Fell Champions

While Pledge had still been a fully functional clan on Gallant Stand II, Sami had been ruthless in the training of its members. They all wanted to be the best, so she’d made sure to work them until they were.

That training demanded not just raids, or PVP battles, or dungeon crawls, but a lot of sparring against one another. Most fights in RPGs worked like Rock, Paper, Scissors, so when training her clanmates, she’d always put them in unfavourable matches. When Everett, she puts him against Mayumi. For Mayumi, it was Il-Su. And for Il-Su, Sami had always fought him herself.

It might have been why so much resentment had been built up against her. She’d never enjoyed dominating him on the battlefield. She preferred to do that kind of thing in other locations.

But now, after everything Il-Su had put her through, all the public humiliation and scrutiny, all the drama and questioned friendships and clickbait ViewToob videos about their relationship and what a villain she was, all the general abuse from the internet in all its trollish glory… she was really looking forward to kicking his ass. 

She made sure she was streaming still. A time or two she’d redirected her stream traffic to Everett and turned hers off for privacy’s sake, and she wanted to make sure her little parasocial goblin chatters would get to see the beating happen in real time.

“Some rules,” Sureya said. “This is a duel, and we are at a funeral. I know you are both foreigners, so I will stress this is not to the death, but first blood only.”

“Pity,” Sami said. 

Did she really want to kill Il-Su? Probably not, though from the sounds of things, if he remained on the Islands for long, it’d eventually come for him. Would she seek it out? No. Would she stop it from happening? Also no. Il-Su had dug his grave. He was well-equipped to trip into it all on his own.

“We are here to celebrate the life of Juala Moseina,” Sureya said. “Not revel in more death.”

“Funny you should say that, considering he murdered Juala.”

“Justice is always slow to arrive. But it is inevitable, like the tides. And when it does arrive, there is no escaping it. It is the one swim no one survives to shore.”

“I’d have thought as a Silayan, you’d always be able to swim to safety. It’s one of those things your people pride themselves on, yes?”

“There is no death more shameful to my kind than drowning,” she conceded. “But justice is an ocean under storm. There is no shame in succumbing to it, just as there is no pride in resisting it.”

“Yeah yeah,” Otter said. “Can we get to the part where Sami stabs Il-Su, and then we can get back to having fun? I hear you guys do orgies at these things, and I am utterly appalled at the lack of anonymous sex going on so far.”

Sureya spared a tight-lipped glance at Otter before bending down to pick up a stone from the beach, a flat rock worn smooth by the ocean. “When this stone hits the sands, draw weapons and fight. Remember, to first blood only. Any use of lethal force will be answered in kind.”

“What, everyone will dogpile them at once?”

“They won’t need to. If someone breaks the rules, I’ll kill them myself.”

The tone in Sureya’s voice gave Sami more pause than the words themselves. Anyone could boast prowess they may or may not possess. Fewer could do it and genuinely believe it as if stating a fact. Even fewer could do it in a crowd and have none of the onlookers doubting you.

So, Sureya was dangerous. And more than just politically so. Sami filed that tidbit away for later. She’d need to ask around, see what Sureya had in terms of battlefield experience, and if she had a Pact. 

Kir lightly tugged on Sami’s arm and pulled her in close, whispering, “Can you beat him?”

“Il-Su? In a straight up fight, with no ambush on his part? Easily.”

That seemed to impress Kir. “He’s quite talented.”

“As an assassin, yes. He’s a very skilled ninja. But I’m a samurai.” 

“I have no idea what those words mean. You… Outlanders are very strange.”

“Why do you care so much that he loses?”

Kir looked away, refusing to meet Sami’s eyes. “Juala was my sister. I should have punished him myself. But I was too busy trying to do damage control. And now it looks like he’s somehow escaped my grasp.”

Sami let out a short laugh before suppressing it. “This? This is the mighty and terrifying Kirhaela I have been hearing so much about? Someone who quits this easily?”

“I haven’t quit,” Kir said, bristling. “But he’s somehow immune to my Pact, and now I think he is colluding with Sureya. Which means he’s politically protected on top of just being a slippery eel. Getting to him now will be… difficult.”

Sami stared at Kir’s lips the entire time she spoke. They were a very distractingly beautiful pair, luscious and bright even without the aid of cosmetics. She tore her gaze away before meeting Kir’s eyes, who had a knowing look to her eyes. Knowing, and slightly amused.

“Well, in this, I will be your champion,” Sami said. 

“I need no champion.”

“And yet, you found yourself with one anyway. Champions are typically rewarded by their ladies.”

“I am not your lady.”

Sami nodded along, as if that made perfect sense. She was about to give a clever response, or at least, something that she hoped was passably clever, when out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sureya toss the stone upwards.

She’d only been half paying attention, but was still ready for Il-Su’s treachery. She was so familiar with it. It came as naturally to him as breathing.

He didn’t even wait for the stone to hit the ground before he drew and cast his first three blades.

Il-Su was good in a fight in the short term, but never built himself for endurance, preferring quick engagements, with short, direct methods. Quick bursts of violence, punctuated with extreme lethality. Surprise was how he won fights.

Sami unsheathed her katana and spun it in a looping parry with one hand, striking two of the blades away from her. With her other hand, she drew her second sword, baring steel only a scant few inches as she pivoted her hips, catching the final thrown dagger on the small section of blade she’d drawn. It wasn’t a clean deflection, and there was a small impact against her Tenacity. Barely noticeable, only a small dent in the health bar in her vision.

The stone struck the ground.

While Sami was familiar with Il-Su’s methods, the audience had not expected it. People jeered and booed, one person throwing what Sami assumed was some kind of slur before someone yelled that both combatants were in fact Salassians. 

It felt weird, getting called a slur that had no meaning to her. Almost kind of funny, as if by removing all historical significance, it wasn’t just a word, but something ridiculous, to be laughed at. 

Too bad she wasn’t in a laughing mood, and her focus was needed elsewhere.

Il-Su sneered at her, as if his inability to get around her swordplay was somehow her fault, and drew another two knives. He launched both, but now that both her swords were fully drawn, deflecting them was trivially easy, and she began to close the distance between them.

Il-Su retreated backwards, throwing knives with each step, but Sami didn’t merely keep pace, she began to catch up. Once she entered melee range, he was finished, and they both knew it. 

He tried to duck through the crowd, but the watchers pushed at him, shoving him away from the cover granted by the hastily made circle of bodies that now comprised their arena. He made another attempt, only to receive a kick for his efforts, staggering him forward and nearly knocking him to the sands. 

Il-Su’s eyes took on a wild cast to them, but she could see them calculating, trying to figure out his next move to escape. She could practically see plans forming and getting discarded behind his eyes. 

Keep throwing knives? No, he’d run out eventually, and they were proving ineffective. 

Close the distance and take the fight to her? No, even with surprise, she’d cut him down more often than not and he most definitely did not have that advantage presently. 

Take a hostage and use them as a human shield until a better avenue of escape came to him? Absolutely not, the crowd would tear him to pieces. 

She wondered if he’d surrender and take his beating. It was the sensible thing to do. This wasn’t a fight to the death. He could just lie down and take it. But just like Sami herself, Il-Su was a creature of pride. She’d never do it, and so she knew he never would as well. 

Which meant he was going to switch to his Pact abilities. And luckily for Sami, she’d been fully briefed on his little invisibility trick by Vex, and his power to somehow cancel out other Pacts from Otter. 

He vanished from sight. He really should’ve gone with a different tactic.

They were standing on a beach, after all.

The second he disappeared, Sami launched herself forward, directly to the spot where his footsteps on the sand were showing him to be. He shuffled to the side, slowly, far too slowly. 

Her katana connected in a wide slash, hitting around the area where his torso would be. Too late, he realized his mistake and dropped his cloaking ability and tried to mount a defense. But he was in her domain now. There was nothing he could do. 

She swung her second sword at him, driving it towards his throat. He lifted an empty hand in a defense, but it was too little, too late.

Her sword connected. But not with his neck, or even his Tenacity.

Half her blade spun end over end, flying through the air away from them both before landing tip first into the sand, the steel cut solidly in half by a black blade that had manifested in Il-Su’s hand.

He opened his mouth to say some cocky remark. Probably about some new Pact ability he had that let him summon a literal deus ex machina to save him from her. She didn’t let him get the opportunity to brag.

Her chat brayed for blood like the little goblins they were, and she was determined to give it to them. She threw the half of her ruined sword that still remained at his face. His eyes widened in surprise, unfamiliar with being on the receiving end of that kind of exchange with her, and slashed with his black blade, hacking at the sword. It cut cleanly in half again, but there was a problem with that as now two spinning pieces of metal hit against his Tenacity. 

Sami began to hum, then sang a pure note, fortifying her katana with her Pact, forcing the steel to be stronger, and swung it at him. He blocked the blow, and his strange black blade sunk into the metal of her sword. Just a bare centimetre, driving a small notch into the blade as they clashed.

“Ah, feck!” Three shouted, her voice coming to Sami’s mind as she activated her Pact ability. “That hurts!”

Sami stared at Il-Su, their swords locked against one another, his sword sinking another centimetre into hers, threatening to cut it cleanly in half. That smile of his was back.

The poor idiot thought he had the advantage.

Sami sang, sharp and high, loud enough to cut through the shouts of the crowd. A note filled with a beautiful vibrato, a note as high as she could go.

And all the discarded daggers, hurled by Il-Su and then forgotten, lifted themselves from the sands and streaked for him.

He tried to disengage, but with his sword buried into the steel of hers, he was locked into position. He couldn’t escape without abandoning his weapon. And if he did that, she’d be free to put her own sword to use while he was defenseless. 

He had no way to react that worked for him. So she gave him the beating he deserved, pelting him with knives thrown at him pommel-first.

His Tenacity broke quickly under the first wave. She didn’t stop there. She sang another note, and all those knives flew backwards and then forwards once more, hitting him like a series of steel punches all over his body. She wasn’t gentle about it. 

The best part was, he would bruise. Maybe get some bones broken. But she made sure not to hit him anywhere that might cause him to bleed. At least, not externally. 

He hit the ground, curling up, shouting what used to be their safeword, as if that would save him now. He’d long since given up that level of protection. And she wasn’t above kicking a man while he was down.

So she did exactly that.

Her boot took him right in the forearms he was using to defend his face. He let out a grunt of pain, but that wasn’t the sound she wanted right now. So she kicked him again. And again. And again, until she heard a wet crunch, followed by a shout of pain. 

“Enough!” came Sureya’s command, and Sami stopped.

She was angry. But as always, she was in control. She had waited for this moment, wondering when it would come. She pulled herself up short, and tried to sheath her katana, but the metal was rent from the clash with Il-Su’s Pact ability, so she stabbed it into the ground. Sami gave Sureya a small bow, as if she were another in a long line of martial arts instructors she’d been under.

It took her a moment to realize the rest of the crowd had gone quiet. Shocked into a stunned silence. Not from the level of violence, but she could hear it, spoken in hushed whispers, over and over, one word.

“Steelsinger.”

Sami frowned at that. Perhaps she shouldn’t have revealed her Pact. She hadn’t known it’d be a famous one. And the way they said the word. With reverence. That was odd. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to duel?” Kir asked. 

“Only if it involves a bottle of wine as the weapon, and my bed as the battlefield.” She said it steadily, staring Kir in the eye the entire time.

“A Steelsinger on the Islands,” Kir said, not blinking or flinching away from the obvious pass. “To get my hands on you, I’d be tempted.”

“To get your hands on me, you’d let me get my hands on you? Or better yet, in you?”

Kir’s snow white skin took on a slightly cyan colouring, like arctic ice. But she didn’t look away. Maybe she wasn’t completely useless about her sexuality after all.

“Fucking bitch!” Il-Su yelled.

Sami sighed, and said to Kir, “Sorry, but I have to talk with the ex.”

She turned to face him. He’d managed to get up on his knees, one arm dangling uselessly at his side. His face was going to be a mass of bruises in an hour or so. It was a good look on him.

He was struggling to stand, but as he did, he formed that black blade in his hand again, and drew back for a throw. Sami moved to draw her sword, but it wasn’t in its sheath. It was stabbed into the ground, just a few feet away and out of reach.

That blade of his might actually be able to penetrate her Tenacity, given what it did to her swords. She watched it warily, trying to time the dodge. But it wouldn’t help. Il-Su didn’t miss. 

He made an angry sound, furious and incomprehensible, and surged to throw.

That was when the spear blade exploded out the front of his chest. He stumbled, falling back to his knees, and looked down, staring at the bladed point erupting through his ribs. Behind him, Reyna shoved it further through, and blood fountained out of Il-Su’s mouth.

“Gotcha, limpdick,” Reyna said with a smirk.

And then, with her other hand, unhooked an axe from her belt and buried it into his neck.

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