Multi-colored sound and fury

  Red sparkling ser bolts cut through the first figure like he had been made of fkes of brittle paint carefully baogether, and the fsh turned purple where it met his blue form. He had time to turn around and face Gradie before the st round of the three round burst caught him in the head and tore him to tiny pieces of pale blue that faded to white i. Gradie had aimed at the chest a 3 rounds off before releasing the trigger, and the recoil, (which was more severe than he would have expected had the gun been a real AR firing 5.56, a less violent, perhaps because of its uniformity) sent the barrel rising into a perfect headshot.

  The uy saw his friend vanish, had time to scream, “Oh fuck!”, and then, for some reason, turn out toward the opening, possibly to s the chaos out there for some sign of the unseen shooter, befradie finished him with a single burst to the head, this time with the recoil handled by and overhand grip on the barrel sheath.

  “Ping, Ping”

  Two semitransparent “+25”s floated up in his peripheral. Wheuro look at them, they stayed at the edge of his vision, and he realized they were being dispyed right onto his eyeballs.

  “Damn bro, you got two more?” Nova asked. Gradie assumed he just hadn’t noticed any numbers during the first fight, or maybe they had been lost in the chaos around the block. The hallway was dead quiet now.

  “Yeah,” he told Nova. “Two poor blue bastards.”

  “Sick. You get half score for them because their weak to you, you get double for yellow, and—”

  “How did you see my kills?”

  “Oh, I have ally kill feed turned on. It’s iings.”

  “There are settings?”

  “Yeah, you gotta—”

  “Where are you?” Angel interrupted, his voice filled with uncharacteristic urgency.

  “Uh,”

  Gradie approached the opening while carefully hugging the wall, and peered out.

  It was another massive cavern, but this one was shaped like an inverse pyramid with a massive dome and a circur skylight at the top, and was at least ten times as big as the ohey had ridden up on the block. At first g looked like a chaotic light show, but as the seds passed, he found some key distinctive features.

  “Big room, there’s like these bounce pads that ge colors, people are flying off of them. There’s some floating blocks… and mirrors?” He saw a sniper bolt form a letter L and vaporize a flying purple shot-gu the tail end of his boung parabo.

  “Oh shit, that’s the bounce house,” Nova said. “OK, I know where you’re at bro. One sec.”

  “Try and find some red and sit tight,” Luke advised. “Don’t wanna have to dig you out of jail.” There was friendly mockery in his voice.

  “Find some red?” Gradie asked.

  “If you stao a wall or something of your color and don’t move, you bee invisible,” Angel advised.

  Gradie wao ask them why the fuck that little tidbit wasn’t part of the orientation, but instead sed the prismatic chaos pying out across the room for some evidehat they weren’t fug with him. An e figure bounced over to an e-walled ptform and swiftly vanished. A few seds ter, a purple bomb sailed through the air and bsted wall and pyer into whitening fragments. Gradie made a hat the trily worked if no one saw you do it, and looked around for something red and close to use.

  Down on the errace, a red cluster of shapes looked promising, until a yellow figure desded on it, shot out the ter and took cover in the resulting hollow form. The piece of red was a loahat stuck out like a pier some yards above his head. Sniper beams and AR bursts sprayed off it, and he decided just to stay put until he had some back up.

  He watched the drama out in the open spatil Nova came ba the s.

  “God damn, its poppin off. Ok, shoot a fre.”

  “Wait,” Angel said. “A fre screams ‘I’m alone’. Fire a one sed burst up at the skylight.”

  Gradie did as he was told, and noticed the rounds lost their brilliance by the time they got to the opening at the top.

  “Shit. Do it again.”

  He fired another burst and wondered if he had infinite ammo.

  “Ok, bro got you,” Nova said. “Here.”

  An e sniper beam bzed a few yards to the right of Gradie and crashed in the hallway. He almost jumped out of the opening.

  “You see me?”

  Gradie saw a faint e spe the lip of the skylight, which based on the known size of the speck must have been the size of a football field.

  “Yeah. God damn, I gotta get up there?”

  “Yonna have to run, bro. Take the bounce pads. You see this reflector up here? Looks like a big on?”

  High up beh the dome, a long crystal covered in maery pointed up at the skylight. The tip of the crystal reflected the dull, even light of the false sky in a scattering of rainbow, but the rest was covered in shadow. As he watched it, the whole thing moved slowly, as the blocky mass it was mouo rotated, traveling along a circur ring just ihe dome. He hadn’t noticed it before, because up there, there was very little guo draw his attention.

  “Yeah. Do these bounce pads go that high?” The flying figures seemed to only ever go about half the dome. As he spoke, another o disied midflight.

  “Not the ones you see, you have to take the ones on the edge to the high steps, then those unch you.”

  “You gonna be able to cover me?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” Nova sounded offended. Partially as an act of repentance, Gradie didn’t waste any more time. He made a note of a staircase running up the sadium sides of the space to his left, and jumped out into it.

  It was like stepping out onto a field at the ter of a packed sports dome. The noise ramped up immediately aiced for the first time that the uifiable roar he had heard boung around ihe hallway was actually the blended shouts, ons, and shit-talking of about fifty people. Not everyoook the “only on internal s” approamunicatiowins did.

  The terrace level he nded on, with a slight bouhat told him the fall would have broken both legs in the real world, was rger than he expected, and was his first clue that things out here were much different than they had appeared from up in his alcove. The terrace was at least as wide as a two-ne highway, shoulders and all, and he felt immediately exposed. A few breaths after this revetion, as he was just getting into his sprinting stride, a green sniper beam came out from some higher part of his peripherals and bsted a hole in the ground a few yards ahead of him.

  “Shit!”

  “Got him,” Nova said. “But you might want to zig-zag or something.”

  Gradie ged up his pace, which till then had been a full-blown sprint down the ter of the ne, and cut at an aowards the cover, a jagged block of purple the size of a Winnebago that had seemingly fallen from the destru above. He was w if falling objects could kill him in this game as he stomped around it, when something strange happened.

  His breathing got heavy. It wasn’t a plete sensation, but more of a subtle nudging from some phantom version of his lungs, much like feeling out of breath in a dream. He reminded himself that he didn’t o breathe here, and the sensation subsided a bit, but almost immediately the muscles in his legs began to ache. As he turned his scolding focus to reminding his legs that ctic acid did in this world either, his feeling of out of breathness returhis time much less of a subtle han something approag a physical reality.

  “What, the fuck?” He panted mid-sentence, ae himself, gave up on jumping up to the staircase, now about five feet over his head and right in front of him, as the thought of pulling himself up and over became a visceral idea, and instead ducked down into a crouch behind another fragment of fallen color, this one unfortunately only about the size of a purple mini fridge.

  “Oh shit, he’s feeling the phantom pain,” Luke said, much more jovially than Gradie thought called for.

  “Really? Bro, my bad, I fot you were so fresh. It’s not real bro. Just don’t think about it and it will go away. a up!”

  A bomb of some cradie didn’t notid a flurry of red and green that recalled, oddly at a time like this, Christmas, flew over his head. This time, there was nothing pyful about them. Maybe because of the sudden unwele return of his physical body, so soon after his avatar had faded away from sensation, but now he had a visceral fear of any of the molten projectiles toug him.

  “Fuck!”

  “Move! Just run it off!” Angel said, sounding like someog his little brother ruin his KD ratio, and his fug tone offended Gradie more than the phantom weariness bothered him or the possibly painful bullets scared him, so he shot up with a growl and climbed up and over onto the staircase, then started to sprint.

  “Serpentine!” Luke yelled with a ugh in his voice that dampened some of the anger brought on by Angel’s scolding.

  Gradie sprinted up the staircase toward the level. As if to let him focus on his own irrational physical exhaustion, nobody shot at him. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, the physical sensation was near overwhelming, like a dense solid weight on his thoughts that threate the rest of him down through the soft cotton ball texture of this false gameworld right into something real and painful. The sensation made him nostalgic for the vault and all those other hims he had run into the ground in the clubhouse.

  The stairs led him ter terrace, like half a city street ed around the edge of the stadium space, plete with buildings and alleys. He looked around him frantically and tried to find the words to ask his other three teammates where to go, but the fear of his words ing out breathless kept them in his throat.

  As if sensing now was the absolute worst time to do so, someone shot at him from somewhere over his head.

  “Shit, I ’t see them!” Nova said.

  “Get in that box ahead of you!” Angel said. Gradie looked around and saw the “box” was a three-story high structure with punched-out shadow squares for doors and windows that looked like something a fireman might train in if drawn by a child who only had three crayons on hand.

  He sprinted for the door, and something magical happened. His exhaustion reached a cresdo, threatening to cut his air off all together, hovered there a moment, theed away, and by the time he threw himself in the darkened building, he couldn’t imagine he had ever been tired at all. For a few seds after the exhaustion passed, he felt his Avatar again, chugging along like a mech suit ed around him, legs shooting out as if operated remotely, then that sensation vaoo and he was left with something like the tireless running of dreams.

  Ihere were only bare walls and floors of uniform color aure, and the light ing in from the unwavering sky far above found no variation beyond itself and the shadow. It felt like being pletely inside a created space, like climbing inside a painting or if a VR game could project itself directly onto his eyeballs. It amplified his nervous sensation of being watched, as if the creator was somewhere unseen, as he checked all his ers and followed every a Philip had ever given him.

  Going through the motions of room clearing here felt silly. Like perf CPR on a Raggedy Anne doll, until Nova came over the s again.

  “Bro, two guys just dropped on the roof a inside.”

  Gradie recalled the first rule of room clearing Philip had given him. When at all possible, don’t.

  “Should I leave? Where’s the unch pad?”

  “It’s like right above you, on the level, in this little recess thing,” Nova said.

  “So I have to go up through this house to get to it.”

  “Yep.”

  Gradie made a snap decision and stepped into the room to his left a up in the immediate left er with his on aimed at the hallway.

  “Try ahem pass if you ,” Angel said, with nervous excitement in his voice. Gradie had been sidering it, but something in Angel’s tohat said ‘please don’t make us wait for you to run out of red jail again’ stirred up his already agitated frustration, and he decided to open up the moment these two fuck heads came down the hallway.

  Standing there, with his rifle raised at a doorway, awaiting a violent threat, the Hardworlder in him just couldn’t let it slide.

  The mind is a difficult thing tle, but the Gunmaze devs have gotten quite good at it. The Spirit, however, is another matter. ime, danger close. episode, Emerald Swordsman.