Fell Champions

Il-Su’s reality blurred, and he found himself on a beach. The same beach he died on, betrayed by the only ally he thought he had. Murdered by an NPC… no. A person. A person that he’d wronged.

Dusk was settling in, the sun sinking low in the horizon, the last light reflecting beautifully off the ocean. It was the kind of view most people sat down and appreciated. 

But Il-Su, wounded as he was, couldn’t afford such luxury. Pegacorn had stitched him up with emergency med kit she’d made for herself as best she could, and Brock had torn strips from his own tunic to bandage Il-Su up from Slider’s betrayal. 

Brock had been tender. Pegacorn hadn’t. Her fingers worked with the kind of grace and subtlety you’d expect out of a club-wielding maniac. Luckily, with the way Tenacity worked, combined with his Strength, the wound would heal in days, if not less. And once his shield was back in working order, the fear of infection would be gone. 

Scanning the beach for threats, Il-Su found about the last thing he expected. His cheeks went hot, and he averted his gaze quickly. Wasn’t this supposed to be a funeral? How could people just be doing that in public? What kind of degenerates were these Silayans?

He looked again. Just to make sure there were no threats. And not for any other reason. All about were people - mostly women - laid out on blankets across the beach, a veritable symphony of flesh, a monument to carnal desire, accompanied by the music of low moans and the gentle call of skin on skin and wet desire. Il-Su was no blushing virgin - not anymore, at least. He even used to engage in regular group sex. But this… this just seemed indiscriminate. Depraved, even. 

He kept watching for another full minute. 

It took him that long to realize that if anyone recognized him, they might try to kill him. And that, with the very public duel he’d just had in front of these people, he was very recognizable. 

He averted his eyes, tried to mentally will the blood away from his erection and back into the rest of his body, and walked away from the absolutely sinful filth that was being perpetrated. He fished out the soul crystal he’d been allowed to harvest from his final kill during Holt’s hastily put together ‘tournament’, downed it, and increased his Strength score by an additional point. Just because he’d been able to easily burst his way through people’s Tenacity during the tournament didn’t mean that would always be the case. Future enemies might actually be smart and invest in the skill, and those he’d fought had been anything but.

He needed to figure out what to do next. Sureya had set him up. If he encountered Kir, it would only be a matter of time before she could ensnare him with her Pact again, new ability or not. And everyone on the Islands wanted him dead because of Old Grey’s orders to kill Juala.

He needed out. Out of these damned Islands and somewhere that wasn’t constantly filled with lesbian orgies. 

He glanced back.

Well, maybe he’d miss that part.

Il-Su pulled up his chat, ready to put up a poll asking the little imps what to do next. They were a literal throng of trolls, and unlikely to give actually good advice, especially since none of his mods had seemed to log into their Grey Gear in time to watch the stream, but there was that old cliché about broken clocks. 

No wardens or jailers were minding the prison, so the little chatters were spamming slurs again. He’d have to start banning a few manually. Let them go bother Beelzebrass, he seemed to like that sort. 

He mentally banned a couple, thinning out the worst offenders, but found that a bunch of chatters were flooding him with comments shitting on him about his admission about Mayumi during the tournament. 

One clip getting linked, over and over again. He clicked it, knowing he shouldn’t. A browser window popped up, a video from Pegacorn’s point of view. It was himself, unable to meet her eyes, mumbling, whining even, “She’s not a lesbian.”

He watched it again. And again.

He could feel the anger, the fury, bubbling. At himself. Worse, he felt the shame. The absolute disgust.

How pathetic. How absolutely pathetic. Was this really what he was? Some weak child, clinging to a fantasy, while the world laughed at him?

Seeing it from someone else’s eyes…

His hands clenched into fists, and he stopped walking. He pulled up another video. An older one. One he’d posted himself, not that long ago.

His real face, enhanced with filters and makeup and generous lighting, all to hide the acne scars and poor bone structure, and the fact that outside the safety of virtual reality, he was just human and not Silence, the Bringer of the Long Quiet. He wasn’t perfect both inside and out of it. Not like Everett, or Mayumi.

Not like Sami. Fucking Sami.

His fists tightened even harder.

In the video, his past self talked about the horrific abuse he’d endured from SamiRai, his now ex-girlfriend. His old self’s eyes contained a zeal you’d expect from a fanatic. His words were so filled with vitriol that spittle flew as he condemned her as an abusive, manipulative whore. 

Oh, how strong he’d felt at that moment. How proud he’d been to post this.

How utterly pitiful and weak he actually was.

Il-Su closed both the video and his chat. He just felt so empty. Just empty. Drained. Hollowed out. This was what he was apparently. How much had he built out his own image in his head as the unstoppable and enigmatic assassin, Silence? He’d actually believed the lie.

But this video… this was what he was. A pathetic, servile, man-boy. A man-boy who was a child-killer. 

Maybe it’d be better for everyone, himself included, if he just walked into the ocean, and let the tide take him.

He looked at the ocean forlornly, considering it.

And he saw himself. Or rather, his own dead body. It’d been dragged to the shore and left there, presumably by some half-drunk Silayan women after the duel. They couldn’t even be bothered to throw it into the water. They probably decided he wasn’t worth the effort, and just left his body to the tide to have its way with him. 

No one was around. They were all busy with their funeral fuckfest. He numbly dragged his feet over to his body. How weird it felt. When he was close enough, he turned the corpse to face him. The expression was locked into a look of surprise. As if Il-Su, in his own arrogance, had thought the idea of him losing, of him dying, was so impossible he could not fully process it in his final moments.

Something about that pissed him off.

“You fucking idiot,” he growled at himself. At the body that used to be him. “Of course you fucking died. Have you made a single good decision in… ever?”

The body stared sightlessly at the sky, offering no wisdom. Maybe that in its own way was wisdom enough. 

Il-Su screamed in frustration and kicked at the dead body, slamming what used to be his face with his boot. He did it over and over again until it wasn’t recognizable anymore. Not as him. Not even as a person. He caved the skull in until it was just a mess of bone and blood and brains, and he shook with anger and exhaustion, his side hurting from where Kenny had stabbed him, but his soul hurting so much more.

So, when he’d respawned in the arena, Holt had made a new body for him. Was Il-Su even… Il-Su anymore? Or was he just a copy?

If he was still in the real world, strapped to a chair with a Grey Gear set on him, then the answer was simple. His mind was just operating an avatar. One that had died and respawned in a new one. 

But this world was real. He had to accept that now. Which meant, he might not be sitting in a chair with some dive equipment simulating reality. He might physically be here. And if he was, if he’d been physically transported here somehow, if this video game body was his new real body, did that mean he was the original, or a fake?

Had the real Il-Su died, stabbed in the back like he deserved? What did that make him? Il-Two?

He chuckled to himself at that. That was the kind of joke Mayumi would’ve made. Back when they were still friends. Which they probably could never be again, because of his own poor decisions and entitled worldview. 

Maybe that was for the best. How many vagrants had he murdered for stat points? How many had he betrayed because of his own selfish point of view? He didn’t deserve a friend like Mayumi. 

Better to get away from her. The only thing Il-Su could offer someone like Mayumi would be to remove the problem that was himself. 

He went over his corpse, going through his body’s pockets and knife sheathes, restocking his own supply and doubling his money, which wasn’t much. It felt an extra level of morbid, knowing this wasn’t some normal video game corpse retrieval, made more so that his body was covered in blood, both from the wound that killed him, and where someone had carved open his chest and ripped out some of his ribs to pull out his heart.

He wanted to throw up. He continued anyway.

When he was done, cleaning his hands of his own blood on his corpse’s clothes, he opened his menu and started a call. Brock answered right away.

“Il-Su!” he said with a smile, though it was tempered by a haunted look in his eyes. The same haunted look Il-Su knew he must’ve possessed as well. 

“Brock. I… what part of the world are you in?”

“Somewhere with a lot of tall grass and these super dumb birds. I think it was called the… Creole Bunny something?”

“The Criobani Empire?”

“Yeah, that’s the place.”

“Need some company?”

Brock smiled warmly. “Yeah. Peg’s coming to me, too. Says we’re gonna clan up. That she already has the soul crystals needed to get it started. I guess that’s a big deal? She’s in the Silayan Islands.”

“That’s where I am. I guess I’ll coordinate with her. See if we can travel together.”

“That’ll be great!”

“Just… try not to fall down any more mountains or hills or whatever. And use… use Slider’s soul crystal to invest in your Tenacity, if you can.”

Brock looked a little green at that, but nodded. They exchanged a few more pleasantries before ending the call. Weirdly, Il-Su felt kind of… free afterwards. Maybe this was what he needed. 

He looked out to the ocean again, for the final fading of the light on its surface, determined to enjoy the beauty. 

And what’s when he saw it.

He felt himself go tense, his body coiling like a predator’s, ready to pounce. 

A raft, built with four torches on it, set out on the waters and letting the tide take it out. And on it, wrapped in filmy white cloth, a bundle. Large enough to be a small human body. 

He was moving before he realized, wading out into the waters. No one was attending the corpse of Juala. Everyone was still engaged in the orgy and feasting and drinking.

The water was cold, enough to shock him out of what he was doing. Was he really about to go and try to cut a soul crystal out of a corpse he’d killed days ago just for a small stat boost? While those that loved her were mourning in their own weirdly erotic way?

Yes. Yes, he was.

He still needed to survive this game, or world, or whatever it was. He needed to survive Holt, and his madness, or his idiocy, or his ambitions. And it wasn’t like someone else at that funeral hadn’t killed him and ripped his own soul crystal out. This was… it was just fair. 

So he swam out, and climbed onto the raft. He cut open the cloth covering Juala’s body, and then sliced through her clothes, then flesh, and bones, until finally he’d cut out her heart. He sliced it open for the soul crystal and found…

Nothing.

It was empty. There was a small cavity in her heart, one a human heart from Earth would never have, where a soul crystal should be. 

Irritation hit him. Was this some, what? Act of spite? Had someone already removed it, just to keep it away from him? That didn’t make any sense. Juala’s torso had been… well, not pristine, not with the state of decay, but no one had cut into her. No one had gotten to it before Il-Su. 

There had to be a soul crystal. Didn’t there?

Had he dropped it? He checked the surface of the raft and found nothing, then checked the white cloth the body had been wrapped in, and then finally, gruesomely, dug into the hole he’d carved into her chest, trying not to gag from both the texture and the smell. 

Finally, he began to carve into the heart some more, opening it further. Maybe Juala had been deformed in some way, or it had something to do with her being a pelanoa. Maybe her biology was just a little different than normal people. 

He found nothing.

Had it fallen into the ocean in his haste to get to it? He looked at the waters, and saw nothing. Soul crystals weren’t heavy, but they were basically rocks. Heavy enough to sink if put in water. He wouldn’t find anything floating on the surface.

He threw the heart away in frustration, and then cleaned his knife in the ocean water and rammed it into its sheath. 

This was bullshit. Someone was messing with him. This was Holt’s fault somehow, and he was going to get…

No. That was the old Il-Su talking. The one who’d picked a fight with Sami on the beach. The one who’d been stabbed in the back and died. He had to learn from that. 

Whoever happened to the soul crystal wasn’t his business. He wasn’t entitled to it just because he’d murdered the woman it belonged to. If anything… the crystal disappearing was good. He didn’t deserve to be rewarded for murder.

It still rankled at him. He wanted it. Probably needed it. But fate had decided something else. Well, wherever it was, he hoped the person who had it was putting it to good use.

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