BOSS RUSH
“Everyone, make sure your Monoculus is online,” said Eri the Swashbuckler, who had taken on the role of team leader while Han the Beastmaster was recovering from top surgery. Eri pointed his wooden sword at the guild’s Shieldbearer and said, “Mal, give us a situation report.”
Mal the Shieldbearer fiddled with their Monoculus headset, which looked more like an antique diving helmet than Rai the Spellcaster’s mid-priced visor or Lan the Gunslinger’s top-of-the-line eyepiece. From a holographic camera on their viewport, a small image projected itself in the center of the group huddle. The hologram depicted a twitchy, hooded figure, slinging a burlap sack over one shoulder while reaching for a bandolier of throwing darts on the other.
“First there was the Sneak Thief over by the mall,” Mal said. “Which didn’t even hit us!”
“Sure,” said Lan as she loaded foam darts into her trusty pair of plastic six-shooters. “But it swiped a few tinctures from my inventory, the handsy son of a Scrooge.”
Losing recovery items early on was even worse than taking damage, because it meant they would have fewer tinctures for the endgame. It also meant that Rai, as a Spellcaster, would need to keep closer track of her own resources to avoid running out of Steam too soon.
“It’s okay,” Rai said. “We’ll all be more careful with our inventories from here on out.”
“But then there was the Witch Hunter...” Mal trailed off, unable to even acknowledge the scaled-down projection of a mitered clergyman that soon replaced the Sneak Thief’s likeness.
The Witch Hunter, a high-level boss whose AI had been programmed to target magic users, had singled out the Merbird Guild’s Soothsayer first. Ara hadn’t even been able to raise her umbrella-staff before the rope-wielding foe caught her in its EMP lasso, cut off her access to Steam, and drained the virtual life right out of her. She’d been so surprised by the sudden Game Over that she fell down the church’s steps and cracked her Monoculus screen along the way. Ara the Soothsayer cried as she called her mom for a ride home, dreading the scolding she'd get for breaking the birthday present her parents had scrimped and saved for months to afford.
“Anyway,” Mal murmured as the Witch Hunter’s ephemeral image was quickly replaced by a figure holding a brass horn, “the Rabble Rouser at the park wasn't bad on its own, but those Street Urchins it kept summoning put a pretty nasty dent in my health bar. Sorry about that.”
“Don't be,” said Rai. “If you hadn't kept all those pesky minions off my back, I might not have made it out of there at all. In fact— Here, let me patch you up...”
Rai accessed her menu to boost Mal’s health in exchange for some of her own energy, but the Swashbuckler stepped in between them before she could complete the command.
“Wait a tick,” Eri said. “We can't blow through all our Steam before the final boss. Taking the big hits for the little guys is exactly what a Shieldbearer is supposed to do.”
“I'm a Spellcaster,” Rai shot back. “Healing the party is what I'm supposed to do.”
“Which you won’t be able to do if you waste your abilities before the endgame.”
“What's gotten into you, Eri? Are you just upset because your dad—”
Eri’s gloved hand slid toward his slender waist and rested on the pommel of his long, curved saber. He was kind of a showoff like that; what Rai and her teammates pulled off with magic and tech, the Swashbuckler could accomplish with a single stroke of the blade. She’d been his friend long enough to know just what the gesture meant: Give me a reason to unsheathe my sword, and it’s Game Over for you. But he’d never attacked her before, and she wasn’t about to give him a reason. Instead, she threw her hands up in exasperation, palms facing the intersecting lines of the gridlocked skybox, until Lan broke the silence:
“Uh, guys? Hate to interrupt... whatever this is, but we got company.”
In unison, the Merbird Guild’s Spellcaster, Gunslinger, Shieldbearer, and Swashbuckler instinctively moved into position around the wishing well that sat at the center of the community hospital’s courtyard. With a faint whirring sound, a small, AI-controlled drone rose out of the well and hovered several yards above the ground. A ray of light emitted from a hololens in the middle of its bulbous frame, which scanned the players one by one before splitting into millions of wire-thin beams that blanketed the area with various ambient textures. The pristine hospital grounds became the dank, grimy dungeon of an abandoned insane asylum, and the wishing well bubbled and frothed with murky, poisonous ooze. The drone itself, once filtered through their Monoculus feeds, became so much more than a hovering little robot. Virtual and augmented realities intersected to construct a nightmare phantasm whose digitized dangers felt all too real.
The Plague Doctor that had crawled out of the toxified well was shaped like a man, in a broad sense, but its hunched-over posture obscured the fact that it must have been eight feet tall at full height, maybe more. This vaguely humanoid monstrosity wore a bird-like mask with a hooked beak, a wide-brimmed hat, and tattered robes as black as midnight. Bony hands twirled a pair of surgical knives between crooked fingers as it stalked toward the party with jerky strides of its spidery legs. With each step, a gout of noxious smoke belched from the rusted pipes that stuck out from beneath its ragged cape at odd and unnatural angles. And it was coming right for Rai.
“Stay frosty,” Eri called out, and he didn’t need to elaborate for the message to get across. Without Ara the Soothsayer’s analytic abilities, there’d be no way for the guild to tell how much health the Plague Doctor had, nor even what it could do. They’d all need to keep on the defensive until the boss’s scripted AI had cycled through its attack patterns a few times before they could figure out how to take it down. Until then, Rai would have her hands full just trying to survive.
“I’ve got you,” said Mal, as they launched themself between Rai and the boss to set up the duct-taped piece of cardboard that gave real-world physicality to their in-game tower shield. They were just in time to deflect a barrage of vicious stabs from the Plague Doctor’s bloodied knives, but what they couldn’t anticipate was the sudden cloud of smoke (dry ice, presumably) that bellowed from every orifice in the boss’s black-robed body and covered the Shieldbearer head to toe.
“My asthma...” Mal wheezed and dropped to the ground as what little life remained in their health bar trickled away.
“No!” Lan shot at the beast while Eri hacked and slashed, but it was too late to save their teammate from the Game Over message that replaced the heads-up display across Mal’s screen. Determined to take this boss down before it could do the same to her, Rai began charging her most powerful magical attack.
“I’m going to avenge you,” the Spellcaster promised her fallen friend, “and we’re going to win!”