Ultraviolet Ultraviolence

Their footsteps were as constant and untextured as the rest of it, increasing in volume like someone was slowly moving a slider on some unseen soundboard. Gradie heard them stop and shuffle then move, stop again and shuffle, then move again, and got the rhythm. They were checking the other rooms, only taking about two seconds to do so. Either they were really good, or…

One stepped in through the doorway with an ultra light hop, twisting in mid air as he did, taking advantage of the worlds light gravity and cartoon physics to get the full scan of the room in one motion. Maybe an eighth of a second after Gradie saw him, the bouncing blue man was aiming right at him.

Unfortunately for Mr. Blue, the motion had become, probably sometime on the previous floor, just a mindless movement with barely any intention, and he didn’t start shooting until Gradie had shot him three times.

After about the second shot, Gradie saw why Mr. Blue was so relaxed. He had a shotgun in his hands. He pulled the trigger without even looking up and the blast caught Gradie in his left arm and knocked him back against the wall. Before the blast had registered in Gradie’s head, Mr. Blue had flown backwards out the door, propelled by a single panicked stomp.

A single shotgun shell floated through the air and bounced on the ground, looking like a stray piece of blue sidewalk chalk. Gradie saw without taking his eyes off his sight that his left arm was completely white, a dappled texture out of place in the uniformity of everything else, and about half a second later, he recalled that Mr.Blue had also turned white on his chest before he had retreated.

“You good bro?” Nova asked on the comms.

“Yeah. Fucking shotgun guy. He’s still in here.” In his panicked adrenal state, Gradie had accidentally said it all out loud. He hoped for a moment that the enemy hadn’t heard, but then a second later,

“Ha ha, fucking shotgun guy gonna get your ass bitch!” from out in the hall.

The strangeness of hearing another human voice in this inhuman plane of existence rattled Gradie’s mind like a sudden sickness. The guy sounded like something off the TV, and it took Gradie a moment to realize it was because he had a slight northern accent he wasn’t used to hearing. Which meant the Spirit he had just shot was from some far northern state, now transported via a strange astral projection to a dream game Gradie was fearful of losing. The idea that here he could run into anyone from anywhere in the world shot through him like a current, terrifying and enticing, and the slow ice bath realization that every crayon colored humanoid in this place was a living breathing soul washed over him in a strange, indescribable way.

Then Angel spoke, and added to the weirdness.

“Sit tight. I’m trying to get to you.”

Gradie’s existentially agitated mind zeroed in on the fact that Angel was also someone very real with a life outside this insane Otherworld, and that if they saw each other there, in the Real, there would be no recognition.

Before he could think too much more about it, another voice sounded off.

“Bye bye mother fucker!”

This time it was a gravely smoker’s voice without any accent that he could detect, followed by a chunk sound that took a moment for his ear to identify.

It was a grenade launcher. The baseball sized yellow orb sailed through the door and bounced off the far wall then rolled into the center of the room. It felt like ages watching it roll, and just about the time Gradie got the idea that he could pick it up and toss it out the door, it went off.

The blast was a white flash with big blue fan blades at the edges, and even at a distance of five feet with Gradie pressed into the corner of the room, he took damage, the lower part of his legs turning a spackled white.

“They have grenades,” he said, this time only on comms, managing to imagine his headset activating.

“Shit!” Nova said.

“Throw em back bro!” Luke offered. Gradie laughed through his teeth, but then Angel gave him an idea.

“If the grenade rounds impact a surface after less than a second of flight time, it goes on a timer.”

At about the same time, the second grenade bounced off the far wall and rolled into the room. This time Gradie dove to the center of the room with a low g glide and snatched it in his left hand, a motion that was unnaturally easy, as if his avatar had magnets in its gloves.

As he wound up to throw it out the door, a question caught up to him and broke out into the comms.

“How long?”

“Two seconds,” Angel said gravely.

The grenade had just cleared the doorway when it went off.

“fucking shit!”

It was Mr. Blue. Rather than wait for yellow guy to launch another, Gradie stepped out through the door way in a practiced motion, aiming to the left at first while hugging the right wall, but after seeing nothing but bare hallway, springing out the doorway with his rifle aimed to the right down the hall.

There was a yellow guy two feet from him. He started firing at his head, and after three clean head shots the guy pulled the trigger on his grenade launcher. Luckily, he had been aiming through the door and his first round went inside and bounced harmlessly. The weapon cycled, and the barrel snapped over towards Gradie’s stomach just before the fourth and last headshot turned yellow man into a white flash.

It was about that time that Gradie noticed that Mr. Blue was not the only other person in the hallway. An orange guy was squatting down next to him with a shotgun, with two other figures formed up behind him, and a red figure holding something long and thin was halfway down the hall

“Shit.” Gradie dove back into the room, fortunately a sliver of a second after the grenade went off.

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The hallway behind him erupted with fire, and he got right back into his corner and aimed at the door.

“There’s like fucking five of em!” he thought on the comms. The wall next to his head made a strange sound and started cracking. They were shooting through it.

Then the shooting let up, slightly, and a strange sound, like a chainsaw roar softened by an old nineties techno dj into something more musical echoed down the hall.

“Mother fucker!” yelled Mr. Blue, and his shotgun boomed.

There was a sound like the chainsaw was being swung through the air and the noise was terminated in a sound like a hollow pipe hitting concrete but with more reverb, and something shot inside the room, leaving a glowing green trail behind it.

Angel rolled over in a mid air summersault and landed in the far corner, staring daggers at the wall next to Gradie, a glowing green sword in his hand.

“Shoot that wall!” he said in the comms, as Gradie watched his scowl tighten. Gradie turned his gun on the cracking wall and opened up with his AR.

“Wide circle!” Angel advised, and Gradie made a wide circular motion with his barrel, cracking the entire surface of the blue wall in dark seemingly drawn on cracks.

Then, suddenly, the shooting stopped. Gradie looked down and realized the bolt was locked open. For a moment, he saw the grey whisp of gunsmoke and the shadowed steel of an AR action, but the vision only lasted until his eyes completed their arc downwards, and then he was looking at a red plastic quasi-firearm with a dark pit of shadow in the top.

“Uh, what—” He thought on the comms.

“Mag on your chest!” Angel replied, then leapt forward and swiped the wall with his sword in a single sudden motion that made Gradie jump back. The blade glowed neon green as it arced and made the same chainsaw roar turned into a techno chord sound Gradie had heard earlier, and the wall exploded outward in a burst of fragments.

Suddenly, he saw the crayon hued figures waiting out in the hall, and his panic triggered a practiced motion in his mind.

“Reloading.” This time, he said it out loud in a low tone quiet enough to hide under gunfire but loud enough to be picked up by the teams earbuds, had they been in a Hardworld, and snatched a magazine off the magpouch on his chest, which he had not till then noticed, and reloaded, only absently taking note that an identical magazine appeared in the empty slot on his pouch a second later.

Angel apparently didn’t give a shit to wait for Gradie to reload or even if he was there at all. Before Gradie had gotten the word ‘reloading’ out, one of the figures exploded into white at the center of a neon green sword swipe. Others fired, and Angel did something that made Gradie’s chest pang with that jealous sensation of watching someone play a game that you havnt had the money to buy yet.

He swiped into the ground, and the blade made that same electronic metal pipe on concrete noise and launched himself up at the ceiling. He rolled midair in another graceful somersault and paused with his feet on the ceiling as if gravity was now a thing he controlled, and sliced downward and another one turned white and exploded, then he kicked off the ceiling, rolled into a crouch on the ground, and swiped up samurai style and the lone figure left standing near him vanished in a burst of white.

“Multikill! Holy Shit!” Nova yelled on the comms.

“Fuck!” the red guy at the end of the hall yelled, and aimed his sniper. Angel swiped the floor again and launched himself diagonal across the hall and disappeared into another room. The sniper fired and the red beam missed him by a mile but zipped just inches above Gradie’s head.

“Shit!” Gradie opened up with his AR, but the sniper took two hits before stepping into a nearby doorway, becoming just half of a red face and a long barrel peeking out from the frame. Gradie kept firing, but the sniper went off anyway, its red neon beam screaming in the air as he stepped sideways.

A green blur shot out of the other door and Angel bounced down the hall right towards the sniper. Another red beam blazed through the air and then there was a neon flash as Angel cut him down.

“That’s gotta get on the reels!” Nova laughed on the comms.

“Any more come in?” Angel asked.

“Nah, that should be it,” Nova said. “There’s a big cluster fuck at the other corner so you should be clear up to the pad.”

“Alright. Hey Gradie, come here.” Angel motioned him over hastily. Gradie bounced down the hall to where Angel was standing, passing two open doors on the way that he cleared as best he could.

“There’s no one in there, come on.” Angel sounded annoyed, almost panicked, and when Gradie got to him he hurried inside the nearest room and pointed to the nearest wall.

“Put your hand on that!”

Gradie just looked at it.

“It’ll heal you, come on put your hand on it!”

Gradie put his hand on the red wall, and after a few seconds his arm up to his elbow seemed completely invisible. Then the color flowed up his arm and spread to the rest of him. It took about five seconds for all the white to turn back to red.

“Woulda been nice to know that before the game started!” he laughed.

“Sorry. We forgot.” Angel said stiffly.

“No, I meant the game narrator or whatever.”

“Oh. Yeah. Let’s go.”

Gradie followed him down the hall, up the stairs, out onto the roof of the building, which was flush with the next level of the terrace and connected by a short bridge. They took the bridge across and headed for a squat building with a wide opening like a Mexican street shop and a pulsing glow inside. It was a white pad, much like the ones bouncing around other players out in the big area behind them, but with a steady white light and pointed straight up to a skylight. Angel stepped on and shot upward, and Gradie followed.

They landed softly on the end of one of the long pier like structures Gradie had seen spread around the massive open space. At the other end was a circular platform ringed with machicolations, with an angled color-changing launch pad at the center.

Out in the main open space, the fight was still raging, but did seem clustered, as Nova had said, in a far distant corner, where colored silhouettes bounced and flew, and suddenly something like a roman candle shot through the air.

“Oh fuck, they found a rocket launcher. Must be fighting over it.” Angel said. That reminded Gradie.

“Where’d you get the sword?”

“On a pedestal, behind a mirror. You have to shoot your reflection, then its like a mini game where your reflection is shooting at you and you have to take him out.”

There was a pause as Angel looked over at him, but Gradie couldn’t read anything in his monochromatic goggled face.

“It didn’t take that long,” he added.

“Ok, youre clear, come on!” Nova shouted on the line. “Its almost there!”

They sprinted down to the platform and Angel stopped at the pad and sliced into the blocks supporting it. Part of it shattered, and the pad, once angled out towards the open space and another dock about a hundred yards away, was now facing almost vertically, which was apparently what Angel was after. He sliced again and the pad was completely flat on the ground. Angel looked up in the air and pointed.

“That’s where we’re going.”

The blocks supporting the big crystal cannon thing up on the ring were about fifty feet above them, moving along the circular track.

“I’ll go first, then you get on and it’ll launch you when it turns red.” Angel stepped onto the pad and it turned from orange to yellow. The pause gave Gradie the chance to think about how ridiculous his situation was, not just the standing here waiting for a blinking light to send him flying, but also the fact that he was deep in the guts of some overstructured gameworld when he could be tripping through realities. Was this really the best the Other had to offer?

“You’re just coping because you got your ass kicked in that white room,” his own voice said, snaking out of the silence. Before he could respond, the light changed from yellow to green and Angel went flying. He watched him sail upward, seeming to hover in the air near the black rail, then slowly land on it, and it occurred to Gradie that he might not be able to duplicate the movement.

He stepped onto the pad, and something bounced on the long pier behind him. Before he could look back, it exploded.

“Shit, I got him!” Nova said. Gradie crouched down and looked around, but there was only still shadowed blocks of color. Nova’s orange sniper beam flashed towards some recess in the tall buildings ringing the top level above him, and the platform at his feet lazily changed from green to blue, then from blue to purple, and Gradie tried to convince himself that this was all pointless and he didn’t care if he died a second time and got sent back to the duel room.

But by the time the bright pad shifted from purple to red, he had to admit it. He was hooked.