Rune Universe: A Virtual Reality novel (The RUNE UNIVERSE trilogy Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

Walpurgis scowled. “You two done? Why are you here? If you want to hire me, I’m telling you right now, the fee has gone up. I doubt you can afford it.”

  “We don’t want to hire you,” said the Beard, “but we do need your help. This is bigger than your highscore, kid.”

  She knew Kipp, she had gone to his funeral, and Rylena and the Beard vouched for her. I agreed to tell her everything we knew, so far. We moved to an empty area of the bar and kept our voices quiet. It more or less telegraphed to everyone in there that we were having a secret meeting. No one bothered us, though, because they knew Walpurgis.

  “And you’re sure this isn’t another joke of his?” she said when we were done. “Kipp sure as hell loved his jokes. A post-mortem one would have been a dream come true.”

  For any other person, the comment would’ve been really insensitive. But, true enough, Kipp would have loved a post-mortem joke.

  Sure, Cole, sure, evil AI’s are building an army of drones to take over the world, I thought.

  “I’m positive,” I told Walpurgis instead.

  She passed a hand over her short black hair and grunted. “If what you’re saying is true, this could be incredibly dangerous. And I’m not talking about my highscore here, Gabrijel.”

  “We know.”

  “Fine,” she said at last, “here’s what we’ll do. Let me talk alone with Cole here for a minute, then I’ll decide what’s what.”

  I raised my hands in a show of surrender. “Sure, whatever.” But I shot Rylena a confused look.

  “Be nice,” she whispered, as she nudged me ahead, “you don’t want to piss her off.”

  “Because she’s really young,” I muttered, “yeah, I got it.”

  “She’s nineteen. And no. You piss her off, she kills us and probably the entire bar.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Rylena’s face was as expressionless as a sheet of granite. She and the Beard headed towards the bar and I noticed that, as they walked, Beard had discreetly placed a hand over his bazooka’s handle.

  “Overreaction, much?” I whispered.

  “Not really,” said Walpurgis, who had moved towards me while I was distracted. “This is PvP territory, compadre, we are always ready for a good showdown.”

  I pointed towards her hips, very distinctly lacking any weaponry at all.

  “I like a challenge,” was all she said.

  “Sure. Mind telling me what this is about?”

  “I don’t know you,” she shot back, “you’re asking me to risk my life for you. If things get tough, perhaps you’ll balk at the first sign of trouble.”

  “I don’t know you either. But Kipp must’ve thought you were okay if you were a friend of his.”

  What would those two have in common? This girl looked, to me, like the kind of person who makes all his teachers worry she’s about to crack at any moment and set fire to the flag, or worse.

  “Yes.” She looked away. “We were friends. Man was insane. He would disappear for like a month to watch some random alien-butterflies in a planet out of buttfuck nowhere, not even for a quest. Then he would find me in a competition or something and ask me if I’d like to storm a pirate fortress, just the two of us.”

  “You did?”

  “We spent like three in-game days hidden in a drug crate,” she shrugged. “Then we put explosives all over the place before we started shooting. It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

  Sounded like Kipp. Now it was my turn to look away. Instead of keeping the conversation going, she stood her ground looking at me expectantly.

  I was lying to myself, I realized, as the silence became uncomfortable fast. I had taken one look at this Blackbay station, at this bar, at this Walpurgis gal, and had been wrong about a lot of things. Her age, for one. Back on the funeral, I hadn’t even gotten a good look at her, nor anyone else. Kipp’s friends. We did have something in common.

  Perhaps I needed to stop making assumptions, and start to see. So I saw. She was tough. But, in Rune, you could be anyone you wanted. She was someone who wanted to look tough to others. What for?

  If people are scared of you, they’re less likely to mess with you. I thought. That was something I knew very well.

  She had just shared with me something personal, about her and the friend she had lost recently.

  I realized if I didn’t do the same, she’d be unreachable.

  It was something eerie, seeing yourself reflected in that way in a stranger’s eyes.

  “Hey,” I said. For a moment, the right words failed to appear. Then it passed. I knew how Walpurgis and I could connect. “We told you we weren’t planning on searching for revenge, didn’t we? We just wanted to find Kipp’s parent’s quest and help him finish it. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not entirely true. They,” I nodded back towards Rylena and Beard, “don’t want revenge. That’s fine, I think. Revenge isn’t going to make anyone feel better, and it won’t bring Kipp back. Even then… I’m going to find out who did this to him—”

  “Then you’re going to kill them,” she said.

  “Yes. I’m going to kill them,” I said back. First time I had said it aloud. It gave a sense of finality to it. I was speaking of taking a human life, a real life, not in a game. My throat felt dry and my voice trembled. But deep down myself, I was sure of it. Seitaro Ogawa was going to die by my hand.

  Walpurgis lips trembled for a fraction of a second. If I hadn’t been paying any attention to her I’d have never noticed it. She spoke one single word.

  “Good.”

  Quest Completed! You have put the gang back together. They were once Kipp’s friends and they are now yours.

  This quest advances the Discover the mystery behind Rune Universe questline. Congratulations!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Blissful Farming

  “Run, Cole! You’re going to get killed!”

  The rabid mutant bear raced after me like a storm of fangs, fur, and exoskeleton. It was fast, so fast, fast enough to dodge a straight shot of Beard’s rocket launcher. The explosion had shaken the ground around us and tore a good chunk of rocks from a nearby mountain.

  My best chance of survival was to sprint towards a tree like my friends had done.

  Regardless, as the murder-bear sprinted after me, I was chasing after a teleporting dog. The poor pup was as terrified of the monster as he was of us, and I knew that if we waited a minute until Walpurgis murdered the bear with her rifles, the surge of quantum energy that had taken hold of the dog would let him jump away to another continent. We would never catch it then.

  Or now —if this ridiculously overpowered bear gutted me first.

  I could take some risks. Kipp’s Key was safely stored inside a Terran Federation bank, which had become standard procedure before we raided a death-planet.

  I jumped aside as I heard the heavy stomping of the monster too close to me. I ate a mouthful of green moldy swamp and felt the air zoom around me as the monster smashed against the empty space where my body had been just one second earlier.

  It wasn’t stupid, either. It turned around with death and destruction reflected in its eight, spider-like pairs of eyes. I couldn’t outrun it now, I knew. My friends were too far behind me.

  I drew my Advanced Blaster Mk 2.3 and shot a volley of badly aimed laser at him (Shooting level 11). The bear roared and charged at me when I managed to score two lucky glancing hits that left smoldering craters around the plaques of his exoskeleton. I dodged again, but my hip brushed against his paws as I rolled in the mud and the impact was enough to short my suit’s shields, breach armor, and break bone. My blaster flew uselessly and landed somewhere out of sight.

  A wave of pain shot towards my brain instantly, followed by the usual surprise at not actually being in shock and agony right now. Didn’t matter that pain was muted if death-bear turned around and turned me into pulpy bits and meat.

  “Beard!” I yelled as I grabbed hold of a patch of fur
in the monster’s sides where its exoskeleton had cracked a long time ago. The mutant turned with the strength of a hurricane and only tenacity let me continue to hold on to it. “I need a grenade!”

  “Don’t let it murder you, kid!” came the helpful reply, frightfully far away.

  The monster roared and shook itself like a dog. I was like a flea holding on for dear life to his fur. My grip slipped and my legs didn’t respond to me. Broken spine? I didn’t care, the nanomachines could put it back together. They wouldn’t put me back together, though.

  A small sphere splattered against the mud on the corner of my vision. A grenade. Great throw, Beard, but still too far away…

  Like reading my intentions, the mutant bear suddenly stood on its two hind legs and jumped backwards so it fell on its back. It must’ve weighed at least a ton.

  That’s when I learned Rune could also simulate the feeling of several internal organs exploding from an impact, kind of like falling from an airplane and landing on concrete. If I had any lungs left, I’d have screamed. My vision went so red that I could barely see the shapes and shadows of the things around me. Didn’t matter, though, most of that was only murder-bear.

  The jump had launched both monster and me just by the grenade. My right arm was still functional, and better yet, not currently crushed by a stunned super-predator.

  Weakly whimpering all the while, I grabbed the grenade and gripped it with my faltering strength as I activated it. Mister Bear, perhaps sensing the danger, rolled back on its feet. His snout was so close to me his breath hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the stench of death.

  “Cole!” It was Rylena’s voice. “It’s too big for the grenade to kill it, you need to bypass its exoskeleton!” As she spoke, a barrage of laser fire smashed against the monster. It shook it off distractedly, ignoring the red and black craters it left in the exposed parts of its body.

  Bypass the armor, got it. I thought. Even while dying in game, my brain was perfectly safe in the real world. I could still think. I could force my broken body to fight to the last second. But, I wasn’t going to risk throwing the active grenade to the bear’s mouth, I had finally resigned to my cursed aim.

  Instead, when the bear roared in front of my face, revealing a bloody mouth with teeth big as swords and covered in yellow saliva, I shoved my fist down his throat, all up to the bicep (Hand to Hand combat level 22).

  The bear tore my arm apart and swallowed it whole like I was made of jelly. In real life, that would have been followed by a fountain of blood and instant death. Here, I was left with a bloody stump and a mocking murder-bear sitting on top of my broken body, as if mocking me.

  Then the grenade exploded right inside its stomach. Its belly extended like a caricature to almost twice its normal size, then deflated as the mutant whimpered a “rawr?” The monster’s mocking expression suddenly became close to a human’s look of disbelief. It glared at me like I had just insulted it’s mother and was about to tell me we were no longer friends. Smoke was coming out of its ears, mouth, and eyes.

  Instead of dying then, it raised a deathly paw, ready to take me with it. I closed my eyes, waiting for the incoming end…

  Right then, a hovercycle’s motor roared right next to me. A series of close-range plasma blasts followed and I felt the bear fall off me. It would’ve felt amazing if I had any lungs left to breathe with.

  Walpurgis had caught up to us. She didn’t stop to check if the giant was dead, she shoved her hunting railgun in its mouth and emptied the battery and the ammo until there was no head left to shoot at.

  Then she turned to me without even taking a second to process the size of the thing she had just killed. “Try and not die for twenty seconds,” she told me as I lay over a bed of mud and gore. “Rylena is carrying the medkit, she is almost here. Beard is after the dog now, he’s going to catch it this time.”

  I gestured Walpurgis with my bloody stump (the only extremity that I could still move) for her to come closer. I tried to tell her something, but I had no air to talk.

  She knelt by my side. “Yes?”

  Instead of talking, I mouthed the words with as much indignation as I could muster. “You… stole… my… kill…”

  The pile of papers on the cubicle was bigger with every passing day. This fact passed completely unnoticed to both Steve and me.

  “So, get this,” I was telling him, “she kisses him to make Han jealous, right?”

  “Neat.”

  “No, not neat. Next movie, Return of the Jedi, it turns out they are twins!”

  “Oh, god,” said Steve with disgust. “That’s a dick move.”

  “Right? My friends didn’t tell me until the third movie, though, they just laughed every time I mentioned that Luke was going to compete with Solo for the princess and all that.”

  My days had fallen into a comfortable routine. I’d get to Xanz during the day and work the mines of paper and errands. During the night, though, I’d drink my special coffee concoction and spend several hours in Rune Universe.

  My first paycheck had come through just a couple of days before. All of it had gone into paying bills and juggling around debts, but the fictional noose around the neck of my family was now calmly hanging instead of being pulled tight.

  During my commute, I’d read the books in Kipp’s stash. I was mowing them down slowly, only one every two weeks. Right now, my favorite author was a doctor called Isaac Asimov, long dead by now, as were most of the writers in the collection. He was the first to write about the workings of a robot’s mind, or at least that’s what the book proclaimed.

  Sometimes, when the constant farming came to a halt or we had to wait for an NPC payment, my friends and I would watch our favorite science fiction movies.

  I slept only a couple hours every night and my body was showing signs of it. I had dark circles around my eyes, which were constantly bloodshot. My skin was grayish and my complexion ashen. Sometimes, when walking, I’d forget where I was going and stand there like an idiot, wondering to myself.

  It was the happiest I’d been in a long time.

  Today was the day we’d give General Jenkins his enhanced dog back. We had done enough quests with him already to max out his disposition towards our group, but it was this last quest which would give us what we needed. Military-grade forcefield generators, one of the hardest to find endgame components of a spaceship. We planned to spend the session celebrating, probably watching the first chapters of a series called Star Trek.

  Just a month ago, the prospect of wasting my time with ancient TV would have pissed me off. I’d have seen it as escapism and trying to numb myself to my shitty day-to-day existence.

  But, turns out, my shitty day-to-day was easier to get through when there’s something out there you look forward to doing, even if it’s as simple as kicking back on a virtual couch with your friends.

  “Alright, man,” I told Steve as the clock hit 6 pm, “I’m off for the week. See you on Monday!”

  “Sure, you have to tell me how the movies end,” he shot back as I left the office.

  The bus that I hailed was the same one I’d almost set on fire a while ago. The algorithms inside its brain had deemed the entire thing an accident and it hadn’t been reported to the police. Darren was nowhere to be seen after our last encounter. Perhaps Roscoe’s intervention had managed to get somewhere.

  Nonetheless, I still carried a lighter in my pocket. Something like a knife would never make it past the scanners of Xanz, so it would have to do.

  Lower Cañitas was quiet and peaceful, just the way I liked it. The polluted sky and the orange tint of dawn mixed in interesting ways that could even be called beautiful. If you were into surrealism. As I stared at the long magenta trails that crisscrossed the clouds, it reminded me of an alien sky I had seen somewhere in Rune.

  It hadn’t been the prettiest sky but it was still a sight to behold.

  Distracted in this manner, I didn’t see the girl waiting in front of the apartment b
uilding’s door until I almost smashed against her.

  The leather, the spikes, and the industrial amounts of gel gave her away. She was Bliss.

  “Hey, Cole,” she said, as I instinctively stepped back. “You have a minute?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I realized in an instant her body language wasn’t threatening. She had her arms crossed over her chest as if hugging herself. The black makeup on her eyes was runny and her gaze was glued to the floor.

  “I’m leaving,” Bliss said, “so I wanted to say goodbye.”

  She shrugged.

  “Leaving is a good idea,” I told her honestly. I didn’t expect this. “But, why now?”

  “I got a new job,” she said. She bit her lip, searching for the words. “It’s far away from here. I think that’s good. This whole city… I don’t know, Cole. It’s suffocating.”

  “Feels that way sometimes, huh?” I knew exactly how she felt. And yet, I couldn’t help but be detached from the whole thing. I should be envious of her leaving. And curious.

  “I’m happy for you,” was what I told her, and it was true.

  She winced like I’d just punched her in the stomach, then she recovered. I’d never seen Bliss act like this, not with The Ferals, not with me. It was fitting, somehow. She was leaving San Mabrada, what use she had of her abrasive personality?

  “Look,” she said, “you didn’t deserve Darren coming after you. The older Ferals know you, Cole. I want you to know, he’s still mad. Our personal hacker talked him out of coming here and just stomping you. He’s had time to cool down now, so… well, he still thinks he has to defend Chimera’s honor or whatever the fuck he’s telling himself. So, he’s probably going to wait until people forget about the whole thing and then he’s going to hide behind an old car and—”

  “Yeah, I know his style,” I admitted. “Do you have any ideas? It’s not like I can punch him out.”

  “Have you tried talking to him?”

  I had not. “You see, last time we met he tried to stab me and I set him on fire.”

  “He’s not that mad about that part. One-on-one fights he thinks it’s fair, it was you supposedly turning us to the police which angers him.”