Project Angel

New Player

One week ago.

Wyck sat upon a Throne.

No, not one festooned by gold nor jewels--no Throne resembling anything like those crude structures of the medieval ages.

It was an intricate web that entangled the owner in coils of wires and processors that effectively immersed them in another reality.

In this way, the Throne console system made Wyck a king. If anyone saw what lay beneath the grey visor; unkept hair, skin as wan as a white plate, bags beneath his empty doe-eyed gaze; it was quite obvious he didn't get outside much.

So, as he graduated from Academy, he was content to be a shut in. No one recognized him as a nobody, no one saw the torn skin of his shoulder meeting metal and steel.

No one called him Wyck.

They called him Reaver. 

******

Reaver gasped.

No matter how many times he entered the Virtual Reality Plane, it left him breathless.
As the cord--he knew it was plugged deep into his real body's neck--brought images and a surge of information into his brain.

Either way, he was a veteran.

After his avatar fell from the sky onto the blue map and other players hit the ground besides him, he was already on his feet.

He looked around with glassy eyes at the virtual landscape, and though the only eyes that beheld him were artificial, his teammates were in awe of his body's assimilation time. It wasn't natural for their minds to be sucked out of their bodies.

Team blue's sigil glowed on each of their chests alongside their weapons and the scintillating armors enveloping them. This was a world he understood; healers, berserkers, marksmen, warriors, and the skin that felt better than his own: ravagers.

"Good luck; have fun," his marksman muttered.

"You too," Wyck called softly, yet another teammate shouted obscenely back: "Sure you degenerate ape!"

Amused, he gazed at the owner of the voice and their username glowed in blue above their head: "Buttface69."

"Reported," one of them replied.

Buttface69 has left the game.

"Great; we can't win short a player! You shouldn't have said anything," a forth player drawled.

"We'll be fine... our ravager has a 99.8% win rate," their healer, "Cherrypup" said.

His teammates laughed at the impossibility of her claim and resumed bickering as the red countdown in the sky faded into the final 5 seconds.

Match Begin.

He tightened his fists around the two slim black guns in his hands and began to run.

The map was a maze of skyscrapers and massive black obelisks. The mountains of metal and glass squeezed an overcast sky into a ribbon overhead as though it was designed to resemble their city.