CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

Jason hurried to the center deck and took his seat.

The pod closed around him, and he smiled.

He liked this feeling of sitting in the pod alone.

Jason now realized that living on his own without any human interaction had been a mentally taxing drag.

However, he still had his usual mindset when on the Overdrive server - he liked playing independently.

Back when he was younger, he'd loved the Good Game Shoppe's independent battles because he could play however he wanted.

He wasn't beholden to a team's overall strategy.

Jason liked playing with Danny for similar reasons.

Both pilots just did their best on their own machines and their own playstyles.

Danny hadn't commented on Jason's melee focus, and Jason was happy letting Danny use a luck-based strategy.

In Jason's opinion, players should only play together as a team if their playstyles were a natural fit for each other.

It had nothing to do with being friends - after all, Jason liked everyone in the Good Game Shoppe.

However, he didn't like the idea of compromising his playstyle to work with someone else, and he felt equally uncomfortable with the idea of someone changing their playstyle for him.

Those kinds of awkward compromises were sure to lead to later arguments.

Indeed, Jason had initially pushed back on Danny changing his Mech for the Tournament of Assassin's second round. It'd taken a lot of insistence before Jason accepted the other player's game plan.

Jason's screen buzzed as his opponent, sitting on the other side of the simulation table, appeared on the VR pod's camera.

BigBucko was a very thin and balding man in an expensive suit.

He was quite handsome, with a neatly trimmed beard, but he always seemed very tired despite his fine clothes and good grooming.

He'd slung his expensive tie across his back and draped his sports coat around his piloting chair.

He half-smiled and half-groaned as he saw Jason.

"Oh man, I thought we were free of you!"

He laughed sardonically.

"It's great to see you again. Hope you don't send me to the loser's bracket, though."

Unlike a conventional tournament, losers were not eliminated after games at the Good Game Shoppe.

Players had to pay twenty bucks for an entry fee, and Jacob knew that many of them underwent a long trek to get to the store.

As a result, every player was guaranteed at least four matches. Players in the winner's bracket were able to play up to eight battles.

BigBucko - whose real-life name was Phil - yawned.

"Do you mind if we start right away?"

Jason nodded.

"Yeah, of course!"

Jason clicked the green button located just beneath the communications screen, forgoing his warm-up time to start the match as soon as possible.

Phil had always asked to start early.

He worked in finance, which meant that he had to wake up and work market hours based on New York time.

That was exceptionally brutal for someone who lived in San Francisco - Phil had to get up at four or five every single day.

After his battles, he had to go right back home to catch some sleep before work the next day.

Hearing Phil's familiar words made Jason feel a little strange.

It'd been the exact same back in high school.

Phil would groan good-naturedly whenever he saw he was matched against Jason. Then he would ask to start early. The same thing had happened every single time they played.

Phil and Jason interacted almost like NPCs in a video game - both of them said and did the same thing every time they saw each other.

It went beyond just the battles.

Their interactions were often similar whenever they talked about their daily lives.

Phil would just repeat a few typical lines.

"Pretty boring day today, just shuffling money around."

He'd shrug and laugh.

"Just putting my time in so I can retire early, you know?"

Then again, it probably wasn't Phil's fault he said the same things all the time.

The man didn't have much energy left at the end of the day.

For Jason, Overdrive was his calling. He was determined to be the best player on the server.

On the other hand, Phil was using Overdrive as an escape. It wasn't his main activity - he just wanted to relax after a challenging day at work.

The virtual reality cockpit thrummed as the fighting arena gradually lit up.

The table glowed bright white, and then a variety of stages started flickering randomly across the three-dimensional projection.

Both players saw through a first-person perspective, just like normal.

However, the battle board's biggest advantage was that it broadcasted the battle in 3-D for everybody watching.

The battle boards had contributed dramatically to Overdrive's rise.

After watching the awesome Mech fights, everyone else wanted to join in.

The stage was always picked randomly for the one-on-one matches at the Good Game Shoppe.

The Russell family knew just as well as Jason did that the player who picked the stage received a massive advantage.

STAGE PICKED: RESORT

The Resort stage depicted an idyllic beachside town.

Half the map consisted of the resort - a tall hotel accompanied by several luxury homes. The other half of the stage was the beach.

That meant that roughly forty percent of the stage was water.

Jason smiled.

He'd been hoping for a challenging stage like this.

Normally, players took the stage into account when picking their machines.

Certain stages put Mechs at an obvious disadvantage, and water stages were exceptionally tricky.

The water jammed beam weapons and caused flame-based attacks to gutter and falter.

Although water couldn't completely stifle the searing flames of the Blazing Avarice, using the system while submerged led to a whopping 80% power reduction.

That being said, Jason stuck by his partner no matter what.

He loved devising strategies and tactics that would help maximize his Mech's strengths and hide its limitations.

After leaving the Overdrive Corporation, Jason had carefully studied every single stage.

Although he was currently focused on mapping, he didn't want to be caught off guard for individual duels.

Resort was one of the new stages they'd added after Jason became a One Star Boss.

However, Jason's diligent studying meant he had a plan.

It was best to fight near the luxury homes and hotels.

Normally, stages like Cityscape had enormous skyscrapers and buildings that towered high over machines. In effect, those buildings acted like natural obstacles, almost like walls.

The buildings on the Resort stage were different.

These smaller beachfront homes were much shorter than a Mech.

As a result, players had to be exceptionally confident with their footwork not to get their legs caught inside the walls while battling.

Jason was certain his opponent lacked his keen footwork and attention to detail.

On top of that, blowing up the generators that powered the houses led to rapidly spreading firestorms.

Most of the homes were built out of wood. Although they were near the sea, they would still burn brightly.

As always, Jason kept his partner's flame immunity in the back of his mind as an alternate win condition.

Jason hit the green button at the side of the stage again, skipping the usual two-minute Mech selection timer.

He knew that Phil wanted to play as much as possible, and he didn't want to keep the other player waiting.

Jason pulled open HemoLovers and loaded in his simulation, deciding to go with the Watchdog-2 configuration for this match.

Jason was mainly excited to try out the enhanced four-legged mode.

However, he would alternate to the Watchdog-1 for the next match.

STAGE LOADED

The two Mechs faced each other and waited for the ten-second countdown timer to finish.

Both players were stuck in place, launched onto opposite sides of the stage.

Phil was standing in the sea, and Jason's dragon perched on the roof of the hotel.

Phil was using a Mech Jason recognized.

Phil was always trying stuff he'd seen on various fansites and community YouTube channels.

During his time as a One Star Boss, Jason had carefully studied as much community content as possible.

Learning about the flavor of the month builds taught him how to counter his opponents. There was always an upsurge in certain Mech types and strategies after certain YouTubers made videos.

Like many players in the community, Phil watched the videos and purchased machines that he found interesting.

As a casual Overdrive player, Phil wanted to play as many different machines as possible.

He did not discriminate between the four Mech classes and used them all roughly equally.

On top of that, Phil's substantial income from working in finance meant that he could purchase any Mech wanted.

Every so often, Phil would go on a month or so of spamming the same machine, but he always eventually changed it up. He'd been the same way during Jason's original stint at the Good Game Shoppe.

In short, he was a classic casual whale.

For Phil, diversity was the spice of life.

He didn't want to dedicate his playtime to improving a single frame the way Jason did.

In this case, Phil was using a thin and gangly Spell Titan - a Mech class that fought with magical powers powered by mana batteries.

The slender Mech looked rather conventional for its class, with the sharp and angular Mana Gatherer Spikes poking out of its shoulder blades and back.

The machine had a long and angular face vaguely reminiscent of a bird or a lizard, and its limbs were exceedingly thin.

In Jason's opinion, the Spell Titans were the strangest of the four classes.

The other three all had clear-cut inspirations.

The Paragons were inspired by super robot anime.

The Hemoborn were cyborgs.

The Kingbreakers were Mechs based on hard science fiction.

The Spell Titans were basically gigantic wizards.

Unlike the other three machines, their statistics were not remotely balanced.

Based on their customization and magic specialization, they always had two or three ludicrously high statistics combined with a few abysmal weaknesses.

This set-up naturally inclined towards highly offensive machines, but Jason had encountered a few Spell Titans that prioritized defense and speed to operate as top-tier scouts.

In the in-game lore of Overdrive, Spell Titans were created by humans from another dimension.

Due to their magical environments, their values and belief system were totally divergent from the rest of humanity, and their machine's abilities and statistics were similarly bizarre.

In this case, Phil was using a Dual Caster, a Mech that split is magic specialization between two distinct types.

In this case, the synergy was very direct and obvious.

The half blue and half yellow Mech combined water and electricity to significantly increase its damage.

The Mech would first soak its foe in water before striking with a thunderstorm. Because water conducted electricity, this led to bonus damage.

The weapons in the Spell Titan's hand - a comically large water soaker and a modified stun gun - helped the magic-focused machine further enhance its power.

The weapons acted similarly to a casting focus from Dungeons and Dragons.

Phil's Spell Titan was one of the few which focused entirely on a single stat - offense.

It had utterly massive attacking power with very little defenses or speed.

The machine was lightly armored except for the chest and some critical joints at the limbs.

The Mech also had very few thrusters.

Instead, it wore a specialized heavy assault suit for Spell Titans consisting of several interlinked Mana Gatherer Spikes. The magical storage tanks were linked directly into its weapons, further boosting their power.

This particular water and electricity Mech concept was already commonplace, but the build had recently surged in popularity because of a popular crafting YouTuber.

As part of his research, Jason was careful to watch every single video that came out from the top Overdrive content creators, no matter how annoying he found them.

That was another reason why he was such a tough matchup for casual whales like Phil - he almost always knew their own machines better than they did.

Jason clearly recalled the video which inspired this particular dual caster.

It was from a content creator known as TheCreativePilot.

The man cranked out videos almost every single day, all with a similar thumbnail - garish colors in the background, a Mech with a blacked-out silhouette reminiscent of the iconic "Who's That Pokemon," and a picture of The CreativePilot's face.

TheCreativePilot was a Caucasian man with brown hair and a weirdly flexible mouth that was always gaping at his own creations.

Truth be told, Jason thought that most of those videos weren't particularly creative.

It wasn't easy to come up with new ideas every single day.

TheCreativePilot usually had about two good videos a week, while the rest recycled obvious concepts that the community had come up with already.

In fact, Jason had a bit of a grudge against TheCreativePilot. The player had called himself the dragon master after a run of - admittedly pretty good - dragon videos.

However, Jason hoped he could one day battle the YouTube star and show him who was the real dragon master.

BATTLE START