Gods of the Game #3, Chapter 19

Introspection.

Lance forgoed training sessions to instead walk, hands linked behind his back, and think.

Sindre’s advice came to him: You want to jump up a whole tier? Then you need to get your head on straight.

Everybody trained. Everybody pushed their bodies to an extreme. Even now, each day leading up to the Finals, all of Brutal Deluxe was sweating, laboring, striving for a slight edge, a little more growth, a little more potency to bring to the field.

He could just don his VMU suit and do the same.

But that felt like a waste. He had only a handful of days left till their third game against Nullpoint. Till he faced Charn Chai.

No. Any substantive growth would have to take place in his mind. In his heart. In his… if he had one… in his soul.

No matter which way he examined his situation, it all came down to a single problem. That he existed without consent, without purpose, without origin.

He wasn’t Charoen, he wasn’t the man who’d created and lived all the memories that gave him context.

He wasn’t the brother Jessie grieved nor who Beatrice had fallen for.

He wasn’t the son Charn Chai sacrificed on his political altar.

Nor, now, did he want to be the soldier, the weapon, the tool that Virgil tried to forge.

What was he? An unasked-for persistence of identity, an echo of an Echo, thrust into a life that he hadn’t chosen.

An absence complicated by his biology, a void that contrasted with the joy he felt on the field, the raw emotions that combat summoned: fury, purpose, exaltation—but which stemmed from biochemical processes, that were, in their own right, engineered, almost a mechanical response.

For the past nine months he’d been navigating emotions and feelings that arose not from free will, but from conditioning, genetics, his stimpack, and the echoes of someone else’s loves and life.

His instincts bid him protect Jessie, serve Virgil, exult in the game—but they weren’t his instincts. They were imposed.

Still, he had to choose a path.

Silence had offered her own, a dark way that wound around and around suicide, courting annihilation and death. Seeking a frisson of emotion in pain and loss.

He’d flirted with nihilism itself: that nothing made sense, nothing had meaning, and that all was hollow, a charade. That he wasn’t a person, but rather a weapon, a function, and that only his body’s hormones and instincts were sacred.

And for most of the season that had served. He’d played and won. Had risen to such heights.

But he’d not risen high enough. Nowhere close to contesting Nullpoint. Nowhere close to feeling whole, integrated, and at peace.

Instead? He felt even more fragmented following  Jessie’s overture. His nihilism thrown into disarray. Dinner with the team had become a new custom; they mostly ignored him, since he was so quiet, but they also accepted him.

Jessie had taken to calling him ‘Cuz’. Lance was surprised to realize how much he treasured that flippant moniker.

But he couldn’t live for Jessie. That was Charoen’s life. He couldn’t live for the game. That was Virgil’s demand, and making of his mind a slave to his stimpack. He couldn’t erase what little self he had and simply be ‘Lance’ - that was, in some manner he didn’t understand, an abnegation in and of itself.

Either you turned toward life, or you turned away.

But what remained? What option was authentically his own? He had to choose a life after being thrust into existence against his will. He had to define himself while being haunted by a dead man.

Somehow, despite all those obstacles, he had to find the means to live.

Means which eluded him.

So he walked the bluffs that overlooked the dark ocean. He spent hours sitting on precarious outcrops where the hot wind tugged at him. He watched gulls swoop and circle. Lay in the brown grass to stare up at the fathomless blue sky.

Time was running out.

Virgil didn’t press him. Sindre updated his training logs, but didn’t call out his absences. Even his teammates intuited that they should leave him alone during these lonesome peregrinations.

The day of the Finals drew ever closer.

Lance’s mind revolved like a broken flywheel around the same hub of absence. This wasn’t his life. He’d chosen none of it. He had no context.

And yet, he felt gratitude and warmth toward Jessie, above and beyond the ghostly love he’d inherited from Charoen. Clovinn’s antics amused him. He respected Samira. He pitied Silence.

And slowly, by degrees, he came to admire Virgil’s ability to persist, life after pained life, so as to see his designs to their ultimate goal.

It was late one afternoon as he sat in a grassy hollow, watching a shrew-like creature ferret amongst the tussocks for grubs, that the parallel hit home: Life had been thrust upon Lance just as death had been thrust upon Virgil.

Yet the könig had made a choice. He’d chosen to continue living despite the pain, the futility, the inevitability of each rapid death. Something in Virgil chose life each time he awoke from his vat. Each and every time he internalized his imminent death, something caused him to raise his head and carry on.

His purpose. His designs for humanity.

And though Lance had no such overarching ambition, still he had to make a choice. One he’d flirted with that first day when he stole Clovinn’s car. Once he’d made in each varied iteration ever since.

Not to live, but the how and why of it.

He’d corrected Jessie. Told her that his existence was as forced and random as anyone else’s. Nobody chose to be born. But everyone else was given time to acclimate themselves to being alive.

He’d been thrown right into the heart of the business as an adult.

The shock had been overwhelming.

But the time for excuses was over.

Watching the shrew jerk its head back out of the undergrowth, a centipede writhing in its like snout, he knew that he’d definitively chosen life. Now he just had to explain the desire to himself.

Or did he?

The shrew didn’t wrestle with existence.

It just hunted, ate, probably did its damn best to find a cute mate, and then either ended up someone else’s meal or dead within a span of years from old age.

He’d thought his own lucidity, his own awareness as to the artificiality of his existence as his bane. But perhaps it was a boon. It allowed him to become aware of the futility of attempting to craft a narrative that explained his existence. There was none.

Yet still he wanted to live.

Why?

Great emotions were moving within him, making it hard to breathe. The shrew darted away and was gone, but Lance continued staring at the same spot of bracken.

Why? Not because there was a reason, a meaning, a purposeful context to his life.

He’d been seeking something, anything to hold onto, but… there wasn’t anything.

There was no meaning to his life. Nothing external that made sense to him.

But still he wanted to live.

His life might be meaningless, shorn of context, without story or purpose, but it was his.

His life.

Its bizarre contours and particulars were unique to him. And his only possible act was to reject it, or claim it.

Breathing deeply, eyes prickling over with tears, chest thudding with each powerful beat of his heart, he realized the essential truth:  he would stop asking the universe, the world, everyone around him, to justify themselves, to explain his being.

He would just live because he chose to.

Nothing more, nothing less.

A simple decision, but perhaps… perhaps there was no more profound stance he could take.

Lance rose to his feet. The dark ocean stretched out before him. The brown landscape to the sides. The hot wind blew. He swayed, then settled.

There was no reason he’d been given this life.

But he’d been given it.

So he’d live it as best he could, as he deemed best, and then, one day, he’d die regardless.

But for now?

Lance raised his fist, clenched it tight, and realized that he was grinning, or perhaps snarling. The urge to scream into the great sky above the ocean was overwhelming, so he gave his voice vent: he roared, and the sound was thin, insubstantial, and torn away by the wind.

But that was fine.

Breathing hard, he rubbed at this face, took a deep breath, then turned to walk back to the complex.

It was finally time to train.

*

Folks stopped to turn and watch as he entered the underground center. It wasn’t as if his entrance garnered cataclysmic attention, but just as his absence had been notable, so, too, was his return.

This time he raised his hand in greeting, returned nods, and first hit the locker room to shower and dress in a training bodysuit.

The hot water felt good. It washed off more than the grime of the past few days.

He emerged in his blood-orange bodysuit feeling light, loaded, and ready to go.

Excitement bubbled up within him as he settled into running the proscribed number of laps. He’d adhere to Sindre’s training regimen. After twenty laps, he moved to the resistance machines and did a light circuit. The amount of metal he could lift with his Strength of S3 was absurd.

But he didn’t push himself too hard. Just worked the circuit, built up a light sweat, then moved to the VMU field.

Several others were already immersed in their own virtual programs. The hellseherins and Catori. Jessie had finished her own regimen, and was stretching off to one side, face flushed.

The old Lance would have gone straight for his suit. But instead he detoured to where she was grabbing the toes of her left foot, leg outstretched before her.

“What’s up, Cuz?”

“Ready to train.”

“Yeah?” She scrutinized him. He returned her stare with a gentle smile. “Huh. Something’s different about you.”

“Nothing much. I don’t think. Anyway, here I go.”

“Luck.”

Her words warmed him. On one level they’d shared the lightest of interactions. On another, the exchange meant everything. Affirmed an intangible.

So he donned his suit, placed his helmet over his head, and chose his training program.

Sindre had chosen a jäger-focused exercise. He’d be facing Charn Chai, after all. Lance appeared high above the blue-surfaced training arena floor, turbine boots already thrumming. He’d be facing an F-ranked jäger, then an E-ranked one, all the way up to S-rank, then back down, oscillating up and down the ranks till he was ready to call it quits.

No problem.

He felt at peace as he saw the F-ranker fly toward him, growing larger by the moment. Not the serenity he’d felt before from abdicating his own sense of self, but a more confident kind of mental calm. He felt solid. He felt real.

He felt ready.

The F-ranked jäger hopped at the last moment. The telltale ripples of his imminent emergence appeared to the left, so Lance drifted wide, trained his lance on the emergence point, and electrocuted the jäger the moment he appeared. Not even the enemy’s clear use of Speed availed him.

The man dropped, his armor ashen and smoking.

The E-ranker appeared in the distance and closed, tapping Speed again at the last moment.

Lance double hopped toward him, appearing just behind the startled jäger, and dealt such a blow to the back of his helm that the man toppled to the ground.

He defeated the D-ranker with similar ease, then the C-ranker. Each had a new pair of Abilities that they brought to the duel, and Lance thought they were trying to use a blend of Conductive, perhaps, and something else they never managed to manifest.

Conductive and Speed. Had Sindre programmed Lance to fight his own duplicates?

Facing the more cautious B-ranker, he tapped Speed and Blink to outmaneuver him, but the other jäger did the same: they engaged in a ballet of Blinks, dancing through the sky as they sought to wrest advantage. The enemy jäger was far more lethal than a B-ranker should have been; what Ability was giving him that edge? Not Berserker. He wasn’t going mad with rage.

Still, Lance dropped him at last with a well-timed blast.

Lance checked his metrics. NDS was at 34%. Gamma was at 105 hz.

The A-ranker appeared and closed.

Again they engaged in a series of calculated hops, the A-ranker savvy enough to keep Lance’s Blink ability at bay as he hopped to seemingly random coordinates in turn. The enemy reserved Speed till the last moment, and managed to tag him with a lighting blast—the hit knocked Lance almost out of the sky, packing an outsized punch that sent him tumbling, limbs spasming.

Lance recovered, swooped to recover his falling lightning lance, then twisted about and sued Shock and Conductive to drop the A-ranker from afar, the intensity of the blast overwhelming his jäger armor with one hit.

Gamma? 113 hz.

Still Lance felt calm, but his thoughts were tightly focused: not Berserker, so what had augmented the enemy attack like that?

Realization hit him.

He knew every power the enemy jägers were using.

Speed and Conductive.

Centering and Energized Strike.

Blink plus Hunter.

Which meant the S-ranked jäger would manifest Stutter Step and Brilliant Energy.

Charn Chai’s power suite.

It was a terrifying combination. Blink and Stutter Step turned his fights into one-on-one murders. Hunter combined with Brilliant Energy made him a terror against isolated opponents. Speed plus Conductive set up his iconic lighting-lance blitz. All of it resulting in fast engagements, ever increasing gamma, which led to more Blink control and greater damage output, allowing him to catch and execute hellseherins with ease and demolish anyone else caught alone, which again only led to ever more gamma.

It was as self-accelerating death spiral that had propelled Charn Chai to the very top.

An unstoppable jäger. Imitated countless times since, but never matched. None of his emulators had ever managed to manifest the same confidence, talent, and malice.

The powers that had made him the legendary Wolf of Terra.

To his surprise, Lance found himself still eerily centered. The realization should have caused him to react, would have left him hesitant and shocked before, but now?

He felt nothing more than solid resolve.

The S-ranker appeared in the distance. This jäger would bring Stutter Step and Brilliant Energy to the table.

Lance settled himself. Watched and waited as the jäger flew toward him, then, not out of anger, not out of fear, nor even out of bloodlust, he opted instead to fly forth and meet the jäger in the air.

The S-ranker Blinked.

With Brilliant Energy, Lance couldn’t afford even being tagged by a strike. So he hopped in turn, and what followed was a game of cat and mouse, each angling and hopping, Blinking and reserving Speed for just the right moment.

Berserker tantalized. But in his calm, focused state, the appeal of going all-out in such manner was gone. Now he understood Virgil’s chagrin over his selection.

Too late.

The S-ranker was cunning and fast. Lance fought to get an angle, to second guess where he’d appear. It felt akin to playing rock-paper-scissors again and again, and each time trying to anticipate how his foe would react to his own last move.

The S-ranker, however, proved too cunning.

A blast of lightning crackled over Lance’s side, and his armor was of no avail. The Pain Threshold was only set to 25%, so it only burned a little, but it wasn’t the pain that mattered.

Stutter Step allowed the S-ranker to immediately reposition himself before Lance could orient, even as Energized Strike empowered his gamma further. Add in Hunter’s boost? The S-ranker was now several stages above him.

Fighting for balance, Lance hopped away, but the S-ranker was there, already assaulting him, and this time the blow dropped Lance to the ground.

Maximum damage accumulated.

Reset.

The S-ranker in Nullpoint’s armor appeared again in the middle distance. Lance took a steadying breath. Centering had kept his own mana fluctuations at an even keel, even during his disorientation, but that hadn’t done him much good.

Berserker. His Apex ranked Weapon Ability. He was effectively fighting as an entire tier lower without it.

And yet. To embrace the wild fluctuations of hz would only destabilize his focus. Make him erratic, out of control.

Just as he’d finally found his center.

He flew forth to engage, and three minutes later crashed to the ground again.

Maximum damage accumulated.

The sight of his father’s face still knotted up his gut. Charoen’s memories were powerful. He felt on edge, breathless, and each sneer he glimpsed through the other man’s visor only twisted him up further. Perhaps Berserker would give him the advantage he needed, seeing as his calm was already falling apart.

No. He wouldn’t just throw away his focus.

He’d made a mistake choosing Berserker. But now he had to live with it.

Again and again he fought the S-ranker. Again and again Charn Chai outmaneuvered him, bypassed his armor, and crushed him.

After the sixth defeat Lance paused the simulation and just hovered there, staring at the distant, monochromatic figure.

Charn Chai.

Was it the fact that it was his father that was causing him to second-guess himself? His calm had devolved into a choppy series of emotional highs and lows. He felt buffeted by anxiety and anger.

Perhaps his father was just too tough. The AI was playing him to the best of its ability, so this simulation was no doubt as accurate as one could get. Perhaps… perhaps Lance in his inexperience had chosen the wrong powers, hadn’t had the time to develop, or simply didn’t have the killer instincts his father did.

He exited the VMU.

It felt like he’d been in there for hours, but Jessie was still stretching on the sideline. Or perhaps she was waiting for him? Pulling off his helm, he walked over.

“You OK?” she asked.

“I… I don’t know.” He dropped into a crouch by her side, sweat dripping from his chin. “Sindre spun up a simulation of our father. S-ranked jäger. Full power suite. I couldn’t beat him.”

Jessie nodded soberly. “If it’s any consolation, nobody else had been able to, either.”

Lance bit his lower lip and looked away. He felt fierce resentment, but against what or who, he didn’t know. “Still. There has to be a way.”

“Despite what Samira says, second place ain’t bad.”

He looked back at her. “You believe that?”

She didn’t answer.

“Didn’t think so,” he said. “Every time I hop, he knows where I’m going. All he needs is to tag me once to start accelerating this lethal loop of getting stronger and faster, and his attacks cut right through my armor.”

“That’s the fucking Wolf of Terra for you.”

“I need to hit Quantum.” Lance considered his own statement, then nodded. “I can’t face him with only Apex powers, and one of my choices stinks. Berserker. I don’t want to lose control.”

Jessie shrugged one shoulder. “Might have no choice.”

“If I do, he’ll just outplay me even faster. I can’t just charge him like a bull.”

Jessie nodded sympathetically. “Look, it’s like mom said—” She caught herself, frowned. “It’s like my mother always said. Just do your best. That’s all the world can ask of you.”

Her correction stung, and then he felt stupid for being resentful. “Yeah.” He stood. “Guess that’s all we can do.”

“Promise me one thing, Cuz.”

“Sure.”

“Get me out of the End Zone and into the game.” Her gaze became sober and intense. “Everybody always focused on Charoen and Charn Chai. But I’m his daughter. He abandoned me, too. This is my one chance. To face him, to confront him. To make him pay for what he did to mom, Charoen, and I. I can’t spend the whole game locked away.”

Lance held her gaze, then nodded gravely. “Understood. I’ll do my best.”

She managed a hard smile. “Thanks.”

“Thank me after the game.”

“Three days to go.”

“Three days,” said Lance. “We’d better make them count.”

But as he walked away, a feeling of futility washed over him. Despite everything, all his resolve, his break throughs, his epiphanies, he still wasn’t the equal of the Wolf of Terra. What if he never would be? Three days was insufficient to find out.

There had to be a way, though. A way to meet Charn Chai in midair and defeat him.

There just had to.