“The First Book of Revelations: Advance!”

Hank rolled backward and popped up on his feet to avoid another blast of ice, but inwardly he was sighing. Already the composition of images in the surrounding area was shifting; a heavyweight had finally bared her fangs. I’d hoped Alana woulda waited just a mite longer…. Ah, well. This way is more fun.

His gaze slid sideways to the radiant form of Alana Donal crossing the arena. Two wings as long as he was tall beat elegantly as she gliding toward him, shedding ivory feathers that tumbled artistically through the air around her. In her wake, Alana also released a wave of orange-gold fire that rapidly spread her image’s influence. And both his and Wivanya’s image were rapidly giving ground to Alana. In terms of image potency, Hank hadn’t yet been forced to face something as overwhelming as her pseudo-holiness in the whole of the tournament.

A good day for a duel, Hank thought with a smile, sparing one more glance up toward the chaotic sky above the arena. Then he drew his revolver, popped the cylinder out and carefully inserted an extremely special bullet that he had made for just this occasion.

With a whispered prayer, he spun the cylinder and then snapped it back into place with a flick of his wrist. He sidestepped another gout of frost as the Frost Dragon began to heave her body across the ground toward him and then aimed his revolver through the inclement elements toward the glorious charge of Alana Donal. Stopping her here was important.

Once Alana Donal caught the scent of your weakness, she would pursue relentlessly.

Bang!

The bullet blasted a hole directly through the ice and wind Wivanya produced and arrived in front of Alana Donal. The woman didn’t even blink. Hank was somewhat aggrieved to see that Alana had already planted her front foot and settled into a steady stance with her spear raised as he had aimed at her; she had predicted his move perfectly. But even so, that bullet wasn’t something that could be easily-

“Sunstrike!” Alana called. It was difficult to tell whether the glorious light of the sun arrived or the spear blurred into motion first, but Alana seemed to be suddenly standing at the center of a world of pure light. Like a black hole pressing on the fabric of space, everything in the surrounding was being inexorably pulled into her gravitational influence. Her intent hung in the air with her words, pure and clear.

Spear met bullet in a brilliant kaleidoscope of light. Alana’s image might be quite flashy, but part of that sense of ‘flash’ was just the natural side effect of the obvious strength of her image. It commanded attention like a lighthouse pulled in ships on stormy nights. In that meeting of spear and bullet, Hank felt Alana’s image continue to increase in intensity. At Alana’s core was a religious veneration that informed every decision she had made since encountering Randidly Ghosthound. There was no hesitation in her strike.

And in exchange for that revenant loyalty, Alana had followed a Path directly toward great power. Looking at the light that Alana could produce with her bread and butter attack Skill, even Hank felt a certain amount of awe for her determination and commitment. He wondered how often she had practiced exactly this Skill in the past, preparing for the day she might use that attack to cut a bullet out of the air.

...in summary, Hank’s bullet and the image contained therein were summarily annihilated. It was the same sort of execution that informed an uneasy populace that it would be no trouble for their despot leader to render them helpless again, if need be. This was just business.

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Hank muttered. He considered trying another shot, because he had prepared three bullets of increasing power to play into the natural narrative of his image, but Wivanya was surging toward him. He leapt backward, creating some distance from those frosted claws and glanced over toward Ancho. “Ah… buddy, I need to borrow your image for a bit.”

Ancho huffed in dissatisfaction. Hank winced as he rolled underneath a blast of frost that passed so close to his face he had to suppress the urge to sneeze. Then he looked imploringly at his horse. “Look, I know ya are hungry, but right now we are fightin’. I promise, after ta’ fight, I’ll getcha plenty of grub.”

To that, Ancho snickered.

Hank’s face turned red. Alana sped past the wrathful Wivanya and approached him with her spear raised. “What do ya mean, the fastest way ta end the match is for me to lose?!?”

But then Alana was before him and Hank couldn’t spare any more attention for his unpredictable partner. He cleanly drew his repeater but had to pause in the draw motion because Alana’s spear swept sideways through the space where his repeater would have been to perfectly unleash a barrage of bullets toward her position. The only reason that the gun wasn’t knocked out of his hand was that he had paused. Hank’s eyes narrowed. She’s faster than I’ve ever seen her…

To avoid the ‘cleansing’ aspect of the holy light that Alana released, which might just cleanse the flesh right from his bones if he was exposed for too long, Hank leaned backward and launched himself into a back handspring. As he flipped backward, he caught himself on the ground with his left hand and raised his right to fire while performing a handstand, but Alana was still moving too quickly for him to get a good shot. Hank could only tuck his knees down, hit the ground, and then roll explosively to the side.

“Going to dodge all day, Hank?” Alana said quietly. “Solar Flare.”

Her already overwhelming speed increased even further. The flames that danced across her limbs surged. Hank grimaced and accepted a shallow gash across his shoulder in order to avoid an even more brutal thrust toward his thigh. Alana whipped the butt of her spear around and Hank narrowed avoided a shattered jaw.

He finally brought his repeater up and unleashed several quick shots, but her body blurred at the edges and the two lifelike wings that extended from her helmet stretched downward to swat the bullets away. Not to be dissuaded, Hank fired six more shots. While her flames devoured most of the projectiles, he did force her to flick her head from side to side in order to avoid the final two bullets.

It was, to put it simply, an unfair comparison of their base specs. And while she effortlessly squashed his counter-attacks, she continued to advance toward him.

Of course, Hank could feel his image slowly gaining traction in the surrounding space. The pressure from Alana’s image greatly increased the speed of its spread. Gradually, the chill of Wivanya was being pushed back by the whistling, austere beauty of the Wild West. He was settling into the track of the plucky underdog. Yet as Hank sidestepped an ice blast and blocked a kick that was crackling with holy energy, he didn’t feel optimistic about his chances.

Alana whipped her spear around and thrust toward his stomach. Hank fired several bullets at her waist to slow her down, but she ignored the attacks. The bullet struck her but only produced the smallest spurts of blood from the wounds. His image didn’t even manage to inconvenience her; Alana’s ability to ignore outside influences was positively unfair.

Her decisive lack of response to his attacks meant that Hank had to bring the butt of his pistol down to knock aside her spear thrust. The skin of his hand sizzled and burned from the strange radiation of Alana’s image as the golden flames licked greedily upward, but Hank was able to spin away without taking serious damage.

Except then he found himself looking at the narrowed, sapphire eyes of a three-meter tall dragon. It was a frozen moment that Hank knew would end as soon as he blinked or reacted to Wivanya’s ambush. Yet he wanted to remain in that strained piece of stretched time for as long as possible. Because as the odds were stacked against him…

As quick as lightning splitting an old oak, Hank drew his revolver, popped open the cylinder, slid in a specialty bullet, then popped the cylinder back into place. As a dragon claw with all the fury of winter was howling toward him, Hank pointed his gun toward the ground and fired. The special bullet blasted him quickly upward about ten meters before he began to slow.

He switched to his repeater and then cursed as he twisted midair and had to deflect another of Alana’s thrusts with the barrel of his gun. Hank lashed out with his leg but Alana somehow managed to duck under the attack while midair and continue her preternatural rush toward him. He aimed with the repeater but she was already too close.

Hoping to seize the initiative, Hank twisted and brought his knee upward in a brutal attack toward Alana’s forehead. But she casually slapped his attack aside with her off-hand, dispersing his force. Then her spear snaked forward and ripped a hole along Hank’s armpit. Golden flames raced along her spear to spread to Hank’s body as they locked eyes. “The Second Revelation: Struggle.”

What followed was a chaotic mess of split-second decisions as Alana’s methodical thrusts inflicted increasing amounts of damage while Hank struggled to keep up. Hank’s left shoulder was almost completely shredded and at least two of his ribs were shattered. He felt something trickling down between his shoulder blades and couldn’t tell if it was blood or sweat.

In the meantime, his image was rapidly gaining traction in the surrounding space; the clouds had truly parted and allowed the sun to shine down on the match. But the small accumulation of advantages simply wasn’t enough to keep up with Alana’s efficient spear strikes.

Even worse, Hank could feel some vital energy in his chest being rapidly depleted as he stayed within the halo of light that Alana produced. He had broken away before the flames spread directly to his body, but they continued to damage him. The holiness about her person was a spiritual poison that seeped into his mind. Against the purity and grace that she displayed, it was difficult to muster up the will to resist.

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Yet somehow, Hank’s smile just kept widening. Ya, jus like this. If Alana weren’t like this…

Eventually, Hank managed to get himself smashed down into the marble of the arena rather than skewered. He left a bloody stain on the ground. As he staggered to his feet, he cast a meaningful glance over at Ancho. Due to the small distraction, he was completely blindsided by a blast of frost that knocked him off of his feet.

Ancho snickered, clearly broadcasting his thoughts. See? Almost over.

“If we win, you can have the trophy,” Hank muttered as he smacked his palm against his arms to restore feeling in the limbs. God, but his left shoulder ached every time he moved. But he couldn’t afford to remain still. So he slid a new magazine into his repeater to pepper Wivanya with bullets. The dragon surged forward with hatred in its eyes, thankfully screening Alana’s vision of Hank as she drifted casually downward. In that opportunity, he Dodge Roll’d several times in quick succession to keep Alana from locking onto him in the short term.

Ancho soft brown eyes displayed complete apathy for a human’s obsession with status. The trophy was worthless to him. Inwardly, Hank was becoming very annoyed. “You can sell it, I reckon. The trophy. For as many apples and sugar cubes as ya want!”

Ancho considered this, chewing thoughtfully on the corner of the referee’s uniform even while snow began to fall chaotically over the arena. Although Hank was moving with more vigor than he had been at the beginning of the match due to the growing momentum of his image, he was still clipped by a large icicle that Wivanya launched out at him. Hank swayed from the glancing impact but was ultimately able to stay on his feet. Blood dribbled out of a half dozen wounds inflicted on him by Alana’s brutal assault.

“I’m barely standin’, bud,” Hank drawled with false humor. At which point, Ancho finally huffed in defeat and gave his permission.

“Eternal Companion,” Hank whispered, even as Wivanya spread her wings wide and screeched. The gains Hank had made in the sky were gradually forced back and snow fell more heavily in the surrounding area. But Hank felt some warmth returning to his extremities. From the distance, the sound of hoofs reached his ear with the reassuring staccato of rain on a tin roof.

Wivanya surged forward with an increasingly dense aura of chilling air around her, forcing Hank to roll sideways and rip open the wounds his body was dutifully knitting together. When the first strike missed, Wivanya narrowed her eyes and conjured a half dozen ice spears that pierced the ground around Hank and hemmed him into a small area. But at the same time, a shadowy figure reached the edge of the arena.

Hank honestly hadn’t realized how much he had needed a horse until he saw one fleeing in panic from a giant grasshopper. Something clicked instantly in his mind. Because the monster was only Level 28, Hank had finished it in a single bullet and cautiously approached the horse. That was how he met Ancho.

But ultimately, Ancho was just a normal horse, even if Hank had his suspicions about that based on how expressive Ancho was. So he couldn’t actually play any role in a serious battle of Hank’s. But really, Ancho didn’t need to; he just needed to spend time with Hank, exposing him to the details and meaning that could only be gathered slowly, through observation.

With enough time and dedication, Hank could create for himself a companion with all the life and character of the real horse.

...minus a few superfluous personality traits, of course.

Once it leapt up onto the raised platform, Ancho’s shadow clone reared up and released a clarion neigh that attracted everyone’s attention. Everyone but Ancho, who buried his head against the referee’s back as his image equivalent bared himself before so many humans.

“Too late to save you now,” Wivanya hissed, but no sooner had shadow-Ancho landed back on all four hooves than it stepped forward and was right next to Hank. As an image, especially as an image within an area with the heavy presence of Hank’s image, space was not a serious problem. Hank swung up into the saddle and they stepped again, escaping from the frigid encirclement. And when they crossed the distance to the far side of the arena, Hank had his revolver ready with the second powerful bullet in the chamber.

It had been far too long since he had seen Alana. Perhaps it had only been fifteen seconds, but after her initial blitz, it made him extremely wary.

Yet as Hank scanned the arena, seething with mist and falling snow as Wivanya’s Skills affected a wider and wider area, he couldn’t find Alana or her tell-tale orange flames. Somehow, this absence did not make him feel better. His narrative instincts made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end; something was about to happen.

But in the meantime, Wivanya beat her wings tentatively, testing the earlier wound that Hank had inflicted. Air churned around the dragon like she stood at the center of a wheel and the frigid currents around were spokes. The swirling pillars of mist seemed capable of grinding Hank to dust if he allowed the dragon to draw too near to him. The shadow horse beneath Hank shook out its mane, loosening some frost that had began to form. Hank frowned around but didn’t yet move as Wivanya shuddered forward. He just casually raised his revolver.

He couldn’t keep this up for long. Relying on the image version of Ancho vastly increased his ability to respond to threats, but it also increased the strain on Hank’s mind. And although he considered himself one of the most determined individuals on Earth, the combination of Alana and Wivanya had constantly dogged him and made the first few minutes of the match feel like hours. He needed an opportunity, but Hank couldn’t win if his precious bullets were used on Wivanya.

The Frost Dragon Broodmother was the perfect distraction that would eventually freeze his remaining strength from his bones. Due to high Physical Defense Stats, Hank couldn’t easily put her out of commission. If Alana truly committed to that path to victory, she could simply sit back and wait until Hank made a fatal error to strike.

Of course, if Alana was the type to sit back and wait, Hank wouldn’t be under such pressure right now.

His eyes flicked downward at the marble underneath his feet. In the brief moment when his eyes landed on the marble that was swiftly turning red and bubbling, the image horse underneath him was blurring away from the spot. But even with the impossible quickness of the image, Alana drilled out of the ground wreathed in that dangerous, orange-golden fire faster than he could escape. The tongues of flame produced a harsh light that struck directly onto Hank’s psyche. The flames snaked outward, seeking to incinerate both his image and his flesh.

Bang!

The second most powerful bullet that Hank had prepared for this match cut through the flames but was soon hollowed of its image by the heat and then melted to a superheated raindrop. It splattered harmlessly on the ground, barely buying Hank a split second of reprieve from the flames. But it was enough for him to open up some distance.

The ghost Ancho wheeled around and whinnied in complaint. Hank lowered his revolver and fed the final bullet he had prepared into the cylinder. His palms were sweaty and tingling as he raised the gun. His image continued to frantically strengthen its influence in the surrounding area, but it continued to shrink away beneath the light that Alana produced. His image flared and strained with all the tragic huffing of a children’s floatie being inflated while an adult sat on it.

Not that he could blame his image much for being restrained; even Hank could only keep one eye open as he aimed. The light that Alana was overwhelming. “Ya never keep me waitin’. That’s what I like about ya, Alana.”

“Surrender, Hank. This is your last chance.” Alana replied softly. Her enormous, snowy wings beat softly, sending a few stray feathers fluttering downward. Those feathers settled on the molten tunnel that Alana had burned through the ground, largely extinguishing any admiration Hank could feel for the feather’s beauty. They were practically weapons, with enough tensile strength to smack away his empowered Mana Bullets.

Hank allowed all thoughts of his image to fade away. Or rather, in a way he had stumbled across by watching the Ghosthound, Hank became the best example of his image. He didn’t need to will them into existence; he simply was the image, made real. He breathed in slowly, then breathed out. He wiped his left hand against his jeans while keeping his gun trained on Alana. “Nah. We both know that ain’t how this ends.”

The marble hissed as Alana drifted downward and settled onto the ground. Her flaming boots gradually caused the extremely valuable stone to bubble beneath her feet. “I’m honestly survived you survived the Second Revelation. I didn’t expect it.”

“How many Revelations are there?” Hank asked casually. But it was a distraction. His right pointer finger twitched imperceptibly. Alana blurred into motion as though she had known the shot was coming. She probably had.

BANG!

This bullet was different from all the others. Hank had prepared it precisely, thinking of this moment. To combat that inviolable, self-righteous holiness of Alana’s image, it was filled with an image of the profane. Even if an image like that wasn’t Hank’s strong suit, it was enough to slow the insidious radiation of her flames and strike a serious blow with the refined bullet within the brass casing.

In a way, I knew it would come ta this, too. Hank thought. In a smooth motion, Alana’s spearhead flashed forward, riding a wave of golden flames. Compared to that power, his bullet was so small. And as fer what happens now…

“The Third Revelation: Anguish.”

*****

Later, when it had been determined that Paolo and Kayle would be facing Alana and Wivanya in the final match of the tournament, Randidly and Tatiana had a dinner of stir fry together underneath the stars. After the food was consumed by Randidly’s endless appetite, Tatiana folded her hands in her lap. She lightly cleared her throat. “Not to pry, but… I can sense your feelings have been… complex since the match. If you don’t feel that Alana’s image is appropriately distant from your own enough to be the victorious one-”

“Ha. No, it’s not that.” Randidly waved his hand, but that just made Tatiana more troubled. For the first time in a long time, she was having a difficult time intuiting what he was thinking as he sat and looked up at the moon. “Honestly, it’s fine. It might be accurate to say… I’m struggling a bit with vanity.”

At least with that, Tatiana knew her role. She remained silent and waited for Randidly to continue. The heavy grey clouds continued to drift across the sky, seeming to tease that they would soon shroud the moon, but never daring to actually impede Randidly’s gaze.

Eventually, Randidly did continue. “Her image is… based on my shape. It is premised on a gaze that has followed me for a long time, filled with worship. Due to that history, due to the detail with which she has viewed me… it is powerful. It captures the right notes. The shape is totally present.”

Then, Tatiana saw what had Randidly in such a strange mood. “...but even if it looks like you, it’s almost surprising how much it isn’t you.”

Randidly nodded. “It misses all the important things. The image is me… but it’s not mine. Does that make sense?”

Slowly, Tatiana nodded in return. “She was a fan first, I think. Of Randidly Ghosthound. And it is very difficult for fans to look at their idols with empathy for their troubles. They only see the bright spots… and the glory.”