Brute Force: Chapter 7

We made it about twenty miles before I realized we had a problem. Two, actually. Those problems were food and sleep.

Survival of the Fittest had biological needs built in. Eating, sleeping, and bathroom breaks were all required. Why people wanted to watch this stuff, I had no idea. But sure enough, when we eventually decided to stop and make camp, there were over a thousand people watching me dig a hole and take a shit like a cat in a litterbox. Some of them left helpful comments. Others left ratings, or criticized my performance.

“You’re all freaks,” I muttered internally, kicking dirt back over the latrine. “Fucking creepers.”

We picked a sheltered grotto to set up for the day, aiming to travel by night. The terrain around this patch of The Jungle was rocky, with terrain difficult for humans to navigate by foot. There were many sheltered areas, with waterfalls to disguise noise and babbling creeks that could be used to mask our scents. I held Angel to my back with the punch-puds and jumped from tree to tree to leave no trace the Pigs could follow, coming to rest on a small level shelf of rock with a burbling waterfall-fed pond. I couldn’t craft, but Angel could. And as it turned out, she was real good at it. I watched jealously as she took the raw wood I couldn’t use and did some kind of interpretive crafting dance, following directions I couldn’t see. The result was a camouflaged shelter big enough to sleep two, a campfire, and a range of primitive tools worked from hide, sinew, wood and flintknapped stone.

“You know what? I’m jealous you can craft.” I sat back on the base of my tail like a kangaroo, picking my teeth with one claw as I watched her work. “Like, really jealous. I want to make stuff. I’m pretty sure I used to make stuff all the time when I was alive.”

She had to pause briefly to speak, so she did so between arrowheads. “You can’t craft?”

“Nope. Well, technically, I can futz it. But I don’t get any EXP out of it, and my tools don’t work like yours do.”

“Tools? Ugh. This is just the rock-bottom newbie survival gear. The Hell Pigs took my good Bronze Pick, my knife, everything.” Angel fretted. When not signing, she expertly worked a [Hammerstone] over chips of flint, knapping them into arrowheads. She’d already made a bow and a stone spear.

I smacked myself in the head with one tentacle and opened my menu. "Wait... hang on. You know what? I might have some stuff from the Hell Pigs you can use."

Angel made a face at mention of the Hell Pigs, but waited as I scoured the contents of my Inventory. There was a lot of junk. There were also some metal tools. I pulled them out of the ether and disgorged them onto the ground.

"Sword, bow, pickaxe, knife, human skin... wait. Human skin?" I not so discreetly pulled that back into my menu. "Oopsie. Anyway, let's see here... you need some Flax Thread?"

"Yes. Please. I can use it to make arrows." Angel picked everything up, regarding the [Primitive Bronze Shortbow] with relief. "Don't suppose you have any feathers?"

I replied by farting out the stack of 52 [Pheasant Feathers] I'd been carrying around since my one and only proper meal.

"Thanks. This makes everything so much easier." She let out a tense breath. "This Iron Bow will be a lifesaver. I wish we had enough metal for bronze-tipped arrows."

“No big deal,” I replied. “Any Hell Pigs that come here are gonna have to deal with me.”

Angel made a face. “You’re strong, sure, but you don’t have a trainer and you don’t have a Lesser Legion to enhance your abilities. Don’t underestimate the Pigs.”

“Why? Think I can’t handle a few banjo-twanging good ol' boys?”

“I don't think you can handle an army of them, no,” Angel signed flatly. “They’re one of the two alpha clans on the server. There’s hundreds of them.”

“Only hundreds?” I puffed my chest out. “Maybe you just haven’t met the right noodle for the job until now.”

She rolled her eyes. “Put your ego away and stop talking to me. I need to work.”

I harrumphed, but with her eyes averted, she couldn’t watch me flounce. So I went to all fours, padded away, and took stock of my character menu.

There was a lot to look at. First up, I had the Mandala: HRIDAYA, the Heart of Earth. Anything with a name in all-caps had to be good. I had 15 Ability Points to spend on fancy moves. I also had twelve messages, 388 new subscribers, and one Patron: Cold_Fox. The game had awarded me some Tribute Boxes, plus I had one Copper Subscriber Tribute from Buh-Buh_Bacon, and one Bronze Patron Tribute from my mysterious vulpine benefactor.

"Chorus: I got some questions for you," I thought out toward the sky, the appropriate location for what amounted to the god of the 'game'. "What the hell is a Mandala, and how do I use it?"

[Mandalas are the keys to unlock advancement through Survival of the Fittest.] Chorus's dispassionate voice replied, as if the A.I had been standing next to and slightly behind me this whole time. [They are the physical embodiment of spiritual power, carried like seeds within the bodies of the most powerful monsters in the game: the Daeva. As Gladiators defeat the Daeva, they are able to claim powers unavailable to normal humans. Their Legions are also enhanced, gaining boosts to their abilities and stats, as well as extra ability points. To ascend from realm to realm, you must collect the mandalas of the Daeva guarding that realm. The number of Daeva per realm varies. In Malae, there are four.]

My eyes narrowed. "Am I going to be able to make full use of this mandala? What will I get: superpowers or Legion enhancements?"

[I am unable to answer this question. There is no precedent or rules base to which I can refer.]

Interesting. I rumbled to myself thoughtfully. Given what Angel had told me and Dimitri had indirectly hinted at through his message, I had a hunch that, even though Chorus here SEEMED to be in charge, the A.I was subordinate to some greater authority. That authority was likely the Society, or managers that the Society outsourced to. But who the hell had the time, manpower and resources to collect and process this much human data and run an illegal EdenFRAME? And if they had the power to do that, then why hadn't human admins removed me from Malae, or reuploaded me to Dimitri’s specifications?

"Alright, next question. What's the deal with tributes?" I shelved that problem for another day, frowning at the shiny giftbox icons dancing and bobbing in my inventory.

[Tributes are loot boxes, which are sent to you on the completion of certain milestones within Survival of the Fittest, or are gifted by fans and patrons. There are also some tributes which may be hunted within the world. They are located in secret, difficult to reach places.]

[Tributes come in ten tiers: Copper, Bronze, Iron, Steel, Silver, Gold, Tungsten, Titanium, Platinum, and Palladium. Subscriber tributes are twice as valuable as any tribute awarded by the system. Patron tributes are three times as valuable. In other words, a Copper Subscriber Tribute is as valuable as a system-issued Bronze Tribute. A Bronze Patron Tribute will contain materials, gear, and resources available in system-awarded Steel tributes, and so on.]

[Tributes are vital to the success of Gladiators in Survival of the Fittest, as they contain equipment that may be completely unavailable in the current Realm. In the first realm, Malae, the only metals able to be mined from the terrain are copper, tin, arsenic and lead. There is no iron. All iron or steel in circulation in Malae is derived from tributes.]

[Patrons have three exclusive gift tiers available only to them: Superstar, Royal, and Divine. These tributes contain unique items of extraordinary quality. Only the most beloved and worthy Gladiators have ever received such gifts, and due to their expense, Patrons able to afford them may request and even participate in special events with their favored champion.]

[All tributes, even the lowliest, cost significant amounts of money. I recommend you publicly express gratitude to your Patrons by name. Frequently.]

"Screw that." I scowled, flipping back to my Abilities and Mandala. “They can go jerk themselves off. I’m not doing it for them.”

[Are you aware that your viewers are able to hear an automatic translation of your telepathic and sign language conversations?]

“Wait. What?” My head jerked back. "These fuckers are in my HEAD? They can hear what I'm fucking THINKING?"

[Thoughts and conversations which do not compromise spectator experience, yes.]

Raw, primordial fury boiled up through my limbs. These fuckers weren't just watching me eat, shit and fight to live, they were listening in to my thoughts? Fuck that. Fuck a whole lot of that. "Eat shit and die, Chorus."

[I have redacted several of your most recent comments as a courtesy to prevent subscriber attrition. This service will only be performed once.]

[I assume this concludes your questions. Have a pleasant day.]

Before I could redact Chorus a new asshole, the AI's presence vanished, leaving me shuddering with pent up rage.

"All of you can get fucked," I thought at my audience. “Every single one of you.”

Getting mad and staying mad felt good, but it wasn't going to help me get myself out of this mess. I shoved the rage down and refocused on my Inventory. I had five Tributes to open, and even though I was pissed enough to snap someone's neck if they looked at me wrong, everyone liked presents. Right?

Copper Arena Tribute

· Pemmican x 10

· Stone Knife

· Flint Arrows x 100

· Rope x 50m

· Recipe: Fish Trap

· Crude Waterskin

· Oil x 10

· Torch x 15

· Tanned Hide x 10

Vanara Award Box

· Trophy of Vanara

· 150 Copper Coins

· Venom Claws (85-110 damage, Acid Venom, Bleed)

· Masterwork Leather Gauntlets

· Flesh of the Devourer x 100

· Devourer Venom

· Leather Backpack

Silver Fame Tribute

· Schematic: Cob Buildings

· Schematic: Treehouse Platform

· Schematic: Ghillie Suit

· Raptor Skull Helmet

Iron Subscriber Tribute

· Oil x 25

· Silk Tent

· Bedroll x 3

· Compass

· Camouflage Paint

Bronze Patron Tribute

· 190 Iron Coins

· Average Rifle (110-132 damage)

· Rifle Bullets x 45

· Schematic: Small boat

· Schematic: Dart Trap

· Schematic: Pressure Plate

· Private Letter (View in Message Center)

From what I'd seen of Malae already, this was some life-changing loot - for Angel. For me? Not so much. Then I had a brief mental image of Noodles the Destroyer running into battle against the Hell Pigs, a loaded gun or poisoned sword in each tentacle. Hmm.

I pulled the Venom Claws out of my Inventory. They were a pair of curved, exotic-looking daggers forged out of dark grey metal. The razor-sharp edges were paler than the rest of the blade, and as I watched, they began to sweat a bright green coating of slimy poison. I experimentally swished and stabbed with them, but my body just wasn’t really built for wielding human-sized weapons. So much for that.

Next up were the messages. I put the knives back in my Inventory, steeled myself, and checked my inbox. The letter from Dimitri was still sitting there, the title dulled out from having been opened. The first new message was from Buh_Buh_Bacon.

“Wow! Really digging the fact you guys are implementing intelligent Legions now. Normally don’t sub noobs in the Jungle but you’re one of a kind. Great acting, great play, really enjoying following you – keep it up!”

I blinked at it several times. This message was… nice? It looked like it had been written by a normal person watching their favorite TV show. Someone with a degree, an office job, or both. I figured the kind of guys who wanted to watch a horse-sized monster pop a squat beside a river were the same kind of screwed up shitbags who ran this place, but Mr. Bacon here read like any upstanding citizen writing a fan letter.

I read it again. Then it hit me. Chorus had just told me that it redacted comments that 'compromised spectator experience'. The AI censored comments about the real world, our place in the VR, and potentially anything else. An AI that powerful could also make running deepfakes of us, and in those deepfakes, we would say anything the Delta Society wanted the audience to hear. That meant the average viewer of Survival of the Fittest potentially had no idea that people like me and Angel had been trafficked into this mess. They thought we were volunteers, temporarily jacking our wetware into the game like esports athletes to compete for fame and glory. If we died, haha – too bad. The audience figured we'd wake up in our cryopods and everything would be fine. It was all good, clean, gory fun.

A chill passed through my guts and gripped them tightly as the implications unfolded, one after the other. These Delta Society guys were monsters. Smart, evil monsters.

Still reeling, I read the other messages. Most of them were like my comments – semi-literate trolling. One Hell Pigs fan chewed me out for killing Razor, the gladiator he followed. One was just an all-caps rant of HACKER HACKER HACKER over and over again. A Nigerian prince apparently had 1.5 billion dollars chilling for me in a Swiss Bank account. Another lady had the most AMAZING work from home opportunity for when I logged out that guaranteed me a steady six thousand credits a month. The rest of the messages were of similar caliber, except for the last one: the Private Letter from Cold_Fox.

Something was different about this message. It had a little padlock icon beside it. I wondered if that meant that it was truly private: encrypted in such a way that viewers, and perhaps even Chorus, was unable to see it.

I opened it, and growled in surprise. Cold_Fox had sent me a short paragraph of what, to most people, would look like a sheet of hieroglyphics. But it wasn’t an Ancient Language I was looking at – it was sign language, in written form.

"Van, we're on the hunt. Make it to Realm 2. More to follow if safe."

Van. Van as in Ivan. As in Ivan Brukov.

The return of my name - my real name - struck me like a hammerblow to the back of the head. And with the name came more memories.

I was holding my guts in, staggering over to a black SUV. My hand slapped the side of the car: immediately, my data swarm got to work, hacking the lock. An augmented reality display showed the progress, filling a bar from bottom to top. Too slow.

"Brukov to Comms. Code Echo; I repeat Code Echo," I gasped, spitting blood on every word. "Valk, I'm fucked. Solonov just tried to fucking murder me. They're on my ass, I need-"

I hadn't realized I'd closed my eyes until I opened them, gasping a deep breath of crisp forest air. I shook my head, and turned to look back at Angel. The girl was making [Rattan Bedrolls]: a normal human-sized one for her, and a Noodles-sized one for me. When she caught me staring, she looked up.

“What?” She signed, holding a strip of rattan between her lips.

I took a moment to compose myself. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Say, I got some lootboxes with gear in it. Nice pair of poisoned knives, some schematics. I can't use them, so they're all yours.”

"Really? Hang on.” She held up a finger, then finished speed-weaving the mat. It was crazy to watch. Her hands moved many times faster than a normal person's could, flawlessly weaving the grass and leaves into a sheet. "Here. Come lay down on this and see if you can set your spawn point.”

I joined her and flopped down, trying to keep from shivering. Cold_Fox was well named, because chills were still rippling down my spine and through my belly as more flashes of memory intruded into my mind's eye. The section of I-5 between Seattle and Tacoma, foggy, the mist lit up with a hazy electric glow. The feeling of my car being rammed, skidding, flipping...

[Spawnpoint updated!]

"Looks good. Thanks."I shook my head and tried to relax, but couldn't chase the tension out of my shoulders. “Here. See what you can do with all this.”

I gave Angel all of the survival equipment, the schematics, the weapons, the Raptor Skull helmet, and half of the copper coins. There were only a few things I held onto for myself. I kept the Trophy of Vanara, the Devourer Venom, the Flesh of the Devourer, some oil... plus the rifle and the ammo for it. I wasn't sure I trusted Angel enough to give her a gun just yet. She still hadn't told me how she'd gotten tangled up with a cartel.

Angel’s eyes got big in her face as she dropped her primitive tools and collected it all up. “Noodles! Holy shit! How many boxes did you get?!”

"Five. Landed a patron and some subscribers. Guess the crowd loves to see them some Noods."

"A pressure plate schematic! Oh my god... this just taught me how to wire." Angel gasped, her hand fluttering to her mouth. "Thank you so much! I… I don’t know if you know how amazing this is.”

"Lets you make a dart trap, right?" Her enthusiasm cheered me up enough that my tail started wagging like a dog's, seemingly with a life of its own. I glared at it until it stopped.

"Not just that. Pressure plates can be used to trigger all sorts of things. You can build some really complex traps and machines, even in Malae... there are copper nodes here, that you can mine and use to wire and even make batteries. Have you ever heard of the Baghdad Battery?"

"Nope."

"Basically, you get a jar or some other kind of container and fill it with a weak acid. Giant Ant acid would work. Then you submerge a cylinder of copper housing an iron rod into the solution. It forms an acidic electrolyte solution that generates a current from the difference between the electrode potentials of the copper and iron electrodes," Angel enthused.

I blinked rapidly a few times. It was Angel's turn to pause awkwardly.

"If you're wondering how I know that, I was studying to be a chemical engineer," she signed sheepishly.

"Yeah. I actually was wondering, because..." I used a claw to sketch a Venn Diagram on the dirt. "On this side of the 'People who know how to make improvised electronics out of tin foil and cleaning products' diagram, we have chemical engineers, and on the other side of this diagram, we have terrorists."

"I was about to start the second year of my Master’s Degree." Angel's brief enthusiasm flickered and died, her blue eyes dulling as she looked down. "I'd just been accepted for a biochem development bootcamp in the NSF Innovation Corps, and... yeah."

Smart AND gorgeous. For the first time since arriving in Malae, I was regretting not being human.

"Don't worry about it. The point is, I have some skills I can put to use with this pressure plate schematic. It's one of those stupid items that I already technically knew how to make, but if I tried to do it without the blueprint, the game wouldn't register it as being functional." Angel scowled as she arranged the survival gear and stuffed it into the backpack. "Traps are how I've survived this long. Now if I could only find some iron."

I eyed the iron ingots in my inventory. "If we hypothetically came across some, you could make batteries, traps, and...?"

"If I could get enough iron to make steel, I could make a gun." She groaned with longing. "God help me. I wish I had a gun."

"Oh yeah?" I still had my Inventory open. The rifle was the second-heaviest thing in my items list after the iron ingots, sitting there in the top row of slots. "Know how to use them?"

Angel flashed me a haughty glare. "Throw a rock up."

"Huh?"

"Grab a rock and throw it up into the air." She picked up the bow and one of the arrows she'd made.

Oh yeah. Here we go. Grinning, I found a decent sized rock and curled the end of one tentacle around it before lazily tossing it up over the pond. Angel swung her bow around, tracking it with the point of the arrow. She loosed… and hit it out of the air with a dull crack.

Welp. That got my attention. I sat bolt upright, mouth hanging open.

“I’m better with a rifle. Even better with a shotgun." Now it was her turn to be smug.

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” I asked, picking up another stone as she nocked a second arrow. This time, I threw it faster. The arrow hit it dead center and sent it careening into the cliff wall.

“Competitive shooter." She voiced this time, so she didn't have to put down the bow. "Trap, skeet, and three-gun, in that order. I was just heading into international competition. There was talk of sending me to the Paralympics."

Suddenly, I saw Angel in a whole new light. "I'm starting to understand why you've still got all nine lives."

“Like I said. I survived because of traps. It took me ages to learn how to use a bow… it’s a whole different skillset.” She set the bow down so she could speak the way she was comfortable doing, by using sign. "The stupid thing is that if I'd been sent straight to the second or third realm of the game, I'd actually have more of a chance. One thing I do know is that the further you get, the more advanced technology you have access to. The First Realm is nothing but bronze age bullshit. There might only two or three rifles on the entire island. All up, there's probably less than a hundred tons of iron being circulated. It's more precious than gold here."

"And the Iron Centurions control it," I finished. "Hence the name. Is that why you're joining them?"

Angel lifted her chin, flashing a hard, fierce look toward the sky. "If I can get my hands on a firearm, even a crude one, I'll rule this game. I'll capture any Legion I want. I'll kill the Daeva, and when I get to the next realm, I'll do it again. And again. And when I win, I'll find some way to get back at those motherfucking cartel bastards. I'll kill them all."

'I'll capture any Legions I want'. I glanced at the gun in my Inventory, thought about it for a couple seconds, and closed the Inventory window. "Sounds like a plan to me. Anyway, I don't know about you, but I'm starving over here. You good for food? I'm going to go out and murder something for dinner. I’ll bring you back some meat."

Angel regarded me suspiciously for a moment.

“That was not a euphemism,”I added. “But it could have been.”