roof.
The strategy worked-now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of two more of the guards.
Shrieking a berzerker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two remaining guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She’d blown a small fortune on spells and rations for this project with the expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and now it was all lost.
She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run, waiting for the guard’s sword to find her avatar’s back and knock her into the dirt.
“Got ’im?” It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was wrong, though: despite Lucy’s avatar’s awesome stats and despite Lucy’s own skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to the cleaners. The guard was kicking her ass. Anda went back to her stuck sword and recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another to her knee.
“Shit!” Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her sword free-finally-and charged at the guard, screaming a ululating war cry. He managed to get his avatar swung around and his sword up before she reached him, but it didn’t matter: she got in a lucky swing that took off one leg, then danced back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, nicking at his sword-hand until he dropped his weapon, then moving in for a fast kill.
“Lucy?”
“Call me Sarge!”
“Sorry, Sarge. Where’d you respawn?”
“I’m all the way over at Body Electric-it’ll take me hours to get there. Do you think you can complete the mission on your own?”
“Uh, sure.” Thinking,
“You’re the best, girl. OK, enter the cottage and kill everyone there.”
“Uh, sure.”
She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside the cottage before she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.
She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She’d killed four of her adversaries before she even noticed that they weren’t fighting back.
In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even non-player characters. They moved like total noobs, milling around in the little cottage. Around them were heaps of shirts, thousands and thousands of them. A couple of the noobs were sitting in the back, incredibly, still crafting more shirts, ignoring the swordswoman who’d just butchered four of their companions.
She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively, she walked up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one side and she followed him.
› Are you a player or a bot?
she typed.
The avatar did nothing. She killed it.
“Lucy, they’re not fighting back.”
“Good, kill them all.”
“Really?”
“Yeah-that’s the orders. Kill them all and then I’ll make a phone call and some guys will come by and verify it and then you haul ass back to the island. I’m coming out there to meet you, but it’s a long haul from the respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, OK?”
“Sure,” Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten.
› no porfa quiero mi plata
Italian? No, Spanish. She’d had a term of it in Third Form, though she couldn’t understand what this twit was saying. She could always paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who cared? She cut his head off.
“They’re all dead,” she said into her headset.
“Good job!” Lucy said. “OK, I’m gonna make a call. Sit tight.”
Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and shirts. She picked some of them up. They were totally generic: the shirts you crafted when you were down at Level 0 and trying to get enough skillz to actually make something of yourself. Each one would fetch just a few coppers. Add it all together and you barely had two thousand gold.
Just to pass the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.
› no [colloq] please, I want my [colloquial] [money|silver]
Pathetic. A few thousand golds-he could make that much by playing a couple of the beginner missions. More fun. More rewarding. Crafting shirts!
She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars showed up. More generics.
› are you players or bots?
she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.
› any trouble?
Well all right then.
› no trouble
› good
One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.
› you can go now
“Lucy?”
“What’s up?”
“Two blokes just showed up and told me to piss off. They’re noobs, though. Should I kill them?”
“No! Jeez, Anda, those are the contacts. They’re just making sure the job was done. Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern, OK?”
Anda went over to Lucy’s corpse and looted it, then set out down the road, dragging the BFG behind her. She stopped at the bend in the road and snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs standing amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand golds’ worth of badly crafted shirts.
THAT was the first of Anda and Lucy’s missions, but it wasn’t the last. That month, she fought her way through
