“It’s all about…” Momo did a drum roll with her hands on the table. “Powerleveling.”
This was her pitch to her board of directors. It did not go over well.
“It’s about getting yourself killed, you mean,” Sumire added grumpily. “And giving Nura post-traumatic flashbacks.”
“We’re going to use a different name,” Momo said for the third time, exhausted. She should have known better than to invoke the name of the competition that had nearly killed Sumire’s little sister. “Something like… Tournament for the Queendom.”
She thought that name was apt.
The victor takes the spoils—and in this case, the spoils were the entire continent.
She concocted the slightly deranged idea on her way down from the mountain; now that her Nether Demon skills were back in her grasp, that meant she had a way to level up again. And if she could level up again, that meant she could ascend to Lesser Godhood, break into the Nether, and stop what seemed like an utterly insane series of events from unfolding.
Valerica told me it’s my turn to protect her. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Sometimes drastic requests require drastic measures.
“I had Viktor run some calculations for me,” Momo said, snapping her fingers.
On cue, Viktor pulled a scroll from his bag and unfurled it on the table. It was a series of mathematical equations that Momo couldn’t understand, but they resulted in a neat little series of decimals at the end of the page.
“Ten thousand novices,” Viktor began, pointing his pudgy finger to the page. “Is all it would take for Momo to break into the next rank. Of course, the busy woman that she is, she doesn’t have the time for such senseless grinding. So, two.”
Sumire scowled. “Two what?”
“Two Excaliburs,” he replied. “I’ve already identified the ideal candidates myself.”
Viktor whisked out a map of Alois, and smacked it onto the table. A plume of dust blew over the group, and Momo heard one of the worker skeletons sneeze.
“Since I believe in due diligence, I’ve researched more than enough possible targets for our queen. There are two individuals in the Elven Empire, one from the Orcish Mists, and, of course, Jarva’s new heir—probably the best choice of the bunch, seeing as he’s an Excalibur only in rank. His actual battle qualifications are quite slim, since he just hatched from his egg.”
Momo nearly choked.
“Wait, what?”
Seeing that she was alone in her surprise, she turned to Sumire, who looked at her sheepishly.
“Jarva has a new heir?” Momo continued, when no one else said anything.
“Yes. It didn’t seem worth sending a memo in the mail about it,” Sumire explained quietly. “Since it’s just like Viktor says. The heir is basically just an inanimate sack of cells at this point. It doesn’t even have legs or arms yet, as far as my intel goes. I doubt it or its appointed protectors would volunteer it for some sort of death match. It’d be like submitting a hardboiled egg for a marathon.”
“Sack of cells or not, I don’t know how I feel about putting the country on offer if there’s a chance that Kyros could reclaim it,” Momo mumbled.
Sumire huffed. “But you’re okay with giving it away to the Elven Empire?”
“Of course not,” Momo said, holding her head in her hands. “It’s just… I can’t imagine a better way to attract the premier talent of Alois to our doorstep without offering a seismic sort of prize.”
“But what if you don’t win, Momo? What if you pass out? What if you die? You just… give away the Queendom? Just like that?”
Momo shrugged. “No. Because I plan on rigging the thing.”
The room went silent. Then, after a beat, Sumire shook her head.
“You’re unbelievable,” she said. “How the hell do you intend to do that?”
Momo fished out a piece of paper from her pocket. It was a scrap from her notebook, wrinkled and full of frenzied handwritten ideas. At the bottom of the page was a sentence, circled with ink. Momo read it aloud, so the full crowd could hear her.
“Each nation can submit one contestant total, but there is no limit to how many of this one contestant can be present on the battlefield.”
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Sumire balked at her, utterly lost. “What is that supposed to mean? That sounds like gibberish.”
Kezko’s chair scraped across the floor noisily. He stood, cleared his throat, and looked toward Momo.
“Shall we show them what we’ve been discussing, your highness?”
Momo shrugged. “I don’t think there will be a better time to try it, so, yeah. Let’s go for it.”
Taking a sharp breath in, Momo pressed the tips of her fingers to the gem in her neck.
[Body Double]
The next sound she heard was a shriek.
Since one of her swords was still levitating in the air, when it executed the spell, it spawned the body double a good ten feet up in the air. The newly summoned Momo fell without a hint of grace, flailing her limbs and screaming until she was caught by Kezko.
“Hello there,” he greeted. The screaming continued, but softer.
“Not again,” Clone-Mo cried, exasperated. “I was just on my lunch break.”
And just like that, Momo’s former self was back in Alois—only, she had never really been there. The only time they had actually spent together was in the Nether, where the spell’s time limit didn’t apply correctly. They had spent minutes or hours or years together in that green grass field, depending on who you asked. Now, they only had ten minutes.
“Is that a cigarette?” Momo said, by way of an introduction. She had planned an entire speech for her clone, a well thought-out spiel explaining her plans, but all of that was thrown in the trash the moment she spotted the Lucky Strike cigarette in between Clone-Momo’s fingers. “Did you—did we—pick up smoking?”
Feeling a foreign, motherly instinct course through her, she plucked the cigarette out of her clone’s hands. Clone-Mo stared at her, annoyed. Or as annoyed as a teenage Momo could look, which was still largely frightened and mousey.
And yet, by and large, this Momo looked different. Uncanny valley different. She had never known this version of herself. Her hair was messy yet stylish, damp from mousse and not just sweat; her jacket was tucked in at the waist, her pants baggy but brand-name. She had freckles. She didn’t even know it was possible for her to have freckles.
This was a version of herself without a severe Vitamin D deficiency.
That was very difficult for her to grapple with.
With a sigh, Clone-Mo extracted a cellphone from her pocket. It was one of those flip phones from the early 2000s, before sliding keyboards took the world by storm. It was bright pink, and had a little hula girl attached to it like a keychain. Momo had no recollection of ever owning this phone; a phone for a high schooler had certainly been out of their family budget at the time.
“Are you… texting?” Momo said, voice hoarse.
“Yes,” Momo said, and then frowned at her screen. “But there’s no service here. Can I use your phone? Cheryl is going to be pissed if I don’t show up for Mallmart diversity training. She told me I needed to help out by providing some lived experience. Apparently they couldn’t find any other gay people in a ten mile radius, so they’re choosing to victimize me.”
“Y–you’re out?” Momo mumbled. “People at Mallmart know you—we’re—gay?”
This was all becoming way too much for her to handle. In the grand scheme of things, she had much bigger fish to fry, and yet this now suddenly seemed like the most pressing issue.
Clone-Mo shrugged, blushing. She still seemed shy about it, but not the extreme extent that Momo remembered being back in high school. Or now, apparently.
“I guess,” she said. “It’s not like it comes up much at the maternity section, but sometimes I do wear my pride bracelet, like today.”
She gestured to her wrist, where a rainbow version of the Catwalk Communicator was sitting. A piece of elven model industry technology transformed into a crayon-infused rainbow arm piece.
Momo blinked at it in disbelief. She was becoming rapidly aware of how time was counting down, and she hadn’t even gotten to the reason she had brought Clone-Momo here in the first place. Not to mention that Sumire was looking increasingly stunned in the corner of her eye. The pirate seemed moments away from having a full blown panic attack.
“Okay. Great, that’s… great, Momo. I’m happy for you,” she said, trying to get her thoughts together. “Look, we don’t have much time, so I need to ask you for a favor. And honestly, looking at you now, this might not even be the hard sell I thought it was going to be.”
Clone-Mo’s ears were pierced, with small black cats dangling from each lobe. Momo looked at Kezko, and gestured to them.
“Do you think those could work?”
“Gem insertion into the earlobe hole?” Kezko said, humming. “I had never thought to do it that way, but it might just work. I’ll have to craft something to fit her specifically, but once that’s done, we should be able to test it with relative ease. The harder part, of course, will be convincing subsequent clones.”
Sumire finally interjected, mouth dry. “Subsequent clones?”
Momo nodded, feeling pretty proud of herself. For as ridiculous as the plan seemed on the surface, it was—in her humble, unbiased opinion—pretty genius.
“Yep,” she said. “That’s the crux of it. I do as much of the fighting as I can myself, but then I can use these mana gems in order to tap into the mana pools of my clones, and fire spells through them. So one clone can summon another, and another, and so on and so forth. It’ll be like an unlimited money glitch, body double style.”
Kezko sighed happily. “It’s spectacular in its recursive simplicity. Of course, there is the matter of the clones’ mana pools being insufficient—since many of them will likely not have magical powers like our Momo does—but that’s nothing we can’t enhance with potions and the like. And since we’re the ones setting the rules of the competition, we can design it to fit our needs.”
“And since I only have to beat two Excaliburs, it doesn’t really matter if the other competitors notice that I’m cheating. We just have to make sure they don’t notice until after the second round.”
“That’s…”
Sumire blinked slowly.
“Still a very terrible plan, Momo. No offense,” she said, finally, to Momo’s displeasure. “You know I’m usually the last person to suggest this, but why don’t we, I don’t know, find you a quest to go on? Go send you to kill some mega-monster? I’m sure our resident researcher over here can find you something. Something that won’t try and take over our capital city for the hundredth time right after I just finished repairing it.”
Sumire fixed Viktor with a glare as hot as the sun. The wizard coughed loudly.
“We…” he trailed off. “Had not considered that approach yet, no.”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Momo mumbled.
“Sounds much less interesting,” Kezko commented, yawning. “But I suppose we can still use the infinite clone technique there, as well. So I won’t complain.”
Momo nodded, and then, as if she had thought of the idea herself, thrust her hand upward.
“Mega-monster hunting it is,” she bellowed loudly. Then, quieter, she added. “And let’s try and forget the other idea I had, please.”