Chapter 42: Observe and Report
The Invasion Report showed ten entries per page. A little one and two in the upper right corner told me it hosted somewhere between eleven and twenty entries tagged with Mask and Shadow. A little twelve in parentheses next to those gave me a pretty good hint as to exactly how many.
That seemed like a lot, but in and of itself, it didn’t bother me.
What did were the three entries I could see without scrolling. Specifically, their lines for Location.
Calgary, Alberta. Detroit, Michigan. Kansas City, Missouri.
That wasn’t as crazy of an itinerary as Albie’s, but still. If the figure was responsible for all three of those invasions, they represented a lot of travel, especially the jaunt up to Canada.
Especially since the incidents in Calgary and Kansas City had both been reported in the last week.
In other words, after I’d first thought I’d seen the figure lurking outside our apartment building.
I scrolled through the rest of the entries on the first page, for now just looking at Locations. All over North America, but at least limited to the one continent. Again, not quite as crazy as what Erin had found about Albie; she’d apparently jetted to cities around the world in the course of a couple of days. Even popping back to Denver to menace us, the figure’s was an itinerary that you could, if you spent most of your time driving, manage on a road trip.
Why would you, though?
“Sup?” Lena asked.
“Looks like our buddy in the mask has been busy,” I said.
My back warmed as she approached. “He’s no buddy of mine.”
“You know,” I said, “the last time you assumed someone was male, it was AlephLambda.”
I could practically feel her rolling her eyes. “Whatever. What did you find out?”
I leaned to the side to give her a better view of my screen. “Twelve reported invasions with the Mask and Shadow tags. I’d say since Erin put up the Invasion Report, but unless people went back and added to their entries, it’s since she added the tag system.”
“Damn,” Lena said. “You’re not kidding about busy. And these are just the incidents somebody reported? Not gonna lie, I totally forgot this site was a thing.”
“I’m getting the impression they’re invading full time,” I said.
“What order are these in?” she asked. “Looks like newest to oldest?”
I nodded. “Check out the locations.”
“Does everybody who invades run all over the world?” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Cam. It seems more likely that Third Eye likes this edgelord aesthetic more than we realized, and the people who get assigned it are the types who really get into invading.”
I considered her suggestion. “We’re not even pretending this shit is random anymore, are we?”
“Nope.” Lena flashed a little smile. “I don’t know how it works, but Third Eye has got to be stacking the deck so players get stuff that suits them.”
That made me wonder. “With your new understanding of Fire, have you come around to thinking it suits Erin?”
“‘Course it does,” Lena said. “Look at this site. The wiki. The wiki team. Even us! Who pumped all that energy into what we were doing?”
I raised my eyebrows. Charging an object with heat or electricity, or even a more abstract kind of energy like life, I’d considered. Energizing a community, though? Lena had broadened how she conceptualized her Reactant even further than I’d realized. At some point, I had to assume her leaps in logic to justify how Fire was the best would catapult her right off a cliff.
But so what? I’d proven we could handle leaping from high places as long as our HP held out.
“Whether that’s accurate or not,” I said, “it’s a nice way of looking at it.”
She propped her head on my shoulder. “You really should learn to trust me about Fire. I’m kinda an expert.”
I tilted my head to bump into hers. “I’ll try. Unfortunately, I think you’re wrong about our invader.”
“Hm?”
“I’ve been reading the descriptions on these entries. Several mention the weird voice.” I highlighted one with my mouse. “Their voice changer wasn’t part of their Third Eye avatar.”
“Maybe they’re like a PVP guild?” Lena said. “They could’ve gotten together on Discord and agreed to do the mask and voice changer thing. Maybe to screw with the Invasion Report?”
Was the figure the kind of person who would organize a guild? Maybe. Did it fit the facts in this case? I shook my head. “I like the idea, but how would they get their avatars to match?”
Lena sucked air through her teeth. “Dang. I don’t see how they could.”
Now that we were on the same page, I read the entries more carefully.
Five of them were perfunctory, just a list of time, date, location, and associated tags. Those might be useful for establishing a pattern of movement, but they didn’t offer any further insight.
That left seven with descriptions.
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Two, the outliers, described one-on-one fights. These were two of the three earliest on the list (the second oldest report was one of those that omitted a description). One was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the other in Camden, New Jersey.
The person writing up the Philly report called the figure “Mask,” which annoyed me because it seemed like the kind of moniker they’d get off on. Lucky me, it seemed to have caught on. Four of the seven reports used it. Faster to write than “the figure,” anyway, and it wasn’t like they wouldn’t think that sounded badass, too.
In that first fight, Mask used Air to fight, about the same as I did. By the next, they’d added Earth. They’d lost both invasions. The person who reported the first one didn’t speculate on HP, but the second had won outright and guessed they’d dealt about 400.
I saw Lena frowning out of the corner of my eye.
“I’d swear we did more damage than that,” she said.
“Agreed,” I said. She’d landed a couple of solid explosions just while I was fighting alongside her, plus her electrical attack, and it wasn’t like I’d failed to do anything. “Maybe we’re going up against someone who cracked the code on Potions.”
Mask had obviously cracked some kind of code, because the five remaining entries, which were spread out across North America, were all from people who had fought them in a group. They’d won, but then, we were talking about as much as a four-on-one fight. They’d better freaking win!
In all of those attacks, Mask used strikes of their shadowy cloak like they had against Lena, Bernie, and I. They’d hit hard, fast, and in three out of the five instances, managed to drop at least one opponent before they were driven off.
Not once had they run out of HP. Three of the reports didn’t even speculate on how much they had, one said 1,000 – nice round number, which made me think it was total guesswork, but then, it was Lena’s actual maximum – and one, 1,300.
“If the Mask we fought is the same person as the one who lost those first two fights,” I said, “either they developed a defense that’s reducing damage like crazy, or their HP went up.”
One thing we’d never seen happen in Third Eye was an improvement in our base stats. Without Albie’s Potion, I’d have the same 10 HP and 10 MP I started with. Same with Lena’s 1,000 and 100.
Lena didn’t answer.
I tried to picture the fight in my head. We’d landed attacks when Mask wasn’t anticipating them, like my ambush and Lena’s electricity, so the usual Third Eye defenses wouldn’t have helped. Those all required us to use our conjured objects to actively fend off what an opponent tried. Was it possible Mask had developed some kind of passive defense?
Maybe, since we still had no idea what their shadows were or how they worked.
Or was their defense, like their voice changer, something more mundane? Did they have room under that cloak for athletic pads? What about a bulletproof vest? If they wore a helmet beneath their hood, it had to be a pretty sleek one, and by extension not all that protective. Perhaps every little bit helped, though.
If it did, and you were actively planning to pick Third Eye fights, why not add every possible physical protection? Wasn’t like you’d get worn out lugging it around the way a non-player would.
It made sense to me, and it fit some of what we’d seen Mask do.
Even so, I had a hard time believing that kind of mundane protection would cut damage so much they could withstand three times as much as they had in their loss a couple weeks ago.
Intuitively, them learning to create Potions made the most sense.
It also annoyed me.
I looked at Mask with their edgy Custom Personification and their voice changer and, yeah, their preference for invasions, and I wanted to think of them as a bad player. Not a bad person, a bad player. Somebody with good twitch reflexes, maybe, the type who could make it as a pro in a game with a pro scene, but not someone who discovered things ahead of the curve, not a creative player, not an innovator.
But that was just me acting like a scrub. Projecting my dislike for someone onto my interpretation of their play.
Fact was, I had every indication that Mask had gotten farther than me, farther than Lena, farther than Erin, farther than Matt. Albie aside – and she shouldn’t count since she was a dev and probably a wizard, too – they were almost certainly the best Third Eye player I’d met.
Not only did I underestimate them at my peril, I did so to my shame.
I’d sort of expected Lena to snap me out of that train of thought, but she’d remained silent the whole time.
I glanced at her.
She stared at the screen with a far-off look in her eyes. She kept chewing her lip and I wondered if she would’ve broken the skin if not for her remaining HP.
Before I could ask what was bothering her, Benji joined us in the living room. He’d swapped his work clothes for sweats, and after a brief glance over our shoulders, he flopped onto the bed we’d dragged out for him. His phone bleeped as he fired up something gacha or tower defense or both.
I didn’t think he usually left his phone speakers on. Did he mean it as a passive-aggressive suggestion that Lena and I bed down and leave this room to him? Maybe, maybe not, but he had to at least know I would take it that way.
Last night, it might have provoked an argument.
Tonight, I reminded myself he’d sped to our rescue.
“I’m done out here if you are, Lena,” I said.
She looked away. “Bernie’s all patched.”
“I don’t think anything else is going to happen until midnight,” I said.
I shut my computer off and stood up. Lena turned off hers and collected Bernie.
“Night,” Benji called.
I nodded to him as we passed. “Good night, Ben.”
He snorted and shook his head. Did he want me to call him that, or not? Pick a lane, bro!
Maybe we’d hash it out in the morning. I doubted either of us wanted to just then.
All I wanted was to sleep.
My body seemed immune to exhaustion; despite everything I’d done, it felt about the same as if I’d spent the day at my computer, writing clickbait articles and playing games that didn’t make me jump off IRL balconies.
My mind? Not so much. Questions and answers and hopes and fears had left me drained.
As soon as we got to the bedroom, I collapsed on the mattress and rolled to the wall so Lena had room to join me.
She settled Bernie in front of me and, instinctively, I wrapped him up in my arms. Hers slid around both of us and she nestled her face against my neck. Which would’ve rejuvenated me some, except that I could feel the tension in her body.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said.
“Bernie?” She sort of nodded against me. “I’m trying to believe it.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
“Those reports,” she said. “They creep me out.”
I shifted enough that I could lean back and kiss her forehead. “Don’t let them. If this Mask character comes at us again, we’ll be ready.”
She chuckled. Briefly. “It’s not so much I don’t think we can beat him.”
“What, then?”
“Did you notice,” Lena asked, “how all the writeups came from people who won?”
A couple of the older, less detailed reports hadn’t, but I knew she didn’t want that kind of pedantic objection.
“And all the recent ones,” she continued, “were from groups. Why? If what happened to me is any indication, this asshole hasn’t stopped going after people who were on their own.”
Despite myself, despite her closeness, I frowned. I thought I understood where she was going with this, but I forced the lump from my throat and prompted her. “So?”
“So what happened,” she asked, “to the solo players Mask invaded?”