by Deck Davis
A quarter of a mile north east of me, there was an open field filled with thigh-high buckwheat. Movement in the field drew my peripheral vision in an instinctual way, like when you see a spider scuttling across your living room. I focused and soon picked out four figures running through the field, weapons drawn, heads hunched low. They looked to be aiming for a large warehouse on the edge of the field.
The buckwheat north of them rippled. It was a violent motion, and the buckwheat began to spread out as if a trail was being drawn through it, like waves parting at the tip of a shark’s fin. The wheat suddenly exploded near the team of four.
I gripped the windowsill by instinct, even though I was completely safe. I watched as a thirty-foot, translucent serpent reared itself up above the team. Its body was almost see-through, and only became visible when rays of direct sunlight shone upon it, turning sections of its skin rainbow-colored like a puddle of gasoline.
Serpent – Level 18
- Serpents are largely dwelling creatures but will slither onto land to hunt. Even at lower levels, they can reach monstrous sizes.
HP: 950 / 950
If I’d had a rune equipped, something like Eyes of the Ranger, or Seventh Sense, I would have been able to see other information about the serpent like its strengths, weaknesses, and maybe even a list of attacks. With only three rune slots available, though, I had to prioritize. You could find almost any information on the mainnet, and I already knew that serpents were weak against gold weapons, and that their attacks consisted mainly of coiling up and then lashing out, using their bulk to propel them with force.
The team turned to face their scaly foe. Their size differences were so great that they looked like children next to it. One raised a bow and fired ether-charged arrows from it. He must have been a Spirit Archer. Another charged with a broadsword, while a third ran around the serpent and tried to climb onto it. The fourth, who must have been a support, stayed as far back as he could and cast healing spells.
They were well organized, with two guys attacking from the front, an archer from the back, and a support topping up the damage dealers’ hitpoints. There wasn’t much else you could do against a thirty-foot translucent serpent (except run, maybe, but some people were too proud to do that nowadays).
Me? My mantra was “fight when you know you’ll win, run when you won’t.” It’s amazing how much your odds change when you’re prepared to do the sensible thing and retreat from an impossible battle. Why stick your hand in the fryer when it’s full of hot oil?
Amazingly, when I focused back on the serpent and the fighters, I saw that the monster was now fully colorized. Not only that, but it was spread out horizontally across the buckwheat, with a series of gouges across its skin. Two of the fighters lay alongside it, just as motionless as the monster, but the support and the archer were still standing.
Incredible. They’d taken down a serpent. Maybe I should have given them more credit. I tried to focus on their team name, so I could send a few bits to them after the match. It was a custom which some of the honorable fighters kept; if you saw someone do something cool, you tipped them.
Before I could get their team name, a sword burst through the support’s chest. The sword, long with serrated blades running down one edge of it, belonged to a figure dressed in black. Just as the support slumped to the floor, his buddy, the archer, lost his head as an axe cleaved through it. The axe was held by another figure dressed head to toe in black. He was nearly seven feet tall and wore an executioner’s hood.
I didn’t need to focus to know the name of this team. The Wraiths. I couldn’t tell you how many run-ins I’d had with these guys.
Team Redrunners eliminated!
4 Teams Remaining
I dismissed the message. We needed to outlast just one more team to place in a high bit position, where we’d get a decent reward. In most maps, solo or team, anyone finishing in the top ten earned a reward, with the amount of bits on offer increasing the higher you placed. Finishing third would net us a healthy sum.
That wouldn’t be good enough when we had so many bits riding on us getting first place.
I turned away from the window. There was just one last room to check, but I knew it was futile. I walked across the hallway and into the bathroom. Just as I predicted, what I needed wasn’t there. Instead, all I saw was a broken mirror, with my ugly mug reflecting back at me. My stubble made me look to be in my early thirties instead of my real age of late-twenties, and the burn scar on my right cheek, that I got when I was a kid, stood out just like it always did.
I got the scar when Bill, my older brother, shut me out of our prot-layer around our house without any protection. He did it as a joke, since that was the kind of guy he was. He’d only meant to do it for a second just to see me panic, but as I banged on the prot-layer sides and shouted for him to let me in, I saw his eyes widen. That scared me the most, because he looked genuinely worried. I’d only applied a base SP layer to my face that morning, since I hadn’t expected to venture out from our ranch, beyond the protection of our prot-layer.
Soon, the barely-filtered sun began to burn my face. I’m not ashamed to say I screamed. The pain was intense, like a blow torch held against my skin. I passed out. When I woke up, I was back under the prot-layer, with Dad knelt above me and Bill pacing in the background, his face so red I thought he was going to explode with worry.
“I’m so sorry, Har. So, so sorry. The mechanism failed. It wouldn’t let me get you back in.”
After that, you’d think that Bill and I would have grown up hating each other. No. He was the best brother I could have asked for. If anything, we got even closer after the incident.
The scar had attracted the teasing of a bunch of narrow-minded bullies in school, where they’d honor me with such hilarious nicknames as Scarface and Al Capone. Once they realized that I honestly couldn’t give a damn what they thought or said, the mocking stopped.
I could have removed the scar from my avatar. If Rynk could make his face rotten, then I could remove a burn mark. You could spend your bits on all kinds of pointless crap these days, but I didn’t. A scar didn’t matter much to me, and the people who it did matter to weren’t worth caring about.
I left the bathroom. Now, before moving on, I had just a few seconds for one of my favorite parts of VBR; looting.
I crouched by Rynk and checked his gear. This was the most delicious part of the game. Upgrading your gear and gaining an extra stat increase that could save your ass later down the line. While looting from abandoned buildings was like eating a fine slab of steak, looting stuff from a foe you’d just killed was the ultimate form of it. It was the kobe beef of looting.
Katana – Level 2 [Fire Elemental]
- The chosen weapon of the Japanese samurai warriors. The most important of their three swords, with the others being the wakizashi and tanto.
[Att: +125 default, +75 fire damage]
Iron Chest Piece – Level 1
A chest piece. Made of iron.
[+85 def]
Bronze Shoulder Braces – Level 2
Bronze-made protection for your shoulders. An upgrade for other, non-metal armors.
[+18 def]
HP Potion x2
Restores hitpoints on use.
I was wearing level-1 crude leathers, whereas Rynk had been wearing a metal chest piece that I knew from experience could withstand a blow or two. I picked it up from the floor, and I swapped my leathers for the metal. As soon as I fastened the clasps that held it in place on my torso, I felt tougher and bulkier, with a slight drop in movement speed, but tougher. I felt like I’d be able to turn a blade or two.
- Iron Chest Piece equipped!
- Bronze Shoulder Bracers equipped!
DEF increased to 148 / 1000
As well swapping out my leathers, I swapped out my basic iron sword for Rynk’s pulse-katana. This was the real score here. A level-2 katana was an upgrade enough, but the extra +75 fire damage was butter icing on a
n already-delicious cake. It was a pity I wouldn’t be able to keep it for long.
- Katana equipped!
ATT increased to 150 [+75 fire elemental]
I snatched the HP potions from his inventory bag as well. I’d taken pretty much everything from him but his runes, and, believe me, if I could have taken those, I would have. The only thing stopping me was that runes were purchased outside of the game, and so they were locked into your avatar.
A sound crackled in my ear, and I heard a familiar female voice.
“What are you screwin’ around with, Harry? Ya got it yet?”
It was Sera. Harsh words, crudely spoken. If there was ever a sentence that summed up Sera, that was it. There was nothing nasty about it. She was a good person; I wouldn’t have teamed with her for so long otherwise. She was just a little…unaware of the effect her words had. And with the little awareness she did have of it, she did nothing to change her behavior because she plain-as-hell couldn’t give a shit. Her bluntness was why I liked her. With Sera, you knew where you stood.
“Not yet,” I told her. “Got one more house to check. It’s just across from the cottage. Ran into a little trouble.”
“We’re twenty percent behind the other teams in levels,” butted in Clyde. “By my sums, anyway. Take ‘em how you will. You need to level up again, Harry.”
Clyde was a consummate professional when it came to VBRs. Hailing from the west coast, where VBR maps were used not for a sporting purpose but mainly to digitally punish criminals, he’d always had a love for VBR’s. And he’d shamefully admit (he wasn’t one to hide his past) that he’d stood in the crowd at a few digital lynchings and cheered them on.
When he was a teenager, he saw the light. He changed. He still kept his love for VBR maps, but, from then on, he used them for what they were actually made for: sport. Clyde’s all-consuming dream was to one day join the New Eden Tronix, who were the biggest and best team in the game. I was under no illusions; Sera, Vorm, and I were just a stepping stone for Clyde.
“As much as I hate math, Clyde’s right,” said Sera. “We’re behind. You should have found the weapons by now, Harry.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Then work faster!” said another voice.
This was the deep tones of Vorm, the last member of our team. He was the eldest of us all. He was a family man, and father of six children. He always had a smile on his face, and always had a friendly word, except when it came to bits. Where bits were concerned, he had a fear that made his knees weak. I supposed it came down to the fact that he had more riding on this than us. I mean, I had my reasons for needing bits, as did Sera and Clyde, but Vorm had kids to feed.
It had been tough to persuade Vorm to agree to our plan. He’d been happy with the way we were steadily working our way up the coal ladder, and then into bronze where we’d consolidate, refine our tactics and save up for runes while consistently placing in top 3-5 in VBRs so that we could earn bits.
I’d seen an opportunity. Every year, the Grand Overseers met and discussed where VBR was headed over the next year. They also voted on which maps to keep in circulation, before finally publishing a list of which VBR systems were to be phased out. They also decided on which maps to pull from the archives and make available.
As soon as I heard that Autumn Steampunk was being added to the roster, I knew that we had an opportunity.
We waited to see which VBR system bid for it, and I was a little dismayed to see that it was Bernli who won. Bernli, despite being a small town, only hosted silver-tier events, and at the time of the announcement we, Team Phoenix, were only coal-rated.
“Just forget it,” Vorm had told me. “Slow and steady. As long as you watch your spending, your bit account will grow.”
“I’m not risking an ‘L’. No, no. Hoo boy,” said Clyde. “Think about what an ‘L’ would do to me. Think a gold league scout’s gonna like that?”
When Clyde said ‘L’, he meant a loss. That didn’t just mean failing to come first, since technically, everyone from second place downwards had lost the battle. When fighters talked about a loss, they meant placing somewhere outside of the prize money brackets. Bernli VBR, for instance, gave prize money to those finishing between first place and tenth. Finishing eleventh in this case, would be a loss, whereas finishing fourth wouldn’t.
“The only reason a gold scout would be lookin’ at you is if they needed a new waterboy,” said Sera.
Vorm had scratched his head. “What’s a waterboy?”
“From the old sports,” said Sera. “Never mind.”
They were right, I knew. Teams that tried too much too fast usually racked up a few ‘L’s in a row, and, from there, it was easy to plummet down the ranks. I didn’t give much of a damn about our ranking. I was in this for one thing only: bits. I needed lots of them, and the time was rapidly approaching when I’d need them quickly.
Jumping up from the coal league to the silver league in an organic way in anything less than a couple of years was impossible. But going from coal to bronze? That was possible. And from there, we could make a temporary leap to silver.
You see, a team could pay to enter a match in a league above their station. For example, a silver-rated team could pay a bit-charge to enter a gold match. The only problem was that if you paid to jump-rank for a match, you were given magnifiers that increased the damage your avatar sustained after the battle. The other obvious disadvantage that you were paying to fight against teams that were ranked higher than you and, thus, had better tactics, coaches, and runes.
So why would someone jump up a league? Why risk it? For bits and experience, of course. If your damage was magnified by jumping up a league, so were the rewards. The bit prizes in silver-ladder battles dwarfed those in the bronze ladder; this was enough to make Vorm and I water at the mouth. The experience points rewards were just as good, which snagged Clyde’s attention. As for Sera, I didn’t know what motivated her. As much as she was plain-spoken, there were some things she kept close to her chest.
Still, it was a giant gamble, but I had a plan.
I told them that as long as we could get to the bronze ladder, we would have an opportunity to win big bits. The reason I was so confident was that the Autumn Steampunk map, which had recently been voted into circulation, hadn’t seen any action since its original run fifteen years earlier. And even though I would have been just eleven years old when it was first released (too young to compete in VBRs), I knew Autumn Steampunk intimately.
Autumn Steampunk was designed by my dad, and I used to play-test it with him in his home VBR design studio.
Chapter Three
4 Teams Remaining
I’d persuaded the rest of the guys to go ahead with my plan, so everything that happened from here on was on me. Vorm needed a considerable amount of prodding, since he protected his digital bits like they were his children, guarding each decimal behind an infrastructure of virtual safes, wallets, passwords and encryptions. In the end, after I’d told him that we couldn’t lose and explained why, he’d given me the go ahead.
“These aren’t even odds,” I told him. “In fact, the odds are meaningless because we’re beyond them. We can get something that nobody else has got.”
The plan was simple. We were going to enter a silver-ladder VBR. Given that it was a complete jump in leagues, the odds of us winning would be longer than the odds of a blind folded guy backward-throwing a basketball through a hoop a half mile behind him.
We each pooled a good chunk of bits from our digital wallets, though I told Vorm to keep enough locked away in the slight, slight, chance we screwed up, and then Sera used her network of dodgy connections to fence a bet on us winning. This was the tricky part of it all; betting on your own team in a match wasn’t allowed, because you could just as easily bet against yourself and then throw the game.
If we were caught doing this, a ban of six months, maybe longer, was on the cards. This had to be done through a proxy, but I trusted Ser
a’s judgment to pick the right guy.
After the bet was placed, we just needed a way to make sure we won. And how could we do that? We were newbies on the bronze ladder, and we were leaping up to a silver match. In all laws of probability, there was no way we should have been able to place in the top five, never mind win.
But that was my area.
As soon as I heard that Autumn Steampunk was moving into the battle rotation for the first time in over a decade, I saw the plan unfold in front of me. You see, this was the first, and last, battle map that dad let me play-test with him. He’d design parts of it in his studio at home, and then I’d enter it via an avatar and wander the map, letting him know which areas I liked and which were bugged. I spent months in the damn place.