Fell Champions

Sami spent the next morning playing with the new page in her menu for clan settings. It had a lot of information and depth to it, more than she expected from the slapdash effort that Holt had put into the actual ‘game’ aspects of transporting everyone into the world of Fell Champions, which made her suspect that the Castille woman had been in charge of this portion of design. 

It wasn’t just a loose band of people with an affiliation and chat function like she’d suspected, which was good, since Otter never responded to messages anyway. A lot of the clan depended on the leader. Whatever the leader’s highest stat was, the rest of the clan would receive a bonus in that stat equal to ten percent of its value. But, once a leader was selected, you couldn’t change who was in the position for a full week. 

It still seemed very generous. More generous than she’d expected from Holt, which just reinforced the idea that Castille was behind it.

Each member of the clan also had access to a chest that they could materialize at will. It was a shared clan vault, something any of the members could contribute to or withdrawn from. There didn’t seem to be a way to restrict access. You had to trust every member of your clan, or risk losing what little accumulated wealth you had. 

Which just meant Il-Su was definitely not allowed to join, as far as Sami was concerned.

The clan storage wasn’t that large. Long enough to fit an average sword in, but not anything bigger than that.  The instructions said that increasing your clan’s rank would increase the size of the chest, but didn’t specify dimensions. It also stated that the storage was a vacuum. Anything living put in it wouldn’t last long. 

But most importantly of all, the clan page came with something that felt extremely unfair. Something that Sami thought solo players should have, but didn’t get access to. Something that would determine not only success in this world, but also survival.

The clan page came with a world map.

It wasn’t particularly detailed. It didn’t contain the locations of any settlements, or name off countries or show borders. It only displayed land masses, but more importantly, where each member of the clan was in relation to the map.

Right now, that was just Sami and Everett, but as membership grew, and their members spanned greater distances, it’d become more important to be able to keep track of everyone.

Lastly, the clan allowed the leader to set a Recall point for any member of the clan. It apparently cost all of the clan leader’s total Will to set up, and allowed any member of the clan to be able to transport directly to the Recall point at any time at the cost of five Will points. Only one such Recall point could be set up at a time, and once one was set, a new location couldn’t be selected for an entire year.

It was useless at the moment, as Sami couldn’t give leadership to Otter without being physically in her presence, and Sami had no desire to ever return to the blighted dust-covered hellscape that was the Salassian Wastes at any point in her life. Their Recall point would likely be the Silayan Islands. They’d just have to get there first.

Not too far away, Everett swore loudly, and there was the sound of clanging metal as he kicked something hard. Something they probably couldn’t afford to damage. 

Everett wasn’t the type for mood swings like this. He was generally too laid back for outbursts of anger, particularly those accompanied by swearing and violence. There was only one person in the world who could’ve provoked such a reaction out of him.

Sami normally would’ve intervened. But now she was questioning her leadership, her ability to actually manage those she cared about. Her instincts might be wrong. It might be better to just let him sort it out himself.

Would it be meddling to get involved? Particularly when the situation was so messy in part because of her?

Maybe she should just sink herself into her menus, and her attempts at diplomacy between the various emerging factions in the playerbase. She could do that much. That wouldn’t get someone else she cared about killed.

No. That was cowardice. And if there was one thing Sami wasn’t, it was a coward.

She steadied herself, breathed in and out in a mantra, counted to ten, and then rose to go see what was bothering Everett.

He was surrounded by an assortment of metal, wooden, and stone parts, all carefully laid out on a sheet of canvas. Some had been cobbled together into the loose framework that would become the hull of their Sandskimmer when it was finished. The instructions said it would take two days to complete, but Everett was confident he could get it finished in a day and a half. 

He looked to be making good progress, but Sami refrained from commenting. She’d learned a long time ago that Everett did not accept positive criticism to any of his mechanical or technical projects until they were done and passed his level of scrutiny. 

“Everything going okay?” she asked.

He looked about to snap at her, made all the more fearsome from his dragon snout, but visibly calmed himself and nodded. He fitted two pieces together with a sharp click, and set them down.

“Don’t even need tools to put this thing together,” he said. “It’s like the pieces know what the end result is. They want to be the Sandskimmer. They want to be whole.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

He rolled his shoulders. She knew what that meant. He was annoyed at something.

“No.”

“And why, pray tell, is construction being easier a bad thing?”

He picked up a small stone dial, then consulted the datapad that had come with the Sandskimmer, something that looked more like it belonged to their world than Fell Champions, and then attached it to the side of the piece he’d just fitted together. True to his word, it looked like it magnetized in place, rather than needing to be screwed or hammered in or welded on or however else one might do such a thing from where they came from. 

“It’s too easy,” he said. “Anyone can do this.”

“And you’re afraid that, what? It needs to be difficult so you can prove your worth?”

“What are we going to do about Kershaughn?” 

Their prisoner, one of the bandits who had tried to kill Sami, and that she’d taken captive since he’d actually been able to help them with some translations they’d needed. She hadn’t given him much thought beyond tying him up, leaving him in the shade, and occasionally watering him.

“I suppose we’ll have to kill him,” Sami said.

Everett’s whole posture drooped at that.

“What do you want to do about him?” she asked. “He’s a bandit at best, a slaver at worst. We need what water we have, since we don’t know how fast this thing can go, and we’re just as unable to secure new freshwater on the ocean as we are in the desert. We have nothing to spare.”

“So, we just kill him?”

“We could untie him as we leave. Minus his water. Let him find his own fate from there.”

“Not much of a compromise.”

“Why do you care so much about him?”

“Why don’t you?” he growled. “He’s a person. You know the truth of this place. This isn’t a video game.”

She said as calmly as she could manage, “Because he tried to kill me, Ev.”

“And so we kill him instead? Is that what we are now? All of us? How quickly you all leap to murder. You, Mayumi, Il-Su.”

This conversation wasn’t what she thought it was. She tried to think, tried to logically suss out where he was coming from. And then realized that was the last thing he needed her to do.

She crouched by him and put a hand on his arm. “What happened?”

“Mayumi called me yesterday. Said… said she was fighting Il-Su. And they were both trying to kill one another. They cared about one another once. And if she’s willing to kill him, or he’s willing to kill her… I worry about us, Sami. About all of us.”

She wasn’t sure what to say. Everett had always been the emotionally intelligent one in the group, followed by maybe Mayumi, weird as that sounded. Sami was as bad at this kind of thing as Il-Su was. 

“We can leave Kershaughn a waterskin,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the smart thing to do, but if it makes you feel better…”

“No, Sami. It doesn’t.” He sighed. “Leaving him alive only to spare my feelings is nearly as bad as killing him, I think. One hundred of us in this world, Sami. All desperate to survive, and with the skills to tear this world apart, and Ingram Holt pushing us all to kill.”

She gave him a hug, and he leaned into it, but both knew it didn’t fix anything. She wished she had the words. Some inspiring speech to say that she wouldn’t let Holt change them. But it was already happening, shockingly fast. 

“Let me build, Sami. It’s one thing these hands can do.”

She left him to it, and went to check on their prisoner. He kept to himself, chained and gagged, and glared at her the entire time she made sure his restraints were secure. She gave him a few sips of water, and then went to go prepare their midday meal. 

It wasn’t impressive. A few nuts and dried fruit, accompanied by some hard tack looted from Kershaughn’s fellow slavers. None was given to their prisoner, something Everett declined to comment on. He just kept working.

They fell into a pattern over the next day. Everett worked in silence while Sami kept lookout. She managed to catch a snake looking for shelter in the shade of the rock they’d sheltered under, and set the meat to drying out like jerky after some instruction from Everett. 

Sami also kept an eye on the online list. Though Holt did not call them to the arena, names began to grey out. Much like Holt had promised, it seemed the people without any investment in either Strength or Tenacity were beginning to fall to strange bacteria that their immune systems had no defense against. 

At first, she’d awoken to two names greyed out. By the afternoon, it was five total. By the time night hit, it was twelve. 

Sami tried calling Otter, just to make sure she was fine. There was no response, which in itself wasn’t unusual from her, but given the circumstances made Sami worry. 

Rua similarly also didn’t answer. 

It took Sami an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize she could call ‘Vex,’ who had previously been ‘Sunny’ on the online list. She’d never met her, and knew nothing about her aside that Otter said she was her ‘daughter’ with no real explanation on that front.

Late into the morning on the second day of construction of the Sandskimmer, Sami called up Vex. It took a minute, but there was a response, the communication window opening up to reveal a redheaded woman with an absolute mass of curls. She looked bleary-eyed and exhausted, but that quickly faded in place of a shocked expression. Vex fell out of view, likely out of the bed that she was no doubt in, and Sami cursed herself for not remembering time zones.

A hand appeared in front of the screen waving, and a voice called, “I’m alright! Just gimme a second!”

Vex stumbled into view, looking absolutely dishevelled. She gave a long, loud yawn.

Sami nodded her head in greeting. “Hello, I’m–”

“Sami, yeah, I know. Hard to forget someone when you’ve seen their O-face.” Vex froze, as if realizing what she’d just said, her face turning absolutely crimson, and almost fell over herself in an avalanche of apologies.

Sami took it all in stride, even if she was running scenarios in her head. As opposed to what a lot of people thought, she wasn’t sexually prolific. Her few sexual encounters prior to Otter had been disappointing, and none of them had been women. As a matter of fact, the only women Sami had slept with at all were Otter and Rua, and while Otter was adventurous and not afraid to seduce various women outside of their relationship – all with Sami’s permission and rigorous testing afterwards – said women had never once made it into that kind of encounter with Sami. 

So, who was this woman to make such a claim?

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, I mean, I didn’t mean to see, but I did, and didn’t mean to say, and–”

“Breathe.”

Vex stopped, which was good, since she’d looked about to start hyperventilating. 

“Explanation, please.”

“Uhm… I don’t know if I should. Not over the messaging system anyway. It has to do with…” Vex left it hanging, but Sami knew what she meant. 

Ah. However Otter was bringing the residents of this world into the framework of Holt’s game. Otter had said there was some sharing of sensation. She’d said nothing of memories. That felt a little more… invasive than she’d been expecting.

How much had Vex seen?

She tried to keep the embarrassment off her face, and she was confident in her success. It was the one skillset she’d learned directly from her father that she actually enjoyed having. 

“Where is Otter?” Mayumi asked. “I’ve been trying to get in contact with her.”

“Oh.” Vex said. “Uhm. Maybe it’s better to show you.”

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