by Wolfe Locke
“That’ll be five Sol,” she said as she held out a delicate human hand that connected to spidery appendages. I recoiled; I couldn’t help it. Yes, I know I’ve killed some pretty heinous and evil things in my life, but this was at the beginning, and I’ll freely admit it, even though I’ve since managed to kill a Lich, a Demon Lord, and a Behemoth, I drew the line at spiders.
She reached out and grabbed my hand and the sound I made wasn’t exactly flattering so we don’t need to review it. “Listen, fuck face, I know your type. You come in here, try to buy a drink and then split without paying. Well, not today.” With one of her other hands, she grabbed a scanner and ran it over my hand. A message in gold lettering appeared that read “482 Sol” and as I watched, the number instantly went down to 478 Sol.” Oh, that was easy.
Naturally, I had no idea when or where I had gotten Solus, which I assumed was some kind of currency. Actually, I did have a vague idea. I’d played video games before, I knew how this worked; somehow killing the undead had given me this money called Solus without me even knowing it.
“Enjoy your drink,” the spider lady told me with a look of disgust as she let go of me. The relief I felt was instant; she thought I was some broke asshole, likely not the first broke asshole to try to skip on a bill. I much preferred that to her knowing I was freaked out by her. She seemed like the sort that would take it pretty poorly.
I pulled up a chair further down the bar and looked up at the screen just in time to see the message and watch as a minotaur in riot gear and a succubus in military fatigues started to talk.
The minotaur spoke first, “And here’s the Top Kills from the Leaderboard. Up first, we have Barry, who is currently ranked tenth in overall kill count. Here we have him using the cover and concealment of his melting ice fortress to raise a storm of ice shards above a group that otherwise had him and his partner dead to rights.”
“That was a good call on his part,” the succubus responded, admiring the scene of death frozen on the screen of the impaled Ashleys. “He was able to pick up eight kills out of this, wasn’t he?”
The minotaur shook his head with a smile. “Oh no, Sandy, he picked up nine kills. See that guy over there, trying to hide behind the rock formation?” The minotaur stopped for a moment and made a series of movements with his hand as a circle appeared around a rock formation, the same formation that I had hidden behind. “Looks like he had been wanting to pick off survivors, but got caught in the storm instead. You can tell he didn’t put any of his points into agility or magic, otherwise, he could have run away fast enough, or sensed the spell overhead.”
The succubus shook her head, disappointed. “Just goes to show you about these humans. How have they lived this long? Oh look, he managed to trigger the potion tower. Looks like he’ll be walking away from the fight completely refreshed.”
I glared at the screen as a close-up of my dying face was shown in the highlight, the announcer putting out a dire warning to anyone watching to not make the same mistakes as me. The camera moved away for a second until my body started to glow with golden light before collapsing in on itself.
I knew I was in trouble as soon as the announcer started pointing it out. “Oh, there we go, looks like our third reincarnator of the tournament has been revealed. Hey folks, if you should find him or the others, send them back our way with the Battle Push function. Thanks.”
Ignoring that last little bit, the fights were pretty great, but not as great as the hand on my shoulder after that as one of the few humans in the bar besides me made a scene. “Hey everyone,” he called out as he forced me to my feet with a strength that completely eclipsed my own. “Get a load of this douchebag, see anything familiar? It looks like we have a reincarnator right here, trying to sandbag their way out of a fight. Do you know what we do to your kind around here?”
I didn’t, but I could make a pretty educated smart-ass guess based on what I’d heard on the highlights. I just didn’t think it was the right time to point that out. De-escalation and all. No matter how much I wanted to give a smart-ass response, I thought it was best to not try to provoke the big bastard.
“We send ‘em back,” he growled.
Chapter 25: Come as You Are
Sometimes, at least for me, I get these premonitions that things are about to go sideways. I could have practically moonlighted as a psychic; my premonitions were that good. So when old banana hands, who looked every bit the part of a linebacker moonlighting as the muscle in a three-ring circus, decided to lay his hands on me, I knew I was going to have a bad time as soon as he said, “We send ‘em back.”
Ok, it was actually pretty obvious that things were going to go poorly. It seemed to me I’d basically been fucking up time after time again.
I tried to reason with man, I really did, but no amount of “I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” and “Come on, buddy, let me buy you a drink, this has been a misunderstanding,” seemed to work on him as he carried me like a child across the room. Sure, I was kicking and screaming, trying to get away, but it didn’t matter. I’d thought I was strong, but this guy was on an entirely different level. How did he get so strong if he’s a human like the rest of us?
There comes a time in every man or woman’s life when they just needed to tell somebody how they felt, and in this case, as banana hands tossed open the door to the patio area, I looked him straight in the eye and fished for the worst, most gruesome insult I could think of. My improv game had never been strong, but I’m proud enough of what I said as he held me over the rails. “You have a weak bloodline, and I hope you get the shits.”
He laughed, “Yeah, I get that a lot. Try to at least get top 200; I’ve money riding on you.”
So, this was worth mentioning, but apparently, he didn’t actually mean “send them back” so much as he just sort of set me on the rail of the bar’s patio and pushed me in. If you were wondering, yes, I screamed the entire time I fell through the air, fully expecting to go splat on the ground, and while I knew I’d probably respawn, I still hated heights, even more than I hated spiders. But I didn’t go splat on the ground.
This was all a bullshit guess, but somewhere around thirty, maybe fifty feet, my body passed through what I assumed was some kind of shield set up around the battlefield to keep everyone who was watching the fighting safe from any kind of magical splash damage. This was only a guess; it also might have been to keep the participants locked in, hard to say.
Notification: Now Entering - The Black Tournament - Consolidated Battlefield #3.
Details: Welcome back, Edgelord Supreme! Your standing has been updated. You are currently ranked 419th of the 419 surviving participants.
*Current Weapon Selection - Steel Core Bat of Frost.
Landing with a thud on the ground, I was relieved to feel the Steel Core Bat in my hand. I had completely forgotten about it after banana hands had decided to toss me out of the bar. I had sort of figured it was still leaning against a barstool or the wall where I had left it.
“Thanks,” I muttered, glancing suspiciously upwards towards whoever had interceded on my behalf. I appreciated it, even if I was pretty sure it had everything to do with betting odds and profits rather than helping me out. Whatever, my benefactor was a problem for the me of the future. The me of right now had bigger issues.
As I cleaned off the rubber dust from the shredded tires I’d fallen into, I noticed an aura of pure menace bearing down on me from a little way away. The source? A neckbeard with a black-edged katana was running at me with full force, which is to say basically a jog, but with more heavy breathing and bouncing rolls of fat. I’d have been more disgusted if not for trying to diffuse the situation. Believe it or not, I didn’t want to kill him.
“I don’t want to fight you, man, but if you want to play stupid games, you can win stupid prizes,” I yelled out to him, as I held the bat outwards in one hand towards him in a challenge, tracking his movements with my eyes. He actually moved pretty quickly, and I wondered if h
e had put all of his points into agility, the same way that I’d put my points into strength. Examining him closer, I saw he was wearing a t-shirt with a ninja playing video games, headband of the shinobi and all. Ah, a gamer, probably thinks he’s some hardass min-maxed. I know how to handle this.
Neckbeard’s pace started to kick up as he sped my way. Electric sparks lit the air around him as he pulled energy from somewhere, his arms trailing behind him as he ran. “Last chance, dude. Don’t make me fuck you up. I’m having a seriously bad day.”
But Neckbeard just laughed as he started trying to run circles around me. “I’ve been preparing all my life for this moment. Training, watching, waiting, and finally my time is at hand. When you were partying, I studied the blade. When you were having premarital sex, I mastered The Blockchain. When you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity, I cultivated inner strength.”
It wasn’t the best monologue I’d ever heard and it seemed like he had taken a bit of an egotistical break from reality as he muttered something that sounded like “Chidori.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, alright,” I muttered to myself as he bore down on me. I had to admit he was faster than me, but judging from his moves, he was like every other nerd I’d ever known and had picked up his concept of fighting watching anime. Not today, asshole. It may have been a while, well shit, it had been years, but once upon a time I had been a fighter and I knew a few things that most guys didn’t until it was too late. Neckbeard said he’d been training all his life for this moment? Well, bullshit. I’d been spending my life trying to forget the things that I’d trained for, one beer and day at a time.
I waited until the very last second, faking being afraid as Neckbeard bore down on me, baiting him until the last minute when I simply sidestepped him and brought the bat down on his Achilles. “Trained all your life, my ass,” I muttered as I crushed his ankle, its flesh turning to pulverized ice. The blow sent Neckbeard flying, giving him a bad case of road rash as he went end over end and I followed.
Within seconds I was on him as he grabbed at his broken ankle, moaning in pain and crying out for mercy, begging me to help him out. I wasn’t buying it. I’d tried, I really had, to talk him out of attacking me. I was pissed. “Listen, fucker, you chose the wrong guy to fuck with. I gave you a chance, I really did, but you insisted on trying to mess with me. Well, congrats, you’ve got my attention. You won your prize, you got me, and do you know what you’ve won? Not a goddamn thing but the cold embrace of death. Absolute Zero.”
He looked at me with the stupidest look that said, “Huh?”
Yeah. I got it, it was a stupid fucking catchphrase and I regretted choosing it to be the name of my finishing move. It was one of those things that would get renamed if something else fit better. On the bright side, when my bat caved in half of his skull, it literally wiped the look off his face as parts of his skull and brains went flying in icy bricks.
Notification: You have gained 35 experience, next level in 60 experience. You have also gained 2 stat points. For defeating a participant with a kill count, you have gained their total kill score. You have been awarded 4 kill points, your total kill points are now 4.
Neckbeard has dropped item “Blackened Katana.”
Note: You may equip this item during the next intermission.
I knew exactly where to put the points, and quickly assigned them to agility. I didn’t plan on dying from being way too slow again. I had a moment, and suddenly a question as I realized I was missing something.
“Lirai, where the shit is the other point I earned for killing Greg?” Yeah, I noticed that little discrepancy. That didn’t sit well with me at all.
Notification: Query - “Point Status.”
Details: Upon defeat, the point you gained from killing the participant referred to as Greg was passed to the participant known as Barry the Iceman when he defeated you. Those with the reincarnation ability still pass points upon their death or defeat.
Chapter 26: Lose Yourself
I wish I could tell you the rest of the battle was amazing. That I squared off against everything that came at me and basically power-leveled my way to the top. But that wasn’t what happened. That wasn’t how my story went. I never claimed to be this clever guy, I wasn’t exceptionally strong to begin with, I wasn’t quick on my feet or that skilled either. Sure, I could talk a good game, but that was basically all it was. The rest of the battle was me figuring out that I needed to get stronger, so I could actually fuck people up, instead of just talking about it and the good old days.
It was easy to forget how to be alive. To not see that it was your own hands around your throat. Your own words that you were choking on. I made a decision that day to pay homage to that which I desired.
In a sense, I was a fraud. I’d been listening to too many people for too long before the apocalypse came. Everyone had opinions on what it meant to be a man, a warrior, a goon, a thug, a smart guy, or a dumb one, and I’d made the mistake of listening to those voices for too long. Voices that had never been in a fistfight, much less a battle. I let go of them, and I let go of the muzzle I had chained myself with.
For me, everything changed in those moments after the neckbeard died. The flow of the battle changed for me. Maybe I was just getting used to my new normal, maybe the shock of the changes had worn off, or maybe I finally was able to accept a part of me that I had tried to shove down and hide from. The part of me I’d locked into a box of memories and tried to drown in booze, vice, and video games. Nothing cool, funny, or sexy, just a matter of losing myself. But I wasn’t lost anymore.
I knew where I was, but I couldn’t think about the big picture anymore. I gave up on it, the next hour, day, year. I couldn’t think about it, and didn’t want to. The next five seconds were what mattered, then the next thirty. Some would call it the fog of battle, and that term could be used kind of loosely, but in this case, think of it as a mental fog. For those of you who might have never played sports or been in a serious fight, I was in the zone.
When I said the zone, I meant time slowed down, but not in a magical sense. I meant in the sense that my brain’s responses to everything sped up, like the difference between trying to play a game with near 0 ping, and a ping above 100. Fear, fatigue, anger; it all dropped off me, and everything around me began to clear.
For the first time since leaving the military, I was free. The pain that I didn’t even know I was carrying was gone. The discomfort in my limbs stopped, my joints stopped popping, my muscles stopped aching. My damaged body had fixed itself in a way that none of my previous respawns had.
I tilted my head back and laughed even as a spear flew by me and grazed my cheek, slicing it open, and though it stung, I hardly noticed as I took off in an effortless sprint in the direction the spear had come from. The distance didn’t matter. It could have been ten feet or a thousand; I was in the zone and nothing could stop me.
My legs pumped as I ran faster than I had ever run before as the spear-thrower saw me coming his way and turned. He ran for his life as I bore down on him with all the rage of a jilted shopper on Black Friday. He was barely a speed bump as he pulled additional spears from the very air and threw them, an inexhaustible stock that I weaved through and dodged until finally, with a howl, I launched myself into the air as I held the bat over my head and frost began radiating from it.
For a brief moment, my eyes met those of the spear-thrower, and I can still remember the look of shock he possessed when he realized he was going to die. In that last second, he dropped the spear he had in his hands and seemed to welcome death, or was giving himself up in surrender, I’m still unsure. Whatever mercy he thought I might have granted him in his surrender didn’t exist. I had killed better men than him long before the apocalypse had ever come.
Notification: You have gained 35 experience, next level in 25 experience. You have also gained 1 stat points.
For defeating a participant with a kill count, you have gained their total kill score
. You have been awarded 5 points; your total points are now 9.
I noticed I didn’t get notification about drops, and seeing the spears still on the ground where he had dropped them pretty much explained it to me. I’d have to pick them up myself. Hard pass. I had no use for them.
For a moment, it seemed like I didn’t have anyone near me and could use my AI. “Lirai, I need to see how far I’ve come before I try using any points, can you make that happen for me? Is it possible without the computer terminal?” It was a quick ask as I watched the body of the spear chucker disappear, already choosing my next target. A target I had no business fighting. An old man with a dripping red war hammer who was standing over the absolutely destroyed bodies of a group that had come against him. Was I dumb for going after him? Maybe. But spoiler alert: I survived to tell the story.
Notification: Query - Populate Status Menu.
*Capability Added at Request - Access Status Menu.
*Displaying status screen now. Simply dismiss when finished.
A quick glance showed me exactly where I wanted and needed to put the points. Just like I had neglected my agility, I had also neglected my magic ability, and if I had learned anything, it was that I wouldn’t be able to win just by being a meathead. I needed to improve. Not just for this battle, but for every battle that would follow.
Notification: You have 8 unused upgrade points and 3 unused stat points.
Crusader Systems - Mobile Upgrade Terminal - Status Sheet
Name
Dan Hanson
Special Ability
Bound Spawn Point