I wake up by way of instantly entering a sitting position, almost throwing my covers clear off, my face flashing back and forth, memories of arrows and guns and roses crashing and tumbling through my mind like elephants on skates. Who—what—where—

Someone grabs my shoulder. “Hey, Kitty, calm down!” I turn and find Moleman looking at me. “You’re okay, now. The fight’s over, you’re alright,” his soothing voice successfully brings my heart rate down from dubstep tempo to something more manageable, like a fast waltz. While I’m trying to breathe more normally, he props up a pillow behind my back, gently pushing me onto it. I lean back. “You’re back at the hospital. It’s been,” he quickly checks his status screen, “almost two hours.” He looks back at me, his brows scrunched up in worry. “How do you feel?”

How do I… feel? I turn my face down to my lap. Oh, would you look at that; my arm is back. And—my fingers brush against my forehead—I no longer have a thing in my skull. So, yeah, all things considered: I’m not dead.

I look back at Moleman.

Not yet.

I try to muster a smile. “I’m—” His hand is warm against my shoulder, his gaze soft and his expression mild. Ah, that’s right. He’s my friend, isn’t he? No need to lie. The smile leaves my face. “—Scared. I’m scared. That’s all.”

“Being afraid is only to be expected,” he says. Then, with a chuckle, “Still, it’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?”

“What is?” I ask.

“I mean, the way you were frozen stiff there at the start… You looked exactly like all your opponents did in the earlier rounds,” he explains. “If that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is.”

I blink at him. “Oh, yeah. It is ironic, isn’t it?” I chuckle. Yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s all ironic, isn’t it? Here I am fretting over being killed. Me. Isn’t that so very ironic? My chuckle soon turns into full-on laughter, from the very deepest recesses of my hollow chest, I laugh. Loud and clear and after a few seconds of stunned silence, Moleman starts laughing too, tentatively at first before throwing all inhibitions to the wind and joining me in full-on belly laughter, soon slapping my back as the ridiculousness of us laughing to begin with becomes the catalyst for even higher levels of laughing, the sounds of our raucous echoing down the halls.

I have no idea how long we spend laughing, slapping each other on the back over the absurdity of it all, occasionally devolving into wheezing chuckles only to look at each other and break into teary-eyed laughter again.

But as all good things do, this does eventually end, in this case by the unwanted intervention of a nurse. Mary, I think her name was.

While we were still laughing, she suddenly poked her head in through the door frame, and once she recovered from the slight shock of our situation, she said, quite clearly, “Excuse me, SuperMoleman… AngelOfBeatrice has already been waiting for over half an hour. Although she has agreed to wait for as long as needed, and although you are the final challenger, we encourage you to take your place in the arena as soon as possible. If you do not join within five minutes, I’m afraid we will need to forfeit your—”

“I’ll be there,” Moleman says once he’s recovered a bit. “Just give me a moment or two longer, yeah?”

She glances at me, but only briefly enough to where our eyes don’t actually meet. “...Very well. Five minutes.”

Moleman nods at her, and she leaves. Then he turns to me, smiles for a few seconds, and asks, “Do you still have that handkerchief I gave you?”

“Huh?” I say. “Oh, yeah, of course.” As if I would ever get rid of it. “Why do you ask?” He stares at me. I blink at him. “—Oh! So that’s…” I pull the handkerchief from my inventory and deposit it in his hand. “If you wanted it, you could just ask for it, no need to be all cryptic about i—”

While I’m still talking, he presses the handkerchief against my cheek, interrupting me.

What the heck is he—

When he pulls the handkerchief back, it’s a little wet. Huh? I touch my cheek. Oh, yeah. It’s wet. I can’t recall when that happened. As I’m thinking, Moleman wipes my other cheek too, before using a spell to clean the handkerchief. He hands it back to me. “I want you to keep it, but more than that—use it. Okay?”

Use it for what? What could possibly happen in these last few hours that would require the use of a handkerchief?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

…Not counting crying hidden by laughing, that is.

But he nudges it at me, and even though I want to point out that there’s no chance I’ll be able to use it before I’m gone, I accept it, slipping it back into my inventory. Maybe if I’m lucky I might drop it as loot after my execution, so it won’t be gone forever. On the other hand, I’ve heard that you can live for several minutes after your head gets cut off, so if I’m able to, I might be able to spend my last few moments alive by removing it from my inventory. That wouldn’t be so bad, I suppose.

“Well then,” Moleman says, abruptly standing up from where he’d been sitting. “How about we get going? I’ve got a match to fight, and you’ve got a front seat to occupy.”

Huh? Right now? Already? But… Okay, it’s a selfish thought and I know it, but it would be nice to stay here for a little bit longer. Can’t I enjoy this a bit more? But I can’t say that, so I simply smile, say, “Yeah,” and stand up out of bed. Then I remember that I’m naked and before either of us has time or cause to comment on it, I pull a leopard skin from my inventory, wrapping it around my midsection with expert ease. Our eyes meet. “You didn’t see anything.”

“Absolutely nothing,” he replies cheekily. And then, we head out.

Being a real gentleman, Moleman escorts me all the way to the seat he formerly occupied. And as I take a seat, I notice with some interest that the people around me, the people he sat next to before, are actually those teammates of his. I look at them in mild bewilderment, and they meet my gaze evenly. I would have expected them to stand up and walk away—that’s how people usually act when I sit next to them—but they remain. They even nod at me. As though my presence isn’t an intrusion. Like I’m supposed to be here.

I don’t have time to question Moleman about it before he slips away to take his place in the limelight. And now I’m sitting here, squeezed between that archer from before, and Ursula. Ah. So this is the true essence of torture? Crushed awkwardly between two people who clearly don’t like you? Makes sense, I suppo—

“Nice fight!” someone who must be a hallucination says. Huh? What? Where—oh, it’s the… archer? He’s talking to me? Why? And why did he say that? But instead of realizing the absurdity of what he just said in relation to everything, he simply grins. “I’ve gotta respect a man who can subdue his foes without a scrap of violence. That’s a true show of power! And your tactics there at the end with that cowgirl? Sure, you didn’t win or anything, but you really pushed her to the edge!”

Uhhh… Why is he talking to me? I look at the arena to try to catch Moleman’s gaze so I can send a telepathic message asking if he put him up to this. But Moleman’s busy shaking Rice’s hand, so it’s up to me to solve this, hopefully without bloodshed. I turn to him stiffly. “I have no idea what you’re talking abou—”

Before I can finish my loss of accountability, he grabs my hand out of the air, shakes it, and says, “I’m Rat! Short for RatAttack. Dumb name, I know, but we all have our issues, don’t we?”

As soon as he lets go of my hand, I pull it back, resisting the urge to hiss at him. Since he already knows my name from Moleman or Pain, I refuse his unspoken cue to introduce myself. Instead, I turn back to the arena, watching with true interest as the exciting finale begins.

After shaking hands, they both take their places on the opposite sides of the arena, eyes locked and faces set in resolute excitement.

“Since everyone down there looks ready, I believe it’s about time we let this final battle take its course,” Pain says grandly. “Now, ready, set… Go!”

Neither side moves. Then, after a moment, Rice draws her bow with all the solemn care of a funeral archer. On the other side, Moleman inexplicably undoes the clasp holding his right arm behind his back. What the heck is he doing—? However, the two people on either side of me, his comrades, don’t react in the slightest. No, as a matter of fact, Rat is grinning even wider, and Ursula… She’s got a small smile resting gently on her stiff face. As I look at her in mild confusion, she meets my gaze, which makes me want to run away a bit.

She chuckles at me. “Haven’t you ever seen him fight properly?”

Well, uh, I’ve seen him in the earlier rounds, of course. But he never needed more than one arm, so I don’t see what he might accomplish by involving his unusable one.

She ignores the words I didn’t speak aloud and turns back to the arena, even going so far as to point at Moleman. “Watch this, then.”

Following her finger, I look back at Moleman.

Even though the match started almost a minute ago, and although Rice is actively aiming at Moleman, she still lets him continue what he’s doing. It’s a bit amazing that she’s gotten this far despite being so chivalrous.

Fully trusting that she won’t just shoot him in the heart while he’s prepping, Moleman turns the straps around, affixing his arm in a weird way to where it’s formed into a fist just above his heart. Then, without even the slightest hint of hurry, he opens up one of his satchels, and pulls out a blue crystal orb. No, it isn’t just a crystal orb—inside of it, suspended in animation, is a single bloomed flower of some sort.

…No, not of ‘some sort.’ I know exactly which lady that is.

Lady 1 777.

…What the heck is she doing here? And stuck in an orb, too?

Before I have the time necessary to answer all of these questions, he carefully pries open the fist of his right arm, depositing the orb within the firm cage of fingers. I wouldn’t have been able to see it from a more distant seat, but as close as I am now, I can tell that the fingers of his right hand actually slip perfectly into five intricately carved grooves in the orb. And then…

—Not much. I was expecting some awesome effects to show up, like a pair of glowing wings or a halo of light, but there’s nothing like that. On the other hand, the complete lack of visual indication that anything is happening does grant an effect in and of itself. Namely, bewilderment.

An effect Rice doesn’t seem to notice.

In fact, now that Moleman has returned his attention to her, she understands that it’s time to begin. Smiling a twitch wider, she perks an eyebrow at him. He nods back at her. No words needed.

She pulls the arrow back an inch, lets the bowstring tremble, and then…

Fhew!

The arrow flies true, whistling through the air with pinprick precision, aimed perfectly for Moleman’s heart, ready to take him out in a single strike.

Or, at least, it would have, had it not abruptly swerved out of the way to slip right over his head. The audience goes silent. For a moment, Rice stares at the path it took from behind her bow. But then a grin splits her face and she pulls another arrow from her quiver, loads it up, and in less than a second it’s up and flying, flashing through the air like a bolt of lightning, only for it to once again curve around Moleman. It doesn’t look real. As a matter of fact, it looks fake. If you showed me a video of this, I would’ve declared shenanigans.

But Rice is persistent—or maybe she just likes the way it looks—so she fires again, and again, and again, sending more and more and more of her arrows into the moat just behind Moleman. In the end, she’s exhausted at least half of her supply, and Moleman hasn’t even moved a single step.

Moleman raises his hand, pointing it at her. “I hope you’re happy with that, because now, it’s my turn.”