27

Risk and Reward

Kat’s dagger, whistling through the air. The sound of wind rushing past Rian’s fists. The rustling movement of their feet, the careful placement of steps, their breaths quickening. The feel of each muscle contracting as he pivoted into jabs and hooks. The smell of dirt and grass churned up by their rapid footsteps.

There was nothing quite like it.

The fidelity was beyond anything Rian had ever experienced. As with his matches against Torgo and Goam, any sense of his body being virtual had disappeared amid the flow, swept away in the current of battle. And unlike before, thanks to Kat’s adept handling, the ever-present worry of death had finally begun to recede. She was skilled enough to hold back from delivering lethal blows when the time came. It even seemed she was making a game out of it, attacking him to the point of bringing his HP as low as possible without killing him.

Sensing her confidence, he stopped worrying about the Y-Locator item transferring to her. He was prepared to explain if it happened—and by explain he meant “lie his ass off”—but it seemed it wasn’t going to be a problem after all. With his mind at ease, he could focus entirely on the fight itself. Everything else seemed to fade until there was only one task at the forefront of his mind.

Land a fucking hit on Kat for once.

Every single goddamn time he found an opening, Kat disengaged and evaded his strikes. Trying again, he managed to corner her with a Dash at the edge of the PVP instance, only to have her throw a smoke bomb at the ground, forming a giant cloud. Unable to see, he swung and hit nothing but smoke, at which point Kat’s dagger swiped and lashed against his arm, cutting down a chunk of his health.

He casted Earthen Harmonics and sprinted out of the cloud to avoid her next hit, but she was already following him. As she closed in, he caught her off-guard with the extra movement speed from his buff.

The moment the fight began to swing in his favor again, her posture lowered in preparation for a dash. Rian swung, sensing the opening, and Kat dashed—backwards. It threw him off for a moment as she kicked off and retreated into the cloud of her Smoke Bomb skill, disappearing again.

He hadn’t even thought of using Dash like that. It was scary enough to go flying in the direction he was looking, but doing it blindly like that was something else, especially as their skirmish came closer to the tree line, which happened to line up with the edge of the PVP instance. Kat had some stellar spatial awareness. Rian, on the other hand, was so focused on anticipating her surprise attacks that he occasionally lost track of where he was moving.

Every time she used Shadow-Walk, she’d appear in his shadow. The counter-play was simple, at least: since they were in an open area, all he had to do was face away from the sun, and she’d pop up in front rather than behind him, which denied her an easy back-attack opportunity.

But as soon as she caught on to him, she started moving faster out of her Shadow-Walk skill, reducing the window of his reaction time until he could hardly begin to move out of the way of her dagger.

When she did finally manage to land a back-attack, critting him for nearly the entirety of his health, she called off the match, and the game bestowed them their hard-earned EXP. He spent a few minutes using Heal to restore his HP to full, and she gave him pointers in the meantime. When they eventually ran out of MP for their skills, it was just a matter of resetting the instance, restoring them to full.

They sparred for hours.

Rian could tell she was miles better than Torgo just by the way she moved. In all likelihood she was going easy on him, but he had no way of knowing. The only sign that she was holding back was that she hadn’t completely floored him yet.

Back and forth, Kat switched between sparring and teaching. She’d deflect entire strings of his punches like it was nothing, and then hold up a hand to pause the fight and tell him exactly what he needed to do. When she pivoted into attacking, reversing the flow of the fight on a whim, she walked him through the best methods of dodging—how to watch his footing, maintain balance and keep as close to her as possible during his evasive maneuvers. Anyone could throw a punch, but not everyone could evade in such a way that created an opening on their opponent.

As a Fighter, Rian’s class was built around parrying, counterattacking, and generally being nimble as hell. He was good at evading thanks to his DEX and his Earthen Harmonics buff, but he was also naturally resilient due to his high Strength, which provided plenty of HP to act as a cushion against dying from a few hits.

Kat, as a Thief, wasn’t just fragile but entirely reliant on dodging and using active skills to distract him, to keep him from landing any hits at all. She had no inherent defense aside from her natural ability to evade and the armor stat of her equipment, which wasn’t all that high to begin with.

He admired her prowess. Playing a squishy class like that would’ve been a nightmare for him in this game.

They didn’t bother stopping to allocate their AP into any stats, as the PVP instance was going to balance them out anyway, negating any changes. Leveling in lockstep with each other, Rian found himself a little disappointed; it felt like he simply couldn’t catch up with her. But she reassured him: the fact that they were leveling equally meant he was putting up enough of a fight for her to gain real experience. Rian doubted that she needed whatever “experience” she was getting from sparring with him, but he supposed she was at least improving her abilities as a mentor.

After a few hours, each of them had leveled far enough to gain another class skill. Rian reached level 15, and Kat level 20.

The moment the level-up happened, a glowing aura surrounded each of them—like flowing gold, the same that Rian had experienced after obtaining his alignment. The aura gathered into their palms and materialized into a gold tesseract.

Rian knew which skill he wanted next from the Fighter kit, but he ran his decision by Kat first. Feeling rather validated, he found that she agreed with his choice.

Spending the gold tesseract, he allocated the point and watched the skill light up on his page.

Parry (Level 1)

(Cooldown: 0 seconds)

Sensing the flow of battle through time, a Fighter can redirect an opponent’s attack. Grants 0-100% damage deflection. When performed, grants bonus damage equal to 10% of successful damage deflection for 1 second.

Comparing it to what he remembered during the Goam fight, the bonus damage percentage would increase with each level. He wondered, as well, if more levels meant a higher degree of slowdown during the parry like he’d experienced before. It was something he’d have to test.

Smirking, Kat showed him what she’d chosen for her level 20 skill.

Life-Steal (Level 1)

(34 MP; Cooldown: 1 minute)

Endowing their weapons with spiritual energy, the Thief steals that which is most precious from their enemies. For 30 seconds, 10% of damage dealt (+ 1% of Spirit) will restore an equivalent amount of health.

Oh god. “Life steal” was supposed to be a common mechanic, not an entire skill all on its own. But in Mirage, that’s what it was. Literally, a Thief skill.

Was that…a pun? A meta-game pun?

Sometimes he wondered if this game was messing with him in more than one way. It was cool to see a skill that scaled with Spirit for once, at least.

“You really chose a regeneration skill?” Rian said. “I’m barely landing hits on you as it is.”

“Well,” Kat said, “it’s either that or a passive that ups critical damage for me.”

He laughed—half nervous, half in surprise. “Okay, I can see why.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to cut our matches short just yet. We’re leveling pretty fast. There’s only one basic Thief skill left for me and two Fighter skills for you.” She tapped on her stat page, allocating unspent attribute points. “Once we get to 30, though, that’s when the game starts to get real. The subclass skills.”

He couldn’t deny that he was excited to see what skills Monks got—or even the other subclasses, as he wasn’t fully committed just yet.

As if she were reading his indecision, she said, “You sure you want to go for Monk, still?”

“I think so. I’m assuming they have some pretty hefty punching skills, right?”

“Well, most of their skills are passives,” Kat said. “There are some special skills beyond the subclass skills, but you get the core of your kit as a Fighter, and things kind of build from there.”

“Really?” he said, and she nodded with reluctance. From the start, he’d been a little disappointed to see a lack of active skills for his Fighter kit. He’d been expecting special combo attacks or something like a flurry of punches and kicks on-demand. But when he thought about it, a system like that wouldn’t make much sense. The game couldn’t directly endow him with knowledge due to the anti-memory-writing mechanism. And it wasn’t like the game could take control of him to perform preordained combos, either. That’d be a little too weird, given the VR’s fidelity; it’d be like losing control of his body to someone or something else. Even if for just a moment. Not exactly a pleasant sensation if he was conscious of it, he imagined.

As for the combat mechanics, he initially hadn’t been entirely sure of how they worked in Mirage. The game seemed to divide things into passive and active skills, but none of the active skills were what he’d expected; even they were more like passive skills. Charge Punch and Vital Strike were really the only skills that had mechanical differences, but it was more so in addition to throwing a regular punch rather than a new way of punching.

Mulling it over, he said, “It seems like everything on this class is about delivering basic hits. Is that why Monks have such a high difficulty rating?”

“You’ve got it,” she said. “Fighters—and Monks specifically—are easy to learn, hard to master. Your fundamentals have to be absolutely pristine to get anywhere with them, to really make use of their crazy passives later on.”

So it seemed after all that, coming into Mirage, a background in martial arts would be the single most beneficial thing someone could have on a Fighter class. He’d considered this before—the application of real life skills to this game world—but now he was beginning to understand that it had more of an impact than he’d thought. Having an inherently high level of control and precision over one’s movement and balance would give a tremendous advantage, even if the translation from reality to the game world wasn’t exact due to the stat system’s influence.

He had a strong feeling that most people in the top PVP ranks were trained in such things. There were plenty of aspects to combat in Mirage, but this one in particular seemed entirely out of reach for him. It really felt as if there was no way he could break into those ranks without a solid foundation like that.

He certainly had time to study it, if he could. He would’ve loved to look up guides or tutorials for basic martial arts or even just for his in-game class, but he had no way of accessing an Internet browser from inside the game. He’d tried to, this morning, to no avail. Of course, he could always go to his guildmates and ask them for general tips, but that would get tiresome quickly.

His only out was Kat. Even then, she was only online during the day. Corvis could help when she wasn’t around, but it wasn’t like he could provide Rian with advanced knowledge about PVP—or at least not yet, he figured. Maybe at a higher companionship level. There was no telling how much Corvis really knew.

And then it occurred to Rian that evening was rapidly approaching. It would be night soon. If, in his current state, he didn’t need to eat or drink or anything to survive, what were the odds of him needing to sleep? Was it even possible, anymore?

Kat leapt to her feet. “Ready to go again?”