Page 63 of Don't Hate the Player
Jake watched Emilia’s Pharaoh perch up among the obelisks in the crumbling architecture of the Memphis III map before the camera snapped to an opposing player’s POV. Chronic had gotten first blood, and Fury was way behind on getting enough damage to fill up their Special Attack meters. Both teams still had all their players alive, so there was still a chance either of them could win on payload.
“They’re too evenly matched; they keep hitting and healing,” Muddy noticed. He was right. Unless someone took a big bite out of Chronic, this match was going to be a long, tense slog. Jake knew how Emilia must be feeling on that stage, fueled by wanting—needing to win to keep fighting for her place here. He wondered if she was also thinking about the kiss in a non-distracting, subconscious sort of way. Kissing her buoyed Jake to some of the best heals of his life. Somehow, he doubted his lips had the same powers hers did.
Or hey, why not? She was the one who wanted to kiss him. Maybe she was on a “get what I want” warpath and making out with him was Step 1 in her quest for world domination. Jake had a sudden, vivid mental image of Emilia decked out in Pharaoh’s gold robes, standing atop a mountain with an army behind her and a swirling ball of necromagic fomenting between her capable hands. He pictured himself as Pythia, dressed as a hospital clown, draped on the ground beside her and clinging to her leg, like the cover of so many of his dad’s awful, vaguely porny sci-fi novels from the ’70s. Jake’s kiss could be good luck too, even if it meant bad luck for him down the line.
“Oh shit!” Penelope exclaimed. “Nobody even saw her coming.”
“Black star,” Bob said automatically, but leaned into the TV to see what Penelope was describing. It was a suicide move from Emilia, averted at the last second from a lightning-fast heal from JOON. She’d leaped from the obelisk and spun to land three paralyzing bolts on Chronic’s healers and tank, and would have dropped from the fall damage if Han-Jun hadn’t laid out a heal/harm wall parallel to the ground. The force field caught Emilia like a bunch of firefighters holding a blanket underneath a five-story window to keep her in the game by a tiny sliver of health. RIKK topped off her bar and sent her on her way, while VANE turned Chronic’s tank armor into swiss cheese.
Jake looked over at Muddy, who was staring openmouthed at the screen.
“Think you can manage that next match, baby Jake?” Muddy asked.
Jake shook his head. That move was barely possible within the laws of math, let alone the mechanics ofGLO. Once Chronic’s tank was damaged, it was all over. Fury piled on the payload and defended it like the walls of Minas Tirith. Byunki even had time to do a moonwalk emote on top of the hover-wagon as his teammates beat back Chronic’s DPS, his Klio’s flame sword bobbing smoothly as the character slid backward in a perfect circle. That was it, payload to Fury. No tank kill, but a way more impressive victory all around.
“Shiii-oot,” Bob exhaled. Fury’s colors flashed along the arena’s LED screens, red and black in a shooting loop around the mezzanine.
“That’s that,” Ki said quietly. “Now we know what we’re up against.”
“It was perfect,” muttered Muddy. “They sandbagged the first half of the match to keep it even and then . . . that heal. JOON just . . .”
Penelope was staring straight ahead at a wall that was now half-covered with one of Bob’s curtains. One of the tacks must have fallen off during the match. “Just gonna say it,” she said. “I couldn’t do that heal.”
“Me neither,” Jake agreed. JOON and Emilia were just not human. That combo looked harder than a zero-gravity trapeze routine, followed by the girl he’d just kissed shooting three dudes in the face with a crossbow.
“You sure?” Muddy asked. “I’m pretty sure you could pull it off for KNOX.”
“Yeah. About that,” Bob said. After the match, Bob had sat down on the edge of the couch near Muddy and put his face in his hands, but now he sat up to look directly at Jake. Muddy was looking at him too, which only sent another stabbing feeling through Jake’s stomach.
Ki and Penelope turned to look at him too, but they both wore such confused expressions that Jake was pretty sure they didn’t know what was about to go down. Everything happened too much these days.
“Do you want to tell them or do you want me to, Hoops?” Bob asked. Yikes, Bob never called him Hoops unless it was serious. They’d called him that for the first few months ofGLObefore he moved on to a first-name basis, back when they still called Muddy “Matty.” Jake felt oddly defensive, because if anything their victory today meant that whatever Bob was worried about wasn’t true and everything was fine. Jake could fight with Fury and kiss Emilia. He was absolutely capable of those two things. Going up against her in the finals was not ideal, but it was not like either of them were going to back down to make the other one feel better. That was not what Emilia was like. It was not what Jake was like either.
“I mean, I don’t—” Jake began. Jesus, there was a lot to explain. They knew one half of the story, but how could he compress everything that had happened since Round 1? Especially since he’d sort of . . . ?super lied to them about most of it.
“How about I do it?” Muddy interrupted. Bob jerked his head around to look at Muddy behind him. Jake’s eyes widened. What did Muddy know?
“Baby Jake’s been colluding with KNOX all week,” Muddy said, directing his accusation to Bob. “I saw them in Crystal Cathedral on Wednesday. Lakeport on Thursday. They were playing freaking minigames in Euphrates Crater while we were in chat on Friday. I was on an alt and saw Jake hanging out with a legacy robe Pharaoh on a Diamond-tier dev server. Put two and two together. Kept trying to catch them in a screenshot, but Jake kept tossing freeze spells at me and running away with her.”
Okay, it was a little funny that the pesky guy in Crystal Cathedral was Muddy, but only if Jake completely removed it from the context of thecomplete shitshowhe had just earned a starring role in. Bob’s jaw dropped, and Ki and Penelope each grabbed one of Jake’s shoulders in unison. He felt like a prisoner about to be tossed on the floor in front of an unfeeling elf king.
“What?” Bob asked. “That’s not what I was going to say, Mud.”
“What were you going to say? Because I have more.”
“I was going to say that KNOX—Emilia, by the way; her name is Emilia—”
Jake cringed. So much for keeping that cat in the bag, Bob.
“—drove Jake to the competition today. And he told me she drove him from Round One last week. They’ve been, I don’t know, hanging out? Jake, what the hell is going on?”
Up on the TV screen, the arena’s recap showed Emilia smiling and waving with Team Fury after their win. She looked fierce in her red jersey and her curls pulled back in a tight, no-nonsense ponytail. Emilia had her hair down when Jake kissed her. He remembered because it touched his face and smelled like Key lime pie.
Penelope followed Jake’s line of sight to the screen and had the good sense to reach over to the coffee table and hit the power button on the remote. Emilia vanished along with the ambient clamor of competition. The ensuing silence quite frankly sucked.
“We’re not hanging out,” Jake began now that the distraction of seeing Emilia was gone, “not like that. I mean I’ve barely even seen her except from the car rides, so it’s not like we’re . . . we’re . . .”
“Take your time,” Ki said quietly. She knew Jake got caught up in his words when he felt nervous. He’d talked to her and P on voice chat more often than Bob and Muddy.
