Opposition by Dean Henegar

Author:Dean Henegar [Henegar, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Deacon stood atop the remnants of the roadblock, watching dust rise in the distance. He couldn’t be sure if the approaching force was his target, or if they were the friendly reinforcements he had been told were going to pass through. Either way, he still had a lot of work to do. Query had tasked him with delaying the enemy force that would be coming down this road. He had run nearly all the way from Hayden’s Knoll to the nearest transition point to make it in time. The soldiers at the eastern transition point almost attacked him when he first came through, then realized wasn’t hostile.

Query might have given him this quest, but he would have done it anyway. Serving in the Army as a drone maintenance tech, Deacon had found and watched the streams of Raytak in-game. He was fascinated that this old soldier was in-game and doing the things he was doing. There weren’t many combat veterans left, and to watch one in action was the coolest thing he could think of.

Deacon’s Army experience was fine, but not that exciting. His unit consisted of a few dozen men who maintained the old drones they stored at the base. Other than putting on the uniform each day—an act that he took pride in—his job wasn’t much different from a civilian working on the many drones delivering goods and services every day. He had grown up on stories from his grandfather about his time as a combat engineer. His grandfather had even earned the sapper badge: the elite of the engineers.

When the AI offered him the engineer class, he jumped at the chance. Then he ran into that crazy sphinx that offered him the opportunity to learn the Combat Engineer prestige class. Sure, he had to do a lot of quests to earn it, but now he was finally able to fulfill the last obligation for the class quest he had been given.

The other players he had met while delivering Query’s messages had been nice, but he was more of a solo player. After character creation, the AI had dropped him into a floundering village of npc’s that he had since grown fond of. The npc’s in the game were almost like real people, and he preferred to stick with the AI-generated people over the real ones. He had always been painfully shy; even his job in the Army hardly ever required him to interact with other people.

Creating new things in this game was his passion, things the approaching army would find none too pleasant. Going back to work, Deacon dug more emplacements alongside the road for his devices. The game gave him a skill called Prepare Ground, which let him dig almost instantly when working on an emplacement for an engineering device or trap.

He had stuffed his storage full of raw materials in Hayden’s Knoll—raw materials that he had crafted into devices on the long run here. He was ready to transform this simple march to attack the transition point into a long, bloody slog the enemy would regret having ever started.

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