Rifleman: A LitRPG / LitFPS Adventure (Battlegrounds Online Book 1) Page 2

  Of course. The stereotypical drill instructor. There was something familiar about the man’s face, but I was having a hard time placing it. Probably because of the hard and intimidating stare.

  “What’s the matter, meat?” the drill instructor growled. “Can’t you talk?”

  Then it hit me. I knew the man’s face. A famous wrestler from a decade or so ago. I couldn’t remember the name, but could remember watching some old matches he’d been in. Some kind of soldier gimmick. A drill instructor, complete with whistle.

  “Pick up a gun,” the instructor said, uncrossing his arms and pointing at one of the middle tables.

  A handgun had appeared out of nowhere.

  “AND SHOOT IT,” the drill instructor bellowed in a voice that demanded instance obedience.

  I sprinted over to the table.

  Normally I’m not one to just jump and obey, but I’d voluntarily chosen to play a military game. Obeying orders was part of the deal.

  And this was obviously some kind of tutorial.

  Chapter Three

  I looked down at the handgun. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen before. Not that I had extensive knowledge of firearms, but I’d seen plenty of movies and vid shows. It was nothing like the weapons used by the police and military in my time. Not something from the past, either. It wasn’t quite sci-fi, but close. The game took place in 2021, a couple decades ago, but had what they called “near future” tech. And this looked near future, all right.

  A long barrel, thick grip. The whole thing looked thin. A light gray color.

  I picked it up, feeling the weight. Not light, but not as heavy as I had thought it would be. I’d never shot a gun before. Not in real life. In previous VR games, there had been no real weight to them. This was different. It was solid. Hefty. As I turned it over, examining all sides, a notification popped up.

  COLT 20411A

  Class: Small arms

  Standard magazine: 20 rounds

  “That there is the most basic firearm,” said the instructor, who hadn’t given a name and didn’t have one floating above his head.

  Startled, I whirled around, gun in hand.

  The instructor just looked down at the weapon as it shook in my hand. It was pointed at his stomach and he didn’t seem to care.

  “You really are fresh meat,” the instructor said in amazement.

  Embarrassed, I adjusted the aim of the pistol, so it wasn’t pointing at the man.

  Not a good idea to accidentally shoot the trainer.

  “It’s a pretty common weapon,” the instructor said, making a sharp motion for me to turn back around and face the target. “There’s a couple different variations depending on your starting faction, but everyone starts out with one of these. It can accept a wide variety of ammunition. Like most of our firearms, we use a polymer bullet.”

  I nodded. That was standard for my time. Had been for a while. Polymer bullets had replaced gunpowder back in the early 2040s. The big advantage of polymers was that they were recyclable, if the casings were recovered, and would biodegrade if the casings weren’t recovered. Eventually biodegrade.

  The militaries of the world had been quick to embrace the new bullets. They were stronger than the old ones, faster, with a longer range and packed more punch. New types of body armor were developed, using the polymer technology, so the bullets had the advantage for only a few short years. Things had equaled out. Still, wasn’t it weird that a game taking place a couple decades in the past used modern ammo? Just one more reason why this game was called “near future.”

  “Standard magazine for a Colt is twenty rounds,” the instructor continued and paused, waiting for me to say something. I had no clue what to say or what was expected. The instructor grunted, not surprised. Somehow it felt like I’d failed a test. “A round is a bullet, in case you didn’t know. That’s twenty shots or twenty pulls of the trigger.”

  I ground my teeth, biting back a reply. This instructor was annoying. But I could handle it, for a little while at least. Most tutorials treated you like you had no clue. The instructor fell silent, thankfully, and I waited.

  And waited.

  “I don’t have all day, meat,” the instructor barked, making me jump again. “SHOOT!”

  Damn, the game’s devs had this drill instructor’s programming down. This guy was near perfect.

  Clutching the gun in my right hand, I took a stance like I’d seen in the movies. Left hand bracing my right, I raised the gun to shoulder height, arms extended, and sighted down the weapon at the target.

  Holding my index finger straight along the length of the gun, I took aim. Trigger discipline. I knew that part. I glanced at the Colt, making sure the safety was off.

  Movies were good for something.

  Taking a deep breath, I slid my finger over the trigger and started to depress it. With a quiet thump, the gun bucked in my hands, the barrel lifting slightly. Not as loud as I’d thought it would be. Another aspect of the polymer bullets. They were quieter. The recoil was less than I’d expected. Chalk it up to bullet and gun innovation.

  Lowering the weapon, I looked down the range, figuring I’d hit center mass. That’s where I’d been aiming, and I was pretty sure the shot had been lined up perfectly. And game mechanics should make my aim better than it really was. Right?

  Wrong.

  The target was clean, no hole from my shot.

  The instructor laughed.

  “Fresh meat,” he muttered and stepped up next to me, pushing me aside. “That was pathetic.” He pointed down the range. “You didn’t even come close. You’re lucky that these guns don’t have much recoil; it would’ve knocked you flat on your ass.” Now he glared at me. “It would have been funny, but I. DO. NOT. HAVE. TIME. TO. LAUGH.”

  With each word, the instructor leaned in closer. Spit speckled my face. This was a little too real. I went to wipe it off, but the instructor roared, inches away. More spit flying.

  “DID YOU NOT HEAR ME, MEAT? We do not have time for you to wipe my spit off your face. If you don’t like me cleaning your face with my spit, then do a better job at shooting your gun.”

  Grumbling internally, I turned to face the target, raising the Colt. I took aim, and a hand smacked my shoulder.

  “Not like that, meat,” the instructor said. “Let me show you how to really do it.”

  A gun similar to mine appeared in the man’s hand. He took aim.

  Why didn’t he just do that in the first place? I noted how he held his hands and positioned his feet. Shifting my feet, I copied his stance.

  The instructor rapidly pulled the trigger. Three shots in quick succession.

  Lowering the gun, he nodded down at the target.

  “That’s how you do it.”

  Three small holes punctured the target. Center mass, one eye, one in the stomach.

  “You do it,” the instructor said. “Make it good.”

  So I tried. I really did.

  And I got better.

  Slowly. But it happened.

  I lost track of how many bullets I’d fired. What kickback there was, diminished with each shot. More accurately, I just got used to it and was able to compensate the more I fired the pistol. The recoil would lift the barrel, which would throw the shot off. Once I realized that was happening, it was easy enough to adjust. I still missed but only two or three out of every ten.

  It earned me some minor praise from the instructor.

  “You at least won’t kill your allies,” the drill instructor muttered after hours of shooting.

  I wanted to see how much time had actually passed but didn’t know how to open my interface. That was a little annoying, but I figured it would come later in the tutorial. Surely the game had some kind of mechanic that accessed the interface.

  I wondered what the time compression ratio was. In Golden Realms of Lore, for every real-world hour that passed, there had been six or seven in the gameworld. Would it be similar in Battlegrounds Online?

&
nbsp; I hoped so. If it was a 1 to 1 ratio, it would be past midnight back in the real world.

  “Guess it’s too much to ask that you actually hit your enemies, let alone kill them,” the instructor muttered, shaking his head.

  My arms felt like lead weights. They shook a little from holding the gun out straight for so long. It wasn’t that heavy, but it added up. I breathed a sigh of relief, glad that target practice was over.

  “Next lane,” the instructor barked, and I looked up at him in surprise.

  The drill instructor had moved down to the next station, a lower table and target.

  “Now?” I asked.

  The instructor didn’t bother answering, just glared.

  With a sigh, I moved to the next lane.

  I shot from every position imaginable. Prone, crouched on one knee, on the side. With a silencer and even a laser sight which helped pop my scores up considerably. The instructor, who still hadn’t supplied a name, just kept pushing until he felt I was okay. Not good. Not great. Just okay.

  “You might hit the enemy once or twice,” he said, inspecting my latest target. That was the best praise I’d gotten.

  Leaning against one of the tables, I felt exhausted. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this tired. Mentally and physically. Combat in Golden Realms, or even Battle Clans VR, was intense, but not this physically draining. Why was I so tired? The game had to have some kind of compensator. The people playing weren’t going to be true soldiers with the physical regimen that came with the job. There had to be some mechanic that would cheat.

  Maybe it just wasn’t active during the tutorial? There seemed to be a lot of stuff not active. It was a pretty bare-bones tutorial.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  Standing up a little straighter, I took a deep breath to control my breathing. I was ready to move on and start playing.

  “Now we’ll run through the next course,” the instructor said.

  I glanced over at him. Shocked. He had to be joking.

  “Now?”

  “Yes,” he said, his glare having weight.

  “But—” I started.

  “Do you expect the enemy to let you rest?” he interrupted, not shouting, just speaking slowly, biting out each word.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No sir.”

  Still glaring, the instructor nodded.

  “Of course they won’t. So get your fresh meat in gear and run through the course,” he barked and pointed off to the side. There was a door in the fence I hadn’t noticed before, or maybe it hadn’t existed until this part of the tutorial. I could see higher walls beyond it. A two-story building.

  I smiled, feeling some energy come back.

  “That there is the CQB,” the drill instructor said proudly, gesturing at the structure. I knew the basic idea of CQB. Close quarter battle within a mocked-up building. I smiled. This was what I had been looking forward to. This is what I thought the game’s tutorial would have been. Not the firing ranges. I mean, I knew what the purpose of all that range time was. To get me used to handling and shooting a gun. I just didn’t understand why.

  In full immersion games, no one really learned how to fight with a sword or fly a spaceship. The game’s mechanics just made you think you knew how. The AI did most of the work. We players thought about fighting and the game took over. We made some tactical decisions, but for the most part, the AI handled it all.

  It seemed that Battlegrounds was going in a different direction.

  A more realistic direction.

  Except for that whole near-future thing.

  Which was fine with me.

  There had been rumors that Battlegrounds Online had been built off the same engine the military used for their training simulators. Maybe that had turned some gamers away. Sure, we all wanted full immersion games, but we wanted it to be a game, not work. Battlegrounds Online had been out for just over three months and was far from popular. Server limitations were part of it. Only a hundred people per server, and time zone restricted. Odd choices. Why limit the number of people that could play?

  “Any day now, meat,” the instructor said. He didn’t bark, but his tone indicated I better get a move on before he decided to bite.

  I walked over to the CQB building. To the right of the door was another table. Laid out on the top was a rifle, two magazines, a set of night vision goggles, a laser sight, and a couple other items.

  SIG TAW 3250

  Class: Combat Rifle

  Standard magazine: 50 rounds

  Picking up the weapon, I was again surprised at how light it was. It couldn’t be the game adjusting for the actual weight. That made no sense when it was the game system that had just made me shoot on the range for the last couple hours.

  Was it hours? So hard to tell without a clock.

  No, the gun really was this light.

  Which was cool.

  The rifle looked hard-core. Not a long weapon. Compact. The stock behind the grip was almost the same length as the rest of the gun. The magazine was just ahead of the trigger guard, the barrel only a foot beyond. Just enough space for a hand to grip it. One of the attachments mounted to the underside of the barrel allowed a hand to grab it in a fist instead of cupping the underside of the barrel.

  I pulled the weapon up to my shoulder, stock tight, and held the barrel. It was kind of awkward, the rifle being so short. I tried the handle attachment and didn’t like it. Didn’t feel right. Sighting down the barrel, I started to like the feel of the weapon in my hands. Looking down at the table, remembering the many movies and shows and games, I picked up the laser sight and mounted it to the underside of the barrel.

  Clicking it on, I saw a red dot against the wall of the building.

  “There might be hope for you yet,” the instructor said. I looked over and saw him smiling. “Most fresh meat think they can do the course aiming down the barrel. That lasts for the first minute or so. You went right for the sight. Maybe you’re not as dumb as I thought.”

  I shook my head.

  “Let’s do this,” I said.

  “This will be fun,” the instructor said with a sneer.

  It wasn’t.

  Not even close.

  I lasted maybe five minutes. Shot two hostages and got taken out by a guy crouching behind a couch.

  A couch.

  And an ugly couch at that.

  I could have shot through the damn couch if I’d been quicker. It wasn’t like he was hiding all that well. I saw his head.

  And getting shot hurt. A lot.

  Bullets stung as they hit my body. Nowhere near what the true pain should be, but it was there. Thumps, like getting hit by a baseball bat. Lots of little ones.

  Not something I wanted to experience again.

  “You’ll have ballistic armor,” the instructor said, laughing as I had lifted up my T-shirt to see all the bruises on my skin. It looked like one big purplish mass. “But for training, we want you to not get hit.”

  Made sense. If players got used to having armor on, they wouldn’t think twice about taking gunshots as long as their Health and Armor were high enough. If the game even had stats like that. There really wasn’t that much information on the actual game mechanics online. Which was a surprise. Normally, after a week, the wikis were full of game details.

  By making us get hit, and it hurting as much as it did, that would train us to avoid it.

  One run through the CQB course and I was convinced. Getting shot was not something I wanted to do on a regular basis.

  “Run through it again.”

  I groaned.

  The layout of the building changed. Instead of a rundown tenement, it was now some kind of sterile laboratory. So much for trying to remember the previous locations and anticipating it.

  Still, I didn’t do as bad the second time.

  Ten minutes, no hostages.

  The third time was better.

  Fourth even better.

&
nbsp; Fifth, I made a mistake and took a step backward.

  Sixth was better than the fourth.

  By the time I ran the course for the tenth, and hopefully final, time I was doing pretty good. I made it all the way through the building. Cleared all the rooms. Took out all the bad guys and lost only one hostage out of five.

  The drill instructor was smiling as I walked out the back of the building, letting my SIG TAW hang by the sling. I was breathing heavily, winded, but was alive. Or the tutorial version of it. Not a single hit against me.

  Yeah, one hostage was dead, but I was alive and so were the other four.

  I’d call that a win.

  “Not bad, meat,” he said. “Not great, but not bad. Between this and your mediocre range scores, you’re good to go.”

  I had started to turn the corner, moving back to the front of the building to run the course again when I registered his words.

  Good to go.

  I was done?

  Not really believing it, thinking he’d made some cruel joke, I looked at him. He nodded, losing the smile. The instructor waved at a table next to the door. It took me a bit to realize I had to return my rifle. I’d gotten used to carrying it, I’d almost forgotten I had it.

  I blinked as a new wall and door appeared behind the instructor. Gray metal, both wall and door. No markings. He stepped to the side and pointed at the door.

  “Through there is your duty station,” he said. “And the rest of your character creation.”

  He paused, snorted, and shook his head.

  “I’m required to give you the rest of your instructions.”

  He stood straight, eyes staring straight ahead, a blank look on his face.

  “Through that door, you will be prompted to choose your starting faction. You can change factions throughout your time playing, and your actions may cause you to change factions without actively trying to,” he spoke mechanically, as if reading from a statement. It was weird. He’d been pretty animated before but now was like a robot. Except for the small smirk he was trying to hide.