Page 13 of How We Play the Game
“I didn’t need—” Ivan cuts me off by sliding the provided headphones over his ears and turning his attention to the screen, where the ten-second countdown to ourGLRmatch is already down to five. I trade in my annoyance for practicality and slip my headphones on as well. The noise cancellation kicks in and trades the chaos of the stage for a thick, pressurized silence that immediately primes my brain for competition. The countdown hits zero, and the match begins on-screen.
CHAPTER FIVE
EVERY ROUND OFGuardians League Royalestarts the same way. Your character and everyone else’s are crowded onto a flying barge that makes a slow circuit above the map. You have a minute to jump off and parachute to your preferred starting area, and the moment your feet touch the ground, there’s a target on your back. Anyone can kill anyone, which means everyone is the enemy. Only one player comes out alive.
The barge for this game is packed with impressive player characters. There are talking lizards outfitted with custom fits that cost hundreds of Wizzcoins, alien bipeds with trophy crowns that denote a hundred, five hundred, even a thousand individual wins, and people like me who personalized their character to look like them. Avatar ZORA has dark skin, afro puffs tied high on her head, and a tactical black jumpsuit that is tighter than anything I’d wear in real life but not as obviously porny as some of the other skins Wizzard offers in the online store.
Boing!I hear a comically overproduced bouncing noise, and ZORA tumbles off the barge and into the open air. Did somebody actually use a bump hammer to push me off? I spin my camera around in my few seconds of free fall and see one character holding a pink, fuzzy spring-loaded hammer while they spam the hi emote. Floating above their head is the name VANE.
“Son of a—” I can’t finish my sentence; fuming at Ivan has left me with a scant few seconds left to pull my parachute before I take fall damage. I slam on the button and feel genuine relief when ZORA lands, hard but not damage hard, on the roof of a squat cylindrical tower.
Damn it, I’m exposed and I need to move, now. I don’t hear or see anyone else, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. Let me just crouch down and see if I can get my head around where the hell I am and if there’s any loot before I jump.
Spinning my camera around gives me a better look at my surroundings. At first glance the map layout looked totally new, but now that I have a second to breathe, I can see that’s not the case. It’s a version of the classicGLRmap they first put out at launch, which hardly anyone plays on anymore because all the decent players memorized the field. This version is strange and run-down, and I’m sure there’s some lore reason why a giant crater is visibly smoking in the northeast quadrant. Whatever next chapter ofGLRthis map is supposed to introduce must move the story into seriously apocalyptic territory, and I feel a flutter in my chest when I realize that we are the first players to try this map, ever. It would be an honor if I wasn’t low-key panicking right now.
I’m not far from where I’d have chosen to land if I had any control over this situation. That’s some good luck, I guess.There’s also a glittering obsidian chest at the dead center of the rooftop here with no one else gunning for it, which is as good a reason as any to start moving in that direction. That’s the first thing you learn when you want to get good atGuardians League Royale—always be on the move. Even if it’s just jumping in place or moving in a zigzag line from cover to cover. Staying still makes you a sitting target for anyone who might have you in their sights. Which in my case might be any of the best players in the country and a bunch of scene-chewing streamers who’d love a quick kill. Yeah, I’m getting out of here.
However, my ears pick up on something that absolutely has to be an error. My noise-canceling headphones are supposed to isolate my game’s sound so I can concentrate on my playing, but I hear an almost imperceptible clicking noise and the low, expectant hum of an open voice chat line. That’s impossible. No one’s allowed to talk to anyone inGLR. It negates the entire point of the game.
I’ll figure this out later; I need to raid this chest and escape to some cover, but when I turn I see the man of my nightmares standing on the other side of the roof. VANE looks as much like Ivan as ZORA looks like me. His Guardians store haircut mimics his real floppy ’do; a Diamond-tier exclusive bandanna is tied around the bottom half of his face, exposing only his avatar’s acid-green eyes, which are brighter than his real eyes but somehow less striking … None of this matters. Ivan has to go.
VANE spots both me and the chest. Instead of making the smart move and trying to take me out, he charges for the treasure instead. Come on, the least he can do is make this hard.I only have the standard-issue laser pistol everyone starts out with at the beginning of a match, but that’s more than enough to put a hole in this dork. I don’t have time to aim as I race him to the payload but I don’t need time; at this range getting a kill is basically reflexive. Tap.Bang.
Nothing. He shielded at the last second.
“Yeah,” Ivan’s voice crackles on the other end of my headphones’ open communication. “That’s not going to work twice.”
“What the hell? Go down. You’re done. Die!” I say out loud, punctuating each phrase with another shot at Ivan’s character. He dodges like Neo inThe Matrix, but doesn’t return fire. Somehow, that makes this even more infuriating.
“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?” Ivan asks. I can hear his smirk over the microphone, and my imagination helpfully projects it onto his character’s pseudo-Ivan face, just hidden by the bandanna. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
I’m going to get a different result. I dash around his character and kick the chest open, which sends a collection of power-ups, weapons, maps, and special attack indicators scattering across our segment of the roof. Nothing too bad, though I’d really like to get lucky and snag the one rocket launcher Wizzard always hides on the map somewhere. I snatch up a decent bow-and-arrow set, one explosive arrow, and a belt of antigravity grenades before lasering a circle in the tower roof below me and dropping through the perfect hole I’ve created like a cartoon character. That’s all, folks.
Shit, no, it isn’t. I hear Ivan drop from the hole behind me and ignore him to crack open a new loot crate on the topfloor. This time I’m not grabbing anything. I take a few huge steps back and send an arrow straight through Ivan’s back when he dives for the cache.Twang. Snap. The arrow cracks in half when it meets Ivan’s extremely basic armor.
“You know, this whole time I assumed you were having a bad day back at Wizzcon,” Ivan says with an audible laugh hiding in the back of his throat. “Thought maybe we just got off on the wrong foot.”
“This is a bug,” I whisper to myself.
“Now I don’t feel so bad.” Another hit, another wasted arrow. “Because you don’t have a right foot.”
I’m assuming Ivan can hear me too. “We have to tell them the match is bugged. It’s illegal to force me to hear you talk.”
“It’s not bugged, Zora.” Ivan’s character rifles through the loot and grabs a second-tier rifle. “It’s proximity chat.”
I look at my heads-up display and shrink back in my seat like a wilted houseplant. Sure enough, the minimap in the top right corner of my screen shows a halo around the little green dot that is my character. Chat mode is auto-toggled for this match. I’ve never, ever played with it on before, because why would I want to talk to my prey before I shoot it?
“This sucks.” It’s all I can think to say.
“So true, bestie,” Ivan responds sarcastically. “But you won’t be playing long. This is for Wizzco—”
Like I’m gonna fall for that. I drop an antigravity bomb that glues Ivan’s dramatic ass to the ceiling and sends me bouncing back up through the hole in the roof I made before. I think about using my explosive arrow to take him out, but I don’t have the time to draw it and still escape. I perform a quick aim check before I leap to the next roof and see aplayer enter my crosshairs. I use a regular laser arrow this time.Twang.Jackpot.
FIRST BLOOD: PLAYER ZORA HAS ELIMINATED PLAYER LEAR.
That’s what I do! Now, to escape. I leap to the next half-ruined building and land right beside someone hiding inside. Throw grav bomb. Aim at the ceiling. Shoot. Done. Two kills down. Now I just have to—
“You’re player ZORA, right?” The voice is friendly, conversational. And not in-game.
