Spacebound Chronicles

Chapter 14: Brisk Haverson

“Stop! We don’t need to-” a plasma shot interrupted Gash Hunter’s peace appeal. The shot was an intentional miss, but it came close enough to be uncomfortable.

“Listen up, you dust-licking casuals!” the pirate leader yelled over the comms. He wore a grey space-armor with a shining skeleton painted on it. “We are hereby relieving you of all your Void Crystals. Comply and we might spare you.”

“There is more to be mined,” Gash nodded towards the dried-out crystal column.

“I would rather not risk collapsing the Maze,” the pirate captain said. “Besides, I’m feeling greedy. Hand. It. Over.”

“Careful now,” Snorri whispered in closed frequencies to both his friends. “He is a Top 500.”

“How do you know?” Logan asked.

“Some of these are NPCs, and he’s controlling them. I don’t know who he is, but tread carefully,” Snorri said, concurrently realizing the captain studied him as well, undoubtedly having realized who he was.

“Pay attention, Logan. We survive, this is what I’m teaching you,” Hunter said as he raised his hands and stepped forward. “Okay, we surrender!” he spoke for all to hear.

The pirate captain seemed flustered by the development, almost as if he hoped for resistance. He seemed ready to say something when Gash Hunter opened one hand, revealing one of the dark crystals, and tossed the shard over to the pirate captain. The bandit leader reached up and grabbed the gem, and at that very moment Gash Hunter disappeared into a shadowy vortex.

Except for Snorri Gian, everyone seemed equally shocked and confused by the sudden vanishing, and even more so when, less than a second later, the huge man reappeared right in front of the pirate captain. The thrown crystal had disintegrated, replaced by Hunter himself, who headbutted the skull painted pirate helmet and pulled a pistol to quickly shoot the two lackeys who still tried to understand what had happened.

Logan Spacebound was watching wide-eyed when Snorri tugged him back into reality. The spy tossed a Dark Matter grenade over a crowd of pirates—players and NPCs alike—that were soon sucked into the portable black hole and vanished into oblivion, opening a path for them.

“Come on, while they’re watching Gash!” Snorri yelled, leading the way back into the pulsing branches of the Maze.

“But he needs…”

“No, he doesn’t!” Snorri opened his hand to reveal another vibrating shard.

Meanwhile, with the two lackeys shot dead, Gash lunged over the captain, holding a long combat knife. With his metallic gauntlets, the pirate blocked the first stab, then the second and the third. The element of surprised gained by teleportation had completely faded now. After blocking the fifth blow, the marauder planted a foot between Hunter’s legs, bringing the character to his knees, incapacitated by a force his player, as a girl, would never understand.

With his target unable to react, the skeleton armored man pulled his own pistol, its barrel shining blue with plasma, angling towards Hunter’s space helmet.

He shot.

But by then his target was gone into another dark vortex, rematerializing in the spot where Snorri held a dark crystal moments prior.

“Sweet lord!” Hunter moaned, still holding his weak spot. “I’m so glad I’m not a boy!”

“What happened?” Logan asked worriedly as he helped Hunter up and Snorri held back a wave of mercenary pursuers.

“He kicked me… Down there…” he grunted.

“Ouch!” Logan said, looking around as he realized the only lights around were the plasma projectiles. The pulses had stopped. “Oh no, there is an energy burst coming. We have to jump branches…”

“I can’t,” Hunter grunted.

“You have to!” Snorri screamed as he came running and gunning, grabbed a dark shard from Hunter’s backpack and tossed it up into the darkness, not bothering to aim.

Once Snorri and Logan jumped, a vortex formed around Gash Hunter and he teleported again into the launched crystal, the intense wave of creeping energy running past soon after. Snorri and Logan, however, landed on a branch directly above, while Gash drifted away in the void until he collided with a distant portion of the maze.

Seeming fully recovered, Gash stood up on his own walkway, waving to his friends before an army of mining drones blocked them off. From the opposite side, the pirate captain approached, plasma pistol in hand, followed by his crew.

Snorri and Logan needed no more than a glance towards each other to communicate their mutual intention: running!

They dashed away together, balls of plasma and mining lasers tearing about. Snorri shot the robots that got in the way, but never turned back, save to toss a grenade over his shoulder at the pirates.

“Jump!” Snorri ordered as he launched himself upwards, dodging an energy overcharge Logan had not seen coming.

Logan jumped, following Snorri’s path with precision, but a mining-bot intercepted him midair. Turns out they were much larger up close than they seemed from the ground, almost the size of a horse. A round metallic horse that shot lasers. It was relentless upon the impact, maintaining enough velocity to keep Logan glued to it.

One of the metal claws reached out to the cyborg, the inbuilt mining laser projector red-hot as it charged a shot aimed at Logan’s face.

Psewn!

The explosion made Logan squeeze his eyes shut, anticipating death, but a second later he realized the only damage happened to the drone, now shattered to bolts and screws. As Logan floated amidst the labyrinth hugged to the husk of the miner-bot, he could see Hunter waving his pistol from a tendril far away.

Once Logan finally regained him footing over one of the Maze’s twisted limbs, he could no longer see either Snorri or Gash, to either direction. All he had to guide him were the energy pulses that led to the outer perimeter of the Maze.

That would have to do.

***

Snorri’s last Dark Matter grenade sucked the last two pirate minions into nothingness, leaving him alone with the captain and an army of crazed mining drones that left no time to talk.

Snorri jumped from one tendril to the next, gravity constantly shifting direction, the world flipping upside-down, then sideways, then tilting ninety degrees to the right, then another sixty to the left. He usually had fun dodging lasers in the grvitational mess of the Maze, but this pirate captain was making it almost too hard to be enjoyable.

With a somersault and a twist to dodge a frenzied robot’s laser, Snorri landed on the tendril previously above the one him and the pirate were, positioning them on what was each other’s ceiling now.

They exchanged fire, both looking up at each other and using the dead drones floating between them as cover. As one of the drones were hit and drifted away, however, Snorri saw something floating behind it that he had not yet noticed.

Plasma mine! How had he failed to see the pirate throwing that?

He had no time to get out of range and only one thing he could use as cover: the ground.

The spy ran around the tendril upon which he stood, the mysterious gravity field always attracting him to its center in a way that the ever-present edge never actually came. Instead, from his point of view, it was the world around that tendril that spun around until the mine was out of sight.

He waited, watching as a swarm of drones materialized from behind the Maze network, coming towards him. They were still too far to try and shoot, but that would change quickly, and in such large numbers it would be impossible to dodge them all. But he could not move away. If he did move, the mine would blast him. If he stood, the drone swarm would cut him to pieces.

Perma-death either way.

He hated those damn drones. So lovely harmless on the way in, such little devils on the way out. But, with that thought, it hit him.

Taking a deep breath and cursing the stars, Snorri unhooked the backpack from his shoulders, heavy with Dark Matter Diamonds, counted to three and flung the bag over the edge of the tendril, across the mine and over to the pirate captain.

From where he stood, clad in his skeletal armor set, Brisk Haverson, the last pirate standing, saw the diamond-filled purse drifting towards him. Snorri Gian, he guessed, had probably given up on the fight and handed over the loot for a chance to run away. But his mission was Gian, and the crystals were just an added bonus. He walked over to the bag, eyes still raised to the point where he had last seen Gian hiding behind the Maze branch.

As soon as Brisk touched the backpack, the permadeath warning crossed his screen and dozens of drones came from either side of Snorri Gian’s hideout, their lasers ready. The concentrated fire of the miners reduced the skeleton armor to ashes, along with the man inside, and before the drones could even adjust their course towards the diamonds they so desperately craved, the plasma mine went off in all its green glory, leaving but two drones for Snorri Gian to handle.

As he dispatched of those, he could not help but regret the fact that he would never know who the pirate captain, a fellow T-500 player now permakilled, actually was.

***

Logan had made it back to the edge of the Maze, and after leaping from tendril to tendril had managed to locate the spot where they had anchored the Amphibian.

Luckily for him, despite the lonely crystal in his spacesuit’s pocket, no miner-bot seemed to mind him when there were two backpacks filled with Dark Diamonds running around.

Before Logan could reattach his tow cable, Gash Hunter appeared miles away at the end of another tendril sticking out of the denser Maze webbing. He fired at enemies still concealed by the labyrinth, but, judging by the lasers that pushed him closer and closer to the edge, they were miner-bots.

Lots of miner-bots.

It became clear to both him and Logan that he was outmatched, and as their helmeted eyes caught each other’s they knew what they had to do. The robots were after the crystals, and given Logan Spacebound’s proximity to the ship…

Gash hurled the backpack through open space, the strength of those massive arms and the lack of any air or gravity granting the package continuous speed. Logan braced to grab it, but the second the backpack filled with stones met his chest, both were sent spinning beyond the edge of the Maze’s gravity field.

After one entire backflip, the backpack escaped his grip, both meandering further away into the empty void at the same seemingly insubstantial speed. The backpack, mere centimeters away from his grasp, intensified the feeling of helplessness as he failed to get any closer to it, no matter how much he struggled.

To make matters worse, one quick glance over his shoulder revealed the approach of a string of mining robots. Hunter was reducing their numbers as they flew past him, but he would doubtfully handle them all.

On top of everything, the pirate ship came gliding through the darkness. His hopes that it would just move on were unanswered, as an airlock opened to a pair of individuals in spacesuits. They launched, attached to tow cables, unlike Logan, in a last attempt to profit for this endeavor.

Robots coming from behind. Pirates coming from ahead. The backpack not any closer.

But he had an ace up his literal sleeve.

Aiming on the opposite direction, he fired the canon on his robotic hand, exploding his space-glove and propelling him towards the target.

As the air left his suit and he touched the bag carrying hundreds of Dark Matter Diamonds, then the warning crossed his eyes:

PERMANENT DEATH ENABLED.