THE FIRST WAVE PART THREE
I felt the breath return suddenly. My lungs hurt so much, and I coughed. My eyes opened, and standing around me were my team mates. I made out Lozano and Miller, but it was obvious we were missing several others.
“Wha… what happened?” I mumbled, my voice barely above a whisper.
Miller looked obviously relieved, “I’m glad they didn’t take you out as well! We weren’t sure, but because you didn’t disappear like everyone else who died, we assumed you were just out.”
Prescott nodded, kneeling down next to me. “We won, but at great cost. We used up the few grenades we had, and both Stratton and Riggs were killed. We already went around and looted everyone, they had more M-4’s, a bunch of ammo, and some more flares and flare gun’s. There was one sergeant in the lot, he had a few grenades, which was great because we needed some.”
He shook his head, frowning. “It makes no sense though, why were there so many of them, and why did they all look the same? There was over 20 of them.”
As if on queue, a message came through the chat system.
TSgt CANTOR TO ALL TEAMS: Well done Red Team! You have survived your first system WAVE. Wave’s are live events that occur at random intervals, and impact all sides at the same time. These insert large groups of NPC’s into the system nearby active conflicts; these are used to pressure both sides, but also allow you to get a bit of experience in case you’ve been… slacking. It seems like not only did you defeat the wave that was sent against our team, but Trainees Adams and Slampa also helped our wave defeat a team of players!
Everyone looked at each other. Adams and Slampa killed some of the opposing side? I definitely had some questions for them when we met back up.
TSgt CANTOR: It is currently past 1400; and as you all know, several of you were to be auto logged out earlier to start on Nights tomorrow. I made the operational decision to keep Prescott and Stovall in to assist in the fight, but its time for them to go.
Without notice, they were suddenly gone. Shit… They had the plan on where to meet up from the message earlier, but when they came back they would be alone in the middle of nowhere. I only prayed they had a light source.
TSgt CANTOR: The rest of you, continue the good work, and we will debrief at the end of your shift. You have less than five hours; so get back to it.
I felt… exhausted. I had ran my ass off, fought in multiple battles, and nearly been suffocated to death. I don’t think I had it in me for anything else today and just wanted to rest.
As I looked around from my position laying on the ground, I could see it on my team's faces as well. We were spent.
“Well,” I mumbled, finally pushing myself into a sitting position. It took a second, as waves of dizziness threatened to overwhelm me. “I suppose we should go meet up with Adams and Slampa.”
Lozano, Maher, and Miller all nodded, helping me to my feet. Miller sent a message to our team chat, letting the other two know we were headed toward the meet up position, and we set out.
It took us much longer than it should have to finally meet up east of the base at the designated location. Adams and Slampa were there, sitting on a couple of rocks, a haunted look on both of their faces.
We all settled in a circle, sitting for several long minutes, not saying a word. The walk here had been equally silent, everyone focusing one step at a time, lost in their own worlds. Yesterday had been so simple; a fight, and finding some of our team, easy. Today had been a rollercoaster of violence after we had found the rest of our team.
We were bruised, battered, and beaten. Despite weeks of brutal physical training and being indoctrinated to this world we would call home for however long we chose to stay in the military, it felt as if we were woefully unprepared for the real deal. But in reality, were we unprepared, or had we just not learned what our lessons were truly trying to teach us?
Regardless, here we were, and this was our reality. A virtual world mimicking the real world, set out to kill us, and use us as pawns for someone else's greater ambitions. Thinking back to the feeling of almost dying… maybe it was better not to be a fighter in this world.
We were briefed that after we graduated from basic training, we would have the ability to select our job. Your selections would be based on your performance. At the time we weren’t entirely sure what that meant; we knew we would be logging into Babylon at some point, but our literature covered very little of the internal workings of the system. Now that we knew we had severed memories from the system, things were coming together in a more obvious picture; our performance here would determine what jobs we would have available to us. Did this mean if you were a killer, you would only get combat jobs? Because I’ve been setting myself up in a way to be ‘sneaky’, would that mean I would only get scouting jobs?
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Thinking back to that memory of my father, so sharp in my mind, I realized as I observed it again he must have chosen a more mundane path. Would I be a coward, picking a job that had very little chance of me dying? How would progress work for such a job? It was obvious how combat related experience happened.
As I was mulling all this over, Slampa finally spoke up, clearing his throat. “So… that was a thing.”
Breaking me from my memories, I found myself chuckling, and everyone around me shared in the laugh. This opened the doors, and suddenly we were all talking to one another excitedly.
I learned that Miller had gained several levels, and a few more skills to boot. She managed to shoot one of the enemies dead, and then much like I had, used her rifle as a cudgel. She knocked out the second one she was facing, and hit the one that was choking me in the neck, snapping something there and killing him. She finished off the third one, and seeing I was still there, pushed the body off me before going to help the others; she had assumed I wasn’t going anywhere, which was a shitty joke.
Slampa and Adams recounted their fight with the Blue Team. After a grenade Slampa had tossed flipped the Humvee, the combined firepower from Adams machine gun and Slampa being better positioned had killed the entire enemy team. They had received some sort of ‘tally’, though not much was explained. Even their Assistants refused to answer questions about it. Once the team was eliminated, they had both received the same special skill, DEATHDEALER, which gave them the ability to see if someone was a player character or NPC from outside inspection distance. Supposedly if it was a player character, the person would exude a red aura, which would help pick out players versus NPC’s. While this didn’t seem too useful here, where the player characters seemed obviously different from the recon teams that all wore the same thing, or the seals, it battlefields with more complicated mixes of enemies it could be very useful.
Likely they received the skill because they were the first team to kill players, so unlikely any of us would get something similar. Maher and Lozano recounted the assault on the small fuel depot, and then the follow up battle with the seals helping us out. The latter half of the story boiled down to basically, “We rode in, broke our vehicle, then helped out.”
As I listened to everyone, I noticed that my chat box was blinking. I focused on it, and suddenly noticed there was a tab called ‘additional notifications’. This was weird, as generally all my notifications would immediately populate in the chat box, even if I swiped them away for later I would just have to mentally crawl back up and read them. I focused on this new tab, and suddenly a bunch of messages flooded into my main chat window;
YOU HAVE GAINED…
There were multiple XP notifications, as well as a level up notification letting me know I had reached level 4. Nice! More skill points to allocate. Additionally, I had a few more messages;
TAYS TIDBITS
Congratulations! You have unlocked the skill Choker - Level 1. You have unlocked the skill Sprint - Level 1. You have unlocked the skill Football - Level 1. You can access these skills under your status menu
CHOKER
LEVEL: 1
TYPE: Passive Skill
BENEFITS: Harder dad… I mean, this skill increases your lung capacity by 25%. What benefit does this provide, you might ask… well, you can hold your breath longer during things like gas attacks, and you are far harder to choke out. This would have been handy a little while ago, am I right?
SPRINT
LEVEL: 1
TYPE: Passive Skill
BENEFITS: You move 10% faster when running. This grows by 5% per level of this skill. You too can be Usain Bolt!
FOOTBALL
LEVEL: 1
TYPE: Active Skill
COST: 25 Stamina/use
BENEFITS: Allows you to throw or kick items back at an enemy when you are targeted by a thrown object. To use, activate this within 5 seconds, and once the object is thrown or kicked, it will immediately hone in on the one who sent it your way. This will only work on objects weighing 1 pound or less and on someone within 20 yards, but increasing the level of this skill will increase both the size of objects and the distance it can be used. This has a lot of cool applications if you're someone with half a brain…
Well, while the choker and sprint skills were a bit underwhelming, that football skill I already had a lot of ideas in mind for. That would have been handy with that grenade… which is probably how I ended up getting the skill, now that I thought of it.
I dreaded equipping more skills, but because I had so many empty slots still… I decided to bite the bullet, equipping all three in rapid succession. The feeling of my arms and scalp burning consumed me momentarily, like something was running under my skin, but the feeling passed way faster than I would have thought. Maybe the system was giving me a bit of a break.
With that done, I assigned my skill points quickly, and returned my attention back to the conversation. All the excitement had died down, returning to the more mundane conversation of what to do next.
Slampa waved everyone around, Adams had the map unfolded for all to see.
“So, the night shift will meet here tomorrow. I want to make this a staging area for our team. I want everyone to leave anything with light here; flashlights, lighters if you found any, and one of those flare guns and a handful of flares. We will also leave several M-4’s and a couple thousand rounds of ammo; this will give the team more weapons.”
We nodded, and Miller spoke up. “I have an extra RPG as well, and maybe we leave a few medical kits?”
Slampa smiled, “Yeah, lets do that. We only have a few more hours today, and honestly I need a break. So we won’t do much else today. But tomorrow when we log in, I want us to focus on further equipment gathering, and to start prodding the base. We have no information of anything going on inside, how many NPC’s they have, levels of the Blue team… any information we can get. I asked my assistant, and they confirmed you can leave messages for folks who are offline and they will be able to retrieve them when they are back on.
“So its simple - gather equipment and information for the next few days, then we can start pecking away at the base for the final few. I’ll send a message to Stone by the end of the day every day with what we have found out, and any updates. If I’m gone for whatever reason, Miller I want you to take over.”
Miller nodded, as Slampa continued. “Any questions?”
We all shook our heads. “Good, lets just spend some time going over our equipment and skills, and figure out who will be best at what.”