New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

*** Elsewhere in the tournament map***

In the center of the map, the fighting between players had already died down a lot. Most players were afraid to go into the pyramid zone, because of the sniper.

Every time they fired a shot, the sonic clap would make players flinch. And that was those not targeted.

The players that became the sniper's unfortunate target, died in one hit almost every time. So that zone became a no-man's-land, except for the brave or foolhardy.

The fighting in most of the zones had died down also, because of the sheer size of the map. Players were crossing paths less and less, making the elimination process slow down.

They were already down two hundred and fifty players, halfway through the end of phase one. Some smarter players had already started switching tactics from hunting to ambush.

They set up traps and waited in hiding, pouncing only when an unlucky player walked into them. They had already taken most of the terrible players out of the picture, and the remaining ones were almost all professional gamers.

This effectively meant that traps were no longer a sure kill method since those who remained were good enough to recover from ambushes. It not only functioned as a good peeling method.

Azamus was still laying down in his perch, waiting for his next prey to waltz into firing range. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a player walking into the pyramid zone.

When he turned his rifle to the player, his scope enabled him to see more details on him, her, in this case. The woman was wearing flashy colored garments, with kaleidoscope patterns.

Azamus locked his reticle on her, readying to shoot, but then he noticed something else. She had wings on her back.

'A fey.' Azamus surmised.

He focused, ready to shoot, but then something weird started happening. The player started dancing.

The fey woman had two kamas, one in each hand, and she was dancing in what looked to be a dance of death. Her movements were graceful and light to the untrained eye.

But to the trained eye of someone like Azamus, it was a whole other monster. The dance moves were strikes, each swipe of her weapons containing strength and precision.

From that alone, he recognized the player. It was another pro player from their days in 'Tower of Babel'.

The graceful killer, Blue Peacock. Her strikes were all but simple.

Azamus had fought her frequently. Her fighting style was resemblant a dance, but her true striking angles were unpredictable.

There was no pattern to her dancing, and one had to go on instinct alone, just to resist her attacks. He had been close to losing to her many times, but his sharp instincts always saved him.

But there was something different about her right now. Azamus focused a bit more on her with his scope, and he noticed something else.

She was… blinking? Her body seemed to blink forward, backward, and sideways at brief intervals like she was at one spot, and then she wasn't.

Azamus immediately connected that to her race.

'What a tricky woman. She picked the Fey race to use illusion magic in her already complicated style.' Azamus thought.

'What a hassle. She has just become a greater enemy than before.' He thought, deciding he couldn't let her get the potion.

He pushed away any distracting thoughts and honed in on his sight and instinct. He aimed before her a bit, at chest height, and fired.

*Bang!* *Ting!*

Azamus saw sparks, where the shot should have gone through nothing, and he knew he had wasted his surprise factor. The illusion surrounding the woman briefly flickered, showing her standing in the exact spot Azamus hit.

She was in a half-crouched position, her kama at head height, with some smoke coming off of it. Her dancing had parried the shot that would have otherwise struck her beautiful face.

Yet, the grin she made, while looking in the shooter's direction, was all but beautiful. She looked like a demon that had just found prey to torment.

'Found you.' She mouthed without a sound, knowing full well Azamus was still looking at her through his scope.

"Shit." He grumbled.

She had been planning on finding him all along. Going towards the pyramid was bait.

Azamus needed to reload at that moment, and he knew she would never let him fire another bullet after that, so he gave up on it. He stowed his magitech flintlock and pulled out the semi-automatic rifle from earlier.

Azamus jumped down from the third floor of his ruin and started running in the other direction, as best as his stubby legs allowed him. He needed open terrain as much as possible, against her.

Any place to hide or duck would mean an opportunity to get closer to him now. He could hear the rapid footsteps of the woman behind him, and just pulled out a grenade from his inventory and chucked it over his shoulder.

A few seconds later, it blew up behind him, pushing him forward a bit with the blast. Azamus spotted a spot of open terrain to his left, so he adjusted his trajectory.

A sudden chill ran through his spine, and he dove forward. A sheen passed over his head incredibly fast, and had he not dove, it would have hit the back of his neck.

Azamus landed on the ground, tucking his shoulder in and rolling back to his feet, now looking to where was behind him seconds prior. And there she stood.

Blue Peacock was staring at him with the eyes of a madwoman, holding her kamas, now linked with chains, smiling devilishly.

"We meet at last, Azamus. How long has it been since our last fight?" She asked, walking to him in an alluring fashion.

Azamus could already feel the slip on his senses, as the woman was most likely already performing some illusion magic on him. So he did what any sane American would do.

He fired all around him. One bullet hit Blue Peacock, and that disrupted her illusion, making Azamus fully aware again.

He dashed away from his opponent, firing in a wide cone around her, trying to get some lucky shots in. Blue, in the meantime, started dancing as she advanced, making her movements wild and erratic.

She also conjured the skill she had used earlier, called Illusory Steps, making her appear as though she was in some place while being elsewhere.

Azamus held nothing back, as he kept shooting at her and backing away. He was almost at the open terrain he wanted to reach, and from there, he could kite his opponent better.

Blue Peacock would not let him reach it easily though, as sashayed her way to him, dodging and deflecting most of his bullets. Of course, some still hit, but none in critical areas.

Slowly but surely, she was gaining in on him, almost reaching her range to launch her chained kamas at him. But Azamus was no fool.

He swapped out weapons on the run again, going from his machine gun, to what looked like a prehistoric shotgun.

"Recoil Escape!" He yelled as he fired the gun.

The gun barked out a massive amount of lead pellets, spraying over a large zone in a cone before him. But that wasn't that skill's actual function.

The skill he just used had to be used with high recoil weapons, as it wouldn't be available otherwise. Recoil Escape let its user fire a shot and use the recoil to propel themselves backward by ten meters.

Azamus had used it just now, to stay out of reach of the Fey woman, so she couldn't attack him. It was the perfect kitting skill, but it had a long cooldown.

Blue had to stop moving forward and focus on deflecting the pellets that might hit her weak spots. Her kamas danced before her exposed belly and face, ricocheting lots of little beads.

The bead wave only lasted one second, but although she had blocked the critical hits, and the beads did minor damage individually, she still lost a lot of health from that.

Even if one bead only dealt one or two points of damage, taking almost a hundred of those in an instant was bound to hurt. She looked up at Azamus, who was now smirking at her.

He riddled her body with small holes, some of which were bleeding. She became enraged.

"How dare you wound my perfect skin!?" She howled, her face a scowl of hatred.

"Phantasmal Propagation!" She yelled, as copies of her melted out of her body.

Three copies of her walked to her sides, making the people looking at this from afar see four of her. All four of them then dashed towards Azamus, simultaneously.

His response to this was to switch weapons again. He went from his prehistoric shotgun to two flintlock pistols with weird contraptions on their butt.

Azamus then started firing at all four Feys coming his way, but their dancing steps made it hard for him to hit. He couldn't let her surround him, so he started running backward, trying to keep them all in the same general direction.

It didn't work out quite like he planned, since his opponent was more agility oriented than he was, so she was quicker. It took only a few seconds before Blue Peacock had a copy of herself at each of Azamus' cardinals.

They suddenly all rushed at him from those directions, aiming for a joint strike. Only one of these was real, but Azamus had no way of knowing if the copies could damage him, so he shot at all four.

The copies took the bullets, with as much realism as the real one would, and that worried him. He thought maybe the original one was the one behind him, so she could strike a crit, but he wasn't sure.

Just as all the copies swung their kamas at him, an arrow came at him at incredible speeds.

'Shit! I can't dodge it!' Azamus thought, gritting his teeth in wait for the multiple hits to come.

But no such thing happened. The arrow grazed his cheek but planted into the ground where one copy had been. That copy had jumped back before the arrow hit it, as the three other copies landed their hits without damage on Azamus, before fading away.

"Seems like you owe me one, asshole." A voice came from a faraway building ruin.

Azamus turned and saw who that voice belonged to.

"You!" He growled in seething rage.