“So, was that, like, an unbelievably apex display of skill and mastery?” Nathan folded his hands in front of him, raising an eyebrow at Tanya as she leaned her sword against the wall of the fountain. “Because I absolutely believe it if you say it was, I just literally couldn’t see anything. Is there any way to, like, get a replay or recording of it slowed down enough?”
“Oh wow, that would be a great idea.” Bo scratched the back of his head in contemplation, nodding in appreciation at the excellence of the notion. “A really great idea!”
“So… no,” Nathan offered, filling in the blanks.
“Oh! Yeah, no, I have no idea what it would take to do that.”
Nathan nodded at that. “I have no idea what we do now,” he said frankly. “I sort of lost the plot while watching that duel. Actually, I completely lost it, and now there’s no driving narrative that comes to mind. Do we, like, have some kind of extended bonding experience? Do clever puzzle games? Arm-wrestle? I don’t think I’d be much of a challenge for you at arm wrestling.”
“Hey, don’t talk yourself down.” Bo grinned, a grin that was pure and friendly. “You look strong too! You’re definitely stronger than I am smart.”
“So not arm-wrestling and not clever puzzle games. I guess we… finish the bag of popcorn?”
“Buddy. Pal. Friend!” Bo’s face took on a complete and total seriousness, a rictus of contemplation of the eternal and numinous Truth. “You are a genius. We should totally finish the bag of popcorn.”
Nathan popped a small handful of kernels in his mouth, barely chewing as they melted and brought bliss with them. His companion, for so the titanic man of rippling muscles was at that moment, did the same with a proportionately equal and absolutely far larger handful, and for a moment both of them had identical expressions on their faces.
“Thanks, by the way. For the lift, for the chance to watch the fight like this, for the popcorn.”
“Gosh, you don’t have to thank me for any of that. It was great to have company for the show. And the popcorn’s so much better shared than it would be alone!” Bo beamed in unfettered joy, then nodded downwards. “Hold up a sec though.”
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Obediently, Nathan held up and looked to where Tanya was standing with her hands on her hips, glaring up at the two of them.
“Well?”
“Yes ma’am?”
“Are you going to kill him or not? I’m done wasting time here.”
“Aw shucks, lady, I didn’t realize you were in a hurry.” Bo sighed, shaking his head. “Sorry about that. I mean, I just really enjoy the chance to talk to someone, you know? Listen,” he said with a sad smile, “I apparently gotta cut this short. Boss just chimed in to agree with the lady. So… thanks for the company, and enjoy the popcorn for both of us, alright?”
“The pleasure was mutual,” Nathan said with complete honesty. “Hope the boss takes it easy on you; you’re pretty great.”
A glimmer of something like rueful recognition met a matching glimmer of intellect in Bo’s eyes. He gave a nod, and then his body language changed completely as he first rolled his neck and then cracked his knuckles. Dropping straight down from the lip of the wall, he landed without heed for the fall and nodded more curtly at the woman he was facing.
He gleamed differently in that moment. Instead of glowing with a bright and wholesome radiance, there was something dark and twisted about the steel in his eyes and the glints of his muscles. His stance was looser and tighter at the same time, and an aura of death wrapped around him rather than the aura of life and joy that Nathan had completely failed to notice.
“So,” he intoned calmly, “my fifth wave is defeated. But your sword cannot harm—”
For a moment, so brief as to be almost unnoticeable but stretched into a fragment of eternity, a narrow cord reached across the dirt and grass and cobbles to touch him on the chest right where the heart would be in a person of flesh and blood. The courtyard went blindingly white a millionth of a second later, and a sound so brutally loud that it brought a total silence in its wake rocked the pocket-world as the return strike followed the path charted by the leader.
Nathan did not see the results, nor hear them. A sound of well over 160 decibels had ruptured out his tympanic membrane, blowing his eardrums out entirely and causing substantial soft tissue damage; a flash of light so bright as to make its measurement meaningless—what sense does a measure of lumens in the trillions make?—had bestowed upon him a totality of flash blindness which would brook no capacity for sight. And so Nathan neither saw nor heard the aftermath of Honeydew’s lightning strike meditatively built up for five waves’ worth of enemies. He did not see the avatar of the God of the Endless Dungeon shrivel and burst at the same time into fractal arcane and mathematical madness of an eldritch persuasion, nor did he hear its soul-rending and lethal scream of agony which gave even Honeydew some measure of gastrointestinal distress—though not technically an ulcer, as it had nothing to do with Helicobacter pylori and everything to do with a metaphysical side effect of the (temporary, be cautioned, dear Reader; even temporary, it is so) death of a God.
He lived, instead, mind avoiding destruction and devastation. Though perhaps… not for long.