Fell Champions

There was a loud explosion followed by a heavy ringing in Otter’s ears. The whole room was filled with smoke and dust, but she seemed fine. Her Tenacity had taken a hit, and her bones felt like what a bell must like after getting rung, but she’d survived.

Otter checked her link with Rua, found her to be fine, and then fussed over Sunny, and found the girl groaning, but uninjured.

“Sleepy,” she grumbled. “Go back to bed.”

“Wake up right now,” Otter growled. “You’ve slept enough.”

Those yellow eyes of hers popped open, and they looked a little different than before. More gold, the irises now like a cat’s. Her ears twitched.

“Didn’t know you were a furry,” Otter said. “Cringe.”

“I’m not…” She looked around, noticing the room filled with dust and smoke. “What happened?”

“Someone just bombed Sureya’s place. Wasn’t a big explosion, I think. Feels more like…”

The hammering from her Fate Sense went harder as her brain completed the thought. She let go of Sunny and turned just in time for a hurled projectile to hit her full in the shoulder, breaking her shield and piercing into her flesh.

Okay. Ow.

Her brain managed to maintain enough focus to note that whatever it was that skewered her was attached to a rope. 

Oh, that felt unfair.

Just as her brain let her know karmic retribution was coming for what she’d done to that poor goblin, she was yanked from her feet. Someone – and she had a good idea as to who – pulled the rope and suddenly she was flying across to the other side of the room and out the window. She barely managed to let out a strangled, “Yeet!”

She fell two stories, hit the ground shoulder first – fucking ow – and was dragged through mercifully soft mud. She drew one of her blades, determined to cut the rope and maybe ease some of her newfound agony, but it went slack. The pulling stopped – thank Buddha’s entire diabetic ass – and Otter just let herself lie there and appreciate the amount of pain she was in.

She breathed in, rolled over, and found Il-Su standing over her. She flinched and nearly kicked him until she saw he was holding a hand out to her. 

She got to her feet on her own, clutching her bleeding shoulder and glared at him.

“Mayumi,” he said.

The little fuck actually looked happy. Not great otherwise. He was a bit pale and sweaty, which was normal for his gamer ass, but it looked worse than normal. 

“Shit stain,” she greeted back.

“Sorry about the shoulder. It should heal if you’ve invested in your stats enough. I had to get you out of the room quickly.”

“Why–”

And then saw in his other hand, he held another small explosive. She tried to block it as he threw it, but was a little too slow. It sailed overhead in a lazy arc through the window above.

She didn’t wait for the explosion. She panicked and tried to send something, anything that could communicate danger through her link, and punched Il-Su as hard as she could. 

Her fist hit his shield and bent a little weirdly from the unexpected impact a few centimeters away from his face, but it cracked and broke under the strain. From all accounts, he’d only fought for his life against Sunny and Juala maybe a couple hours ago. He’d probably barely recovered any Tenacity since then, which almost put them on a level playing field.

Almost.

Il-Su got a foot in between both of hers and pushed with one hand, sending her tripping backwards and falling on her back. The fall by itself didn’t hurt, but her shoulder and the thing lodged in her shoulder hit the ground, and her brain discovered a whole new level of pain she hadn’t been familiar with previously.

Somewhere in the background of it all, she heard the explosion of his second grenade. 

Pain flooded her link. Fear. Shock. But Rua was alive. Bewildered, frightened, in pain, but definitely alive.

“Sorry,” he said. “I reacted, I didn’t mean to… here, we need to get that grappling hook out of you, it was the only way I could think to get you out of there fast enough.”

He was leaning over her again, a hand reaching out to her. So she kicked him in the shin as hard as she could. Not the friendly kind of kick like you’d give a friend who’d annoyed you, the kind with enough force that it threatened to break bone.

Il-Su went down with a cry of pain, falling face-first into the ground. He barely broke his fall with his hands. His face lit up with surprise as Otter heaved back and punched at him as hard as she could. 

“Stop!” he said as he managed to shove himself out of the way. “I’m trying to help!”

“You shoot me with a grappling hook and try to blow up my girlfriend, and this is you helping?”

They both managed to get their feet under them again, separating and squaring off. Il-Su was clearly favouring one leg over the other, but Otter didn’t really feel like she had a lot of fight in her. She was bleeding a lot from that stupid piece of metal speared into her. She was feeling woozy, and not the good kind. 

“You don’t get it,” he said. “We have to kill Kir. This is my only chance. Probably the only one I’ll get.”

“You really didn’t think about collateral damage at all, did you? Or any of the people you’ve hurt since you’ve been here?”

He looked confused. “You mean the NPCs?”

Of course. He still hadn’t figured it out. For such a smart guy, he’d always been a bit slow. 

“We’re not in a video game, you absolute twit. I swear you have dodo in your genetics somewhere. Have you ever met a video game AI capable of half the things Holt’s so-called game can do?”

“What?”

“Ask yourself. Think about it. You ever see industry AI capable of speech this well-written? Not perfect, because no one talks perfectly. They stutter. They stumble. They say stupid shit. They’re wrong. Because they’re real. 

“And the sheer amount of so-called NPCs. What kind of processing power would it take to run a world like this? A hundred players, running rampant over continents, all rendering in an environment too real, crowds that behave like actual people and not just on pre-programmed loops? You talk to the street vendor, and notice they have more to say than just a few lines of dialogue?

“You think Holt as Creative Director came up with the entire Silayan culture? Coral houses? Colour everywhere? We both know the industry doesn’t take chances on stuff like that. It’d look Medieval European, with maybe a couple new ideas thrown in. This all looks original in an industry that we both know investors and stockholders have forced to be as intellectually bankrupt as possible because it’s the safest option.”

She saw it, somewhere in the back of his eyes. The doubt. The questioning. But there was also something there with it. Panic, real fear. 

“I have to make sure she’s dead,” he said. “And I can’t face her directly. I can only mute it a little bit, not actually cancel it out.”

“She’s a real person.”

“If she is, if all this is…” He closed his eyes, and breathed in. He actually seemed like he was in pain. “If this world is real, then I’m doing it a favour by taking her out of it.”

He pulled another clay ball from underneath his cloak, and struck the wick against something on his belt. It lit up.

“Typical Il-Su,” she snarled. “Get a problem with one person, and take it out on the biggest crowd of people you can.”

He’d been in the middle of rearing back, ready to lob the thing, but her words made him pause. She used that moment of hesitation to summon a Thread of the Scourge, lashing out and catching the bomb in his hand and ripping it out and away, throwing it into the air where it harmlessly exploded.

What few bystanders that had stuck around for the first two explosions finally decided to run away after the third. Somewhere Otter could hear fighting, the ring of steel on steel and shouted violence. Probably Kir’s and Sureya’s people. She didn’t have time to deal with that problem.

The one in front of her was big enough as it was.

Or maybe the nearby fighting wasn’t a problem. Maybe it was an opportunity.

People in the street had been angry. Even now, faces peered from windows, confused, afraid, but still trying to figure out what was wrong. Trying to figure out the story.

And this was a world of stories.

“I did that for you,” Il-Su growled.

“What? Kill Juala?” she said, trying to be as loud as possible, hoping her voice would catch the right ears.

“No, the crash out! Dumping Sami as publicly as I could and telling the world what an absolute bitch she is! I did that for you!”

Okay. That was a little off topic. She wanted to get him back on track, but she’d never been able to resist a good piece of gossip. The dumber, the better.

“Sami always had to get her way! Always! She saw how we looked at each other, and she was jealous. She wanted to break us up before we hooked up. That’s why she chased you away.”

It took a second for Otter’s brain to catch up. The words made sense individually, but not all together in the statement he’d just made. It was like announcing to the world all giraffes were green now because they’d filed a complaint against the cloud beetles. That deep fried tutus were the best afternoon meal, and paired quite well with a baked umbrella stand, but only if you basted it in lime and vegemite. Or that baseball was actually fun to watch.

She couldn’t have heard any of that right. It was the blood loss. 

“But I’m gay,” she said numbly. 

“No, you’re just confused,” he said, as if it were the most sensible thing to say in the world. “I didn’t know I was bi either until Everett. Why else would we have all been in a relationship?”

The wheel her brain-hamster ran on came unscrewed, collapsing and sending the poor little metaphorical critter sprawling. 

The rational part of her brain wanted to argue with him. Tell him he was an asshat, and doing lesbian erasure, or that she liked him as a friend and saw him as a little brother who happened to be an idiot. But the rational part of her brain wasn’t working and had gone on strike.

So she punched him in the face.

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