Chapter 118: To The Victor

In one moment, Lena and Allen faced off across the practice field, surrounded by snow and mud and the walls beyond. I stood on the back porch with everyone else; All of us but Jan conjured shields and braced ourselves.

In the next, a thunderclap ripped the air apart, I was on my ass, my ears were ringing, and the practice field had become a haze of snow.

I dragged myself up, groaning, blinking. My butt and back hurt from the impact and that pain didn’t go away a heartbeat later. I didn’t have to scrape my phone off the porch to know my HP were gone, but I confirmed it anyway.

When my vision cleared enough for me to look around, I saw Gerry was still on his feet and Jan was still in her chair, more or less shielded. Everyone else had fallen like I had.

In the field –

Allen cried, “Ah! Get it off!”

“Bro!” Jan screamed. She scrambled around Gerry and would’ve jumped off the porch if he hadn’t caught her waist.

“Here,” he said. She beat her fists against his arm, but he ignored them and lowered her easily to the snow.

I bounded down after her.

“It’s okay.” Lena’s voice cut through the cloud of snow, soft but firm. “You’re okay.”

Enough of the snow settled that I could make out movement. A larger figure on its back, scrambling away from the smaller one kneeling near it. Allen downed, Lena beside him.

She reached out.

“Don’t touch me!” Allen rasped. To my ringing ears, his voice sounded high, reedy, breathless. I realized his voice changer must have been fried by Lena’s attack.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” she said. “But you’ve got to let me or Jan or somebody take that mask off.”

He flinched. His shoulders sagged. “... okay.”

Lena touched his face. When her hands pulled back, they held a broken porcelain oval, trailing scraps of fabric and wire. She whispered, “Oh, God.”

Allen’s head snapped up.

By then, Jan had reached them. She skidded to her knees and shoved Lena away. “I’m here, bro.”

“Sis? Don’t –”

“I got you.” She threw her arms around his shoulders. He buried his face against her neck.

Lena had allowed herself to be pushed. She rocked backwards.

The mask tumbled from her hand and rolled across the snow. As the last of the cloud finished settling or blowing away, I finally saw the results of her sealed secret technique.

In the real world, it had left a deep divot in the ground where Allen had stood. Not quite a crater, but enough that all the flash-melted snow ran into it. Arrows of mud pointed all around it where they’d been flung. The impact hadn’t been huge, more hand grenade than artillery piece, but it was so, so much more than we’d seen a normal player do with Third Eye.

Through the game’s filter, the destruction looked far worse. All our shields had buckled. The captives had all gone for Iron, and each of their shields had bent and warped. Mine, Stone, had fared a little better, but the side facing up was pitted and blackened. Several of the crude barricades ringing the practice field had collapsed, while others sagged against their cracked, singed posts.

This was Air as a Material, activated with all seven Fire at Lena’s disposal. A week ago, someone had posted on the wiki that they could create “controllable lightning” with that combination. It sounded super cool, but they’d been flooded with reminders that they’d permanently spent a precious Reactant.

A Reactant wasn’t so precious when you could buy it back with Tickets. Lena would’ve used one for this match even if it was her last, though.

It had proven every bit as fast as we’d hoped. Allen never stood a chance of blocking it with a conjured object, much less the Key he’d flung far from his body to open up Lena’s armor.

Trouble was, it hadn’t been as controllable as promised. A difference in practice? Or between one Fire and seven?

Even Lena’s own armor hadn’t been spared. The plates were bent and distorted, and some had outright fused together. It no longer looked like the shining armor of a cliched hero from a modern anime. Try the uneven, misshapen mecha of a cannon fodder alien in one from the ‘80s. If it had been any more aligned, I didn’t think she would’ve been able to bend her arms; as it was, I heard the plates grinding when she tried.

Almost a third of Allen’s mask had broken off, from one eyehole down to the corner of the rictus grin. I wondered if it would be restored to pristine condition when Phantom respawned the next day.

The electronics trailing behind it, what little was left of Allen’s voice changer, wouldn’t. Whatever insulation he’d added to his armor after our first fight back in Denver, it hadn’t been even close to enough to protect the device against this. The acrid smell of slagged wires and burned plastic assaulted my nose as I neared it. Parts of its casing had blackened.

I shivered and it had nothing to do with the cold.

Lena’s attack itself would, at worst, have taken the last of Allen’s HP. If the voice changer had overloaded and caught fire right next to his face, though...

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I crouched beside her and hugged her shoulders. Her armor offered the impression of resistance, like I was embracing her through a layer of wadded up paper, but it didn’t actually stop my arms from encircling her.

She looked up at me. “Oh God, Cam.”

“How bad is it?” I pitched my voice low to try to keep Allen and Jan from hearing, but I didn’t think they were paying us any attention.

Lena said, “He’s just a kid.”

I frowned. “I meant the burn.”

“It doesn’t matter how bad it is.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have risked hurting him at all.”

I exhaled. “We already figured he was younger than us, Lena.”

“He doesn’t just look ‘younger than us.’” She stared past me.

I wrenched my gaze away from her and turned.

Allen had sat up. When he noticed us staring, he shoved his face against Jan’s shoulder again.

Too late.

I’d already seen his soft features, still round with puppy fat. His big brown eyes. The acne speckling his nose and cheeks. He might look more like Jan someday, thinner, sharper-faced, with just a few hints of pockmarks on his cheeks.

Someday. You know. A couple years away.

Jan wasn’t his little sister at all.

At least the injury from his shorted-out voice changer didn’t look too awful. Blistered skin from the fire, oily smudges from the smoke. A painful burn, but not a dangerous one.

Not that that seemed to calm Lena any. She jerked out of my arms and padded across the mud to where Allen and Jan huddled. I drifted along in her wake.

Jan glared up at us. “What?” she snapped.

Lena bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”

Jan looked away, her eyes disappearing beneath her layers of winter wear. “For what?”

“I didn’t realize how young you were, Allen,” Lena said. “I didn’t realize what would happen with your voice changer, either. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I should’ve been more careful.”

Allen’s head snapped up. Jesus, he looked young! I’d been tricked by his height into assuming he was at least an older teenager, but now, with the grace of his avatar stripped away, it was achingly obvious he wasn’t that old. When he pushed himself to sit upright, he moved with the gawky uncertainty I remembered from my own growth spurt. What did that make him? Fifteen? *Fourteen*?

“Don’t you dare pity me.” He tried to conjure his antihero persona, but without the voice changer, he stood no chance. His voice broke as he spoke and his unburnt cheek turned as red as the blistered one. He looked away and tried to hide in his sister’s embrace and his tattered cloak.

Lena knelt beside the siblings. “Can’t help it, kiddo.”

“It’s my fault, too,” I said.

Lena’s head snapped toward me. “Cam, no! You’re not the one –”

I raised an eyebrow. “– who planned for you to pull Allen’s Key away from his body so he couldn’t defend himself? Then break out an Air with seven Fire?”

“Seven!” Allen gulped. “Shit. Shit! You been holding back on me all along.”

“Not enough, obviously,” Lena said.

“I thought –” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I was so dumb!”

Lena opened her mouth to speak.

I trusted her in a lot of ways. To try to do the right thing. To play Third Eye magnificently.

To tell an injured kid on the verge of tears he’d been dumb when that was manifestly, dangerously true?

Call me an untrusting asshole if you want, but I cut her off. “Lil’ bit.”

Lena and Jan both glared at me. Allen flinched.

I crouched beside them and held my hand out. “Sorry, but you all know it’s true. You got dealt a terrible hand, Allen. The way you played it still wasn’t right, or smart.”

Allen sucked air through his teeth.

“You already got what you want,” Jan said. “Why won’t you leave us alone?”

“Because leaving you alone would be dealing you another low card on top of everything you’ve already gotten,” I said.

“If they had a hand that was really bad,” Lena said, “wouldn’t another low card probably give them a pair or something?”

I slowly turned to her. “That is so not the point.”

It was the right thing to say, though.

Allen snuffled, snorted, and couldn’t quite suppress a laugh. The corners of Jan’s eyes crinkled. She tried not to chuckle, failed.

Her cough cut her off.

Allen tensed. “You better get back inside.”

“‘m fine,” Jan muttered.

She wasn’t, and we all knew it. Allen stood up and helped her to her feet, practically carried her. I wanted to offer a helping hand, but I’d seen how they flinched away from us and couldn’t really blame them.

Instead, Lena and I followed them up the steps. The captives watched us. No longer captive, if Allen abided by the terms of the match – not that he had much choice anymore.

Silently, Gerry opened the cabin door. Jan shuffled through. Allen followed with his arm around her shoulders.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what to say.

When I turned, I found Lena nose to chin with Matt.

She said, “Did you know?”

“How young Allen is?” He tapped his chin. “Let’s leave it at this: I’d have been very surprised to hear an adult try to call himself the Nightmare Knight without apparent irony.”

She grabbed his arm. “Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” Matt said, “kid or not, he was dangerous to himself and others. He needed to learn better.”

“Cam and I would’ve found a better way! Or we would’ve run away with you guys instead of fighting.” She looked to me. “Right?”

I met her eyes. I wanted nothing more than to wipe away the tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.

I couldn’t. “This was the best way.”

Lena’s eyes widened.

Gently, I pulled her away from Matt. My hands massaged some of the tension from her arms. “You know that, Lena. You’re the one who challenged him.”

All that tension rushed back. She hung her head. “Don’t remind me.”

My hand cupped her chin. When her eyes blinked open, I smiled down at her. “I will, because I have to remind you why.”

Her gaze flicked to the cabin door.

“You couldn’t let Allen go on like this,” I said. “For our sake. For anyone else he attacked. Especially for him and Jan.”

“If they stay out here,” Lena said, “Jan’s going to get sicker. So is Allen, just, not so much in his body.”

I nodded.

“I should’ve found a way to stop him without hurting him, Cameron.” Lena set her jaw.

I ran my fingers along the line of it. “I know, Lena. We should’ve.”

“That’s right.” A smile tugged at the corner of her lips. She poked my ribs. “Plans were supposed to be your department.”