Kodiak grunted in approval. "Good. Now for the teams. The game mode is Duos."

Before the words had even finished echoing, Ursa Major was practically vibrating with excitement. He bounced over to Ray's new form. "Dibs! I call dibs on the new guy! We're gonna wreck this lobby, man! The unstoppable bear and the… uh… mysterious grey jumpsuit of doom!"

"Not so fast," Kodiak rumbled. He pulled up a semi-transparent window in front of their group. "To keep things interesting, we're randomizing." He glanced at Alyna's avatar. They were seven. "Are you good with a random?"

She shook her head, a smile on her lips. "You guys are a team of six. That works perfectly for duos. I'll stay on the sidelines. It'll be more fun to watch you all try to kill each other anyway."

Kodiak mouthed a silent "thank you" and tapped the button. A digital slot machine spun before settling on the final pairings.

TEAM 1: KODIAK & GORO

TEAM 2: KITSUNE & URSA MAJOR

TEAM 3: GLITCHY & GLITCH

A collective silence fell over the group. Leo looked like his favorite toy had just been taken away. Reina's nine tails bristled with visible, sarcastic annoyance.

"Oh, fantastic," she muttered. "I get to babysit the walking disaster."

Ray looked at his partner. Anya's small, hooded avatar seemed to shrink in on itself, her bunny-ear antennae drooping with anxiety.

It was then that a new player entered the lobby, and the general chatter immediately quieted. His avatar was a masterpiece of ostentatious design—a tall, impossibly handsome figure clad in armor that seemed to be forged from shifting, hexagonal plates of fire. A stylized logo, "HEXFIRE," burned on his chest.

"No way!" Leo gasped, his voice a mixture of awe and hero-worship. "It's Hexfire! The god-tier pro! He has a 98% win rate!" Goro's massive hand clamped down on the back of Leo's neck, stopping him from rushing forward.

Reina rolled her eyes. "And a 100% chance of being an insufferable ass."

"What's up, Hex-heads!" the streamer announced, his voice booming through the lobby's public address system. "Your god of the game has arrived! As always, I'm feeling generous today. First five noobs to subscribe to my channel get a 1000-credit gift pack to buy some real gear!"

He strutted through the lobby, his fiery avatar parting the crowd. His gaze landed on Ray's simple, grey form. He stopped, a condescending smirk on his perfectly sculpted face.

"Well, look what we have here," Hexfire said, his voice dripping with disdain. "Did your system crash halfway through rendering, buddy? Or are you just poor?" He laughed, and a few of his sycophantic followers laughed with him. "Tell you what. You look like you need the help. Subscribe to my channel, and I'll make it two thousand credits. Enough to buy yourself a personality."

Ray's avatar remained perfectly still. The offer, the condescension, the transactional nature of the interaction—it was a perfect microcosm of the world he despised.

"No, thanks," he replied, his voice flat and unfiltered.

Hexfire's smirk faltered for a fraction of a second, replaced by a flicker of confusion, then irritation. He wasn't used to being refused. "What, too proud to accept a handout? Suit yourself, noob. Stay in the gutter."

He turned and swaggered away, his fiery armor a beacon of arrogance.

The giant countdown timer hit zero. A deafening klaxon blared. The platform beneath their feet dissolved.

And they were falling.

The world fractured into a kaleidoscope of screaming color and digital static as they fell. Ray's HUD lit up with the vibrant, chaotic map of the Chrome Battle Royale arena: a multi-leveled urban jungle of neon-drenched skyscrapers, grimy, trash-strewn alleyways, and precarious, high-altitude mag-lev tracks that snaked between the buildings.

Just as they were about to land, a stark, red warning box flashed in Ray's vision, a message specifically for new players.

[SYSTEM WARNING: All neural accelerator-class cyberware is prohibited in this game mode. The match speed is normalized for all players. Attempting to activate prohibited hardware will result in an immediate and permanent account ban.]

Then came another one.

[SYSTEM WARNING: All advanced combat-assist software is prohibited in this game mode. This includes, but is not limited to, projectile prediction scripts, tactical analyzers, and automated targeting overlays. Match processing is normalized for all users. Attempting to activate prohibited software will result in an immediate and permanent account ban.]

So, no speed or software advantage, Ray thought, a flicker of something almost like relief passing through him. A level playing field.

He and Anya landed in a crouch in a dark, narrow alleyway, the sound of distant, virtual gunfire already echoing off the walls. Anya's small, hooded avatar immediately pressed against a large dumpster, her bunny-ear antennae twitching nervously as she scanned the area.

"Okay… okay," she whispered over their private channel, her voice trembling slightly. "I'm running a passive scan of the local node. There are two teams fighting in the plaza just north of us. And… wait." Her antennae twitched again. "There's a sniper nest on the roof of the building across from us. Two of them. They're camping the main street."

Ray initially defaulted to his cold, machine-like efficiency. His mind processed Anya's intel, analyzed the map, and calculated the most optimal path to their objective. He moved with a silent and deadly purpose.

"There's a team moving into the adjacent alley," Anya whispered, her voice a nervous tremor in his ear. "Two of them. They're setting up an ambush at the far end."

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

"I see them," Ray responded, his voice flat. He had already spotted their faint digital signatures through the wall. He equipped a silenced pistol from his inventory. "Stay here. Cover the entrance."

He moved, a grey ghost against the grimy brickwork. He scaled a stack of overflowing trash containers and pulled himself onto a low-hanging fire escape. Below, the two enemy avatars were taking cover behind a burned-out car, their weapons trained on the alley's exit.

They never saw him coming.

Ray dropped from the fire escape, landing silently behind them. Two precise shots from his silenced pistol, two clean headshots. The two avatars dissolved into a shower of pixels before they even knew they were under attack.

He was a machine, executing a program.

Objective complete.

He rejoined Anya. "The path is clear," he said.

They were winning. But he wasn't having fun. He was counting the steps, not dancing.

They were moving through a cluttered marketplace when Anya suddenly stopped. "Wait," she hissed. "There's another team moving in from the west."

Ray had been about to move forward, but stopped.

Anya's hyper-vigilance had just saved them again. He looked at her small, trembling avatar, and he felt a faint, but genuine, sense of responsibility for her, not just as a tactical asset.

"Good catch, Glitch," he said, his voice surprisingly warm. "Stay behind me."

They encountered the other team a moment later. Ray had them lined up for a perfect, clinical takedown. He was hidden behind a stack of crates, his aim steady. But at the last second, one of the enemy players tossed a flashbang. Anya cried out as her avatar was stunned, her vision completely white. She was a sitting duck.

Ray's processors screamed at him to take the shot—it was the optimal play to neutralize the threat. But another thought, a more human one, cut through the cold logic: Protect your partner. He looked at the two enemy players advancing on Anya. He stopped calculating the odds. He ignored the perfect headshot. He saw a ridiculous frog-shaped grenade, and a new, reckless idea took root.

He grabbed the "Bouncy-Grenade." He armed it and threw it.

The grenade hit the ground and began to bounce erratically, emitting a high-pitched, cartoonish boing with every impact. The two enemy players stared at it in confusion. Then, it detonated in a harmless, but powerful, concussive blast of green goo, sending them flying harmlessly into the air, their avatars flailing wildly as they bounced off the walls before landing in a heap.

Ray laughed. A real, genuine, unforced laugh. He wasn't just counting the steps anymore. He was dancing.

It was then that their path crossed with Kitsune and Ursa Major.

"There you are!" Leo's voice boomed over the channel as he charged into the marketplace, his combat-ready teddy bear avatar firing wildly.

"Leo, you idiot, that's Glitchy and Glitch!" Reina's exasperated voice followed as her sleek, fox-masked avatar appeared, expertly picking off the players Leo had been shooting at.

A chaotic, friendly firefight erupted. As Leo charged, firing wildly, Anya hid away and launched a simple, low-level "Lag Spike" hack she'd designed herself. For a split second, Leo's avatar stuttered, his aim thrown completely off balance.

"Hey! My connection!" he wailed, just before Ray's rounds hit him, eliminating him from the game.

"Serves you right, you walking disaster," Reina sighed over the comms but no moment later, a sniper shot from a distant rooftop took her out of the game.

"Of course," was the last thing they heard from her, her voice dripping with profound, theatrical annoyance. "You owe me one, Leo."

Ray and Anya rushed inside a small abandoned shop on the ground floor of a nearby building, before the sniper could take a shot at them.

"Well," Alyna's voice chimed in their private channel, laced with amusement. "That was entertaining."

Her small, hooded avatar looked up at the distant skyscraper, through the small shop window from where the sniper had taken out Kitsune. A new, unfamiliar resolve hardened her anxious features. "We should go after them," she whispered, her voice surprisingly firm. "They took out Reina. We can't just let them win."

Ray looked at her.

He should deem it as an unnecessary risk, and head for the safe zone. But now? He was having too much fun to stop now.

"Lead the way, Glitch."

Anya's bunny-ear antennae twitched as she went to work. Her true skill was not in combat, but in seeing the unseen. She scanned the digital environment, her vision a cascade of flowing code, and found it: a faint, almost invisible digital trail, the ghost of the sniper's path, leading towards the high-tech industrial sector of the map.

They moved through a series of interconnected maintenance ducts, the path narrow and claustrophobic. It was Anya who spotted it first.

"Glitchy, wait," she said, pointing to a section of the wall that seemed to shimmer, to glitch, just slightly. "There's something hidden there."

Ray placed his hand on the wall and a hidden panel slid open, revealing a small, pulsating loot cache. Inside, nestled in a bed of shimmering data, was a matched pair of sleek, high-caliber pistols. Their frames were a polished, pearlescent white. He picked them up.

[LEGENDARY WEAPON ACQUIRED: THE BINARY STARS]

[PERK: Gemini Recoil - Recoil is significantly reduced when both pistols are fired simultaneously.]

A surge of reckless confidence washed over him. He equipped them, abandoning his previous, cautious single-pistol approach.

The sniper's trail led them to a massive, spherical chamber at the top of a skyscraper. It was a zero-gravity manufacturing facility. Large, unfinished robotic chassis and industrial components floated serenely in the air, creating a complex, three-dimensional battlefield. The only light came from the glowing, molten metal being worked on by automated robotic arms that moved with a silent, hypnotic grace.

As they floated into the chamber, the ambush was sprung. Two players in heavy armor, their forms bristling with grappling hooks and magnetic boots, detached themselves from the shadows of a massive, floating engine block.

"Got some rats in our nest," one of them barked over the public channel as he used his mag-boots to sprint along a rotating robotic arm, constantly changing his angle of attack to keep Ray off-balance.

The other kicked off a chassis, sending the massive piece of metal tumbling directly toward Anya's cover.

"Glitch, move!" Ray shouted.

She yelped, pushing off her perch just as the chassis smashed into it, the sound a deafening, metallic crunch.

Anya's anxiety, initially heightened by the disorienting zero-g environment, quickly sharpened into focused competence. She became Ray's navigator. Her avatar clung to a piece of debris, her bunny-ear antennae twitching as her eyes darted everywhere at once.

The sniper on the gantry laughed, a cruel sound over the open comms. "Got the rabbit cornered!" He fired.

Ray saw the tracer round closing in on Anya's position. There was no time to warn her. Acting on pure instinct, Ray fired one of his own pistols, not at the enemy, but at a small piece of floating debris nearby. The recoil from his shot nudged him just enough to send a second shot from his other pistol that intercepted the sniper's round mid-air, a tiny, brilliant explosion of light and data. It was an impossible, subconscious calculation of physics and trajectory.

He had just discovered a new trick. He began using the recoil from his new dual pistols, The Binary Stars, to propel himself through the zero-g environment. He fired one pistol to push himself left, the other to push himself right, turning himself into a dizzying, unpredictable gun-dancer.

One of the enemy players, seeing Ray's wild maneuvering, laughed. "Look at this clown. He can't even control his own movement." He anchored himself to a large, floating chassis and took aim.

"Glitchy, he's got a lock on you!" Anya warned. "But he's predictable! He's not accounting for the drift of his own cover! That chassis is going to block his line of fire in three… two… one…"

Just as Anya finished her countdown, the massive piece of machinery drifted between Ray and the shooter. The enemy's shots sparked harmlessly against the metal. Guided by Anya's callouts, Ray used his pistol-propulsion to launch himself into the open. He spun, a dizzying, acrobatic maneuver, and fired both pistols at once. The Gemini Recoil perk kicked in, the two shots perfectly steady. Two clean headshots. The two enemy avatars dissolved into pixels before they could even react.

The victory was flashy, reckless, but undeniably fun.

Ray and Anya floated in the silent, zero-g chamber, the only sound the soft hum of the manufacturing arms and their private comms.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Anya whispered, her voice a mixture of nausea and exhilaration. "But… that was amazing."

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