Of course, now I constantly got accused of hacking all the time, too. To quote my wizened boss, Ray Wierzbowski: “That’s how you know you’ve mastered a videogame—when a bunch of butt-hurt crybabies start to accuse you of cheating in an effort to cope with the beatdown they’ve just suffered at your hands.”
When I pulled up my friends list, I saw that Cruz and Diehl were both already logged in, their player rankings listed beside their call signs. Cruz (whose call sign was “Kvothe”) was currently in 6791st place, and Diehl (aka “Dealio”) was ranked 7445th. Their Terra Firma player rankings were much higher, but they were both still a long way from making it into the Thirty Dozen like Ray.
I switched on my helmet microphone and joined Kvothe and Dealio on their private voice-chat line.
“You still won’t admit you’re wrong?” Cruz was shouting as I logged in.
“I told you, your Wonder Woman argument proves nothing!” Diehl said. “Yes, Princess Diana of Themyscira did once wield Mjolnir in some obscure bullshit cross-over issue! That only proves my point, Cruz! Do you think Wonder Woman would ever be caught dead wielding Sting?”
“No, but she’s a superhero, and they don’t use swords, do they?” Cruz said—clearly without thinking his statement through.
“Superheroes don’t use swords?” Diehl said gleefully. “What about Nightcrawler? Deadpool? Electra, Shatterstar, Green Arrow, Hawkeye—oh, and then there’s Blade and Katana! Two superheroes who are actually named after swords! Oh, and Wolverine had that idiotic Muramasa Blade made with part of his soul. Which, while incredibly lame, was still a far cooler magical weapon than Sting!”
“Sorry to interrupt, ladies,” I said. “I think you should just agree to disagree.”
“Iron Seagull!” Cruz called out. “I didn’t see you log in!”
“You’re late, fool,” Diehl said. “And Cruz won’t shut up about Wonder Woman!”
“I’m right on time,” I said. “The briefing doesn’t start for another thirty seconds.”
“What the hell happened with you and Herr Knotcher today?” Diehl asked. He said it with a thick German accent.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “Because I split before anything did.”
“Well, he was making threats toward you to his idiot friends after the bell rang,” he said. “Vengeance in his eyes and all that. Plan accordingly.”
I cleared my throat. “Time is short. Let’s talk mission, guys.”
“If this is another Disrupter takedown, I’m out, y’all,” Cruz said. “I’ll bail and play Terra Firma instead. I’m serious, guys.”
“What’s the matter, Kvothe?” I asked. “Don’t you enjoy a challenge?”
“I enjoy balanced gameplay,” Cruz replied. “I’m not a masochist like you.”
I felt a brief impulse to defend the game, but it was hard to argue the point. The Disrupter was a powerful new weapon the Sobrukai had unveiled after one of the game’s most recent content updates. It was capable of disrupting the quantum communication link to all of Earth’s defensive drones, rendering them useless. For the past few months, all of the game’s most devoted players—myself included—had been trying to figure out how to disable a Disrupter’s defenses and destroy the damn thing. But so far the Sobrukai’s new super weapon had proven to be indestructible, and that made many of the game’s higher-level missions more or less unwinnable.
Despite the endless barrage of complaints claiming that Chaos Terrain had broken and/or ruined their own game, the company refused to remove the Disrupter from the enemy’s arsenal or make it easier to destroy. As a result, a lot of Armada players were defecting to play Terra Firma. The Disrupter never showed up in any TF mission—maybe because by the time one made landfall, there was nothing the EDA’s ground troops could do to stop it.
“It’s a new mission,” I said. “Be optimistic. There might not be a Disrupter in it.”
“Yeah,” Diehl said. “Maybe the devs have cooked up something even worse.”
“What could possibly be worse?” Cruz asked. “A mission where you have to blow up a Death Star while being attacked by two Borg Cubes inside an asteroid field?”
“Cruz,” Diehl immediately chimed in. “I highly doubt that either the Borg or—”
Thankfully, an alert sounded in our headphones just then, signaling the start of the mission briefing. All of the data display windows vanished and I found myself seated in a packed briefing room, with Cruz and Diehl’s uniformed avatars Kvothe and Dealio sitting on either side of me. We had each customized our avatars so that they vaguely resembled our real selves—only slightly taller, more muscular, and less pale. The avatars of a few other last-minute arrivals were materializing in the tiered seats around us.