Erik ate until the food meter on his HUD was full, at which point the prompt vanished, and he could no longer consume the dead plant. Already, the vines stretching into the jungle were beginning to shrivel.
“Now if I guessed correctly, I should reach the next growth stage by the end of the day,” he said to Marcus, “which just means we need to find you something to eat.” This was imperative. Keeping their team on par with each other as much as possible would be essential to their success. While their achievement of getting an early team kill could help put them ahead in the long term, it was likely that other players had made more successful progress toward the next growth stage the day before and were now roaming the world as larger, more dangerous dinosaurs.
“Can’t say I’m looking forward to chowing down on some raw hamburger,” Marcus said, his Rex’s lips curling up on one side in a snarl as he contemplated it. “I’m more of a cooked steak guy, you know. Steak with some really good grill marks.”
“The game handles the flavor. You should be fine,” Erik reassured him. Now that the murderous plant was dealt with and he’d gotten some food out of it, he checked Sarah’s dot on his map. As if she knew he was looking, her voice came over the party line, though she sounded far away, as if she were speaking to them through a tube.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “You’re not moving.”
“Yeah, we’re good here, Sarah. Heading to you,” Erik said as he turned in the direction of her dot on the map and began to trot on his small triceratops feet, Marcus falling in alongside him.
“Good, because you need to see this.”
Marcus groaned, shaking his boxy Rex head from side to side in dissatisfaction.
“Are we really doing the ‘you need to come and look at this’ cliché? Why not just tell us what it is?” There was a brief pause before Sarah answered, and Erik suspected she was trying to decide what kind of answer to give.
“It’s a big black and gray wall of cloud, and I think it’s moving toward us,” she told them, opting for a serious answer rather than taking Marcus's bait.
“Who gives a shit about a cloud?” Marcus scoffed, his Rex giving a decisive snort, but Erik’s stomach sank. Battle Royales had gone through something of a renaissance pre-VR. It had been a very popular genre, and Erik had seen some of the footage from those old games.
“Let’s hurry,” he said, turning his short-legged trot into an awkward gallop. Marcus only needed to trot a little faster to keep up. Erik switched to a private channel with Marcus as they ran between the trees, dried vegetation crunching under their feet.
“You need to stop picking at Sarah,” Erik told him.
“I’m not—”
“You are. I get that you two have problems.”
“She’s the problem,” Marcus snapped. “I’m not the one who betrayed my friends so I could be a big-time gamer.” Erik said nothing for a moment as they continued on. He didn’t agree with Marcus, at least not anymore. He had been hurt by her leaving their team at the time. Now he felt that it was the best choice she could’ve made. He knew there was no point debating it with Marcus, but he had to say something.
“You need to put those feelings aside,” Erik said. “There’s a bigger picture here. We can win this if we can all get on the same page. If you undercut her every time she says something, then this will be over fast. For all of us.” It wasn’t the point he would’ve liked to make. He would’ve preferred to make the case that they were better off as friends. That Sarah had done the right thing for her own future. He knew that Marcus’s resentment was rooted at least a little in his wounded pride. Mad that between himself and Sarah, she had been deemed the only one worthy of achieving their shared dream.
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Marcus said nothing, and then the jungle trees stopped, opening up into a large clearing shaped like a half-circle. The other half of the circle didn’t exist because the clearing ended in a sheer cliff. Past the edge was nothing but a hundred-foot drop to the jungle canopy below, but that wasn’t what grabbed his attention. It was the cloud, except it wasn’t really a cloud at all. It was a massive, swirling wall of gray and black. So vast it could’ve swallowed mountains.
“Okay, I take it back,” Marcus said, his Rex eyes wide. “That totally merits ‘you need to come look at this.’” It was truly something to behold, and from this vantage, Erik could see it stretching off into the distance, bending gradually to enclose them in what had to be a massive circle, though they could only see part of it before the trees blocked their view. “What the hell is it?” Marcus asked.
“It’s a mechanic,” Erik said grimly. “Can’t believe I forgot about it.”
“A mechanic?” Sarah asked, trotting over to join them. “A mechanic for what?”
“For pushing the players together as the game progresses. It will advance slowly, shrinking the available space until there’s none left, and any player who gets caught in it will die,” Erik said. “How exactly varied depending on the setting of the game, but they were usually thematic. In our case, I’d guess we’re looking at an impact winter.”
“Like from an asteroid impact?” Marcus asked.
“Exactly.”
“The game is called E.L.E,” Sarah said. “So I guess that’s appropriate.” While they stood for a moment, intimidated by the sheer size of the death wall, a flash of bright yellow light came from within the cloud, and then, punching out from its face, a small meteorite blazed a path above the canopy down below before slamming into the ground. The resultant shock-wave knocked over the nearby trees, rolling outward blindingly fast, passing over the three baby dinosaurs up on the cliff with enough force to send them stumbling back.
“Holy shit!” Marcus yelled as the shock wave passed. In the distance, they could see other streaks of small meteorites crashing down onto the game world.
“What the hell is going on?” Sarah said as the sounds of impact rolled over them from the far distance, one after the other. As if in answer to her question, a notification window popped up.
Objective Update:
Meteorites with unusual properties have fallen all across the world. Secure meteorite zones and fragments to earn rewards.
- Primarch
Meteorites continued to fall in the background as Erik read, and he couldn’t help but laugh. It was so incongruous, so strange for him to be here, in this body, watching a stunning recreation of the events that may very well have led to the end of the age of dinosaurs. 165 million years of dominance brought to a close by rocks from the sky, and a wall of ash and snow.
“One fell down there,” Sarah said, breaking into his thoughts as she stepped forward, using her raptor's snout to point down at the bottom of the cliff. They could see the crater from their vantage point, with the trees knocked away, and small fires burning in the surrounding area. “Maybe if we follow the cliff we can find a way down.”
“Yeah,” Erik agreed.
“Hey, what about finding me something to eat?” Marcus complained. “My hunger meter is getting pretty low.”
“We won’t be the only group headed for a meteor,” Erik assured him. “I expect we can find you someone to eat, and do the objective at the same time.”
“Man, please don’t say it like that,” Marcus said, his head tipped to the side. Sarah chuckled, and her raptor made a strange throaty hssk-hssk-hssk sound in parallel. Erik saw Marcus bristle at her laughter, his hackles rising as his lips peeled upward to show his teeth, as if he were about to snarl.
“Let’s go, we’re losing daylight,” Erik said, heading off the reply. Marcus tilted his head to look at Erik with one of his eyes, and then relaxed. Erik, for his part, wondered if the others had noticed how easily their body language was being adapted into these animal forms. How naturally they all seemed to fit into their bodies. Was that an aspect of the game's programming, or was it the nature of the human mind to adapt? He decided he’d have to look into it after they were done playing, or maybe he could compose a study himself. He was in the right environment for it.
Together, the three of them set off along the cliff, staying just within the treeline to make sure they were less visible. They had been fortunate not to encounter anything except one aggressive plant, but Erik had no doubt that would change as they approached the meteorite. As they walked, he could feel it in the back of his mind; he could feel that big wall of death creeping ever closer.