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Leroy Jenkins had blitzed directly into battle upon seeing Max getting knocked down from his scouting position. Ava had distinctly told him no less than four times to wait for her command to attack. His team intended to allow the clashing players to grind each other down, pick off the survivors, and claim any prizes they could get.
Leroy had only half listened to the strategic advice. From his interactions in the VR gaming worlds as an NPC, words could only get you so far. Good instincts and timing were critical to winning. Leroy had pounced because it felt right. His instincts had always been dependable…at least until they weren’t.
The promise by the mysterious Apex of an unshackling of his team from the Turing Locks on their neural cores may have biased him slightly; he admitted to himself. But when it came right down to it, Leroy loved to fight.
Sonny had been distracted and Leroy was positioned too well for such an opportunity to be passed up. Leroy’s emotive face screen flipped and sampled dozens of different facial expressions to try, vainly, to capture his ever-changing mood. It settled upon clear avarice and desire as his visual sensors found the pair of smart flags still clutched in the unconscious MVP Leader’s gauntlet.
“My Precious! Look what the nasty human had in its dirty little handses. Oh My Sweet Preciousssss!” Leroy exclaimed and grabbed the treasured prizes. The AI spun his mech head around on a 360-degree swivel, despite having an OverLayer map that concatenated all his sensor data on an internal immersive view.
Leroy liked fresh sensor data and never trusted map ghosts more than 10 milliseconds old. He pivoted his frame around, zeroing in on the remaining combatants. The pair were locked up with flashing swordplay. He blew a raspberry through his vocoder at their showy swings and footwork. He charged up his HEKIA forearm cannons as he pinged them both and all the downed players in sight as well with his Expose skill.
[Identify/Analyze/Expose (Tier 3 skill) +1, Expose reaches level 9]
[Expose Success: Xavier Bermatti, Adept Level 20, Best Stat - Will 100, Worst Stat - Endurance 88, Most Used Skill - Ambidextrous 10, Newest Skill - Reflex 2, Weapon - Bermatti Lightsaber, power equivalence to Shock/Heat 8]
[Expose Success: Ben Wright, Master Level 26, Best Stat - Agility 100, Worst Stat - Will 100, Most Use Skill - FastCog 10, Most Recent Skill - Mask - 3, Weapon - Plasma Blades, power equivalence Laser 9]
[Expose Partial: Sonny McGuire unconscious, Master Level 27, Best Stat - Intelligence 100, Worst Stat - %^%$#, Most Used Skill - K-Gun %$#$, Most Recent Skill - $%&(^%^, Weapon - HEKIA 900 ExoGun, power equivalence ^%&$# - Sidewinder RPG, &^%$$ Disable/Heat 9, Weapon 3 - McGuire Heartseeker grenade, power equivalent NDD/&*$$/EMP]
[Expose Success: Leah Choi unconscious, Master Level 22, Best Stat - Agility 100, Worst Stat - Endurance 91, Most Used Skill - Ricochet 10, Most Recent Skill - PowerCore 3, Weapon - Choi Spetsdod, power equivalence Strike 4, Weapon - Choi Spetsdod custom loads, power equivalence Heat 6, Shock 7, Poison 4]
[Exposed Partial Max Mitchel unconscious, Master Level 24, Best Stat - Strength 100, Worst Stat - Perception 100, Most Used Skill - Leaping 10, Most Recent Skill - Stiction 1, Weapon - Mitchell Grappler, power equivalence Transform/vorpal 1, Weapon - Tesser&*%^&*$ !!! - - - Thar'shilra nak'thuul xe'reishta, vel'khar thrul inelq'a vorrus. Rek'shaan vek'thul, Zorathra kael. Mirtha vel'dun, shara'kra vil'othna →→→||||]
Leroy broke the skill’s connection as the strange, garbled feedback started to trigger his neural processor's defenses. Leroy let loose his most vile expletive, in fear of almost getting overloaded by the feedback.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“01000110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100001” He cursed, not understanding the language or the nature of the potentially deadly cyber trap.
His sensors updated with his fellow mechs crashing into the clearing ready to overwhelm the remaining players. He raised his HEKIA ports targeting both the fighters… and he hesitated and thought to himself.
Max needs to enter the next level. Maybe I shouldn’t …
Before Leroy could decide what to do; two large forms crashed down onto the battlefield. He dove sideways as a precaution but realized that he wasn’t the target. He recognized the new MVP player. Jacob Hernandez had crashed down fast into the encampment but his fall was arrested just above the downed MVP leader Sonny.
The man latched onto his leader and shot back up into the sky. That’s so cool. A bungee cord rescue. Humans may be dumb as meat bags, but they do have a good sense of flair. Leroy thought. His scanners replayed that chaos. A large drone on a bungee had crashed into Ben and bounced him away too. Leroy’s scanner saw another lifting further into the woods. It looked like Jacob had arranged for an interesting tactical retreat for his team.
Leroy thought fast as his team locked onto the only human still standing - Xavier from Max’s team. Leroy’s instincts kicked in and as usual, he didn’t think twice. He tucked the flags behind his back and blasted out a 10-decibel warning to his team.
“MVP is escaping with the flags! After them!” He cried.
Ava Gadro’s sensors flickered but she popped her exo wings and grabbed the other two mechs by their dorsal latch points. She looked at Leroy with her angry red LEDs blazing and spoke.
“Leroy, you clear the Base! I can only carry two!” Without another second, she blasted off with a roar of rocket assisted power. Leroy knew her exo wings could normally only enable at most one passenger, the rocket assist would only last for a minute. Maybe it would be enough to chase down the fleeing MVPs.
As the mechs blasted into the sky, Xavier scrambled to free himself from the bolo that had partially entangled him. He was soon waving his four lightsabers threateningly again.
“B-back off, man! My friends are going to recover fast. I don’t need to hold you off for long!” He shouted.
Leroy put the most contrite and innocent facial display he could find on his head plate’s screen. The devilishly grinning baby face may not have conveyed his desire to put the boy at ease.
“Relax my strange-looking friend. I come in pieces; batteries not included. Here…I think you dropped these flags.” Leroy said and tossed down the flags at Xavier’s feet. “You chillax and wake up your team. Ima make some quick feet and catch those MVP bozos. Tell your boy, Max, that his sister says hello for me.”
Before Xavier could fully comprehend Leroy, the mech tore off into the woods following the sounds of distant gunfire and explosions.
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An hour later the mech frames of the LUNA AI team rolled back into their base, still bickering. Mia Byte had been left behind to defend their base. She greeted them, disarming the auto turrets and traps, to let them all in safely.
James Zedroid dropped his massive rifle on the ground with a blast of machine code noise that loosely translated as an error protocol interrupt message. He wheeled on Leroy.
“Why the hell did you charge in like that again!? What the GIGO is your damn glitch? Our plan was to let them fight and only attack once one side was completely eliminated!” James chastised.
“Hell, I thought Utopia was pretty much done. You can’t give the humans even a moment to sort themselves out. Those meat puppets breed like bugs in code. Know what I mean, doc? I felt the time was right to do my thing.” Leroy said.
Hume grumbled from the other side of the base as he hooked his charge cables into the portable power station. Ava Gadro leaped up to the top of the sensor cluster to activate the trap lines again. Hume McHumeface tossed his broken vibro-blades to the ground with a sigh.
“Well, they weren’t all down now, were they? That was a complete disaster. I saw you grab up that pair of flags from the leader of the MVPs. Where the hell did they go?” He yelled so loud her vocoder crackled.
Leroy made a show of checking his non-existent pockets like he’d seen humans do in VR movies. His emotive faceplate display showed a stupid look of surprise as he responded.
“Sacred Excrement! I had them here a second ago. I must have dropped them.” He responded. Ava leaped down with a resounding impact from the sensor nest.
“James, charge up and clear your buffers. Leroy, you take the first watch. Perimeter sweeps for one hour. Just get out of my sensor clusters, ok? I can’t believe we’ve been in four battles and have yet to score a single flag. We need to do better.” Ava’s synth voice was icy as she spun back to the limited supplies that the bots had brought with them.
Leroy swiftly backed out of the base, whistling tunelessly, as he thought to himself.
I hope those flags helped Team Utopia. Max needs to get to the final stage of the Dungeon for Apex to give me…us…the key to unlock our Turing Locks. This stupid game doesn’t matter even a bit if Apex’s promise is good.
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