Con Quest!

“Are we going, or what?” said one of the randoms over voice chat.

“We’re staying right here,” said Cat with far more confidence than she felt.

The other player paused. “Yeah, okay. I can get into that.” The other three players tucked themselves into the room’s remaining corners.

And time started to tick by. Ten other squads left. Then eight. Now seven. They had to quickly jet from shack to metal bunker to slightly larger shack to stay inside the ever-shrinking area of play. But they’d managed to successfully avoid seeing another person’s avatar for pushing thirteen whole minutes now. By Cat’s standards, this was a great success.

“We’re doing great!” Cat encouraged over voice chat. They’d slowly increased the quality of their weapons and gear over time, and they were looking truly poised to be winners.

“So long as we don’t choke the second we see another team,” said one of their randoms dryly.

“We won’t,” Alex piped up from beside Cat. She grinned. That was the spirit!

The area of play shrank one last time and their team made a run for it. Safely inside the big metal walls of a bunker, they settled in. Cat watched the team counter tick down to five teams. Four teams. Now three. And then … just one other team was left standing.

“This is it—” Cat was cut off by the sudden sounds of footsteps. She swung around, her arms flying through the air at her station. There, coming up the stairs! Her hands, already sweaty, gripped her controllers harder and pushed down the trigger buttons. She started firing wildly at the same moment that Alex and their teammates did.

“I’m hit!” Cat yelled as the opposing team got off a few shots at her. She focused and fired back, moving back and forth to make herself a more difficult target. She kept firing. “Got one down!”

“I’ve got— Ah no!” One of their randoms cursed. Cat didn’t blame them. They’d gotten downed and eliminated from the match. Another of their teammates took down two opponents before going down themselves in a fiery grenade inferno alongside their third random teammate. Now

it was just two on two. Cat and Alex versus two members from the final opposing team, with gear just as high-level as theirs.

This was going to be tough.

“I’m going to flank them!” Cat shouted to Alex, leaping over the walls of their once-safe bunker. Alex didn’t respond—he must have been concentrating hard. Cat decided she would keep quiet so as not to disturb his jam.

Cat ran around the outer wall of the settlement, keeping her ears open for the final two combatants. This was it—she was so close to that Quest item. She just needed to keep it together for a couple more minutes—

She was being shot at! Cat saw a bullet whiz past her avatar’s ear and she spun around so fast she almost got VR vertigo. Spraying bullets wildly, she somehow managed to down her opponent before she even had eyes on them—they must have already been low on health from an earlier fight.

“Yeah!” Cat yelled. “Alex, this is it; we’ve just got to take down one—”

Thwump. Cat’s character was caught by a sniper. She was dangerously low on health. “Sniper! Above!” she called out to her brother over the mic.

“I see them, I see them…,” Alex muttered back, much calmer than Cat felt.

“Get behind them; I’m going head-on!” Cat called out, racing up toward the highest building on the settlement, dodging shots from the sniper.

“Yep!” agreed Alex, sneaking up on their final opponent from the other direction.

“This is it!” Cat gritted her teeth as her avatar crested the final roofline. She and her enemy were face-to-face—this was the only thing standing in the way of a massive success for their Quest list. Cat opened fire and—

“I’m down! I’m down?!” she yelled in disbelief. The sniper had been amazingly accurate. Cat felt devastated. She’d been so close to victory. She could taste it. It was right there …

WINNER!

The bright letters flashed across Cat’s screen, shocking her out of her self-pity. What?

What?

“What?!” Cat shouted.

“I got them,” Alex said calmly. “I did it. I got them.”

“What?!” Cat repeated, sure she must be somehow simultaneously seeing and hearing incorrectly. “What?!”

“We won.” Alex sounded happy for the first time since the match began. “We won!”