The main crowd was a mix of gaming fans, wealthy patrons, and expensive escorts. Some of the more striking attendees wore only silicone plastic, their bodies appearing like walking prisms with crinkles, as their clothes shimmered when they strutted.
Akiko noticed how spry and energetic Ben seemed. “I’ve heard there’s someone named Eagle Killer tha–”
“The best gamer ever,” Ben finished for her. “She was a master at Honor of Death and she’s even better at USA.”
“Can you beat her?”
“Probably not,” Ben answered.
“You don’t seem too concerned.”
“If you’d had the day I had, you’d know nothing could make it bad.”
“How about if it ended in death?”
Ben stared at her and frowned. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“I’m serious. You should have spent your free time practicing.”
“That’s what I have the first round for.” He checked the gun controller in his hands and loosened his game shoes.
“Are you seriously taking this that lightly?”
“Relax. No way is Mosquito going to let me die so early. We’ll be split into four teams of two. He’ll probably pair me up with Eagle Killer, so I won’t get killed right away.” His eyes strayed to someone behind her. “Orochan! How are you?”
Orochan approached them. “You shouldn’t have stuck your neck out for me.”
“You wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t asked you for a ride,” Ben answered.
“I shouldn’t have sent you to clean up my mess. I’m sorry. One of my girls must have been working for him.”
“It was Reiko.”
“How do you know?”
“She came by earlier. Don’t be upset with her. She didn’t have a choice and we made up. If I win, will he keep his word?”
“Mosquito is a man of his word,” Orochan confirmed, lifting up her pinky that was still there. “But if you don’t win, you’ll die a painful death.”
“At least he made my last hours enjoyable. Can I get a drink?”
“You need your reflexes to be at their…” Akiko started, until she noticed his hands were shaking. “Hold on.”
She called over one of the waiters who was dressed in an American flag, his short pants revealing most of his hips. “What can I get for you?”
“I’ll take that,” Ben said, grabbing a glass of wine on his tray and consuming it. “Better. You two should take your seat.”
Orochan and Akiko headed for their round dining table.
“I can’t read him,” Orochan said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Akiko lied, not mentioning his quivering hands.
Waiters brought a first plate of seared ahi tuna as appetizer. Seven of the contestants were in place. A thin, bony woman in a wheelchair rolled out and the audience began to cheer. She was a brunette with freckles, missing both her legs. There was an acute sharpness in her gaze.
“Who is that?” Akiko asked.
“Eagle Killer.”
“Why doesn’t she have prosthetic legs?”
“She had both her legs removed so she can stay interfaced with the game permanently,” Orochan explained. When she saw Akiko’s surprised reaction, Orochan said, “It’s common among the devoted. They directly connect the portical with the muscles and nerves in their body and are perpetually in the world.”
“How about when she sleeps?”
“She wants her subconscious to stay immersed in the game too.”
“Why do they call her Eagle Killer?”
“She got it after she beat the old champion. He was a cocky guy, undefeated, and used to have a pair of pet eagles he took everywhere. When she beat him, he got so mad he killed them both. People started calling her ‘Eagle Killer’ since then.”
Two assistants helped her strap into the controller, which was specially retrofitted to work with her body, including two bionic legs that connected to her pelvis.
The spotlight went to Mosquito.
“We live in the ruins of great empires and it’s usually so depressing,” Mosquito said. “But now we have a game that challenges our notions of greatness, a game where America won. It sounds horrid, but freedom never sounded so sweet as in the USA. In honor of tomorrow’s fortieth anniversary of our victory in the Pacific War, we have a special guest, an unabashed patriot, a censor as gamer to join our tournament.” He spouted on for a while longer before loud music introduced the players.
Ben was teamed with Eagle Killer and they both started in the jungles of Luzon in the Philippines. The Japanese were building a satellite dish to call down aerial strikes. Two of the teams – Americans with local guerilla support – had to destroy the installation while the other two – Japanese – defended it. Eagle picked up an assault rifle and climbed to a vantage point where she could get a good line of sight. Ben went for a weapon, but was shot, killed immediately by the enemy. He appeared stunned and stumbled about, doing his best to coerce the controls into doing what he wanted. He called one of the waiters and asked, “How do I sprint?”
“I’m not allowed to say, per the game rules. Sumimasen.”
Ben’s avatar jumped about, ran in sporadic bursts, and appeared shellshocked. Eventually, he ignored the weapons in the cache and started running in the opposite direction of the Japanese forces.
“What’s he doing?” Akiko asked.
Orochan observed Ben’s avatar. “It looks like he’s running away,” she answered
“Why?”
Orochan tried to decipher Ben’s perplexing action. “He might be misunderstanding the rules and thinks surviving is the best way to win? I’m not sure, but if he thinks that, he’s in for big trouble.”
“Why?”
“He can get through the first and second round like that, but later they’ll tally up the score and, when you run, you get no points.”
“How do you score?”
“Destruction gets points. Kills get points, depending on where you shoot them. Victory nets points. There’s extra side missions too. Eagle Killer is getting reconnaissance points for exploring all the different areas before she goes for the kill. More points means better weapons, stage selects, and perquisites that make a huge difference in the final round.”
Akiko watched the other screens and the fighting had already commenced. The visuals were stunningly realistic and it looked like a documentary, only more vivid and colorful. She could see the individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, the sun getting doused in a mesmerizing blaze that deluged the whole sky. There were streams and little fishes in them, dayflies swarming in their futile pursuit of existence, and snakes that slithered and hissed at the caprice of combat. Two things broke the realism. No smells, and the humans. The humans looked photorealistic when they didn’t move. But the animation was stunted. Their shoulders were too hunched up, the movement was sometimes too limited, and other times too exaggerated. Their facial expressions were the same: too emotive or too limited in regional influences, so that they looked like robots rather than live human beings. The broader motions generally looked passable, but even their clumsy interaction with weapons indicated the portical restrictions.
The quick movements in the camera angle of the players gave her a headache. She sipped her water, watched Ben again. He was still running in the opposite direction while explosives were rippling across the screens of the other players. One of the screens was splattered in blood, the screen getting split in half.
“Did he lose?” Akiko asked Orochan.
“Each player gets three medics to come back unless they take a headshot direct to the brain. Most players don’t shoot opponents directly in the brain because that means less points. They want all three kills.”
The match was a frenetic brawl that seemed like flashes of jungle, bullet sprays, random explosions, and soldiers charging before disappearing into the trees. It was hard for her to get a grasp of what was going on, though the people watching wer
e hypnotized, flipping from different player perspectives on their personal porticals. They checked stats, examined their positions on the map, and gambled. Two dozen waiters and waitresses were taking wagers on kill times, match lengths, and even death order.
“Why are people so into this game? It’s just a bunch of fake soldiers running around shooting each other.”
Orochan did not hear her question, instead cursing, exclaiming, cringing, and cheering on the decisions the players made.
The first round ended eighteen minutes later with Eagle Killer and Ben’s team coming in second place out of four, due largely to Ben’s abstinence from combat. Eagle Killer had the most individual points at 342, but Ben’s total of 15 points brought them down.
The losing team was unstrapped from their controllers, taken to the dais at center stage, and chained to the ground. A waitress slashed their torsos and limbs, blood forming pools around them. Both men were begging for mercy, imploring to be released, until transparent walls surrounded them, cutting the noise off. Three waitresses rolled down cages with the Pomeranians Akiko had seen earlier. They were let in through a small orifice. The Pomeranians attacked with their abnormally large fangs. It would almost be comedic if it wasn’t so violent. The furry monsters ripped their victims to pieces, shredding apart skin, tearing at the lungs, the stomach, and the heart, sundering the ropy intestines from their bodies. Every devastating blow brought cheers from the crowd. Akiko turned her head away and looked at Ben. He was in an exchange with Eagle Killer who was criticizing him, though he appeared indifferent to her harangue. “I’m trying!” Akiko heard Ben insist. “Can you explain some of the controls to me?”
“I hope they have the swimming death next round,” Orochan said. “You’re gonna love it.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Akiko asked, surprised.
“Only once. They’re so expensive to get into.”
“Where do they get the contestants?”
“You can volunteer, but ever since Eagle Killer joined, the volunteers have gone way down. It’s mostly debtors who want to wipe the slate. But every so often, there are people dumb enough to wager their lives on it.”
“What does that gain them?”
“Gaming champions are gods,” Orochan said. “Ben seriously needs to get better or he’s going to get killed.”
The second round began and the six remaining players were tossed into a two-story shack. Outside, thousands of monsters approached who were the spirits of the Chinese who had been massacred at Nanking. They were seeking vengeance. Bullets were useless against them. Fire arrows, though, dissipated their energy form. The spirits were horrific and disturbingly realistic. Many had limbs missing, bullet and sword wounds, ghoulish facades and bizarre animation that emphasized the supernatural element. There were children and women with clothes torn off, crying for justice. The spirits carried pitchforks, spears, and whatever else they could get hold of.
“What’s going on here?” Akiko asked.
“It’s a standard ‘kill as many as you can without getting killed’ stage,” Orochan explained. “The pair that tallies the most kills when the wave ends wins. This is a long round. They have to kill sixty thousand of those spirits or survive until dawn, but Eagle will try to kill them all because there’s more points that way.”
“Sixty thousand?”
“That’s how many died at Nanking. The creators wanted it to be authentic.”
Akiko had read reports that the actual number of civilians killed at Nanking ranged from two to three hundred thousand. She’d seen photos of pregnant women who had their heads chopped off, babies killed to sharpen swords, and gates where Chinese heads were hung. Peasants were massacred, teenage girls were perforated from their genitalia up, and that wasn’t mentioning those hurt in the bombings. Even knowing the necessity of striking terror into the civilian populace, it’d been hard to stomach for her. The casualty rates had been reduced in the historical records to make the battle more palatable for the puppet government set up under Puyi, the former Emperor of China, as well as the citizens of the Empire who would have found such numbers appalling. What Tokyo Command called the “China Incident” was nowhere near conclusion when the Battle of Nanking took place and the last thing they needed was a rallying call for the survivors and those fomenting for peace. Fifty years later, no one remembered the dead apart from this videogame. Mutsuraga hadn’t even gotten the casualty rate correct.
Once again, Ben appeared confused. His character was able to kill a few spirits before a pair of them overwhelmed him and ate him limb by limb. With the second life, he absconded up the stairs into a corner and tested out the controls, trying to figure out which combination of commands did what. At one point, he took off his portical goggles, called over a waitress, and ordered a cocktail and shrimp.
What is that baka doing? Akiko cursed to herself.
“Does he want to die?” Orochan asked out loud. Many other viewers expressed similar sentiments, disappointed by Ben’s play.
As though they were meant to be distracted, they were served their next course – brussels sprout hash with bacon vinaigrette and poached eggs, grilled octopus with roasted mushrooms in brown butter, and garlic scallion string beans with candied hazelnuts. Akiko wasn’t hungry, but she ate enough to replenish her strength. She almost spat her food out when she looked back and saw Ben flirting with the waitress. On the screen, his character was still hiding away from the combat zone. The other gamers were busy slaughtering wave after wave of undead assailants. A player was late refilling his quiver of arrows and one of the spirits leapt in through a window, grabbed him by the neck, and unleashed tentacles on his face. The player lost control as his avatar became possessed and attacked his partner with a pistol. The partner fired back and both were quickly killed, then resurrected by a medic. Two lives to go.
Eagle Killer wasn’t content shooting arrows from her secure position. She carved out a swathe of destruction, jumped out of the shack, grabbed the arrows from the fallen kamis, and used the fiery edges as a blade to kill more. She grabbed a pitchfork and put the edge on fire, setting a thousand ablaze in one quick swoop. Her movements were intuitive and fluid. She anticipated every player’s move before it happened – all except for Ben. When one of the spirits finally broke through a window in the upper floor, Ben ran downstairs and took cover behind another player. After the player dispatched the spirit, Ben tried to engage in combat with some of the kamis, but was immediately killed. He appeared dumbfounded.
“Are you not going to eat your octopus?” Orochan asked.
“Go ahead,” Akiko said.
The match concluded thirty minutes later, after Eagle Killer got hold of a flamethrower and obliterated the opposition. Her player avatar was smoking a cigarette lit from the flames of her enemies. Eagle Killer and Ben came in second place again. This time, Eagle Killer had harsher words for her partner.
“You’re bringing my score down,” she snapped. “This is the lowest team score I’ve ever received at this point in the game. What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m trying, but the controls are different from what I remember. Besides, you should be happy: your individual scores are the highest they’ve ever been, right?”
“That’s because you’re not doing your share! You’re not even trying. If you want to die, do it on your own time. This is a complete disgrace and a waste of my time. Why are you even here?”
“You’re a lot nicer on the portical,” Ben commented.
“I want to see Mosquito,” Eagle Killer demanded of a waiter.
“You know Mosquito’s policy of no communication with players during the tournament,” the waiter answered.
“How am I supposed to play with this idiot on my team?” she angrily asked.
Eagle Killer’s point total was at 1,232. Ben’s was at 35. The first team to succumb to the spirits was taken to the center dais. They were an overweight pair, one an ethnically Japanese male and the other Korean. Tran
sparent walls went up around them. Unlike the first execution, their arms and legs were not chained. Water filled the cage from below. The two did not seem worried at first, joking, even laughing with each other. That was until the water reached their neck level. Soon, it was over their head and a minute later, there was only a sliver of air left. The two had to swim and waddle to stay above water level.
“Why isn’t the water going all the way up?” Akiko asked, noticing it had stopped.
“The point of the torture is to see how long they struggle, because, as long as they swim, they can live,” Orochan said. “The worst part is the hope of survival.”
They both swam to keep afloat. There wasn’t enough space at the top for them to swim on their backs, so they were continually moving their arms and legs. She knew both of them realized this was the end, but they struggled vainly against it.
“Does Ben have any chance of winning?” Akiko asked Orochan.
“It’s tough, but the other team picked the convoy mission in the invasion of Hiroshima so if he does a good job there, he might still have a chance.”
Akiko got up and accosted Ben, who was talking to a cocktail waitress. The waitress left in a hurry when she saw how annoyed Akiko appeared.
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