Chapter Fifty Five: The Gods May Throw a Dice
May 20, 2011
Salt Lake City, UT
Announcer 1: Let’s take a look back at today’s action! It’s been a spectacular day at the Salt Palace Convention Center, here in downtown Salt Lake City. One thing is clear: Awakening is the biggest thing happening in the eSports world today!
Announcer 2: You couldn’t be more right about that, Sam. This is just the first day of the tournament, and we have already witnessed a new age in professional gaming. We started off the day with one hundred teams from around the globe, all vying for that five million dollar prize for first place. That’s nearly five hundred participants, many of whom have been playing the game since the beta last year.
Announcer 1: I think you call yourselves “betas,” isn’t that right, Sven?
Technical Commentator: Yeah, I was in the first round of betas last summer.
Announcer 2: So Sven, what can you tell us about that insane first round? I don’t think I’ve heard of anything quite like that.
Technical Commentator: The Battle Royale? Yes. That was quite a shock. We have seen many events and challenges in Awakening already, but this was the first one like this.
Announcer 1: What is a “Battle Royale” anyway?
Technical Commentator: It’s a type of event where all participants are dropped into a shared field, then usually they fight each other until there is only one person left standing.
Announcer 2: But Awakening doesn’t have PvP, Right?
Announcer 1: Right! So, how did the one this morning work, Sven?
Technical Commentator: You are correct; Awakenings doesn’t support PvP… yet; there have been rumors that the next update might be bringing that into the game as well, however.
Announcer 1: Really? That’s big. I bet there are many players who are looking forward to that feature.
Announcer 2: Well, maybe not everyone likes fighting other people, though. I know a lot of players love the fighting monsters dynamic.
Technical Commentator: You are right. The event this morning stayed true to that play style. Rather than fighting other players, the teams were all challenged with waves of mobs… monsters. I’m really jealous of the participants. Normally, only one party can fight an enemy at a time. Once the battle starts, other teams are locked out and can’t interfere. They changed something in the code this time, and now it was a free-for-all. Not only could you team up against one enemy, but multiple mobs were able to keep swarming the teams, even before they finished taking down a different monster.
Announcer 1: Yeah, I think we have some footage of that, right, Kelly?
Announcer 2: We sure do. Look at this fight as a team this morning was eliminated when two orcs charged through the middle of their battle while chasing another team. That was chaotic.
Technical Commentator: Yes, I’ve never had to deal with that kind of thing before. I can’t wait until they introduce that into the public version of the game. I’m sure it messed up with a lot of the team’s strategies today, though. That’s quite sinister to introduce a new dynamic into the game on the first day of the tournament.
Announcer 1: Too right, especially as this was an elimination round. In fact, it looks like they are all going to be eliminations, all the way to the final.
Announcer 2: In that first battle, we went from 100 teams, all the way down to 32. From 463 participants, down to 147. It’s hardly surprising that nearly all the four-player teams were eliminated.
Technical Commentator: Yes, five-player teams would definitely have an advantage with attacks coming in from all sides. See, like this team, you can see that they have already developed a star pattern formation rather than the more typical flanking formation. They are getting more cautious.
Announcer 2: That’s one of the Korean teams, right?
Announcer 1: You got that right; that’s White Tiger out of Busan. They were ranked in the top ten in the qualifiers.
Announcer 2: I just want to take a moment to appreciate these battlefields. I know we have never seen anything like this in an eSports tournament before.
Announcer 1: It’s astounding how much work they put into these, Kelly. We can show some footage from the two arenas that were taken before the round started. It’s amazing!
Announcer 2: The Salt Palace has two event spaces; combined, they provide nearly half a million square feet, and I.S.K. used every inch. The South Hall is a wild environment with complete hills, rivers, groves of trees, and even some hazards, like gravel pits. The North Hall was made up to look like a post-apocalyptic city, with burned-out cars and collapsed buildings. The amount of detail they put into the environments is unbelievable!
Technical Commentator: This is what makes this game so exciting. The teams were each assigned a random environment; then, they had to start fighting off waves of monsters, one after another. There has never been a game as immersive as this in the history of the world. I really hope I can get a chance to try out the arenas after the tournament is over.
Announcer 1: I’ll bet a lot of spectators are with you there. So, what can you tell us about the waves?
Technical Commentator: That was brutal. I’ll be honest: I don’t think my party would have made it past the first five waves. Once the round started, every five minutes, another group of mobs was introduced into each arena. Not only were the numbers of monsters increasing, but the complexity of dealing with different mobs at the same time…
Announcer 2: I can imagine. To add to that, each time another team fell, the odds kept getting worse.
Technical Commentator: Exactly! I can’t believe the top 32 managed to hold out through 17 rounds. That’s over an hour and a half! By then, each of the arenas was packed with monsters, and there were no safe corners left.
Announcer 1: Let’s take a look at some of the teams at the end.
Announcer 2: Oh! That’s Rocinante! I’m a big fan. You can really tell they know what they are doing.
Technical Commentator: Yeah, I didn’t think much of them, to be honest. I thought they just edited their videos well to make themselves look good, but seeing them live like this… You can tell they are the real deal.
Announcer 1: Sven, what can you tell us about their strategy?
Technical Commentator: They have a well-balanced team for starters. They have an assassin who is built for DOT. That’s tricky to pull off, but DEVEREUX does it well. That’s likely because the team’s communication is so good. They hardly talk at all, but they seem to know exactly what all the other party members are up to. That’s a lot of practice and trust.
Announcer 2: They had a stumble halfway through the preliminaries, but they made up quickly and were in the top half of the qualified teams.
Technical Commentator: Their real power is the team leader, TRAVELER. That guy is a legend. He knows everything about the game, and probably more about the monsters than the developers do. See, he’s changing the formation as soon as he spotted the grumi bears approaching. Partnering up the healer and the ranged DPS. He must have military training. His reaction time is unbelievable.
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Announcer 2: Oh, there’s TSUKI! She’s my favorite. A tank that flies around the battlefield.
Technical Commentator: We call them Shields IN Awakening. You’re right about TSUKI, though. It’s mostly because of her videos that AGI shields are a thing now.
Announcer 1: Well, it’s hardly a surprise that they made it through to the third round. What do you think their chances are overall?
Technical Commentator: Rocinante? Hard to say, all the teams that cleared rounds one and two are monsters in their own right. With how the first two rounds played out, I have no doubt that I.S.K. has even more surprises for days two and three.
Announcer 1: With that, now’s a good time to take a commercial break. We’ll be right back in a minute!
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The pain in her head was unbearable. She used to gloat about never getting sick, but now she felt like she must be making up for lost time.
There was a steel spike stuck through her forehead, all the way to the back of her skull. The spike seemed to have dozens of smaller spikes that branched out into her brain.
Any movement caused the whole network to light her brain on fire with pain, but if she stayed still, the dull pain would gradually increase until it was again unbearable. She would shift in her bed, and the fire pain would start its cycle once again.
She wanted to die. She wanted to remove her own head and shove it into the freezer to cool the fire.
She wanted… Ice cream.
Yeah, Ice cream would help. Sick people got ice cream. She was sure that’s what her friends back in elementary school said.
She was jealous then. They got ice cream, but she never got sick, so she never got ice cream.
But now she was sick. So, of course, she should get ice cream. Finally.
Dammit. How does the ice cream arrive? Was it magic? Like the tooth fairy? Was there a magic sprite that filled your freezer with ice cream when you got sick? She hoped so since the last time she looked in the freezer, there were only some ice cubes that had been there since she rented the apartment, three frozen microwave pot pies, and some frozen peas that were nearly as old as the ice cubes.
She opened her eyes, and the pain intensified. It hurt so much now that it literally took her breath away.
Was she dying? Is this what dying felt like?
Do people die of the flu? Maybe. She would look it up if the thought of staring at a screen didn’t make her nauseous, threatening to start her dry heaving, which would start the whole brain spike tree fire thing over again.
What time was it anyway? She was missing work. Why was she missing work during the most critical moment of her entire career?
Because of a virus? How had her immunity failed her so completely?
She lay there in torment, tortured by a microscopic organism and hallucinations of magical ice cream.
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Announcer 1: Aaand we’re back! I’m Sam Phelps, and I’m here with Kelly Park and our technical commentator SVEN GALLY. So, Sven, What about the second round?
Technical Commentator: To people new to the game, it might not look too different from the first round, but trust me, this is where the top teams, really showed their stuff.
Announcer 2: What do you mean?
Technical Commentator: So round one was pure survival. All you had to do was find a good position and defend it. Mind you, it’s easy to say that, but it was incredibly difficult to execute.
Announcer 1: Round one ended when the top 32 teams were the last survivors. Round two, however, went to the top 16 teams who scored the most points during two hours of monster raids.
Technical Commentator: Exactly! There was no way to win just by camping out. The top 32 teams were all strong. In fact, only one team was actually defeated before the two hours were up. All 31 of the remaining teams made it the full two hours.
Announcer 2: So the top 16 were the high scorers? Can you explain how those points work?
Technical Commentator: Sure, the points system was identical to the one used in the preliminaries. This was basically a repeat of the one-month qualifiers, only compressed into a mad, two-hour dash.
Announcer 1: Sure made for great television, though. Look at these fighters! It’s great that I.S.K. Is able to incorporate the actual gameplay over the cameras they have positioned around the arenas. These fights are good enough to be taken from action movies.
Technical Commentator: Yes. It’s truly amazing technology. No other game can do so much, and look so good, all while being playing on a cellphone.
Announcer 2: And for free, too. It’s no wonder that Awakenings is the number one video game in the world.
Technical Commentator: So, as you can see, everyone is fighting far more aggressively. They are desperate to get in as many kills as possible. Here’s where you can see the true experts. Look at team 8Mile, you can see how they bypass all the weak, fast moving mobs like kobolds. Instead, they focus on the point bombs like dire wolves. Ah! Did you see that?
Announcer 1: Yeah, they stole that kill from the other team! That’s a pretty nasty trick.
Technical Commentator: Yeah, but it works, and no one wants to be left out and eliminated. How they even came up with that strategy so quickly is amazing. It’s an education just to be able to see these teams compete. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like tomorrow.
Announcer 1: Speaking of tomorrow, Any predictions on what to expect from tomorrow’s competition?
Technical Commentator: That’s a good question. With two days left and only 16 teams competing, I’m hoping we get to see more individual teams up close. If we split elimination each round, that’s five more rounds to go, and we already lost 84 of the original 100 in the first two rounds!
Announcer 2: That’s true. I think we’ll get to see more of each remaining team.
Announcer 1: So let’s look at who we have left at the end of day one.
1. Team 8Mile (USA) [863 points]
2. Team White Tiger (Korea) [822 points]
3. Team Salamander (USA) [819 points]
4. Team Otome’s Kiss (Japan) [805 points]
5. Team Rocinante (USA) [801 points]
6. Team ManUnited4Eva (UK) [789 points]
7. Team MST4K (USA) [781 points]
8. Team Gamers Union (India) [774 points]
9. Team Conejos Malvados (Mexico) [774 points]
10. Team DelhiMeat (India) [754 points]
11. Team Pawafuru (Japan) [748 points]
Team SarangGG (Korea) [747 points]
Team WuWei(China) [743 points]
Team TribblesTribblesTribbles (Iceland) [731 points]
Team Delicacy (UK) [729 points]
Team Marmite (Australia) [722 points]
Announcer 1: That will do it for our full coverage of the first Awakenings Global Challenge Tournament. Kelly, Sven, and I will be back tomorrow for more in-depth coverage and analysis as we get close to that five-million-dollar prize for the champion! Good night!
Announcer 2: Good night!
Technical Commentator: Night!
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The alarm went off. She still felt like death, but somehow, it seemed like she was actually getting used to the pain. Was that a real thing? Could you get so used to pain that you started to forget that it was there?
Dammit! Thinking about the pain made her fully aware that it was, in fact, still there.
Focus. Focus on getting out of bed. If you get out of bed, there are those pills that your assistant got for you on the table, and a bottle of water. Water sounded good. Not as good as ice cream, but anything to quench the… nope. Focus! Get out of bed. Get the pills.
She threw half a handful of the pills into the mouth, the washed them all down with a swig from the water bottle.
Seconds later, she was on her knees, trying not to throw it all up onto her bedroom floor.
Today, they were launching the new version. The special version she and her team had been working on for months. There was no way she was going to miss this.
She took a deep breath, then struggled back to her feet. She slowly sipped a bit more water from the bottle.
That’s it. That’s how to do it. Small sips. Just let the water slowly run down your parched throat. Easy, swallow slowly.
She looked at the time. It was nearly 5:30. Had it really been half an hour since the alarm went off? How is that even possible?
She needed to take a shower, get dressed, and get to the command center. She almost added coffee to that list, but in her current state, the evil beverage would likely put her into a coma. No, she would have to do this without the chemical crutches. Well, besides whatever was in those pills.
She picked up the phone and hit the speed dial. A young male voice answered. She managed to whisper out that she wanted a car. The voice responded that one would be there in 30 minutes. Then it said something the voice never said.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure… fine… half an hour. I’ll be ready.”
Dammit. Now she had to get ready.
Moving like an invalid, she took a hot shower, then got dressed. She grabbed the bottle of pills and popped a couple more. Then washed them down with a more conservative mouthful from the water bottle.
As she moved, the pain in her head continued to strobe every few seconds. It was odd. The pills seemed to give her a small amount of separation from the pain in her body. Now, she noticed something. With each pulse of pain, she could smell something. It was… the smell of burnt toast. Was that a thing, too? Maybe her brain was melting.
With each wave of pain, now came the unmistakable smell of burnt toast.
And something else…
An image burned into the back of her eyelids. It was like a reverse photograph.
She had to ignore this stuff. Get into the car. Get to the office.
The image burned into her retinas… What was it? It was familiar. A face… but whose?
It hit her all at once. She knew the face. When she recognized the face, the smell changed into something sickly sweet. She fell to her knees and threw up. Water from her stomach and one of the pills she had swallowed were on her bedroom floor.
But suddenly, she was better. Much better. Not perfect, but much, much better. Maybe she just needed to throw up.
She quickly cleaned up the mess, got dressed, and made it out to the car, only a few minutes after it arrived.
Glad that she was on the mend, her mind wandered back to the strange image she had seen. The face she had recognized, despite only seeing it for a moment, many months ago.
It was the face of the man that Mary had warned her to stay away from. That she had promised to stay away from. How could she even make that connection?
Perhaps it was some form of brain damage, brought on by the fever?
As the car drove to the command center, her mouth unconditionally mouthed a name. She didn’t even notice it. She didn’t say it out loud, but mouthed it silently.
Kira.