Cline Ernest - Ready Player One

I executed a backflip and landed behind the supine mech in a crouch. Its single functioning arm flailed wildly while its tail and legs thrashed about. Sorrento appeared to be struggling with the controls in an effort to get the beast back on its feet.

I selected YATSUAKI KOHRIN from my weapon menu: Ultra-Slice . A glowing circular saw blade of electric-blue energy appeared in my right hand, spinning fiercely. I hurled it at Sorrento, releasing it with a snap of my wrist, like a Frisbee. It whirred through the air and struck the Mechagodzilla in its stomach. The energy blade cut into its metal skin as if it were tofu, slicing the mech into two halves. Just before the entire machine exploded, the head detached and blasted away from the neck. Sorrento had ejected. But since the mech was lying flat, the head shot out on a trajectory parallel to the ground. Sorrento quickly adjusted for this, and the rockets sprouting from the head began to tilt it skyward. Before it could get very far, I crossed my arms again and fired another specium ray, nailing the retreating head like a clay pigeon. It disintegrated in an immensely satisfying explosion.

The crowd went wild.

I checked the Scoreboard and confirmed that Sorrento’s employee number had vanished. His avatar was dead. I couldn’t take too much satisfaction from this, though, because I knew he was probably already kicking one of his underlings out of a haptic chair so he could take control of a new avatar.

The counter on my display had only fifteen seconds remaining when I deactivated the Beta Capsule. My avatar instantly shrank back to normal size, and my appearance returned to normal. Then I spun around, powered on my jet boots, and flew into the castle.

When I reached the opposite end of the huge foyer, I found Aech and Art3mis standing in front of the crystal door, waiting for me. The smoking, bloodied bodies of over a dozen recently slain Sixer avatars lay scattered on the stone floor around them, slowly fading out of existence. Apparently, there had been a brief and decisive skirmish and I’d just missed it.

“No fair,” I said, cutting my jet boots and dropping to the floor beside Aech. “You could have saved at least one of them for me.”

Art3mis didn’t reply. She just gave me the finger.

“Congrats on wasting Sorrento,” Aech said. “It was an epic throwdown, for sure. But you’re still a complete idiot. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I know.”

“You’re such a selfish asshole!” Art3mis shouted. “What if you’d gotten yourself killed too?”

“I didn’t, though. Did I?” I said, stepping around her to examine the crystal door. “So chill out and let’s open this thing.”

I examined the keyhole in the center of the door, then looked at the words printed directly above it, etched into the door’s faceted surface. Charity. Hope. Faith .

I took out my copy of the Crystal Key and held it up. Aech and Art3mis followed suit and held up their keys too.

Nothing happened.

We all exchanged concerned looks. Then an idea occurred to me, and I cleared my throat. “ ‘Three is a magic number,’ ” I said, reciting the first line of the Schoolhouse Rock! song. As soon as I spoke the words, the crystal door began to glow, and two additional keyholes appeared, on either side of the first.

“That did it!” Aech whispered. “Holy shit. I can’t believe this. We’re really here. Standing in front of the Third Gate.”

Art3mis nodded. “Finally.”

I inserted my key in the center keyhole. Aech inserted his into the keyhole on the left, and Art3mis placed hers in the keyhole on the right.

“Clockwise?” Art3mis said. “On the count of three?”

Aech and I nodded. Art3mis counted to three, and we turned our keys in unison. There was a brief flash of blue light, during which all of our keys and the crystal door itself vanished. And then the Third Gate stood open in front of us, a crystal doorway leading into a spinning whirlpool of stars.

“Wow,” I heard Art3mis whisper beside me. “Here we go.”

As the three of us stepped forward, preparing to enter the gate, I heard an earsplitting boom. It sounded like the entire universe was cracking in half.

And then we all died.

When your avatar gets killed, your screen doesn’t fade toblack right away. Instead, your point of view automatically shifts to a third-person perspective, treating you to a brief out-of-body replay of your avatar’s final fate.

A split second after we heard the thunderous boom, my perspective shifted, and I found myself looking at our three avatars, standing there frozen in front of the open gate. Then an incinerating white light filled the world, accompanied by an earsplitting wall of sound. It was what I’d always pictured being fried in a nuclear blast would be like.

For a brief moment, I saw our avatars’ skeletons suspended inside the transparent outlines of our motionless bodies. Then my avatar’s hit-point counter dropped to zero.

The blast wave arrived a second later, disintegrating everything in its path—our avatars, the floor, the walls, the castle itself, and the thousands of avatars gathered around it. Everything was turned to a fine, atomized dust that hung suspended in the air for a second before slowly settling to earth.

The entire surface of the planet had been wiped clean. The area around Castle Anorak, which had been crowded with warring avatars a split second before, was now a desolate and barren wasteland. Everyone and everything had been destroyed. Only the Third Gate remained, a crystal doorway floating in the air above the crater where the castle had stood a moment before.

My initial shock quickly turned to dread as I realized what had just happened.

The Sixers had detonated the Cataclyst.

It was the only explanation. Only that incredibly powerful artifact could have done this. Not only had it killed every avatar in the sector, it had even destroyed Castle Anorak, a fortress that, until now, had proven itself to be indestructible.

I stared at the open gate, floating in the empty air, and waited for the inevitable, final message to appear in the center of my display, the words I knew every other avatar in the sector must be seeing at this very moment: GAME OVER.

But when words finally did appear on my display, it was another message entirely: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE AN EXTRA LIFE!

Then, as I watched in amazement, my avatar reappeared, fading back into existence in the exact same location where I’d died a few seconds earlier. I was standing in front of the open gate again. But the gate was now floating in midair, suspended several dozen meters above the planet’s surface, over the crater that had been created by the destruction of the castle. As my avatar finished materializing, I looked down and realized that the floor I’d been standing on earlier was now gone. So were my jet boots, and everything else I’d been carrying.

I seemed to hover in midair for a moment, like Wile E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons. Then I plummeted straight down. I made a desperate grab for the open gate in front of me, but it was well out of reach.

I hit the ground hard and lost a third of my hit points from the impact. Then I slowly got to my feet and looked around. I was standing in a vast cube-shaped crater—the space where the foundation and lower basement levels of Castle Anorak had stood. It was completely barren and eerily silent. There was no rubble from the destroyed castle, and no wreckage from the thousands of spaceships and aircraft that had filled the sky a few moments ago. In fact, there was no sign at all of the grand battle that had just been fought here. The Cataclyst had vaporized everything.