Page 19 of Played By Design

A camera swoops overhead, its red recording light sweeping across the tablet in my hands. The footage streams live to however many thousand viewers are watching the Pulse Riot competition, either in person or online.

To my right, a shadow moves in my peripheral vision. Kain stands beyond the competition floor boundary, arms crossed, feet planted.

The announcer breaks through my headphones, muffled but present. “—BunnyGlitch approaching his personal best on this map, folks, and we’re not yet at the two-minute mark⁠—”

I tune him out. The strike zones are everything.

The streak hits its threshold, and the beat-map distorts, the hexagons stretching and the pattern warping. They stop simply lighting up and start pulsing instead, brightening and dimming in a rhythm half a beat off from the core track. Most players fall apart here.

I don’t miss, left thumb hitting a stretched hexagon while my right index finger catches a double-tap.

The tablet rests warm across my thighs, heat building beneath my palms where I grip the edges. My wrists ache. This is the fifth and final match of the event. I’ve worked my way up through the tournament, starting early this morning, with only short breaks between matches.

The ache in my wrists becomes a distant hum, a signal from a body I’ve left behind as my focus narrows to the next strike. Then the one after that.

Green. Green. Green, green, green.

The combo hits five hundred.

Cheers go up from all sides.

I don’t look up.

The final sequence loads. The beat-map compresses, strike zones appearing in clusters of three and four, demanding both thumbs and at least three fingers on each hand. My breathing syncs with the rhythm, shallow and even through my nose. Each exhale gathers warm against my skin, but I block out the discomfort.

Six hundred combo.

Six fifty.

The announcer’s excitement climbs with my combo. “—folks, we are witnessing something special⁠—”

Seven hundred.

My ring finger trembles on a double-tap, the strike zone flashing yellow before solidifying green.

Too close.

I shift my grip, and the next cluster lands cleanly. Green, green, green.

Seven fifty.

The final stretch of the map accelerates, strike zones flooding the screen. My fingers become a blur of thumb, index, middle, and ring. Thumb, index, middle, ring. The pattern locks into muscle memory. For three perfect seconds, there is no tablet or fingers. Only the pure, clean rhythm of completion.

The final strike zone lights up blue, and my right thumb finds it.

Green.

The score locks.

The crowd erupts.

I pull my headphones off, and the sound crashes over me. Cheers, whistles, the announcer shouting about a new record. Lights sweep across the stage, strobing white and blue.

I blink hard, still surfacing from deep within the hexagons.

The stage lights burn white spots into my vision, and the roar of the crowd crashes over me. My own breath, damp and hot, sticks the mask to my skin. I need a clean lungful of air, but the stage still holds me captive.

My final score glows on the massive screen behind me, the digits forming a number my brain can’t process. Forty-seven points higher than my personal best.