Champions, Craftsmen, Campaigns and Catastrophes
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 6: Our Little Oracle
Elias Voss was not having a very good day. A long day at work had left him hurrying home, because if he missed out on the guild meeting in World of WarMachines, he wouldn’t be able to take part in the invasion in the Universe At War mode the next day.
Not that he hated his job, mind you. He didn’t like it, but it passed the time. Paid the bills. Allowed him occasional luxuries like the WarMAC controls bolted to a flimsy desk in a room whose sole purpose was housing that desk and the computer he called his war room.
The floor was bare except for the inevitable nest of wires and cables that came with any serious WarMAC setup.
The walls were a different story. Twenty stick on hooks dotted the walls. All of which had plastic encased papers that changed daily or weekly depending on Elias’s needs.
Such behavior may be considered strange by people who didn’t play the game, but amongst hardcore World of WarMachines fans, it wouldn’t raise an eye for more than a second or two.
The walls weren’t covered in WarMac posters.
No championship screenshots.
No signed merchandise.
That was the furthest thing from Elias’s collection currently hanging off the wall, almost like children’s art on a fridge. Although it could be said that to a layman, it was about as comprehensible as a child trying to draw a unicorn and it ending up like a blob with chicken and horse heads.
Instead, it was charts. Notes. Schedules. Maps of a planet that only existed in digital form on World of WarMachines server. It was incomprehensible to just about everyone. A layman found it unreadable, a WarMachines fan found it almost boring. But he had refined these charts, notes and schedules for weeks for the guild meeting he was about to miss if he didn’t turn on his computer RIGHT this moment and launch the game the second the computer let him.
Finally, as the game launched, he hurried to the fridge and grabbed himself a can of ... something ... he wasn’t looking, he just hoped that it fizzed and had plenty of caffeine in it. He’d need it. The work day had been long, and he was going in without a chance to catch his breath. He needed a breath. A moment. To marshal all the numbers and facts that had bounced around his brain during his work day, waiting to spill out in electronic form tonight.
Most people dreamed of giving a speech and realizing halfway through they were naked. Elias’s version was realizing he hadn’t prepared. That was naked enough.
He sat down just as the game finished its launch sequence and hurriedly inserted his account card into the reader with one hand and used his other hand to pop the tab of the can he had liberated from the fridge. He took the first fizzy sip—and nearly spat it back out.
Cherry Cola?
When had that...
Eleanor. Two months ago. They’d pulled an all-nighter at work, and rather than drive ninety minutes home afterward, she’d crashed at his place. They’d watched some forgettable movie on television before falling asleep. Nothing had happened. It had been entirely platonic. But the interest had been mutual.
It wasn’t one of his favorites. If he ranked every drink he’d ever had, Cherry Cola would finish much closer to the bottom than the top.
But right now, it burned his mouth and gave him that first bite of caffeine. More imagined than real, mind you. But needs must. And right now, he needed a lot. Sleep. Caffeine. Relaxation. Most of all, he needed to convince fifty other people that the upcoming battle, no, the WAR they were about to commence, was going to turn out far differently than they expected.
They had already committed expensive consumables, rushed equipment upgrades to meet the operation timeline, risked hundreds of millions of credits’ worth of WarMACs, and invested three weeks of real-world planning.
Every individual number looked reasonable in isolation. Elias believed numbers didn’t lie. Only that each number told just one part of a story. Put them together, and the confidence everyone else felt looked less like a fortress and more like a dam holding back the sea. Elias could already see the cracks. Everyone else was still admiring the concrete.
He had made it. Barely. Only pilots with WarMACs already loaded aboard the virtual invasion ship were allowed into the meeting. In a few hours, those machines would be dropped onto the planet below. Guilds were always riddled with spies from other guilds, so operational chat NEVER took place in open guild chat. You had to have skin in the game to take part. No one was naïve enough to believe this method kept all spies from the meeting, you just hoped the ones who were in the meeting weren’t reporting to the enemy.
Tonight’s target was Tortin IV, held by a loose coalition of smaller guilds. Individually they weren’t much of a threat. Together, they controlled mines, production facilities, and far more importantly, the gateway to everything beyond them. Tortin IV’s truest value came from where it stood in the Universe at War map.
Ships moved between star systems through gates. They were ruinously expensive to build and maintain, but a system without one was effectively isolated. Establishing a new gate meant marooning construction ships for months, spending tens of millions of credits, and waiting more than a year of real time before the first ship ever passed through it. And that assumed someone else didn’t decide to erase a year’s worth of work in thirty seconds.
Most of the War Chat was controlled by Everloathing’s senior leadership. Every guild taking part in the operation was holding its own version of the same briefing. This wasn’t a democracy. It was a chain of command.
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