Champions, Craftsmen, Campaigns and Catastrophes
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 1: The Power Level Grind
“Alright, time to go to work”,
It was a statement of intent, made verbally, even though he was the only person in the room, and even he could barely hear the words he muttered.
He wondered if he said that out loud just to make him feel slightly less like a robot.
At some point, the whole thing had become automatic.
Log in to World of WarMachines.
Start a new character.
Fight a campaign against the system.
Fight another.
Fight another
If there was time?
Stretch
Roll aching shoulders
Blink tired eyes.
Then...
Back to work.
Trade in all his salvage from the campaign victories to purchase alloys in bulk from one of the game’s corporations
Rinse and repeat, getting the game’s NPC corporations to trust his latest character, to give him access to better stuff that they wouldn’t sell to just anybody, only those with the reputation earned through combat.
Spend an hour upgrading gear through the game’s equipment editor, following painstaking rituals to make sure everything was of the best quality possible.
All for someone else.
Time and time again, he would build up something that could compete, character and machine wise, with those that belonged to the best guilds on the server.
More than once, he logged into his old account anonymously.
Not the one that he used everyday. That changed depending on what order he was working on at the time.
The one that had the cobwebs on it. His first one. His REAL account.
The one that played on the highest level possible.
The biggest stakes
Championships.
Money.
Glory.
When he saw a WarMAC he had personally built being piloted by someone else, he invariably felt a sharp twinge of ownership. The thought was always the same: The customer hadn’t deserved it. If they did, they would have built it themselves. But he ruthlessly stamped the envy back into its hole before it could take root. He had built the machine. The character. He had molded them, but it had never been his to begin with.
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