Big Bob smiled as a series of scantily clad attendants ran about with the preparations for his chariot. He believed in equal opportunity casting, so both men and women wore the required grass skirts and coconut bras. There were enough coconuts after all. His smile widened as the mural painters continued uninterrupted. They knew what orders applied to them, and like true artists, they threw themselves into their work. The painting of him riding his shark-drawn chariot through the clouds was larger than any building he ever lived in, and captured his magnificence perfectly. After all, he made it through the hell that was the tutorial with a not-too-shabby 21 levels. He deserved the worship.

It was good to be surrounded by the artistically minded.

“You,” he pointed at a woman running past with empty hands. “Ensure my cape is ironed and lint-free. I must look dazzling! Oh, and fetch my helmet. The one with the horns.”

“Yes, Big Bob!”

“Oh, and one more thing,” he said to stop her from scurrying away. These women were always retreating from him. Always so reluctant to commit to their roles. “Where’s Mathias’s family?”

The woman paled.

“Um, I’m his fiance, Big Bob.”

“Oh,” he rubbed his jaw. “Shame, going to have to feed you to the sharks.”

“But, but, but —”

“But, but, but,” Big Bob mimicked in an impressive falsetto. “Them’s the breaks, kiddo. Blame Mathias, unless you want to become my fiance instead?”

The woman stammered, and then her eyes widened. Darkness pulsed out of the corner of Big Bob’s peripherals. He turned.

“Wha —?”

A slit of darkness occupied the air beside his throne. Before he could move, a beautiful black woman stepped. Tall, and strong, with large breasts, she was attractive, but a bit too hard-looking for his tastes. She wore some kind of torn white jumpsuit with reflective gloves and shoes. Her body radiated power in a way he hadn’t felt since the Tutorial ended.

“Who are you?”

She ignored him and looked around with a scarred grin.

“Which one of you is Big Bob?” she asked.

Big Bob bristled. Wasn’t it obvious? The whole point of his gigantic physique, his post-apocalyptic name, and his leather harness was to announce that he was in charge!

“I am!” he shouted. “I’m Big Bob and I run this island all the islands!”

“Ok,” she said as she stepped closer to him. “Last chance. Surrender everything you control to me and I’ll let you live.”

Now he recognized her voice. She was the person who spoke to him on the conch!

“You!” he said as he stepped closer. “You’re the one interfering with my troops.”

Now that he towered over her, she didn’t seem so powerful.

“Giving me chances?” he scoffed. “I’ll give you one chance to —”

Blood spilled from his mouth. He looked down as pain radiated from his chest. Her hand thrust inside him. Her fingers were spread, devouring him. Hot pain blared. What was this? What about his levels? He swung a fist and hit nothing. She wasn’t there. Blood flowed from the wound in his chest. He clapped a hand over the wound.

“Help!” he shouted. “Your leader is being attacked!”

Everyone stood there, stunned and watching. The unhelpful, ungrateful, untalented —

A foot slammed into his hip. Bone snapped from the blow. Pain sliced through his thoughts as he flew through the air and hit the ground like a wet towel. He groaned, gasped for air, and screamed.

“Help me, you bastards!”

The woman looked at him dispassionately as she slowly lowered her leg. All his attendants stared at him like deer in the headlights.

He pulled his chain and sent a command through the metal leash. The sleeping ghost shark jerked awake. Its eyes burned with pale fire as it swam through the air toward the woman. Yes! Eat her my pretty!

He snarled through the pain, but then his eyes widened with renewed terror.

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The woman’s Mirrored hand melted and flowed into a long chain that ended with a large bell. As the bell struck the shark, it rang out a fierce toll, and the sound split the air and space itself. A pink tear opened inside the shark and the ghostly monster that Big Bob used to ensure his reign shrieked as the portal tore at its body.

Salty ectoplasm exploded as the destabilized shark’s corpse pulsed and roiled. The woman withdrew the chain and flexed her Mirrored fingers. She examined the spectral gore as it evaporated like crystalline smoke.

What level was she? How could she have so much power? He would have known if she was in the Tutorial because even with all the monstrous bastards he had to face in that hell, he never saw someone as scary as her.

She walked over to him. Her Mirrored steps clipped like glass on the concrete of the pool. Big Bob tried to drag himself away. Vitality seethed in his hip as it rebuilt his broken bones. He tried to focus on the techniques that could help him heal, but the pain and fear in his mind prevented him from gaining any control.

The woman loomed over him.

A hand on his shoulder yanked him to his knees with inexorable strength. His knees crashed into the concrete floor hard enough to send cracks running out.

Hot breath panted against his neck as though a hound stood behind him. He felt something warm in his pants, but couldn’t say if it was blood or urine and dared not look away from the woman before him. Her eyes were demanding as any director, as impersonal as a camera, as draining as a silent audience.

He hated her with every painful pulse of his heart.

“Will you surrender yourself and all your forces to me?” the arbiter of all fear asked him.

“I… I will,” Big Bob barely managed to keep from sobbing. “It’s all yours, we’ll change the mural, and I’ll serve you however you want. I can show you everything on the island, I can lick your toes, anything you want!”

But once you’re complacent, and full of coconut milk, with your ass fat in the chair you stole, then I’ll strike! Even as the pain overwhelmed him, he plotted the demise of this stranger. His acting would buy him enough time to enact his revenge.

She would pay for her transgressions!

###

Zoe looked down at the gigantic, shivering man. How was he so large? Strange Skein bloated his heart and flooded his veins. Wood? Something similar at least. She ignored his promises and pleading and listened to his heart.

[Our Hearts Toll as One]

Her technique wrapped whispering fingers around the seat of his shame. Blood flowed and pounded out a beat of truth. She listened to the tempo, some rhythm matching something she heard in a tavern in another world, and a sickening feeling overcame her like a sour smell wafted under her nose.

His tears and sobbing were a wonderful performance, but as her technique peeled away the acting she found nothing else. Lies all the way down, so she summoned a portal to the tip of her finger. It burned and devoured the air in that curious, spherical way, and without a word, she poked it into the back of his head.

The giant stiffened mid-ramble, and collapsed.

With more Might or Willpower, his meat and mind could have resisted her technique. As it was, she stabbed into him like a coal through wax and pulled her Mirrored finger out from the back of his skull with the same ease.

Gore dripped to the floor and the reflection beneath revealed her placid expression. Did she feel this death? Hard to say, but at least she ended the pain he felt, and the pain he caused.

She looked around at the vast poolroom. Everyone there looked back: the scantily clad attendants, the painters on scaffolding on the far wall, and the prisoners huddled inside the empty concrete pools with the ladders removed.

[Our Hearts Toll as One]

Her technique pulsed out and spread throughout the building and beyond. Three hundred people lived on the island, and she felt the fear in their hearts. Only the forty people inside this building knew of her existence. She felt hope in their hearts, but with that uplifting hope came the steeper cliff of fear.

Each heart beat like an island in the sky, afraid of falling, clutching onto anything to keep it aloft, even if the ropes were Skein.

Her technique settled around each of the people on the island. None of them were strong enough to resist her. They held no love for Big Bob, but no love for her, though why should there be? Under the tortured sky of the apocalypse, it was hard to feel anything but fear, but this was merely the surface, if she looked closer she could see that beneath the urge to survive their dreams still lived. For instance, one of the women in front of her held a love deep inside her heart like a seed beneath frozen ground.

Zoe retreated from the view of her technique and focused on the people in the room. Their gazes reflected her own in a mute exchange as they tried to figure out what she wanted, and what she would do.

“Did any of you accept the Heart Torn system?”

Silence greeted her words, until the closest attendant, the woman clutching onto love, spoke up:

“A few did,” she said. “But they vanished after accepting.”

Zoe nodded.

Encountering Rue’s new system was one of her fears about leaving the frozen island. She would have to cross that bridge when she came to it.

“Miss?” the attendant said. “Um…”

The young woman’s voice left her as she met Zoe’s gaze.

“What is it?” Zoe said as she tried to make her voice as soft as possible.

“None of us liked Big Bob, we didn’t want to serve him, we just want…”

Other voices rose from the concrete pools.

“Please, free us!”

“We’ll help you, do whatever you want!”

“He’s dead,” Zoe’s voice tolled like a bell. “But I’m not in charge. I don’t want to rule you, any of you.”

Silence spread after her words before that same attendant spoke again.

“Then what do you want?”

“You can travel to the other islands?

“Yes, Big Bob has his chariot, and we have our sky bikes.”

“Sky bikes?”

“The Polyp helped us build them after —”

Zoe waved her hand.

“Not important. Saddle up your bikes,” she said. “My friends are waiting on the other island. I believe we have some of your people as well. A group of archers and a big guy with a harpoon.”

The woman’s eyes widened.

“Mathias is alive?” she turned to the other attendants. “Ready the chariots and bikes! Get those people out of the pools! We’re free again, spread the word!”

The attendants hurried to follow the woman’s orders and Zoe smiled.

“Looks like I know who’s in charge,” she said.

The attendant blushed.

“I’m Maria,” she said. “Follow me, I’ll take you to the hanger.”