Slum Online by Hiroshi Sakurazaka Read Free Book Online Page B

she wanted to go up against the New York Yankees. It might have looked like a fair fight; they both had the same joystick, the same buttons, the same screen. But the gulf of experience between Fumiko and her unseen challenger was wide and unfathomably deep.
    Fumiko lost the next match in under thirty seconds. I thought about telling whoever was playing her to go easy, since she was obviously a beginner, but I didn’t say anything. She had sat down at a head-to-head game, so if a challenger wanted to wipe the floor with her, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Those were the rules of the RL arcade.
    Fumiko rose to her feet in a huff. “It’s only a game. So how come I feel so humiliated?”
    “Because it’s only a game. C’mon, let’s go.”
    “Not so fast. I want revenge.” Her eyes gleamed with determination. “This is the kind of game you play, right?”
    “Forget it.”
    “Why?”
    “If it means that much to you, you should practice until you’re good enough to get your own revenge.”
    Fumiko looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes. Apparently I hadn’t quite worked off the notebook debt yet. There was only one way out. I sat down at the controls, slid a coin into the slot, and selected the karateka.
    I didn’t have a grudge against the jujutsuka who challenged Fumiko, and I didn’t want to go overboard with her right there, so I only gave the fight about 80 percent. I won the best-of-three match in forty seconds.
    I heard a man shout from the other side of the cabinet. Another challenger appeared—an eagle claw. This wasn’t the same player who used the jujutsuka against Fumiko.
    Eagle claw was a style of gongfu that focused on attacks made with the hand held in a position resembling—you guessed it— the claw of an eagle. They had a wide range of hand techniques at their disposal, and they could easily defeat an opponent in a single flurry of attacks. The eagle claw stylist was one of the most powerful characters in the game.
    Using a cancel trick, the eagle claw could access certain secret moves. As it turns out, the arcade version of the game still had some bugs. If you canceled out of a spin attack, you could interrupt the move after the game had registered the attack. Since the move was considered canceled, the attacker could go right into his next move. The person on the receiving end, however, faced a recovery time whether he’d blocked the attack or taken the hit, so once the move landed he would take an endless string of hits. People who knew the game called such tricks the Dark Arts, and it was playing dirty.
    The eagle claw canceled out of a spin punch and immediately threw, and canceled, a reverse punch. In all of three seconds, my karateka had been knocked out of the ring. I lost the round.
    “He kicked your ass.”
    “Quiet.”
    I took a deep breath, cleared my head, and concentrated on the screen.
    Unlike RL, the rules in computer games were relentlessly rigid. There was no gray area. Sure, the guy sitting on the other side of the cabinet had turned to the Dark Arts, but in a very real way, the bug that made that possible was just another rule. It wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Crying foul wouldn’t change a damn thing. If taking one hit meant losing the round, all you had to do was avoid getting hit. I could do that. At least I hoped I could.
    I won the next round without a scratch. From behind the cabinet I heard the sound FX of a fist striking the control panel. It didn’t bother me. I was the karateka now. My body was nothing more than the CPU controlling it. A CPU didn’t get angry. A CPU didn’t bring its fist crashing down on the control panel. I won three matches in a row. Six flawless victories. The man sitting on the other side of the cabinet stood up.
    There was no expression on his face. A poorly rendered texture was plastered over the polygons that made up his head. Three earrings sparkled in his right ear. His left ear was unadorned. He looked a little