Here, reader, is how the song went:
Tvuum. Tvuum, tvuum, hust! Tvuum, tvuum, hust!
Nathan scowled as his visor displayed the so-called translation of the chant. He was not scowling at the translation, per se, though he did take note of it and of its meaninglessness; he was practiced in many things, and among those things was giving a trivial amount of attention to scrolling text without being distracted from a battle.
Another was the art of giving just the right amount of consideration to what he would describe as shitposts in such conditions, such as the visor’s use of the phrase Tiffany problem. He knew this to be a term coined by the Earth author Jo Walton, the great queen of philosophical science fiction and fantasy of the early 21st century, and it described the situation where the name Tiffany felt anachronistic to modern-to-her readers despite it, as a form of Theophania, being quite a common name in Earth’s medieval England and France—and as such, a fantasy novel set in that time and place could not use the name without jerking a reader out of the flow of the novel, and terminating their reading trance.
Nathan also was practiced in having battle-companions appear from nowhere, fight by his side, and then die. Perhaps with less realism, yes, but there had been no time to explain and no time to internalize anything that was going on… and he, regardless, had no reason to expect regrets out of his erstwhile allies.
Plus ten lives. That was the pop-up he had been shown over Tiffany’s corpse in the moment of her death. Not in his visor’d eye, no—that one had been with his flesh eye, his mortal eye, his baseline and unassisted, unimproved eye. And he had understood perfectly in that flash of the moment why Tiffany had been so willing to assist. The woman had thrown away one life, and netted nine in exchange.
Nathan was not a particularly talented economist, as the billionaires (or would-be billionaires) at the golf club and the pet Austrian School economists who were the property of those magnates reminded him anytime he failed to agree with them rapidly enough. But he thought that perhaps he could understand the value of a catgirl’s nine lives.
Tvuum, tvuum, hust! Hoyadayeehvuum!
“This is really just too much,” he muttered, stepping back into a combat stance and shaking his head as the pain grew. “Steady on, Nathan. Steady on.”
Having exhorted himself properly, he shook his head again and grabbed for the pistol he’d picked up from the Hexarch, the one which had proven so efficacious—if also useless—against the egg-shaped mech. What he found was a few scraps and an almost psychic feeling of sheepishness as his living metal companion finished snacking on the last remnants of the gun. He sighed helplessly as his internal vision of defeating his final enemies with a casual act of gunfire as they showed off with their whipswords was vanquished before it had even properly taken hold, and then there was nothing to do but to settle into the moment and prepare to be thankful for what he was about to receive.
His rear foot kept tapping insistently, though. It was almost as if…
… as if he knew that song.
“Tvo hokkoho dum da dum dup de da pud,” he mutter-sang along with the rhythm, body swaying. “Tu mok da bok wa tokka tvuum tvuum. Hust!”
“HUST!”
As his two opponents agreed with him, he felt the power of the song fill his limbs. He knew he was going to fight them off—the armies of seven nations couldn’t beat him at that point, because the song itself was saying so. Back and forth through his mind that concept bounced, urging him forwards, urging him to strike with the unstoppable power of the lone warrior who shatters the realm before him.
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All he needed to do, he knew, was swing. Swing in this perfect way, drive the enemy before him. Every one of them had a story to tell, and every one of them was the hero of their own tale, but none of that would matter—the song was here, and the song was prophecy.
And the feeling coming from his bones said that his blade should find a home, and that home should be in the foe.
“Nah,” he muttered, and shuffled backwards instead.
“Oops-a-la,” his visor translated one of the two Flatlanders left standing as saying, and then he lunged sloppily and spitted her—and how did he know it was a her? Well, she was singing soprano, so he made an arbitrary decision to gender her on the basis of her voice; and by good fortune, he happened to be correct—on the eighteen-foot length of his formidable tool.
Her body swayed on the rapier-thin blade which pierced the innermost secret triangular prism in which she kept her phylactery, except that instead of it being a thinly veiled allegory for tefillin it was instead a “TERRANCE”-class AI chip which recorded her success at ending rivalries permanently whether or not she started them—or, if you will, a foe-lack Terry. This was not the narrative source of her true power, nor was it something required for her to remain registered with the tournament whose qualifying scrum Nathan had found himself in; but it was a piece of computational hardware integrated with her cognitive substrate.
Brains are plastic, by which, reader, you are not intended to understand that they are a petroleum product or a bio-equivalent to same. Rather, they change and shift as they are used, and the Flatlander’s brain-equivalent had grown into and around her TERRANCE chip to the point where its disruption cascaded—ah, I am losing you, dear reader.
Very well.
Terry died, and it fried her thinky bits along with it. So she died, and there was only one.
Nathan, in the meantime, had no time to spare to appreciate the vicious elegance of his strike, which was executed entirely by his wildly overpowered living weapon-and-armor. He had overcome the song-trap that had sought to lure him into a compromising position and bait him into dying to overconfidence, but his one remaining enemy had grown vast off of the buffs and enchantments and empowerments from the battlefield and its music. Previously only hip-high on him, the last of the Flatlanders now towered over him at eight feet tall and rippled with bulging rhomboids as each parallelogrammic muscle flexed in perfect harmony.
It was charging him, tapered cone lancing forwards with a red-hot tip, and he knew instantly that it would boil him from the inside if it so much as scratched his skin.
But there was more than one song that shared a beat.
He tapped his front toe to the ground twice and then slid it back, then did the same with his other foot. Then—tikka-tak-tak, his foot spoke, and then the other, tokka-tak-tik.
Tikka-tokka-tikka-tak, tikka-tak-tak-tokka-tikka-tik-tak, and Nathan’s feet took him in a spin as he brought his sword around and deflected the incoming lance strike, because his song said so, and surely the Flatlander didn’t know how to—
And then.
Ta-takka-tik tak-tik. Tikka-tikat-tikat!
The Flatlander flipped onto one hand for a beat, clapping its feet together to syncopate the rhythm as it spun, resuming its tap battledance as it landed upright once more. Tikka-tak-tak, it retorted, stealing the rhythm from Nathan’s very steps, and tokka-tak-tik, for it was by far the superior dancer and by even a greater margin the better battledancer. For whom did the Earthling think he was facing? Was this not a battle-hardened warrior who had survived the fight against the Tiffany? Was this not a leader empowered by the willing contribution of his followers’ last few black-blooded beats?
No. No, Nathan was not.
But then again, after those crucial few moments? Ah, neither was it.
The last of its dying compatriots… finished dying, and Nathan stepped forwards with a shake of his head.
“Good game,” he said gently to the warrior who was lying on the ground, having torn every tendon-equivalent and sprained every muscle in his body in the moment of the boosts running out. “Well played. No rematch.”
And with one smooth motion, he ended the duel.