Chapter 458: There Was Nothing

Neville had been making distance to take a small break. When facing a frame this tough to damage, one couldn’t take a single break, even when he had already severed a wing. He didn’t know whether Lilianna would fire recklessly again or have another plan.

But... Neville looked at his avatar’s hands and thought, I’m getting tired. I wish I could just cheat and use my body like usual.

Still, Neville proceeded to do what he had already planned. He began to burn his thrusters and peeled away on a vector ninety degrees to her last facing.

His mecha dropped behind a skyscraper for a line-of-sight break and curled around the far side to come back in from a fresh angle.

Neville counted silently in his head.

Lilianna’s missile cooldown was about twelve. Her cannon was probably at eight on the surviving wing. Her greatsword had no cooldown but had a swing-recovery window of about one and a half.

That gave him about a four-second window roughly every eight to close, strike, retreat, and reset.

Neville’s mecha came around the building at the four-second mark. He raised his plasma blade and targeted the right wing-root. Since she had been guarding the left side now, this was the only logical thing to do next.

But then, Neville suddenly stopped on his tracks. His mecha didn’t exactly stop, but his avatar did.

His mecha kept its momentum for another half-second on inertia before his hands caught up to his eyes and slowed it.

Lilianna’s mecha was unusually still. She did stop briefly if there were a lot of weapons that were on cooldown, but this wasn’t one of them.

It hung there in mid-air on a thruster wash and did nothing. The greatsword that had bitten into a hover-rail and was still there, unmoving. Its tip caught on a girder, and the blade sloped down at a thirty-degree angle and stayed there for a moment.

"...Miss Lilianna?"

Neville opened his mic and called out before he could even think about it.

"Miss Lilianna? Are you—is the game glitching for you?"

That was the first thing that came to Neville’s mind. He didn’t know that games like mecha combat simulation, which were well known and passed through generations, could never have such things as crashes, overloads, or glitches.

But as a previous modern-day man, Neville’s thoughts were just that simple.

"If you’ve crashed, ping a forfeit or see if the menu has an unstuck button in it. I’m sure that the system will reset."

Then Neville suddenly thought that Lilianna probably didn’t want to because of pride reasons.

So, he assured her by saying, "Please don’t worry, we could still have a fair fight. As far as I could see in the menu, this place’s virtual pod didn’t save a win counter. Please don’t try to manually reboot from inside. I also don’t know if the rollback’s bad on this kind of build."

But Lilianna had said nothing, and her mecha remained motionless.

This is weird. What was going on?

Neville looked below and around. He saw the street, the digital pedestrian crossed at a digital crosswalk with the simulated patience of a randomized NPC.

Above them, the sun was still there. A hover-taxi banked around the corner of the building and gave them both a wide berth. Its onboard logic decided that mecha-fights were probably best avoided.

Neville had a bad feeling about this.

If some error did happen in the game, shouldn’t they both be notified about it? Also, it shouldn’t just let Lilianna’s mecha hang in the air like this without stopping the match timer.

If something did happen, they would be ultimately ejected from the virtual pod. Given that it was a latest model, it should be able to do that much, right?

So what was wrong?

"Miss Lilianna." He dropped the honorific. "Lilianna. Are you in there? Can you open your mic? Can you say something? Please, just say anything. Or just wiggle the finger of your mecha."

As soon as Neville said that, Lilianna’s mecha began to descend.

Not the controlled descent of a pilot easing down to landing. But it wasn’t a free fall either. The thruster wash that had been holding it up had cooked out, and the mecha slid down through the air slowly.

The greatsword caught harder on the hover-rail it was resting against. It slid down it and started shearing through.

SCRREEEEEEEEEEE.

The sound went through Neville’s cockpit, and Neville quickly moved and kicked his thrusters into a dive. He ultimately caught up to her at the level of the office sector windows.

"Lilianna," Neville called sternly, hoping for a reaction. "Do something, anything, please."

Neville pulled his mecha into a parallel descent, matching her vector. It was close enough that their cockpit visors should have been able to see each other.

But there was still no reaction from Lilianna.

"Forfeit," he muttered, annoyed and helpless at the same time. "Just forfeit. I don’t care. I’ll forfeit. I’ll forfeit the whole damn round. I’ll lose the match. Just — forfeit."

Neville opened the menu to press the forfeit button, but before he could even find it, Lilianna’s mecha suddenly vanished.

Huh?

Forfeited mechas did the slow, opaque-to-transparent dissolution while a system banner came up announcing the result.

But Lilianna’s mecha just wasn’t there anymore; it disappeared.

The hover-rail her greatsword had been cutting through finished its slow shear into open air. A piece of digital railing clattered four hundred meters to the street below.

Neville’s mecha hung alone over the city.

"...what?" Neville said.

The map then blinked, and buildings began to de-rendered first. The skyscrapers were framed, then went translucent, then went away. The pedestrians and hover-traffic disappeared, then the streets disappeared, then the sky disappeared.

Neville was standing on nothing with his cockpit still humming around him. He looked at a black void that was rapidly being replaced by—

The waiting room.

The same waiting room he had loaded in from at the start of the match. His mecha was placed in the loading cradle with a soft mechanical clunk.

Neville was transferred out and looked left and right.

The opposite cradle where Lilianna and Lilianna’s mecha should’ve been was empty.

The cradle wasn’t even there anymore. The dock slot was a smooth blank wall, like he hadn’t been fighting anyone earlier.

The match counter in the corner of his HUD wasn’t running. The score-readouts didn’t appear either.

There was no win-banner.

No win or loss banner.

No queue button.

No rematch invitation.

There was nothing.