Robot Adept

“I saw it,” Agape said. “The Game Computer puts the games on holo. We saw him following you, and creeping up on you at the end.”

“What a fool I must have seemed!” he lamented.

“It is always easier to judge the play when you aren’t in it,” she reminded him. “We knew he had not remained, so could not be caught by your lapping him and putting him away so you could finish the course. But you did not know, and we knew that too.”

But his chagrin went deeper than that. “Could it be that I dawdled because I wanted not to win? That I betrayed my cause?”

“You wouldn’t do that!” she protested.

“How can others be sure? How can I be sure?”

She paused, considering. “There is another game tomorrow.”

“Aye. Needs must I prove therein I be no malingerer.”

“You will,” she said. But she could not ease his doubt.

Bane was Predator again for the third game. This was the critical one; if he won, the match was over.

Mach stepped through the curtain. Five seconds later, Bane followed.

He was a dragon. Not a fire-breather, not a flying creature, but nevertheless a dragon, with horrendous teeth and claws.

Ahead of him was a salamander. That was a far smaller creature, but formidable enough in its own right, because it could set fire to any vegetation it touched, and burn most other creatures. Dragons, however, were immune to heat, because so many of them were firebreathers; even those who were not, like himself, possessed enough of the fire-resistant scales and mouth armor to resist the efforts of the salamander. Thus the dragon could chomp the salamander, and the salamander was the Prey.

The landscape was fantasy too: exotic enchanted plants grew high, bearing blossoms that natural flowers could never manage. Bane recognized poison sprayers and sleep weeds and illusion spikes. As a dragon, he had little to fear from these, but a man would have had, literally, to watch his step.

However, there could be aspects of this setting that could damage a dragon, such as clefts in the ground covered by illusion. He would have to watch the path taken by the salamander, and if he saw anything strange, be warned. Meanwhile, because of the prospects for illusion, he could not afford to let the Prey get out of his sight; he could lose critical time trying to locate it through the fog of illusion.

They wound through a forest whose trees supported monstrous webs. The hidden giant spiders could not hurt either contestant because only a contestant could harm a contestant, but they could impede progress significantly. If the salamander got entangled, the dragon could catch it; if the dragon got caught, the salamander could gain vital time.

The trees thinned out, and they came to the water.

This was an inverted lake: broadest at ground level, with the water extending up instead of down in an irregular dome. Effects like this did not exist in Phaze; this magic setting was Grafted of imagination rather than reality.

The salamander plunged in. Bane followed. He was now a sea serpent, chasing a kraken. The kraken was a monstrous magic weed whose stems and branches were tentacles. They had little stickers that stung and poisoned the flesh of ordinary creatures, but the hide of the sea serpent was too tough to be affected. If he caught up with the kraken, he would simply bite off its tentacles, making it helpless.

The kraken was aware of this, and propelled itself through the water by stroking with flattened tentacles, making the same speed that the serpent could by threshing its coils. The two of them churned the water, generating myriads of bubbles that sank quickly to the bottom surface.

Bane was gaining. The kraken could move as rapidly as the serpent, but it took Mach a while to catch on to the most efficient use of his paddle-tentacles. By the time he plunged out of the far side of the lake, Bane was only two seconds behind.

In air, Bane was a roc: a monstrous predatory bird, said to be able to carry an elephant aloft in its talons. Bane believed that was an exaggeration; nevertheless, very few creatures on land or in the air debated territory with a roc. Mach was a wyvern: a small fire-breathing flying dragon. He was of course no match for the roc, but dangerous to most other creatures.

They flew through colored clouds: red, green, blue, yellow, black. These might be harmless, but could also be nuisances; the wyvern brushed by a green one, and its substance adhered, stretching like taffy, fouling a wing. The wyvern whipped back its snout and blew fire at it; the green taffy shriveled and smoked and let go, but Mach had lost time. Bane was now only one second behind.

Thereafter they both skirted the clouds. Most were probably just vapor, but neither player could afford to take the chance that it wasn’t. Time was at stake, and a shift of a single second could make the difference.