Fell Champions

Sami didn’t know what to expect as Vex took her on a virtual tour of an overly colourful house. The whole place looked jarring to her, with bright splashes of every kind of colour that demanded attention. Everything competed, and nothing complimented. It was a visual war, and greatly assaulted her sense of aesthetic. 

The halls were long and winding, and twice Vex exited a building to cross a bridge built into a patio to another structure. Once, she apparently got lost and had to turn about, going back the way she came, before finally coming to a large room devoid of furniture or decoration. No carpets, no wall hangings. Just a large open space, with a person sitting in the middle of it, meditating of all things.

Sami had never known Mayumi – Otter – to meditate. She’d never had the patience for it, and the few times Sami had tried to force Otter to do it had turned into impromptu napping sessions. But here she was, in a full on Lotus pose, eyes closed but clearly in deep concentration.

Her shoulder also bore a new scar, nasty and not fully healed. Sami’s eyes narrowed at that.

“What happened?” she asked.

“She and Il-Su tried to kill one another,” Vex answered. “He got away. I’ve been slowly healing her day by day, but I don’t really know how to use my powers that well. I’m worried I’ll do more damage than harm. So I’ve been patching her up slowly.”

A healer? Otter had been holding out on her. That was very good news. 

“Why did they fight?”

Vex shrugged. “Local politics. He’s working for someone named Kir, who’s been provoking a war between factions here. She’s the second in command of the Mikovians here, and for some reason they took over one of the islands. Il-Su killed Juala, one of the heads of government among the Silayans, and tried to kill two others, Leilynn and Sureya.”

Well, this sounded like an absolute clusterfuck. Leave it to Il-Su to create this much chaos. She was going to need a full debrief. History on all the factions, key figures behind each, possible motivations.

Sami was a little ashamed to realize that her heart was beating with excitement. 

It had always been her job to clean up these kinds of messes, or to prevent them from happening. Usually between guilds in game, or content groups doing collabs together. The idea of it happening on such a grand scale, with such important stakes, sent a thrill through her that she wasn’t entirely happy with. 

Still, this felt important. Like a test, one she could succeed at. 

“And Rua?” she asked.

“Mama is… she was taken by Kir.”

“What do you mean, ‘taken?’” 

Sami meant to be more diplomatic, but she could feel it. A terrible beast rising inside of her. If Il-Su had touched her…

“We’re… not sure. Kir has her prisoner, and they’re headed to Pruana Isle. It’s the island the Mikovians took, and it’s supposed to be heavily fortified.

“She rarely responds to messages. There are only small windows she has where she’s able to talk. We think she only responds when she’s alone and can’t be overheard, and always disconnects early. We haven’t gotten much out of her, beyond that she’s in good health.”

Another objective to add to the list then. 

“Tell Otter to call me when she’s available, whenever she’s finished with…” she gestured at the meditation.

“She’s been doing that for a day and a half straight.”

Impossible. Absolutely impossible. Otter didn’t have the mental discipline to maintain that kind of focus. Or patience. Or bladder control. 

“What?”

Vex fidgeted a little. “I don’t know what she’s doing either, and I can feel her through our link. She isn’t sleeping. She’s concentrating on something. Liaru – she’s, uh, the head servant here – has been making sure Otter gets some broth into her twice a day, but she’s been literally spooning it to her, and she hasn’t come out of it once. Her body’s taking in the food, but her mind is somewhere else.”

“Black Rime Citadel,” Sami said in a hushed voice.

It had been the first of the Great Fortresses in Immortalized, a black spire made of ice atop a jagged peak. Between the elements and the dangerous mobs on the path, the trip alone claimed half the players who dared to brave it.

Black Rime Citadel was the first in a series of supposedly unbeatable dungeons that had fantastic loot, and were required for world progression, but were deliberate meat grinders. People had loved Immortalized because of its difficulty. No one had ever beaten one of them.

Until Pandemona.

It was the first thing that had put her on the map in the gaming sphere. A plan so ridiculously stupid that it was impossible for anyone sane to come up with it.

*-*-*

Sami had just been getting into gaming at the time, and was regularly making runs on the various Great Fortresses. There were other activities to do, other raids and dungeons to participate in, but the Fortresses had always had their own allure. If you could beat one, you’d be a legend. 

Everyone came at it in small groups, four being the maximum allowed by the game, and the dungeon adjusted its difficulty depending on how many were present. 

Sami always went alone. She reasoned, if she was going to be a legend, better to do it on her own merits. She was tired of others getting credit for her achievements. 

Sami usually made it up the mountainous trek with minimal difficulty, after she’d learned all the little tricks to surviving it, and getting the winter gear necessary to keep her character from freezing to death. Too many corpses of half-naked barbarians or women in chainmail bikinis littered the black ice of the Rime. It was a great way to find free loot, if you could be bothered to go through the junk that such trash players tended to carry. 

The tower itself was immense. The Black Rime Citadel was a spire made of black ice, stretching impossibly high into the heavens. You couldn’t even see the top of it without some kind of Airweaving to enhance your sight. It was impressive the first ten times you saw it. You tended to ignore its grandeur after that.

At the top of the mountain was a small tent city made by the playerbase. Its layout constantly shifted as people logged in and out. Immortalized was pioneering the time dilation Grey Gear, which made for great streaming, but it was difficult to get more than a hundred people into any one instance of a zone as a result. The admins were patching the issue every other week, and had settled into a much less stark time delay between the real world and the game world as a quick fix until popularity picked up the playerbase more.

Most players just hung out around the Citadel rather than entering. It became a prestige spot to loiter in, and a lot of players had merchant shops running to try to cater both gear and consumables for anyone trying to venture into the Fortress. 

Sami ignored them all, bypassing them. But on one particular trip, she noticed a pretty girl sitting at the base of the central tower.

Unlike others, she wasn’t conversing with her fellow players, wasn’t getting ready for a raid, or preparing to enter the dungeon, looking for a group, or even selling goods. She was just sitting there. And casting the odd elemental weave magic.

Sami couldn’t see what the spell was. She wasn’t much of a caster type, and hadn’t memorized the animations for the various weaves, but it was small. Very small. But the girl kept doing it. She had to be spamming some kind of low-level spell, but Sami couldn’t see the effect, or the spell itself.

Whatever. It didn’t matter. Sami put it out of her mind, and went in for another doomed run on the Black Rime Citadel. 

Sami tried another dozen or so runs, and each time passed by the girl, who was busy just casting her spell, over and over. After a while, it got to annoy her, this girl who didn’t seem to be doing anything, while others were busy being logical in their presence. But no, not this girl.

She didn’t ask to join any groups, never went into the Citadel, never showed off or challenged anyone to impromptu PVP matches. She just sat there with a dumb smile on her face, as if she knew a joke no one else did.

It hit a breaking point for Sami. She liked things to fit in neat little boxes, and this little idiot was just spamming low level weavings for no apparent reason. She’d seen people approach the girl before, and while she’d seemed friendly and willing to talk, the conversations were never long, and left those who tried walking away with disbelief writ large on their faces.

“What’re you doing?” Sami asked. Demanded, really.

“Sitting,” came the response. The girl seemed far too pleased with her answer.

“Why?”

“Because if I were standing, everyone would be checking out my ass.”

Sami snorted. “No, really.”

“Yes, really. It’s that nice. I gots both meat on it and tone. It has both jiggle and might. It can bounce quarters and crush them. You know. Between my cheeks.” She actually had the grace to blush at how stupid that line was. “It is the Holy Grail of Asses. I worked hard on it.”

Sami gave her a flat-eyed look. The girl batted her eyes in a coquettish fashion. Sami refused to give her the satisfaction and instead went on another failed excursion into the Tower.

Three trips later, Sami seeing the girl each time, she broke down and tried talking to her again. 

“Don’t you have anything better to do than to be sitting here and casting spells?”

The girl shrugged. “I’m beating the Citadel. No better use of my time.”

“By just… sitting here?”

“Yep.”

“What, is you standing up after sitting here so long going to upset the balance of the earth, shift some tectonic plates around, and knock the whole tower over?”

Something seemed to light up behind the girl’s eyes. “Do you think that would work?”

“What? No. Your ass isn’t nearly big enough.”

Some part of Sami was exasperated at the very idea of discussing another woman’s ass so openly. But another part of her felt a guilty kind of pleasure at the banter.

“Wanna know a secret?” the girl asked.

“I suppose,” she said, trying so hard to pretend to not be interested.

“I actually know how to beat the Citadel.”

Sami snorted and rolled her eyes, and almost left then and there. But even in that moment, she’d sensed something special about the girl.

“How?”

“Send me a friend request. With access to your personal profile.”

One of the better features of Immortalized had been the Personal Profile System, a way to have personal info about yourself that was verified through payment info, contact information, and social media. It wasn’t foolproof, but it allowed you to share certain info about yourself with other players and was very difficult to fake. If you were caught falsifying data, you’d catch a permaban with no appeals, and your Gray Gear would get bricked. 

It was all to have a safe way to share details like the classic Age, Sex, and Location without having to worry too much about predators, and given how thorough Immortalized was about keeping playing interaction records and sharing them with law enforcement when necessary, it added a nice safety net in a gaming sphere of harassers, predators, and AI bots. 

Sami debated it for a moment. She wasn’t really playing for the social aspect, just to relieve the tedium of her life and put her kendo lessons to use. Still, this was the closest to not being bored she’d been in a while. 

She flicked open her menu, sent the Friend Request along with a Profile Share. “SamiRai. Sami.”

The girl smiled, accepted the menu prompt, and replied, “Pandemona. Or Mayumi.”

They’d both been the same age, sixteen, and from the same country, though on opposite ends. Sami lived in British Columbia, Mayumi in Ontario, but that hadn’t been a concern for them at that point. 

“So, what’s your plan?” Sami asked.

“I’m gonna bypass the mobs inside and just destroy the tower.” 

She said it in a kind of matter of fact way, like how you’d say you were going to take a walk to the corner store, or order a pizza in for the night. She was serious. Or looked it, anyway. 

“People have tried. Fireweaving doesn’t stick to the Rime. You can’t burn it down or explode it. Earthweaving won’t affect the ground here. My own Metalweaving might scratch the tower, but it just fixes itself right away. I don’t even think any destructive spells would do anything except slide off the wards on this place.”

“Huh. Really? People have tried all that?” Pandemona asked the question with such mock innocence that even Sami and her need to take everything literally could detect the sarcasm.

“Okay then, what’s your plan?”

Pandemona triumphantly pulled a piece of paper from her breast pocket and presented it like a trophy. Sami took it and unfolded it. 

It looked like it was drawn with a child’s paint set. There were a lot of scribbles of numbers and random letters, crossed out lines, and a doodle of a fallen tower coated in white ice with a stick figure standing in victory over it. A stick figure with improbably large breasts.

“What do you think?” Pandemona asked.

“That you think your tits are bigger than they actually are.”

“Not that, obviously I’m allowed some artistic license. About my math.”

“Your… math?”

And then Sami examined the scribbles she’d glazed over before, and realized they were equations. Ones she could barely make any sense out of, except…

No, the first one was a calculation of how tall and wide the tower was. An estimation, but one with work to back it up. The second equation was a weight calculation, with notes of how much certain materials in the tower weighed given samples Pan had observed and in some cases chipped away from the Citadel. Smaller notes on material volume, density, and overall strength. It was largely speculative, as she didn’t have any data from the upper floors, but it looked like solid work. Probably not correct work, but solid.

Sami tried to wrap her head around it. She liked to think she was good at math, and while this made far too many leaps in logic for her liking, it looked somewhat sound. But why would someone put this much thought and effort into calculating the height and mass of the…

Oh.

The realization that this weird girl might actually be kind of a genius hit Sami at that moment. It had been humbling and awe-inspiring all at once to meet someone so brilliant.

So of course Pandemona had immediately said, “I’ma smack the tip of the big ol’ penis tower til it’s flaccid.” 

“You… you… what?”

No, that didn’t make any sense. If you did that, even assuming you could generate that kind of force – which Sami very much doubted even the highest level players utilizing the most destructive weaves could – all you’d accomplish was some minor damage at the top of the tower.

No. She thought it through. It wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t a hammer and nail situation. Why would you care so much about how tall and heavy the tower was if something that idiotic was your plan? You wouldn’t.

“You’re going to add more mass to it somehow,” Sami said. 

“Yep!” Pandemona said with a cheery little smile. “With a Waterweave. Specifically, a Creation Waterweave.”

“You’re going to create water to…” And Sami shivered from the cold. She didn’t actually feel it, not in Immortalized, the tech wasn’t there yet, but her game avatar did the animation. “It’s going to freeze, isn’t it?”

“Has been so far.”

“What do you mean, ‘so far?’”

Pandemona cast another of her tiny weaves, almost by reflex. And Sami stopped. And looked upwards.

The tip of the tower was impossibly high, and made part of Sami’s head go a little dizzy just looking up at it. She had to cast a quick Airweave to enhance her sight, and up high, in the morning glint of the sun, Sami could see ice. Not the glossy black of the Tower’s Rime, but the white of regular water frozen to something.

A lot of it. In a large cocoon-like formation, all on one side of the tower. It had to be bigger than a house. She just couldn’t get a read on its dimensions from this distance.

A Waterweaving like Pandemona was describing could only create a litre of water.

“How long have you been doing this?”

“I dunno. Two months, in-game?”

“And you haven’t logged out?” Sami said in a strangled voice.

“And lose all my progress in this instance? Fuck that.”

“You can’t just be online for that long!”

“Eh, Immortalized’s time dilation is okay. It’ll only have been like, two days maybe in the real world. I have my sister monitoring my fluids, and I’m wearing adult diapers. I’ll be fine.”

“You… how much longer are you going to be doing this?”

“I dunno. My math said it should’ve fallen like three days ago. Heard a group a few hours ago say there were a bunch of cracks in the walls for some reason, so it’s working, though.”

“Log out right now, this isn’t healthy.”

Pandemona had smirked then. Sami hadn’t even known she’d liked girls at that point and found that cocky expression insanely hot.

“Betcha a good Airweaving will knock it right down.”

Sami had almost scoffed at that. And then thought better of it. That kind of challenge would only make things worse. She tried to think of something to do, anything, and was just caught staring as Pandemona summoned her Essence Spark, and turned the brightness of day into a rolling wave of clouds as black as the Tower’s Rime. 

This girl wasn’t some filthy casual. Only the highest level mage players could summon a storm of this magnitude. This wasn’t some weirdo testing a theory. This was a serious player trying to do the impossible. 

People fled the impromptu storm, but many, Sami included, saw the destructive aftermath. They witnessed what followed. The first of the Great Fortresses fell. Pandemona caught it all on stream, and made sure the whole world knew exactly who the cause of it was.

Many would remember her as a master planner, or a destructive force of nature. But Sami would always remember one moment in particular after the Black Rime Citadel fell and Pandemona stood on its ruined remains. She’d looked back directly at the somewhat terrified Sami, and said apprehensively, “So… wanna be friends?”

*-*-*

Those memories had always been fond to Sami. She’d long since forgotten the fear she’d felt in the moment. But now, watching Otter sit in deliberate meditation, she began to feel it again.

“Bring me closer,” Sami said.

Vex must have been feeling something similar, because her steps were hesitant. As she moved, the screen displaying Sami moved with her. And as they approached, she was terrified of what they’d find.

“She’s just meditating,” Vex said. “I think she’s trying to forcibly evolve a skill.”

“Does that work?”

“Sometimes. But not often. The Dreamer has the final say in that kind of thing.”

It didn’t seem like the kind of thing Otter would do. She didn’t approach problems the way most would. She came at them sideways, from angles most would not expect. She was hasty, impulsive, impatient, and quick to set everything on fire, but also brilliant in her own way. 

“Closer,” Sami said when they were within just a few feet.

Vex sighed and then moved near enough she was almost cheek-to-cheek with Otter, their faces close to touching. 

The window moved nearer. Sami felt like she could reach out her hand and touch Otter. Instead she contented herself with staring at her face.

“This isn’t some weird sex thing, is it?” Vex asked.

Sami found herself unable to rip her eyes away from Otter’s lips. Lips that were identical in size and shape to Mayumi’s, missing only her old scar. How had Sami ever fallen for this changed face for even a second?

“No,” she said. “I needed to confirm something.”

“What?”

“Mayumi… Otter doesn’t meditate. So, if she’s not meditating, but it looks like she is, what is she actually doing?”

“I dunno, power napping?”

“Her lips are moving.”

“What? No, they’re…” Vex trailed off as she looked at them.

It was subtle. There was barely any movement at all. But it was there. Otter was whispering, but without sound. 

“Who’s she talking to?” Vex asked.

And even though Sami couldn’t hear the words, she knew something of what was being said.

“She isn’t talking to anyone. She’s telling a story.”

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