The Dragon's Revenge Read online

  [Group] ‘Time to find a new challenge, don’t you think, Raitha?’

  [Group] ‘I have to agree. I shall always think fondly of these pirates, for giving me such a good start in Epic Two. Even so, we must bid them farewell. Let me fly around and try to identify a new hunting ground for us.’

  [Group] ‘Shall we take a break first?’

  [Group] ‘Very well. Meet you on the other side.’

  It really was disorientating unclipping from the game. Next to me, removing his helmet, Raitha took a moment before his eyes focused and he flashed a white grin. ‘Level five. Very respectable.’

  ‘More than respectable, it is awesome. I can hardly believe that only this morning I was stuck, needing to drop rocks on a slow-spawning snake to advance.’

  I held out my fist for him to punch in return but Raitha just looked puzzled. ‘You copy me, it’s like a high five.’ When at last he understood and his fist was outstretched, I leaned over and touched my knuckles against his. ‘Go us.’

  Walking back through the control room towards the canteen, we both paused to look at the board recording player progress. It had been reorganised to put everyone in order of their level. The leading player Molino had reached 55. Nevertheless, because so many new players had just started, even level 5 put us respectably in the middle.

  ‘Look!’ With real excitement in his voice Raitha pointed at the board, somewhere just above us.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sapentia, she’s here!’

  Was it strange that my heart should leap at the thought that Sapentia was in the building? What were my feelings? Of course I was delighted another staunch raiding comrade was here. Then there was the celebrity dimension. I was somewhat in awe of her online profile as a VR dating expert and script writer, and I was certainly in thrall to her looks. If a cherub had an arrow to aim at my heart and it was magically imbued to attract me to Japanese goth girls, it would be a critical hit every time. Even as I saw the name (Sapentia, wizard, Level 8, Aurigna), I felt a flush of warmth in my cheeks and ears at the prospect of actually speaking to her in person.

  ‘There might be others.’ I observed in as neutral as voice as possible.

  ‘Braja!’

  ‘Braja!’

  We both called out at the same time. The entry on the board read Braja, warrior, Level 4, Aurigna.

  ‘And Grythiss is really flying! Look already level nine.’

  ‘Grythiss, Shadow Knight, Level nine, Risthrastan,’ Raitha spoke aloud. ‘This is most marvellous. How shall we meet them?’

  ‘In real life? Or in the game?’

  ‘In the flesh.’

  ‘I have an idea. They will be at that meeting.’

  Scrolling along the bottom of the character board, and also displayed on posters stuck to all the doors of the control room, was an announcement:

  Important.

  Team Meeting 7 p.m. in the control room.

  Everyone to attend.

  Chapter 9

  Team talk

  Back in the game, Raitha had found us a new camp. Inland from the sea, the hills beneath the forest grew larger, with wider and deeper undulations of valley and crest. At last, the uneven terrain culminated in a huge hill that pushed high above the tree line and which was crowned with the ruins of a circular wall. Beyond the wall, reported Raitha, was a passage leading into darkness through ominous-looking carved stone lintels. What interested us, however, were the graves on the exposed hillside and the zombies and skeletons standing upon them. It was quite an army that had assembled there, as though a powerful lord of the undead was gathering troops to him. In all sizes, though with a predominance of former humans, the skeletons (whose exposed teeth gave them an air of being amused by something) held a variety of weapons: swords, spears, axes, bows (aha!). The mobs were levels 6 to 9, which was perfect. The pulls were tricky though.

  After we’d fought and killed two outlying zombies – receiving only minor wounds – the next-easiest pull looked like it would bring a minimum of three mobs, so clustered together were they.

  [Group] ‘Here’s a thought,’ I offered, ‘the skeletons are going to be a lot faster than the zombies. There’s a group over to the right of two zombies, one skelly. What if we pull them and run halfway around the hill? We should have time to deal with the skeleton before the zombies arrive.’

  With a flurry of wingbeats, Raitha landed on a rock near to me. We must have made an odd sight, an eagle and a wolf staring appraisingly at silent, unmoving figures from the grave.

  [Group] ‘That skeleton is level eight, hard for us. We can try, but if you are mistaken, break off before the other mobs catch up. It would be a shame to die. And my ability button has not reset, has yours? I’m concerned that if we die, we might have a long wait until we can use these abilities again.’

  A quick look showed me that Wolf Form was indeed greyed out. [Group] ‘It has not.’

  [Group] ‘Possibly, it will reset after twenty-four hours, perhaps though it will be a week, or more. Bear that in mind when you decide whether to fight or run.’

  [Group] ‘Ready when you are.’

  After a short wait, while Raitha beat his wings heavily and took to the skies, I targeted the skeleton in the group of three undead and rushed up the hill. Just as I was considering whether to leap upon him, all three figures lurched towards me, the skeleton raising a short sword. Even after four years of playing Epic at a much higher level than this, my heart still jumped at the sight of monsters running fast towards me with the intention of killing me. Swerving sharply, I ran down the hillside to where the first trees grew, then swerved again to my left and ran as fast as I could. It seemed to me that I could hear the skeleton close behind: if so, he was fast. I didn’t want to turn to check in case he was upon me while we were still too close to the zombies.

  [Group] ‘Is it working?’ I asked Raitha.

  [Group] ‘Indeed it is. Keep going though, until I stay stop. In fact you have to go more than halfway around the hill to maximise your distance from the zombies.’

  Leaping over bushes and clusters of white flowers that I did not recognise, I rounded a lone, fragile-looking birch tree when Raitha called out, [Group] ‘Now!’

  Roaring – not that it would have the slightest effect on the undead, but I felt fired up for battle – I halted, turned completely about and, when the skeleton got into range, grinning manically, launched myself at him. Too bad he had no throat; it was a good bite.

  You have bitten a skeleton for 4 points of damage.

  You have increased the skill Bite (24).

  Now, with an unpleasant clacking of bone on bone, the skeleton slashed at me.

  You have been hit by a skeleton for 5 points of damage.

  As I bit and clawed, while my enemy slashed (far too rapidly), Raitha came crashing down upon the skeleton, rapping vigorously at its skull with his sharp, curved beak.

  [Group] ‘Peck his eyes out!’ I joked.

  Raitha came straight back with, [Group] ‘Bite his liver!’

  Still no sign of the zombies. My hit points were down nearly half, but so were the skeleton’s and his or her (hard to tell if it were once a male or female human, I was too busy fighting to count the ribs) life was draining away faster than mine as Raitha clawed and pecked furiously from behind. All of a sudden a shadow fell across me, a pungent, unpleasant smell of rotten flesh filled my nose and at the edge of my vision I could sense something swaying: the zombies were here and with some alarm I saw Raitha’s hit points drop fast to below half.

  [Group] ‘Abort! Abort!’ I cried. Without waiting to check - I knew he would do as I said – I broke off from the skeleton who, astonishingly, gave a triumphant laugh. Epic 2 definitely had more sophisticated AI in the behaviour of the mobs than did Epic. Away I went, my small train behind me, this time heading for the forest in earnest. After a few minutes of galloping down the hill, I was dodging in and out of trees, still hearing the skeleton behind me, crashing through bushes and branc
hes as it sought to cut me in half.

  [Group] ‘You will be pleased to know I am safe,’ Raitha announced with a calm voice.

  [Group] ‘Good. I’m running in the forest, in the direction of the coast, I hope.’

  [Group] ‘I shall search for a glimpse of you when the gaps in the foliage allow. Don’t run into any mobs.’

  [Group] ‘Excellent advice.’ I probably sounded sarcastic, but I didn’t mean to. At the speed I was going, with my perspective so low to the ground, it would be very easy to accidently blunder into an unpleasant encounter.

  Ducking under branches, leaping bramble-filled ditches and constantly swerving between trees, I stayed clear of my pursuers. It seemed that the forest was becoming younger here and the rolling ground less steep. Good, this felt like the forest was thinning out. And soon I saw confirmation in a glimpse of grey seas, where a silver sheen seemed to lie like a magic, elven cloak on the restless waves.

  [Group] ‘Get ready to fight!’ Raitha called me away from my appreciation of the landscape.

  [Group] ‘What is it?’ I looked about, wildly.

  [Group] ‘The skeleton. He’s still after you. No sign of the zombies. I think we can take him.’

  [Group] ‘I agree. Here I go.’

  With that I turned and ran back towards the forest. There he was! Still grinning, still wielding a short sword and running, with apparent eagerness, to chop me up. As the gap between us closed to just a few metres and I leapt up to bite the head of my enemy, a streak of brown, of curved claw and hooked beak shot over my head and knocked back the skeleton, whose hit points having fully recovered now dropped by a third.

  Soon, we were battling away and I began to feel anxious. Not about the outcome of this engagement. With both Raitha and I hammering away and splintering the skeleton’s bones, we were going to win. My concern was that by the end of the battle, I’d be on maybe 10 to 15 hit points. Same for Raitha. And if those zombies turned up…

  Looking anxiously in every direction I could without losing my attacks on the skeleton, I could feel my body tensing. Lower and lower went the skeleton’s health bar, until, with a rattle of his teeth, he collapsed in a sudden shower of unconnected bones.

  The skeleton is dead. You gain experience.

  Good experience too, nearly 20 per cent of the way to level 6.

  And no zombies. Yay.

  Raitha sounded very pleased. ‘Well done. Imagine I am holding out my fist towards you.’

  ‘I touch mine to yours.’ I raised a front paw and with a chuckle, Raitha wafted a few wing feathers over it.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now we need to rest, let’s go to the shore.’

  ‘Meet you there.’

  When we were sat, side by side, looking out at the waves and distant islands, I found myself remembering my early days in Epic. Evidently, so did Raitha.

  ‘This is like Broomdark Hall,’ he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. The regions could not have been more different. Here, we were under a high, if grey, sky, with a silver sea before us stretching to the horizon. Broomdark Hall, on the other hand, was basically a huge haunted house full of mobs and after you’d cleared out the yard trash, it was impossible to avoid pulling at least three or four mobs at a time. After each battle, Raitha and I would sit on a stone sepulchre and wait to heal up. We’d pass the time talking about school and family. While I certainly had an interest in life in Kerala, Raitha was deeply fascinated by what I could tell him about Ireland and his questions always seemed to be exploring whether he’d like to move to my country.

  One thing he didn’t really understand was how isolated Mum and I were, despite our living in a large, bustling city in a country famous for the friendliness of the people. Raitha, too, came from a relatively poor family. Unlike my solitary upbringing, he had grown up with the children of four other families in a large, ex-colonial house they lived in near the sea. He had been part of pack of more than a dozen kids, who played games of football on the dusty, hard earth in front of the house in one long game that lasted months. Or who hid and sought one another, as they ran through the rooms of the large building. I, on the other hand, spent most of my time hurrying past other Dublin kids in case they were trouble. And whereas Raitha knew everyone on the street and would see nothing untoward in strolling into his neighbour’s house, Mum and I never spoke to our neighbours, apart from to argue with them (like when we confronted the couple in the house to our right about them filling a bin next to the wall that divided our yards out front with awful-smelling rubbish and leaving it for weeks). Listening to Raitha talk about his childhood, even though he had very little by way of possessions, I’d have swapped places with him.

  Although we were healed up before 7 p.m., the time for the meeting, another pull would take too long, so we went back through the forest, to where we could look up the steep, rocky slopes towards the ominous wall and barrow entrance, then unclipped.

  For the team talk, a stage had been set up beneath the player scoreboard. On it was a podium, with a small black microphone curving towards the speaker. There were three chairs: Blackridge sat in one; the elderly woman I’d met, Katherine, was in the other. The third was empty. The room was very full, it was a bit like being at a gig, with the large map a bigger version of the sound desk, around which the crowd parted.

  The composition of the audience was interesting. Some would have been Yuno employees and you’d expect a fairly wide range of ages and an even split by gender there. Everyone else, presumably, were gamers recruited from Epic for this project. And the people around me did have a certain look. I mean, of course everyone is an individual and there was considerable variation, not least in the nationalities present, but still, definitely more men than women, definitely younger (twenties, I’d say, mostly) than old and a predominance of very casual dress. I fitted right in with my denim knee-length shorts, grey hoody and Rampage T-shirt.

  And of course, there was Watson. Surprisingly, my heart warmed to see him as he stood at the podium, tapping the mic to obtain our attention. Looking like a top-heavy sailor, in a navy company polo shirt from which emerged thick, muscled arms, he seemed like an old friend in comparison to the self-important Blackridge.

  Expectant and silent, the whole room waited for Watson to begin.

  ‘Thank you.’ Watson peered through half-glasses at the top of the podium, where presumably he had some notes. ‘This is the greatest team of gamers ever assembled.’ Smiling, he looked around the room and although it was brief, I felt that he caught my eye. ‘How many of you wanted to beta-test Epic Two?’ A few people raised their hands. ‘Go on, please, don’t hold back, let me know.’ More joined in. Maybe a third. I had been interested, of course, but Epic still had a lot of content I’d never seen, plus all my friends. We’d discussed moving over as a group but not enough had wanted to.

  ‘And how many of you have wanted to play Epic or Epic Two with a state-of-the art rig and ping times of less than a millisecond?’

  With a loud rustle, all of us raised our hands and there were a few cheers. Watson chuckled. ‘Of course.

  ‘Well, if I were you, I’d be pretty happy. You get to do something you enjoy at the elite level, you get to keep your characters and gear when the game launches and…’ His voice rose with incredulity. ‘You get paid for it!

  ‘You deserve this. For the hours you put into Epic; for the community you created around the game; for the way you carried the storylines into the highest levels.’

  Now Watson’s voice became deep and serious, the sudden change of tone and volume instantly stilling the room and attracting our attention. ‘Of course, you are not here just to have fun. We have a serious task in hand, one that we can only achieve together.

  ‘Yuno has announced to the world that the launch date of Epic Two has been put back a month. We have apologised to all our early-bird subscribers and given them all a month’s free subscription. That gives us nine weeks to fix the game. Nine weeks, to achieve
a goal that we did not believe would be managed in nine months. You have to level up, stop Mikarkathat from taking over the game, and kill her. It is a daunting prospect, but if you collaborate and put the hours in, it can be done. Especially, because you have the advantage of being able to access our developers’ notes about the game.

  ‘I’ll keep this short, as you’ll want the opportunity to ask questions before getting clipped up again. We have installed extra rigs on the floor above, please go there if all those on this level are busy. Mr Blackridge - the General - and the Yuno team will organise you into groups of seven, the optimal amount for the experience-calculating algorithm. Don’t bother with trade skills. When you are hitting the seventy-plus levels, we will start raiding for the gear you’ll need to face the dragon, especially for gear with cold resistance.

  ‘Now, are there any questions?’

  A hand shot up and before Watson could politely call on the speaker, a young-looking goth-type asked, ‘Why don’t you reprogram the dragon?’

  ‘Oh, we will. Next time she respawns, she won’t be AI. For now, however’—Watson sighed and gestured with both arms, as if to say, What can you do, it was a dumb idea—‘our problem is that to maximise the dragon’s machine-learning capability, we let her go and dispersed her code over the millions of computers of our community hosts. Like the game itself, there’s no possibility of editing Mikarkathat in a conventional way. She’s too dispersed. And she’s evolving too.’

  Now a tall, brown-skinned woman, wearing a white headscarf, put up her hand and waited for Watson to nod towards her.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she began, ‘we are reprogramming her and the game. Every action of ours in the game has a code consequence. It is like the premise of Gödel’s Theorem. And for Mikarkathat, we are trying to write the G-string.’ The woman looked around, confident that we would all understand her point, although I only half got it. Our actions in the game were also changes in the code.