For The Win Read Online Free PDF Page B

him with its burning eyes and it dropped Ping and Lu to the oceanbed. The powder in the pan flared -- and died.
    Misfire
!
    Ohcrapohcrapohcrap,
he muttered, hammering,
hammering
on the re-arm sequence, his fingers a blur on the mouse-buttons. "Crapcrapcrapcrap."
    The Jabberwock smiled, and made that wet meaty sound again.
Burble burble, little boy, I'm coming for you
. It was the sound from his nightmare, the sound of his dream of heroism dying. The sound of a waste of a day's worth of ammo and a night's worth of play. He was a dead man.
    The Jabberwock did one of those whipping, rippling barrel-rolls that were its trademark. The currents buffeted him, sending him rocking from side to side. He corrected, overcorrected, corrected again, hit the re-arm button, the fire button, the re-arm button, the fire button --
    The Jabberwock was facing him now. It reared back, flexing its claws, clicking its jaws together. In a second it would be on him, it would open him from crotch to throat and eat his guts, any second now --
    Crash!
The sound of the blunderbuss was like an explosion in a pots-and-pans drawer, a million metallic clangs and bangs as the sea was sliced by a rapidly expanding cone of lethal, screaming metal tableware.
    The Jabberwock
dissolved
, ripped into a slowly rising mushroom of meat and claws and leathery scales, The left side of its head ripped toward him and bounced off him, settling in the sand. The water turned pink, then red, and the death-screech of the Jabberwock seemed to carom off the water and lap back over him again and again. It was a
fantastic
sound.
    His guildies were going nuts, seven thousand miles away, screaming his name, and not
Leonard,
but
Wei-Dong
, chanting it in their Internet Cafe off Jiabin Road in Shenzhen. Wei-Dong was grinning ferociously in his bedroom, basking in it.
    And when the water cleared, there again were the vorpal blade and helmet in their crust of barnacles, sitting innocently on the ocean floor. The gweilo -- the gweilo, he'd forgotten all about the gweilo! -- moved clumsily toward it.
    "I don't think so," said Ping, in pretty good English. His toon moved so fast that the gweilo probably didn't even see him coming. Ping's sword went snicker-snack, and the gweilo's head fell to the sand, a dumb, betrayed expression on its face.
    "What the --"
    Wei-Dong dropped him from the chat.
    "That's your treasure, brother," Ping said. "You earned it."
    "But the money --"
    "We can make the money tomorrow night. That was
killer, dude
!" It was one of Ping's favorite English phrases, and it was the highest praise in their guild. And now he had a vorpal blade and helmet. It was a good night.
    They surfaced and paddled to shore and conjured up their mounts again and rode back to the guild-hall, chatting all the way, dispatching the occasional minor beast without much fuss. The guys weren't too put out at being 75 bucks' poorer than they'd expected. They were players first, business people second. And that had been
fun
.
    And now it was 2:30 and he'd have to be up for school in four hours, and at this rate, he was going to be lying awake for a
long
time. "OK, I'm going to go guys," he said, in his best Chinese. They bade him farewell, and the chat channel went dead. In the sudden silence of his room, he could hear his pulse pounding in his ears. And another sound -- a tread on the floor outside his door. A hand on the doorknob --
    Crapcrapcrap
    He manged to get the lid of the laptop down and his covers pulled up before the door opened, but he was still holding the machine under the sheets, and his father's glare from the doorway told him that he wasn't fooling anyone. Wordlessly, still glaring, his father crossed the room and delicately removed the earwig from Wei-Dong's ear. It glowed telltale blue, blinking, looking for the laptop that was now sleeping under Wei-Dong's artistically redecorate Spongebob sheets.
    "Dad --" he began.
    "Leonard, it's 2:30 in the morning. I'm not going to discuss