Gems, she mentally laughed at the new term for generic boost codes that had sprung up after Crisis. Most gems consisted of nice little codes that could recharge a person’s vitality, their health status, their power levels, or even strengthen a code, depending on the code and coder itself. She had a few as well, though hers were used to strengthen her attack codes. Dylan loves these things, doesn’t he? I’ll have to ask him later.
“Ready?” she asked quietly as she closed her inventory file. She could feel the tension in the air. She grinned. Forget cutting the tension with a knife, she thought as the adrenaline began to pump in her veins. Cut tension with a plasma charge and blow the crap out of it.
“Ready,” the group chorused back, each finished with their own checks.
“We’re going to crash the party,” she explained as she hefted the plasma rifle and looked at her team. “Shane is the primary goal. I’m assuming Gargoyle is gone, and I’m going to talk with the programmers at WarpSoft later and see if we can come up with something that can track him so we can figure out how he’s avoiding the IP ban and traces. I’m also assuming whatever is wrong with the Nexus isn’t happening here, but I’m leaving it up to you guys to sweep the outer parts of the world to make sure. Grab some shuttles and go as fast as you can, then log off, and we’ll talk about you helping the others with the rest of the worlds.”
“What’s our secondary goal, then?” Michael asked. She glanced over at him.
“Don’t get eliminated.”
* * *
The gamers were cornered between two hallways with planters, using fallen debris and anything else they could lay their hands on for cover. They were focused solely on keeping the furballs at bay. Very few were using codes, she noticed immediately as she peered around the corner of the hallway. Most were relying on the plasma rifles supplied by the station. She grimaced. She really hated the idea of close quarters combat with a plasma rifle.
She watched as a small streak of light suddenly emerged from behind one of the fallen barricades and struck a furball. Instead of exploding, however, the furball twitched and fell over. The beam of light tracked to the left and every time it touched another furball, the furball would twitch and fall over. The light would then continue on to the next one.
That is so cool, she thought. We nerds always come up with the best way to kill things in a spectacular manner.
The power of the beam, apparently, was limited. Moments later it dissipated after taking out about a dozen of the aliens. The furballs surged forward again, using their overwhelming numbers to try to take the barricades. The gamers, she saw, were ready for this, and unleashed a hail of both codes and plasma fire into the roiling mass. The mass of furballs was stopped by the equally heavy firepower of the cornered gamers, and the furballs were pushed back once more.
However, she saw in the rush, two or three furballs had gotten through, and a gamer had been taken down by the aliens before his teammates could save him. He depixelated rapidly, which meant the furballs had gotten him good. While the number of furballs seemed to be infinite, the gamers were a limited supply. Once they fell, they were done.
“Stacey, Michael, prepare to lay down some cover fire,” Tori said as she tore her gaze from the large mass of furballs to search for the smaller group Stacey had reported earlier. They were gone, she noticed immediately, but their path was fairly obvious. Near the second barricade, where resistance had been heavy, and the pile of furballs was growing quite high, a large hole in the wall was apparent. She sighed and shook her head. Another change of plan was in order.
“Okay, guys, Plan DD,” she looked at the rest of her team while pointedly ignoring Stacey’s angry scowl. “It’s my fault the gamers are under siege like this. So I think we should go and take out that group of furballs that burrowed into the wall. Then we blow through the wall ourselves, snatch Shane, and we’re out of here. Sound good?”
“No,” Michael hissed. “What if more furballs follow us down into the hole?”
“Then we’re royally screwed,” his brother countered. He rolled his head on his neck to relieve some tension in his shoulders. “So we seal it behind us.”
“Oh, and how do we do that?” she asked, curious. She hadn’t thought of furballs following the team down the hole and shivered at the thought of being between two violent synapse packs in a tiny space armed only with plasma rifles and codes.
“We blow the entire corridor?” Tyler suggested evilly. Tori started to shake her head but stopped, intrigued by the notion. She thought about it for a moment.
While blowing the hallway might cause major structural damage to the station, she was already sure the station itself was a lost cause. Once the tournament was over, she was certain the programmers would come through and rebuild everything anyway. She shrugged. What’s the worst that can happen?
She tapped the hard floor with a free hand, thinking. The odds of them blowing the entire station were minimal, though given her earlier luck, it could very well happen. And that would violate the rules of the tournament. Not good. But then again, it was also possible that everything would work according to plan. She wondered what the Chaos code would make with her destroying a portion of the station.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” Tori agreed after a moment of silence. “That’ll take some of the pressure off the gamers and allow us to cover our own butts. We eliminate that stupid synapse pack. Yeah. You know? This could work.”
“You’re the only woman I know who resorts to explosives for life’s little problems,” Tyler chuckled. “If you were single, I’d totally ask you out.”
She ignored him and ran a hand over the cold metal plating of the hallway. She nodded. It might be dangerous, blowing the walls. The amount of shrapnel involved made her shiver. However, since the majority of the gamers were dug in and fairly well protected, the explosion should only affect the furballs.
Of course, she thought as she looked back at Tyler, that’s what I thought last time.
“Okay, what sort of explosion did you have in mind?” she asked the larger man, who seemingly was pulling items from nowhere. Tyler looked at her as he accessed the last items he needed from his inventory list.
He grinned malevolently.
* * *
“Think you laid down enough explosives?” Stacey asked sarcastically as Tyler returned to the group and flipped off his chameleon code. His body shimmered and came back into focus. The code, designed by another gamer Tori knew, was a simple camouflage code. It made the person blend in with their surroundings and disappear. It was very handy in urban environments.
Tyler’s bronzed, hulking mass was twice the size of Tori’s, and yet with the chameleon code masking his every movement, he was quieter than a mouse in church, she realized. Tyler grinned at Stacey, amused, as she placed her hands on her hips and glared at him.
“You can never have too many explosives,” Tyler countered, his grin never faltering. Stacey harrumphed and looked at Tori, who managed to control her laughter.
“He has a point,” she coughed, looking away from the angry woman. “If we’re going to do it, do it right. Yeah?”
“Fine, sure, whatever,” Stacey sighed. “Let’s just get on with it.”
“For someone who plays violent videogames, you sure are weird about explosives,” Tori commented.
“I like explosives just fine,” Stacey argued, “I just like to be far away from them when they go off.”
“Got it,” Tori said. She looked at the others. “Are we ready?”
“Yeah,” Michael grunted as he double-checked his plasma rifle and the magazine charge. “Tyler goes, ducks inside, secures the entry. We all follow through, and then Tyler blows it all up behind us, and meets back up later on.”
“Don’t forget to yell ‘fire in the hole’ for the gamers’ sake,” Tori reminded Tyler as he looked at her. Tyler and Michael both nodded.
“Get ready,” Tori muttered as she looked back around the corner. The furballs were massing
again for another assault, and the surviving gamers looked beleaguered at best as they continued to kill as many of the furballs as they could before the creatures charged. She nodded as she spotted a few of the younger gamers preparing their attack and defense codes. They should be all right, she thought. She breathed out and tensed her muscles. It was now or never. “Go!”
Tyler reactivated his chameleon code again and sprinted out from cover, massive frame almost completely invisible as he moved swiftly to the hole. Ignoring stealth for the moment, the massive young man slipped inside the large hole in the wall just as the furballs launched their own attack, charging the fortified positions of the gamers. She nodded and looked at Michael and Stacey.
“You two, next,” she ordered. Neither argued with her as the sounds of the pitched battle grew louder. She wondered for a split second whether or not the furballs had finally made it into the front lines of the gamers before she realized it didn’t matter. They needed to stop the furballs who were in the walls of the station, and fast. “Go!”
Stacey sprinted out first, her plasma rifle tracking the furballs. She did not, however, fire, opting instead for a more conservative approach. The furballs ignored her, even though she was in the open and less than twenty feet away from them as she stepped inside the large hole. She sighed in relief. Two for two.
Michael followed her out, darting from cover and out into the open. His boots clanged loudly on the metal hallway floor, making her grimace. While Tyler had “sneak” in his genetics, it seemed his older brother had “loud and cumbersome” in his, she thought. A few furballs noticed the massive man and his desperate sprint, and they turned their attention on him. She swore and activated a code. She waited impatiently as her power levels dropped as the code drew more energy for its purposes as Michael began firing at the approaching furballs. Two of them dropped from the plasma rifle’s fire, but even more turned their attentions onto the large man with a collective snarl.
“Not good,” Tyler shouted from inside the hole and aimed two fingers at the furballs intent on attacking Michael. The tips began to glow white as the code activated at full power. He suddenly screamed. “Ild angrep!”
Two bright fireballs the size of ping pong balls erupted from each of his fingertips and hurled themselves at the furballs. While in flight, they each split into ten marble-sized fireballs that were so bright they looked like miniature suns. The twenty fireballs each struck a furball and erupted in a small pyre, igniting the fur on the furballs’ bodies. The foul creatures shrieked in agony as the fire consumed them, their piteous cries nearly bursting her eardrums.
She nodded in satisfaction as Michael made it through the hole unscathed. She looked back at the mass of furballs; the rest of them hadn’t spotted her group. She dashed out into the open.
One thing she realized as she emerged from cover was the sounds of battle, not too bad while she was in the second hallway and out of view, were extremely loud when in her face. Deafening, she thought as she slipped on a limb of one of the crispy, dead furballs. The reverberations of the battle, both from the gamers and the furballs, were intense.
She ignored the angry howls and screeches from the furballs and slid inside the hole as Tyler fired two shots from his plasma rifle. Two furballs dropped, their bodies twitching on the cold metal floor as they skidded to a halt a few feet from the hole. He looked at Tori and grinned.
“They thought you were dinner,” Tyler laughed darkly.
“Blow it,” she ordered as she moved down into the darkened tunnel. She took a moment to marvel at the size of the tunnel before she remembered what had dug it and shivered. The prospect of close, hand-to-hand fighting against a synapse lord and a pack of furballs was terrifying. Even more so in the confines of a tunnel they’d dug. They knew all the passages, all the secret holes. They were designed to dig and to kill.
She suddenly stopped and looked over her shoulder where Tyler still stood, giggling gleefully as he pulled out a small controller, shaped like an old game console controller. She called out to him.
“Fire in the hole, remember?”
“Oh yeah, I knew that,” Tyler said with a wicked grin. He coughed and boomed at the top of his lungs, “FIRE IN THE HOLE!”
Dozens of gamers looked up briefly at Tyler then back at the furballs directly in front of them before they threw themselves down onto the floor. Tyler twisted one knob, and she could almost feel the energy from the controller as it came to life. He twisted the second knob, and a slight rumble sounded from the outside of the hole. Nothing else happened. She cocked her head quizzically at Tyler, who scratched his head. The young man was obviously confused.
“Where’s my ka-BOOM?” Tyler whined as he flipped the switch on the controller again. He looked up, his expressions muddled and hurt. “I wanted an earth shattering ka-boom!”
“Jesus Christ,” she swore. She started to run back to Tyler before the younger man flipped the controller over and laughed.
“Oh, my bad,” Tyler said and tossed the third switch on the bottom of the controller, which he’d evidently overlooked. “This time’s for real, y’all!”
A loud roar slammed into them as every device Tyler had been able to scrounge up detonated at the same moment. The force of the explosion blew Tori backward off her feet and onto the torn up floor. Dust came rushing down the hole, blinding her as a small part of the overpressure wave raced down the tunnel. She covered her face and rolled onto her stomach as the wind rushed past, filling the tunnel with dust. She could feel the rumbling of a portion of the station falling down somewhere, and she hoped it’d been blown as planned. Why does this keep happening to me?
She cautiously lifted her head and blinked away the dust which covered her eyes. The tunnel the furballs had dug into was filled with dirt, and it coated the floor with a thin yet visible layer. She looked at her arms and shoulders and saw more of the fine powder. Slowly, carefully, she stood up and looked behind her.
The hole was blocked with a large pile of rubble obstructing almost all light and sound from the outside. The large pieces of debris were going to be impossible to move, she realized. The passage behind them had been closed, according to plan. She grinned and felt like celebrating until she realized suddenly someone was missing.
“Uh, Tyler?” she called out, her ears still ringing from the force and noise of the explosion. She looked down at the tunnel fragments that covered the floor and could see nothing. She felt a twinge of panic and guilt welling up inside her. “Tyler?”
“Ouch,” a soft cry came from behind her, further down the tunnel. She turned and looked as the large man, partially covered with dust, debris and smoke, tried to turn over. She carefully walked over to where he lay and knelt down. She wondered how he’d gotten behind her.
“Hey,” she said as she quickly checked him for injuries. She whistled in astonishment. Not only had he somehow managed to not die in the explosion, none of the bits of debris or shrapnel had even come close to hitting him. It seemed to be a miracle, or a gift from the prophet Murphy. However, something was wrong with the man, she noticed as he began to move. “You’re alive.”
“I think so,” he coughed and tried to turn over again. Tori helped him and grimaced as Tyler’s front came into view. His full front.
“They need to blur that,” she said as she quickly turned away, embarrassed. Tyler swore, looked down and frantically covered himself. True to the rules of The Warp, it appeared that he was anatomically correct. Tori, suppressing a sudden fearful shudder, focused on the rocky walls instead. She felt a small surge of panic begin to well up inside her. “Um, hurry up. We need to catch up to the others.”
“I thought it was a bit drafty in here,” Tyler joked as he dug new clothes out of his inventory. The game immediately corrected his clothing to his new selection, and he looked down and sighed. She exhaled as she realized she’d been holding her breath. She was also sweating profusely.
Snap out of it, girl! She told herself. He’s not Gavr
ie. Not every person is out to hurt you.
“That’s funny,” she tried to laugh to cover her fear as she peered down the darkened tunnel. “C’mon, ninja boy. We need to move.”
“Think we helped the gamers out?” he asked as the two of them began to move down the dark tunnel.
“I sure hope so,” she replied, with a second glance behind them. “I mean, how bad could it be?”
“You keep saying that,” he grumped in a low voice as the two moved down the tunnel.
* * *
The new synapse lord was a monstrosity compared to the earlier one, she saw immediately as the team came to a halt just around the corner from the creature. She could see the arms of the lord, as well as the claws well enough, and the beast was simply huge. Much larger, she noted, than that ogre she’d fought in Kadashter long ago. And that thing had been the size of a large truck!
Tori had the unfortunate “luxury” of being point for a change, and she’d halted the group with a raised fist when she’d heard the synapse pack. Now she looked around at the rest of the dark tunnel the creatures had dug in the metal walls and mentally whistled. It’s pretty impressive, she thought as she leaned against a smooth part of the wall which hadn’t been destroyed by the furballs.
Using the scattered debris as cover, she’d crept closer to the giant beast, flitting through the shadows as a spirit would. Her previous hard-learned experience as an en finite in Crisis helped, but she knew deep down there was no god but Chaos, and Murphy was Her Prophet. Especially in The Warp. In addition, given she wasn’t the stealthiest person in the group, it was a small wonder she hadn’t been detected by the monstrous beast.
She shouldered the borrowed plasma rifle and aimed carefully. She knew if her aim was off, the synapse lord was going to wreak holy havoc on them in the narrow confines of the hall. She hadn’t been given a chance to properly sight in the rifle yet and had a sickening feeling this little fact was going to come back and bite her in the rear later.
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