Ready Player One: Level Three: 0034 Summary & Analysis

Wade takes out the Leopardon robot he won in Black Tiger. He shouts its name and the robot instantly grows from 12 inches to 100 meters high. Wade enters it and takes a seat in the captain’s chair; he also puts on a bracelet that will allow him to control Leopardon from the outside. He orders the robot to transform into the starship Marveller, and he sets off for the Chthonia. It looks like every OASIS user is headed to Castle Anorak at the same time, and Wade wonders how many of them are there to fight and how many plan to just sit back and watch. Landing on Chthonia, he is shocked by the swarms of avatars standing there. At the entrance of the castle stand Aech, Art3mis, and Shoto, each inside their respective robots.

As Wade swoops in, the crowds chant his avatar’s name. Shoto points out that if the shield doesn’t come down it will be “pretty embarrassing,” but Wade assures him that there are still six minutes left and that it will come down. At that moment, Sorrento emerges from Castle Anorak, smiling and surrounded by ten other Sixers. He welcomes them to the castle, his voice booming through a speaker, and insists that they will not be able to get through the shield. The gunters shout and hiss back at him, and Wade says that he’s wrong: they’re coming in.

Sorrento puts a small item in front of him, which instantly transforms into Mechagodzilla, a robot twice the size of the others that is “nearly indestructible.” The ten Sixers then activate their robots in unison. Some gunters turn and flee, but many stay and hold their ground.

The Sixers have built an armored bunker filled with weapons and Supply Droids behind Castle Anorak. At 11.59am, one of the Supply Droids, SD-93, frees itself from its charging dock and transmits an equipment requisition order to two robotic sentries at the entrance of the bunker. The sentries allow the droid to approach the weapons stockpile and retrieve an antimatter friction-induction bomb from the inventory. The droid then rolls up to the very top of Castle Anorak, easily passing security checkpoints. On the roof of the castle a Sixer wizard sits holding the artifact that generates the shield. SD-03 detonates the antimatter friction-induction bomb, vaporizing itself and the Sixer wizard, leaving the artifact to deactivate and drop to the floor.