The doors opened, and I heard the screams of the crowd through my earpieces again. The Astafar Unlimited designers had created a new arena for this match, and I didn’t know quite what to expect when the duel began, but I was still a little surprised by what I saw when the virtual door opened.
A bridge of white marble stretched for sixty feet over blue sky and fluffy white clouds until it met with a high column of stone that extended like a vertical wall. A white marble staircase hugged the alabaster polished rock there, and I sprinted across the bridge toward the steps while I dropped my hands to my waist to weapon switch to the dagger and iron shield.
“He’s running DaggerDancer, Champ! Mobility build! He guessed you were going to be running your usual! Oh, Champ! You gotta hear this crowd! They don’t know what you are doing!” Dini was giggling in my ear piece, and I only grunted when my feet hit the stairs.
The older VR games had set a limiter on how fast your avatar moved through the game world, but Astafar Unlimited had changed the industry when they decided to enable players to move as fast as they could spin the traction pads of the omnidirectional station. The idea caught on like wildfire, and soon the entire world was playing the game. In many ways, the technology was a blessing. Every gamer was in good shape from walking, running, crouching, jumping, and fighting through the virtual world.
The stairs spun around the massive, towering sky column for hundreds of yards, and there was no guardrail on the right side, just a long, long, long drop to the ground of the virtual world. I could make out the shape of Astafar Unlimited’s main continent ‘Corbya’ below me, and I could see the ‘Valon’ string of Islands off of the coast.
I had reached the top of the stairs before Jin did, and I was a quarter of the way across the arena before I saw his Yamman lizardman avatar poke a scaly head above the edge of the arena. He carried two short swords in taloned hands, and I tried not to smile when Dini yelled his encouragement in my ear.
“He is nothing before you, young man. You are the Champ! The Champ! He’s not going to know what hit him!”
Jin’s arm flashed, and a red colored dagger spun across the arena toward me. It was his class’ Red Bullet skill, and I triggered Shield of Justice a fraction of a second before the spinning dagger hit me. The weapon bounced off my shield like a ping pong ball, and then sped back toward Jin. I always turned off the damage numbers on my user interface display, but I kept the health bars active, and I saw about an eighth of his health drop. It was a surprisingly rookie move for Jin to make, and the attack was going to leave him stunned and bleeding for a few seconds.
I smashed into him like a virtual freight train.
Except that my build didn’t have any real heavy hitting skills. My dagger struck him a split second after I triggered Unleash the Red and I saw the bleeds stick to him. Then I used Passive Aggressive, and another stack of bleeds was added. I triggered Trip as Jin’s first attack hit me, and I decided not to bother trying to block his strike with my shield. He used Blind Blade, and the entire world went an opaque gray as the effects of the blindness came to my headset. I could tell that his attack triggered after my snare slowed him, and I knew where he stood, even though I was blinded. I used Lawful Seizure and then swung my dagger to where I knew Jin was still snared. I didn’t feel the weapon hit, of course, but there was a slashing sound in my audio, and my blind was transferred to my opponent while I gained his enchantments.
The DaggerDancer class didn’t have many self-enchanting skills, sometimes known as ‘buffs,' but one of the most powerful was an activated skill named Rage of the Shadows. It gave an increased attack speed and increased the chance of a critical strike. The buff was actually able to self-renew itself with every critical hit, and DaggerDancers could continue to eventually stack up to ten copies of the buff on themselves for a crazy high damage output. I wouldn’t be able to use the skill to add more stacks of the buff, but if I got lucky with my critical hits, it would be possible to hold onto the buff for the length of our fight.
I stepped to the side, and Jin’s twin swords snaked out to where I had stood only a moment before. His avatar had black smoke over his eyes, and I burned through all of the rest of my skills that weren’t on cool down to stack up a bunch of bleeds on him. Then I dropped my hands to my waist to switch to my maul before I used You are Guilty! I got a bit lucky with my resets, and all of my grayed out skills popped back into color to let me know I could use them again.
“Yeahhhhhh Champ! You strike! You dodge! Pivot! Destroy!” Dini’s voice was shouting in my ear, and I stepped behind Jin to attack a few more times with my maul.
Jin’s health bar was at the halfway point now, and every tick of the clock saw the bleeds rip another 5 % of his red life bar away. I’d taken a bit of damage from his first hit, but Lawful Evil had given me it all back with its vampiric properties.
Jin’s stuns cleared, and he used Dark Step to teleport thirty feet away from me. I knew that he had the skill on his bar since it was standard on these builds, and I switched back to shield and dagger before I executed Justice is Calling! My battle cry pulled him back to me and added a bunch more bleeds to his hefty stack.
The Korean challenger was in trouble. Most of the standard DaggerDancer builds relied on heavy upfront damage combined with evasive skills. There were a few healing type skills that a player could equip for the class, but they diluted the damage per second and quick strike abilities of the class. Jin had counted on me playing one of my usual classes, and he had thought that he could beat me in a game of quickness.
His only hope was to attempt and burst me down with a quick series of strikes, but I switched back to my maul with a hand drop, triggered Passive Aggressive again, and made a massive overhead swing. Jin sidestepped the attack easily, but I had expected him to try and avoid the attack. I brought the back handle of the weapon around to tap him quickly on the shoulder, and it activated the triggered debuff.
Even with the 10% attack speed debuff, the lizard avatar went crazy with dual short sword attacks. The maul was a terrible weapon to parry with, and though it didn’t weigh anything in my virtual hands, the game mechanics made it so that you could only use your chosen weapon as quickly as the rules allowed. If we were using real life fencing foils I could have blocked every one of the Korean man’s strikes, but moving my hand that fast with a maul would do nothing.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t parry.
I am the Law gave me a 20% damage resistance, and Jin was debuffed with a 40% damage reduction along with a 10% slower attack speed. I also continued to heal from the many stacks of bleeds on him, and his life ran out a few moments later.
I was at 95% health.
“Leo The Lion wins round one!” the announcer shouted over my ear piece, and I heard the crowd echo through his microphone.
My vision blurred to a rainbow swirl of pastel colors, and when they became organized, I was standing back in the prep room in front of the skill shelves.
The timer appeared again, but it counted down from sixty seconds instead of thirty.
“Champ, you are fighting strong!” Dini yelled.
“What should I switch out?” I asked.
The second round was always interesting. Jin had no way of knowing what I would pick for my class and skills, so he had made an educated guess based on my previous matches. Now that I had mixed things up, and picked a class that no one had thought was suitable for dueling, he had to come up with an entirely new game plan. He was going to have to either change his build to attempt to kill me even quicker while mitigating my offense, or he was going to have to change his skills so that he could survive longer. On the flip side, he knew that I knew of his choices. I could also change my skill set build during this round break. Then all the choices that he would make would have been for naught. Winning the first round really put me at an advantage, since Jin had to react to my victory by trying to guess if I would change my winning build or not.
“Switch out Lawful Seizu
re for Eye for an Eye, Champ!”
“Yeah, that was what I was thinking.” Eye for an Eye was a Defender Battle cry skill that returned 60% of the damage that I took to the attacker for five seconds. It was slightly different than Shield of Justice because I still took damage with Eye for an Eye, and it wasn’t a 100% return, but now that I knew Jin was playing a DaggerDancer, Lawful Seizure wasn’t that useful.
“Replace Flick with Severe Sentence, Champ. It is too redundant with Justice is Calling!”
“Got it,” I said as I took out the ranged throw and switched it with the melee attack.
Severe Sentence was a Defender attack that always did critical double damage. If I used a dagger, it added a bunch of bleeds and snared the opponent, if I used my maul it knocked back the enemy. It was probably the only useful skill on the Defender class for direct damage in duels, but I hadn’t wanted to include it because I was worried that Jin would play an Arcane or Summoner class. If he had picked one of those, then I wouldn’t be able to get near him without the aid of the Flick skill.
“Go to your quiet spot, Champ. I’ve got the words for you. Can you feel the power in your body? Can you understand that the universe is not just around you, but inside of you? It is, Champ. The universe wants you to win. No one can beat you, Champ. You’ve got the mind. You’ve got the body. There is nothing in your way. Do you see yourself winning?”
“I do,” I said to Dini.
“Say it louder, Champ! This place is roaring with your fans. They all want you to win. Can you hear their love, Champ?”
“I do,” I shouted a little louder into the microphone that was positioned on my VR helmet.
The doors opened to the bridge, and I sprinted toward the steep staircase that wrapped around the wide pillar of stone. I ran up the stairs quicker than my first time, and my legs gave me a pleasant sensation of exertion as I reached the top. Jin hadn’t emerged from his side of the stairs again, and I continued my sprint toward his side of the arena.
“He’s hiding on the stairs Champ. Be careful!” Dini warned as I got half way across the hundred foot arena.
I saw Jin’s lizard avatar poke his head above the stairs, and then he hid again. I guessed his strategy was to get me to come down the stairs, where he could use his daggers or short swords to rip me to pieces. The strategy was probably a bit better than his alternatives since Justice is Calling! wouldn’t be able to pull him out from behind cover.
There was no timer on these matches, but I didn’t want to wait for too long. The developers often warned that they had ‘mutations’ that would affect the world after the two-minute mark at random. It could be anything from a shrinking arena to the wind that would push us off the top. They could even change around combat rules so that damage was doubled, or skills recharged twice as fast. Anything that messed with the dynamics of the game skills would probably aid Jin more than me since his DaggerDancer class was heavily leveraged on being able to quickly roll through all of his skills for big bursts of damage.
I held my shield and advanced to the edge of the arena so that I could try and look down the stairs. My opponent was ten feet below me, but he jumped up so that he could see the edge of the top flat part of the arena.
Then he turned into a puff of smoke.
“Watch out Champ!” Dini shouted, but I’d already guessed what was about to happen, and I sidestepped without even looking behind me.
I was just a touch faster than Jin, and he missed his attack on my back. I guessed that he meant to use the single knockdown attack that was available to the DaggerDancer class. It was called O Goshi and would have launched me off of the edge of the arena. Shield of Justice wouldn’t have helped me since it only reflected damage, and neither would have Eye for an Eye.
I reached down to my waist and switched to the maul. Then I spun on my heel and triggered Severe Sentence as I swung the two handed weapon. Jin’s O Goshi attack had caused him to step to the edge of the arena, and my dodge had been perfectly timed. My own blow smashed right into Jin’s scaled back, and his avatar launched into the air as if he was being pulled on a zip line. He tried to twist in mid-flight, but it was too late, and he fell off of the arena.
I stepped to the edge and watched his form break through the clouds below. A few seconds later it faded from the view. I wondered for a second if they would actually log him out of the game, move him back to the prep room, or just let him fall for the half a minute it would take to smash into the distant game world ground beneath us.
“Champ! Champ! You did it!” Dini’s scream of joy brought me back to the arena, and I heard the cries of the crowd penetrate the ear pieces I wore.
I raised my maul into the air and smiled.
“For the tenth year in a row! Leo the Lion has held onto his title!” the announcer screamed.
I felt hands tear at my suit sensors and someone pulled off my visor. Jax, Garf, and Calic helped get me out of my omni station, and the announcer ran over to raise my arm up to the gathered crowd.
“Leeee Ohhhh!”
“Leeee Ohhhh!”
My friends were hugging me now, and I gestured to them with a bow. The crowd knew who Jax and Garf were and I heard their names being screamed out along with mine.
“Leeee Ohhhh!”
I looked across the battle ring and saw Jin step out of the omni station. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he buried his face into the shoulder of one of his trainers. I could understand the young man’s agony. His entire country was watching him, and he had failed.
“Leeee Ohhhh!”
Garf took my other hand and raised it in the air, and Jax grabbed my other from the announcer. The crowd went beyond insane, and it looked as if a mass of fans were pushing aggressively against the two deep wall of armored security.
Now there would be interviews, and more interviews, and after parties, and then more after parties. I probably wouldn’t get to sleep for two days, but maybe that was okay. We had all planned on taking a few weeks off, and our manager had booked us a resort stay on some private island somewhere in the Caribbean.
I tried to force a smile to my face, but I failed. I knew the truth about my career, and it saddened me somewhat. What would I do with the rest of my life? Where would I go? Could I find another purpose?
Jin had been the best in the world, but the battle had been too easy.
Could I find a new challenge?
Get the rest here:
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Amazon Canada
Amazon Australia
Werewolf!: Hell High Book 3 Page 18