Chapter 80: No Eye In Team

I don’t think anything Mask could have said would have allayed my suspicions entirely. He could’ve offered an explanation that left room for reasonable doubt, though.

Say he’d looked Matt up after watching Lena’s video, for example. That would make sense. If you were impressed with a guest star’s cameo, why not check if he had his own channel? Even though Matt didn’t, his username might still lead back to his real name through some social media linkage; I knew my digital trail wasn’t obscured carefully enough to hide my name.

That’s not what Mask did. I’m not sure what sound he tried to make, but it sure wasn’t an explanation. Through his voice changer, it came out as a burst of static.

He gripped the edges of the Street Fighter 2 cabinet. Despite the admittedly impressive Third Eye shit he could do, it didn’t crack under his grasp.

I’m sure that was very disappointing to him.

I reminded myself that it didn’t matter how ridiculous I found his persona. The dude had just, if not admitted, at least confirmed in my mind that he was up to some very dark shit. I had to take him seriously.

Eventually, he released the arcade cabinet and turned to face us. His three eyeholes lined up on my face. I’m sure he was glaring, but of course, I couldn’t see it.

Gerry elbowed my shoulder. Because I was focused on Mask, I didn’t dodge this time.

I risked flicking a glance at him. “What?”

“We gonna fight now?” he asked.

I probably shouldn’t have, for a number of reasons, but I chuckled. “I think that’s up to Mask. What’ll it be? An answer, or a fight?”

“You want an answer to your question, OldCampaigner?” Mask asked. “I can provide it.”

“If you know where Mr. Green is, please, tell us,” Erin said. “I’ve been trying not to worry, but it sounds as though I should have.”

“He’s somewhere his talents can be put to better use.” Mask shook his head. “I think you’ve misunderstood what I told your bud, though.”

Erin pushed her glasses up. “I think you deliberately said it in a confusing way.”

His mask tilted, just a little.

“It sounds as though you’re implying you’re not going to tell us,” Erin said. “Instead, you’re going to show us, probably by doing the same unpleasant thing you did to him.”

I was either getting better at reading Mask’s body language, or I was projecting my ideas about him onto his almost microscopic motions. The slightest shift of weight from one foot to the other, the tiniest creak of the leather of his gloves.

It seemed to me that Erin spelling out his sinister implications annoyed him.

Because he wanted to play the enigmatic villain? No, the enigmatic antihero. He had declared that in his mind, he knew he was doing the right thing.

Or was his reaction because he wanted a last scrap of plausible deniability while Zhizhi was filming the whole confrontation?

Either way, I was sure the answer to Gerry’s question was about to be “Yes.”

My fingers slid across my phone. I’d gotten pretty good at swapping to the Third Eye app and the Reactants page without looking. I didn’t call up Air – yet. If Mask wanted a fight, he’d have to start one.

This time, I fully intended to finish it.

Maybe once we got Mask’s HP down, he would drop the edgelord act and give us some straight answers.

Or, he might turn our broadcasting around on us, trusting we wouldn’t threaten him while we were on camera. Ironic, but fair enough. I could try to sell him on the idea that we were the ones controlling the footage and could cut or keep whatever we liked, but I didn’t think it would work. I trusted Zhizhi to play along. I wasn’t sure about Gerry, though, and I was very sure Erin would either fail to sell a threat or refuse to make it in the first place.

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Whatever. At the very least, Mask wouldn’t be a danger to anybody else for the rest of the night.

Was I getting ahead of myself?

The next few seconds answered that question.

Mask went for his phone.

I called up Iron with Air as soon as I saw his hand twitch toward the folds of his cloak.

I still wasn’t fast enough.

I staggered back, clutching my throat where it felt like I’d been punched by the guy fifteen feet away. This wasn’t the rapid, repeated pinprick attack he’d used against Lena and I. It was more like the one he’d used to knock Bernie out of the fight before I arrived.

I didn’t know how much HP I’d lost, but it felt like if I’d taken that hit with none left, my windpipe would’ve been crushed. It probably wasn’t true, because Third Eye effects didn’t seem to apply their full force to physical objects, but that didn’t make the pain any less stunning in the moment.

Zhizhi scrambled backwards while Erin and Gerry brought their phones up. When I recovered enough to drag my own into place, I saw she’d gone for a malleable Earth and Stone shield, while he had deployed Iron, with no obvious indication what Reactant he’d used to conjure it.

They both swung their shields into place, as did I, but Mask hesitated and let us all overcommit. Only then did he whip another hammer blow at me. The light in Cinder Alley was dim, but brighter than on the street when I’d fought him before, enough for me to see that the shadows he wielded did extend from the hem of his cloak. I still didn’t know what Reactant he was using, nor what Material he was using it on.

I did, however, move fast enough to bat it harmlessly aside.

In exchange, we got –

Nothing.

Erin didn’t attack at all, just spread her shield to a wider form so that it would make attacks on both herself and Zhizhi difficult. Gerry tried, but he reacted too slow to what both Mask and I were doing, and his swing was overly telegraphed when he lunged forward. I was pretty sure I could rule out Air as his Reactant. Probably Earth, too; either or both of Matt and Erin would’ve taught him the trick of manipulating an object’s shape in place of moving it.

Hopefully, he had Fire. At least if he did manage to land a hit, that would do a lot of damage.

He didn’t manage.

Mask sidestepped, barely even a dodge, swatted Gerry’s attack to the brick at his feet, and used the same motion to strike at me again. He transformed the roiling shadows halfway through their thrust, turning them from a single mass into dozens of tiny lances. I blocked all but two, and those only had enough momentum to sting when they jabbed into me.

Every little bit hurt, though.

Worse, by far, he kept the pressure on. His other hand swept around. If I hadn’t practiced with Albie, I never would’ve moved fast enough to deflect his next blow, much less to pivot and fend off the stabbing tendrils.

For somebody outnumbered three to one, Mask was absurdly overcommitted. Although I hadn’t tried to attack, I’d seen openings I could’ve targeted. Why, though? I had the most agile defense, and I seemed to have pulled aggro. My teammates should’ve been picking him apart.

Trouble was, Erin wasn’t attacking and Gerry’s attacks weren’t landing. It wasn’t just that he struck slowly. In fact, considering that he had to move his whole body to manipulate the spacing of his conjured object, he moved damn fast. It was that by the time he realized Mask had left himself open and started trying to exploit it, Mask was already on to his next attack.

In theory, the three of us should have been so much better off than when Lena and I fought Mask. More players, more Reactants between us.

Lena and I, however, knew each other’s games inside out. Years before we’d loaded Third Eye for the first time, we’d honed the rhythm with which we attacked and defended. I knew exactly how to create openings for her. She knew precisely when to exploit them.

I’d never played a single game with Gerry, and Erin and I had only played Third Eye together in situations where we had no time pressure.

Surely Erin and Gerry had played together, at least? It didn’t matter. Erin stayed on the defensive, and Mask seemed content to ignore her. Gerry couldn’t pin Mask into a range where his strikes could land.

While our timing and spacing were horribly unoptimized, I could tell Mask’s attack was the opposite. He’d hit me first, so he was going to keep hitting me until my HP dropped to zero and the odds tilted back in his favor. That was in keeping with how he’d handled the invasions we’d read reports of.

However much I might hate it, Mask was a hell of a player. There was a very real possibility he’d engaged in more Third Eye PVP than anyone in the world. Who would have him beat?

Albie and her brother, perhaps, if they’d been doing this for a long time. But unless they were part of a secret order of battle wizards waging an invisible war in the shadows of human history, who would have given them enough of a challenge for them to learn anything from it?

Omar, perhaps, if he really did have other players on his payroll and chose to practice his PVP skills against them. But would his employees really have gone all out against their boss?

It didn’t matter. Omar wasn’t here. Unfortunately, neither was Albie.

Mask slipped effortlessly past one of Gerry’s attacks. Erin backpedaled to keep her shield between him and Zhizhi.

I was on the back foot, too, because Mask was almost in my face now, crowding me, attacking from strange angles, cutting into the speed advantage I got from Air and maximizing the mutability he got from whatever he was using.

He might be the best Third Eye PVP player in the world.

And for all intents and purposes, I was fighting him solo.