Nathan knew himself to be outmatched the moment he gave his first riposte.
With the duel-bubble burst, he had a full view of the scrum’s battlefield, one that seemed to be better and clearer than it had been before despite the occasional gout of smoke, fire, haze, or gaseous weaponry. This included his opponent, a faintly smiling androgynous figure who was completely still except when moving purposefully, in which case they were moving very much faster than his eyes could easily follow.
The opponent in question was very rarely still.
Were it not for his assistive equipment, Nathan was confident that he would have died in the second exchange. The alien, for the humanoid was too featureless and bland to be human even if they had been in his home dimension, danced around his every blow and their counters were like lightning. Only the deflection of his living metal left his limbs unsevered, though the impacts were still bruisingly painful. And every attack he made was, in turn, parried or turned aside with casual ease.
The eight suns—eight, for he could see an eighth one now; this was the measure of vision in that place, and he was now eight-sun-levels-sighted, or possessed of eight levels of sight—were warm, and his exertions left him warmer. He dripped with sweat that soaked through his polo shirt, that uniform of the so-recently-destroyed golf club, and if he had been wearing socks he would have worried that the wetness would result in the promotion of fungal growth in a world whose equivalent of clotrimazole he was not familiar with.
He did, however, distantly remember the feeling of the living metal coating his arm, and the way it felt like it had exfoliated the skin. So perhaps he was aware that his days of worrying about his skin care routine had come to an emphatic end, and not only because he would soon die.
Ah, reader, yes—he would, indeed, soon die.
But not to the next exchange of blows, nor to the next, for even as the mysterious attacker in its pale blue billowing cloak and pale gray robes left another pair of bruises along Nathan’s shoulder, the young man asked a simple question.
“Why are you training me?”
The figure paused, sword resting lightly against the other blade mid-deflection.
“I know you aren’t trying to kill me,” Nathan said matter-of-factly. “For one thing, Metal—” for he had needed a way to describe his equipment, even if that was certainly not what he was going to name it— “would have eaten your sword or something, probably. For another, your sword’s blunt. And for a third, you always outplay me by just enough to show me something I’m doing wrong. So I’m asking you again. Why are you training me?”
The figure shrugged gently, and the translation of this reply appeared on the visor which was resting thin over one of Nathan’s eyes. “In the tomes of old and the sayings of the sages, it is written that one day came one from beyond the stars, beyond even the beyonding itself. And this one fought with the great sages of the Tanned and with the great sages of the Zug and with the great sages of the MIAROMA and with the great sages of the Maim! Savor! Vore!, and these four collections of great sages were one and all under the stars as the Cus All, for they knew that they would return to the world and must in their second incarnations avoid the act of rule—they would be the Re Cus All, and they would fade into the shadows.
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“And then did the one from beyond the beyonding walk the world for an age, and as the world turned there grew new sages, the sages of the Nim. And these were the Gee Nim, the Rizz Nim, and the Aha Nim, and they gathered their armies and their merchants and their scholars, and each in turn did battle with the visitor. And the sages of the Nim became wiser and more powerful, and their armies became more cohesive and more distilled, which was a terrible thing because soldiers will wage war even when they could make peace and in so doing they will make of the fields a desolation; but the farmers fed the one from beyond the beyonding and their crops killed the soldiers and ate their bones, and the merchants grew clever and skilled in game theory and devised the ultimate long con in which they would pretend to be ethical and everyone would believe them because they were making the world a better place, those suckers, and the scholars became so brilliant as to distill all of those happenings into one cohesive whole and understand what was going on.
“But most powerful of all was the sages, and they left this knowledge and wisdom for the future: if the
Nathan’s eyes finished flickering across the scrolling text, and he sighed and shrugged. “Okay, valid,” he muttered. He tried to parry the incoming strike that he could sense coming at him, and did well enough that the androgynous stranger was unable to brush his parry aside and leave yet another bruise on him. “So we’re really good at, what, training people? Leveling them up? Is this a video game world?”
That got him a narrowed pair of eyes and a straight thrust to the solar plexus that almost punched the air out of him. “No, dumbass,” came the translation of the narrowed pair of eyes, “reincarnators are the center of the narrative. Everything revolves around them. Being near you assholes makes us better; the more defined by our proximity to you we are, the more it refines us. Fight you, fight beside you, make something for you, the more time on the screen we have the more we grow. But now there’s only one kill left before the end of the scrum, so!”
And with that, the stranger turned into a blur of strikes.
And Nathan blocked and parried as the sword he’d taken off of Tiffany’s body woke up and started to fuck with time and space.
High parry, low parry, deflect and riposte. He barely avoided being disarmed, and then twisted his body around an incoming strike as a blast of energy sent the opponent’s sword off-center. He ducked under the next blow, rolled to the side, parried twice, side-stepped, and then stepped forwards as if going for a clinch and sprang backwards.
Then he turned and threw his sword through the chest of the guy creeping up behind him, because it turns out that trying to sneak up behind someone with a primordial precursor piece of equipment that’s mostly focusing on sensory enhancement and situational awareness is a really bad idea.
And so ended the scrum. Not with a whimper, but with a lot of banging and explosions and dying.
Just how the sponsors and viewers liked it.