Chapter 100: Arranged PVP

Our battleground was everything I’d promised Mask.

A triangle of open ground, grass where it wasn’t worn down to dirt. Some apartments overlooked it on one end, and our hotel was tall enough I could see the windows of its top story poking over the intervening buildings. Those were far enough away I didn’t think anyone could make out what we were up to.

Especially since our only lights came from our phone screens. Lamps shone through a few of the distant windows, street lights glowed from the main drag a block away, and a few stars shone overhead. Now and then, headlights marked the passage of a vehicle.

None of it seemed to touch the field, and there wasn’t any moonlight to pick up the slack.

Lena and I had kitted ourselves out as best we could. She had her phone strapped to her chest and her smart glasses on. We both had headsets to put us in touch with the rest of the team, and cameras on our shoulders. We wore our heaviest jeans and coats, plus some athletic pads for our knees and elbows. Mask’s paintballing gear would’ve been an upgrade. Was it as good as a real bulletproof vest, and, if not, could we get those? Something to research, something to buy.

Something out of our price range. What we had fit, if not our actual budget, then the budget we liked to pretend we had.

Hopefully, we’d still be around to see our credit card bills and regret our hubris.

I liked to think we were on the right track, because Third Eye interpreted our gear as armor.

Through my phone camera, Lena’s avatar glowed like a steel cage trying to contain molten lava. Her wings trailed flames behind her, and burning ringlets of hair curled at the base of a helmet with a pattern that evoked her usual crown.

I’d seen my avatar’s getup. Nothing so fancy, as usual, but at least I got a padded jerkin in place of my usual tunic. Apart from Lena, Matt was the only person whose avatar I’d seen take on an armored configuration, and his had looked a lot like this.

A good reminder. Matt’s armor apparently hadn’t helped him much when Mask invaded him.

As for the man himself...

“Fourteen minutes,” Mask called. “You actually made it.”

Lena tossed her hair. “You sound disappointed. You really wanted to get pissed at us, huh?”

“After you dragged me all the way to the ass end of Texas,” he said, “I already was. You breaking the rules would make it fair.”

“The rules you imposed,” I said.

He didn’t respond verbally, and if he twitched, I couldn’t see him do it.

Without my phone, Mask would’ve been essentially invisible: a triangle of black against the darkness of the lot. From the way his voice echoed, I knew he had his back to us, so we couldn’t even see the porcelain of his namesake.

Good thing I had my phone.

If anything, Mask’s attire looked more deeply black through Third Eye, but there was a glossiness to his cloak that reflected the light of Lena’s flames. Even the distant stars and street lights seemed to shine back from him. I felt like I shouldn’t have had as clear a sense of his outline as I did.

Maybe Third Eye didn’t approve of stealth builds.

“You actually left your Daimon behind?” Mask asked. I wondered how he was checking without turning to look at us.

Whatever he was doing, he sure didn’t have a complete picture. Lena had left both her Daimons behind, and neither had seemed real pleased by it. The last we’d seen of Bernie, he’d been growling from where we left him in Donica’s arms. Ryu had contributed a string of frowny faces from his temporary home on my computer.

“I’d be a pretty crappy pet owner if I asked Bernie to fight for me,” Lena said. “And a pretty crappy player if I needed his help to beat you.”

“Bullshit!” Mask tensed for a second, then, with what looked to me like a lot of effort, shrugged. “Whatever. It won’t make any difference.”

“I have to admit,” I said, “I wasn’t sure you’d just stand here waiting for us.”

Mask turned at last. I only knew because the familiar oval of his namesake shone out of the darkness. All three of his eyeholes fixed on me. “You think I’m scared of you, OldCampaigner?”

I forced myself to shrug. “I think agreeing to fight us two on one is... ambitious, considering everything we’ve logged this past week.”

“Then you’ve got a lot more to learn,” he said.

“Always.” For once, I could smile at him honestly. “I’m just saying, man. We can still settle this without a fight.”

“For what it’s worth,” Lena said, “I’m not convinced we can. Also, if I want to.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You should listen to Ashbird,” Mask said. “There’s nothing to settle.”

“You sure?” I asked. “You could always tell us where our friends are.”

His mask tilted back. “Pointless.”

“Why?” I asked the question even though I was pretty sure I knew what his answer would be.

He proved me right. “Because you’ll see them soon enough.”

So I stepped forward, spread my hands, and said, “Okay.”

For a moment, nobody answered.

“What?” Echoed back and forth across the field, distorted by Mask’s voice changer. Plus the fact Lena had shouted it at the same time he had.

I took another step forward. “Use your Key – yeah, we know what it is – and send me through. I can see what it is that has you so spooked, and talk to the people on the other side, and, again, we can settle this like grown-ass adults.”

Lena grabbed my arm. “No way. You want to let him pick us off one by one?”

I reached up and squeezed her hand. “I want to avoid a fight, if we can.”

She shook me. “And lose one if we can’t.”

I turned just enough to catch her eye, while keeping my own on Mask. “If it came down to it, you could always just beat him yourself.”

“I mean, you’re not wrong.” Lena let go of me to cup her chin. Then she tensed. “That wouldn’t bring you back, dummy!”

I found it surprisingly easy to grin. “Would you be okay with it if we both went through the Key?”

She hunched her shoulders. “Okay, yeah. That works. Although I’d still rather kick Mask’s ass first.”

We both shifted our stances toward him. Neither of us had actually looked away.

“Well, Mask?” I reached out with my free hand, palm out. “You came here to grab Ashbird and I. Here we are.”

The sound of Mask’s gloves clapping together rang like a gunshot in the empty field.

I didn’t think it meant he wanted to take us up on our offer.

“Nice acting,” he said. “Did you adlib it, or did you script it while you spent the last week running away from me?”

My grin turned rueful. “Scripted.”

“Cut us some slack,” Lena said. “We only just started doing YouTube a month ago.”

“No,” Mask said. “I don’t think I will.”

He snapped his hands to his sides. His cloak rippled and pooled at his feet. Tendrils crept across the dirt toward us.

“We may have rehearsed our lines, Mask,” I said, “but they weren’t lies. All we want to do is save our friends. Learning what you want is literally a bonus. Why insist on fighting us?”

“You want me to send you through with all your resources intact? To believe you’ll understand? To trust you?” His staticy laugh cut through the air. “Never again!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lena shift her attention to me. She mouthed, “Again?”

I started to shake my head.

Mask’s darkness slammed into our shields.

Trying to talk him down had been worth a shot. The next time I walked into a serious fight without a plan to defuse it would be the first. Maybe it didn’t bode amazingly that this would be the first time I knowingly walked into a serious fight at all, but still.

Let’s be real, though.

Mask talked a decent game about being the hero of his own story, but everything from his actions to his outfit screamed that he didn’t like the kind of narrative where the “hero” got his way without throwing hands.

Just as Lena and I had rehearsed our scripts, we’d rehearsed our defenses.

My fingers flew across my screen, pumping more Air into the Iron I’d been primed to conjure before I ever started talking.

Lena and I had each blocked Mask’s attempt at a surprise attack, but now I took over the tanking duties. Mask’s blows thudded dully against the sides of my Iron, not so much blocked as cut off before they could form into proper attacks. When he swung his hands around to try to strike us from behind, I flicked my shield back to mash the darkness into the soggy ground.

At the same time, Lena’s Iron blazed red-hot with Fire, then shot forward with Air. Mask dropped any pretense of offense to draw his cloak up between the two of them. The darkness rippled and buckled where she struck, but her attack did rebound off it.

I started to whip my own Iron in at a different angle.

Mask pivoted in a heartbeat, conjuring a lance of darkness from the pool he’d snuck around our backs.

I didn’t react as quickly and my shield had twice as far to travel. So what? With four Air pumped into my Iron, Mask might as well have been attacking through molasses.

Lena struck again, perfectly timed with my deflection, and Mask didn’t manage to get his cloak in the way. Her Iron smashed him to the ground, then glowed brighter as she pumped in more Fire for another attack.

Mask rolled out of the way and up to his feet, and both sides of his cloak swept up to block Lena’s strike.

Which meant he was defending with both hands.

He had none left to deflect my Iron, careening down from overhead. It smashed him to one knee. When his hand shifted to brace himself against the dirt, Lena’s object reformed into a crude missile and shot through the gap in his conjured darkness.

Lena said, “Shit.”

Though I couldn’t see why, I nodded. “We knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.”

She shrugged. “A girl can dream, yeah?”

Mask drew himself up. He snapped his hands to his sides, flaring his cloak once more. His avatar’s chestplate, black leather crisscrossed with straps, so glossy it shone almost as much as his cloak, looked undisturbed. It certainly wasn’t lit by a glowing projectile inches away from it.

Lena’s missile had vanished.

“You know,” Mask said, “when you bailed on a repeatable source of Tickets to get away from me, I wondered if you weren’t worth invading, after all. If you weren’t as strong as I’d hoped.”

Lena groaned. “Careful you don’t get a boo boo from all that edge. Do you even listen to yourself?”

“Even if I’m the only one who will,” he said. “I don’t care about your opinions. Just that you’re worth my time.”

“And?” Lena asked.

Mask brushed the dirt from his gloves. “You’ll do.”

“What changed your mind?” I asked. I kept my gaze fixed on him, and decidedly not on the hints of motion in the darkness behind him.

I couldn’t see his expression, and his voice changer made his mood hard to read. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but imagine a grin splitting his face when he said, “When I realized you were trying to set a trap.”