Serene

Serene wandered away through the fairground, buffeted by shoulders of crowding passersby without taking any real notice of it.

She didn’t have any real destination in mind. She’d told Sam she was going to gather intel, but that was a lie. Maybe it was air she needed, but that was not a plentiful commodity in this packed space. Wherever she turned, she was met by a sea of countless faces—hard-bitten losers, jubilant winners, drug-high revelers; all equally uncaring.

Serene’s body could not muster enough survival instinct to flinch when she heard a husky, sweet voice in her ear: “Hello, Catherine.”

Turning, she found Nyx standing there in her scandalous bodysuit, arms folded beneath her breasts. The Sheerhome townsfolk, who normally possessed the social propriety of sea lice, made a liberal bubble of space around her, casting their eyes down, or away, or anywhere but the demoness as they passed.

“You did very well,” Nyx continued. “The Ratcatcher boy performed far better than I ever could have expected.”

“I suppose he did.”

And then he lost. Serene felt an irrational surge of rage in the pit of her stomach at that. She’d known he would lose all along, but he’d tricked her into believing he had a chance.

Then again, it was only right that she should suffer too. She deserved far worse, besides.

“In no small part, I suspect, because of your encouragement,” Nyx mused. “You use your feminine powers deftly, dear.”

“Thank you, most calamitous.”

“If you continue to perform so admirably, I might give you a little treat at the end of this.”

“I would like that, most calamitous.”

Nyx clicked her tongue. “For now, I have another task for you.”

“I was going to collect information on Sam’s next opponent,” Serene protested weakly, though she could not bring herself to care much either way.

“Ah. You can put him out of your mind, dear. He’s inconsequential.”

“Then what would you like me to do?”

“I hear that Henke’s opponent for the third round has just dropped out of the tournament. Unsurprising, considering they both work under the same promoter, and he wants his strongest fighter to proceed. Henke the Hero sustained heavy damage in his fight with our dearly departed Ratcatcher, but is currently receiving treatment from the most accomplished Physician in the city.

“With his next opponent out of the picture, he will be able to spend the entire time until the finals recuperating. Most likely, he will be back in fighting shape by then.”

“So, then…”

The demoness stepped closer, and the whole world seemed to be swallowed up by her yellow eyes, staring at Serene with such an intensity she could swear her skin was burning with it. “You will break out those big doe eyes of yours and cozy up to someone on Henke’s team. Pump them for information—and whatever else you need to pump along the way—then report back. Samantha must win this tournament.”

Serene looked down, fought the urge to be sick on her shoes; only semi-successfully, as she let out a queasy, acidic burp. “Yes, most calamitous,” she said once she had recovered from her brief lapse. “It will be done.”

“Good.” Nyx turned to leave without a word in parting.

“Wait!” Serene found herself crying out.

Nyx halted, turned one burning eye on Serene. “Yes?”

“What was that technique he used in the fight? He called it a valor surge, but I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Ah.” The demoness let out a musical chuckle. “A quaint relic from a bygone time—nothing more.”

“What does that mean?”

Nyx turned back to face her fully. “A valor surge does not come from a skill or any other ability. It’s a facet of the Concord that allows a user with honorable intent and conduct to unleash a massive burst of power coaxed from their own soul. In theory, it’s quite powerful, as you no-doubt gathered from seeing it employed first-hand.”

“Then… that’s why Ratcatcher kept telling his enemy what he was going to do? Because it was ‘honorable’?”

“Well, I’m not inclined to believe he was quite a big enough idiot to do it by accident, so yes, I believe so.”

He’d planned it out, Serene thought, with a wave of admiration that only made her feel that much worse as it soured in her. Just like his first match, he’d planned out the exact strategy he needed to beat the Hero.

“However,” Nyx continued, “it’s not like it was some stroke of genius. It was a wild gamble at best—valor surging is an inherently unreliable technique due to the fact that it cannot be harnessed at will—it occurs at random, subject only to the unknowable whims of the Concord’s infinite automated processes. It’s not enough to just ‘act’ honorably during a single moment, or a single fight. A hundred different factors, or a thousand, or a million, must come together to produce a valor surge. I believe Era added them with the intention of incentivizing honorable conduct during physical conflicts. In that sense, it was an utter failure, being so rarely utilized that most mortals don’t even know about it.” She gave a half-shrug. “Although, I suppose it still presented his best chance of winning. I can’t say he made the wrong choice, however distasteful I might find the practice personally.”

“Distasteful?” Serene asked.

“Yes. Aside from everything I’ve just outlined, valor surging has one other fatal weakness. However much damage it produces, a valor surge is never lethal. You could hit an enemy with ten of them, and they would not die.” She sneered, showing sharp teeth. “The perfect tool for those who get by on half-measures. Such as our dear Samantha, coincidentally.”

“I… see.”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, most calamitous.”

“Very well, then.”

The demoness left, taking her bubble of breathing room with her, and Serene was once more buffeted by the merciless throngs of sweaty bodies, her hair slicked down by the light rain.

* * *

Bill

Bill hated his job.

He always pulled the shit details. Always. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to make his boss hate him, but it must have been something terrible, because Lickspittle seemed to have taken it upon himself as a holy calling to FUCK Bill in the ASS at every CUNTING opportunity.

They’d drawn lots over who had to clean up the mess over on Hell-3—Juarez had looked all green in the face over it, and he’d once taken a bet to lick a dead guy’s eyeball without batting a, well, eye, so that meant it had to be real bad. Bill had drawn the short one. OF COURSE he had. Lickspittle must have rigged it somehow.

But, like the good little slave he was, Bill went scurrying off without question. Armed to the teeth, too—a thick pair of gloves and a leather apron to keep the juices off him, a face mask filled with fragrant pine needles to keep the stink out, a large bucket to collect parts in, a tarp—already black and stiff with old blood—to roll the body into, a good shovel with a steel rim, and a rake for the fine cleaning.

He felt like he was carrying half a fucking cleaning cupboard as he made his way through the fairground. He apologized meekly to every stupid motherfucker who bumped into him, nearly upsetting his carefully balanced things, and muttered curses as soon as they were out of earshot.

His mood did not improve when he entered the pit through one of the tunnels and found the thing he was supposed to be cleaning.

Fuck my life.

In his eight years on the sanitation crew, he had never seen a mess quite like this—a reddish, pinkish, bluish mass of soupy flesh, like a giant, runny turd. It… It just didn’t look human anymore. The head was missing completely. Wait, no, he could see an eyeball here, a scrap of an ear there, something that might have been a nose. Was that a forearm? No, it was just a long chunk of a ribcage.

The legs were the only part of the body that was relatively intact. They jutted comedically out from the heap, feet pointing up in the air.

Bill felt his gorge rise, and ripped off his mask a moment before he started spewing everywhere. Without the mask holding it back, the oily, blood-sweet smell got ten times worse, and he was sick again. He spat chunky saliva, retched, spat again, then stood, inspecting the small off-yellow pile he had made next to the big red one. Great. ANOTHER mess to clean up. Why not?

With a sigh, Bill let his gear clatter to the ground and scratched at the patchy, inflamed skin under his slave collar. Best set to work before someone showed up to yell at him for not getting the pit back in presentable condition quick enough.

It was times like this that he wished he'd picked Tidy Up at Level 4. At the time, he hadn't seen the point in getting a skill that did pretty much the same job as a shovel. Now he could see it.

Bill heard a thud somewhere behind him and spun with a start. There was a woman coming toward him—oh fuck, she was a big-old bitch, too—striding purposefully across the pit. Where the fuck had she come from?

“Where the fuck did you come from?” Bill asked, echoing his own thought. He scrambled for his spade and put it between them like he knew how to use it—he didn’t.

The woman—a Level 4 Laborer—stopped in front of him, hands on hips, unbothered by the steel spade head hovering inches from her chest. She looked pretty young, but she was at least a foot taller than him and muscled like she'd gone a bit overboard on the Strength allocation. She was a free woman going by her lack of a collar, and a fighter going by the fact that she looked like beat shit, which meant that Bill should technically be talking to her all polite-like, but FUCK THAT.

The woman had a severe set to her brow, like she was contemplating murder. She wasn’t contemplating his murder, was she? He hadn’t done anything! Not lately, anyway.

“Hello, sir,” the woman said, and gave a smile that immediately made her look a sight less bloodthirsty. “You’re here to take care of that body, right?”

“You see any other fucking idiots standing around with a fucking shovel in this fucking place?” Bill grumbled, giving a little rattle of his tool beneath her chin for emphasis.

“Do you mind if I help?”

“Fucking what?”

“Do you mind if I help you clean up the body? He was a friend of mine.”

“Must’ve been some fucking friend,” Bill muttered. “You wouldn’t catch me touching my own mother with a ten-foot pole if I found her like this. I’d leave her for the goddamn crows.”

“Actually, I just met him tonight.”

“Huh.” What a fucking PSYCHO. “Well, if you’re trying to get his boots, don’t bother. All property of deceased fighters is collected by the sanitation crew.” He jabbed a thumb at himself. “That means me.”

“Don’t you think a man ought to be buried in his boots?”

“The fuck do I care? Only grave this idiot is gonna see is an Outside midden heap. At least the funeral will probably have a big turnout—attended by a congregation of the city’s finest stray dogs and tweakers, I’m sure.”

“Wait, so you’re not going to bury him?”

Bill let his shovel drop and rubbed at his eyes with the backs of his gloved hands. “Lady, I don’t fucking know, and I don’t fucking care. That’s not my department—I just get the mess to the corpse carts, and the waste disposal crew make it go away from there. They could fucking eat it for all I care.”

“I see.” The woman picked up the fallen spade, and his bucket, and scraped herself a shovelful of human slop to dump inside with a horrible squelching and plopping, as of a particularly runny bout of diarrhea hitting toilet water. If the woman minded, she made no show of it. Putting spade to gore once again, she said: “Then, you wouldn’t really mind if I took him off your hands, right?”

“Who?”

“The body.”

“Oh, the mess. Do what you want with it—they don’t pay me enough to care.” He hurried over to drag the miraculously unsullied boots off the cold legs, scrubbing away some tiny bits of blood spatter with the heel of his hand before setting them aside. “Minus these, of course.”

The woman glanced away from her grisly labor to size Bill up. She eyed the collar around his neck. “Do they pay you at all?”

“Sure they do. In bread. Sometimes it’s not even got weevils in it.” He was only halfway joking.

“Want me to take that thing off for you?” She motioned to her own neck.

Bill frowned. “The fuck good would that do? They’d just beat me purple for it.”

“Not if you run away.”

“And get done in by some shiteating monster two miles outside the city? No fucking thank you.”

The woman nodded once and returned to work.

Bill watched her a while, leaning on his rake, and thanked his lucky stars that there were crazies like this bitch in the world, willing to clean a mess of this magnitude for free. But then he started to feel awkward just standing there, so while she scraped the last of the bloody, sandy gibbets into the bucket, he went and rolled the legs up in the tarp, folded it like a burrito. There was a specific way to do it to keep the mess from coming free. Then he raked the stray bits of bone and viscera dotted around out of the sand, and deposited them in the bucket, and then they were done.

“Here you go, sir,” the woman said, handing back the shovel after scrubbing blood off it with a handful of sand. She looked down at the full bucket of unspeakable slop between them. “If I wanted to bury him, where would I go?”

Bill had to think about it, scratching at his neck. He burst a blister. FUCK. Hurt like shit. “Outside the city, I reckon,” he said. “But you’ll have to wait until the morning at least. The street curfew's been lifted on account of the tournament, but the gates are still shut for the night, and they don’t open at this hour for anyone but the lord or the guard captain, so…” He shrugged. “That’s assuming you survive the night, of course.” Which was NOT fucking likely.

“All right,” the woman said. Stooping, she bundled the corpse burrito under one arm and picked up the cadaver soup bucket with the other.

Bill frowned. “Where are you going?”

“Outside the city, like you said.”

“No, I said you can’t fucking go outside the city, you deaf cunt.”

“Thanks again,” the woman said with a smile that was unnervingly friendly, and began trundling off with her unwieldy burdens. Over her shoulder, she called: “If I win, I’ll buy your freedom as thanks!”

He shook his head incredulously as he watched her go. Crazy bitch. Thanks for what, exactly? She’d spent the last ten minutes doing his job, hadn’t she?

I’m not getting that bucket back, am I? Or the tarp… FUCK.

Lickspittle’s going to have a lot of fun with that.

Bill sighed, gathered up his tools, and left Hell-3. There’d be another mess for him to clean up by now.

There was always another mess.