Chapter Five #2
“Feels great, I don’t know!” I flick my eyes up toward my live webcam and scowl.
A camera on my computer. A camera in my face.
Forty-odd players left to go. This is starting to feel bad to me, inside.
“Can we do this after?” I notice my hands are shaking.
Not enough to throw me off the rest of the game, but that’s not normal.
“After defeats the point of an introduction. The audience wants to meet you!”
“Well, I don’t really want to meet them, so.” I know it’s the wrong answer, but he’s standing so close to me I can almost feel a dull pain under my skin.
“Anything else you want to say to the fans?” the man asks skeptically.
More players have come into my proximity zone, and with them comes their chatter.
“So, what do you think? Should I build up a fort or—”
“—outfit only costs like 5k Wizzcoins, but the backpack is from the—”
“Zora!”
“Please go away,” I say quietly. The microphone picks me up or doesn’t.
A handful of shots ring out from around a nearby dumpster, and I toss a gravity bomb in that direction. The two players hiding behind are thrown up into the air and suspended for the shortest of seconds. My shaking hands make me miss the dual shot that could have taken them both out.
“—what you get for messing with RUDY!”
“—hopefully next time I’ll be able to see chat so I can—”
“—been to New York, but I’ll be doing GRWM vids starting—”
“Zora,” the camera man begins again.
“I said FUCK OFF!” I all but shout. The mic definitely picked that one up. I glance up to see if anyone noticed. The players haven’t, we all have headphones on, but I do catch a glimpse of Brian Juno staring right at me. Frowning. That can’t be great.
Camera Man yanks the mic away from me and steps back like I’ve shocked him through the lens and hurries not toward the next player in the row, but toward Brian.
It’s then I notice that there are multiple camera guys onstage, at least ten, each one currently engaging in pleasant back-and-forths with other players.
No one is bothered by their presence except for me, and probably Cassius, if I could see him.
I may be failing at meeting my audience, but I have the highest kill count of anyone in the match. That has to be enough to make up for any popularity points I lost by skipping my inconvenient intro.
A loud horn blast interrupts the match, signaling that we’re down to the top twenty surviving players.
To make sure we run into each other, the play area shrinks and those of us outside the safe zone have less than a minute to make it in before we are automatically disqualified for the rest of the match.
I cast around for something that can help me move faster and see two important things.
First, I see a unicorn. A scaly, leathery space unicorn. In Guardians League Royale, unicorns can fly, which would be very useful to have right now. Second, I see VANE again, gunning for the same god damn horse.
“No!” I yell out.
“Yes,” Ivan’s voice says sweetly. He mounts the unicorn and soars up above me, cackling over chat.
If there’s one thing I have to give Ivan credit for, it’s his uncanny ability to find the right person to put him in the wrong situation.
I’ve been sniping up all match, so it only takes a second for me to look up, aim, calculate the trajectory of his flight, and shoot not at him, but at the unicorn’s hindquarters.
Zip. Neigh! The unicorn’s legs flail in the open air, and I hear a faint whickering noise before it pops out of existence.
VANE has nowhere to go but down. His character falls quickly, too quickly for him to pop his parachute, and his avatar crashes to the ground before blipping away just like his noble steed. Big RIP, you absolute fool.
So that’s taken care of. I could have really used the transport, though.
Without it, I have to leap from rooftop to rooftop, with each bound exposing me to fire from unseen enemies.
I check the player count—we’re down to seven, and when I land in the plaza, I do so on top of someone else, smooshing them with my superhero-landing stomp.
Immediately, I take a laser blast in the shoulder and see my health dip down a few notches.
Damn it, it’s over. They have the high ground.
I don’t have any defense glyphs to protect myself from another shot, so I’m going to have to avoid dying the hard way.
I dash toward cover, use the water spouting from the plaza’s central fountain to send myself shooting up into the air, and use my laser gun’s special attack to shear the health away from whoever is bad enough to have his head poking up from behind his cover.
Three players left now. One more kill will put me in the top two, but this isn’t Wizzcon and a top two doesn’t mean anything until the end of the summer.
Some tussle across the plaza takes out number three.
Now it’s me and the chunky silhouette of a special edition player avatar.
I don’t need more detail to identify CASS—he plays as a dinosaur in a chicken costume.
A quick speed boost sends me rocketing across the plaza toward the last place he dove, my lasers ready to take him down with a forehead shot when I hear the crack of player-generated lightning.
I backflip out of the way of Cass’s spell cast, thinking briefly of Ivan’s quick evade from earlier, and load the explosive arrow into my bow.
The arrow, thicker and easier to follow than the thin laser types the bow usually fires, arcs gracefully across the sky and lands directly behind Cass’s cover.
The boom is satisfying. The message BATTLE WIN: ZORA is even more satisfying.
If there’s one thing that might make up for my reaction to the cameras, it’s a first place win. How’s that for a rematch, bro?
When I wrench my headphones off, I shudder with relief when the individualized attention gives way to the relative anonymity of being one in forty-nine players onstage.
Somehow the racket of people emerging from the game in real life is less overwhelming than having their conversations float in and out of my ears against my will.
“That was brutal.” Hearing Ivan’s voice next to me as opposed to projected directly into my ear confuses my brain, and it takes a moment for me to orient myself toward the actual source of his voice.
“For real,” Kavi adds, beads of sweat visible around her hairline. “What a match.”
“Not the match,” Ivan says. “Zora was brutal.”
Excuse me, sir. This isn’t Guardians League Tea and Crumpets. It’s Guardians League Royale, battle implied. Brutal is the name of the game, literally. Metaphorically. I’m not sure which one I mean, to be honest.
“Does anyone know what happens now?” Trieu asks. “I thought there’d be some kind of, I dunno, confetti cannon? Champagne? Something to mark the end of our first match?”
“I don’t think we’re that bougie,” I offer.
But Trieu has a point. The other players onstage are all out of the game now, headphones already hung around their necks or on their desks, but there’s radio silence from the theater’s front row of seats, which is where Brian retreated once the game began. And now he’s not alone.
The camera guys are crowded around him, each one holding their device down as they appear to be scrubbing back and forth to find a specific moment. Before I can ask myself what they’re all looking for, I hear it.
“I said FUCK OFF!” plays from one tinny camera speaker.
That gets my attention. And Ivan’s. And everyone else who’s close enough to the front row to hear it.
From another camera, fainter but still audible in the background of their footage, “—said FUCK OFF!”
“OFF!”
“I said—”
“FUCK—”
So, it’s possible I didn’t “all but shout” that particular phrase. I may have truly, loudly, and with astonishing powers of vocal projection screamed that particular phrase at a volume high enough for everyone’s microphones to pick up my voice.
Kavi looks at me, a hint of panic in her eyes.
“Zora, you didn’t.”
For the first time since emerging from the game, I peer over at Ivan. He looks relaxed as ever, slouching low in his chair with that smirk on his face.
“Oh, yes she did.”
Come on, it was one curse word. One of the stronger ones, but still.
“Grow up,” I snap at Ivan. “I shot a unicorn in the butt and landed so hard on a guy he exploded, but the f-word is a bridge too far?”
“Unironically, yes,” Trieu says.
“But why?” I ask. It doesn’t take long to find my answer. Every eye follows Brian as he rises from his seat and glides toward my desk, the long lines of his purple suit accentuating each click of his heeled black boots against the stage. This is how I meet my hero.
“You are Zora Lyon?” Brian asks with a glance down at the tablet in his hand.
He pronounces my last name like the city in France, which I hoped one day he’d do just so I could correct him with a joke about actual lions, which would make him laugh, which would make him remember me forever and support my dreams like a Canadian fairy godfather. This does not happen.
“I am,” I say instead. Up close Brian looks, and it may just be the circumstances, more intimidating than his wholesome image might betray.
He has blue eyes, unusually bright against his tanned face, and right now they are staring at me so incisively I half expect him to start communicating telepathically.
I thought he’d look younger, and I suddenly realize my error: the version of Brian Juno in my head is actually a combination of the many Brians I’ve watched in Wizzard Games creative interviews going back almost two decades.