Ten minutes later I was strolling up to the Children’s Park.

There was no way children would be coming back to play here… not a chance. I scanned the devastation and sighed. NPC kids were still kids, and they deserved better than a park scattered with bodies, body parts, blast craters, and playground equipment full of bullet holes.

I wasn’t the type of person to shirk duty, but this was a bit much, even for a guy who’d done several combat tours. I sighed and wondered if the cleanup and the danger level of a park full of mines wasn’t too much of a hassle. I brought up the quest prompt again.

A desperate series of clashes between the Puddin Pack and the Roly Poly Craft Ninjas has left many dead, and local borders in flux. In the last clash, the Roly Poly Ninjas prepped a kill zone at Children’s Park and led the Puddin’ Pack through it to great effect. But now that the border in the area is secure, no one has had the decency to clean up. Children will be coming back any day now to play in the sun, and if you don’t collect the mines, it will be a bloody day to play.

Quest: Remove landmines from Children’s Park

Objective: Disarm and remove 20 mines.

Reward: 1 random uncommon card, Plus 700 reputation with residents of Bangchom District. Gain ownership of Bangchom District (Optional). Minus 700 reputation with the Roly Poly Ninjas. (War with Roly Poly Ninjas if ownership claim to Bangchom District is pressed.)

“Yeah nah,” I said. The cops would come and cordon off the area, make sure kids didn’t get blown up. In the middle of this thought, I remembered the police had been chased out, murdered or disbanded as part of the storyline for this whole nano-city.

Well, some other rube would waste hours doing this, and possibly blow himself up in the middle of the job.

“H-hello?” a little voice called.

“Who’s that?” I called.

A small, grubby face appeared between two of the playground bars, followed closely by another.

“Mister?”

I unsheathed the vibro sword and started checking directly in front of me for mines. Slow and easy, like they teach you in Basic. “Hang on, kid. I’m on my way, okay?”

“We’re really thirsty. Hungry too.”

“What’s your name, huh?”

“Sota. My sister is Mei.”

“Where’s your parents, Sota and Mei?”

The little face filled with despair. “I dunno.”

“Don’t worry, Dirk Stone’s got you. You just stay put and I’ll see about the lethal ordinance buried all over the place.”

I’d been in something similar overseas. Even saved the kids, though one of them lost a leg before I could get them out. It all rolled over me. That was old me, this was cyber-enhanced nano me. I’d get them out whole and safe.

There was that one nagging doubt, though. Was I saving NPCs? Or real children? And did it matter.

It didn’t. I couldn’t leave little kids to die. Even if they were made up by the damned AI to tug at my heartstrings. I knew Eric, and he was an NPC, and he was realer than a lot of the civilians I worked with after the war.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

They were people. Beings created entirely out of nano-goop had begun to attain a place in my mind similar to Patches: part of the family and worth dying for.

Big Damn Hero Dirk Stone was on the case.

The quest was just to remove the landmines, but this place had been blown to hell and needed all new equipment anyway. This wasn’t cross turf, but it wasn’t nothing… I decided to call Eric anyhow.

The first landmine was less than a foot from my current position, which sped my heartrate up a tad. I gave a quiet string of swear words and checked the surrounding dirt for any other buried bombs. Meanwhile my phone rang, several times, until Eric picked up.

“Hey,” I said.

“Boss.”

“Whoever you were about to take into Cross territory, get them over to my position instead. Bring Nolan and a couple of his people to schlep out some metal detectors, ordnance disposal, crafting materials, and paint.”

“That it?”

I detected sass, but didn’t mention it. “Food and water. Some wheelbarrows, or whatever’s better than that. Floaty crates or whatever he’s got for hauling dead bodies.”

He snorted ruefully. “You got it.”

I sighed, shook my head, pulled out my vibro-blade and started checking for landmines.

Nolan, Eric, security and the others weren’t long, maybe half an hour. I already had three mines flagged, working in toward Sota and Mei.

Nolan surveyed the scene only briefly, peering distastefully at the bodies and the sorry state of the park. In short order we had people going wee-eeep! with the metal detectors, flagging their positions, and stepping carefully over them to flag the next one. Meanwhile Nolan and another tech carefully pried them up and unlocked the mechanism that armed them.

Nolan beamed. “Free landmines! It’s not even my birthday!”

Whoever the Roly Poly Ninjas were, they were some serious dicks and were in need of a thorough extermination event.

We reached Sota and Mei a good thirty minutes after Nolan and Eric showed up, reached some water up to them, then realized Mei had taken shrapnel from one of the explosions. We got her a healing patch after a drink of water, and for a couple solid minutes she cried and screamed.

My inner rage demon grew, and I forced myself to listen to every pained grunt and sob. The nano-healing patches worked great, but they really knocked you out for a short time. As I’d just learned, two at once resulted in blinding pain.

My chest ached for this probably-fake kid. She turned a look of utter horror on me that had me feeling like a complete tool, even though I hadn’t done anything to her. Any effort I made to calm her down worked the opposite way, and I gave up trying.

It was messed up. This nanogame could make happy places for us all to live and work and play. It didn’t have to make children and then stick them in the middle of some damn hellhole and leave them to die.

I swore silently to myself and turned back to the child. With Sota’s help, she calmed right down and accepted the first rice ball stuffed with seaweed bits and tuna fish. She set right to work chowing down.

I did the math in my head. “You two were out here after midnight?”

Sota got another mouthful of rice ball and started going ‘fuff muff herf miff’, but after another couple minutes I was able to learn their parents were fighting, and so they slipped out to the playground to sleep it off. They had blankets and pillows with them.

This turned out to be a bad decision, when the bullets started flying and the mines started exploding.

“Hey, kid,” I said, and produced one of the cards. “You see this?”

He nodded. I handed it to him. “Learn it, okay? It might keep you safe.”

He took it with a simple: “Okay.” My stomach sank even further; he and his sister were real kids trapped in this thing. Maybe it still mattered afterall.

“You know where those ninjas have their base?” I asked.

He stared at me, mouth stuffed completely full of rice, and nodded.

Five minutes later Eric and I were at either side of the door to the Roly Poly Club. The neon sign was off, given it was early afternoon, but it looked like a ball-shaped bug with a huge smile and two rows of spotless teeth giving me two big-gloved thumbs up.

A light rain had just started. If it picked up a little, I might feel like it was washing some of the guilt off, the guilt I had no business feeling in the first place.

Eric knocked again.

A gruff voice grunted from within. “Go away!”

“We’ve got a special delivery for one Ninja, one RP Ninja?” I responded, trying to keep the anger out of my words.

“Screw. Off,” the voice answered. I knew that tone, that dismissive sound that meant he didn’t expect anything bad to happen. That tone that meant he didn’t know who he was talking to.

A lot of idiots had given those same words with that same tone back to me back when I’d been Kevin Daley.

“You the guys that set up landmines in a park for kids?”

Silence greeted that remark.

I sheared the lock off with the vibro-sword, ripped the door open, and sprayed some plasma blasts inside. Eric avoided being hit by the swinging door, then stepped aside to toss the special delivery into the entryway.

It was a frag grenade wrapped in eight landmines. A handful of seconds later, fire roiled out through the doorway and left Eric laughing, or coughing, or both at the same time.

“Pfft,” I snorted. “There’s no minus 700 reputation with the gang if there’s no gang.”

We entered the hideout after another pair of grenades, and turned the place into a low-budget horror movie.