Wounded Legion_a mech LitRPG novel

by Xavier P. Hunter

  Reggie juked at the last second, and the shot glanced off Vortex’s shoulder without doing damage.

  Still unaccustomed to the lack of a targeting reticule, Reggie swung and twisted the control stick guiding the Ninjato. Before Lion[1] could angle its Mass Driver at a vital area, Vortex slashed it aside. The Critical Hit bonus popped up in his view as he disabled the weapon.

  That never happened. Plasma Launchers didn’t hit critical, and Reggie hadn’t used anything else in ages. Critting that Mass Driver felt good.

  Suddenly missing his main armament, Napoleon unleashed a barrage of SRMs at point blank range. Both juggernauts took damage from the blasts, though Vortex came out on the worse end of it for having less armor. Reggie found that the left arm was down to 2 hit points.

  “Not so tough, huh, in that puny Wolverine?” Napoleon radioed. “Watch me box with this loser.” That was the moment when Reggie realized the taunts were being broadcast to everyone.

  [Secondary Objective: Destroy Enemy Juggernauts 361/772]

  Around them, the battle still raged across the mountainside. Napoleon’s forces were being devastated, but that seemed a foregone conclusion now. All that was left was a duel atop the mountain for bragging rights.

  Lion[1] swung a fist and connected with Vortex’s cockpit, dropping it to 30/40. Even though he was unarmed, a heavy juggernaut could still inflict major damage. The second half of the one-two punch missed as Reggie ducked aside.

  It was instinct. Reggie had reacted like his character from Silent Shuriken. And like that mid-level ninja he played for a change of pace, he was already counter-attacking before he registered the action consciously.

  Vortex used the momentum of its dodge and kicked the inside of Lion[1]’s knee.

  Lion[1] Left Leg: 52/60

  Napoleon took another swing as Reggie stepped back to regain his footing. This time, he brought the Ninjato around and caught the Lion’s elbow joint.

  Critical Hit! Double Damage!

  Lion[1] Right Arm - 18/50

  “Squirmy little runt!” Napoleon shouted. He charged in, and Reggie barely had time to move aside to avoid getting bowled over.

  As Lion[1] passed by, Vortex took a swing and connected as the larger juggernaut continued onward.

  Lion[1] Rear Torso - 44/60

  But the space opened up between them meant that Reggie was exposed when Napoleon launched another barrage of SRMs.

  Damage warnings blared. Reggie felt the shift in balance as Vortex lost its left arm. Widespread damage across the rest of the chassis armor lit his own wire frame view his juggernaut in mostly yellow, with the cockpit armor edging dangerously close to red.

  “Your tricks are crap,” Napoleon said, breathing heavily as if he were the one physically fighting here. “I’ve still got you outgunned and my FreedomDefender is tougher than that crummy Wolverine of yours.”

  Reggie pulled up, unable to help himself. “FreedomDefender? You are so goddamn full of yourself. You wouldn’t know the first thing about defending freedom.”

  “Hah!” Napoleon countered during a lull by mutual agreement to trade barbs. “I’m Mr. First Amendment. Real world, I defend performance artists’ freedom of expression.”

  In some small way, perhaps Napoleon did contribute. Not every fight had to involve life and death. But as someone who took a more literal part in that protecting freedom and liberty…

  Reggie was about to shout something that would have sounded a lot like “I died for your freedom,” but realized how close it would have sounded to “I died for your sins” and thought better of it.

  Vortex charged in. FreedomDefender pulled back an arm to time a punch for Reggie’s arrival. When that punch came, Reggie sliced cleanly through the arm that threw it.

  The two juggernauts collided. Despite being outweighed, Vortex had caught Napoleon’s juggernaut flat-footed and off balance from a punch it had expected to land. In a maneuver Reggie was sure Frank would have been proud of, he bowled FreedomDefender over.

  “You think you can out-wrestle—oh, shit!”

  Napoleon’s bluster at his chances of winning a fight on the ground lasted only until he realized that the summit of Einarth City wasn’t so large as he and Reggie were treating it during their battle. Reggie’s collision had driven them both over the edge of the steep side of the city.

  Once…

  Twice…

  Three times they struck roads and failed to arrest their fall before momentum carried the grappling pair over yet another precipice. The last fall was destined to be the longest, as a sheer cliff wall receded and the two juggernauts plummeted toward ground level far below.

  End over end they slowly spun, each at turns being on top or beneath. Napoleon shifted tactics from trying to clutch Reggie close to frantically trying to separate so that he could have some vain hope of survival.

  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 wit
h 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.