Love.exe: Surviving Chapter 46: Kraken

Chapter 46: Kraken

The tentacles had multiplied while he was still finishing the thought about the first one. That, in itself, was already rude.

He was in the fastest current, which meant the zone was sliding past him at a speed that made the first tentacle a problem he had already left behind by the time three more rose across the field in front of him.

Each one climbed out from below and did something different the moment it reached race level.

One swept laterally across the middle lanes with a slow motion of something that had discovered a target worth being smashed.

One had not moved in several seconds and simply occupied the transition zone between two water currents, which was its own kind of threat.

One was descending again, which meant it had already acted once and was resetting for whatever it intended next.

The fastest current pushed his truck at the upper part of what the zone’s physics would tolerate.

The trucks ahead in the same lane grew visibly closer with each passing second in a way the slower lanes simply never managed.

The current gave him the forward motion.

His engine gave him more.

The two together were enough that when the first descending tentacle crossed his lane he had a window to use that a truck in the middle or left current would not have had.

The tentacle was moving, but he was moving faster.

The gap between one edge of the tentacle and his path existed for about three seconds before it would not exist at all.

He took it.

The tentacle surface filled the left window for a moment.

Close enough that he could see its texture, the scale pattern, the particular shade of dark the corporation had chosen for its kraken.

Then it was behind him and the lane was open again.

The tentacle was behind him and kept going.

A sensible response, if one ignored the fact that the situation itself had no sense.

To his left, across three water currents, a truck was no longer in the race in any meaningful way.

A tentacle had hit it somewhere in the previous thirty seconds.

The result had been less a collision than a slap delivered at very high force.

The truck was moving, technically.

In the sense that it had a direction.

But the direction was not forward and the speed was not for racing.

The truck was swatted around between sharks, whales and another tentacle before the darkness below the water currents claimed it.

That was one less competitor.

Then, Smokescreen discharged in the second-fastest lane ahead of him.

Proxy found that interesting.

What it created in water was not smoke but an opaque chemical cloud that dispersed slowly in the current.

The cloud occupied roughly one lane’s width for four seconds.

Long enough for the truck that had deployed it to exit forward.

And leave the two trucks behind it with reduced visibility at exactly the moment a tentacle descended through them.

The first truck managed to steer around the tentacle.

The second went through the cloud still blind, and found the tentacle by the inevitable contact.

The impact was enough to transform the truck into a displaced wreckage, which flew through the undersea like a torpedo. A truck in the next door current narrowly avoided being hit by it in what would certainly be a good fireworks show.

The driver in that lane said something.

Proxy could not hear it through the water, the cab glass, and the general situation of mayhem.

And then, his attention was preoccupied by a jellyfish ahead and to his right.

It sat in the second-fastest lane with calm permanence of something that did not accept the existence of the race as something worth respecting.

Its bell was wider than the water current.

Which meant trucks there were met with an obstacle they didn’t seem to ask.

It did not seem to care.

The water current moved around it rather than through it.

That disturbance made turbulence at water currents.

That turbulence made it near impossible for a truck to remain in the water current without flying through the undersea.

Burst fired from somewhere behind the jellyfish.

Presumably toward a lead truck.

It struck the jellyfish instead.

The jellyfish did not react in any visible way.

Its forward momentum rebounded off the bell.

It shoved the truck that had fired it three meters backward, rolling.

Proxy found that an oversight.

He kept going.

Something was moving in the dark below the water currents The zone had a floor in the sense that there was a depth beneath the currents.

Below that depth there was an absence of light.

Except for one point of bioluminescence moving slowly in the direction opposite the race.

It was large enough that the light was not really a point at all.

More a diffuse glow.

It drifted the wrong way with the unhurried consistency of something that had not been told there was a race above it.

And would have remained unimpressed if it had been told.

He watched it until it was out of his sightline.

To his right, two trucks deployed Ram at each other from different water currents at the same time. Which was the kind of decision that created an outcome only a virtual environment could fully commit to.

Both Rams connected the instant the trucks crossed into each other’s lanes.

Both trucks smashed against each other in a wreckage and were driven outward by the other’s force.

The left truck crossed into Proxy’s current sideways at a speed its driver had not intended.

Proxy steered slightly.

He slipped past it with the smallest input the speed of the fastest current allowed.

The right truck was thrown in the other direction.

It met a tentacle that had been stationary for several seconds.

Apparently it had chosen that exact moment to stop being stationary.

The tentacle was not going to change course.

The truck was moving too fast to change course.

The crash that followed created a sound that carried even through the water.

The end of the zone was visible now. It was a defined line ahead.

The next zone beyond it already readable from here as something different in color and light and texture.

He could see the remaining distance.

It was not long.

The water current at this speed was reducing it in a way that was almost worth admiring.

Then, of course, it surfaced.

The displacement of water came first.

When something that large moved from below into the water currents, it appeared as a pressure change before the body became visible as a body.

The currents disrupted across multiple lanes at once.

Trucks in the middle field lost steering for a full second while the zone’s physics changed.

The tentacles extended to full reach in every direction at once.

What had been a manageable obstacle became something occupying a significant stretch of the zone between the course and the end.

Trucks ahead of him were steering through the gaps between tentacles toward the exit.

The gaps existed.

They were not generous.

He watched the tentacle positions.

He mapped the openings.

Then he saw Nyx’s truck at the front of the field.

It was in the fastest current.

Expected.

It was near the zone end.

Also expected.

What he had not accounted for was the direction the truck was taking inside that position.

The path she was choosing was not one of the openings that led toward the next zone.

She had the accelerator down.

She was heading for the kraken itself.

He watched that for a moment.

His hand stayed steady on the wheel.

"Right," he said.

He did not sound surprised.

Which was, in itself, a kind of surprise.