Gabby shook Avony. "No, you can't go linkdead on me now. And if the Coder is running the dragon, then that's to our advantage, because then he's locked into the rules of the game. He can't metagame in the dragon."
Unthar's voice alerted them to watch again. "Do I get my reward?"
The dragon snickered, smoke belching out of its mouth and nose. "Of course. I will remove the block on your Special Forces application. Just make sure you don't have any more...transgressions. I won't be there to fix it for you."
"I want one more thing," said Unthar.
The dragon coughed a laugh and extended a claw toward the Brute, inching it closer to his face, daring him to flinch. Unthar held steady, staring down the claw.
"Oh, sigh," said Asphyxia. "What does it want then?"
"A chance to kill the others. Especially that Avony," said Unthar. "Self-serving bitch has always walked around the school like she owned the place."
Asphyxia snapped its head backwards in a dreadful laugh that covered the ceiling in smoke.
"Oh, I am going to so PK him," simmered Avony.
The dragon snapped its claws at Unthar and a brilliant light engulfed him. "Let's make this more interesting, shall we?"
Suddenly Unthar doubled, a clone of himself appearing nearby, and then another and another. Until a dozen Unthars milled about, practicing with their two-handed swords.
"We should get down there now," said Avony.
The two girls left the windowed room and found the tunnels shortly after that led to the smoke dragon's cave.
Gabby put her hand on Avony's arm before she could go in. "I'll take Unthar."
Avony appeared not to comprehend Gabby's words, a quiet rage simmering under her pale exterior.
"You know the Warrior-Maiden sucks against groups," said Gabby. "I need to be the one to take him on."
Avony seemed to disagree at first, but nodded to herself after she worked out the logic.
"It'll be tricky pulling it off," said Avony. "Think you're up to it?"
Gabby smiled. "Yes, actually. Because of your help."
"I'll distract the dragon, then," said Avony, pushing up her now gray sleeves.
"Avony...," said Gabby, her words trailing off with import.
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for being my friend in here. Makes me miss the old days," said Gabby. "And no matter what happens, good luck when you get out of here."
"You too," said Avony.
They embraced in an awkward hug, arms not quite making it around and quickly pulled away, embarrassed.
"I think we'd give the others a heart attack if they saw that," said Avony as they crept down the tunnel toward the cave.
Avony moved left along the wall while Gabby strode forward with her blades drawn. The twelve Unthars were busy performing movements in concert and didn't see her stroll up.
"Hey, meathead!" she yelled, wanting to draw both Unthar and Asphyxia's attention.
Up high on a pillar, she thought she saw something move. She hoped it was Mouse and not more wraiths. The Unthars turned in lock-step and advanced toward her. They weren't moving in the formation she wanted, so she shuffled to the side and attacked the lead Unthar with a Cat and Cut.
The rest of the Unthars rushed in behind and Gabby quickly found herself in the middle of a pitched battle. While Unthar outnumbered her, controlling the clones of himself made him slow, so she was able to move between them skillfully, blocking his attacks with Two Moon Sweep and Cat and Cut.
A tiny scream from high above alerted her to Mouse's attack on Asphyxia. She'd leapt from the pillar onto the dragon's head. While the dragon was distracted by the painful daggers, Avony moved in with a flying side-kick.
Gabby didn't have time to watch their battle as she was overwhelmed by her own. She wanted to get the Unthars into a position to use Bladestorm, but doing so would get her killed if she did it wrong. She moved among the pillars and lava spots, utilizing them as shields to keep them from ganging up on her.
Gabby knew Avony was right as soon as the mind-text came. She still carried fresh guilt from her exchange with Zaela. She was over thinking the neural shaping problems instead of just doing them.
she sent back.
Distracted, an Unthar got the tip of his blade through her defenses and opened up a cut in her arm. Before the rest could capitalize on her mistake, she launched into Angry Fish, escaping their net.
Gabby wanted to send back a response telling her that it was no different than before, but she was busy staying alive. Unthar was getting used to controlling his copies and she was having more difficulty defending. If the fight went much longer, he would kill her and they would lose.
Gabby wanted to not think about the problems, but every time she did one now, she thought about how she'd manipulated Zaela all those years to keep her in LifeGame. The more she thought about it, the more her reactions were muddied with guilt.
Mouse screamed when she was launched off the dragon's head, landing in a heap. But not until she'd gouged out one eye on the dragon and damaged the other. The shadow beast could hardly see now as it lunged at Avony.
Avony must have been distracted sending the mind-text and didn't dodge the dragon's swipe properly. Its shadowy claw hit her fully in the chest, flinging her against a pillar. She was alive but disabled. Instead of finishing her off, possibly because it was mostly blind now, it leaned down over Zaela's corpse.
The last mind-text slowly sunk into Gabby as she threw out desperate Two Moon Sweeps and Cat and Cuts. Her allies were down and the dragon was looming over Zaela.
Was that all that it was? All interaction was essentially manipulation, but intention made it right or wrong?
With those thoughts, she slowly pushed away the guilt. Her blocks came quicker and she began to have time for counterattacks. Lunging with an Angry Fish, she sliced an Unthar in the chest, causing all of them to cry out.
Gabby sensed an opportunity. When Mr. Johnson had copied him, he'd made a mistake. Instead of a hit causing one twelfth of the pain, it caused normal damage, which distracted Unthar from controlling his clones properly.
As she grew more comfortable with neural shaping, not thinking about the reasons why, but just approaching each one as an analytical problem, her moves became precision death. Gabby slashed another as she somersaulted out of the way, running behind a cluster of pillars to reset.
With a breath of room, she realized the situation with Zaela had changed. Asphyxia's great smoky body was now half-gone as the dragon was slipping into Zaela's open mouth. The shadow beast was going to asphyxiate her friend if she didn't do something soon, but the Unthars were still in play.
As they streamed around the pillar, Gabby slipped her blade in under their defenses, damaging Unthar and distracting him from her true purpose as she manipulated the circle of attackers. In a sea of blades, Gabby flung herself through their midst, the power of her blows coming through the neural shaping problems.
No longer stymied by guilt, Gabby positioned the Unthars into a circle around her, all of them except one. Fearful that they would slip out of alignment before she could attack, she unleashed the Bladestorm. In a fury of steel, like a thousand piranhas descending on an unknowing prey, she decimated the eleven Unthars displayed around her in a circle.
The Unthars fell away from her like blades of grass, slipping limply to the ground and then puffing out like a popped balloon, until only one remained, cowered in pain from her assault.
Gabby sprinted toward the altar as the last bits of the shadow demon were entering Zaela. Her friend was convulsing, chest heaving and spittle forming on her lips.
With nearly
nothing left to attack from the dragon, as the tail was snaking down Zaela's throat, Gabby leaned forward and inhaled.
The smoky tail entered her mouth and immediately began to choke her. But she didn’t hesitate and inhaled again. The dragon's tail pulled slightly from Zaela's mouth, entering Gabby's instead.
Gabby inhaled again, breathing deeply, bending backward and pulling, no matter how much the urge to cough the dragon back out overwhelmed her. She kept sucking out the dragon, keeping it from killing her friend, taking it into herself.
Black spots began to form at the edge of her vision. She was blacking out. Someone yelled, the sound dulled by the ringing in her ears. Mouse was staggering to her feet pointing at something behind Gabby.
Unthar had recovered from her attack and was running at her, sword over his head, ready for a two-handed strike. Black liquid smoke trailed from her lips as she inhaled the last bits of the dragon Asphyxia.
Gabby knew that Unthar's rage filled attack was easily counterable, in fact, she knew she could kill him before the smoke demon made her pass out.
But with the demon trapped inside of her, she spread her arms wide and tilted back, so the blade would hit the demon's head first before it killed her.
The last thing Gabby saw before the black spots joined together and stole her consciousness from her was Unthar's blade singing through the air, directly at her head.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mr. Johnson had been cruel when he'd designed the raid. Normally a game death resulted in a reset of all lingering debuffs, including pain, while the player waited to be released back into the regular world.
Instead, Gabby hovered in some formless black space, impaled with the pain of Unthar's strike for what seemed like minutes, though it could have been only seconds. If she'd been killed for real, she wouldn't have had to endure the pain afterwards.
When at last the pain subsided, Gabby tried to examine the formless space she was trapped in. She tried to access her interface, but nothing popped up. Even the OOC program was disabled. She was cutoff from the world, trapped within her eye-screens and sense-web.
Gabby wondered if that boy they found early in the raid had been stuck in this space until the raid had just ended. Or at least she assumed it had ended with the dragon killed, along with her, of course.
This death room was a convenient way to remove the losers from the scene without them knowing it. Gabby tried to concentrate and feel if she was being touched or moved, but the sense-web on her body had been activated to somehow mute any feeling.
She wondered if she'd been loaded into the back of a truck, and would wake up in a prison, or a horrible factory, or maybe she'd be conveniently killed at a later date and her body dumped into the ocean. She hoped her parents would miss her.
She regretted that she wouldn't be able to help the Frags any longer, but she didn’t have much time to consider all the possibilities when she'd seen Zaela in danger.
Gabby hoped that Zaela would know she'd sacrificed herself for her. Maybe it would make up for all the manipulation over the years to keep her in LifeGame. But that was over, now. Zaela had survived the raid and won.
Gabby sighed.
Just not with her own life intact.
She sighed again. Which was strange in itself because she couldn't really hear the noise, or even really feel the exhale of air across her lips.
When strange and powerful light shone into her blank space, she recoiled as if it were the sun itself. But then she realized it was only a cloud, illuminated from some sun she couldn't see.
Gabby didn't have long to contemplate the existence of the cloud when another joined it. The fluffy wisp of air seemed only at arm's length. She reached out to touch, finding it amazingly small and just outside the edge of her fingertips.
When a concrete sidewalk snaked through her formless void, section by section, she tried to get up to her feet, using the sidewalk as a guide. The sparse world spun around her indiscriminately and by the time she regained her sense of place, a grove of trees and a few more clouds had populated her space.
As more objects began to draw themselves into the void, Gabby realized what was happening. The raid program was ending and the LifeGame interface was drawing itself back around her. Normally this happened in the blink of an eye. At worst, a few second loading screen was required. But never this slow repopulation. Something was interfering with LifeGame loading.
This piece by piece rekindling of reality also exposed to Gabby that she did not see the world as it was. Instead, she saw a canvas on top of the real world, drawn by the Coders, letting her see what they wanted her to see.
When the lawn flowed under her body, Gabby was able to get to her feet. She recognized the fields near the track. A tent threaded itself into existence around her.
A noise of surprise escaped her lips when two men, Administrator Bracket and the Coder, Mr. Johnson, appeared only feet from her.
"--some bug in the raid program slowing the transfer to the new version," said Mr. Johnson.
Bracket squinted at her. "I think she's back."
"Welcome back and congratulations." Mr. Johnson clapped his hands slowly, sarcastically even. His pale nostrils flared with arrogance beneath his red eyes.
Administrator Bracket eyed the Coder suspiciously and nothing in the two men's demeanor made Gabby feel any better about her situation.
"You got what you wanted," said Gabby. "I lost the raid and won't make University. Now what do you want?"
"Au contraire. By the thin hair of a giant, but win you did," said Mr. Johnson.
"How?" she asked.
"That dim-witted teammate of yours, split me in half," he said. "Meeting the criteria for completing the raid, moments before his sword killed you, too."
She was not surprised at his admission of playing the part of the shadow dragon.
"Do you usually get your kicks from causing pain to students?" Gabby said, louder than she'd intended, prompting a raised eyebrow from Mr. Johnson.
A small black speck flew from Mr. Johnson's shoulder. Gabby wasn't sure it was real or a figment.
"Gabby?" A muffled girl's voice came from another section of the tent, causing her to forget the speck.
When the tent flap opened revealing Avony with Mouse trailing behind, Gabby's heart deflated.
Avony laughed. "Truce over so soon?"
"No, I'm sorry," said Gabby. "I thought you were someone else."
Avony appeared different than she had before. It took a moment but then Gabby realized Avony was no longer wearing her Evil Doll skin. She looked more natural, even a tad innocent, and not so evil.
Avony scrunched her face as if she knew something, but her furtive glance at the Coder told her that now was not the time. Mouse shuffled to the side, wide eyes peering through her curtain of hair.
"Hey, Song Ling," said Gabby.
"Hi, Gabriella," said Mouse.
The Coder cleared his throat. "Well, I guess we're all enjoying our little reunion." He pursed his lips, grinning like a parent humoring a child.
"Since we're all here, I guess I'll get on with it. Spoils of the winners and such," he said.
"Where's Unthar and Stephan?" asked Avony.
Mr. Johnson clasped his hands together in front him. "Ah. Them. The former has accepted a different reward for his efforts. The latter did not survive the raid and has been relegated to a lesser path." He shrugged dismissively.
Gabby knew that Unthar had moved on to Special Forces since she'd heard him during the raid.
"What about the others?" asked Gabby, thinking about Zaela.
"If they made the cut off, they moved onto University," said Mr. Johnson. "If they died during the raid or didn't have enough points, they didn't."
His plain tone emphasized the implied threat of what happened to the losers. Gabby guessed since they were pretty much done with LifeGame, the high school version anyway, that he didn't care so much to keep pretenses up.
"Can we see wh
o made it and who didn't?" Gabby asked, fearing the answer.
Mr. Johnson's eyes flashed with a crimson brilliance that hinted secrets. "Not yet. First, I have an offer."
The three girls shared glances. If they had been alone, Gabby would have expected for him to bring up the Frags. Her stomach tensed in anticipation. Even Administrator Bracket leaned forward with curiosity.
"As winners of the Asphyxia raid in dramatic fashion--" Mr. Johnson smiled at Gabby. "--and top LifeScores, I am pleased to offer, as a representative of the LifeGame Integrity Engineers, the three of you, Gabriella DeCorte, Avony Stone, and Song Ling, a job with the LGIE, effective immediately."
Avony's face lit up, while Gabby tried to will hers to do the same. Mouse looked confused, maybe she hadn't heard of the LGIE before. Mr. Johnson studied her as she and Avony reacted, squealing and hugging.
When Avony hugged Gabby, she felt her hot breath in her ear, and the whisper of "Zaela." Avony scrunched her face again at Gabby, but she couldn't read the quick glance before they were apart again under the watchful gaze of Mr. Johnson.
Gabby wasn't sure if Avony was telling her to ask about Zaela or that she knew something about her friend.
Before she could ask, Avony paused and tilted her head, asking: "What do you mean by effective immediately? Wouldn't we go onto University first?"
The Coder grinned a deviant grin, winking at Avony. "She's a clever one. No, you won't go to University. The situation with Southland has become dire and we need the talents of girls like yourselves. We'll send you to a crash course and then put you to work."
Before anyone else could speak up, Gabby asked, "What about Zaela?"
Mr. Johnson offered a bored look. "What about her?"
"She won the raid along with us. Why isn't she here? She was still alive at the end." Gabby glanced at Avony to see if that's what she'd meant, but Avony had her lips pursed together as if she were straining to say something.
"Zaela? Oh, no. She lost," he said. "Your team won the raid, not hers, and she didn't earn enough points to make the cut off. She's headed to an appropriate place for her kind as we speak."
Gamers - Amazon Page 17