Matchmaking as a duo required adding a partner to a party first, a simple enough setting tucked into the status menu, one Logan and Alice had already sorted out before their food even arrived.
The food did arrive, warm and fragrant, exactly the kind of ordinary moment they wanted to enjoy for now.
But before they could take their first bites, the world shattered into noise.
A shockwave of pure sound tore through the restaurant, a frequency that sank into muscle and bone alike and locked every single person in the building in place. Logan felt his own body go rigid mid-reach for his fork, his eyes still working, his mind still working, everything else simply refusing to answer.
Alice sat frozen across from him, eyes wide, meeting his own with nothing either of them could actually do about it.
Men in black moved through the paralyzed restaurant like they owned it, wrapping both of them in dark cloth and hauling them out the door in seconds. A spacecraft revealed itself from stealth overhead, waiting.
ROMO tried to intervene. But lightning chains, thick and gold, tore down out of nowhere and wrapped around the ship’s own hull before it managed a single evasive maneuver, holding it locked in place. The Tier-9 Mythic unit at the other end of those chains hovered nearby, half man and half horse, its whole lower body wreathed in the same crackling gold light.
Logan and Alice were gone before ROMO ever broke free.
...
They woke inside a cube of shimmering violet light, the two of them alone together, matching cuffs locked around both their wrists.
Alice was match-making in duo mode since they were already at the party.
```
[ Match-making disrupted. Remove active energy disruptor to proceed. ]
```
"Figures." She turned her wrist over, inspecting the cuff without much surprise at all.
"You’re taking this awfully calmly." Logan raised an eyebrow at her.
"My parents will come." She said it with total confidence, not a shred of doubt in it anywhere. "They always do."
Logan studied her for a moment. "Is this... your second time?"
"Third, actually." Alice shrugged like it barely mattered.
Logan opened his mouth, closed it again, and decided not to ask.
"We could summon our units." He looked around the cell instead, taking in the walls, the ceiling, the faint hum of something enormous running just beneath the floor. "But..."
The vehicle around them wasn’t Tier-4. It wasn’t anywhere close.
It was a Tier-9 unit holding them prisoner and could have swept his Mythic roster and Alice’s Tier-1 Mythics both off the board without even trying.
"Yeah. Let’s just wait." Alice nodded, her eyes glinting. "They took me because they want something from my parents. That much I’m sure of. Until they get it, they’re not going to risk damaging the leverage."
"And if it’s the other kind of leverage?" Logan’s voice came quieter. "If they’re trying to draw your parents out to kill them?"
"Then that won’t happen." Alice’s jaw set, certainty replacing any trace of fear at all. "My parents don’t lose."
Logan’s fists clenched at his sides. "We’re still powerless. We need to catch up to those at the frontline of this tower. Fast."
...
They dragged both of them to a lab an hour later, a needle finding Alice’s arm before either of them could do anything about the cuffs still locked around their wrists.
A man stepped into view once the vial was full, a scar running the length of his neck, a tattoo shaped like a claw curling up one side of his face.
"Mosin Vargant." He said his own name like an introduction to a business meeting rather than a kidnapping. "Your parents’ agency has a direct line. Let’s use it."
A holographic display flickered to life in front of Alice, Garen’s own face appearing on the other end of it a moment later, worry already breaking through his usual composure.
"Alice-"
"Garen." Mosin’s voice cut clean through whatever he’d been about to say. "You and Isolde will come to the coordinates I’m sending now. Bring the Regalia Armament Starfall Eternis with you. Refuse, and your daughter and the boy both die."
Garen’s face went very still.
"I’ll only let them go once I’ve confirmed both your deaths," Mosin said it with no theater in it at all, just cold, patient certainty. "You remember why, I’m sure."
He did. Logan could see it plain on Garen’s face even through the projection.
"A dual-mode match, two years back." Mosin’s own eyes had gone distant, replaying something old and unhealed. "My wife and I found Starfall Eternis first. You and Isolde decided you wanted it more. She died in that fight. I surrendered, and I lived. I’ve had a long time to think about how unfair that arrangement actually was."
"There’s nothing unfair in battle. She should have surrendered if she didn’t want to die." Isolde coldly replied.
"Five minutes." Mosin’s grin came slow. "I have eyes on the location already. Don’t waste them. If I don’t see you there in time, I’m torturing these two kiddos before feeding them to my pets."
The location he’d chosen had been built for exactly this. Formations and devices layered into every wall and floor, engineered specifically to kill Tier-9 players the moment they set foot inside.
...
Garen and Isolde appeared exactly on time. Except, they were not actually there physically, but Mosin or his devices couldn’t tell.
Mosin’s grin widened at the sight of them. "Watch your parents die, both of you. I’ll send you to join them shortly after."
One of his men leaned in from the side. "Boss, not so soon. Give us a few days with these two first. We’ll have fun."
"Haha. That does sound better."
Logan felt something cold settle into his chest. Beside him, Alice’s hands had curled into fists, her whole body rigid, watching the screen where Garen and Isolde stood at the center of a killing field neither of them seemed to have noticed yet.
The formations activated. Light and color tore across the display in a sudden, violent bloom, an explosion swallowing the whole feed in white.
Alice went very still.
Then her eyes lit up.
"We’re saved." She whispered it, certain, right as something shifted deep in her own stomach.
A shape emerged from her mouth a moment later, small and strange, a semi-metal and bio creature shaped roughly like an octopus, one oversized eye blinking open on its otherwise smooth little head. It didn’t hesitate. A portal tore open in the air in front of it, and Garen and Isolde stepped straight through, whole and unharmed.
Logan blinked. ’A Tier-9 Legendary unit inside her body?’
A barrier snapped into place around all four of them instantly.
"Don’t worry, everything’s okay now." Isolde smiled at them. "We never leave Alice without safety. This little guy is our instant transport to her location, hidden within her body, shrunk, and disguised so that no scanners can detect it."
"Now, let’s mop up this bastard." Garen’s voice had lost every trace of the calm warmth Logan had come to know from him. In its place sat something sharp enough to cut.
"You both!" Mosin’s eyes widened, and he summoned his units, which were not too many, as he had an average win rate and couldn’t increase his army outside that much.
Garen and Isolde also summoned. A giant turtle with a live volcano smoldering on its own shell. A cyborg harpy strumming something that looked like a guitar but sounded like the end of the world. A dozen more shapes, each stranger than the last, all of them Tier-9 and all of them furious.
The attack that followed tore the entire underground chamber apart, walls and formations both giving way at once, Garen and Isolde moving alongside their own barrier as the whole structure collapsed around the fight.
ROMO appeared overhead the second daylight broke through the rubble. Garen and Isolde threw both Logan and Alice bodily into its waiting tractor beam, safe inside a heartbeat later, before both of them turned back to the battle still unfolding beneath them.
Mosin emerged from the wreckage himself, flanked by another Tier-9 player and a handful of Tier-8s backing them both.
Their summons flanking all around.
It didn’t matter in the slightest.
Garen Rezvolt sat thirteenth on Earth’s Global Player Leaderboard. Isolde Rezvolt sat ninth.
Mosin didn’t even crack the top hundred.
Both of them carried combat-built Mythic-rank Classes, and Mythic-rank Talents to match.
And eighteen Tier-9 Mythic units answered between the two of them, an army built out of years of victories.
Garen drew twin pistols, each one humming with barely contained power. Isolde’s own chakrams spun to life in either hand, crescents of pure light carving the air around her.
Fury did the rest.
Garen’s guns didn’t stop firing. Round after round tore through Mosin’s Tier-8 escorts before any of them managed to close half the distance, and the second Tier-9 player lasted only slightly longer, cut down by three of Isolde’s own summons converging at once.
Isolde herself moved like something out of a different category of combat entirely, chakrams weaving a pattern too fast to properly track, opening Mosin’s own defenses wide before he’d even finished raising a hand to stop her.
Their summons were overpowered and destroyed by the combined might.
Although they fought back, they were far outclassed in terms of combat power and combat ability.
Mosin Vargant didn’t survive long enough to finish whatever speech he’d no doubt been planning.
The eighteen Mythic units mopped up whatever remained without slowing down at all, a decade of accumulated dominance finally given somewhere honest to land.
Inside ROMO, Logan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
Alice just grinned, watching her parents work through the viewport as she’d never doubted the outcome for a single second.
"Told you. Now, we continue our date, so let’s go. Romo, take us to Lake Bloom Cafe."
Logan wryly smiled. "Well, I am still hungry, so let’s go."
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