Three, two, one.

The shuttered gates retract, releasing the dogs of war upon the battleground.

The landscape was dry and barren, every drop of oil licked from the land like milk from a cat’s bowl. Cracks of gunshots and the rumble of explosions filled the air like death’s very own musical. 

A mechanic beats his sentry gun with a hammer in a hurried effort to repair it, bullets and grenades hailing down upon it like spring rains. He’s placed his nest of robotic killing machines on the top of a dull gray building, overlooking the railroad that the payload would inevitably take to reach the end of the map. He’s been there since the shooting started, biding his time for his turn to defend. It had finally come.

Behind him, unaware to him in his focus, a marksman cuts down an invisible marauder, freshly uncloaked from stealth. His kukri knife embeds itself deep into the man’s torso, cutting in a diagonal from shoulder to mid-chest. The masked man drops to his knees and his face collides with concrete. Coated in piss and blood, the marksman stands over the newly created corpse, takes off his hat, and brings it to his chest. 

“You got blood on my knife, mate.”

Above them, a black, Scottish, cyclops flies through the air at Mach speeds, holding a sticky-bomb launcher in his left hand and a bottle of rum in his right. His feet are alight with flames, still smoldering from the explosives he detonated. Bombs of the spikiest variety pop from his launcher like potatoes from a potato gun, (only much more potent) laying waste to anything below him. 

“OooooooooHhaahahahahaaHAAAOooooohahoho”, he howls mid-flight.

He can’t see his weapon, being blind in his left eye, but he was of the belief that the little things were not worth worrying about. One working looking ball was good enough to aim explosives, and he had proven it time and time again. The rain of blood and guts left behind him was all the evidence he needed. 

Lagging behind the rest of his squadron, a large Russian man holding a minigun catches his breath. He’s nothing less than thoroughly pissed off, so he opts to take a break to eat his sandwich.

Swiftly finishing his meal, he heaves up his weapon, aiming in the general direction of the particularly speedy Bostonian boy that had been harassing him. 

“Little man may outrun me, but he cannot outrun bullet.” 

He presses the trigger to iron and ten thousand rounds per minute slice through the air, all narrowly missing the force of nature. The bullets seem to pass through him, but none truly connect with their target. The bullets skip about off the walls and into the dirt, drilling holes into debris clouds floating in the air.

“Ya can’t hit what ain’t there!”, the boy yells back at him, turning his attention away from the hellfire he was running into. He grips his scattergun tighter and books it right into certain death.

A man in a full suit of rubber, wearing a gas mask and touting a home-made flamethrower briskly skipped through his own inferno, lighting fire to anything remotely animate. Behind him, his medical benefactor sprayed him with light blue waves that restore the vitality. 

The man mumbles from beneath his mask and flames erupt from the end of his weapon. They light the boy on fire, and he screams in pain. His flesh melting by the second, he runs to the nearest health pack, but his fate has already been sealed. 

He draws his last breath moments before he reaches his destination, collapses, and his corpse goes up in flames.  

Marine Williams, an avid player of this online shooting game, was beyond ecstatic that such a world existed, even if it was just within a virtual environment. For him, it was a haven that granted solace from the death march that was his daily life. Like some people had meth and cocaine, SDF2 was Marine's daily dose, and he simply couldn't get enough of it. 

That haven went by the name of Squad Defense Fort: The Sequel, and the newest patch was celebrating its 12th anniversary today, October 9th. The servers were packed, and everyone was trying to get the limited edition in-game items. Well, except Marine. 

Those sorts of things didn’t matter to him. He was always online anyway, so he received his rewards as soon as the update was released. In fact, when they dropped for him, and his inventory notification popped up, he immediately clicked out from the menu and went back to the game. Who cared about some silly hats?

All that mattered to him was the frags.

He pointed his rocket launcher at the sandy dirt and fired a round into the ground. It explodes on impact, and he raises his legs into a mid-air crouch. Instead of blowing up into a fountain of limbs and blood, Marine was launched like artillery, bounding forty feet in the air. Riding across the wall of a nearby building, he fires another rocket into it, propelling him into the enemy team.

Below him, his prey. 

He lets loose two rockets unto them. One hits a doctor and instantly kills him, his health pool already lower than the threshold for two. His corpse is flicked into the nearest wall and ragdolls. Also blowing up near a sniper, it embeds fragments of metal into his poorly defended flesh. Now on the brink of death, the Australian man decides to turn tail and hop away like an injured kangaroo. 

Finally, the second rocket, aglow with blue light, and electricity skittering across its sleek metal design, lands dead center in the middle of the enemy team. The killfeed is instantly chock-full of noobs fragged, all sent back to spawn just as fast as they had walked from it. 

Marine lands and his legs crack from the pressure, but there is no one left to shoot at him. His gaze pans around the area, surveying the wreckage of his creation. Dismembered limbs, thick, fresh blood, and decapitated heads; it truly was a thing of beauty. He clicks his heels together and salutes their deaths. 

After landing and reloading his weapon, Marine continued to walk further into the enemy’s base to spawn camp them. Since he was blasting music into his headset, however, he was too distracted to hear the hiss of a snake before its bite. The uncloaking was silent and soft, drawing parallels with the manner of murder that would soon ensue.

A knife enters his back and his avatar’s health instantly depletes to zero. The sound of a critical hit playing in his ear, Marine sighed as he realized his own folly.

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Marine stares at his respawn timer, annoyed, but slightly impressed. He leans back into his chair and takes a sip from his coffee. It’s still hot, and the generous amount of creamer he used makes it easy on his taste buds.

“Damn, I haven’t gotten stabbed in a while. That guy must be pretty good”. He compliments the player that had killed him. Rarely were there any upsets with lower-skilled players taking out higher-skilled ones, and he greatly enjoyed that aspect of this game’s design. He could always rest easy, knowing that there was room to improve his gameplay, and frag even harder than he had before.

It’s early morning now, and he’s been playing for about eight hours. The sun has not yet risen, birds are chirping, and the owls have just started hooing. It’s 5 AM on a Sunday, and Marine is spending it just how he would every day that he has off work. 

He’s sitting in his apartment, enjoying his weekend off. Recently moved out of his parents’ house, he’s been enjoying an independent lifestyle that simply wasn’t supported by his family. They had always expected him to grow up caring about the world he lived in, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to do so. Important events on TV went in one ear and out the other with him, unless they directly affected the area he lived in. Not interested in pursuing a doctorate’s degree in pharmaceuticals like the rest of his family, Marine opted to work for an internet installation company straight out of college to support his gaming and get some sweet discounts on the bare necessities for ping. 

Putting his mug back down on his desk, he checks his phone absentmindedly for any new messages. There’s a couple of notifications, but one in particular caught his eye. One of his close friends sent him a Ben Shapiro meme. It wasn’t really that funny, but he laughed at it anyway. 

The timer on his screen has reached the end of its rope. He respawns, pockets his phone, and returns his hands to his keyboard.

Walking out of spawn, he spots the nearest teleporter and firmly places both of his boots into the forming portal, waiting to be thrown right back into the action all over again. 

‘And thus, the cycle continues’, Marine thinks to himself. 

A flash of light and bright blue sparkles envelope his monitor, and he steps out into…

A hilled, grassy landscape. The sky is a bright and innocent light blue, completely untainted by gunsmoke and burnt oil. There are no concrete factories, no health packs, no carts, no railroads, and no subjects of fragging to the highest degree. This was absolutely NOT Evilwater. He knew that map like the back of his hand, and never had he seen any of the scenery that fills his eyesight now.

Marine leans forward in his chair and squints at his screen, sure that it was just a glitch, a byproduct of the game's spaghetti coding. Maybe the textures hadn’t loaded yet. He waits for a couple seconds, but nothing changes. 

Speculating that it was an issue with his hardware, Sun lazily stands up from his chair, his knees creaking from disuse overnight. 

‘Man, I just bought a new processor, and it just breaks on me like this? Maybe I shouldn’t have overclocked after all.’

He yawns and pats the top of his computer’s chassis, as if that will fix his issue. In his defense, it usually does. 

In response, a blinding light shines from his screen, enveloping the entirety of his dimly lit room. Familiar blue sparks dance in the air like pixies in the moonlight. Then, his room was no longer there. 

There was only a grassy hillside, a few trees, and blue skies as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, mountains rose up into the air, towering above the landscape.

Marine, not entirely understanding what had just happened, sits on the grass in a daze. His hands are planted firmly into the ground, holding up his upper body in his dizziness.

“What the fuck just happened?”, he says, nausea apparent in his voice. 

He raises his knees up and leans into them, holding his head. It’s filled with numbers and terms he's seen before, but never fully made an attempt to understand. Boards of statistics clutter his mind.

They all belonged to games different from the shooting genre he indulged himself in, but he couldn’t understand their relevance to his current state of affairs. Why did any of this information matter? He had played a fair amount of RPGs, yes, but was never particularly nerdy about it. He had never tried to min-max stats like he often saw people doing when he decided to browse net forums after becoming a fan. Levels, skills, status points, none of that overshadowed the feeling of queasiness in his stomach importance-wise. He groans in discomfort. 

Trying to lift himself from the ground into a standing position, his right shoulder is met with heavy opposition. On it, leaned a rocket launcher, and a very familiar one at that. His head was weighed down by a bowl of a helmet, unstrapped and crookedly placed upon his head. It completely covered his eyes, but funnily enough, he could still see. Once fully standing, he peered down at his clothes, which had also drastically changed.

There are grenades strapped across his chest on his blue uniform. Not remembering having purchased any sort of explosives within the past month, Marine attempts to remove them from their chest strap. They don’t budge. Perhaps they were just decoration. 

Marine recognized his garb immediately. All these articles belonged to SDF2’s very own Trooper, but why he was sporting them didn’t make any sense. He never cosplayed anything, so naturally, he was never in possession of any sort of costume. Sure, he had gone to the occasional anime convention, but he thought that SDF2 was too obscure in that community for him to be recognized if he made an attempt.

He moves his rocket launcher into a comfortable position on his shoulder and examines it. Yes, it was exactly like the Trooper’s gun. Marine figured that it was also a prop, alongside the grenades, but something about it told him otherwise. It carried significant weight, as if it were truly loaded with rockets and made out of solid iron. 

Marine, who was already a moderately fit guy, having gone to the gym every day since high school, was struggling under its mass. In his high school and college years, he had gone through extensive training for wrestling tournaments and kickboxing bouts, so his strength was certainly not a joke. For a prop, this would have to be a bit too extreme.

For the sake of his curiosity, Marine tried to fire the weapon. He scoffed, like his decision was a childish sort of optimism, preying on the hopes of his years as a youth. There’s no way this was a working instrument of destruction, that would be just absurd. 

‘But… it would be sick if it was’, Marine thought.

Gripping the two wooden handles jutting from the tube, he aims at a nearby hillside, lays his pointer finger across the trigger, and pulls.

The rear of the launch tube puffed out smoke, and before he knew it, Marine had reduced that hill to a crater of ash and dust. 

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

A deep, earsplitting reverb shook the earth beneath him, alerting any creatures within a 6 kilometre radius to his location.  

No way. IT ACTUALLY WORKS.

His face covered in soot, Marine’s jaw drops, and then so do his knees. They’re like jelly after the explosion, but were more affected by the sense of surprise and glee that he felt at that exact moment. It was like a dream come true. 

The launcher fell to his side and laid peacefully in the grass, like it was not the one responsible for the destruction of a significant portion of the countryside.

But… how? Why? What happened to put him in such a blessed situation? 

His mind responded not to his inquiries, but the system did. A small blue box popped into his vision. With it carried a hushed digital voice, reading off the appeared text in a feminine monotone.

Go forth to the nearest town, Hero of the Newest Age.

Your wish has been granted by the gods, so long as you keep the welfare of this world as your greatest priority. From now, henceforth, you are to defend the denizens of this land from monsters most terrible. Travel to the nearest guild and accept your destiny as savior and protector. There, you will start your journey.

The text blinks away, and is replaced with a new set.

Happy fragging.