Glitch Boxset

by Victor Deckard

  Soon I found out what those small robots were doing. They were placing traps here and there. The drones would come to a halt at some point and beside them would appear a trap that would grow transparent, leaving only a faint light behind. The drones seemed to pick a place to set a trap completely randomly.

  After three or so minutes elapsed, the drones picked up speed and flew away. I ran around the level, trying to figure out where all the small flying drones had gone, but I never did. They had disappeared with no trace.

  Although the level was completely constructed and all the traps had been set, the mobs didn’t spawn. I wandered around the level for a few minutes and then decided to return to the elevator.

  Once I got inside, the doors slid shut. Then the elevator trembled slightly as if it had just come to a stop after the long descent and the doors slid wide. I stepped outside.

  The mobs started to spawn now. I aggro’d the most powerful one, who could kill me quickly and almost painfully. After reviving in the elevator, I punched the button again and opened the doors to see the huge blocks move around through the air to create a level once again.

  So I had found out something interesting. The question was if I could benefit from it somehow. I also wondered if Christine was aware of the process of the randomly generating level. If so, why didn’t she try to open the doors? Perhaps, because there was no use in doing so.

  Yet there might be another reason. Christine might not know about this. Unlike all the other players, I couldn’t quit the game and could experience pain for some reason. Along with that, I might also be able to interact with some objects like the doors of that elevator while all the other players including Christine couldn’t. This needed to be verified. Had to ask Flynn about it.

  The level was soon constructed. The round white drones appeared. What if I could interact with them somehow? What if I could make the drones set the traps where I wanted them to? It would be awesome.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t all that easy to catch a drone. They were flying a few feet above my head and they darted up and down the corridors at such high speed I simply couldn’t keep up with them.

  Then I chanced on a drone that was placing a trap next to a wall. I leaped up to the small robot, extended my arms above my head, and grabbed the drone. As soon as I touched the cool surface of the drone, electric power surged through my body. I was in excruciating pain while the debuff that had been placed on my character was active. Luckily, the debuff only lasted for a few moments.

  I wasn’t all that keen on touching any of those drones anymore.

  After that, I decided to use my psi-powers on the drones. However, my skills barely had any effect on the small robots. Not for the first time, I thought that something was terribly wrong with those drones. They didn’t have their stats displayed in my HUD and almost didn’t get affected by my psi-powers. How come?

  I had no answer to the question.

  I decided to resort to raw power. When one drone was nearby, I wrenched my pistol from its holster and opened up. The drone continued down the corridor, totally ignoring the bullets pinged off its smooth glistering surface. With there being no HP bar above the drone, it was hard to tell if the bullets inflicted any damage on the robot.

  I dumped two magazines into the drone but to no avail. The impacts of the bullets striking the robot left no scratches, no dents on its surface, no nothing. It didn’t seem to take damage whatsoever. I decided to unload one more mag into it and then let it go.

  After I fired three or four times more, the drone suddenly exploded in a downpour of torn fragments flying every which way. They clunked to the floor only to disappear almost instantly in weird green flame consuming them.

  All the other drones continued with their chores, totally ignoring the drone’s bitter fate.

  I commenced hunting down the other drones, firing at them with my pistol. I managed to obliterate a few more robots before running out of ammo. However, destroying several drones made no difference as for every robot shot, another one took its place.

  Then the drones flew away. I let the mobs whack myself and as usual, revived in the elevator. All my progress was erased so the amount of ammo I had on me got restored again.

  I opened the doors once again. The level was being reconstructed from scratch. I was racking my brain. Destroying the round small robots had dome no good. What other options did I have?

  This time, I didn’t interfere with the small robots. Instead, I just waited for them to finish their work. When they flew away, I just wandered around the level, seeking the traps. Having found one, I set about examining it closely.

  It absorbed me for a while. I died when accidentally getting within the range of a trap, then revived in the elevator, waited for the level to be constructed, and went on with my experimenting with the traps.

  Eventually, my efforts yielded some results. First, I learned that there were a few types of the traps. Second, I found out that all the traps had one quality. When you approached a trap to within a foot or so of its range, the light that a trap emitted became a tad brighter. Which meant that the trap was about to detonate.

  It was next to impossible to learn about that quality with the swarm of mobs around which was why Christine had never learned about it. Therefore, I had just obtained a sort of an advantage over the girl.

  Now that I knew how to determine when at trap was about to explode, I set about practicing leaping to the side in time to avoid being caught in the blast radius.

  I died a lot. Without using Acceleration, it seemed to be almost impossible to get from a trap in time to avoid being hit by the resultant explosion.

  I died and revived over and over and over again.

  When I was about to give up, I pulled it off. I had approached a trap and upon seeing its light get somewhat brighter, I instantly leaped to the side. The trap exploded, but I wasn’t hit by it and no debuff was placed on my character.

  There ya go! Nailed it!

  However, it took me a few hours more to hone this trick.

  Then a notification popped up in the log. Flynn was online again. And he brought some good news.

  Flynn had found out that few players knew about the glitch of the Arena and how to cause it. But he learned that in order to get rid of the slave collar, I needed to waste Christine. Which was next to impossible due to my having no good armor and reliable weapon.

  Even if I had still had my chitin armor and Ice Volcanos at my disposal, it would have been all too hard to whack Christine as she was extremely experienced and skillful player.

  But there was another way to get rid of the collar. Flynn said that the collar would fall off me if Christine died first. I had always gotten slain by the mobs before the girl had since I had no armor on. But if she were to somehow die first, then the slave collar would unfasten and fall off. As for Christine, she would revive in a random Resurrection Pod in the current location. It got me thinking.

  What if I could make Christine die first somehow? For instance, to sic powerful mobs on the girl somehow or something like that.

  Flynn also said that if I managed to kill Christine or make her die somehow, then my character’ level would get restored. Me level had been 17 before Christine put the slave collar on me. So if I managed to kill her, my level would become 17 again as if Christine had never reduced it by killing me.

  Then I asked Flynn if he knew about the procedural level generation. However, he didn’t catch the drift. As it turned out, the other players couldn’t open the elevator’s doors. Some had tried but to no avail. Which meant that I really was the only player who could do it.

  There was nothing more to talk about. I thanked Flynn and bid him farewell.

  I immersed myself in deep thinking. How to get Christine killed? To open the elevator door and shove the girl out into the abyss? It might work as she had never seen the level generation. So seeing it for the very first time would take her by surprise and give me
an opportunity to thrust her from the elevator.

  But what would happen next? Would she die at some point? Probably. But what would happen to me? I knew the answer to the last question. When Christine got too far away from me, I would be being electrocuted, that was for sure. Besides, there was no telling whether falling into the black void would kill the girl. So I had to come up with a more reliable plan to waste the girl.

  Some time elapsed, but no bright thought occurred to me yet. I decided to practice my recently acquired skill in safely getting away from the exploding traps.

  I was well aware that with the swarm of mobs around, it would be way harder for me to trigger the traps without getting hurt. Which was why I caused mobs to spawn.

  It took me a few hours to get used to dealing with the mobs and the traps simultaneously.

  Then out of the blue, a thought occurred to me. I had finally gotten a seemingly good idea and decided to test it.

  I set about causing the level to generate itself. When the level was done, I examined it carefully.

  As I had been playing with Christine for a way long time, I learned that her armor protected her perfectly against electricity and cold but almost didn’t gave her protection against fire. Moreover, it would be awesome, if I could weaken her armor with acid traps.

  So I needed the level having the traps arranged into a specific pattern.

  I re-created the level repeatedly hoping I would soon chance on what I wanted. However, every time something was amiss. Every time the placement of the traps wasn’t satisfactory. One time I got the level having few fire traps, another time the traps were spaced too far apart, etc. Since the level always generated absolutely randomly, it was really hard to get exactly what I wanted.

  After some time passed, I suddenly felt as if something made me choke. I didn’t immediately realize what was wrong. I always began to choke when getting too far away from Christine, which meant that if I didn’t get back to the girl, I would be electrocuted.

  How come I was suffocating now if the girl was offline?

  Then it dawned on me that Christine must be trying to connect to the game and soon would here. Which meant that twenty-four hours had already passed. The time had passed like it had flown by.

  The choking worsened. Christine should enter the game any minute now. Had to get to the elevator ASAP.

  The problem was that I was too far away from the elevator. Even if I activated Acceleration, I wouldn’t be able to get there in time. What to do? If Christine found out about the procedural level generation, I would lose my advantage over the girl and due to that, probably would never be able to whack her.

  When I was about to succumb to panic, it dawned on me what I needed to do. Instead of running for the elevator, I darted toward the nearest trap.

  Once I got within its range, the trap exploded. The shock wave slammed into me, hurling me across the corridor to smack against a wall. My HP shrank by ninety percent. An icon of a fire debuff popped up in my HUD and flames enveloped me. The torture lasted only for a moment.

  I revived in the elevator. The doors were closed since progress had been erased again. The next moment Christine materialized in front of me. She looked around and when our eyes met, she said surprisingly, “Here you are. Thought I would have to wait for you to appear for a while.”

  “I’ve been trying to connect to the game for the half an hour,” I lied.

  “Fair enough.”

  I said nothing.

  “You look unhappy,” She observed. “What’s wrong?”

  Aside from your making me participate in the endless fighting the mobs and triggering the traps causing me to suffer extreme pain, everything is just fine, I thought.

  But I didn’t give voice to my thoughts. I said instead, “Nothing’s wrong. Let’s get cracking. Can’t wait to be done with the Arena already.”

  “Don’t freak out,” The girl said. “Mark my word, we’ll soon beat it.”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  “By the way, I can play only for two or so hours today. Think we can beat the Arena in two hours?”

  It cheered me up. I had to put up with Christine only for two hours and then I could continue working on my plan. My mood lifted a few notches.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “Good,” Christine replied and turned to face the doors. When they slid open, we burst outside to fight the swarm of mobs.

  But I didn’t do my best like I had told Christine. No sirree. On the contrary, I sought an opportunity to get myself killed. I knew that we would never beat the Arena so I just stalled, waiting for the two hours to pass and for Christine to get the heck offline.

  We died, revived, fought the mobs, and died again, to no end.

  And then, after we re-started the final round again, the giant took off in pursuit of me. I darted around a corner and found myself at a junction with traps both to my right and to my left. I would surely have died had Christine not appeared behind the giant and aggo’d the huge mutant. So I had to continue with this mindless fighting the mobs. Then I noticed a trap nearby and darted toward it to get myself killed. Christine shouted to me, but I pretended not to hear her. The trap exploded, my character took damage, and then the giant finished me off. After the girl got whacked too, we revived in the elevator and she blamed me for getting myself killed on purpose. After I managed to convince her that it had happened accidentally, the girl lifted her left hand and fixed her gaze on the crystal embedded into her flesh.

  This was where my memories reached the present moment.

  Chapter four

  So I stood in the center of the elevator, looking at the Christine and waiting for her to finish whatever she was doing. I didn’t hurry her. It was to my advantage to play for time.

  A few minutes later, Christine turned to face me and said, “Okay, I’ve changed something in my build. Maybe it’ll help. But not now. Gotta go already.”

  “When will you get back?” I inquired.

  “In two or three hours. Can’t tell for certain.”

  “Okay. I’ll be trying to connect to the game by then.”

  “Good. See ya later.”

  She looked at the crystal again and disappeared. I wasted no time getting back to business. After opening the elevator doors, I waited for the level to finish procedurally generating itself. Then the drones appeared to place the traps. I examined the level and found the placement of the traps to be unacceptable.

  I caused the level to re-create itself over and over again, but every time it turned out to be unsuitable for my plan.

  I was on the verge of getting into a state of depression when I finally got what I wanted. After leaving the elevator, I entered a short corridor leading to a small chamber. There were a few more doorways. I went through one of them and found myself in another hallway. It was wider and longer than the previous one was. I negotiated it and walked into a big room with more doorways. I examined all of them. Inside one corridor, I came across a very lucky placement of four traps.

  All of them were very close to one another. The one closest to the mouth of the hallway was an ice trap. When triggered, the ice trap placed a debuff on a player that reduced his or her movement speed to a crawl.

  A little farther along the hallway, behind the first trap was a powerful acid trap, which could destroy Christine’s medium armor in no time.

  These two traps were situated so close to each other than a player could trigger both of them at once.

  And half a foot behind them, were too more traps––fire traps, to be exact. When triggered, a fire trap shot long flame in the direction of the player within reach.

  So if I could lure Christine in this hallway, she would be done for in nothing flat. The ice trap would slow the girl down, causing her to be almost immobile. The acid trap would either obliterate the girl’s armor or weaken it to the point where it would give her almost no protection.

  Then I would have to dart far
ther along the hallway to trigger the two fire traps. When they released two fire streams, I would backpedal as fast as I could manage to avoid being set ablaze. When I was out of reach of either of them, the fire traps would train the flames toward Christine.

  The girl wouldn’t be able to race away due to the slowing-down debuff placed on her and her armor would fail to give her proper protection due to being destroyed by the acid trap, so the girl would be burned to death in a few moments.

  The question was how was I going to lure Christine into this particular hallway?

  She sure as heck wasn’t going to get in there by chance. I had to trick her into entering the hallway somehow.

  I walked from the elevator to the corridor and then retraced my steps a few times, racking my brain. Still, no bright idea occurred to me thus far.

  Maybe I should cause the level to re-create itself again. I entered the elevator and the doors slid shut. But when I was about to split the elevator to get myself killed so that I could cause the level to re-create itself, I thought the better of it.

  I had dismissed the idea because there was hardly any chance of getting a level having a better placement of the traps than the current level had.

  So I just stood in the elevator, racking my brain. However, before I could come up with a plan of luring the girl into the hallway, Christine herself materialized in the elevator.

  Her totally unexpected appearance even made me wince. How come she was already here? Had the three hours already passed? I could hardly believe it. It seemed to me that it was only an hour or so since Christine went offline.

  The girl noticed me instantly. She gave me a surprised look. “Wow. You already here, huh?”

  Something was wrong. I was about to say that I was here because we had settled on entering the game at this time, but I held my tongue in time. It was obvious that the girl arrived earlier than expected.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “And what about you?”

  “It took me less time to do all the chores IRL than I expected it to. So I decided to play the game. But I sure didn’t expect you to re-connect to the game this early. It’s only one hour since we left!”