovered just above the chasm she’d opened. “You killed Prism.”

  I didn’t know if she meant it as a question or an insult, or both at once. I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

  “No,” she said. “No, it doesn’t. Still.” She made a show of looking around, marking the ruinous cavern and grimacing at the state of the place. She paused as she scanned the waterfall on the right side of the chamber, likely wondering if it concealed a means of escape. “You had help.”

  “I assume you watched the footage,” I said, bored and growing annoyed by the exchange. “It’s not hard to find.”

  “I did,” she admitted, her tone suggesting that she felt the act had been beneath her. “Your new friend wasn’t as eager to help her fellow heroes of Gallant Tower as she sh
ould be. I convinced her to adopt a sharing mood. She knew the rough area where you skulk, but my methods of rooting out evil dens are more… thorough.” She scanned our surroundings. “To be honest, I expected… more.”

  “Place was a lot cleaner a few minutes ago,” I said.

  Meteora did not seem impressed, nor did she seem likely to keep the conversation going for long. “I told him to take someone more powerful than that little cheerleader that latched onto him.”

  I tilted my head as I noted a slight shift in her tone.

  “Afraid?” I asked.

  Meteora laughed, long and full-bellied. “Of you?”

  “No,” I said. “Of her. Sure, she’s not a whole lot quite yet, but those powers seem destined to scale up. Way up, given enough time.”

  Meteora’s entire face seemed to twitch. “Given enough time, indeed,” she said, not trying especially hard to keep the ominous tone from her voice. “Well,” she said, holding out one of her burning palms. “We’ll have to deal with the others in due time, but they said you were the mastermind, so here I am.”

  Meteora wasn’t doing a whole lot of heroic roleplaying. The viewer bots could hear our exchange. I suppose everyone had simply grown used to how violent and callous the most powerful heroes of Titan Online had become.

  How spiteful.

  I spat. It seemed to please her.

  “You should count yourself lucky,” she said. “My encounters always end up in the highlights. I’ve given you plenty more than your fifteen seconds of fame—”

  “Minutes,” I said.

  “What?”

  I didn’t repeat myself, and Meteora’s look went murderous. She glanced sidelong at one of the viewer bots as it hovered close, and I saw her tracing the contours of the toothy gap in the cavern’s ceiling, looking for a way to cause the most devastating accident possible.

  If she couldn’t loophole the perming penalty on heroes, would she just kill me anyway? She’d drop to tier two, and the climb back to tier one was a long one, much longer than any other jump in tier. Just how loyal was she to Leviathan? And was it him who had sent her at all? I don’t know why I hoped it was. It was almost like I needed it to be him. That I needed at least that small piece of acknowledgement, that I was a threat – a future threat, even – he felt compelled to snuff out.

  I hated myself for feeling it, but there it was, exposed like a nerve.

  “Despot,” she said, raising her voice for the benefit of the viewers. “Since you have killed one of our city’s greatest defenders, the heroes of Titan City have deemed you unworthy of this place. Unworthy of this sodden, broken corner of the world. It will be destroyed. As to what may come of you, that is in fate’s hands. Not mine.”

  Ah, there it was. The acting I’d been waiting for.

  She was planning to destroy the base. Not much of a cop-out, but then, maybe Meteora and company really had grown that good at dodging AI penalties. Maybe Titan Online really was that broken.

  Or maybe Leviathan really did see me like I wanted him to.

  Go ahead, Meteora. Shoot.

  She smiled, and I had the morbid impression that she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “If you’d kept the team you used to take down Prism,” she said, “this would have been tougher. As it stands…” Her palm turned a deep enough red that I thought I saw flecks of black tailing off her fingers. “NPCs, all.”

  Then I understood the angle. By targeting the crew, Meteora could avoid the largest AI penalties, reserved for hero-on-hero violence. It was a dangerous game to play, and any whiff of an intentional aim in my direction would result in the AI taking notice, but as I took stock of my surroundings once more, I realized that there wasn’t a whole lot of barrel left to conceal the fish.

  I even thought about swimming myself, jumping off the edge and seeing if I could survive the fall into the subterranean river below. Thing is, even if I survived, I’d surely take enough impact damage to go red at best and likely risk death.

  I tried to turn my disgust into a reassuring smile when Sebastian gave me a helpless look. I had no doubt that if Meteora had been low enough to try it, the big man would have leapt for her ankles and tried to drag her down into the pit along with him.

  As it stood, he was the biggest target, and Meteora was wasting no more time.

  The crew members – Spooks, Greek, Luther and the small trickle of pinned and wounded exchanged looks, the white icons above their heads holding steady, much to my surprise.

  Much good it did them.

  Meteora had been at this a long time. She didn’t slam the heels of her palms together or bother with some dramatic charge. Her powers operated quickly and violently, as did she.

  She barely extended her right hand all the way, leaving her fingers loose as she conjured a swirling ball of fire. One last white smile against a darkening sky, and she flicked the ball forward.

  When the sphere extended a short distance in front of the hero, it expanded into a roiling torrent that struggled to maintain its shape. It was a blinding ball of hellfire that looked by its jagged sides and trailing whips to contain demons, and Sebastian was its target. He, good loyal Sebastian, shoved me backward with his ham of a hand before he braced to meet it.

  I was dimly aware of a shadow that stole over the rest of us just before the mass of fire struck the platform. The massive stalactite, which had been nested among the crackling wreckage of the planning table, now lurched into motion and began to tip like an ancient tree. Meteora’s blast took it the rest of the way, turning the solid mass into a hail of burning comets. The floor gave way, and I found myself falling alongside Luther into the workshop below.

  As I went, I saw B5’s outline shimmering like heat on a summer day from his place atop the pile, his remaining arm outstretched. Somehow, he had dislodged a titanic cut of stone enough to get it rolling. Enough to take the brunt of the blast.

  But B5 had left nothing to guard himself. I hit the stone floor hard, seeing my HP sink to a deep red. The sides of the chamber closed in around me, monstrous blocks of stone falling in like a collapsing ant hill.

  I lost all sight of Meteora and the burning sky, of B5 and his sacrifice.

  I lost the light.

  Nineteen

  Square None

  I may have been alive, but I didn’t feel like celebrating the fact.

  Alert: Sebastian, Spooks and Greek have been killed.

  Sphere Update: 3 Slots Vacated. 11/20 Slots Filled.

  Despot: 11% HP

  I would have laughed, if I could move. I’d survived the fall by a hair’s breadth.

  In time, the dust cleared enough for me to see light making its way in from the cracks in the rubble above. As the fight hadn’t officially come to an end, Meteora would know I was still alive. There surely couldn’t be anything more she could do for now. She’d played her hand and, somehow, I was still here.

  Though buried and in the dark, the next notification flared brightly for me to see.

  Encounter Ends

  Despot vs. Meteora

  Winner: Meteora!

  Infamy Reward: None

  Relief washed over me. She’d come to the same conclusion I had, and with nothing more to do, she’d simply abandoned the fight. Receiving no or low XP for a fight wasn’t uncommon, especially if the combatants were mismatched tier-wise or one of you barely gave the other person a scratch. It prevents powerful players from mopping up XP from weaker ones, and prevents people from doing minute amounts of damage, running off and farming XP that way.

  Not that Meteora needed more XP as a tier one. That wasn’t why she’d come here. I could only hope that now she would be slinking back to Gallant Tower.

  Despite my terrible predicament, I liked to think I’d just come out on top merely by surviving.

  It took upwards of half an hour, but more light continued to leak in from the broken sky as loose bits of stone and rock were pried away. Someone was rooting away up there, metal scraping ag
ainst obsidian, and finally, I saw the butt end of one of Luther’s spears penetrate the gloom in a pocket to my left, gripped by the hairy, meaty and unmistakable hands of Luther himself.

  “Well, look at that,” I said weakly, listening as Luther grunted and heaved. The black shelf above me gave just a bit, and I was able to drag myself toward the tinkerer. When he saw me, he let out a startled yelp and withdrew the spear. For a moment, I thought he might be digging to confirm my death – and his freedom from my Sphere of Influence – rather than trying to lend assistance.

  But then his hand broke the space between light and dark like a savior reaching below the waves to a drowning man. I reached up with my left hand and its torn glove to take it, and spared a glance behind me at the deeper dark I left behind. I saw another hand back the way I’d come, along with a bulky arm and blond hair fallen over a face locked in the permanent sleep of death.

  Something broke in me in that moment. Sebastian was dead. I had seen the notification. The AI had told me it was so. But now I saw it, and all the ruin around it.

  I sighed and took Luther’s hand, allowing him to pull me out of the wreckage.

  We both collapsed on top of the pile, the tinkerer covered in fragments of shale and trickles of blood from myriad cuts. He adopted a strange expression, and when I reached up to touch my mask, I found that it had been shattered, and that half had fallen away. One side of my face and one eye was now bare for all to see. It seemed to have a positive effect on Luther, who nodded to me as if in sympathy.

  I looked up, marking the gray skies above and noting the absence of a vengeful, fiery would-be god and the black viewer bots that had tailed her, and then I steeled myself. When I finally looked around from my patch of rubble, I couldn’t help the feeling of utter devastation that infused me on seeing the total destruction of my base.