The stalagmites had been dislodged or smashed to bits. The planning table and weapon racks had been buried. The iron stair that bordered the waterfall had fallen into the depths. Even the frothing, roaring subterranean river itself seemed to have altered its flow, loose boulders and jagged scars marring the shelf underneath it and redirecting the torrent above.
On the other side of the small hill where the stalactite from the former ceiling had impaled the center of the platform, I could see that the supercomputer was still playing something on a cracked, sparking screen.
The sight of the stalactite reminded me of who had shifted it against all odds, moving it directly into the path of Meteora’s fireball.
“B,” I said, struggling to my feet. Luther supported me as I went to climb the pile of rubble.
When you got low enough in HP in Titan Online, your in-game body grew weak and sluggish. It was real enough to make you come close to feeling the pain and fatigue yourself.
I braced myself against the side of the fallen obsidian fang and circumvented it. On the other side, I saw the droid that had been my staunchest ally and my most crucial. Rather, I saw what was left of him, and the sight brought me to my knees once more.
B5 knelt in a similar position, his one hand still pressed against the flat side of the spur he had pushed to save me. You might have thought him sleeping or offline, if you didn’t see the ruinous, melted mess the fire had made of his face. No more bright green bulbs for eyes. No more slight tilting chin. No more banter.
He was dead and gone, as were the rest of my allies. Well, most of them.
It had all come crashing down around me for the second time, and both had been quite literal.
“A little on the nose,” I said, speaking to the AI. Speaking to God, for all it mattered.
I hadn’t expected to feel such profound devastation, but as I knelt there, looking at the remnants of B5 and feeling the weight of the stones on which I rested and under which my men were buried – NPCs or otherwise – the pieces began to show.
Luther patted me on the back in an awkward attempt to soothe as my shoulders bobbed. Tears streamed down my face, and only half of them were hidden from the virtual world I considered the true one.
For the second time, I felt that I had died in Titan Online. And for the second time, it had come at the hands – at the self-righteous, poisonous fists – of one of its greatest heroes. The clips of our exchange would circulate for the day and then be lost to the archives, and none would be the wiser. The powers that be would remain, while everything new, everything exciting, heroic and villainous alike, would crumble as soon as it gained enough clout to be noticed.
I had put everything into Streak, and Leviathan had taken him from me. The speedster had been everything I was not: powerful, benevolent, dashing.
Good.
Bitterness was my curse. The result of a life poorly lived or barely lived at all. This was my life. This was the life I wanted. To be a hero. Not to be adored. Not to be seen and spoken about in awe and reverence. To be an example. To show that the idealized world of Titan Online, with its absolutes and its bright and bold, could only come about due to the minds of those who inhabited it.
That all of the stories fans and players alike watched and remembered, stories of heroism and valor and dastardly deeds supplanted, was a collective of humanity. Of its triumphs and tragedies. Of its good men and its bad. Of the way the latter informed and gave reason to the former. Reason, and meaning.
Titan Online was supposed to be different than the real world. In here, the villains robbed banks by stealing sacks of gold. They stole nuclear weapons and used them to hold cities hostage. They waxed poetic about the errors of mankind and their dark designs. In here, the heroes rose up to stop them, shining beacons of hope and justice. They never killed. Not on purpose. They always granted second chances. It was a play that both the heroes and the villains exalted in, acting out humanity’s darkness and its light, and the winning out of the one over the other.
Things were simple. Things were clear. Good was good and bad was bad. The two defined one another, they weren’t wrapped up in one another.
Only, that wasn’t the case. Just as in the real world, Titan Online was a mask that, when cracked, exposed the ugliness inside. The ugly mix of gray instead of pure white or perfect black.
Streak had been buried under a hundred tons of virtual masonry and alien technology before I came to that realization. Despot, his dark shadow, had now followed suit.
I saw something, then. It was a light that could have been a reflection on B5’s melted outer shell. Only, the closer I looked, the clearer it became that the light was coming from within him. It was green, like his eyes had been, and when I pried open a peeling rib of chrome-covered steel, I saw it wrapped up in a nest of wires and circuitry.
I reached in and gripped the glowing Ythilian core between my thumb and forefinger and pulled it free. When I held it up in front of my face, turning it over in my hand, the stone flickered but didn’t quit or die. It reminded me of the way the droid’s eyes and slitted mouth would blink in accordance with his mood. In accordance with how annoyed he was at me.
“Clever,” I said. It appeared that B5 had secreted the stone away for safe-keeping.
I smiled at my own foolishness. I had come to know B5 in his physical form, so much so that I had ceased to think about his source. He was still here, in one form of another.
My smile fell away as behind the stone came into focus. I lowered all that remained of B5’s metallic body and secreted the core away into a pocket inside my ripped and tattered coat. Then I got back to my feet, approaching the supercomputer for the last time.
The obsidian shelf on which it had sat had caved in, and half the unit was now sunken into the innards of the base. The screen was cracked, but images still played out, and now that my emotions had run their course, I saw what it showed for the first time.
Leviathan stood atop the tallest building of Titan City. Gallant Tower looked out over the great expanse of fields and farms to the north, with gray-white highways marking the land’s veins. There was a satellite city close by, one of the boroughs of Titan that wasn’t quite large enough or frequented enough to be considered a separate place.
This was where the aliens had made their war during that fateful crisis event not so long ago. The Ythilian invasion. This was where the mountain of rubble had come into form as the invaders had smashed the concrete town to bits and raised a macabre metal-and-stone monument in its place, built around the guts of the crashed ship where Streak – where I – would meet my end.
Leviathan waited until a mass of red-eyed, black-shelled viewer bots hovered around him like a murder of crows and took off, the force of his expulsion tearing the top of the tower free.
The hero raced over the highways, his eyes scanning the crowded streets below and the lots between them. He didn’t spare a second glance at NPC citizens fleeing the lasers and screaming starships that filled the horizon, nor did he lend aid to embattled heroes down below. He was beyond that.
No, Leviathan was here to finish things, to make the biggest mark he could. To end Deadlock once and for all, and to kill me in the process. The latter was a happy mistake, but one he’d gladly make again, given the chance. The former gave him a singular focus. Made him sloppy.
I had seen the clip of Leviathan taking damage from the falling craft previously. I had seen footage of him taking minor hits that made him wince across eight years of events and encounters. Great and small, the Ythilian Hive Stone that had animated my beloved helper had pointed me to them all, to every instance of Leviathan’s pain. They were moments and clips anyone could see, but the core had acted as a beacon. It couldn’t tell me Leviathan’s superpower, his strengths and weaknesses, but it could show me the path.
I saw the footage in a new light, and despite my mood, my heart began to swell and harden at once.
Leviathan’s mind was focused on the tower’s nest. H
e knew Deadlock waited for him there, just as he knew the Ythilian core – the great McGuffin of the entire crisis event – was there. All he had to do was bring it down, destroying his greatest nemesis and cashing in on the biggest moment of the event.
He didn’t need the Fame. Leviathan was at peak power. He couldn’t get any stronger, faster or more impervious to hurt. But he had sponsors to please and fans to coddle. He had to do his part.
And he never saw the attack coming. I’d never known about it either, until now.
The blast that took him out of the sky was blinding purple. I watched it take him right there on the screen, and gasped as Leviathan gasped. He fell, hitting the ground with a shocking force that interrupted many of the smaller battles around him.
Leviathan roared to life, launching debris in every direction as he stood among the ruins. His white spandex chest was marred with a black smudge where the beam had struck him, and he looked, if not gravely wounded, then at least worryingly so. A shadow passed over him. It belonged to an Ythilian mech. Leviathan had fought bigger foes and stronger, but I thought I saw a note of fear in the hero’s bright blue eyes as the Ythilian General faced him down.
Recognition dawned. This had been B5’s last master. His last commander. Because of the nature of the stone I held, it wasn’t able to access its full knowledge base until it tiered up along with its wielder. B5 did not remember this General because he was beyond my power. He didn’t remember that he had already fought Leviathan, at least in a manner of speaking.
Leviathan gritted his teeth and shot forward. He didn’t look half as fast as he had before, but I didn’t think the change was a result of the damage he had taken. The mech responded in kind, with another purple blast roaring out from its scorpion-like tail. Leviathan braced for this attack, setting his feet, crossing his arms in front of his face, and deflected the crackling beam.
The mech marched forward, firing the purple beam continuously. When it reached Leviathan, the beam ceased and the pilot balled his mech’s mechanical clawed hands into fists, bringing them down. Leviathan intercepted them, catching hold with either hand, and hero and mech strained against one another. Leviathan gritted his teeth at first, but then he smiled as his strength began to win out. Cracks appeared on the backs of the mech’s clawed gauntlets, and the frame shuddered.
As I watched, the robot’s tail broke loose and fell to the ground. The tail then sprouted legs, short razors that recalled a centipede, and skittered into one of the trenches the war had dug. It disappeared, heading west, and Leviathan didn’t notice it.
The two titans strained against each other until one of the mech’s hands shattered. Leviathan followed the motion by turning his free hand into a fist. He shoved off the ground with his left boot and shot up, his fist screaming toward that green-glass shield and the General inside.
Almighty brawn.
But the Ythilian General had a trick up his sleeve.
I saw the incoming sneak attack this time. A purple star winking against the black and red skies. It was a beam fired from the scorpion tail, and it was racing toward Leviathan.
Just before Leviathan could break through the cockpit, his eyes widened in fear, the whites at the edges of the blue taking on that purple sheen. He abandoned his charge and spun in the air, twisting as quickly as he could as the beam rushed in. It missed him by less than an inch, the buzz of it stealing all sound as it exploded against the underside of an already-crumbled building.
Leviathan watched it pass, relief rushing in to supplant the former fear.
But he had forgotten the metal beast behind him. The mech lurched into motion and lanced its remaining gauntlet toward the hero. The blow struck Leviathan in the back and launched him forward. His body dug a new trench across the battlefield, scattering smoke and dust, and when he rose again, he did so on shaking legs and with drooping arms.
And that’s when it hit me, the pieces falling into place in front of my eyes.
“The mech wasn’t strong enough to do that before,” I said in a whisper.
“Eh?”
I jumped, not having noticed Luther by my shoulder.
“The mech couldn’t hit him that hard previously. And why did Levi fear that last beam attack? It wasn’t powerful enough to break through his armor rating before either.”
“He dodged it. Seems smarter than taking a hit,” Luther said, dismissive.
“The first one hit him clean on and he blocked it like it didn’t matter. And given all we know of Leviathan, the mech shouldn’t have been strong enough to grapple with him for as long as it did.”
“Looks like he won out on that exchange,” Luther said. “Crushed its carbon-fiber hand like it was an apple.”
“After a struggle,” I said, shaking my head. “After some time… it wasn’t immediate. And that final blow… that hit shouldn’t have been hard enough to do so much damage.”
“What ye sayin’, lad?”
Before I could answer, the footage of Leviathan’s fight took a dramatic turn, drawing my attention. The darkened skies lit up, and the sun fell from the clouds. At least, that’s what it looked like. I only realized it was Meteora’s work when I saw the fireball strike the ground in front of the general’s mech. It created an explosion that sent the behemoth tumbling backward, and when the smoke cleared, Leviathan was standing on top of it.
He squatted down and smashed through the cracked shield of the mech with one fist, latching onto the silhouette’s throat inside. After a brief, indistinct struggle, the shadow of the Ythilian General stilled, and Leviathan kept his cold grimace for a good while longer.
When it was done, Leviathan looked back toward the rubble tower and its swirling debris with newfound focus, and, I thought, just a bit of the fear from his recent clash still lurking behind the façade.
That look was the last piece of the puzzle falling neatly into place. Despite Leviathan’s seeming victory, and despite the events I knew would follow from these moments, I had it.
I finally had it.
I knew what Leviathan’s superpower was.
“His power levels changed throughout the fight, Luther,” I said. “One moment he’s invulnerable to an attack and the next he’s weak to it. His stats must change, but I can’t imagine it’s random. I think he can switch his stats around, but it’s not instantaneous, or there is some sort of cooldown on the ability. It’s like he can ‘Power Shift’.”
I let the phrase settle, seeing how I felt about it. I was sure I was right. It was the only explanation.
Luther blinked, for once incapable of feigning disinterest.
“Clever thing,” I said, looking at the green nugget I clutched in my hand, though I was thinking of the force that had created it. I was thinking of the AI, and how it had tried to kill Leviathan by exploiting his weakness.
The only weakness he had.
But a game is a game, and it has boundaries. The AI couldn’t just snuff him out of existence. It needed help to create the right situation to take him down.
It needed me.
I held the glowing gemstone in my hands like a treasure whose secrets I had only just learned.
“What now?”
Luther’s question, innocent and simple, was like a splash of frigid water on a fading man.
“Chaos, Luther,” I said. “Now, we sow chaos and discord, and see what comes of it.”
Twenty
Favors
Armed with newfound knowledge and the reckless abandon of one recently bereft of everything, I set out to water the seeds of my insurrection, and reap the crop that would be Leviathan’s destruction, and my absolution.
Of course, it took some doing to get out of my base, seeing as it had been reduced to a leaning platform of cracked obsidian and slate backlit by the gray glow of an embattled sky.
And when I say I got out, that isn’t exactly true. I tried climbing out, but the rubble in the center of my former base wasn’t piled high enough to reach the hanging teeth set i
nto the hole Meteora had blown into the roof. I asked Luther for his opinion, but the tinkerer was at a loss. I thought of calling for Madam Post to lend an assist, but I realized that all of my communications equipment was either dashed or buried under tons of rubble. That, and B5 was the only one who knew how to use it all.
I felt another pang at the memory of the recently-melted droid, but I clutched at the Ythilian Hive Stone I had secreted away into an inner pocket in my torn and sodden coat and tried to keep heart that he would be the same when I found a new shell for him to inhabit.
Ultimately, I bid a short and hopefully-encouraging temporary farewell to Luther and logged out, leaving the disagreeable NPC to twiddle his thumbs on the edge of the abyss for the better part of an hour before I logged back in. That reset my position, as the game – unsure where to spawn me with the loss of my base – placed me nearby on dry land. I wasted no time and made my way to the rotted timber door to the warehouse that housed Madam Post’s cardboard throne.
The dock workers – of course, there weren’t really any true dock workers in the area, just a collection of grimy, useful goons who handled Post’s shipments – were used to my presence by now. Hell, a good number of their friends and former colleagues worked for me… had worked for me. So they didn’t pay me any particular mind as I strode in to the less-than-austere audience chamber.
Madam Post was seated in her musty chair, same as always, her beady eyes tracking me like a distrustful crow. Whispers started at the sides as her soldiers realized I was quite alone – no Sebastian or Scale to shadow me.
I stepped closer to Madam Post than I had any right to, counting on the reputation I had built up in recent weeks from Tenuous to Neutral to protect me from a reactionary attack. Still, some of her burlier guards stepped forward, looming from the shadows.
The old crone waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, she smiled and inclined her head, as if she were a mourning grandmother at a funeral. I was conscious of my shattered mask, and the fact that half of my face was now exposed – a face Post had never seen before. I didn’t think she was one to be intimidated by masks – few in War Town were – but still, there was something to appearances.
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