Infinity Legends

Chapter 2: The Outcast

Coming back to the real world always felt disappointing and empty, but after the humiliation Barry had just gone through a whole new level of despair downed on him as he pulled out the VR headset. The stadium around him was bathed in red neon celebrating the other team’s triumph, and wherever Barry looked the grandstands were covered in esport fans maddened by excitement.

The Choker was one of the most feared, most powerful creatures in the Fantasy Stars RPG world, a challenge very few players ever took on. Given its infamy and ridiculous strength, the beast was also stupidly expensive in Fantasy Stars Legends matches, and therefore had never been spawned in a professional game…

Until that day.

Half of the crowd was ecstatic by the m******e they had just witnessed. One of the best teams in Fantasy Stars Legends League being utterly destroyed by a single monster. The other half was booing, enraged at Barry’s cowardice as he had chosen to kill Kramen without a final showdown with the Choker. But sometimes yielding and dropping the king was the most dignified way to take a bow.

Not that those bloodthirsty lunatics on the audience would understand. Most of them were probably there to see powerful players using their shiny powers to hack through endless waves of brainless NPCs, not realizing the true worth of the Spawn-Masters and their strategies.

Part of his teammates had already left the stage, stomping, a larger portion had begrudgingly walked to the opponents for polite handshakes and congratulations. But Barry could not help but sit still, the weight of defeat too heavy on his shoulders for him to stand or ever divert his gaze from the floor.

The crushed Spawn-Master only looked up when a tiny, yet surprisingly firm, hand clasped his shoulder. Behind his chair, Dana offered a tight, pained smile of comfort. The short red head—who moments ago had embodied a gigantic alien brute named Arlak—indicated the exit by throwing a thumb over her tattooed shoulders.

“Come on, kid. Time to regroup.”

***

The ride on Dana’s motorcycle to the Crooked Goose Bar had given Barry time to reflect on his catastrophic mistake. It was a tug-of-war between optimistic self-justifications and the awareness that his mistake had just been eternalized by joining history as the first spawn of a Choker in competitive FSL. By the time they had arrived at Dana’s father’s pub, which doubled as the Star Rangers real-life HQ, Barry was almost convincing himself that perhaps the mess was not that grave.

As soon as Dana opened the bar’s back door, however, all the effort at self-confidence evaporated.

“What the f**k were you thinking, Barry?!” Jack’s player, Louis, snapped as soon as Barry stepped into the dimly lit back room of the Crooked Goose, a tiny windowless space that most likely saw a illegal poker game or two every week. “Sarista told you to retreat and leave it to us!”

“Settle down, Lou,” Dana, despite being half the fat man’s size, pushed him back into an old moldy couch. “He knows he f****d up. Your ranting will just piss me off more. And you? What you looking at?”

Dana was referring to Belle, Louis’ sister and the player of Jill, who was sitting quietly on the far corner of the room. Her silence hardly eased the intensity with which she stared Barry down. At least Dana’s intimidation attempt made the pale brunette divert her gaze.

“Dana, don’t try to defend him,” Louis said after shaking off Dana’s shove. “We’d be in the world series if this shithead had not gone k******e!”

“His right,” Barry muttered from behind Dana’s tattooed toned frame. “I’m a shithead.”

“You made a mistake,” Dana replied to Barry as angrily as she did Louis, then turned back to the man on the couch. “Just like Jack here did when he killed three of our guys with grenade last season.”

“That didn’t cost us the national-freaking-title!”

“Will you shut your trap, Lou?” Dana grabbed her short red hair as if about to rip it off. “Barry slipped! We all do! But at the end of the day he’s part of the team and we’ll stand by him, like it or not!”

“Don’t be so sure, Dana,” Richard, the man behind Sarista, spoke while leaning against the backdoor’s frame, arms folded over his leather jacket.

“Richard… I’m so-” Barry started apologizing but was cut by Dana’s hands squeezing his cheeks together.

“Where the hell are the others?” Dana asked.

“I sent them home. I don’t want an audience for this…”

“For what?” Barry asked through squeezed cheeks, just before Dana let him go.

Richard looked past Dana and Barry, straight to Louis and Belle.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Louis shrugged. “You’ve got something to say, spill it.”

Richard closed his eyes during a very deep and very long breath, then stared directly into Barry’s soul with his pair of grayish eyes.

“You’re off the team, Barry…”

“What?!” Barry asked.

“What?!” Dana asked.

“What?!” Louis asked.

If one paid enough attention, even Belle could have been heard asking that.

“I’m sorry, but it is what it is,” Richard confirmed.

“This is bullshit!” Dana took a step towards the leader, a finger aimed at his face. “Who decided this? You?!”

“Our sponsors did,” Richard said flatly. “And can you blame them? We were just crushed because of our Spawn-Master. The web’s going wild with #StarRangersSuck and #ChokeOnChoker!”

Dana was taking a deep breath with which she would fuel her next rage, but Barry took the opportunity to step up and speak for himself:

“I get it, I made a mistake, but I didn’t know units committing suicide would give the enemy spawn-points!”

“It’s your job to know,” Louis grumbled from the couch, and Richard nodded in sorrowful agreement.

“B-but… I got us to four Legends Cup finals! Won two of them!” Barry protested again, his voice echoing hollow across the small room. No one wanted to reply. “I-I’m your star player!”

“You were,” Richard said with no pleasure whatsoever. “You were our star player when you were a twelve-year-old outsmarting grown men and pro-players. Now you’re a seventeen-year-old who just outsmarted himself. I’d give you a second chance, but the sponsors have spoken. Razor and Flying Cow have already called me, and I’ve got three texts from Tortoise Wax. They want you out. All of them.”

Barry looked at Dana. Her lips were pressed, a physical translation of her holding back all the swearing she wanted to spurt out. She knew whatever she said would never outweigh the people literally paying their salaries. Barry knew that too.

“So… Who’ll you get to replace me?” Barry asked, voice shaky, on the verge of breaking.

“Me!” a blonde skinny man in loose clothes appeared from behind Richard. The stranger bared a crooked smile, his blue eyes shining with a dissimulated eagerness as he approached on a limp.

“I told you to stay at the car!” Richard tried stopping the invader, but he simply continued on his hindered walk until he stood face to face with Barry.

“And who the f**k are you?” Dana asked, venom dripping from her words.

“The name’s Andre Schulze,” the young man said with a hint of arrogant pride. “Though you might know me as…”

“Andrew Laserburn,” Barry interrupted, and Andre confirmed the link with a pleased nod.

“Why don’t you just stick with your buddies?” Dana barked. “Seems to be working out for you.”

“Because I did not win thanks to my team. I won despite them!” Andre retorted as he started pacing around the room, not acknowledging Louis or Belle. “I will drag those useless losers to the world series podium, but I’ll want your efficiency on my side next year. Afterall, you did do a decent job until Kramen Blacksky committed the opprobrium of the century.”

“You only won because of that opprobrium,” Barry stated.

“Did I? You had your troops retreat. I needed more points for the grand finale,” Andre kept walking in circles. “When you had your troops retreat, I had my players do the same. A ploy to incite you into sending more waves for them to cut through and gather the remaining Spawn-Points. I did not expect you to so eagerly hand them out to me!”

“You had plenty of points,” Barry said plainly, stating a mathematical fact to counter the attempted eloquence of his replacement. “A Choker was unnecessary.”

“Grandeur often is. ‘The First Choker Summoner’ is a title I shall forever hold. Unlike your ‘Prodigy Spawner’. You do look quite old, and not smart enough, to keep that label.”

“I don’t care about labels…”

“Which is why you’re done,” Andre closed the distance between him and Barry in three slow limps, their faces far too close as Andre smirked in dominance.

“Hey, Barry,” Dana tugged on his sleeve. “f**k this asshole. We’re outta here.”

At first, Barry ignored his friend’s plea, keeping his gaze locked into Andre’s for two brief seconds before giving in and following Dana to the door. There was nothing more to be said. Nothing more to be done. On the way out, Richard tried whispering something, perhaps an apology, perhaps a word of reassurance, but whatever it was never came out as Dana’s elbow pushed the leader into the doorframe as she passed by him. And however genuinely sorry Richard felt, Barry could not deny the pleasure he got from Dana’s unwarranted aggression.

***

It had been over an hour since Barry and Dana had sat down on the bench on the Crooked Goose’s porch. Dana had been sipping beers Barry was too young to have, and neither of them had said a word. The old tunes from the bar’s jukebox, the late night crickets and the occasional drunk patron blabbering had filled the night, but not a word from the duo sitting on the bench.

“So… What now?” Barry grunted after more than an hour of unsuccessful internal dialogues.

“f**k’em. We find a new team,” Dana downed the rest of her seventh bottle. “You go, I go.”

“You’re bound by contract,” Barry stated. “We all are. Were.”

“Then you find a new team and you kick our asses until those morons bring you back.”

“I doubt any decent crew will take me after tonight,” Barry said, looking up into the starry skies. Real stars that were much prettier, although not nearly as intriguing, as Fantasy Stars. “Besides, this might be the right time to end it.”

“End… You’re not talking about your life, are’ya?!” Dana asked behind clearly intoxicated eyelids. “I’ll kick you ass if you kill yourself!”

“No, I mean…” the words stopped in Barry’s throat. They were easier thought than said. “Perhaps it’s time I stopped playing.”

Dana stared at him for a while, not a muscle on her tiny tattooed body moving as her drunken thoughts twisted and turned trying to unscramble themselves.

“You’re serious…” she said at last, more stating than asking.

Barry nodded. “Go to college. Get a real job. Live a normal life.”

“But you’ll keep playing casually. Right?”

“I…” Barry ran a hand over his stubby beard. “I don’t know if people like us can ever go back to casual.”

“Eh, probably not,” Dana shook her head. “Running around the galaxy doing quests gets pretty dull after kicking ass in Legends Cup. But hey, at least you’re smart. You’ll do well in a normal boring job. To me it’s either bartending or smashing skulls with Arlak’s axe… Not that I’m complaining.”

The two friends chuckled, then fell back into the deep, dragging silence for another five minutes.

“f**k. I’ll miss you, kid,” Dana said. “Team won’t be the same without’ya.”

“I’ll miss you guys too…” Barry replied, for he knew that he, too, wouldn’t be the same without the team.