by Deck Davis
“We’ve got a wave coming. It’s gonna swallow us in three minutes, so we need a plan, and we need to move out,” I said.
“You’re the boss. You know the map better than we do,” said Sera.
“Let’s get our maps open then,” I told them.
My own map buzzed in front of me. Every so often, a corner of the blue light crackled, like a book with a tiny fold on a page. It meant that somewhere in the real world, in the server room, one of a multitude of processors was struggling under the load. It was a hell of a lot of strain to generate a digital world with sensory realism and real-time combat.
“See where they wave is going to close?” I said.
I placed a marker on the area that would be left open after the wave. It was a team marker, purple colored, so they’d all be able to see it.
“Looks like a little neighborhood,” said Vorm.
“Right. But it’s in a valley. There’s a bunch of hills sweeping around three quarters of it. And then where the hills end, there’s the road that leads in.”
“So, we stay on the hills, watch the road,” said Sera. “Pick off anyone who looks vulnerable.”
“I think everyone else will have the same idea,” I said.
“Two teams then,” suggested Clyde. “Two on the hills, two sneak in by the road.”
“I think we need to get there before anyone else, and hole up. I’d rather be waiting in one of those houses and watching people coming in than arriving late and being the one in the crosshair.”
“No guns in this VBR,” said Sera, “So no crosshairs.”
She just loved picking people up on details, not because she cared about correcting grammar and facts, but because it amused her.
“Actually, there are crossbows,” said Vorm. “And they have crosshairs. Shove that up your —”
“Guys. Are we agreed?” I interrupted. “Get there first, hole up, and let the others fight each other for a while?”
I got two ‘yesses’ and one grunt from Sera that I took to be assent. With that, we moved out of the warehouse, each of us brandishing a golden weapon. Vorm had an axe, Clyde wielded a quarter staff, and Sera had a set of daggers. I had the golden broadsword. Until this moment, I’d never truly appreciated how comforting it felt to hold a sword so powerful it could slice through a tree trunk as if it were a dandelion stalk.
The wind was biting outside. It felt like little fingers nipping at my skin and twisting it, performing the same thing on my face that Bill used to do on my nipples. He called it ‘Bill’s Titty Twister.’ I didn’t know if this was a natural weather variable of the map, or if the overseers had tweaked it a little to bring out maximum discomfort. A fighter going through hell played well with the crowds.
Outside the warehouse there were three other buildings. The ground was covered in parts by orange sandstone, making it look like a desert in a Western movie. A train track ran through the complex, over to a widened gap in the chain-link fence that closed the perimeter, before disappearing out of view into the rest of the Autumn Steampunk map.
As we headed north across the complex, running to the cover of abandoned crates and forklift loaders wherever possible, a message flashed in front of me, complete with the tingling of a bell.
Team McDonobell eliminated!
3 teams remaining
I couldn’t help but smile. Team McDonobell was a corporate team sponsored by a leviathan fast food company that came about when two industry giants merged. They no doubt had the best coaches, the most expensive runes and the cleverest strategists, yet someone had taken them out. It was also nice to see ‘the man’ fall.
“Let’s hit the road, Jack,” sang Vorm. “And don’tcha come back no more, no more, no more, no more…”
If someone out there, maybe a spectator with a battle camera set to roaming, had left our sides and zipped up, up into the air, so high that they touched the clouds, they would have seen our four little dots leaving the industrial complex and heading north.
At the same time, they would have seen another team dressed in black, not far away, and heading in the same direction while a third team closed in from the east. The pawns were in place for a final battle to decide the winner of Autumn Steampunk.
Chapter Five
3 Teams Remaining
The wind was in a frenzy now, and the sky had darkened to a coal-grey. If this was autumn, then it was an angry one. It was autumn after a heavy night of partying with its buddies, winter and spring, getting no sleep, and then being woken up at 6:00 am to go to work.
I checked my map to see how we were looking for time. Glad to be with my team rather than being alone, I set out.
Wave Completion: 01:59
We covered the short distance of the map slower than I would have liked. The quickest way to the wave-free section was through a field of chest-high grass. It would have afforded us cover from the other teams, but I remembered the sight of the serpent slithering through the buckwheat and emerging like a great white leaping out of water. I decided we should take the long-way round. Our weapons might have been amazing, but that didn’t help our HP or defence. One surprise attack from a serpent and suddenly we’d all be worm food.
The wave was still comfortably behind us by the time we reached the small neighborhood of houses that would host the final battle. Just as I’d told the rest of the guys, this little collection of homes was hemmed in by a series of hills, giving it a dark look that was only magnified by the clouds overhead. The only road into town passed by a giant rectangle billboard that said, ‘Welcome to Newtown Estate: A Family Neighborhood.’
Newtown were big real-world property developers a few decades back, and they’d built thousands of identikit neighborhoods filled with houses spewed out by an industrial-sized 3D printer. They marketed these homes as though they were doing a good deed, with slogans like ‘helping the poor buy a home,’ yet they avoided talking about the effect that printing tons and tons of plastic every year had on the environment.
Looking closer at Newtown Estate, I could see that the plastic of each house was scorched, decaying, and full of holes. Graffiti covered every available inch, displaying peace logos, environmental symbols, and messages that stated, in the crudest possible terms, what they thought of Newtown Estates. There were no graffiti artists in the map, of course. This was all Dad. Just like hiding the weapons under the floorboards in a room designed to look like my childhood bedroom, this little neighborhood was another of his Easter eggs—his own little way of saying ‘screw you’ to the companies that had made prot-layers necessary.
I brought up my map. With three teams in such close proximity right after a wave, it was no surprise that the terrain on my holo-map had more red dots than the face of a baby with chicken pox. It seemed that both remaining opposing teams were in or around Newtown Estate.
The Wraiths were up on a north-facing hill, and from the fading of one of their dots, it looked like they’d been immobile long enough for their markers to disappear. The other team left, Team Bassinger, had set up in a house in the neighborhood. With us crouched behind the cover of an abandoned petrol tanker—a vehicle that had lost its purpose over a hundred years ago—our three teams formed a triangle. The question was, who would make the first move?
“This is like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” said Clyde.
What is that? A book? A film? It was familiar to me from somewhere.
“Come again?” asked Sera.
“It’s a film. Back when they used only live actors. It was a spaghetti western about three guys trying to beat each other to some Confederate gold buried in a grave. In the end, they all meet near the treasure and point their guns at each other, knowing that one of them would have to make the first move. It’s a really tense scene, no joke.”
Clyde was a strange one. As much as he spent his time surfing the waves of VBR news and keeping up with the latest developments and newest technology, he also had a love for the past. He liked books made of paper (think of t
hat—a book made from an actual tree) and films older than even his great-grandparents. He’d tried to introduce us all to them. Personally, I’d loved the musical about a little and large guy in suits trying to put a band together and running from the police, and I’d found the spaceship film where a crew tries to deal with an oily black alien particularly thrilling.
Sera, on the other hand, hadn’t been impressed. Her idea of a good time was…actually, I had no idea what she did for fun. I knew she volunteered at an Iperithum mine and toiled for several sweaty hours mining the precious material necessary for manufacturing prot-layers, but she always complained about it. I got the sense she did it because she thought it was right, not because she enjoyed it.
“I guess the question is,” said Sera, “who makes the first move?”
“Statistically, the ones who move last have a higher chance of winning—seven percent higher, in fact, the last study said,” said Clyde.
Vorm shifted his axe from hand to hand. It looked like it weighed a ton, but it didn’t bother him. He chewed on the cigar in his mouth. In all the hours we’d spent together in avatar form, he’d never lit it. I would have said it was just a meaningless prop, but I’d once seen him charge back into a battlefield we’d retreated from just to pick it up after dropping it. It obviously meant something to him; otherwise, he wouldn’t have wasted the bits buying it.
“We could hit them full on,” he said. “Storm the house. Clyde can use his fog-rune. A few axe swings here, a decapitated head there, and suddenly there are only two teams left.”
It was then that Sera gave Vorm a strange look. She widened her eyebrows while keeping her stare fixed intently on him. Vorm looked back at her blankly. Then, understanding seemed to dawn on him.
“Maybe Clyde’s has a better plan,” said Vorm.
I was about to ask them what the hell that was about when I heard the sound of cheering. Faint at first, like a football match being played far away. It became louder and louder until, soon, it was a roar on all sides, a crashing tide of jeers and encouragement and insults.
“Looks like we’re locked in,” said Sera. “No going back; no return trips.”
All around us, in a circle that had a diameter of a quarter of a mile, a sea of faintly-rendered people had appeared on the map. Some were down low, others high in the air. They were packed tightly together. Looking closely, I saw that some wore black hoods with ‘Team Wraith’ written on them, while others had T-shirts proclaiming their love for various teams that had already taken an early exit. Two guys, inexplicably half naked, with their bellies wobbling as they bounced up and down, held up a sign that read ‘The guy behind us can’t see!’
I’d expected this—not the sign, but the crowd. Some VBRs did it, and some didn’t; it depended on the overseer. On the maps that did, it worked like this: When it got down to the last two or three teams and it looked like the end was near, a projection of the audience was cast into the map so that fighters could see them. It was thought that having an audience shouting encouragement and insults got the fighter’s adrenaline flowing and led to a more explosive finale. That was the secret to getting your battle talked about. If I was an overseer looking to improve my VBR’s viewing figures, I’d focus on the ending. Give ‘em a good show, and they’ll talk about it for days.
As I looked at the audience, scanning the multitude of faces, I stopped. I saw someone that I hadn’t expected to be there for the life of me. At that point, if you’d crouched in front of me, you’d have been able to pick my jaw up off the floor. Sitting in the audience, safe and secure in a plush executive viewing box, was Overseer Lucas. Even so far away, I’d have known him anywhere. I’d have recognized his high cheekbones that had earned him the name ‘Marble Face’ back in school, as well as his smile that looked more like a sneer. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times growing up and one that I’d hated more and more each time I saw it.
Lucas wasn’t the overseer for Bernli, was he? No, it would have come up during my research before the battle. Besides, I’d heard that Lucas had been promoted to Third Overseer of New Eden, which put him only two slots behind the most powerful VBR job in the world: Grand Overseer of New Eden. The smug little ass was successful, I grudgingly had to admit. So, what was he doing spectating a backwater VBR like this?
I adjusted my field of view, zooming in on the audience. As I did, the pixels that compromised them started to flake a little. Autumn Steampunk was a graphically-intensive map, and the Bernli processors could barely run it in normal view, let alone if I tried to zoom in.
I was able to focus my view enough to see Lucas’s face more clearly. When I did, I saw him make a sign. It was a nod, and it wasn’t to anyone around him. In fact, he was alone in his executive box, so there was nobody he could have made the nod to.
Except me, maybe. Had he nodded at me?
I zoomed back out to normal view and turned away from the audience to face my team. For a second, I caught Sera staring right at Overseer Lucas. Then, she nodded too, subtly. It was almost too small a gesture to see, but she did it.
“We ready?” asked Clyde. He sounded impatient.
“We don’t have a strategy yet,” I said. “We covered as many scenarios as we could before the fight, but it was impossible to know exactly where the final waves would settle. Just a relax a second, and let’s figure this out.”
Vorm looked at Sera. “Time to do it?”
Sera slowly turned her attention away from the audience. She gave me a slight glance. The wind lapped at the side of her head that wasn’t buzzed to the scalp and blew her hair in front of her face. She pushed it away, faced Vorm, and then nodded. Then, the team started to walk down the road and into the estate.
“Guys,” I said. I wondered if I’d missed a vital discussion. Maybe they’d talked about the tactics, and I’d just zoned out or something. “Guys?”
No answer. They walked beyond the giant billboard and entered the estate. They weren’t even taking any care to be stealthy about it. There was no doubt that Team Wraith, up on the hill, and Team Bassinger, in the house, would see them. It was like they’d drawn targets on their backs.
Crossbow bolts whizzed down from the hill. One struck Vorm in the arm. He tore it out and threw it on the ground. Still, they kept on walking. A fireball rushed at them, aimed by someone from Team Wraith. It scorched the ground in front of them, but they didn’t stop. What the hell was going on?
I turned and looked at the horizon. I zoomed in on Overseer Lucas’s box again. I focused more and more closely, enlarging his face as much as I could without destroying the pixilation completely. I saw his sneer, wider than ever and just as loathsome as when we were kids. Whatever was going on, Overseer Lucas had something to do with it. All this time, all these years, and he was still so petty that he couldn’t let it drop.
I knew what was happening now. I didn’t fully understand the why, but I knew the what. Ahead of me, in the center of the little neighborhood of 3D printed, identikit homes, Team Bassinger rushed out of their hiding spot. There were only three of them, it seemed.
As I watched them, I got the sense that I’d heard of Team Bassinger before, but from where? They weren’t exactly famous. Had I met them in the player’s lounge or something? That’s when it hit me; I hadn’t met any of these women before, but I’d met the now-absent fourth member of their team: Rynk! He’d been on team Bassinger.
There was a tall woman with long, red hair that ran to her knees. She had a longsword held over her head and a shorter sword in a sheath on her hip. Another woman had short, silver hair cut into a bob. The spear in her hand was aimed at Clyde’s throat. Hanging back, out of reach of the melee, was a thick-set woman with pale skin and a blood-red pattern etched around her right eye. Her hands, which she held aloft in front of her, burned with a raven-black light—or, more specifically, an absence of light. It was like she held two mini-black holes that she could wield at will that I knew she’d soon be blasting at my team.
; Even with the element of surprise, the three members of Team Bassinger shouldn’t have stood a chance against us. After all, we had golden weapons. There’s no way they should have been able to kill us. Nevertheless, I knew that was exactly what was going to happen. I sprinted toward the fray. I watched Sera lift her dagger to parry a blow from the redhead’s longsword, yet her movements were mechanical and much slower than she was capable of. Similarly, Vorm swung his axe at almost half-speed, as if he was just making a show of attacking rather than wanting to do damage.
The roar of the audience thundered like the angriest storm. The spectators wanted to see blood. They ached for it, and why not? VBR was a release for them. A way to work out tensions and urges that society frowned upon.
Fireballs and bolts rained from the hills above as Team Wraith, no doubt deliriously happy at the gift of sitting ducks below them, tried to pick off both sets of fighters. One fireball landed one meter to my right, crashing into the earth and scorching the green lawn of a house. A bolt sipped right past my ear, sounding like an angry wasp. I put my head down and charged. Whatever the hell was going on, I’d stop it. Then, the redhead’s longsword caught Sera in her throat, puncturing her skin and sticking out at the back.