Chapter 11

Your Drill Will Pierce the Heavens!

I opened my eyes, expecting to see a big and crazy battlefield, but, instead, I was in the cockpit of some kind of machine. A very small and cramped one at that, I had barely any room to move at all.

“Shit,” Stephen’s voice crackled in my head. “I’m so sorry, I totally spaced on this part.”

“And what part would that be, Stephen? This sure looks like a very important unforgettable part.”

“Yeah, yeah, well I forgot. Basically, we spawn underground, we are in some kind of like drill machine things. Just use the control stick in front of you and watch out for—“

The drill rocked like crazy, my whole body vibrated, even chattering my teeth.

“Watch out for what, Stephen? Watch out for what!?” But he was gone, all I could hear was rumbling and drilling, as I could only assume the drill on top of the machine whirred to life.

My head was thrown back as the machine shot upward. In front of me a screen burst with information. Not nearly as overwhelming as Wordy, but still a lot of word and number vomit. But the most important piece of it was obvious: a large map, showing an icon pointing above a simplified blue image of the drill, indicating that was me… and 98 other drills in red.

“Oh fuck,” I said as I gripped the control stick to keep the drill steady.

I mentally asked if I had any relevant Stats that could help me survive this. It was quiet for a second as my Stat sheet was examined. Then the small list came through:

[ Relevant Stats:

Go Kart Driving: 1

Car Driving: 1

Trucking: 1

Plane Piloting: 1

Tank Piloting: 1

Mech Piloting: 1 ]

My heart sank as the row of ones went down. Just as I was giving up hope…

[ Video Gaming: 200 ]

[ Total Relevant Stats: 206

Your overall Skill for Piloting is… 20! ]

Hell yes! Gaming swooped in and clutched it for me. It’s hard to believe that in the Old Days adults thought games were a waste of time. Suck on that you crodgety old fucks.

As soon as my Piloting Level was decided, the things I was seeing made a lot more sense. I was suddenly able to understand the jargon on the side of the screen as the depth levels, counting down to the surface. I focused on it, and made it into a visual that was even simpler to understand, a line going up, showing me my place on it. We were about 10% up. Long way to go.

Two red drills suddenly turned and aimed directly at me. Alarms went off, alerts flashing all over the screen. I frantically looked for what to do, some kind of drill missiles, I dunno, just some kind of weaponry. But there was nothing. All I had was my drill. Which meant I had only one good course of action.

Wait for it… wait for it…

The drills came closer, gunning for the sides of my machine.

Now!

I killed the engine, staying still as they continued up, where they crashed directly into each other. They exploded in flames that rocked my machine and my head slammed into the screen. But a little head pain was preferred to being drilled into oblivion. I’d survived my first attack. But I had no doubt that there would be a lot more coming.

A blue flashing filled the screen. I frantically searched for where it was coming from. Didn't take me long to notice a flashing blue drill, quite a ways higher than me and far to the left of the map. Stephen. It had to be.

I didn't understand why we couldn't talk to each other anymore—maybe to make this part of the match more tense? The only form of communication we seemed to have was the flashing light. I pushed a button on the side of the oversized joystick, knowing what it would do. My icon started flashing in response. Both our markers synched up, flashing in unison, two blue markers divided with an uncomfortable amount of red drills in between.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

A beeping started and I looked to the top of the screen, at the surface. A large blue X was drawn, near the middle of the distance between us, in an area where not a lot of the enemy drills were gathering. I pressed the flashing button again, hoping he knew I understood. His icon flashed and he started to direct his drill toward the marker. We were in business.

Just ninety eight—whoops, excuse me, only eighty more problems were left. The smaller number just made me more nervous that we weren't even going to make it to land. That would really suck, go through all this preparation and all I would gain from it would be a few measly Stat gains in operating a vehicle. How would that help me in a tournament setting?

I shook my head and focused in on piloting the drill. Just in time too, a red drill from below had its sights set on me, warning alarms going off.

Shit. I couldn't do that slowing down trick again with the enemy coming from directly below me. So what else could I do?

I sure as hell didn't know but I was gonna stretch that level 20 in Piloting as far as I could.

My first idea was to try and get him to crash into someone else. I drove the drill close by other machines, likely making their alarms go off like crazy, and then I would swerve in front and above of them. The first time I did it it seemed to help, the drill chasing me had some trouble getting around the other innocent one.

I pulled ahead and tried it again, maneuvering exactly the same way. I didn't understand why the guy was targeting me, every drill looked the same as far as I could tell, why was he just going for—

The guy did the unthinkable, he drilled straight up this time, tearing the drill between us to pieces. Another explosion jostled my drill but I managed to keep my head steady. Mostly from fear of being next. My enemy was barely slowed down at all from his extreme show of violence. I looked at the bottom of the screen, where a meter told me how much boost I had. There was a bunch of numbers and jargon but it probably took math skills to have that and it had been since grade school when I bothered with that Stat. So I didn't have an exact gauge of how far what I had in the tank could take me.

So all I could do was guess. The bar was completely full as I hadn't used any boost yet, that was good. But I still had a lot more ground to cover. I was in line with Stephen's marker but I had only just passed the mid point of the depths. It was too good to hope that a full tank could last that long, in reality it probably could only take me 20% higher, at the absolute best.

I had one thing going for me: the lunatic after me had for sure used a lot of his fuel reserves already. All I had to do was out last him. I steered my drill up and around another drill, wishing I could somehow help them from the fate they surely would meet.

Yet, luckily, my enemy didn’t do that terrible violent maneuver again, he followed me up and around. I could almost hear the innocent pilot's sigh of relief.

And it was good for me, too. If he didn’t dive right though again, that meant either it took too much damage of the drill to do it repeatedly…or, perhaps, his fuel reserves were lower than I thought.

Spirits lifted, I gunned the boost button. My head slammed back into the seat as I rocketed up, dodging fellow drills as I went. I kept one eye on the guy after me and, sure enough, he started to lag behind. He could only manage short bursts every few seconds. I fell into step with him, every time he stopped boosting I hit mine, holding it a bit longer, and then releasing as he did his pathetic boost. I glanced at the fuel and the distance remaining to the surface. It didn’t take a math genius to know that I had this in the bag. I grinned like a lunatic.

My eyes mostly stayed on the enemy drill, timing the boosts as well as I could. I was so preoccupied with that that I completely missed a shining something on the screen. I didn’t know how long it had been there but it seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, a big round gray circle, flashing like mad.

I did what anyone would do when faced with an unknown object that appeared quite suddenly: I got the hell away from it. I jerked the drill to the side, barely dodging the thing. I had no idea what it could represent, but, hopefully the guy chasing me wouldn’t see it? I didn’t have much hope of that, it was hard to miss and he had a lot more time to prepare than I did.

Yet, he made no moves to avoid it. Seconds passed and he still had a straight on collision course with the flashing symbol. Could I really be this lucky? Surely the flashing symbol would be much harder to destroy than the drill—maybe it represented a block of iron or some shit. He would hit it head on and this time explode in a flame of—

He hit it. And to my horror, he was catapulted up way faster than any boost I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe it—the fucking symbol was a boost! Why couldn’t they color it green or something?? I didn’t have much boost left but I gunned it, and drove side to side, trying to throw him off even a little bit. But the damn guy’s boost was too fast and his piloting too good to shake him.

I… I wasn’t going to make it.

All I could do was jerk the drill to the right as hard as I could as the guy made his final advance on me. His drill sliced through mine and the world was a whirl of metal and rocks.