“Well, Tamarind Rind,” a cheerful voice called out as the duel-bubble vanished as soap bubbles do when a child is trying to catch them.

“Well, Boombox! I’m not gonna pretend I expected that outcome,” came the immediate, baffled-sounding response.

“Okay, then I will! Gosh, I sure did expect and predict that outcome, didn’t I.”

Nathan shook his head, smiling faintly, still looking downwards. “They absolutely did not predict this outcome,” he said unnecessarily. “But that’s fine. Life is supposed to be full of surprises, even though that’s terrible.”

There was no response. There could not be a response—the last of the egg-mech’s crew was dead, its own internal anguish rendered literal by the application of an acute angle to its own hypotenuse. But he could imagine one, imagine a whole range of them; rage at defeat, respect at victory… well, he thinks to himself, not that one, not if it suicided.

Ultimately, he knew it didn’t matter why the triangulonic foe would not surrender, nor would it accept an offer to end the duel on an amicable basis. Perhaps understanding why would give him valuable cultural context for future encounters, but… would he ever encounter them again? He had no reason to expect not to, but he also knew himself to be completely ignorant of the overall structure of the multiverse. And so he simply reached down and, as the other corpses began to rapidly fade into nothingness, he placed the flat of his sword upon the forehead of the greatest enemy he had ever faced.

(This status would not remain assigned to that particular corpse for very long.)

“And the duel is over, isn’t it!”

“Yes, Boombox, that’s why the gray bubble that hid everything inside it from everyone else on the field is gone.”

“Gosh, Tamarind Rind, thank you for confirming that. But!” Boombox’s voice pivoted instantly from sarcastically simpering to an incisive patter, seamlessly becoming a consummate professional analyst instead of a wisecracking talking head. “Look over there! The team from Taktonics is done processing the bodies of Quarternion Evanescence Beleaguers. They did take three losses in doing so, but now they have a refreshed army of undead, and these are way more powerful, and look, they’re instantly launching them out of the carronade they’d been using earlier! Everyone thought it was completely useless, but look at Evan just absolutely turning into a fine mist as he gets punted through the annihilation field defending the Vovowavine fortification! That thing is beyond completely useless!”

“It sure is, Boombox,” Tamarind Rind agreed smugly. “And Dejaboja made it through the field but impacted against the surface of the fortress. It’s not like—wait, are those cracks in the wall?”

“Surely not, Tamarind. Are you telling me that—”

“Geale got misted by the annihilation field, but look at that mist go! It still has the same velocity that it did before it passed through!”

“There are cracks in the wall and the mist is through the shields! The corruption is going to be—”

Nathan tuned the voices out, correctly understanding that there was nothing to be learned from listening further for the moment. Whoever was in the fortification was doubtlessly going to die a horrible death, and he preferred not to consider that at length. Instead, he studied Tiffany’s body, considering carefully what he saw.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

She, unlike all of his foes and unlike Bob, had not faded or rapidly decomposed. Her pained-but-beatific smile remained fixed upon her face as she lay on her side in death, composed as though she were an artwork. Indeed, forsooth, and verily, this was as she’d intended it, because she had known herself to be dying; not exactly, since she had planned to be kneeling over her pommel rather than on her side after throwing a foe-stuck sword, but close enough that she counted it as a smashing success in her last moments.

Success, because of the dynamic, powerful elegance of every curve of her torn and sundered body—and smashing, because of the effectiveness of that hurl.

Nathan studied her body for long moments. He considered the mysterious Natasha’s words, that girl whose intervention had saved his life and started his adventure. He tossed them around in his head, rolling them around; he rotated them in his mind’s eye, as though they were a puzzle or a hypercube-based visualization exercise.

Megaman your way through as far as you can, she had told him before wishing him luck.

Well, Nathan thought to himself, megamanning, huh. There were no parts left from the Flatlander mecha, nor were there any weapons left from the same. And one of Bob’s pistols had survived the fight, but… well, those had been referred to as conversion rounds. And Nathan had no desire to be kicking off antimatter explosions at distances that might wind up being remarkably short—besides which, he had a strange tickling instinct which told him that any piece of ranged weaponry he found would be a boosted single-shot, or single-magazine, weapon in practice.

A single overpowered shot from one of those pistols seemed like an awfully terrible idea.

The railgun didn’t seem like the greatest of ideas, either. It was a big gun, suited to Tiffany’s six feet of height and her stupefying musculature. It had compressed the lion-girl’s six breasts rather than lying between them, and Nathan was fairly confident that trying to take it would leave him… impaired in his mobility, and unable to use it even minimally without actively leaning on his new living metallic companion and assistive existence.

He didn’t know a whole lot about his soulbound piece of equipment. What he did know was that he had no desire to be beholden to it, even if that was completely inevitable. And so, whether or not it was entirely rational to set the notion of the gun aside, he did so after only a moment’s further consideration.

His eyes narrowed as he looked at Tiffany again. Not at her gun, not at her sword—at her, at the skintight single piece of clothing and armor which had covered so little of her. He ran his finger across it, examining the seal of it as it passed over her curves, studying the way it shifted under his touch. His instincts—and how did he have those instincts, he asked himself, but at this stage in his lives he attributed it to an understanding of narrative logic and the theory of game interactions, which was quite incorrect. But ah, his instincts! They told him that the armor would come to him at a touch, that it would reshape itself to fit him and protect him, giving him near-perfect protection from harm until it took, in fewer than the few seconds it took to recharge, enough of said harm to kill him during that window.

“Useless,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Stops one bullet, then does nothing as the second bullet kills me.”

And in this regard, he was correct, and he knew himself to be correct.

So without any real alternative, he reached out and picked up her sword as Boombox and Tamarind Rind gave a play-by-play of three towering mecha getting into a knife fight with an even more towering kaiju who was supported by a cackling helicopter beetle. He swung it around, spinning it in his hand in a way that he would never indulge in during an actual fight, and pulled it into Plough Stance.

Kicking a clod of dirt up into the air and bisecting it with the blade, he idly pulled the sheath off of her hip and slid the sword inside it. Slipping the resulting package of lethality onto his own hip and watching it with his head cocked to the side as it nestled into his body as though it were magnetic, he gave an inquisitive hum and then shrugged.

He was losing his shit, he recognized, but he supposed that it was better than dying.

And then his sword was in his hand again, and he parried low and struck high.