Chapter 38: Mask

Something swept across my shins, hard enough to knock me from my feet.

I hit the pavement knees-first. The impact came with a jolt of pain, but compared to jumping from the balcony, I barely registered it.

Of course, unlike the pavement I’d crashed into, what had hit me this time didn’t stop striking.

The return swing caught me in the back of the head and slammed my face into the sidewalk. I rolled into the convenience store parking lot and pulled my Iron close, swinging it blindly to fend off attacks. It didn’t work. Pain blossomed all up and down the side of my body from fast, tiny hits.

“Fool.” The distorted voice came from right next to my head.

I probably screamed. I definitely rolled away.

I tried to slam my Iron into the spot I’d just vacated, but it did nothing to stop the assault. A wall of inky material enveloped me. It rippled, sending needles of itself jabbing into my face and chest.

Another explosion. My back caught some of the splash from it and I flinched away, but it was far better than the continuing assault.

“Get away from him,” Lena snarled.

I rolled to my feet and saw her standing a few feet away. Her fingers jammed her phone screen, unleashing another explosion, this one directly on the figure. It blew them back, taking their shadowy cloak with them.

I scrambled to my feet and stood side-by-side with Lena. I dared to spare her a glance. “Are you okay?”

“Better than he’s about to be.” The hoarseness of her voice, and her tear streaked face, said otherwise.

I focused on the bastard who’d done that to her. Worse, to Bernie.

The figure looked even taller up close, or perhaps they’d drawn themselves up to a greater height.

Their shadowy cloak roiled at their feet. Was it part of a Custom Personification, like Lena’s wings, or something they’d fashioned out of Reactants and Materials? If the latter, I again wondered what Material it had been made from. If it was something Lena and I had seen before, it must’ve been altered by Water into this form, so changed I couldn’t even speculate on the base version.

The only thing on them that wasn’t inky black was their mask.

It was porcelain, perfectly smooth and featureless except for the eyeholes. Three of them. Two where I would expect a person’s eyes to be, and a third in the center of their forehead, almost completely shrouded in the shadows of their hood. Not that I could see anything through any of the holes. Either their skin was even darker than Erin’s, or they wore some kind of skin-tight bodysuit that went up and over their head, because everything beneath the folds of their cloak looked utterly black.

Through the Third Eye filter, anyway. I lowered my phone a bit to get a look at the person rather than their avatar.

I said, “What the hell?”

With or without the filter, I was looking at a towering masked figure in a deep black cloak that draped across the pavement.

At first, I thought nothing had changed. Whether I looked at this person through Third Eye or my regular eyes, their avatar remained. Were they even a person? Or had I been mistaken before, and this was another creature, after all?

No.

Instead of a cloak of roiling darkness, the figure wore a velvet-lined black cloak, expensive looking but, improbably, two sizes too big for even their towering frame. Instead of a featureless mask with three holes opening onto more shadow, they wore a featureless mask with two holes, opening onto a pair of dark eyes, and an oval of black paint where the third eyehole went on their avatar’s mask.

If Third Eye attire looked like Hollywood quality costuming, this was the same design, executed at the level of closet cosplay.

Despite the figure’s attack and their evident proficiency with Third Eye, the sight of them almost made me laugh. This person had decided to dress up as their own character while they played.

The thought of Bernie lying unmoving on the sidewalk, and Lena weeping over him, stole all the humor from the moment.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

The figure said nothing.

“Listen, asshole,” I snapped. “I know invasion is part of the game, but I also know you’ve been stalking us for a couple days. You better give us a damned good reason not to call the cops after we kick your ass.”

“Do as you like.” Their voice remained distorted. I realized they had to be wearing some kind of voice changer under the mask.

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Which was, on the one hand, just about the most edgelord thing I could imagine.

On the other hand, though, both the voice changer and the mask represented sensible precautions against my exact threat. Unless Lena and I not only defeated the figure, but captured and unmasked them, what would we tell the cops? To keep an eye out for tall people? For all I knew, the figure was wearing platform shoes, too. It would be no more ridiculous, and their cloak pooled around their feet either in or out of the Third Eye filter.

“Cops, hell,” Lena growled. “I’m going to do to you what you did to Bernie.”

The figure slid into what looked like a credible fighting stance, one hand tucked under their cloak, the other stretched forward, cupped, beckoning us to try.

I saw Lena nod out of the corner of my eye. I nodded back.

Her fingers jabbed her phone.

Mine swept through the air.

The figure’s attack came from below and splashed against my Iron shield. Lena’s explosion blew them backwards into the street. I shoved my Iron ahead, feinting an attack, then snapped it back down before I even saw the shadows begin to move. While I caught the figure’s attempt at a counterattack, the next explosion knocked them all the way to the far sidewalk.

“Fuck,” they hissed.

I wondered if this was the first time someone had stood up to one of their invasions.

One on one, they might have beaten Lena or I. At minimum, they must have scared the shit out of Lena for her to have called me for help; she certainly hadn’t when Matt invaded her a few weeks ago. The fact the figure could do enough damage to drop Bernie, even though he’d withstood at least one attack from the creature, confirmed just how dangerous they could be.

It didn’t exactly shock me. Lena and I had advanced pretty far compared to most of the Third Eye players we’d met, but I knew others had probably surpassed us. Matt practiced almost nothing but PVP. Omar, unless his prizes were another scam, had access to resources or techniques we hadn’t even discovered.

That, however, was compared to one or the other of us playing solo.

The two of us as a team?

We’d been practicing that in every co-op game we’d played for the last five years.

Take our follow-up, for example. My instinct might’ve been to pull back, play defensively, probe my opponent, and find out if they still had HP. Lena’s instinct was to sink her teeth into the first sign of weakness and hang on until her opponent stopped moving. When we worked together, I let her set the pace.

Blast, block, double Iron – one hot and slow and offensive, one cold and fast and defensive –, another blast.

The shadows roiled around the figure, impressively fast, shockingly durable. I wasn’t sure they’d used so much as a second MP in the entire fight, anymore than I’d had to. It was obvious they’d practiced the hell out of their technique, because despite our best efforts, they almost managed to hold their ground. The shadows bubbled up around explosions, deflected hurled Iron. Even with the pressure we put on, I needed constant vigilance to keep strikes from whipping past. Twice, three times, four, I failed and felt jabs of pain to let me know my HP were still being whittled away.

But the figure kept backpedaling, and we kept advancing.

Lena’s next explosion shoved them back against the gray stucco of a veterinary hospital. While I swatted away a pair of striking shadows, she conjured another Iron. She did it with three presses, but no explosion followed. I knew what that meant. Electricity, not heat. Continuing damage, a lot of it.

I pivoted from defense to disruption. My Iron snared the shadows and kept them pinned low while Lena’s shot forward.

The figure’s grunt started off with the usual distortion, then turned into the ear-splitting whine of an overloaded speaker. They must’ve clamped their mouth shut, because I didn’t catch a hint of how they sounded after their voice changer shorted out.

Lena kept pressing the electrified Iron against their chest, while their hand and their shadows clawed at it and tried to hurl it away.

I shot Lena a glance.

Her shoulders shook, her eyes blazed.

Would she keep going until she electrocuted the figure? Could she? I suspected while our HP lasted, we suffered the full Third Eye effects of our attacks, but once they ran out, only the fraction that was real – that was aligned, as Albie had put it – would affect us.

At the moment, I didn’t give a shit.

Not because I was going to stand there and let Lena kill somebody, but because as long as I saw those shadows clawing at her Iron, I knew the figure still had HP. Once we ran out, we lost control of our objects and couldn’t conjure more.

Besides.

Fool me once, you know?

Instead of trying to stop Lena or call for the figure’s surrender, I concentrated on my shield. Good thing, because after a few seconds of scrabbling at the Iron pressed to their chest, they realized they couldn’t force it off and snapped their hand forward.

Five spines shot from the hem of their cloak, higher than I expected. Two hit me and rocked me back. I managed to block two of them before they could strike Lena.

The last jabbed into her head and she flinched away.

I flung my Iron into the figure and whirled to check on her.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Concentrate!”

I felt another blow whip into my legs. My Iron slammed down, but my rhythm had been thrown off. The attack carried on and snarled Lena’s ankle, dragging her down. Her Iron clattered away, deselected.

I forced myself to face the figure.

They drew themselves up. It was hard to tell under their cloak, but I thought their shoulders were shaking. I supposed they deserved credit for keeping their composure enough to remain silent after Lena had fried their stupid voice changer.

You know what, though? With Lena and Bernie both lying on the sidewalk? I didn’t feel like giving the figure any credit.

They struck and I swatted their shadows down with a flick of my finger.

More shadows bubbled up, writhing, twitching, but only in feints, just trying to draw my Iron out of position. When I didn’t bite, the figure began to shift from one foot to the other, impatient, their visible hand twitching.

I smirked. This bastard used unfamiliar gestures. Fast ones, and complicated. So what? I’d learned to follow Albie’s hand motions in little more time than this. If the streetlight hadn’t been out, I’d have tucked my phone away and fought just by watching the figure’s hand. With two of my own to manipulate Air, they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

As it was, they hesitated too long to attack. Lena hauled herself back to her feet.

We squared up in the street, shoulder to shoulder. I felt the warmth of her at my side, her wings forward, one cradling my back.

She reached out and mimicked the figure’s inviting, mocking gesture.

I stretched my neck and swung my Iron up.

Then light flooded our eyes and a car horn blared in our ears.