There's an Enemy Over There
Dwelling on a past mistake, turning it over and over until all that's left is lament.
We call that regret.
What's already happened cannot be changed. Spilled water cannot be gathered back into the cup, and time that has already passed does not return.
Is there anyone who lives without making mistakes? Everyone slips, once or twice at least—some of them trivial, some of them enormous. And each time, realizing what you've done and suffering for it in silence is harder than people think.
That's why there are those who say you shouldn't think about what's already gone. You can't undo what's been done, so rather than remaining captive to the past, think about the future.
I don't think they're wrong. It was always more practical to worry about how to solve a problem than to stay chained to the present by a past you couldn't let go of. There's even a saying that trials pass.
But when you're staring at the consequences of your own mistake, even that isn't easy.
Like right now.
I had no idea how it had come to this. The starting point was probably the moment someone accepted a mission that might have been a joke, or might have been genuine entertainment.
It wasn't that I hated missions. Anything that could juice up a stream was welcome as far as I was concerned. But everything in this world needs a sense of proportion. Too much is no good. Too little isn't either.
I let out a long breath and looked over the mission donation log floating at the edge of my vision.
$10 for every kill with the designated weapon
The mission itself wasn't that hard. Weapons are made to kill, and used to kill, so they come with a certain amount of lethality built in. You can even kill someone with a rock you pick up off the ground.
So of course, in Last of Quantum, a game overflowing with every kind of killing tool, "kill people with this specific weapon" didn't sound difficult no matter how you looked at it.
Except that kind of thing always has its difficulty spike depending on the situation you're given. You can't swim in a pool with no water. A bullet with no gun doesn't mean a thing.
Not that the mission was some insane "kill them with a bullet" challenge. If it had been, I would have refused from the start.
Well. I couldn't refuse now anyway.
It had started with someone's donation. They dropped a hundred dollars up front, saying they'd pay the kill bounty in advance. That was the spark that lit the fuse. Kill-add donations kept rolling in after that. What had clearly been a mission of ten dollars per kill flipped into a mission of one kill per ten dollars.
The kill count piled up to fifty. No—factoring in the fifty dollars that had just come in, I was now being forced to hit fifty-five.
Looked at coldly, it wasn't that big a problem. I was proficient enough with most weapons that I could call myself mastered. I was confident I could perform above average with anything I picked up. But that was all it was: confidence. On a battlefield that changed by the second, there was nothing you could be sure of.
Especially whether you even had a weapon. A guy with a knife can't take a guy with a gun. Exceptions exist for everything, sure—but that doesn't make it any less hard.
I was no different. Just because I slaughtered people easily didn't mean I could do it with whatever I happened to be holding. There were weapons that made killing easy. And there were weapons that made it a nightmare.
"Are you people actually making me do this mission?"
I'd hoped otherwise, but of course—the viewers seemed to be enjoying this.
The weapon the donor had specified was simple enough. Get the kills with a pistol called the Kolibri.
You could argue I'd already been slaughtering people with a Glock, so what was the problem? The Kolibri was not a normal pistol.
The smallest pistol in the world. That was the name attached to it.
It was so tiny you could barely get a proper grip, and the magazine, the slide, every last part was so small that operating it was a pain. The barrel was basically a hole drilled through a scrap of metal, and the accuracy was abysmal. The ammo was a problem too—the casings were so thin and fragile they could deform from the shot itself.
The real issue, though, was the power. True to its reputation as the smallest firearm on earth, its stopping power was about on par with a pebble thrown by a child.
So, to summarize: short effective range, almost no lethality, a gun that barely counted as a weapon. You had to hit something vulnerable like an eye just to deal damage. And I had to get fifty-five kills with it.
I'd said you could kill someone with a rock. I hadn't meant I was actually going to kill people with a rock.
My head was spinning.
Future problems can be future-me's problem. For now, I needed to focus on the match in progress.
Whoosh!
I read the path of the incoming arrow and slipped it with a light sidestep. Among the enemy players I'd been matched with this time, there was apparently someone in a similar vein. I wasn't in a position to talk, running a Sword & Shield Combo myself, but the weapon they were using was distinctly unusual.
A crossbow. A weapon that locked and released the string mechanically to fire a bolt.
The crossbow did have its advantages. Easy to get used to. You could keep it cocked and pull the trigger at the perfect moment. The body was compact, which even made it decent for concealed shots.
All of that, though, was "better than a bow." Compared to a gun, it fell behind by a mile.
"What kind of weapon is that..."
It was so absurd I muttered it without meaning to. A crossbow, in a world crawling with firearms. You'd have to be genuinely unwell to pick that.
Maybe it was the peculiarity of games, but the chat's opinion of the crossbow was better than I'd expected. A one-shot headshot, even—didn't that mean it hit about as hard as a sniper rifle? People used it for a reason, apparently.
It was a weapon you almost never saw anyone carry in real life. Watching a player wander a battlefield with one was, I had to admit, a little fascinating.
Whoosh!
A crossbow was a single-shot weapon. Fire once, then reload—which put it on the slow side for rate of fire. I turned my head to slip a bolt aimed at my skull and stepped forward in the same motion.
If I'd had a ranged weapon, this would have been easy. With nothing but a sword and shield, closing the distance wasn't a choice. It was mandatory.
Clang! Shing!
I swung the one-handed sword, parrying the next bolt in sequence, and in the same fluid motion caught another on the flat of the blade, turning it aside. The one that came in low for my legs I handled by simply stopping mid-stride.
Thuk!
The bolt punched into the ground where my leg should have been.
A glance at chat showed the dominant reaction was how did she even dodge that. I, meanwhile, was mildly thrown by the unexpected follow-up attacks.
A crossbow, by nature, leaves a gap after every shot. You have to reload. I'd counted on that—block the first bolt, then rush. Instead a second one came in. I took it on the blade. Then another came in low at my legs.
That rate of fire made no sense given a crossbow's reload speed. Had they stacked nothing but reload traits from Last of Quantum? Was there some method I didn't know? Or, because this was a game, some obscure system—maybe crossbows didn't have a reload at all.
If something like that existed, people would have been using it. Still.
The enemy kept lining me up with that same rapid fire. I slipped what I could, knocked aside a few more, and closed the distance.
Getting hit probably wouldn't even hurt much. The damage couldn't be that high. I still didn't want to take it.
A ranged weapon that pathetic. Not a rifle, not a sniper—just a crossbow. Letting some user holding that thing land a hit on me.
I didn't like it.
If you asked me why, I couldn't have given you a clean answer. Pride, maybe, at the thought of taking damage from a relic. Or maybe I just didn't like this particular player. I couldn't make a rational call. I just didn't want to.
Even though I could have closed the gap fast if I'd only protected the fatal spots, I went out of my way to dodge and bat away every shot as I walked in.
I was going to cave that user's skull in.