Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel by Dave Bakers Page B

my teeth, I gradually brought my left arm upwards.
    Brought my left wrist out in front of me.
    It was bright red.
    I breathed in deeply, still aware of all the other gamers staring at me.
    Only now beginning to feel the first flushes of embarrassment.
    With my other hand, I touched the wrist tenderly.
    Pain flurried up to my temples.
    Harold looked to me with a wide-eyed stare. “Can you move it at all?”
    I gritted my teeth, stared at my left wrist as if I might be able to will it not to hurt any more, then I tried to turn my hand.
    The pain was excruciating.
    But I forced myself to get it all the way around.
    Only when I tasted blood in my mouth did I realise that I’d been chomping down so hard from the pain that I’d cut open the inside of my cheek.
    When I breathed in the papery, plastic smell of the convention centre, it seemed almost like it might cut open the insides of my nostrils.
    I heard a couple of mumbled remarks but couldn’t make out any of the distinct words.
    I knew that the gamers wanted to get on with the Second Round . . . and, perhaps even more important to them, they wanted to see if I was going to be able to continue.
    For them, if I was to drop out now, it would mean one less competitor for them.
    One less that they’d have to beat.
    I couldn’t blame them, I would’ve felt the same.
    That’s just how pro-gaming goes.
    I brought my left wrist around another rotation, experimenting with the pain.
    Again, it was almost too much to bear.
    But, when Harold opened his mouth to ask me the question I knew he was going to ask, I knew already how I was going to respond.
    “You think you can play?” Harold said.
    “Yeah,” I said, still gritting my teeth, “I’ll be fine.

 
     
     
    22
     
     
    AS IT TURNED OUT, I probably would’ve been fine if I hadn’t rushed all the way to the Second Round.
    Because the format of this particular stage was going to be a simple two-versus-two knockout.
    It was sorted alphabetically by first name, and since ‘Zak’ has a habit of ending up near the bottom of any self-respecting list— surprise, surprise —that was just what happened.
    Not that I minded, though.
    It meant that I could take some time to recover.
    Give myself a chance to get some sort of a grip on my pain.
    Within our group of players, there was a pair of knockout tournaments.
    Thirty-two players in all.
    Two trees with sixteen players each.
    The top two players—the winners of each tree—would go through to the quarter finals.
    The last eight of the Grand Tournament.
    This, I could already see, was going to be somewhat brutal.
    I couldn’t help glancing along the lists of names, looking for just where Chung Wen would feature in all of this and seeing that he was off in the other tree.
    We wouldn’t need to play one another to get into the quarter finals.
    For some reason, I took some sort of solace from that.
    And I wondered just what I was really afraid of with him.
    Because, if I really wanted a good shot of taking the trophy then, surely, I’d have to get my head around playing him at some point . . . then again, I guess that I should’ve been somewhat happy at being able to put it off till the last possible moment.
    The Second Round—it turned out—would feature a variety of fighting games.
    Like the First Round, it would be a blind competition, meaning that we would have no idea what game exactly we’d be playing before the title card popped up on the screen.
    The way it worked was that the players waiting to play had to sit on a whole bunch of sofas while; behind a black, velvet curtain, the games all took place.
    From where I sat, I could look up and see my dad sitting in the spectator seats, on the front row.
    He was, true to form, tapping away at his mobile on his chess app again.
    When he finally spotted me, he gave me a smile and a wave.
    Actually looking away from the screen of his mobile for a couple of seconds.
    The spectator seats were about three-quarters full in