Chapter 147 - VR Confrontation

Kitana didn’t recognize the username. If Kieran had told her that he wanted to watch another pro player, she would be fine with it, but this SentientHamster189 sounded like the person barely even knew he had such a username.

Of course, her username of ‘Steel Raven Lady’ was not that well known either, but she had put a lot more thought into it. “Maybe that player is a bot, or just boosting an account while saving the first free name change.” Kitana thought to herself.

She checked the leaderboard quickly and realized that Kieran was right. She was ranked second on the leaderboard, while SentientHamster189 was first, having more than 30% more kills than her.

Kitana wanted to complain about the defender’s advantage, but she knew Kieran wouldn’t understand, so she had to prove herself.

“Okay Kieran, let’s go find him! I’ll prove that I’m better than him!” Kitana chalked it up to the incompetency of her team, which was why SentientHamster189 was able to rack up so many kills.

She had been avoiding the team chat for a while as she didn’t want to bother with all the distracting trash talk, but she needed information on where the top-ranked defender was.

[Fuck me, is that SentientHamser189 guy hacking? How is he so fast? I can’t even turn my neck that fast.]

[He’s defending the second reactor now! He just killed me and my squad, there are two other teammates backing him up as well. They are playing like a military squad – is a mercenary group using this match as practice? Fuck them, they’re spoiling the game!]

[No, that’s impossible! I’m fighting him right now at the third reactor. We need help! Where’s the fucking rich player who had the mechsuit? Stop jerking off with the other player and smash these cunts!]

[Anyone know where my cat went? I paid fifty bucks for a virtual pet but I lost it on this battlefield…]

Kitana sighed, but at least she now knew where SentientHamster189 was. “Seems like he’s with a squad as well, must be a booster.”

Boosters usually worked in groups, racking up kills for a single account while they used bots for the supporting accounts to make the main account stand out even more. This allowed the main account to rank up even faster.

Kitana had defeated her fair share of boosters back in the past, so she wasn’t afraid. Not when she fought in real life as one of the best Keepers. Her reputation in front of her brother was at stake as well.

She kept the team chat open as she raced to the third reactor, fighting her way there. Nobody in the defender team was her match one-on-one, and she did not waste time on many of them, leaving them for others.

Reaching the third reactor, she could already see that the attacker that previously typed in the team chat was already dead. There was no sign of SentientHamster189 as well, and it looked like the third reactor was completely undefended.

[He’s at the first reactor now! He just wiped out our squad leader in one hit!]

Kitana cursed, foreseeing that she would be trapped in a perpetual chase where she would never be able to catch up with him if she relied on the team chat. “Well if he keeps running, I’ll make him come to me!”

She quickly headed to the third reactor’s terminal, setting up the overload function for the terminal. [Self-destruct – Five minutes countdown.]

If this was a real battle, Kitana would have immediately placed a detonation charge to blow up the entire reactor, but this was a game, so she had to defend the terminal for five minutes to ensure the defenders did not input the shutdown sequence.

Immediately the defenders began to swarm over, forcing Kitana to defend aggressively. The notification of the self-destruct also notified the attackers, which also began to rush over, causing the area around the third reactor to become a pitched battle.

Kitana danced across the battlefield, shooting out critical parts on enemy exosuits while deftly dodging the enemy with her overly-augmented mobility loadout, the thrusters burning blue as she spun around.

She did not know what SentientHamster189 looked like exactly but was sure that with the amount of pressure, she was inflicting on the defenders, she would be able to find him soon.

The focus fire from the defenders became even more intense, forcing her to eventually retreat under the cover of her fellow attackers. The defender’s team chat was going equally wild, flaming Kitana to no end.

Kitana checked the leaderboard, but noticed that the gap between her and SentientHamster189 had only increased further!

[He’s cutting us off at the spawn area! We can’t even get past him to the third reactor!]

The extra lives that the attackers had would cause them to spawn at a safe area on the moon’s surface, but it did not mean that they were completely safe on the way to the moon’s base. Apparently, SentientHamster189 and his squad were holding up more than ten attackers on their own.

This caused the reinforcements of the attackers to be cut off and as the attackers continued to fall one by one at the third reactor, the number disparity became even more and more apparent. Kitana cursed, wondering if SentientHamster189 was actively avoiding her.

“Dammit!” Kitana cursed as she decided to head directly to the reported location, saving her attacker team. As much as she wanted to go solo, she knew she could not win while her team was getting pressured like this.

However, the moment she got there, she was just a step too late – SentientHamster189 and his squad had already retreated. “What the hell is his problem?!” Kitana raged in her mind, while Kieran was beginning to pout.

“You told me you were going to fight him!” Kieran complained.

“Well if he wasn’t such a fucking coward I would!” Kitana shot back in her mind internally, but externally she forced a smile. “I am, Kieran, it just takes time. Not every battle is about killing the opponent, it’s about the objective!”

As the battle raged on, the lives of the attackers and defenders began to slowly deplete at an equally steady rate, reducing the number of players on the field. The attackers did not manage to destroy even a single reactor, and it was now five versus five.

Kitana had not died yet, but so did SentientHamster189 and his squad. There were only five minutes left till the defenders automatically won. This already implied to the attackers that the only way to win was to kill all the defenders immediately or detonate all three reactors at the same time.

There was no time to get together and plan due to the time limit, so the attackers simply rushed forward, doing what they thought was best. Kitana expected the defenders to continue hiding from her as usual, so she decided to activate the overload function on the first reactor immediately, while the remaining attackers did the same for the other reactors.

However, unexpectedly, SentientHamster189 was already at the first reactor, waiting for her.

“Finally!” Kitana cheered, but she put her game face on, immediately firing at him.

It was the first time Kitana had seen him directly, and she immediately noticed that it was a spearman exosuit. “What?! You’re telling me a melee exosuit managed to kill that many ranged mechs?”

Kitana assumed it was due to his squad working together, but as they duelled and Kitana failed to land hit after hit, she started to be warier and warier of SentientHamster189.

“If I’m right, he did the same as me and put everything into mobility! A single hit would incapacitate him, but I can’t hit him at all!” Kitana frowned. SentientHamster189 suddenly sped up towards her, attempting to impale her in a lancer charge.

With her boost thrusters, she immediately accelerated back while throwing out the remainder of the grenades she had picked up, forcing them to detonate immediately as she somersaulted back down, before blind firing into the smoke. The smoke blinded her equally, but Kitana had more than enough energy to continue firing.

Out from the smoke, a spear was thrown extremely fast towards Kitana, but she dodged it with ease, spinning to the left as she pulled her rifle up to bear again, but SentientHamster189 was already in front of her, having dashed out of the smoke in a different direction.

“What?! He threw his weapon to gain extra speed?” Kitana was caught off guard as SentientHamster189 immediately used his two hands to lock Kitana’s exosuit arms down, crushing them with his grip strength.

As a melee exosuit, naturally SentientHamster189 had a sheer advantage over the ‘Iron Bullet’ exosuit at such a close range.

The arms of the two exosuits were designed differently as well, with Kitana’s arms being focused on precision and fine control, while SentientHamster189’s arms were focused on grip strength and raw power, enabling him to crush Kitana’s arms with ease.

With her arms crushed, Kitana could no longer shoot back, only trying to lift her legs in an attempt to kick the enemy away, but SentientHamster189 immediately punched Kitana right in the helmet, instantly killing her.

Kitana’s view went grey as she became a soul-like ‘avatar’, watching her body collapse to the floor as SentientHamster189 walked over to retrieve his spear that was stuck in the wall.

“Noooo! You lost!” Kieran was distraught. As much as he wanted to watch SentientHamster189 in action, he hated the fact that his sister lost even more.

“Don’t worry Kieran, once I respawn, I’ll come back for a revenge match!”

[Battle Ended: All attackers in respawn mode. Defenders Win!]

The battle scene abruptly changed to the post-match scene, showing everyone’s virtual avatar and the final score. Kitana quickly looked around for SentientHamster189’s avatar, but could not find him in the sea of avatars.

“How the hell did he survive my grenades and who is he?” Kitana wondered. She knew many enforcers and military personnel that played Shattered Empire, but they were usually ranked higher and wouldn’t waste time on an unranked match like this.

***

Ceres wiped off his sweat as he exited the VR pod. “Wow, I had forgotten what it was like to play VR after so long.”

“What do you mean? Did you not have VR pods in Zone 17? Didn’t you just come from the Zone?” Don curiously asked as he too exited the VR pod alongside Randy. The three of them had decided to train for the squad test using the Shattered Empire VR game.

Ceres realized his slip of the tongue, before stuttering slightly. “No… I meant I didn’t have the money back then to play in such a good pod, so it’s very new to me.”

“What? Impossible. You were a legend in that fight! You even beat that ‘Steel Raven Lady’ in one fell swoop! If I had known you were that good earlier, we should have not spent so long avoiding her.” Randy excitedly patted Ceres’s shoulder, before realizing it was extremely sweaty and tried to wipe off the residual on his pants.

“It’s common protocol among rebellion squads to always avoid the big fish. No point having some stupid heated battle – life isn’t a team deathmatch, there’s always an objective to focus on.” Don slapped the back of Randy’s head softly.

Ceres nodded. Killing for the sake of killing never worked in real life – unless the objective was to eliminate the enemy.

“Still, that ‘Steel Raven Lady’ gave off quite the impression. She was extremely professional…” Don pondered, scratching his beard.

“There’s no chance of anyone outside tracing us right?” Ceres asked worriedly.

“Of course. The rebellion needs to hide. All our traces on the VR net are completely obfuscated. Right now, if they are trying to find you, they’ll probably end up finding the wrong person in a random inner zone!” Don laughed heartedly.

The three of them decided to head over to the canteen for a meal together. The mess hall was designed around a centralized kitchen which effectively doled out various forms of nutri-paste. The rebellion wasn’t running a high-class restaurant, so nobody really complained about the standard of the food.

Ceres had been eating nutri-paste very often, apart from the first time he ate a grodaw raw and the infrequent mawsie meat. Looking at the hundreds of other people having their meals on bench tables, it really felt like he was back in the orphanage.

Sometimes he wondered whether he subconsciously craved stability and structure, which is why he kept gravitating towards these kinds of organizations. “Maybe it’s my training that makes me feel like I want to be a cog in a machine.”

Ceres understood where these feelings came from – it was due to the educational syllabus of the military orphanage. The orphans were geared to enter the military after all, so it was only natural that he was influenced in that direction as well. Didn’t he want to join the Dest Troop Legion?

It was far too late to think about that either way. Now that he joined the rebellion to save his friends, there was no turning back. He was effectively an enemy of the administration and the Five Families. “Well, I already was before I joined, so not much of a difference.”

“Either way, we worked really well as a squad! I think we can even break into the major missions at this rate.” Randy said as they queued up in front of the central kitchen with metal trays in their hand.

The missions in the rebellion were divided into three categories – minor, major and top. Right now, Ceres was supposed to act like a newcomer and participate in his first minor mission.

Minor missions were run-of-the-mill tasks, but still essential to making sure the rebellion could stay afloat. It ranged anywhere from resupply missions to escort missions – effectively the low-level tasks not many would be thankful for.

Major missions were important tasks: things like recruiting a target, setting up a new supply network, infiltrating a known Five Families organization or retrieving a sensitive data package from one of the informants embedded in the enforcers. All space missions were included in this category.

The top missions were life-and-death missions for the rebellion. Failure could potentially result in the death and eventual exposure of an entire rebel cell. “Too slow, I’m climbing too slow,” Ceres muttered to himself.

However, he could not rush it, as rising so fast to the top would only put a big red sign above his head with the words ‘SUSPICIOUS’, especially when he had just been recently exposed to be in Rockhold.

Ceres wondered how Cardenia was going to deal with the enforcers – no doubt they were putting a lot more emphasis on Rockhold now.

Sitting down with the squad to eat, he shovelled the nutri-paste into his mouth, not caring about the taste. He pulled out his multi-terminal to check the leaderboards of all rebellion agents in the ‘White Fang’ rebel cell, seeing his agent call sign at #490.

“Feels like the competition all over again…” Ceres sighed. The last time he focused on winning something, he had failed to notice the signs all around him, causing him to be oblivious to what could happen.

Sure, no one would have expected Ceres to know that he would have been sabotaged in the final duel, but in hindsight, Ceres knew that if he had just paid more attention to what was happening around him, maybe he would have had more control over the outcome.

He recalled the group stage qualifiers for the exosuit repair category, where the outers and inners all ganged up on him. Ceres had previously assumed that it was the nature of the competition and understood that the outers too had underlying grudges against him, but he was naïve and treated it as though it was not his fault.

Mr Qiu’s smiling face appeared in his mind, causing him to feel anger rising within him again. “Never again. Never again.” Ceres repeated to himself. This time, he was going to take a more proactive role wherever he could.

As Ceres lifted his head up, he noticed Sierra in the mess hall eating, who locked eyes with him. A mixture of curiosity and anger could be seen in her eyes, before she angrily looked the other way, forcing the food down her throat before she almost choked on it.

“My actions have directly led to the creation of a cult…” Ceres sighed even more, causing Randy to look at him curiously.

Before Randy could ask, Don quickly put a hand on Randy’s shoulder, his eyes glancing between Sierra and Ceres and giving a knowing smile. “Sometimes a lovestruck man has to dwell on it for a bit, give him some time.”

Randy did not understand what that meant at all, but he decided not to ask Ceres, who kept on sighing every now and then. He wondered what was the past of the mysterious ‘Dumpling’, but it seemed like a bad idea to dig it all up with the continuous sighing of Ceres.