Warcross: Chapters 11-18

Sure enough, Hideo is there, flanked by a bevy of bodyguards.

“All custom-made. They revamped the space a few years ago, too—it’s double the size it used to be.”

Official players on the floor shine in the dark, their outfits lit up in neon, their names, team affiliation, and level hovering over their heads like golden trophies.

The figure at the top looks up only briefly from behind a cage of ornate gold bars.

He is decked out in his classic DJ attire—a black, well-tailored suit, gold shades, a gold face mask and a state-of-the-art set of headphones with gold metal wings embellishing both sides, as if he were the messenger god Hermes wearing something designed by Hermès.

The track shifts in one smooth measure—the sound of electric violins, cellos, and a deep, reverberating beat fills the space.

“Hey!” I say to him, planting a wide, naïve smile on my face. “Tremaine Blackbourne, right?”

I turn my attention to Max Martin’s info. His is surprisingly sparse, too. No odd security shields. Nothing useful.

Then he’s already nodding farewell, passing us by with his entourage, bodyguards, and a trailing, screaming mass of fans.

The way Tremaine was seething in the background will fuel me for the rest of the championships.

Ren looks the most frazzled out of us all, with his short brown hair sticking out in every direction and his eyes hidden behind a pair of white sunglasses.

Hideo is standing before a podium and facing a barrage of flashing lights.

“The Demons are competent at everything and incredible at nothing. You concentrate on being a great Architect, Emi, and you’ll win us the game. We’ll make sure you’re up there in no time.”

“You know Tremaine better than any of us. So keep your personal grievances out of it and help our wild card out, yeah?”

Around my waist is a utility belt, equipped with a myriad of tools I’m all too familiar with.

The pole careens sharply forward, toppling at an angle against the wall of the building.

Most players wouldn’t have been able to dodge it. But my reflexes have been honed on the streets as a bounty hunter.

My fingertips brush against the Morph power-up. It’s in my hand. A tingle rushes up my arm at the acquisition.

I land hard on my back, knocking my avatar out of commission for several long seconds.

“Don’t let me talk you into playing chess,” she quips, repeating Asher’s warning he’d given me when I’d first met her.

A roar comes from the audience, and her opponent shakes her hand grudgingly.

“I didn’t tell anyone to make you the number one pick. Asher Wing did that on his own. You’re quite the commodity.”

It’s a notorious gathering place in the Dark World.

“I suppose chivalry isn’t dead,” he finally says.

I shiver at the memory of his expression, of those vicious, dark eyes, absent of any hint of the playful, polite, charismatic version of himself that I thought I knew.

I pause with my mouth open, my momentary bravado disappearing.

I’m past the shields that protect the surface level of Warcross and have dived into the sprawling, encrypted, anonymous underground world of virtual reality that has sprung up right under the Warcross platform.

Narrow, dilapidated buildings stand right in the middle of the street, while some doors leading into buildings hang upside down, as if impossible to get into.

The ship’s bow displays an ornate wooden carving in the semblance of a backward copyright symbol.

Regular Warcross teams are sponsored by wealthy patrons; Dark World teams are owned by gangsters.

He’s not here for the game. He’s dallying around, probably just keeping a low profile while he waits. I’m willing to bet he’s here to make contact with someone.

In the midst of all these hulking avatars, the newcomer is inconspicuous, a lean shadow.

His black helmet is completely opaque, so that all I see in it is the reflection of my generic avatar.

But when she and Zero both turn their heads simultaneously, I realize that she is a proxy, a security shield behind which Zero can completely hide his identity.

The serenity of the real world feels jarring after my jaunt in the Dark World.

I pull up a map to hover transparently before me, along with the list of coordinates I’d just jotted down in the Pirate’s Den. Then I turn my attention to the longitudes and latitudes on the map’s sides.

The headquarters themselves even look different, and with my lenses on, the walls are covered in swirls of color and artistic renditions of the company’s logo.

I look on in fascination as he weaves my data into what we already have of Ren’s, an algorithm right before my eyes, fashioning it into the equivalent of a noose.

Something about the gesture feels nostalgic, and suddenly I can see my father hunched over the dining room table, humming cheerfully to himself as he measures strips of fabric against his wrist, a half-empty wine bottle nearby, the floor around him cluttered with sequins and reams of cloth.

“One of the first things I put on my personal, augmented reality view was an unobstructed night sky,” Hideo says.