A few words came to Danny’s head on how he should describe what he just saw: Amazing, awesome, unbelievable. But he decided not to say or exclaim any of those words.

  If he reacted to everything surprising that Cane could do, well, there’d be no end. He just gripped the steering wheel tightly as the windshield began displaying statistics about the car.

  “Whoa!” Danny exclaimed in excitement. On the right side was a row of rectangular bars that ascended from big to biggest. The top and biggest bar was labeled Max Speed. At the top middle of the display was a label for Armor, with the number 100 percent written next to it.

  On the left side, there was a label for Nitro, accompanied by an empty tank icon.

  “What you are staring at with amazement is your driving system. Every official Overdrive racer has one. These labeled statistics may change depending on the situation of the race. As you rise up in the league, new statistic labels will also appear on your windshield. But not too many, as that would distract you from racing,” Cane explained.

  “Nice! I didn’t have any of this during the qualification races,” Danny said.

  “That was because you were not an official racer yet. All non-official racers are required to master the basics of driving before they can race in Overdrive Online. Tell me, Danny, before you purchased Overdrive Online, could you drive?” Cane asked.

  “Yeah, I could drive, but every instructor and lesson told me not to drive at full speed like a crazy person. Also, I had to follow like a million traffic rules. Not sure I remember them all,” Danny said.

  “I do not think that would be possible. A million traffic rules? I didn’t realize there were so many. My data on the real world must be severely lacking,” Cane replied.

  “No… Cane, I was exaggerating. It’s another thing humans do,” Danny explained.

  “I see. Well then, I request you make such exaggerations known to me after you are done saying them,” Cane said.

  “Sure, Cane,” Danny said. He gripped the steering wheel tighter than before and looked at the dashboard with a more enthusiastic expression on his face. “Let’s see what this baby can do,” Danny said.

  He stomped on the pedal, and the car accelerated. As it did, Danny noticed that the car purred louder than the previous sports car he had. He kinda liked it. It was calm and fierce at the same time.

  Danny noticed the bars on the display began to show a different color starting from the bottom. The color shifted forwards and back. It was kind of a speedometer, telling Danny how fast he was going.

  Right now, the colors were halfway up the rows of bars. Danny remembered the statistics saying that the max speed of the car was one hundred and seventy miles per hour. So he should be going about eighty-five miles per hour right now and getting faster by the second.

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  “Sweet!” Danny exclaimed. He looked up ahead and saw he was getting closer to one of the edges. This was the part he was dreading. He would have to drift.

  To say Danny was a bad drifter would be an understatement. Only a few times had he managed to drift, and that had taken everything he had.

  The crashes kept getting more and more annoying. He was using a virtual body, so he sustained no injuries. But on this track, there were no arena walls for him to crash into.

  Just an empty space that seemed to have a grass field. So if he were to fail at drifting, that wouldn’t be so bad—or so Danny thought.

  When he had reached the edge, he turned the steering wheel, trying to drift away from it. The tires screeched towards the opposite direction, but the muscle car itself kept moving further into the empty space and was moments away from passing into it.

  “Well, at least I’m not going to crash this time,” Danny thought. The muscle car entered the open space. As it did, Danny felt like he had been submerged in water.

  His movements were sluggish, the tone of the area was dark and dim, and time seemed to have slowed down. Danny was freaked out. He let go of the steering wheel and shook his head left and right. But he did so very, very slowly.

  “What the hell is going on!?” Danny screamed internally. Then a countdown appeared in front of him.

  Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six… Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Zero.

  When the countdown hit zero, Danny was teleported back to the start of the track. Danny moved his avatar’s body around, and everything seemed normal. The tone of the track had also returned to normal.

  “What… was… that?” Danny asked, slowly and breathing heavily. He seemed to be a little traumatized.

  “There is no official name for it, but I shall call it ‘The Dead Zone,’” Cane said. “Unlike the walls of the arena you saw in a qualification race, what exists outside of the edge is an unusable space. If a racer fails to avoid it, they are transported back to the start of the track, and the laps they had crossed are also reset,” Cane finished.

  “What!?” Danny exclaimed, frustrated. He couldn’t believe it, but he was now missing the arena walls of the qualification race. Yes, he hated crashing into the walls, but it was a far better punishment than starting over while every other racer had already passed him.

  “That’s it. I’m screwed. There’s no way I’m going to come close to winning my first race.”

  “Don’t give up so soon. You still have less than forty-nine hours to practice your drifts. I can teach you, or more precisely, the game can teach you,” Cane said.

  “What do you mean the game can teach me?” Danny asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Please wait just a moment,” Cane said. Minutes passed without Cane saying anything more. Danny repeatedly tapped his finger on his elbow, waiting for Cane.

  “Process complete,” Cane finally said. “Please open your digital screen and navigate to the skills tab.”

  “Skills tab?” Danny asked. Danny hadn’t seen any skills tab whenever he brought up his digital screen, even after he became an official Overdrive Racer. But he did as Cane said. If the tab wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. But if it was…

  Danny navigated through his digital screen and found the skills tab Cane was referring to. “That’s strange,” Danny thought. Danny had been to this part of the screen and could have sworn on his life that this tab wasn’t here before. Maybe Cane did something. He pressed the skills tab, and it took him to a page with a grid of listed skills.

  “What is this?” Danny asked.

  “It is exactly what it looks like. Here on this page are skills the game teaches you. When you have mastered a skill, you can activate it automatically without having to manually perform it,” Cane explained.

  Danny's eyes widened after hearing what Cane had just said.