by Deck Davis
Part Two
The Battle
Chapter One
The water in the glass in my hand shook from the force of the vibrations. The relentless thud, thud, thud sent ripples across its surface, stronger each time. Eddie, Wolfy and Glora looked to me every so often for guidance, but I just shrugged. This part of things was new to me, too. I’d been in some big VBRs before, but nothing like this. All around us, the other VBR teams chatted. This wasn’t like the fighter’s lounges, though. In the fighter’s lounges, before a battle, people wore their most comfortable clothes, fashion be damned. After all, your clothes didn’t transfer onto your avatar. Nobody would know what you were wearing in real life, because you’d be tucked up inside a gel capsule. Today, though, every VBR fighter wore their best clothes. They’d dressed to impress.
This wasn’t a fighter’s lounge. This was a giant auditorium connected to the New Eden VBR stadium. The constant thudding that made my water to ripple wasn’t from the approach of some monstrous beast. No, this was something much worse. Beyond this room, through a maintenance tunnel and then out into the stadium, waited thousands of VBR fans, more than I’d ever imagined would gather in one place at the same time. Even through the one-foot-thick stone walls of the auditorium, I heard them shouting, screaming, and baying for us to come out.
Soon, we’d have to go out, but not for the battle royale. It wasn’t quite time for that. First, we had to suffer through something that, in many ways, I dreaded even more than the VBR itself. It was time for the unveiling.
The speaker in the corner of the room squealed. The screech of feedback stunned the room into silence. We all sat and waited. Every fighter on every team, some with clenched fists, others nervously chewing on gum.
Then, Overseer Lucas spoke. I tuned out his words. All I could think was, ‘Are we ready?’
~
Following the night on Perlshaw peak when they’d made me captain of the team, our team knew we didn’t have much time to prepare for the VBR. I called up Dylan and told him I wouldn’t have time to come back to the ranch, and then I got to it.
“We’re gonna be working long hours,” I told Eddie. “We’re gonna have to travel some, too.”
Eddie had just shrugged.
Glora had smiled and said, “Cool. Anything beats this dump of a town,” though I didn’t believe that she really thought of Perlshaw as a dump.
Wolfy had been the only one to protest. The big man had scratched his head. He looked a little nervous. “I...uh…got a hitch.”
“With traveling?”
“Uh huh.”
“We need to, Wolfy. I need to level up my abermorph at least once—twice, if possible. Otherwise, I can’t equip runes, and that already puts us at a disadvantage once we’re in New Eden. That means we’ve gotta compete in a few circuit VBRs before the big one.”
“Prepare to fail; fail to prepare,” said Eddie.
“Other way round,” I told him.
“It’s like this,” said Wolfy. “My dad’s getting’ old. Real old. And his mind… Well, his clock isn’t ticking like it used to. I can’t be away from him for long. I’m hoping that when we place high in Eden, I can use my bit cut to hire him an AI caregiver, y’know, like the ones on the mainnet?”
Uh oh. More pressure. More stress weight added to my already-tired shoulders. “Okay, Wolfy. I get it. I do. But what about the other VBRs? You must have left him before?” I said.
“Elder Arin steps in where he can, and Florence, the barmaid at the Rat. She’s always visiting him.”
“She’s visiting you, you big ape,” said Glora. “She likes you.”
Wolfy’s cheeks reddened. “Yeah…but anyway, I need more notice to leave him.”
I didn’t know what to say. Family came before bits, before VBRs, before everything. I knew that first hand. There wasn’t a single thing in the world I’d be unwilling to throw into the pits of hell just for a day with my family again. Still, in the long run, it’d be better for Wolfy and his dad that we were more prepared for New Eden. More preparation meant more bits. I just needed to persuade him.
Luckily, Eddie had been following the same track of thought. “I’ll square it with Arin, and your girlfriend, Florence, will pay a visit.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Wolfy.
“Yet,” added Glora.
Over the next ten days, we practiced and practiced. When we weren’t practicing, we were traveling, and we managed to hit two small-fry VBRs, one in Hollum and the other in Sharna. We placed 5/50 and 7/32, respectively, earning a few paltry bits to take back to Perlshaw with us. The biggest gain, however, was in experience. I managed to level my abermorph to level one, unlocking my first rune slot. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Since my storm knight was injury locked, I couldn’t remove my runes from it. This was a shame because my Copy Cat rune was insanely useful in battle, and my Hear Evil, Speak Evil rune always came in handy. Still, I added a few runes from Dad and Bill’s collection to the ones Team Perlshaw already had. I kept Dad’s Rune of Lesser Healing to myself; it was only a standard healing rune and wouldn’t appeal to the others much, but it had sentimental value to me. I had only levelled my abermorph avatar enough to open one slot, and I decided that as a tribute to my family, the Rune of Lesser Healing would fill it.
As well as using the battles to gain experience points, I also learned how the team worked. There was a glimmer of tactics in their style of fighting. After all, they’d managed to qualify for New Eden before I joined the picture. Eddie, as captain back then, had instilled a vague kind of strategy in them, which made me wonder why he’d doubted himself. It seemed to me that Eddie’s tactics came to him instinctually. He didn’t think about them much; a plan formed in his mind, and he acted on it, kind of like they brewed in his gut. My gut didn’t enter the picture much. My tactics had come from years of study, first with Dad and then when I started fighting for real in VBRs. I had suffered defeats and pain, I had made mistakes, and I had come through each time with a new lesson learned. This was what frustrated me so much about Eddie; if the guy would only take the time to learn a little, he could be great.
At the end of our ten days, we finally had to say goodbye to Perlshaw. We loaded up Eddie’s wagon with supplies: runes, food, changes of clothes. We decided to take the carriage rather than a car because, as Eddie put it, ‘It’s always better to make a stink of an entrance.’
A crowd of Perlshaw townsfolks waved us off. The landlord of the Thirsty Rat, a barrel-bellied guy named Ivor, donated a crate of Amber Rose which I knew would be sloshing in Wolfy’s belly before the end of the first night. Shenna Coren, the owner of the bakery, handed Eddie a large box. He lifted the lid and immediately started drooling. Inside was a giant vanilla cake with ‘Team Perlshaw’ written in butter icing on the front. Again, it wouldn’t take long to end up in Wolfy’s belly.
And then we were gone. A chorus of goodbyes, good lucks and even a ‘good-riddance’ (this one cruelly shouted by the mother of a girl named Tina who Eddie had recently dumped) sounded behind us. The horses’ hooves click-clacked on the road, and before long, the wheels of the carriage were steadily turning, carrying us away from the peaceful town of Perlshaw.
I watched it as we rolled away. I watched as the sloping hill steadily grew smaller. I didn’t take my eyes off it while the amber glows of open hearths disappeared and the honest townsfolk became dots on the horizon. The weirdest thing was that the further away we got, the more a feeling, a cold, empty kind of feeling, grew in my stomach. I realized that I was missing the town already. That resolved it. When this was over, I’d bring Dylan here for a trip. He’d love the place.
We went by the Perlshaw s-station and then hit the open road. Of course, we couldn’t actually use the roads, since those were reserved for s-cars. The state highway patrol was less inclined to tolerate Eddie’s road antics as the depleted cops in Perlshaw were. So, we moved parallel to the road where we could, following i
ts true path to New Eden.
It was thirty-six hours later that we saw the first burst of neon light that marked our nation’s capital. By then, we all stank. Wolfy was hungover, and Eddie was growing increasingly hyperactive, like a bored kid. We were getting sick of the road, sick of hearing the never-ending thump of the horses’ hooves.
Our lethargy was soon broken by a sign. Thirty feet high, alive with ever-changing neon perma-gel, shimmering red, blue, purple: WELCOME TO NEW EDEN
There were lots of names for New Eden. Home of a thousand suns. Hope of the North, Savior of the South. City of Delights. Most of these were written by the NE Tourist Board, yet there was no denying what an incredible place it was. If you flew way up over New Eden and looked down, you’d see something that looked like a circuit board. The city had been designed with such precision that planning permission for a new building often took weeks. ‘Order’ was the keyword among city planners. New Eden architects were selected not for their eye for art, but for how straight their ruler was.
Yet, if you dropped out of the airplane and parachuted into the streets of Eden, you’d see something else. A kind of under-the-nose chaos: red light districts where men and women sold themselves and darkened alleyways where drug pushers conducted business, speaking in a code that would have eluded even the best code-breaking machine. You’d see s-cabs zipping down the slick city roads, with ever-changing holo-ads on their doors and neon-lit taverns with impossibly fashionable bar staff and even more glamorous clientele, and, behind the bar staff, rows upon rows of fluorescent-colored spirits that were blended with the sole intention of mashing brain cells into pulp.
It was a place where music careened out of windows, different genres pumping out of home gel-stereos, out of nightclub speakers, from the amplifiers of live bands. The notes crashing together in a medley. With the music came the chatter of street vendors, tourists, and New Eden residents competing over the din to make themselves heard.
Wolfy and Eddie hadn’t been able to contain themselves over the thought of spending a couple of nights sampling the delights of the New Eden street life. Glora hadn’t been too fussed about the bars and clubs; she wanted to visit the New Eden Concert Hall, where her favorite singer, Red Ruban, was making an appearance.
“None of that,” I told them. “Do you think it’s wise to get rat-ass drunk before the VBR? To stay up all night at a gig?”
Eddie nodded. “Yeah...we know. We’d never really do anything to jeopardize things. It’s just nice to think we could.”
“At least we’ll get to see the city when we ride through,” said Wolfy. On this, all three of them were agreed.
Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. As we approached the city gates, two uniformed policemen stepped out. After asking our business, they scanned our wrists, and then they shepherded us around the city limits to an altogether smaller gate in a dead part of the city. VBR fighters, it seemed, were not going to be allowed to go into the main city.
“Overseer Lucas doesn’t want any funny business,” one of the policemen had explained. “Wants the battle organized like clockwork. No last-minute pull-outs because some numbskull decided to get drunk or summat.”
That was how, soon after seeing New Eden for the first time, Eddie, Wolfy, and Glora were denied sampling any more of its pleasures, and were instead guided straight to a specially-built, temporary facility reserved for VBR fighters, coaches, managers, and strategists. Me? I didn’t care as much, because I’d been here before.
Chapter Two
In the auditorium, as Overseer Lucas spoke over the loudspeaker, Eddie leaned in close. We sat in a circle, tight together, so that we could hear each other without being overheard ourselves.
“Okay, I know about this bit,” said Eddie. “It’s called ‘the unveiling.’ They do it in big cities like New Eden, Lossage Falls...y’know, the big cheeses.”
“What is it?” asked Wolfy. “And what’s with all the banging and shouting?”
“It’s real important. Overseer Lucas, Harry’s best friend…”
I glared at Eddie. No other words were needed.
“Overseer Lucas, fat-bottomed, dick-faced prat,” Eddie corrected himself, “is going to call out the name of each team one by one. They usually do it in order of prestige, y’know, like who’s in the diamond league, and who slipped enough bits into Lucas and the other overseers’ pockets to get called first.”
“Because the sooner you get called, the more people are still watching,” said Glora. “I get it. With one-hundred-twenty teams getting yanked onto the stage, people are gonna start to snooze.”
While the other fighters around us were dressed in their best clothes, Glora’s version of dressing up was a scruffy pair of jeans with rips in the knees, the jeans tight enough around her thighs that they looked like the denim would snap. She wore a red lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. On her forearm, she had a tattoo. It was strange lettering from a language I didn’t recognize. I wanted to know what it said, but now wasn’t the right time to ask her.
“So,” said Wolfy, “we need to put on our pretty dresses and twirl. We need to ham it up for the masses.”
Eddie nodded. “In the unveiling, when our team name is called, we’ll go out onto the stage. We’ll have to introduce ourselves to the crowd, answer a few questions, and somehow make ourselves seem interesting enough to captivate them and the millions of people watching at home.”
“And then they send us bits,” I said, “depending on how much people like the look of us, and what kind of impression we make. They may even send us runes.” I’d heard of the unveiling before, but it was nicer to let Eddie explain it, as he seemed to enjoy doing it so much.
“Correct,” said Eddie.
The speakers crackled. Overseer Lucas cleared his throat. The shouts of the crowd drifted into the room, and I felt a shift in the energy, as though every fighter in here had tensed up all at once.
“And now it is time,” began Lucas, over the speakers, “to unveil our competitors in the New Eden Team Royale!”
A shudder went through me. It wasn’t a cold one, but, instead, it was hot and full of anger. I felt my fingers curl up. Tension lashed around me like a second skin, constricting my movements, and then the tendrils of it seeped into my brain, tweaking with my synapses.
“Why do you always get so weird when we talk about the overseer or when you hear him?” asked Glora.
“Was he your boyfriend, or something?” asked Wolfy, with no hint of a joke.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“A team never hides anything from each other,” said Eddie, with a look of utmost honesty on his face.
I don’t know why, but I started telling them. I hadn’t spoken about it much to Sera, Vorm or Clyde, even though I’d known them for years. Although I’d been with team Perlshaw for less than three weeks, I was already spilling the source of my hottest anger. I told them about how, when I was eleven, Mom and Dad fostered Lucas. Back then, he didn’t have the ‘overseer’ part of his name. He was just regular Lucas, a normal boy with nothing fancy to him.
That said, maybe normal was the wrong word. It was hard for a kid with his kind of sad upbringing to fall into that category. Mom and Dad didn’t tell me the grimy details because I was so young, but I knew that Lucas’s parents hadn’t cared for him. Instead, they were people he needed to fear, people who he needed to watch what he said around, unless he wanted his pale skin covered in purple bruise splotches, and the kind of folks who, after state involvement, were found to be unsuitable to raise a child.
I got the impression that the bruises weren’t even the worst of it. When Dad sat me down to explain a little about Lucas, I could see the darkness brooding behind his eyes. For one of the few times in my life, I saw my Dad angry. He was furious at what Lucas, this poor boy, had been through.
A dark cloud followed Lucas into our home, and into his new life. I’d resolved to do what I could to lighten it. I decided that
I would treat him like a brother. Bill was a little more aloof, since he didn’t like getting attached to the foster kids, but he was still friendly with him. We did our best to make sure the pale skinned, black-haired boy fit into our family.
Not long after this, things started going missing. At first, it was food, then it was tubs of perma-gel. Pretty soon, Mom lost some of her jewelry, and a bunch of CD-s went walkabouts from Bill’s room. After a while, the trail led to Lucas. It was Mom’s necklace that gave the game away; she had a bronze necklace that molded in the circle shape of the sun, with little triangles surrounding the edges the way a child would draw it. Bill had made it for her in metal class in school, years earlier. When Mom realized that it was missing she frantically searched the house for hours, before finally discovering it in Lucas’s room. It was hidden under his bed, along with everything else that had recently disappeared.