NOVEL WEB Chapter 98: Battle Derby (1)
The publicly accessible battle derby was divided into two phases. The battle royale qualifying match and the actual race amongst the qualifying racers.
It was just unfeasible to have all the people who sign up to be in a race together. That was why they had the qualifying match. The qualifying match wasn't anything sophisticated.
You simply took out opponents and survived until there were only ten people left standing. Then those ten or less people would race. Sometimes people were a little battle happy and eliminated down to less than ten but that usually wasn't the case.
The battle royale arena was a massive plexiglass ball. Players entered the ball and then rolled around chasing each other and picking each other off. The middle bottom part of the ball opened up to drop the eliminated players out of the ball, so they didn't get in the way of other players.
The ball had large person sized spikes that you could push people into, accidentally hit yourself, or grab onto to change directions and momentum. The spikes themselves were more like pillars with grippy bits if you wanted to hang from the ceiling, than spikes but the game called them spikes.
I learned that the roller blades actually had motors on them to propel you forward. The initial speed of my blades was capped at 15 miles per hour for child safety, but Ralph took the limiter off so they could reach normal speeds for the race.
All of the contestants gathered in the middle of the massive ball. I saw Mira amongst them, but she ignored me.
"Ladies and Gentlemen! We are about to start tonight's qualifying match! In one corner is a bunch of people and in the other corner is a bunch more people, and they're going to fight it out! Isn't that exciting?" The announcer said. I couldn't see the announcer so I had no idea what they looked like.
"Alright, without further ado, let's start this match! Begin!"
The first thing I did was get out of the center of the people. I bladed up the wall and turned left. My plan was just to circle around the side to size up my competition before making any moves, but one of my competitors had other plans.
He had a sword and a mohawk. He followed me up the wall and tried to attack me from behind. I tried something fancy, hoping the blades would keep me balanced. I turned around and started going backwards.
I don't know how the motors realized to switch directions, but they did. I parried my opponent's attack and then cut his sword hand off, but I wasn't watching where I was going and I slammed into a spike pole and went tumbling down into the center of the ball.
My opponent didn't waste a second and grabbed his sword from his falling severed hand and came down to finish me off. His severed hand was just mechanical, so blood loss wasn't a risk for him. I blocked the blow, kicked him up into the air and got back on my blades.
The kick flung him high into the air. He landed on a spike and the pointed pole went through his torso. He hang there upside down. Strangely enough, there wasn't any gore because his torso appeared to be cybernetic as well. He lay there upside down, struggling to get off the pole but having no leverage to do so.
Another blader came by with a vibro dagger and cut the stuck guy's head off. It slid down into the bottom of the ball and a hole opened up to swallow his head. Still there was no gore. His entire body seemed to be cybernetic other than his head of course.
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A ton of bodies came sliding down into the bottom of the ball and the hole opened up and swallowed them. In half a minute or less, more than half the competition had been eliminated.
The vibro dagger guy came after me next, but I extended my blade with blood manipulation before he could get to me and cut him in half. Unfortunately, that didn't stop his upper body from flying forwards and stabbing me in the stomach.
I punched him away from me and he slid down into the hole that opened for him. I pulled the dagger out of my stomach and sent Vi to the area to staunch the bleeding and heal the wound.
A guy with a chainsaw arm came rushing at me and I bent backwards as far as I could go to avoid getting my head sliced off. I got up off the ground finally and started blading around in a circle again just watching out for attackers.
The chainsaw guy got distracted by someone else so I was off the hook there. I realized I hadn't seen Mira all match so I started looking for her. I saw her come down from the top of the ball fighting another opponent while blading backwards.
She had a short vibro sword that she was using to fend off her opponent with a flail. That didn't prove terribly effective as the chain of the flail wrapped around her sword and the opponent yanked the sword out of her hands.
She didn't waste a second in retaliating though. She did a 180 to switch directions so she was going forwards, grabbed a spike and swung around it to slam her blades into her opponents neck.
She landed on the ground on their neck, crushing their windpipe and sending them down into the hole. She bladed around the hole and grabbed her opponent's flail before it fell into the hole as well.
She untangled her short sword from it and put that in her sheath before wielding the flail as her own. She used it to take out of the legs of one blader and slammed it into the stomach of another.
I shook myself out of the trance that watching her work had put me in and began doing work myself. Every blader that came near me got their head chopped off by an extended blade of blood.
I couldn't take the chance that there upper body would keep acting after I sliced them in half and stab me like the other guy had. The buzzer went off and the announcer said, "Stop! Stop! The match is over!"
"With the remaining eight bladers, we will have our main event! The battle derby race! We will be back in thirty minutes to start the race. We're giving our racers a few minutes to recuperate and regear.
I bladed over to Mira before she could disappear into the hole. I wanted to talk to her.