It was Reggie’s turn to hang on. Wrapping Vortex’s legs partly around the larger juggernaut’s midsection, he raised the Ninjato and prepared for impact.
“Remember this day, Napoleon,” Reggie told him. “This is the day it all came crashing down.”
Napoleon managed to maneuver into a position where Vortex would partly break his fall. Given the distance of their drop, it was more prayer than planning, but Reggie wasn’t taking chances. Just before the two juggernauts struck the city streets, Vortex wedged the Ninjato against FreedomDefender’s cockpit.
Then, as Reggie was getting used to, everything went black.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Reggie was enjoying a cup of coffee in his Seattle Lite apartment and watching television when there was a knock at his door. Muting the volume, he called out, “Come on in.”
June opened the door and stepped inside. She was dressed in civilian clothes—a paisley sundress and flats that he surmised was popular back in the real world. She was grinning. “We won!”
Reggie matched her grin. “Hey! How about that. But we knew from the first ten minutes that we had that.”
“I mean the war,” June said. “Chase just negotiated the peace deal with the second in command of Liberty Clan. He raked them over the coals. We’ll never have to see that Napoleon guy’s face ever again.”
Checking the television screen for the time, Reggie did a little quick math. “I’ve got almost an hour before I can head back in.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bedroom.
But June wasn’t watching his gesture. She was fixated on the TV. “You’re watching the weather of all things?”
“I know. I know,” Reggie said, taking up the remote and flicking off the picture. “I’m the last guy who should care about the weather. But it’s weird. I do. I can check in and see what’s happening back home or anywhere in the world. I can guess what it’s like where my old unit is, or if my uncle in Buffalo is shoveling snow.” He tossed the remote onto the couch. “But it’s silly. I get it.”
June looked a little deflated. “You miss it. That much I can understand. But… it’s not so bad here, is it? I mean, you just got crushed to death on Hrothgar V, but you’re not in any pain. Right?”
Chuckling, Reggie thumped his chest. “Takes a lickin’. Keeps on tickin’. Didn’t feel a thing. I suppose I could go in and up the sensitivity on experiencing pain. But why?”
June nodded, seeming to relax. “Right. Same for everyone, I guess.”
“I didn’t suddenly get stuck in masochist mode just because I’m a permanent resident.”
Collapsing onto the couch, June took a long breath. “Sorry to bring it up.”
Pushing aside the remote, Reggie sat down beside her and looked deep into those green eyes. “You’re not… considering anything drastic. Are you?”
He thought back to all the times she’d told him about the real world, beyond the hospital that he’d once mistaken for Earth. The physical therapy. The surgeries. The looks she got from strangers.
She couldn’t look straight at him. “No. I mean. Not really. It’s just… never mind. I’m fine.”
“No. Tell me,” Reggie said. The tough guy, bottle-it-up routine didn’t apply in here. It was just the two of them in Seattle Lite, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of them. “I’m here.”
After a shuddering sigh, June began. “At least once a week I wake up and fall out of bed. Being in here, being whole, I forget to put on my legs before trying to stand. I can feel them. That whole phantom sensation problem is amplified because I’m not learning by rote that my legs don’t go all the way to the floor. Every night I log in, my mind gets told it was all a bad dream. I really look like a movie star. My body’s whole and healthy, and nothing aches or stabs or itches. Nothing hurts without even being part of me anymore.”
Reggie put an arm around June and pulled her against him. She sank against his chest and sniffled.
“And here I am, complaining to a man who… who…”
“You can say it. I’m dead. It’s weirdly disconnecting. But I’ve been in here so long, I waffle between imagining my body’s still back in that hospital hooked up to every machine imaginable and thinking that this is some weird hallucination. Other times I think this is what heaven was supposed to be for me.”
“Your dog tags said you were an atheist.”
Reggie chuckled despite the mood in the room. “It takes a special kind of asshole to be an atheist in the afterlife.”
June’s soft weeping broke amid a snort of laughter before resuming. “I guess so. Can you do me a favor though and not mention any of this to Dr. Zimmerman?”
She’d never come out and said it, but Reggie had heard the hints of envy. A life without pain, without a body ravaged by injury. June had been considering ending her life to join Reggie and Frank in an existence that was purely digital.
“Sure, but I want you to do me a favor in return.”
Wordlessly, June nodded.
“I want you to record a message. Put it on a thumb drive or whatever people ten years in the future use these days. Tell yourself all the things you hate about life. All your pains, all your problems. Put it on video. Can you do that?”
She pulled away enough to look up with narrowed eyes. “Why?”
“I want you to destroy it as soon as you’re finished. Don’t keep a copy anywhere. No backups or autosaves. One copy. Gone. Forever. The next time you consider what it’s like living in Valhalla West’s little digital terrarium, remember how easy it is for something that’s just a piece of data to disappear without a trace. Forever. With no coming back.”
Tears welled in June’s eyes as she nodded in understanding. “I’ll do it. I promise.”
June cuddled against Reggie and waited out the timer with him until he was eligible to relog back to Armored Souls. The countdown reached zero, but neither of them said a word. She fell asleep curled up on Reggie’s couch, and he didn’t have the heart to wake her.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
It was a green, bright morning at Arlington National Cemetery. White, wispy clouds dotted the sky, and the cherry trees bloomed pink. Not that Reggie could smell them.
Military dress uniforms were the order of the day. Everything was just as it had been for the millions of other soldiers interred at the nation’s most distinguished resting place. The one innocuous exception was a scattering of tiny cameras and microphones translating the scene in real time into the language of the Valhalla West servers.
Reggie and Frank were dressed in uniforms that were identical to the real thing to the point where Reggie had to believe that some army liaison had to have been involved as a consultant. They felt just the way he remembered, right down to the itch of the starched collar.
Beside them, in a digital rendition of an Italian suit, was Ken Bradley.
“Ya done a bang-up job, Kenny-boy,” Frank remarked, not taking his eyes from the ceremony in progress. “Gonna be like this for mine?”
Ken nodded. “The least we can do.”
June and Dr. Zimmerman were there as well, but they were in the flesh. Zimmerman looked just the way the simulation portrayed him—a squirrelly little man, wrinkled and bald except for a fringe of gray around the sides. June was a different story.
She’d warned Reggie that she had tinkered extensively with her appearance at character creation. But standing by Zimmerman’s side, June Mallet was impossible to mistake. She was dressed in her army uniform, cap hiding her blonde hair. One side of her face was discolored by a skin graft, and one eye didn’t track where she looked—a glass replacement for the one she’d lost. Though she stood straight and tall, June clutched a cane for support.
“No man should see this,” Reggie muttered, shaking his head as the guns fired.
He knew at least half of the attendees. There were men and women he’d served with, including a number of older versions of guys from his old unit. It was easy to forget at times how long he
’d been gone before waking up in the Valhalla West playground. He saw a few relatives he was surprised had come all the way to D.C. to see him off.
Then, on the periphery of the guests, just as the bugler was playing taps, Reggie spotted Chase and Lin.
Lin looked just like her Armored Souls avatar. As an online personality, he could have seen her disguising herself to avoid recognition, but she’d gone with maintaining her brand and appearing as herself. She wore a plain blue dress and dark glasses.
Chase bore enough of a resemblance to recognize him but only in the face. Real world Chase was taller than his in-game persona and a good deal heavier. The suit he wore looked freshly bought or at least well kept. His hair was plastered to his head and shone with some greasy styling product. The beard he wore was close-trimmed, and unlike Lin’s, his thick-framed glasses were crystal clear.
He kept his arm around Lin through the ceremony. It appeared that their in-game affair had spilled over.
Reggie choked up at the tears he saw throughout the audience. His old C.O. offered condolences to his mother along with the flag used in the ceremony.
As the attendees drifted away and Reggie’s Earthly remains were consigned to their eternal resting place, Frank clapped a heavy hand down on Reggie’s shoulder.
“Just think of it this way,” Frank said, turning Reggie and sweeping a hand out in the direction of all the other grave markers in Arlington. “Of all the fellas in the ground here, you and me are the only ones still kicking around.”
With a furrowed brow, a thought occurred to him. Not every soldier killed in battle died instantly. Most but certainly not all. He and Frank were the first of a new breed of survivor. How long would it be before the army stopped considering soldiers like him and Frank dead at all? Would a day come when there would be entire prosthetic bodies to put a brain back into?
Would any of them be able to tell the difference if it had happened already?
Possibilities swirled in Reggie’s mind. He’d lost a decade without ever noticing it. What if he lost a century? What if this simulation was being run by aliens, and Reggie’s Earth was long gone? What if God had put this all together for him as the only afterlife a non-believer’s mind could wrap itself around?
“Come on,” Reggie said to Ken Bradley before his mind carried him off on the winds of blossoming madness. “Let’s get back to the fake world. I don’t belong here anymore.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Reggie stood on the top floor of a palace high-rise at the heart of Jenova City on Nibelheim. This was now officially the center of Wounded Legion, the one unassailable place in the Armored Souls universe for him. It had a civilian population of over 30 million, and a player population that had grown to nearly a hundred in the weeks since the war ended.
Every player who joined had the option of taking over a whole skyscraper of their own. But June had chosen to share Reggie’s. He’d never kept track of her hours in Armored Souls before they shared living quarters—it had seemed like an invasion of her privacy. But now that she spent her off hours in game beside him, he’d noticed that she was working and logging in with little room for anything else in her life. He could hardly imagine when she found the time to buy groceries.
But to some degree, he couldn’t blame her. Standing on his balcony with a view over a sprawling metropolis that belonged to him on an entire world that owed him fealty, Reggie could find few enough reasons to relog to his Seattle Lite apartment.
Going through his regular morning routine, Reggie pulled up a menu to check Wounded Legion’s health.
[Faction > Roster > News (518) > Rewards > Info]
Reggie only ever paid attention to priority messages anymore. The few that demanded his attention got flagged and dealt with. The rest either fell to one of his officers or by the wayside.
He tapped the faction list and checked for new holdings won overnight.
[Nibelheim]
[Green Zone]
[Schet IX]
[Alcon Prime]
[Turrim Auream Starport]
[Nephtali]
[Torbek]
[Dundee Proving Ground]
[Calgon]
[Tullus VI]
[Tirith]
[Chronic Prime]
[Ginjui IV]
[Ophan II]
[Sarmon]
He scanned to the bottom. There was nothing surprising. Just as it should be. Peace was relative in Armored Souls. A new war could be just around the corner, and it would come without warning. He had alliances and defensive pacts. The next war to find him could be defending the Boat Doctors or even Semper Fi against an aggressor.
Tapping menu buttons idly, he looked in on his finances.
[King - 2,250,750Cr]
Wounded Legion was bringing in twice that a day, and half was going straight to the pockets of his troops, divided evenly. Profit sharing wasn’t the default option, but more and more leaders were finding that the practice increased recruiting success. Even after paying maintenance costs on all his holdings, Reggie was pocketing over 100,000k a day to make tweaks to his empire.
June came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. “What do you see when you look out there?” she asked, kissing the back of Reggie’s neck.
“Possibility,” he replied. “I can make it anything I want, and since it’s our home base, no one is allowed to take it from us. The whole rest of the galaxy can be in chaos. We could have the Star League fall apart. But right here, this planet, would be a haven for us.”
“Sounds boring,” June said, releasing Reggie and leaning back with her elbows on the balcony railing. She threw her head back with a 150-story drop below her. “Isn’t this world safe enough as it is? This universe? I want to try something dangerous.”
Reggie almost suggested that she try it in the real world, but the temptation was probably too great to overextend. Ken Bradley had let it slip that anyone who’d spent long enough in the Armored Souls universe could be replicated by AI like Reggie had. He could only hope that June got her kicks in the game world and hadn’t discovered that her ticket to paradise was one skydiving mishap away.
With a smirk, Reggie brought up the player mission generator. June furrowed her brow and watched but said nothing.
[Primary Objective: Windsurf on Tullus VI]
“What?” June scoffed. “That’s not a real mission.”
Reggie shot her a mischievous grin. “You should see the reward I’ve set up for it.”
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
The news popped up in Reggie’s field of view just as he was getting across his suggestive promise for his afternoon outing with June.
But she was already popping open a UI window, fingers tapping at nothing in midair.
Reggie scrolled to the bottom of his news inbox.
“Armored Souls is pleased to announce that at midnight, server time, the galactic map will be locked. ‘Why?’ you ask? Because tomorrow marks day 1 of the First Annual Valhalla West Ragnarok Showdown. Form your teams. Compete for prizes including the limited edition Valkyrie-medium juggernaut.”
There was a link at the bottom to the specs on the Valkyrie.
“I want one,” June said flatly. “It’s a Phoenix that packs firepower like a Titan.”
“Seems a little overpowered,” Reggie said dubiously. There was no way Valhalla West was going to allow more than a handful of those into the galaxy. “Does this mean windsurfing is out?”
June’s grin was fierce. “Call the others. We’ve got a tournament to prep for!”
TECH REFERENCES
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Xavier P. Hunter was born at the dawn of the video game age. He grew up with a game controller in his hand, moving from Atari joystick through PS4 controller the way a hermit crab outgrows its shell. His little league was RBI Baseball, his first
date was Princess Zelda, and his first unpaid internship was leading raids in World of Warcraft. He lives in a world of pixels and frame rates, coming out infrequently to eat and that sort of thing.
Most of his writing is done while patches download or when servers are down for maintenance.
Like most superheroes, he operates in meat space under an assumed name.
xp-hunter.com
Table of Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Wounded Legion: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 2) Page 25