es The clear sea water brushed lightly against the golden beach along the wild coastline. Not a single artificial object was visible in the field of vision. Sea birds of different sizes flew around freely…

SHRIEK!

A loud signal of danger appeared from the birds standing on a cliff, and a dark object dived from the sky.

The birds below quickly scattered and dived to gain their speeds, but they were still too slow.

Snatch!

The sharp claws of the eagle dug deep into the bird’s back, penetrating its organs.

“Stunning,” on the cliff wall was a small cave and Dr Zeta was seating at the entrance inspecting the scenery, “the graphics, the environment and the mobs looked much more realistic and comfortable than last time.”

“Yes,” Phurder Puler appeared from behind of Zeta, “Cine Graff and Theta Jenner had spent a long time on improving the graphics, we actually ‘built’ an entirely new engine enables for the new graphics to work.”

“Where’s Dr Angle?” Secny, Inqua and Casio exited their login cave too.

Phurder produced a virtual display of the map, which marked their locations and he chooses to contact Bino who was outside the simulation, “Bino? Can you search again?”

On the other side, Bino skillfully entered the search function and glanced across multiple display boards, “Her identity coordinate is completely gone from the user list. So far, I can only see all of yours’s locations.”

“Not good, not good…” Phurder muttered.

“Maybe try looking for any program changes on the map?” Inqua Ranger finally spoke up with his ghost-like voice, “if she did something that doesn’t obey the simulation law, there should be an indication in the system.”

“Sure,” Bino dragged over another monitor which was hovering in the air, “Let me see…Oh, no…that’s a problem.”

“What?” Phurder cried.

“There are so many program changes, more like glitches that I cannot interoperate which one is Dr Angle and which ones are glitches…but hang on…all these glitches seemed to be centred around one spot...”

“Just send us the coordinates and we can ‘tp_’ there,” Inqua stated.

“There,” said Bino and copied the coordinates to the digital chat, “you should be able to copy it…oh, Dr Cotanian you are done with the press release?”

“What’s happening,” Cotanian sat down beside Bino and pointed at the screen, “I see, you are giving them a coordinate, but I am pretty sure that’s wrong.”

“Huh?” Bino fixed his vision to where Cotanian was pointing, “What’s that? Hang on! I swear I didn’t…”

“Well,” Cotanian said angrily, “you probably should pay more attention to details.”

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Bino walked in circles while waiting for further instructions and he shouted at the rest of his team, “guys don’t wander off too far! We are getting Dr Angle’s location coordinates!”

“Sorry,” Bino replaced the old coordinates with new ones, “I didn’t see that Dr Angle’s location popped up on the main map, which is pretty far away from where I previously thought.”

Before Phurder could say anything, Inqua made a head start, “are you sure that’s Tann’s identity? What if it is another glitch?” However, Phurder pushed Inqua lightly, “mate, how lazy are you, we just need to teleport a few more times, it’s not like I’m forcing you to travel half the simulation world to get there.” Yet, Phurder was met with Inqua’s cold stare, “are you joking, if it is a glitch, then that means that part of the simulation has a problem with it. I am not here to get trapped like Tann.”

Phurder paused and thought for a moment, then he called Bino again, “can you confirm if that coordinate is not some glitch?”

“No, it is not,” replied Bino confidently, “I am still very surprised that I didn’t see before. It perfectly matches Dr Angle’s identity function.”

“Alright,” Phurder pressed on his watch, which displayed his programming site, “is there any way to tell her not to move away?”

Bino zoomed-in Tann’s red dot and rubbed his chin with interest, “well…since we lost contact with her, it is not something I can do right now, but surprisingly, she seemed to be completely stationary at the moment. Just teleport there, there’s no way she can get away from you guys.”

After receiving the final confirmation from Bino, Phurder turned to the team and announced, “alright, we have obtained Dr Angle’s location, so please open your Terminal Board and type in the following command: _tp_Vec_(386.5,486.9,34.5);. However, don’t press ‘enter’ right away, wait for my command in three…two…one…go!”

In a blink of an eye, they were gone.

All the faces turned towards Tann as she entered the club room. She quickly realized the new faces staring at her, so Tann responded them with a nervous greeting, “hello…I’m Tann…you guys are the team B…”

“GREAT!” A mean and harsh voice cried, “I suppose that you feel you have MUCH more important things to not show up for the entire week and leave us with all the work! I don’t care what the seniors say how good you are, I care that you show us some basic respect!”

Tann looked at the speaker, for a short moment, she thought she was looking at Loci’s twin brother. The person was short, covered in armour-like clothing and wearing a ridicules straw hat with a row of solar panels on it. The only difference between he and Loci were the eyebrows, Loci had thin eyebrows while this guy had something that looked like two bananas. He stormed towards and started to make weird hand gestures that Tann could only interoperate as ‘glitches’ in her simulation.

“I’m sorry,” Tann said while biting her tooth tightly together, “do you have something for me to program?”

“Definitely!” the boy said, “If you can’t even program that, guess I’ll need to kick you from the team.”

“Relax Isaac,” a tall and handsome boy who was covered in all sorts of sparkling pieces of jewelry. On his plain white shirt were a few buttons made from large diamonds and his belt was handcrafted with the finest leather and the enormous belt buckle was made with, of course, pure gold.

“That’s a heavy belt for sure,” thought Tann, “I am surprised he manages to visit this room for a whole week.”

“You must be Ivy Wittman right? Nice to meet you, I am Viscosy Floyd, and I am also new to Qchong University,” the golden boy addressed Tann in a surprising kind tone and swung his gold-coloured hair in the air, “this is our team leader, Isaac Hook, and that’s my girlfriend Shelia Terminal.”

Behind Viscosy was a girl who seemed to be one of those…It took Tann a long time to understand that the girl was indeed Shelia Terminal. The girl seemed like a walking corpse with her discolored grey skin tightly outlined her skeleton structure. Behind her pair of great round glass were two red restless eyes. Shelia’s vision accidentally with Tann’s which caused her to hide instantly behind Viscosy.

“Shelia is quite a shy girl,” Viscosy said and moved aside, exposing his girlfriend, “come on, don’t be so shy.”

“I need to take a look at the personality generator after I log out,” Tann thought, she suddenly turned to the left and saw Rosy looking at her with sorrow, “I know, it is a real shame I can’t be with you.”

“That’s enough with the introductions,” Isaac’s annoying voice Tann back, “let me show you what we have so far.” He pointed at a large blueprint on the workbench, “my voice is dying, Viscosy, can you do the explanations instead?”

“Sure,” Viscosy handed a laser pointer to his girlfriend, “can you point at the places while I am explaining, starting from the top.”

Shelia moved the red dot to the top of the blueprint which was a large disk-shaped object with the radius of half of a meter.

“That is our ammo,” said Viscosy.

“Excuse me?” Tann blinked at the object Shelia was pointing, “What do you mean by ammo?”

“We are going to shoot these from our turret,” said Viscosy, “since the competition requires the turrets to only be ‘anti-personal’ so Isaac suggested that cold weapons such as blades will be good since they are silent and with predictable ricochet patterns…”

“So we can place the turret outside the field of vision of the targets and use the structure of the building to hold off key entrances,” Isaac said and showed Tann steel saw blade, “we will be using the same blade, we had already done a lot of measurements of the ricochet patterns last week, so it’ll be your job to figure out the velocity and angle of the firing of these blades.”

Tann took out her laptop and looked at the paper slipcovered with different values. It was a simple task that reminded her time in primary school where she had to create a game where the player had to bounce a ball off different surfaces enable to score a point. She just needs to set the coefficient of the collision to an adjustable value, and the rest can be easily worked out. However, enable to not make the other suspicious, Tann slowly entered the commands while keeping an eye on her groupmates.

Isaac sat down near another workbench and started to attach motors on to a cylinder-shaped container. He took the saw blade and checked if it can fit into the container, then he used an electrical drill to make a hole on the bottom of the container. On the other hand, Viscosy went over to Isaac and said something besides his ear. Isaac nodded and Viscosy dragged Shelia away from the club room.

“Where are you going?” Tann asked.

“Getting a drink,” Viscosy replied and disappeared from the door.