Page 81 of Don't Hate the Player
“I know,” I say. Pop fog, jump to next roof. Penelope’s doing a great job staying in the radius of Pharaoh’s stealth attacks. “Up ahead, VANE’s scouting that palace.” From my angle on the roof, I can see that the payload isn’t there, but now’s as good an opportunity as ever to get a shot in. “Cover me.”
Penelope swings her character around to keep my back as I ping a bolt off Ivan’s armor. I watch him spin around and spot me on the roof. Another bolt crunches through and takes off the tiniest sliver of his health bar. It’s enough to grant me the power to charge a magic shot that will take off more than a sliver, and as I send it sailing into Jubilee’s shoulder, I see my camera angle slide wildly to the left. Someone’s hit me from the side.
I wheel around and see Byunki swinging at me and pop another fog to try to get behind him, but he’s seen me play against Lucafont and anticipates my move. He pulls his arm back for a heavy attack and—BAM!—collides with Bob’s mech armor instead.
“I got him, keep hunting.” Bob doesn’t have to tell me twice. Penelope and I leap down from the roof and continue on street level, dashing through ruined walls that form shortcuts through the city’s half-destroyed buildings.
Our payload is in another castle, it seems. Up ahead, the windows of the western palace glow with the unmistakable rainbow tint of a jewel cask. Penelope alerts the team that we’ve spotted the payload. Jake meets us on the street, where we see Ivan and Muddy heading straight for our prize.
“Don’t let them land,” Bob pants. You’d think he was actually running around with how out of breath he sounds over chat. His command comes too late. Red text appears in the center of my screen: Payload Timer, Two Minutes. Fury’s got the cask marked.
Before I can stop him, Jake’s Pythia dashes past me into the palace and smacks Muddy’s Nero with a well-placed staff strike. It’s enough to knock Muddy out of the payload’s radius, but it’s also exactly what Muddy was waiting for.
“Jake, no!” I call out as I run in to support him. I fire off triple bolts at Muddy, hoping to land a stun. Get the hell away from my snake priestess boyfriend, space scum. Yeah, that’s right. I’ve decided. I’m kicking Fury’s ass and asking Jake outright after, you slut-shaming piece of shit. Penelope falls back to swipe at Ivan while Jake and I chop Muddy’s health up as best we can before he leaps away. With all three of us in proximity, the payload quickly switches to Team Unity’s possession. Flag: captured. Now we just have to keep it.
The rest of our teams have caught on to the battlefront moving to the western palace. Bob and Ki file in quickly and form a half circle around the payload. I see from the health bars in the top corner that Han and Erik are topping off Fury’s health for the next phase of battle. Ki and Jake heal us as well while we wait for our enemies to arrive.
It doesn’t take long.
I’m more than happy to engage Ivan one-on-one as Unity launches into a dense, defensive battle—a sortie, if I remember Byunki’s military terms correctly—centered on the payload. I trained with him for months, so there’s nothing he could do to surprise me. Parry, leap back, pop fog, close-range shoot. Tap into my magic meter to cause a little pain, dodge back, and keep chipping at his health.
To my right, I see Ki engaged in an ice fight with Han-Jun. Neither of them has any advantage, but the giant icicles erupting from their battle quickly begin taking up more of the palace floor. Euphrates Crater might not have any default environmental hazards, but player-generated ice can change that real quick before it melts. Ki is playing masterfully, barely taking one hit for every three she lands on Han-Jun. Her special meter fills up faster than I thought was possible, and the millisecond it’s charged, Ki blasts Han-Jun across the palace with a chunk of ice big enough to bury him completely. Han-Jun drops. Fury is down a healer and is no longer eligible for a payload win!
“Nice one,” Jake congratulates Ki. He’s locked in a fight with Erik’s Jenkins, holding his own, and still has time to toss a heal where it needs to go.
“Don’t you mean ice one?” she asks triumphantly.
Her victory is short-lived. Erik dodges one of Jake’s attacks and slides on the remaining ice toward Penelope, who doesn’t see him coming.
No one can warn her in time. Erik is juiced up from his fight with Jake and slams a mechanical baton into Penelope’s Castor. If she wasn’t weak to mechs, she might have survived, but that baton attack drains health over time, multiplied by his character’s advantage. Castor glows blue, briefly turns so transparent we can see his skeleton model shine bright through his armor, and drops.
It’s death to look away from my screen, but I sense Penelope’s movement two seats down. She leans forward and holds her head in her hands, allowing herself a moment of disappointment before she pops back up, crosses her arms, and drifts her eyes up toward the ceiling. Dropping in competition shows the dead player a third-person view of the rest of the match and cuts their audio so they can’t advise their teammates.
With Penelope done, we’ve lost our chance to win the payload too.
“Abandon ship!” Bob shouts. With the payload strategy scrapped, we move through to our less-loved but still feasible plan of going for a checkmate.
Unity scatters like roaches, the remaining four of us each leaving from a different direction pursued by a Fury player. Byunki is after me, and a glance behind me shows Muddy running to catch up with Bob.
Byunki’s Lucafont whip-catches Pharaoh’s ankle, and I take another hit. I spend my leftover juice from my fight with Ivan shooting at his spectral armor but don’t have enough to pull the Shatter special that won the first round.
“Heal.” I try to remain calm. We still have both of our healers, and one should be free to help me out here. No one arrives. “Heal!” I try again. Nothing.
Byunki lands more blows on me faster than I can throw fog to evade them. I’ve shaved off about a fifth of his health, but he’s easily taken three-quarters of mine. It’s possible that Unity could take him from here, but I’ll be damned if I let Byunki take me out of this match without taking him with me.
Lucafont’s head is hidden beneath a glowing white helm, but I picture it shielding Byunki’s face, salivating at the prospect of humiliating me one last time in front of my parents, friends, and Jake.
“Stand down, Em,” Bob calls. I don’t know where he is on the map or how he can see where I am.
No. I don’t want to abandon this fight. I have maybe a quarter of his bar now and enough of a charge to pull off another necromagic attack. If I use it, my special counter will reset to zero, but it might be exactly what my team needs to hammer down the rest of Byunki’s health.
“Em, don’t do what he wants,” I hear Jake say. “Come to me. Middle plaza.”
He’s right. I should have listened to it coming from Bob, but hearing Jake’s concern snaps me out of the rage I was feeling just a moment before. I turn and run, using Pharaoh’s superior speed to leave Byunki whipping his sword into a cloud of fog.
My call for heals went unanswered because of the situation going on in the middle plaza. Ki, Bob, and Jake are there staving off double attacks from Ivan and Muddy. I had decent luck with Ivan before but don’t want to alert them to my presence, so I leap up onto a building and see if I can line up that magic shot I wanted to use on Byunki. I could aim for Muddy, since he has an elemental strength against Bob, but I see his health bar is nearly twice what Ivan has to work with.
As much as I want to slam this bolt into the asshole who betrayed Unity—and I really, really do—the smart move is to take out my former partner. Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes.
