Wounded Legion: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 2)

by Xavier P. Hunter

  Dr. Zimmerman knocked on the open door to alert Reggie of his presence before stepping inside. “Hello, Sgt. King,” he said with that smile he wore like part of the uniform.

  “What am I doing here, Doc?” Reggie asked. “I was getting some weird error messages between getting fragged in Armored Souls and winding up here. Had me worried for a minute there.”

  Footsteps outside the door preceded the entry of Ken Bradley. He looked out of place in this simulation, wearing an Armored Souls promotional T-shirt and baggy jeans. “I can field that one.”

  “Are you sure?” Zimmerman asked. “This really is more my department.”

  Heeled shoes clacked on the hard, cold hospital floors, and June entered the room, dressed in her nurse’s uniform. “What happened? Reggie wasn’t supposed to be back here? I thought you were going to find a quiet time to take him aside.”

  “We ran into a technical glitch,” Zimmerman said.

  “What glitch?” Reggie asked, worried that somehow he wasn’t going to be able to get back to Armored Souls.

  “It’s not a glitch!” Ken Bradley shouted, silencing everyone. “We brought a guy back from the dead!” He covered his face in his hands and paced the room. “It was all theoretical. It was pie-in-the-sky.”

  Reggie felt light-headed. Was this really possible? “You’re talking about Frank, right?” he asked. “Frank died, and you managed to use your techno witch-doctoring to resuscitate him?”

  June sat gingerly on the bed beside Reggie and took his hand. “It’s you, Reggie. You died.”

  He looked down at himself. There was nothing he saw that wasn’t a computer simulation, he knew. It wasn’t the reassuring anchoring point to reality that he’d hoped for. But if there was one thing that he knew wasn’t a simulation, it was his own mind.

  “I’m real.”

  June looked him in the eye. Those deep green pinpoints of hope that he could lose himself inside looked so real. So real…

  “You are,” June assured him. “You’re as real as any of us.”

  Reggie pointed out the window, even though there was no direction that truly aimed back toward the physical world. “But out there, I’m…” he couldn’t say it.

  Dr. Zimmerman nodded. “Yes. You’re dead.”

  “When did it happen?” Reggie asked.

  Dr. Zimmerman tapped on his tablet. “By your reckoning of time, about the point where you were coordinating an assault on Nibelheim.”

  June drew him into a hug. “I’m so sorry, Reggie.” He could hear the tears in her voice.

  Tentatively, Reggie wrapped his arms around her, feeling the warmth of her body through the fabric of her uniform. Simulated. Every feeling, every sensation, fed into a digital algorithm in a computer somewhere, continuing to lie to Reggie that he was still alive.

  “How?” was the only question he could formulate. Then he came up with a second, more relevant one. “Why?”

  Ken Bradley talked with his hands, gesturing manically. “Here’s the thing. We don’t know how. We tried. It worked. We’ve got a million—well, really, a trillion—scans of your brain. It’s a learning algorithm. Feed it enough data, and it replicates patterns. It extrapolates. It… behaves like a human brain. It kinda shit the bed when you died in game, but we dove right in and patched it manually. Shouldn’t happen again.”

  “You didn’t answer why,” Reggie said firmly. “Why? WHY?” He shrugged loose from June’s embrace and crossed the room in a dash to grab Ken Bradley by the shirt collar and slam him against the wall. “Tell me why you stole my mind and put it in a jar!”

  Ken took Reggie firmly by the sides and lifted him as easily as if he were a child, completely unfazed by Reggie’s outburst. “Calm down. Let me explain,” he said, setting Reggie down on his feet beside June. “This is it. This is big. Like, capital ‘B’ big. Up until now, people have been oohing and ahing over a read-only medium. We get simple commands from a human mind. We provide sensory feedback in return. It’s a loop, but that loop has to go through living tissue. Living brain matter.”

  Dr. Zimmerman stepped in. “Let me have a try. June here lost her legs some time ago—I know she told you. She had prosthetics in the real world. Does that make her, what… 85 percent human?”

  “Of course, not,” Reggie snapped, glaring at Ken Bradley and his “I wrote this world” super strength out of the corner of his eye. “But that’s not—”

  “What if she’d lost both arms, too?” Zimmerman asked. “Only 75 percent human? 60?”

  “Hey,” June objected. “I’m sitting right here.”

  Zimmerman ignored her. “What about soldiers who wind up with a plate in their skull or missing an eye?”

  “I’m not missing a part,” Reggie shouted. “I’m dead! All of me is dead.”

  Zimmerman’s eyes lit as if Reggie had just caught hold of the threat he was spooling through this labyrinthine explanation. “Yes. Exactly. And until now, we didn’t have a prosthesis for that.” He clasped his hands together earnestly. “Because June and all those other soldiers who came back missing part of themselves… what made them who they are is still there: their personality, their memories, their essence.”

  “Their souls?” Reggie asked.

  Zimmerman shook his head. “I’m no theologian. I can’t answer that for you. But what I know is this. Here. Now. In this room, you are every bit as much a human being as the rest of us.” He surprised Reggie by suddenly grabbing the sides of his head. “In here, you are alive, thinking, pondering, feeling the rip tide of emotions threatening to sweep you under. I’ll help with that. I’m trained for that. Let Ken’s people wonder how they did it and give themselves rotator cuff injuries patting themselves on the back. You, me, and if you’d like, June, can all help you through this.”

  Reggie hung his head. The fake world was spinning around him. “I… I’d always harbored this dream that there would be a cure someday. It might have been years down the road, but I’d wake up like Dorothy after visiting Oz. I’d look up some of my buddies from the game and meet them in real life. I’d… I’d track down June Mallet in the flesh and thank her properly for all she’d done for me. But this… I’m not sure I’m ready for it. I’m not sure this is for me if I’ve got no hope of getting out again.”

  Zimmerman and Ken exchanged a look.

  “What?” Reggie demanded. “What was that about? Is there something else going on here? What’s the deal?”

  Zimmerman patted the air with his hands. “Calm down. It’ll all be fine. There’s no use acting rashly. For now, it might be best if you just went back to Armored Souls and carried on same as ever.”

  Rubbing his eyes, he looked at Zimmerman again, in case this was a joke. “Same as ever? I died! There’s no going back to the way things were before, now.”

  June took Reggie by the hand and guided him onto the bed beside her. Zimmerman sat down opposite her.

  “There are two options for you,” Zimmerman said with deadly earnestness. “You can go back to Armored Souls—or any of the other games, for that matter, including your apartment—or you can remain here in the simulated hospital environment, and you can receive more traditional treatment.”

  Reggie sniffed once and wiped his eyes. “What if… what if you just let me… you know… move on? I lost plenty of good men, and none of them got a second chance. I don’t deserve any different than they got. If Sunday School was right, there’s a bunch of guys I wouldn’t mind seeing again, maybe owe some apologies to.”

  Zimmerman let out a long sigh. “I’m afraid that isn’t one of your options.”

  Reggie scowled. “Why not? It’s my life, dammit.”

  Even if he didn’t really want to find out what came next, Reggie resented the idea that it wasn’t his call.

  Ken Bradley stepped in. “We’re on a military contract,” he explained. “Top brass are big on this idea of prosthetic soldiers. They can recruit bodies at any high school or strip mall, but turning that body into a solider
is big bucks. When you start talking Rangers, SEALs, fighter pilots… I mean, a good fighter pilot costs as much the plane he flies. They hate losing that investment. If they can back you guys up…”

  “That’s neither here nor there,” Zimmerman cut it. “The bottom line is: the US Army has put a lot of money behind this project and you don’t get to pull the plug on it. And you shouldn’t want to. You’re being given a gift, a unique second chance. It’s like a retirement theme park with behind-the-curtain access. You ever get sick of Armored Souls, play Silent Shuriken. Ninjas not your thing? Run a bar in Business Mogul. Don’t fancy the corporate life? Be bigger than life in Jukebox Hero.”

  Reggie wanted to scream, to sob, to burst out like a sabotaged dam and drown the city below in his fury and frustration. What right did they have to do this to him? Who decided that Valhalla West got to play God?

  Standing and shoving back Zimmerman as he attempted to follow, Reggie stalked over to the hospital window and tore the curtains aside. Beyond the glass stretched a grassy lawn and lines of leafy trees afire with fall colors. A parking lot off to one side was filled with cars of makes and models that looked vaguely familiar yet not. Probably something to do with how long he’d been in a coma, missing out on new model years.

  “If you wanted to make all those trees barren, put snow on the ground out there, how hard would that be?” Reggie asked. As he watched, the leaves melted from the trees like watercolor. Swirling winds blew past the windows, and when Reggie blinked at the sudden bright white, the world had been grasped by the frozen embrace of winter.

  “About that hard,” Ken said.

  Reggie turned to look at him. “This is the afterlife I get? Your sandbox? I get to be your little lab rat, and you decide on the maze?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Zimmerman answered the question Reggie had posed to Ken. “We’ll monitor your mental health, but this is a long-term study, not a lab experiment. Between check-ins, your life in the Valhalla West ecosystem is yours to do with as you see fit. Be the man you want to be. See the sights, win the battles, live the life of a hero or a villain, an adventurer or an inventor. You have the time, and nothing’s stopping you.”

  Reggie’d had it with both of them. He turned to June. “Is this why you were acting funny? You knew?”

  “Last time I died and got forced out, I checked in on you,” June said quietly. “I didn’t know what to say to a dead man. I guess you’re an exception though, in more ways than I know how to count.”

  “What do you think I should do?” Reggie said. “Act like nothing happened? Just go back to playing games all the time? Doesn’t it feel like the afterlife should be more than that?”

  June smiled sadly. “I’ve never seen you happier than running military operations. Why shouldn’t that be what you get to do with your life, afterlife or otherwise?”

  That was a good question. What would Reggie have chosen for himself? Beer and football round the clock? He had that in the rec room or Seattle Lite anytime he wanted. Another chance with Daisy? No, not that. Other women? There was an app for that. But that wasn’t his style.

  Reggie looked June in the eye. She didn’t flinch.

  War games where no one got hurt or killed. A woman who was there for him even when he turned her away time and again.

  “Can we keep this quiet?” Reggie asked somberly. “I don’t know how people will react if they know I’m just an advanced AI at this point.”

  June’s lopsided smile told Reggie the answer before she said a word. “Frank got back into the game three days ago, and he found out from this side.”

  “Sorry,” Ken said. “That was my bad.”

  Reggie sighed. “And because it’s Frank…”

  “Yeah,” June said. “Everyone knows.”

  “Wait. Hold on. Three days ago?” Reggie asked. “How long was that glitch?”

  Ken spread his hands. “We debugged a dead player in under a week. I’m calling that a win for the quality team.”

  “Don’t worry,” June said, putting an arm around Reggie’s shoulder. “We didn’t finish the war without you. But we have been taking care of business.” She tapped some unseen console commands in the air, but at the end of them, Reggie’s relog screen came up.

  [Relog options: Apartment - Armored Souls - Silent Shuriken - More Options]

  Reggie’s finger was halfway to touching the button for Armored Souls when he paused. He had, quite literally, nothing to lose. “Want to come by my place first?”

  June nodded, and Reggie tapped the button for “Apartment” instead.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Reggie logged back into Armored Souls hours later feeling like a million bucks. He’d decided he was a lottery winner. His name had gotten scratched off the Grim Reaper’s hit list without him being properly collected. Reggie had dodged a bullet that even Neo couldn’t.

  He had to believe that because to believe otherwise might drive him insane.

  The less Reggie considered that he had been reduced to a self-aware learning algorithm, the better his chances of leading some kind of life in the simulation. His solution was to throw himself back into the war effort with abandon.

  “How we doing, people?” Reggie called out as he entered the War Room in the Green Zone. “Let’s have a look at that map.”

  There were cheers and claps on the back, many from people Reggie didn’t even recognize. Chase hugged him. To his surprise, even Lin hugged him. Frank came up with a firm handshake and a greeting of “welcome to the club.”

  Reggie pulled Frank aside amid the chaos. “Wait. I thought you were…”

  “Nope,” Frank said. “You beat me by two days, but I didn’t get my circuits twisted up in some damn glitch. Kenny-boy thinks he’s got it solved. God help us.”

  So Frank was a ghost in the game world now too. Armored Souls was growing more haunted by the day.

  “C’mon, King,” Pounder99 said. “Let’s get you up to speed.”

  The galactic map flared to life. A time-lapse playback showed the progress of the war while Reggie had been out of commission. It was like watching mold grow on a rotten tomato. The Wounded Legion Alliance spread from the edges of Liberty Clan Coalition space and slowly devoured everything in its path. At one point, a huge chunk of the coalition simply vanished, its color reverting to unfilled neutral space.

  “What happened there?” Reggie asked.

  “D-O-Double-Gs of War disbanded two days ago,” Chase said. “Chief Gangsta SnoopDaddy couldn’t handle losing every day so he quit like a little biatch.”

  There were chuckles around the room at SnoopDaddy’s expense.

  “We’ve got them on the run, then,” Reggie concluded after a cursory examination of the war’s progression. “Any sign of Napoleon being ready to surrender?”

  “Unconditional?” Pounder99 asked. “No. I’ve started receiving daily threats from the little punk-ass, but he’s only offered terms that include returning all his territory.”

  “Plus Schet IX and Alcon Prime,” Chase added. “Which we took back a few days ago.”

  Reggie spread his arms. “I’m out of the loop. If you boys and girls have any plans in motion, don’t set them aside on my account.”

  Lin snorted. “We’ve been toying with them, waiting until you got back. June said it was only a matter of time, so we held off taking their best planet.”

  “Too bad about not being able to take capitals,” Pounder99 said, rubbing his chin. “Love to drag that guy out of his bunker, Saddam style.”

  Reggie scowled. He was just as happy that home bases were immune from attack. He’d been reduced to a single holding, and that game balance rule was the only reason they were still standing in the Green Zone right now.

  “So what’s this best planet of theirs?” Reggie asked, pointing to the galactic map. “You talking about Hrothgar V?”

  Pounder99 grinned. “If you don’t mind me asking, any chance you might let Semper Fi have that one when this is all
done? Wouldn’t mind moving my base there. Unless you’d rather Hrothgar than Nibelheim.”

  Chase held up a finger. “We can move to Nibelheim anytime you like. I held off since it costs another 250,000Cr to make the switch. Figured we weren’t in danger of losing it.”

  Reggie shrugged and held out a hand. “You want Hrothgar? It’s yours. Just let me take it so that Freedom Coach Napoleon sees the message with Wounded Legion’s name on it. I’ll trade it to for 1Cr right after that.”

  Pounder99 shook the offered hand. “Deal. Now… let’s get ready to wreck some robots.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Hrothgar V was the middle planet of the system. Pounder99 and Chase had already masterminded the capture of Hrothgar Prime, and Hrothgar II through IX except for the most populous, most prosperous, and most heavily defended planet in Liberty Clan’s possession.

  Whiteout winds whipped across the landing site as the whole mobilized complement of Wounded Legion, Semper Fi, Mile High, Boat Doctors, and 21 Gun Salute turned the wintry tundra into a parking lot. At the bottom of the ramp, Reggie paused.

  “You know the plan,” Pounder99 said. “They’ll be gunning for you. I don’t want to see you within two kilos of that mountain until we take out the long-range guns.”

  Reggie took a long breath. Right. Command Radius be damned. If Napoleon discovered Reggie was on the ground in range of the city’s guns, nothing on Hrothgar would stop him from taking Vortex out.

  That was why there were now eight Wolverines assigned to Wounded Legion with identical blue paints jobs acting as decoys.

  “Wouldn’t I be better off helping on the initial assault?” Reggie asked. He was in charge of every aspect of this mission except as related to his own safety.

  “Just kick off the missions, King,” Pounder99 said firmly. “You’re the inspiration here. I don’t want this to be a vendetta from the get-go. There’s going to be plenty of fighting in the streets. Don’t worry. You’ll get to put some dents in that sword of yours.”