Chapter 25: Secret Techniques

I waited. I tried to hold myself steady and impassive, like a ref should. When nothing happened, though, and when it continued not to happen, I glanced at Lena and Matt.

Neither had moved. Through my phone camera, Matt’s hand was tucked into a fold of his cloak; without it, into a pocket on the inside of his jacket. Lena just stood there in a wide stance, phone in one hand, fingers flexing on the other.

I got it. The first two rounds had shown them both how far a hundred HP went: not very. Neither wanted to make the first move and give their opponent an opening.

The whole match structure probably didn’t help.

When we’d fought the creature at the construction site, it had been a mad dash, backing away, throwing out as many attacks as we could muster, mostly defending ourselves. We hadn’t had time to consider our options.

With the pauses to announce damage and edit in explanations, this bout was almost – but not quite – turn-based, and it was giving the players time to think. Time to overthink.

Despite the chilly air, I felt a trickle of sweat on the back of my neck.

I told myself I shouldn’t care. It might be kind of satisfying to see Lena beat Matt. It would be easier to edit the video in a way that fit our channel. But ultimately, this wasn’t dangerous for anyone, it wouldn’t take or give XP, it carried no prize. It didn’t matter.

When I was younger and more ambitious and even less focused, I put in some time studying tabletop game design. Back then, there was a divide between “combat as war” and “combat as sport”. “Combat as war” design emphasized making a fight so devastating that players would put all their focus on either avoiding it, or stacking the odds so far in their favor that actually playing it out was a formality. “Combat as sport” focused on making each individual fight tactically engaging in its own right.

As far as I could tell, the concept started out as a way for stodgy designers to talk shit about newer games. But as shorthand, it had turned out to not be completely useless.

Third Eye played the way we were today was definitely combat as sport.

Here’s the thing. If you think that means it wasn’t tense as hell, you’ve never seen a mob of sports fans at the end of a big game.

Just before I thought the extended timeout might drive me crazy, Lena finally cracked.

She dashed forward, thumbing her phone as she went. All she conjured was a single piece of smoldering Wood, but it was enough to prompt Matt to call up an Iron shield.

Lena dropped her initial Wood as it clanged into Matt’s shield. She kept sprinting and crossed between Zhizhi and I.

Matt obviously recognized what she was trying – to conjure another explosion on the other side of his shield. He flexed his fingers, and the Iron reformed, shrouding him in a crude sort of armor. It looked more like one of those old-fashioned diving suits than medieval plate, but I knew that was just because it didn’t have to be articulated. If he wanted to move in it, he could just reform it on the fly.

Lena skidded to a stop and tried an explosion anyway.

Matt rocked back on his heels. His armor rang like a bell. His voice came out as a weird echo, half muffled, half clear, because the Third Eye construct around him wasn’t entirely real for us. “Nine.”

Lena’s lip curled. She pivoted and readied another blast.

A spear lanced out from one of the crude gauntlets around Matt’s hands.

This time, instead of deflecting with an object or a blast, or simply taking the hit and trying to power through, Lena tried to physically dodge.

Matt’s attack curved in the air and smacked into her shoulder, but the readjustment robbed it of all the linear force that made it dangerous.

Lena laughed. “One.”

“Interesting,” Matt said.

I couldn’t see his finger motions because his “gauntlets” were just big Iron balls in the general vicinity of his hands. An intended advantage, or just lucky? Either way, he must’ve done something to snap the extruded Iron up again.

“Ow,” Lena said as it whipped against her arm. “Still one, though.”

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Matt’s Iron flicked toward her again.

She ducked under it, backstepped out of its way, and finally, grabbed the end. “Congratulations. You found a way to make fighting you even more annoying. There’s no way you’ll win like this, though.”

Matt’s crude gauntlet moved, and the Iron squirmed in Lena’s grasp like a tentacle.

She let go of it and shied away. I felt my back tense as well, and saw Donica and Zhizhi do the same.

That movement was a little too familiar.

“What?” Matt asked. “I hope I’m not the only one who’s learned from everything we’ve run into.”

“You got a long way to go before you can compete with that,” Lena said.

“We all do,” Matt said. “Starting down that path is why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“I’m here to make a video. Also, to get you back for invading me.” Lena lowered her eyes. “... but yeah. That’s why.”

“What are we talking about again?” Benji asked.

“The last time we saw a demonstration of Third Eye combat,” Miguel said, “one of the developers participated. Suffice to say, the players among us are all playing catch up. I hope they’ll forgive my saying so, but they have not gotten very close.”

The truth, if not the whole truth.

Of course, Miguel’s half-truth meant Lena and I still had to drop the Third-Eye-is-real bombshell ourselves.

Benji frowned. Then he shrugged and leaned back on the bench. “You played with one of the actual devs? Guess that’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah, she’s the best,” Lena said. Abruptly, she clapped. “And if we’re going to play catch up, let’s get playing.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Matt said.

Before he was even done speaking, the tendril of Iron he’d extended flicked upwards. Lena batted it aside, but I saw her wince from the impact. It kept whipping back and forth.

I got what Matt was trying to do. Each of these hits accomplished almost nothing, but each cost him absolutely nothing. As long as it disrupted Lena’s concentration, he could keep plinking away one HP at a time without so much as spending another MP or Material.

In fact, his hits came so rapidly, I thought they might add up to more than the stronger linear strikes he’d been using. I couldn’t be sure, because Lena had stopped calling out the damage she took from each individual blow.

One thing about Earth, though. Aside from shaping a mass into a single direction, it didn’t seem all that fast. The next time Matt whipped the tendril up, Lena just broke into a run. He batted at the air she’d vacated and she darted in a circle around him.

He whipped his tendril back to rejoin his armor and aimed another.

He’d extruded it about a foot from his hand when Lena struck.

All she did, visibly, was summon a single Iron plate in contact with Matt’s armor. It didn’t look like it hit hard. It didn’t glow red hot. It certainly didn’t explode.

It did, however, make Matt scream.

Lena tensed and pulled her plate away.

Matt fell to his knees. His armor sloughed away. He gasped down a breath. “What the fuck?!”

“I guess that worked,” Lena said. She crouched. “You’re okay, right?”

“Of course,” he rasped. He didn’t sound okay. “But seriously, what was that you just did? Did you find a brand new Reactant?”

Lena’s wings and hands stretched out as she preened. “Nope.”

“Are you really not going to tell me?” Matt asked. “At least tell your viewers.”

“Ugh, fine. You don’t have to whine about it.” She straightened up and conjured Glass. On that, her electricity visibly arced.

From what we’d seen while we trained the previous day, I suspected she’d pumped another three Fire into her Glass, which seemed like a lot considering how profligately she’d spent her MP on the match.

Matt gawped at it. So did Miguel and Donica. Zhizhi either kept her cool better, or hadn’t seen enough Third Eye phenomena to realize why it seemed so crazy.

Benji, of course, fell into that last category.

Matt reached up toward the Glass, but pulled his fingers away before they came into contact. “What are you using to cause that?”

“Fire,” Lena said. “God. You even like Third Eye PVP, and even you wrote off Fire as just ‘destruction?’ Well it’s not. Fire doesn’t destroy. It energizes. You find the right way to think about it, the right way to tell the game about what you’re thinking, and you can do at least this much. I’m sure we’re just scratching the surface.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“I mean,” she said, “I didn’t want to be the one to say it...”

He chuckled. “Makes you wonder what we haven’t figured out about the other Reactants, eh?”

“Nah.” Lena shrugged. “I figure those are exactly as boring as you made them out to be.”

“Hah!” Once again, Matt brushed off his pants and stood up. He flicked a glance at his phone. Contemplating his own Reactants? I knew I’d looked at mine differently since Lena’s discovery.

“I didn’t run you all the way out of HP with that electrical attack, did I?” she asked. “You never actually announced the damage.”

He frowned down at his phone. “No, not quite.”

“Okay, cool,” she said. “When it went to three rounds, I was kinda worried. How much, though?”

“Seventy one,” Matt said.

My eyes widened. My mouth opened.

Like a good ref, I clamped it shut.

I doubted it mattered. Lena did the math a second after me. She snapped her hand up.

But by then, Matt’s Iron was a Lance again, jabbed right into her chest.