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Chapter 1
Emma
I hadto win this next game at any cost.
I was just one victory away from reaching the third-highest rank in Nexus Legends Arena, a popular multiplayer online battle arena game. I’d been playing for three years almost religiously, and I did it all out of pure, unadulterated spite.
A few strands of hair escaped my ponytail, sticking to the back of my neck. The gaming café was impossibly stuffy and reeked of body odor, but it was the only place nearby with a computer capable of running this godforsaken game. Constant commotion, accompanied by last decade’s dubstep hits, surrounded me, but all I could focus on was the game.
Finally, I found a match. As the lobby loaded up, I carefully scanned the usernames of the other nine players. A small sigh of relief escaped me when none of them were familiar. When the match began, everything else faded away—the tension in my shoulders, the aching in my legs after a long shift at work; all of it. My entire focus zeroed in on winning. My teammates and I were playing exceptionally well. Aside from a few close calls, we executed a nearly flawless game. Winning seemed almostcertain.
Until it wasn’t.
I was dominating my lane opponent and snowballing my lead. We were so close to victory that I turned on my microphone to ask the team to group up so we could finish the game. That turned out to be a huge, ginormous, catastrophic mistake. One of my teammates decided to be a sexist moron and started shouting gibberish over the in-game voice chat; accompanied with insults about me being a woman and daring to invade his sacred gaming time. My frustration bubbled over and I couldn’t help but screech into my mic before ripping off the headset. The café around me was quieter than usual, a sign that people had stopped to see what was going on with me, but I didn’t care.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered to myself.
Nobody batted an eye when it was a guy getting angry. I finished the rest of the game without in-game sound and after an unnecessarily drawn-out fight, we won. I leaned back into my chair and sighed as the enemy team’s base exploded. The griefer—what we call the idiots who ruin games—had completely sucked my enjoyment out of the game. The victory screen and the animation for ranking up to Masters that followed didn’t spark any joy in me. I was in the top 0.5% of players, and yet, I still felt like I sucked at this game. Worst of all, my ex’s voice echoed in my head. His voice had this screechy, grating quality that drove me up the wall, even on our good days. Even when it was just in my mind.
“You aren’t good at this, just give up.”
“I want to try. It looks so fun when you play with your friends.”
“You’re never going to get it, Emma. Stop trying.”
“Why won’t you just teach me?”
“Nobody had to teach me. Maybe you’re just too stupid to get it.”
“Fuck. You.”
The only good thing that came out of that relationship was heintroduced me to gaming. Playing NLA pulled me out of a dark place after the eventual breakup. Driven by pure spite, I was determined to prove to myself that I wasn’t as useless as Michael thought I was. It was pathetic that his words still haunted me. It was pathetic that I felt the need to become better than him at this stupid, over-complicated, and infuriating game just to prove he was wrong about me. It was also pathetic that I’d stuck with this for three grueling, long years.
A tap on my shoulder and a smooth male voice startled me back to reality. “Nice job hitting Masters.”
I turned my head to see a guy who looked to be in his mid-twenties standing nearby. He had dark hair, thin-framed round glasses, and wore a black hoodie. My eyes flickered to the wrist brace on his right hand.
“Thanks,” I said, still somewhat fuming from the game. I pushed my chair back and turned to face him properly. “I didn’t expect to do it with a griefer on my team. I always thought getting to a higher rank would weed them out, but I guess not.”
“Well, that’s even more impressive,” he said. “And I think it’s doubly so because you played here of all places. I would’ve never come here to play my promotion games. Too distracting. I would’ve stayed at home.”
I raised an eyebrow and stared at him. I was expecting a wildly different backhanded compliment. Maybe something about how impressive it was that I’d gotten to this rank despite the ‘disability’ of being a woman. After being told last year that having breasts put me at a disadvantage because of the extra weight, I was bracing myself for another sexist remark whenever a man opened his mouth in this godforsaken gaming café in downtown San Francisco.
He cleared his throat. “What?”
“Nothing,” I quickly muttered. “I completely agree, it’s too distracting to play here. If I could play at home, believe me, I would, but not everyone can afford a gaming setup these days.”
“Wait, you only play here?” he asked, looking me up and down. I nodded. “And you hit Masters just playing here?”
“Yeah?” I said, unsure why he was even asking. “I don’t come here to watch others play, now do I? I’m the highest rank in the café most nights, so there’s no point in watching the others.”
Then an awkward silence stretched between us. He was almost looking at me in disbelief. Was it because he thought I was too poor to be playing video games? I’d heard that before. But then again, an hour at the gaming café was cheaper than an hour of therapy—or at the rage room.
My eyes flicked to his wrist brace again, and I decided to end the awkward misery. “What happened to your arm, big guy?”
It took him a moment to look down at it, then back at me. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Wrist injury. The doc says I need to rest it for a month. I overstrained it by playing NLA.”
“Sounds rough,” I said, trying to be polite. “You must’ve played a lot.”
