by Deck Davis
“Well, we were there,” said Glora.
“Yeah, but we wanted the high ground. That was the whole reason for us going that way.”
“Maybe Team Elk did too,” said Eddie.
“Then why hide? If they wanted to scale the cliff, they would already have been using the pods and cranks when we got there. But they weren’t. They were hiding, and they were waiting.”
“Are you saying they knew we were coming?” said Glora.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
There was silence as the three of them digested what I’d said. Then Eddie spoke.
“But how, Har? How could they know where we were headed? Purple pins are only shown to team members.”
I shrugged. “Maybe the overseers were doing it. Or, one overseer in particular.”
“Lucas,” said Rynk, with a tone of apathy that suggested he was starting to dislike Lucas as much as I did.
Eddie shook his head. “No way, no how. The overseers wouldn’t do that.”
“Look at the facts, kid,” said Rynk. “Team Elk were holed up, cooling their feet waiting for us. And as soon as we split up for the pods, they moved in. Now, my mom used to tell me I was destined to be rich when I grew up, and that didn’t quite happen, did it? I don’t believe in fate, coincidences, star charts or any bullshit like that. This was planned by the Team Elk dumbasses, pure and simple, not some stupid coincidence.”
Eddie looked like a kid taking a spoonful of fishy medicine. He was trying to stomach it down because maybe he knew it’d be good for him, but it just wasn’t enough. It was a funny thing, watching someone whose beliefs were being challenged head-on. It would be interesting to see how Eddie handled it because moments like that showed who you really were.
“The overseers might manipulate things,” he said. “They move pain sliders, send a few more monsters into battle if things get quiet. But they wouldn’t outright cheat. They wouldn’t feed another team our map pins or something like that, if that’s what you’re sayin’.”
“Why are you defending them so much?” I asked.
Eddie folded his arms. He didn’t look good. Something about this conversation had really gotten to him. “When I was growing up, pops took me to Kinohelm through some trip his work had given him. He worked for Star Cinemas, and he won an employee of the month thingy. We were poor, y’know. Going to Kinohelm just hadn’t been in the cards until then, much less a VIP package with an after-battle meeting with Overseer Godyen. This was before he quit, by the way.”
I nodded. Overseer Godyen had been an overseer forever. He was an overseer when my grandad was alive, and he was still going until I was around ten years old. I remembered seeing him on the news once, with his white hair and his thick beard that he combed with grooming oil. He had a look in his eyes that made you trust him, even though you didn’t know him. Honesty could sometimes shine through in a person’s face, and it was radiant on Overseer Godyen’s.
“Not everyone’s like Godyen,” I said.
Eddie shrugged. “Then he’s what an overseer should aspire to be. Godyen sat with me and pops for an hour, even though he had loads of stuff to do. And he answered every stupid question I had about VBRs. After that, I decided that one day, I’d fight in one of Overseer Godyen’s battles.”
“He must have resigned not long after that,” I said.
Eddie nodded. “Yup. I never fought in one of his maps, but he was the first overseer I ever met, and that’s what they should all be like. Even if some of them are a bit free and loose with their pain sliders, they wouldn’t outright cheat. Overseers have a code. They have ethics. That’s why they get chosen.”
“A man will do anything if he’s got loose morals and empty pockets,” said Rynk. “Fairness and being nice don’t pay the rent.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t buy it. If Team Elk knew we were comin’, they musta found out some other way. Listen, guys, I’m not arguing to be difficult. It’s just what I think, is all.”
I liked the way Eddie had handled it. I didn’t agree with much of what he said, other than his belief that overseers should have been responsible, just, and incorruptible. But the fact was that they weren’t, and that was that. Still, Eddie had handled it well. He hadn’t gotten mad or anything, he’d just said his piece.
Glora crossed her arms, and when her shirt sleeves moved I saw her forearm tattoo. She must have had to pay for that to be on her avatar. “It doesn’t matter who’s messing with us. The thing we need to decide is, what do we do next?”
“It throws our original strategy out of the window,” I said. “We were gonna find somewhere to hole up and maybe level up and loot a little, while everyone else kills each other and thins the numbers. Now, I’m thinking we can’t sit on our asses in one place for too long.”
“You really think Lucas is abusing his overseer powers just to screw with you?” she asked.
“I can’t say for certain, but after this little run-in, I know one thing: Nowhere is safe for us now.”
Rynk started to pace. “I buy it, partner. I do. The question on my lips now, baby, is where do we go?” That was the question. There was no sense going back on ourselves, which ruled out the jungle and sand dune quadrants. That left the tundra quadrant and the shadow quadrant. I didn’t know what waited there, but I got the sense that the final waves would close in around the shadow quadrant. After all, there had to be a reason it was so mysterious.
First, we were going to have to brave the icy tundra. I opened my map and zoomed in on it. The map contours revealed an expanse of never-ending whiteness. It was a frozen plain that would be home to only the most hostile of monsters, the only ones that could withstand its perilous temperatures. The ice plains were broken here and there by scattered buildings. Most snow-based maps had various research centers and habitats there for you to loot, and that was what I guessed the buildings would be.
With the quadrant chosen, now I needed to think about where to go within it. With the first wave gone, the time for experience farming was coming to a close, and it would become more and more dangerous to spend much more time looting. We had to be careful.
So…where would I place our next purple pin? As I concentrated on the map, I heard a voice in my head. It had a familiar eastern twang to it. It was a well-natured, but strictly professional voice. It was the voice of Clyde, one of my former Team Wolfhound teammates. He used to have an opinion on anything related to in-game strategy.
‘From the second wave onwards,’ he’d say, ‘it ain’t about your blade. Most of the fighting in a smackdown’ (this was what he always called battles) ‘is done in your head. PSY-CHO-LOG-I-CAL. That’s the name of the game. When wave two hits, people start to get itchy. They’ve done their lootin’, done their levelin’, and they wanna test their steel. So, they start prowling ‘round the center of maps, where most of the buildings are. They go lookin’ for smackdowns. And when they find ‘em…well, they realize every other guy had the same idea. They find ‘emselves in a war zone. Bad way to do it.’
Clyde was a cold, strictly business guy. I’d known him for years, but he’d never truly been a friend. His only friend was his avatar. But god, the guy knew his stuff when it came to VBRs. I opened my map and tried to think about it the way Clive would. Soon, I found a place to go. We wouldn’t be staying there for long, but it was a destination to head toward. The longer we stayed put, the greater chance there was of someone spotting us. A moving target was always harder to hit than a stationary one.
I placed the pin. “Check your maps, guys. We’ll head out in a second. Glora, your Hexer Senses skill lets you pick up on enemies and loot, right?”
“Yep.”
“Have you already spent your skill point from leveling up?”
“I was just about to level Hex Igni. We could do with some flame damage.”
“Do me a favor and put another point on your senses. With enough pre-emptive warning, we won’t need as much firepower. The man with the dagger kills t
he guy with the level eight golden sword as long as he is quiet enough to stab him from the shadows. I’m not getting ambushed again.”
“Gotcha.”
I clapped my hands together. “Okay, let’s shake our asses.”
Just as we went to set off toward the other side of the cliff, which was a gentle slope which led down to the start of the tundra, something changed.
The sky darkened. It was as though pure-black clouds had smothered the once blue heavens, covering them like a never-ending smog and draining away any color. Deeper and deeper it got, until the sky, and now everything around me, was so dark that I felt like I was lost inside some labyrinth. Even the sounds around me were muted; the wind, although I felt it on my face, was silent, and none of my teammates spoke.
What’s going on? I said it out loud, but my lips had made no sound. Guys? What’s going on? And then red lightning crashed across the sky, cutting in a fire-like way through the smog clouds. It was a deep, dark red, an angry red. It was the color of blood, as if some almighty god had gutted the sky with a spectral blade.
Thunder rumbled. Red lightning flashed again. Then, a shape began to appear in the sky. It was a deep red shape. At first it seemed to make no sense; it didn’t resemble anything I had ever seen. Gradually, more of the red cut through the darkened clouds until the shape took a form I could recognize, and, when it did, I couldn’t believe it. It was a circle, a burning bronze color, with little jagged edges all the around it, like the way a child would draw the sun. I knew that shape. It was the same as the necklace Mom always used to wear, the one that Bill had made for her, and that Lucas had stolen. Back then it was the necklace theft that had led to his talk with Mom and Dad, and things had circled the drain from there on.
Text appeared in front of me in bold letters.
BRONZE SUN ACTIVATED
NPC monsters become more powerful and roam in greater numbers when the Bronze Sun shines. Waves wash over the battlefield more quickly. Beware, fighters. Your time is almost up.
The black clouds left the sky now, replaced by the pure blue that was there before, except now the bronze sun still burned bright in the sky as an ominous reminder of what the overseers had done.
I brought up my map. Now, right where we were and stretching out a little around us, a faint amber color was overlaid.
“The hell is this?” said Rynk.
“Some kind of overseer thing,” I answered. “They’re making things tougher. If you check your maps, though, it’s only affecting where we are, by the looks of it.”
“Still think your overseers are so holy, Eds?” asked Rynk.
Chapter Twelve
84 Teams Remaining!
Even as we set off toward the purple pin on my map, the sudden emergence of text in front of me declared a thinning of VBR numbers. This was common after the first wave. As Clyde used to say, some people took surviving the first wave as a sign that it was time to stop looting and start looking for a smackdown, whereas others, those who had maybe parachuted to an unfortunate part of the map or were engaged in melee when they should have been running, were caught up in the hitpoint-sapping blue light of the wave.
Getting caught in a wave was a rookie mistake, and it worried me how close we had come. Sure, we’d been ambushed by Team Elk, but that was no excuse. I should never have let it come to that. I hoped that now, with Eddie keeping track of the next wave, we’d be more prepared.
The cliffs, as we’d learned to our dismay, spread out for miles east and west, as though it were a giant wall protecting against barbarian invaders. The quarry cliff might have been a steep drop on the sand dune quadrant, but it was another story in the direction of the tundra. There, it sloped downwards on a friendlier gradient.
We followed a rough path down it. The yellow-stone color of the sand dune quarry started to give way to brown mud, which, in turn, soon became covered in a white dusting of snow. By the time we reached the bottom of the cliffs, the environment had changed completely.
You have entered the Tundra quadrant.
The ground was just as hard as it had been in the sand dunes, except, this time, it was made of ice. There was a chill in the air. It was the kind that, in real life, would gradually lower your body temperature so much that when you finally got inside and found a fire or a radiator to warm up near, the change from one extremity to another would shock your body. Your fingers tips would seem to burn, and your skin would chafe. Snowflakes the size of my palm danced left and right as they twirled to the ground, like dust particles caught in sunlight. It made the air look almost dirty. I wondered if the same god who had pierced the sky to make the fire lightning would now come back here with a towel and give the tundra a good old scrub. The plummeting snowflakes shrank our field of view considerably.
It became so bad that it was disorientating. Everything, including our hair, was white as the snowflakes stuck to it. The landscape around us blended into one sheet of utter white, a featureless, freezing land. It was like a vacuum of space and time where nothing existed, and the only thing to remind me that I was still, in fact, alive was the feeling of snow planting itself on my skin.
It was easy to see how, hundreds of years ago, the first people to explore the real-world land where Antarctic City now sat, would get lost and die. They used to plan their expeditions years in advance, yet the utter and never-ending bleakness stripped them of their mortality all the same.
“This changes things,” said Glora, struggling to make herself heard through the wind. “We could be near another team, and we wouldn’t know it until we bumped into them.”
“You guys were at Sootstein, right?” I said.
“That’s where we met you, in the fighter’s lounge,” said Eddie. “Love at first sight.”
I grinned. I could still remember the first time I saw Glora in Sootstein, how her singing voice had drawn me toward her. But fond memories would have to come later. Right now, we had a battle. “An ice map is all about visibility. Snow maps tend to stretch for miles without many places to hide, which means there are more battles. First chance we get, we need to find some snow-armor. Something white to make us blend in.”
The wind in the tundra whirled and moaned like a phantom, and it stalked us for every foot of ground we covered. We soldiered through it, the snowflakes sticking to our faces, the cold shivering its way through any gap it could find in our clothing. I sucked it up and focused on the pin on my nav-wheel. We were headed toward a collection of three small-sized buildings in the southeast corner of the tundra, around ten miles away from the southern seas, and two miles west of the shadow quadrant. Places like that tended to have less loot nearby, and that meant that there was less competition to get there. Less competition meant fewer fights, which added up to a happy, and still alive, Team Perlshaw. Of course, more battles were inevitable at some point, especially if we made the hallowed ground of top ten, but I’d take them as they came. For now, the lonely places of the map, like the one we were headed to, were our homes. By the time we got there and looted a little, it would be time for the second wave, and I had an inkling that we’d be positioned just right for it.
We walked for thirty minutes. The bronze sun seemed to follow us, lurking behind rare gaps in the clouds. Every so often, we passed pools of water that reflected the sky so perfectly that it seemed like we were caught in the fold of a mirror image; like we stood on the spine of where two worlds met, and we were just insignificant specks trapped in them.
At one point, Glora held her hand in the air. The blinding snow blizzards seemed to come and go with such speed that it was hard to know if you were walking into, or away, from one of them. Now, when Glora beckoned us to halt, we were slap in the middle of a furious tide of snow that whipped and whirled in the air.
I stopped, but Eddie and Rynk carried on walking.
“Stop,” shouted Glora, but the wind took her voice and carried it away into the mayhem of the tundra. “Stop!” she shouted again, her voice coming clear and crisp
now that she’d switched to TeamSpeak.
“Not the time for a rest darlin’,” said Rynk. “We’re almost there. Can’t you keep going a little?”
“My Hexer Senses gave me an alert. Something’s nearby,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Sure as Manchester rain,” she said.
I brought up my map. There were no red dots near us, which meant that it was unlikely any fellow fighters were moving our way. Then I heard a thud, followed by another. They were so loud that they cut through the haunting screams of the tundra winds. Something big was nearby. The Bronze Sun meant that the NPC monsters on the map were larger and tougher, and that meant that if something was stalking us in the blizzard, it wasn’t going to be easy to kill.
“Can anyone see anything?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Eddie.
“Not a damn thing,” said Rynk.