the Wargame AI explained at Nic’s request.

Before Nic could answer, glorious popups appeared on his HUD.

PERRI >HARPY> VERONICA PERRI >HARPY> MARTHA PERRI >HARPY> CHRISSY

And they kept on coming.

While Nic and his squadmates engaged in other gunfights across the battlefield, Perri rained down bullets and missiles on any Azure proxybots in her path. She managed to rack up eight more kills before she was finally shot down out of the sky. Nic got one more kill, as did the other three members of Team Scarlet, but they all earned their fair share of deaths as well.

Maqsud was the last to die before Nic accessed another status report.

NIC [41%] 11|5 JAREK [33%] 2|6 PERRI [100%] 9|5 MAQSUD [100%] 3|7 SHANTI [88%] 2|5 SCARLET: 27 | AZURE: 28

So close! Nic lamented. They just keep pulling ahead of us!

“We have a problem,” said Maqsud when he was restored to life through his next proxybot.

“Talk to me,” Nic replied.

“We have an Incognito enemy in our midst. Edith. She strikes me as particularly ruthless. I died in the northeast quadrant of the field.”

Nic shuddered to remember the way Jarek was eliminated in the Final Exam. Nic himself had met a similar fate not long after that—he winced at the thought of being snuffed out from behind, because even though no blood would be spilled, his SimSuit and its realistic pain settings would make him feel the sensation of a Combat Knife being raked across his throat.

Jarek must have come to the same conclusion just as quickly, because he interjected, “That is a big problem. That is a very big problem. I am not tryna get ganked like that. Uh-uh.”

“Trust me, there are less painful ways to die in this Wargame,” said Max.

Then, as if by the logic of a nightmare, Nic felt an invisible hand grab his shoulder. A sharp blade pierced his proxybot’s neck. He felt a sudden jolt of pain that squeezed the air out of his body. Strangely, he always assumed he would scream in a moment of terror like this, but he was in such abrupt agony that his body couldn’t spare the energy for it.

Mercifully, it was over soon. The simulated pain was taken away as quickly as it was given.

EDITH >KNIFE> NIC SCARLET: 27 | AZURE: 29

He spent the entirety of his respawn timer silently rubbing his neck through his SimSuit. He felt for the warmth of blood or any tender parts of his skin that hurt to be touched. He found none.

Wargame’s pain settings are calibrated to Realistic per the Treaty of 2401 and they cannot be changed. Remember what they sacrificed. Remember why you fight. The AI’s words were carved into his pain receptors by this point.

“Team Scarlet, sound off,” he commanded when he respawned.

“What is it, Shanti?” Jarek asked. “That’s not far from me. Weapon? Or a—” Nic heard Jarek gasp and then his audio output went silent.

SCARLET: 27 | AZURE: 30

She was trying to warn him, Nic realized. She saw Edith somehow. “Shanti knows where the invisible one is. It was a warning!”

“Shanti,” said Perri, “did you see the Incognito player? How could you see her if she’s invisible?” No response.

We need to figure out a better system of communication here!

In the interim, Maqsud earned another kill. “That’s more like it!” he declared in the team chat. “I’ve just happened upon a Sniper Rifle, my weapon of choice. I think I’ll call down an Ultravision. Edith, your Incognito is almost unbeatable—almost.”

That sounds handy. “RTIFIS,” said Nic, “display Ultravision specs.”

Pair that with a Sniper and... well, that’s genius. There are only two catches. He’s got to be quick. And he has got to be a perfect shot.

The score changed but there was no audible reaction by a fallen player—it must have been Shanti.

SCARLET: 27 | AZURE: 31

“Sorry I was too slow, Shanti,” said Max. “But this ought to help even the odds.” Nic heard the muffled crack of sniper fire through the team chat.

MAQSUD >SNIPER> EDITH SCARLET: 28 | AZURE: 31

And it did help. Even with the expiration of his Ultravision, Maqsud used the Sniper Rifle from his high vantage point to pick off several more Azure combatants in the ensuing seconds. It was finally time for Max to hit his own stride; he went on a killstreak that thrilled Nic to watch through HUD notifications, eight perfect headshots followed by a miss before finally cleaning up his ninth victim in total. Only once both 5-round magazines were expended did Azure finally snuff him out.

Meanwhile, Nic collected three more kills before dying again. Jarek and Perri each died as well.

NIC [100%] 14|7 JAREK [100%] 2|7 PERRI [100%] 9|7 MAQSUD [100%] 12|8 SHANTI [100%] 2|6 SCARLET: 39 | AZURE: 35

Nic smiled. It felt good to be in the lead finally.

This isn’t over yet, though, he warned himself against celebrating too soon.

ITEM DROPS AVAILABLE (1)

“Good work, Team Scarlet,” he said into his mic. “Don’t let up. I have an Upgrade inbound.”

“Congrats, man,” said Jarek. “What’d you get?”

The Squad Leader bolted to the drop location that RTIFIS tagged for him. “Incognito.”

“You gonna go all stealth killer now, too?”

“No. I have a better idea.”

Nic climbed a boulder and fought off another blue proxybot, Veronica, to get where he was going next. He sprinted as fast as his own proxy would move while still keeping his SMG leveled. The environment was eerily quiet, the gunfire so distant, and the air so paper thin, that firefights happening elsewhere sounded like dull, gentle clicking in his ear.

“Shanti,” he said finally, beginning to lose his breath from sprinting. Even though it was simulated, his real body was moving in the Corvette’s Simnasium, his real legs and arms pumping and his real lungs racing to keep up. “You seem to have a knack for stealth. Not only that, you understood this Upgrade, how to track it, better than anyone. I know we didn’t practice Upgrades much in the sim, but... I think you should take this and see what you can do with it.” He tapped her proxybot on the shoulder and it spun around in an instant.

She said nothing, like always. Even with the totally featureless helmet-like head of the bot, its glassy visor reflecting his own mechanical avatar, he imagined he could sense her hesitation, her unease—and maybe a bit of excitement thrown into the mix. He held out the purple Upgrade Pak slowly as if to say, Here, take it. She accepted it warily.

Now she has to say something, Nic thought, remembering how he’d always triggered these proxy powerups in the past. This should be interesting.

But Shanti simply attached the Pak to her torso like a clip-on backpack and flipped a red switch on the side, revealing a square of green metal underneath. A universal indicator of “off-to-on.” The instant she did so, visible light distortions rippled out from the center of the Upgrade Pak until her proxybot vanished from sight completely about a second later.

Nic carefully studied the place where Shanti had just stood. His eyes picked apart the landscape for subtle imperfections in the Upgrade Pak’s cloaking technology—a stray flicker of light, or a shadow where one shouldn’t be. He saw nothing... at first. Closer inspection showed exactly one footprint on the sandy surface of Planet Gwher. More of an indentation, really. Depending on the terrain, he deduced, one could hypothetically track the whereabouts of an Incognito player—or at least spot where they’d been. It remained to be seen if this is how Shanti tracked the movements of the bloodthirsty Team Azure player Edith or if it was just her intuition.

His thinking was cut short when something hit him in the back of the head.

“Ow,” he muttered, spinning around. It was only enough to knock 1 percentage point off his health total—a minor nuisance.

NIC [99%]

His eyes widened in his SimSuit helmet when he saw what had hit him.

The blast went off first, an abrupt, peppery little burst of smoke. It only did another 12% damage—nothing compared to a Fragmentation Grenade—but what the EMP Grenade lacked in raw strength, it more than made up for with its utility. It sent out a short-range electromagnetic pulse that could disable anything that relied on electrical power: weapons, vehicles, and, of course, proxybots themselves. Nic seized and shook with the very real electrical current passing through his avatar as well as the simulated pain that came with it.

“Hello, Nic,” said the voice of a Team Azure proxy as it stepped out from behind the cover of a boulder. It was Edith. “Did you enjoy your lead while it lasted?”