Ready Player None

Chapter 2.2 - Kate "The Winner Takes It All"

With Alex locked away for the night, I headed back to the simulation room.

Instead of climbing into my own pod (which was back to normal, exactly as I predicted), I veered towards Alex's. Okay, so I'm not proud of this next bit, I'm a really honest person. Believe me. But I can't use my own account to play my way in the OASIS, cause it's locked down to local travel and escorted trips. I love my brother, but he doesn't know how to have fun, and sleeps way too much, so I sorta found out how to add a second private identity onto his account. It lets me go anywhere I want, as a custom avatar, and as long as I play in the middle of the night absolutely no one knows anything about it.

Well, except for you.. you won't tell on me, will you?

My avatar was right where I left her, at the staging point for the huge Xylos tournament that I absolutely had to be at tonight. If anyone checked me out, they'd see a 6-foot blonde in her mid-twenties, bedecked in classic outworld bounty hunter gear. And that's it. Nothing about me, or Alex, or anything that would provide any sort of true identification, no matter how hard they looked.

Other than the name of my avatar, which was "Myst3rie". That part they'd remember.

The team was already there.. I kind of knew them, but not really. It was mostly a matchmaker group, with a couple people I'd worked with in the past, and at least two undergeared credit farmers along for the ride.

"Bout time", said Grovenk. "Get those buffs up, everyone, we could be called in at any moment." He was a chunky ogre-looking guy, which made for a great distraction to enemies, letting far runners like me sneak up behind an unsuspecting adversary before they realized their mistake. We had won a few minor three-person tournaments, along with the healer Chalis.

"Is Chalis with us?" I asked, casting shadows on myself, and linking my hate to the ogre. I really didn't like our chances if we had to work with someone new. My preferred tactic was to be well away from the group most of the time, dipping in for a few spot heals now and then, and Chalis had proven to be expert at watching out for everyone, not just the tank.

One of the new folks, named entirely in consonants and symbols, said "No Chalis. No heals. Heal self."

Great. Ok, so we weren't a team. We were a group of targets for other teams to practice on. I charged up all my backup weapons, and set their blast to maximum. I may not live long, but I was going out in a blaze of glory.

It was only a few more moments till a portal appeared in the center of the staging area, glowing with the same off-green that was apparently our team color.

Grovenk yelled, "Let's go!"

I was the first one tumbling through the portal, both pistols blazing.

Naturally, that made me the first one to hit the suppression field on the other side of the portal, and the first target to attract the gods-be-damned tracer spirits who normally delighted in finding hidden assassins in the shadows. I was an assassin, but was neither hidden, nor in the shadows. The spirits didn't seem to object to having their task made so easy. I glowed.

Our zone-in spot had unfortunately been placed directly in front of the fortified advance line of another team, a team so organized and methodical that they had a fortified advance line instead of a tumbling bounty-hunter slash obvious-target armed with only two pistols and a willingness to die.

My team sucks.

On the other hand, with no heals we were all going to die fairly quickly anyway. If I could just get one spell cast before the impending barrage hit me, I might be able to turn the now-defunct Plan Awesome into Plan Credit Scavenger.