Chapter 117: The Magnificent Ashbird
The sun continued to rise over the tree line, the snow continued to melt beneath Lena’s wings, and Allen continued to press his Iron down on her chest.
“That’s enough,” Matt said. “If she’s too proud to surrender –”
I whispered, “The Magnificent Ashbird isn’t asking for audience participation.”
Matt started to push himself from his chair. “How the hell can you sit there and let Allen do this to her? Aren’t you going to fight him?”
“Fight him?” I tore my eyes away from Lena long enough to glance at Matt. For just a second, I allowed myself the savage grin I’d been holding back all morning. “I beat him last night. Didn’t have to lift a finger.”
Plans, after all, were my department.
Matt stared at me.
Slowly, he eased back into his chair.
The rest of the audience looked my way as well, which probably meant I’d spoken too loudly.
Sure enough, I saw Allen’s mask tilt in our direction.
I called out, “Sorry. I couldn’t let somebody interfere.”
“It’s all good,” Lena said.
Allen’s attention snapped back to her. His arms shifted. His Iron pressed down.
Until Lena pushed it off her. Not with a Third Eye object. Sure as hell not with a mighty feat of strength. She just braced her back against the muddy ground and gave the Iron a shove. What looked like a hundred plus pounds of solid metal raised over her outstretched hands like it was papier-mache.
Allen tried to slam it into place again and she held it on the tips of her gauntleted fingers.
She climbed to her feet. It would’ve looked even more impressive if she hadn’t slipped in the mud, but even then, nothing Allen tried so much as budged her.
His fist curled. “I know how much HP you’ve got, Ashbird. You post it on the damned wiki. I know how much that had to have hurt! Why don’t you just quit already?”
Lena tapped her chin, which left just one hand holding the Iron at arm’s length. “If I had to guess, I’d say... because of a trick?”
“Bullshit!” Allen chopped his hand down and his Iron went with it. The sound of its impact against Lena’s armor pealed through the air.
Lena made no effort to stop it. She just looked down and sighed.
Allen backed up. “No way did you get this powerful. No way you got stronger than me. You can’t trick your way out of that!”
“Okay, so.” Lena’s voice softened. I’d been expecting this callback, but I’d figured it would sound mocking. Instead, she kept her tone gentle, almost apologetic. “I think that conclusion is kinda dumb?”
“W-what?”
“‘Tricks ain’t shit?’” Lena shook her head. “What do you call the way you defend with your Key? Or the way you let Phantom do most of the fighting so you can catch people by surprise? Or even that heated edge attack you stole from Gerry?”
Allen’s voice changer crackled as he sputtered.
“Tricks are the shit in Third Eye,” Lena said. “You and Matt like to go on and on about what’s supposedly ‘literally the point’ of Daimons in the game? Well this is literally the point of the whole damn game. This is what it’s trying to teach us.”
“You can’t know that,” Allen said.
“Honestly?” Lena ducked her head. “You’re right. I can’t.”
He started to straighten up.
“I can make an educated guess, though,” she said. “I can watch what happens every time the principle is put to the test and see what works and what doesn’t. Most importantly, I can prove my way of playing the game will beat yours. It won’t even be close.”
Allen barked a laugh. Maybe it was the voice changer, maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but I thought it sounded more hysterical than mocking. “You’ve barely even hit me.”
“That,” Lena said, “is what should really worry you.”
His shoulders stiffened. “You think I’m scared of you?”
“I hope not.” Her smile slipped. I hated how tired, how sad she looked so much more than I had watching her pretend to lose a match. “I’m still kind of pissed off at you, Allen, but I legit don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to be scared. I want you to listen. For your sake, for Phantom’s, and especially for Jan’s.”
“You got no right to talk about my sister!” Allen snapped his hand forward. Phantom and his Iron alike hurled themselves at Lena. Again, she made no move to deflect either.
Beside me, Matt grunted.
I shot him a glare. Sure enough, he’d fixed his gaze on the point on Lena’s armor the Iron had bounced off of.
When he’d wanted to help her, I’d at least agreed with his sentiment, even though I’d had to stop him from interfering. If he was going to start giving Allen tips mid-match, he and I would have a lot more of a problem. I respected his passion for teaching, but there’s a time and place, man!
He didn’t say anything, though, just stared at the armor and smirked.
Specifically, he stared at the dent.
Like the outfits our avatars wore, Third Eye armor seemed to be more or less cosmetic. It didn’t actually protect us, it just reflected our understanding that we needed protection.
On the flipside, it didn’t scuff or deform when we took damage.
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If we somehow continued to manifest it after our HP ran out, it might start taking damage just like our bodies would. We’d never had the chance to test what happened when we ran out of HP during the narrow window when we were absorbing a Reactant and appeared as our avatars in the physical world. Under any other circumstances, our gear disappeared with the last of our HP.
Matt already understood. If Lena’s armor could be dented, it meant it wasn’t part of her avatar.
In a way, this, too, was a borrowed trick, and it had started out as one of his. When he guest starred on Lena’s channel, he’d shaped himself a suit of Iron armor and tried to use it for both offense and defense. That had limited how he could attack, though, and forced him to keep manipulating the Iron just to move around.
Last night, Lena and I had refined his concept.
Her armor was the purest expression of the idea that Third Eye rewarded tricks, not power. Not only did it not require a ton of any one Reactant, it wouldn’t work if you used more than a single unit of Earth to shape each piece.
Shaped with one Earth, the plates were hardly aligned with the real world at all. As far as Lena’s body was concerned, her armor weighed little more than aluminum foil, and if anything, offered less protection.
As far as Allen’s attacks were concerned, Lena’s armor was steel so heavy a person couldn’t even walk in it. Instead of flinging around a shield to protect herself, she was wearing dozens of shields, and each bulky Iron plate was backed with a unit of Plastic that she’d used Water to shape into dense, springy foam padding.
Between Allen and Phantom, they could punch through both layers eventually.
Eventually was a long time when your opponent no longer had to worry about defending herself.
Phantom’s inky pseudopods battered Lena’s armor. As far as I could tell, he couldn’t hurt her at all. He certainly hadn’t so far. Allen hurled strikes at her; those, at least, left dents, but nothing broke through.
Lena ignored them. She took her time crafting a missile, sleek and aerodynamic Iron, and hurled it at Allen. He was too frustrated to even try to block and it caught him in the chest. His grunt hissed through his voice changer.
Lena snapped the missile back and forth with tight, linear motions. Her two Air didn’t do much damage, but each strike had to at least sting.
“Fuck,” Allen screamed. “This doesn’t make any sense!”
“It would if you stopped to think about it,” Lena said.
When we worked out the plan, I’d asked her – begged her – not to turn the match into a tutorial in real time. We weren’t filming this, it wasn’t going to show up on her channel, and the lessons she wanted Allen to learn would sink in better after she’d kicked his ass.
She’d said they would sink in even better if she gave him every chance to recognize them in advance, and he didn’t take it.
Watching her now, as she flicked her missile into him over and over again, driving him back, sapping his HP, making him madder and madder, I thought we had different definitions of giving somebody a chance.
Not that I was complaining.
“Phantom,” Allen said, “keep her off me.”
“What kind of jerk makes his pet tank for him?” Lena snapped.
Her missile darted forward.
Phantom rippled to intercept it.
“He’s not –” Allen’s response garbled into static when Lena’s missile transformed in mid-flight, shifting smoothly from Air to Earth to dodge away from Phantom and jab into Allen’s boot. He hopped backwards, cursing.
Still, he flung his Iron forward, one strike after another, trading HP for damage if only he were doing any damage.
Eventually, he’d have to give up attacking entirely. Even the smallest hit was still a hit. They added up, while his own did nothing to her.
The one thing we hadn’t been able to plan around was that we weren’t sure how much HP he had. Had he spent Tickets on it, or found some other way to raise his total from what we’d read in those earliest invasion reports? Had he gone into those reported invasions below full HP?
If either of those were true, all the momentum in the world might not be enough for Lena to beat him. With enough HP, he could literally run her out of MP before he dropped.
Neither of us believed he’d cranked his HP, though. Matt, Nadia, Bob, and Ramon had said they’d been able to drop him to zero just a week ago. He’d started using Phantom to tank attacks and teleported especially nasty ones through his Key. More tricks he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, but surely they explained his increased durability.
Surely.
I felt sweat bead against the lining of my gloves.
Lena could beat Allen, I knew that now. If he’d realized about her armor in advance and had time to either come up with a counter or craft his own suit? Maybe not. Like this, though, with him too caught up in defending himself to process what she’d done, absolutely.
Could she beat him without hurting Phantom?
I knew she would try. I respected the hell out of her attempt.
Let’s be real, though. If some asshole trains their dog to attack you and it starts ripping into your arm while they advance on you with a knife, that’s awful, it’s not the dog’s fault and it’s awful, but you’ve still got to do whatever it takes to get that dog off you or you’re gonna die.
Lena could make her point about playing the right way just by refusing to use her own Daimons in a match, without tying her hands behind her back to avoid hurting the one that was actively fighting her.
The last traces of even a sad smile disappeared from her face. She set her mouth in a hard line and tapped her phone.
Her missile began to glow.
Allen tensed; though I couldn’t see exactly where he was looking behind his mask, the shift in his body language told me he was considering the use of his Key. How much Fire would Lena need to put in before he used it instead of letting Phantom tank?
More than one, it turned out.
When Lena lunged forward, Phantom threw himself between Allen and her missile. Darkness roiled; the Third Eye version of Allen’s mask went from comedian to tragedian.
The missile skittered across the snow, deflected, but a flick of Lena’s hand sent it flying back at Allen. She tried to dip it around Phantom’s folds, but the Daimon moved faster than she could without spending more MP to swap back to Air.
All the while, Allen battered her defenses. The heated edge of his Iron finally cut into one of her oversized pauldrons. He tried to jerk his object back and it took him two pulls to dislodge it. A hint of burning plastic wafted through the air.
My eyes narrowed. He had to know that wasn’t how Third Eye equipment behaved.
He did.
“So that’s how it is,” he muttered.
He wound up and struck again, aiming for the crack. Lena managed to twist so his Iron struck sidelong, but that just served to damage the pauldron further. So what if she hit him three times while he attacked? Phantom tanked it all, and while the Daimon’s cloak looked increasingly ragged, he remained in the fight.
Lena nodded. “That’s how it is.”
Allen threw his head back and barked a laugh. “Dumbass! You think I can’t open something up?”
He flung his Iron at Lena, but by the time it slammed against her breastplate, he’d already deselected it. The lightless plane of his Key appeared in the air. He pressed it forward.
Lena dodged, but her hand slipped into the Key.
I tensed, even though I knew from Gerry’s abduction that the Key didn’t cut or disintegrate objects that went through its edge the way portals did in some games.
Sure enough, Lena’s hand emerged unscathed.
I could tell, because the bulky gauntlet she’d shaped with Third Eye had vanished.
“Well,” Lena said, “shit.”
“You should’ve hit me harder when you had the chance,” Allen snapped. “Now I’m gonna peel you out of that tin can.”
“I guess it can’t be helped,” Lena said.
I swallowed. I whispered, “Gerry.”
Everybody except the two combatants looked at me. Gerry said, “Huh?”
“I think you’d better stand in front of Jan and call up a shield.”
To his credit, he got up and did as I asked, despite the confusion twisting his features. “Why?”
“Yeah,” Jan said. “Don’t you try to baby me.”
Because, I thought, you don’t have any HP. I was too busy calling up my own shield to answer.
I knew the phrase Lena was about to invoke. In her own way, she was almost as ridiculous as Allen, and I suspected she had less of an excuse. Why did her version delight me while his made me roll my eyes?
Down in the practice yard, like the wonderful dork she was, Lena’s voice rang out without a hint of shame. “Sometimes, you have to use ‘that.’”