Are yall seeing this?
Gradie got his AUG up and firing but all he could see was the headlights, which made his attempt fucked from the jump. At first, he assumed it was a car, maybe because of Luke’s mention of a Lambo, so he fired between the two headlights at the right-hand side where the driver should be, like he had trained a thousand times.
But he only got two bursts off before the headlights split apart into two motorcycles. He tried to line up another shot, but the lights zipped by and swerved in impossibly tight curves.
The moment he got one in his sights, it didn’t matter.
The riders opened up with some kind of one-handed machine gun with an RPM out of a bad action movie and an ammo capacity to match and the air cracked open like it was sweating bullets. Gradie went prone holding the trigger and the two motorcycles sliced by.
For an instant, Luke was just standing there, unharmed, and Gradie thought they had made it through, even rolled over to reach for a fresh mag on his chest, then a wire leapt off the ground and went taught between a kunai stuck in Luke’s suit and the receding engine sounds, and yanked him ten feet horizontal and flat on the ground.
“Piece of shit!”
Luke disappeared into the mist along with the riders, and Gradie balled up laughing.
“Bro fuck you get these crotch rocket riding mother—” Luke was cut out by a full auto burst. For a moment, silence, and then,
“Fuck your pistol rounds bitch!”
There was a sound that was unmistakably an exo-powered fist punching through a motorcycle helmet and turning a skull to paste. Gradie looked up, and sure enough, a star twinkled.
Somewhere off to the side, another full-auto burst flashed in the mist, followed by the unmistakable sound of Angel’s laser rifle, and another star twinkled as the first one fell.
Then something else caught Gradie’s eye.
The Dragon, a dark undulating form against the dim stars, becoming clearer by the second as the mist faded. In another expression of the strange dream knowledge this place gave out like breath, he knew the Dragon was a friend, if only he could get to it.
He looked down at the glass, now like a flowing river pressed under a clear single pane, and summoned a bullpup .50, like a near future upgrade of the GM6 Lynx, and something like a harpoon gun mixed with an AT4, holding one in each hand.
He swung the .50 around on his back via the sling and fired the hook gun up at the dragon. The metal projectile, a harpoon composed of articulated joints, flew right past the dragon, then, like the helicopter he had watched before, was caught up in the dragon’s gravity field and curved into an orbit around the serpent.
He pulled a lever on the harpoon gun and the nano wire caught in the latch, shooting him up into the sky. He hit another button, and the gun began to retract the wire into itself, pulling him toward the Dragon.
“Holy shit bro did you just snag that dragon?!” Nova laughed.
“Yeah, gonna give him a squad invite.”
“I wonder if it will actually let you stand on it,” Angel said.
“Look out!” Nova said.
“Contact right!” Luke yelled, and another burst of 50 cal MG fire broke out far below Gradie, letting him know that Luke had gotten another gun.
AUUNNNGGGHHHHH
The dragon roared, and while the sound was not unfriendly, it sounded a bit like a warning. Gravity shifted as Gradie approached, moving from the cube below him to the dragon itself, but it was not the sterile gravity of a planet. While he felt the dragon become the new “down”, and his stomach dropped as if he were falling towards it, another opposing force, another field of gravity just as even and powerful as the first, buffeted him away from the black form, and he felt the strain on his hook gun’s rachet.
The dragon was exactly as long as a suburban block, four storys in diameter, and blacker than the space around. He had seen this kind of black before, in Lucy’s hair and accessories, but to approach an entire being of it made his skin crawl, a surprisingly visceral physical reaction that felt like a reflex. But despite the blackness, it glowed, a corona of white, wavering, flame-like aurora that only ever appeared at the edges no matter how the thing moved, like an eclipse given form.
He half expected his feet to sink into the darkness and the dragon to swallow him through its non-skin, but his feet set down on the thing with the same humming glass sensation as when he had first set foot on the cube below, like it was pure potential frozen in place.
If the dragon gave a shit about him being there, it didn’t show it. Its massive head, eight-eyed and angular like a cut jewel, nodded up and down as it moved along its path, and Gradie got the feeling it couldn’t actually see or respond to anything happening in the game.
Gradie steadied himself, looked up, and saw the cube rotate as the dragon passed. The misty face he had left had long since rolled out of view, and he watched three new sides of pure havoc.
Smoldering tanks and ruined buildings. Tracers dancing in smoke. Something that looked like a lightsaber duel. Energy blasts and even a wrestling match. On one face, the glass was still mostly intact and reflected the stars and the passing dragon clearly, while another side was engulfed in concrete and metal and burning wrecks. A squad of three moved around atop a building, throwing out machine gun fire and grenades at a forest that grew towards them like a green wave rolling across the black plain.
“Where’d you get to Corpse?” Luke said.
“I am currently on the fucking dragon.”
“Bullshit!” said the twins.
“Can’t see you bro,” Luke said. “But if you can be my eye in the sky, I’m looking for, oh shit.”
The 50 MG went off somewhere on the other side of the cube, reminding Gradie of his own rifle.
“One sec, gonna get the high score real fast.”
He aimed down the scope at the three guys on the roof, now joined by a fourth holding a flamethrower. The motion of the dragon was not as steady as it felt, so he went prone on the soft darkness and aimed for the flamethrower tank. The trigger was dream-butter smooth.
The barrel exploded and rolled back into the gun and a hand-sized shell casing shot out across the dragon's back, just as the flamethrower guy exploded.
“God Damn, you got a fifty up there?” Luke said.
Gradie, feeling disappointed that the explosion hadn’t touched the rest of the guys, and in fact had turned into a rolling cloud of smoke that obscured half of them from his line of sight, tried to get a bead on one of the ducking frightened players on the roof that he could see, when his world turned upside down.
AUURRRRNNNGGGCCCHHHHHK
The dragon rolled like a vanta black rug being yanked out from under him by God himself and Gradie went flying off into the void as everything spun.
“Shit!”
“Ha ha what the fuck?” “Did you piss it off?” The twins said in his ears. A second later, the wire went taught and he was yanked to a gut-punching stop like a poorly worked yoyo.
“Ugh!” His air left him, and so did the rifle. He watched the GM6 spin towards the forested side of the cube as the familiar Culver's topped side of the cube rolled into view.
“I see the dragon,” Luke said. “But not my little buddy. Oh shit, are you that thing hanging off—”
“How the fuck did you get up there!” Nova whooped.
“I am the chosen one.”
“Then why are you hanging off like a dingleberry?” Angel said dryly, which sent Nova into hysterics.
A golden beam of light shot out across the plain and lit up the remaining segment of mist.
“Fuck was that! God dammit!” Luke’s voice echoed like a bad Halloween toy, and Gradie knew he was inside a soon to be falling star.
Following the path of the beam, Gradie found a figure standing in a possibly trademarked pose, cupping his hands at his hips, charging another energy blast. Three other figures stood next to him, one of which held what Gradie recognized as an Ancient Staff with the circled X symbol of Zaros on top, and one of which was riding a fucking horse.
“Four of them, horizon facing the Culver’s,” Gradie said.
“Well fucking get them then dragon rider!” Angel said.
A retort that he had no gun formed in his mind but died before it reached his mouth and an embarrassment took its place. A fight of pure imagination and he was mourning a gun that didn’t even exist. This was the type of game he had been waiting for all his life, exactly what he had hoped Gunmaze would be every time he heard about it, and here he was swinging on a wire, helpless.
He looked at the dragon, and shockingly, the dragon looked at him. Four of its eight eyes, with black pupils and sclera and white blazing iris’ like an eclipse, blinked at him as if to say, “Well, quit thinking about it, and fucking do it,” and he felt that he was receiving a message from the unseen creator of this fragment, that whoever it was had felt the same disappointed hope about Gunmaze he had, and decided to do something about it.
And that was it. He cupped his hands in front of him and summoned two orbs of black energy flaming white at the circumference. He told himself and the world around him that they were the same kind of energy that pulsated through the dragon, and in fact was drawn from the dragon itself, and would cut through any other made object or avatar like a round through air. After a moment of focus, he felt with the bleeding dreamknowledge of the place that it was so.
The dragon made a strange rumble and Gradie braced himself for another spin, but the rumble found a cadence, and Gradie decided it was laughing.
He laughed too, and cut the wire with one of the orbs.
The fall was sudden, but he steadied himself with the orbs, which he decided had antigravity auras, and steered himself toward the four attackers charging into the mist.
The horse rider charged lightning in his lance and the other guy fired off another energy blast. Gradie aimed one hand at the center of the formation and fired.
The orb shot off like a rocket, and Gradie fell sideways into a spin, now trying to balance on the one remaining anti-grav ball. Even seen from the warped perspective of an embarrassing spin, the explosion was amazing. A single pure cracking tone, like a champagne flute played so loud it shattered, and a solid hemisphere of pure white light breaking into a wave of black distortion, like someone was smudging reality itself, that shot out like a shockwave across the plain. When it was done, and the sound echoed in the void, a hole the size of a parking lot with razor-clean sides gaped open on the ground, and the glass around it rushed like electrified water.
Gradie placed the single remaining orb under himself, like he was about to start breakdancing and landed on the ground with the satisfying sound of the glass cracking and hissing beneath the ball of eclipse.
Then energy blast guy flew across the ground and fired a blast right at Gradie’s face.
In a reflex, Gradie raised his hand, and a beam of eclipse light disintegrated the guy’s blast and went right through him, continuing on and landing on the side of the Burger Box, detonating in another orb of black destruction that left a clean-cut sphere of nothing and sent the surrounding glass into a frenzy.
But energy blast guy stood in front of him completely unharmed. He looked at his chest, looked behind him, looked back at Gradie, then glanced at the hole the first orb had left, where three figures, mountless and weaponless, now climbed up out of the smoking pit.
“Ohhh, so it like destroys things and the stage, but not players,” Energy blast guy said. “I was about to say that would have been broken as shit.”
He looked back at Gradie, who was too embarrassed and disappointed to reply, shrugged, and started charging another energy blast in his hands.
Then someone turned on the lights.
Gradie jumped back and energy blast guy ducked down with his hands over his head as the energy ball fizzled into empty air. The formerly black star-studded void had snapped instantly into an infinite ceiling of sheet metal roof and steel struts, like a solar system sized warehouse, with shapeless white lights stuck regularly across the rows. Hovering in the air, the dragon was frozen still, like a sliced-out video frame stuck on pause.
Beyond the dragon, looming like things out of a nightmare, were three figures that, if the scale of the cube was to be believed, were miles tall. Big goggle eyes stuck in flesh of nebulae glared over armless labcoats that floated on tails of lightning struck clouds.
“Holy shit,” said Nova. “The mods.”
Ever found an exploit in a game that was more fun than the game itself? Next time, how high have you really gone? Next episode, Soulflight.
