The Arena

by Drew Seren

  13

  Horc hurled the handle of his axe into the ocean as far as he could. “Well that cheap thing is gone. The only problem is now, I don’t have a melee weapon.”

  “Hold on a second.” Tufkakes opened his bag and started digging through it. “I think I’ve got something in there. You can use a sword, right?”

  “Sure.” Horc stood off to the side and watched Tufkakes. He didn’t normally have trouble digging through his bags. Normally he opened up his bag, thoughts about what he needed, and it appeared in his hands. He wondered whether this digging that Tufkakes was going through was some kind of negative thing for Procyans. He knew most races and classes had both positive and negative traits. Tufkakes had said something about some major buffs Procyans Rogues received, and it made him wonder if digging through bags was a debuff of some sort.

  After a moment, Tufkakes pulled out a long sword. “Here. It’s too big for me. I’m limited to daggers and short swords.”

  Horc looked at the sword.

  Katana of Cutting

  Damage 27,

  Speed 17

  “It’s nothing special, but it’s close to what that ax could do.” Tufkakes held the sword out to Horc.

  Taking the sword, Horc turned it over in his hands it felt fairly light. “A little less damage than the axe did, but it’s a faster weapon.”

  “So, if the battle lasts long enough, you’ll get in a couple of extra blows.” Baladara looked at the sword. “Overall not a bad exchange, and it’s definitely better than trying to just stab people with arrows.”

  “And if we’re lucky we can get some better drops.” Greensleeves frowned. “I’m guessing it doesn’t have a sheath.”

  Tufkakes shook his head. “Asking for a lot out of random drops, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, sometimes it would be nice if the game made things a little easier.” Greensleeves started walking down the beach the way they’d been going.

  “No worries, I can just tuck it across my back for now.” Horc slipped the sword into the strap he’d been carrying the ax on. It felt different, but easier as it settled there. At least with the sword, he wouldn’t feel like he was missing something if the fights got into close quarters.

  The wall ended a short distance farther down the beach. The opening was uneven, with the base sticking out farther than the top, and the way it looked, it would be easy for someone of average build, or smaller to simply walk up the end and then walk along the top of the stones. Since they hadn’t met any resistance other than the Serpent Cult dudes, Horc was fairly sure the wall wasn’t officially finished, but that made him wonder why the AI hadn’t just willed the wall into existence complete, without flaws. There were a lot of things in Halfworld that didn’t make a lot of sense to him.

  “Does this feel too easy to everyone else?” Tufkakes asked.

  Baladara shrugged as she waved them all to stop at the end of the wall. “Yes and no. That’s what I was thinking when I found the other end of the wall and did a bit of scouting. Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of guards around, but then all the players I stumbled across were already captured by the pirates, so I guess a lack of security makes sense. There are some wandering guards as we get closer to the arena proper, and the bad guys I spotted were all triple-X level, so all we know is they’re more than we really want to take on.”

  “Which isn’t a good thing.” Greensleeves peered around the rocks. “We need to figure out how this whole place works and what we’re going to need to do to free Steelmaiden and Slasher.”

  “And any of the other players who’ve been caught up in this mess,” Horc added. He hated the idea that other players were being held by a malfunctioning AI. He didn’t know a whole lot about how AIs functioned, but he was fairly sure they weren’t supposed to hold players hostage. Sure, in Galactic Explorers, he’d played scenarios where he had to rescue other players, but that had always been during special events and if the party wasn’t rescued within a certain amount of time they were allowed to log out and then resume the game at the point right before they’d been captured for the special event.

  “If we can,” Tufkakes muttered. “You know more than a few of these guys are complete assholes.”

  “Yeah, we know,” Greensleeves muttered with a sigh. “But nobody deserves to be stuck in a game long term.”

  “It’s hard enough knowing I’ll get out eventually as long as I don’t die here. They probably don’t know that.” Horc looked over Greensleeves’ shoulder, not seeing anything important, or any other people nearby. He wondered how many of the players caught by the AI had freaked out when they realized they couldn’t log out. He’d had his own freak-out moment when he’d heard a tornado had hit his house and he was stuck in his pod. It hadn’t been a long one. He wasn’t prone to major freak outs, but in the back of his mind, he was still worried something might happen and he’d never be able to return to his body and eventually his mind would disintegrate into the ether of his pixel-prison.

  “Exactly.” Greensleeves turned away from the wall. “So how do we want to handle this?”

  “We need to get in there and find out what’s going on,” Baladara said. “I can slip in using an invisibility spell, but that only covers me.”

  “I can Shadowwalk in,” Tufkakes suggested. “But again, it doesn’t help more than just me.”

  Horc looked between them. “I don’t like splitting the party—that’s how we got in this mess to begin with.”

  Greensleeves shrugged. “We might not have much of an option. You, Wolf, and I can’t be that sneaky. If we try to go in with them, we’ll all probably get caught.”

  “Sometimes we have to split the party,” Baladara said. “Besides, odds are, Steelmaiden and Slasher didn’t know what they were getting into.”

  “You don’t either,” Horc countered. None of them knew what to expect, particularly if the AI had gone rogue. There was too much of a chance something would go horribly wrong and things would get much worse. They were playing a game. None of them expected things to become life or death. In games, if people died, they simply rezzed at their respawn site and kept going.

  “Right, but we have a much better idea,” Baladara continued. “I bet they’d do it for any of us… if they could.”

  “She’s got a point,” Greensleeves said. “Besides, we never know how much information they’ll be able to dig up while they’re in there. Also, if they can get in and out fairly easily, or at least in a way they can remember, then we’ll be able to communicate with Steelmaiden and Slasher while we’re working on getting them out.”

  There was no way Horc could argue against that logic. They desperately needed more info to be able to make informed decisions. “Okay. Fine. You two head in there. Be careful.”

  They both flashed a thumbs-up.

  “We’ll be back.” Baladara’s hands moved and quickly vanished, followed by the rest of her.

  “Show off.” Tufkakes stepped back into the wall’s shadow and slowly faded from view.

  Horc watched him disappear and hoped the knot in his stomach was just basic fear that he wasn’t going to see his friends again. There was a good chance nothing was going to happen to them and they’d return shortly with news they’d found their missing party members and even had a plan to get them out.

  “Why don’t we go hang out by those palm trees over there?” Greensleeves pointed to a small clump of tall, slender trees not far away. “They aren’t much but will give us a little bit of cover.”

  “Better than hanging out here waiting for someone to spot us peering around the edge of the wall.” Horc glanced down at Wolf sitting next to him. “Come on, boy, let’s get out of the direct line of sight.”

  “And there’s shade over there,” Greensleeves added. “Not used to sweating in the game yet. It’s almost too real.”

  Horc nodded. “Yeah.” There was a lot about Halfworld that was more real than he’d been expecting, but he knew the pod was adding to their experi
ence. The more he could just enjoy the sensory experience and forget about his own life or death concerns, the more he could enjoy the game that went beyond things he was used to playing.

  As they reached the palms, the air in front of them shimmered like a heat wave and Miranda appeared. She looked the same as she had before in her long gray robes and short brown bob. The only thing missing from her previous visions was her tall staff. She still didn’t have any text over her head.

  “Well, at least, you’re trying to stay alive this time,” she said, turning slightly as if to get a look at their surroundings.

  “Yeah, we are,” Horc said. “Have you got any news? Is my pod free?”

  “They are about to pull the plug on your pod at the house and hook it into a portable UPS. Since I’m your sys-admin, and just got promoted to pod system director, I’m here to make sure there aren’t any problems on this end when that happens. The backup battery on your pod is nearly depleted so they reached you just in time.”

  Horc frowned. “Nearly depleted? I thought those things had a two-week life-span. At least that’s what we tell the customers.”

  Miranda shrugged. “You’ve been doing tech support long enough to know that what we tell the customer and reality is often two different things.”

  Fear lanced through Horc. If the rescue team had been slower to reach him, his body might’ve died while he’d been in the game doing god-knows-what. “Now isn’t the time to drop bombshells like that.”

  “Right,” Greensleeves stood at Horc’s side glaring. “I haven’t been able to find any data that suggests less than two weeks.”

  “And to this point, we haven’t had anyone really test the system long term. There was no reason for it.” Miranda got a faraway look. “Okay. Alan, let us know if you feel anything strange.”

  “Anything like—” Pain lanced through him. Cutting off his words. Horc tried not to but couldn’t keep from screaming at the top of his lungs. His entire body was on fire and felt like he was being torn apart. He couldn’t think about anything else but the heat in his veins. It shot out of him, racing from his core like he was a volcano trying to explode.

  Then as suddenly as it started, the pain stopped. Horc dropped to the ground, panting.

  Greensleeves put a hand on his shoulder. “Dude, are you okay?’

  Horc took a long centering breath. “Maybe. Damn, I thought I was being torn apart while being set on fire from the inside. That’s not something I want to do again.” He wiped a hand across his brow, and flung sweat onto the light brown sand he was sitting in.

  “But you survived,” Miranda said. “That’s a good sign. Do you have a Log-Out, or Exit Game option?”

  Bringing up his main interface, Horc quickly scanned the options. He shook his head. “Nope. Exit Game is still grayed out.”

  Miranda pursed her lips, put her hands behind her back and started to pace. “We were hoping that when we reset your power connection, you might get more of a system reset. It didn’t happen. We’re going to have to do some more digging and see what we can figure out. Until then, keep playing a smart game and stay out of trouble.”

  “We’re playing a game. We shouldn’t have to be staying out of trouble.” It was all Horc could do to keep the irritation out of his voice and not snap at the woman. Things were making less and less sense the longer he was stuck in the game.

  “You’re an anomaly in a game that shouldn’t have any.” Miranda replied. “One of several anomalies right now. We’ve got to do what we can to keep you safe. You know that.” She stared at Greensleeves. “David, you know this. Rick should’ve told you all about this. See what you can do to keep him safe.” Without another word, she vanished.

  “Wow.” Horc stared at the spot where she’d been. “I didn’t think she could get any more annoying, but it looked like I was wrong.”

  “Some of the sys-admins are like that,” Greensleeves agreed. “I guess I should be happy Rick isn’t.”

  “Which brings up the question of, why he isn’t our contact?” Horc started to stand, but his head swam, so he opted to stay seated on the warm brown sand.

  “I guess she’s out of the Dallas office.” Greensleeves offered Horc a hand up. “But if she just got a promotion, I would think she’d be more valuable elsewhere, unless they’re thinking a senior pod person should be handling your situation personally.

  Horc shook his head, figuring he probably had time to sit there for a little while before Tufkakes and Baladara returned. Maybe by then he wouldn’t be so wobbly from them changing out his power source. “There’s a certain logic in that. She must be working directly with the rescue team.” If changing out the power supply had hurt as much as it had, he wasn’t sure he wanted to experience what would happen if his uninterruptable power supply was somehow disrupted. He suddenly felt safer with his pod trapped under the rubble of his house as opposed to in some transport driving to a Total Immersion Systems lab where they’d begin trying to get him out of the pod and back to the real world.

  14

  Something rumbled in the distance. It sounded like bricks being slapped together. The sand on the beach shimmied with each impact.

  Horc looked around. “Okay, what was that?”

  “Not sure.” Greensleeves stood from where he’d been relaxing against one of the palm trees. “Want to go check it out?”

  “Sure.” Horc wasn’t sure. There was so much going on in Halfworld that he was quickly getting to the point he didn’t want to check out strange sounds for the fear that they might finally find something that was beyond their ability to successfully confront. When he’d been in so much pain; as they’d finally gotten to his pod and disconnected it from his near-failing UPS, it made him realize how much danger he was in. It was more than a game. For him, it might be life or death. He didn’t want to die in the game, because of the game, or even because of the damned tornado that had leveled his subdivision. There was a lot he still wanted to do with his life. But sitting there in the grove of digital palm trees on a beach where the sand was no more than pixels, he couldn’t think of any of the important things. He knew there had to be more to life than sitting in a cubicle all day long and putting himself into his gaming pod at night, but it was eluding him. He didn’t want a family, he knew that. He wasn’t a family sort of guy. He liked going out with friends, although he didn’t do that nearly enough. There were adventures to be had in the real world.

  As he and Wolf followed Greensleeves out of the grove toward the sound that was shaking the game, he glanced down at Wolf. He’d never had a dog IRL but wondered what it would really be like to have something, someone dependent on him, but was willing to give unconditional love. He scratched Wolf’s ear as they walked. It might be nice to find out. He wanted out of the game. He wanted to have a chance to live his life more fully than he’d been living it. There had to be more.

  “Well, that’s not good.” Greensleeves stopped and pointed to the wall.

  Horc stared. The wall was building itself. Brick by brick the wall was growing taller and longer, curving around the island’s edge. “Baladara didn’t say anything about the wall growing.”

  “And we didn’t see any evidence of it on the edge we went around.” Greensleeves said as a rough block appeared out of thin air and dropped several inches down onto the layer of blocks below it. A sharp crack rolled across the beach. There was a loud screech as the block slid a few inches, so it bumped up against the previous one dropped on its row.

  “Maybe when she was around the other side it wasn’t building for some reason and it’s trying to reach the edge we went around.” Horc shook his head. “The other question, if it’s the AI that’s building the wall, why not just create it whole, why go to the trouble of making it block by block? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Greensleeves stood there on the beach, looking thoughtful. “Yes and no. I’m not a coding expert, that’s Rick’s job. But what if the AI doesn’t know the codes for creating a finished
wall from scratch, what if the codes it knows are for blocks and it figured out that blocks make a wall.”

  “So, it’s learning.” Horc scratched his head as another block appeared out of thin air and dropped onto the wall with a loud clack. “AIs are supposed to do that, but I’m not sure I like the idea that the AI running the game I’m playing is learning how to kidnap players and build walls. That really can’t be good.”

  Greensleeves nodded. “I agree. Let’s get back to the grove and I’ll let Rick know about this. They can’t do much about the AI until we can get you and everyone else out safely, but they can at least start planning.”

  “Getting everyone out safely is a great idea.” Horc wasn’t about to leave anyone in the game, particularly those who couldn’t log out, players stuck like he was.

  “Your pain when they changed out your power supply shook you up, didn’t it?” Greensleeves asked as they turned and started back toward the grove of palms where the others would know to look for them.

  Horc shrugged. “I guess it did. Until then, I knew there was a chance something might go wrong, and I might die, but the pain… Greensleeves… David… you have no idea. I’ve never felt anything like that in real life and I never want to feel anything like that again. It was horrible.”

  “It looked and sounded horrible.” Greensleeves stopped and put his hand on Horc’s shoulder. “Alan, you can’t give up hope. I know Rick and the other programmers are working hard to make sure you get out safely. We have to trust in them to do their jobs and make things right.”

  Horc nodded. “I know. After that pain…” He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. Something changed. I realized that if something went wrong, I really could die in here and there’s so much I haven’t accomplished in life.”

  “What are you missing?” Greensleeves put his arm across Horc’s shoulder and steered him along the beach. “You don’t have kids or a wife, or partner. Do you want those things?”