“You wouldn’t mind playing a game with me, would you?”

At Joy’s call the game was decided.

A voice declared in the blonde- and black-haired twins’ and Joy’s head, “Marco Polo-ish. Do any of you need the rules explained to you?”

Joy thought, ‘what a stupid name.’

But before he could process what was happening, the three combatants found that the wool had been pulled over their eyes.

Joy was blind.

It was a jarring experience, especially when he was about to get into a massive fight with two unknown combatants. But Joy trusted in his own luck. This game was chosen for a reason and Joy was going to clobber these two girls.

He took a calming breath and reevaluated his plans for this fight. The women would be just as disoriented as he was, hopefully. It would be super unfair if he was blind, and they were not.

In the stillness Joy realized that he could hear the two women surprisingly well. His sense of hearing had been magnified by the game’s rules to compensate for the lack of vision.

He could work with that.

Joy could hear hyperventilating gasps as the two women shuffled around, trying to find each other in the darkness that enveloped them all.

Their breaths finally eased, and the two of them struggled to find each other in the dark. Joy started walking slowly towards the two of them. Their hearing was probably as advanced as his own, so they would be wary of any suspicious noise.

He heard the distinct sounds of cloth ruffling, as if someone was cocking their arm back to throw a punch.

Then Joy’s world shifted. Without his eyes, there was no way to truly distinguish what had happened, but the ground beneath his feet had suddenly changed and the sounds of one of the women was much closer than before.

Then a fist collided with his face.

In a moment of unusual clarity, Joy let the blow send him downwards while letting his feet be carried up by the momentum of the punch. This allowed Joy’s foot to connect with one of the twins’ faces.

His beautiful, trusty shoes collided with enough force to make a tooth fall out of the twin’s mouth. He knew it because he could hear the tooth cascading down the cobblestones after his strike.

“Shit.” A cry came from the twin’s mouth as she struggled to recover. Joy tried to capitalize on his fortune, he hoped to land a solid punch to her noggin, causing her to be knocked out and only leaving Joy with one opponent.

But that punch never landed. As Joy did a massive swing to the twin’s head, the air suddenly shifted, and his punch totally whiffed.

He tried to calm himself and open his ears to the world around him, trying to discern where the wily twin had gone off to when a massive uppercut sent him flailing onto his back.

Joy’s chin ached from the strike, and he heard a little giggle coming from in front and behind him.

Joy curled up into the fetal position to defend himself, but the two women never capitalized on his pain and misery. Instead, he heard them shuffling around trying to find each other again.

Why were they finding each other? Why did his punches always miss?

There were obviously some gimmicky gifts happening here, Joy thought without even the slightest bit of self-reflection on those words.

As the twins touched each other again, Joy tried to prepare himself. He wasn’t exactly sure what would happen, but he prepared for it as best as possible. He rose to his feet and held himself in a boxing position. Feeling his adrenaline kick into overdrive, Joy felt the air shift around him again and he turtled up against the incoming onslaught.

As the blows landed on him, Joy noticed that they distinctly felt like the blows of a single person. The twins were not double teaming him. If he opened his ears beyond the sounds of the beating he was taking, he could even hear the other twin shuffling along somewhere behind him. The far one seemed to be the same distance as before the air shifted.

He waited for a single mistake by the person giving his beatdown. They were full of technique, but they had obviously never fought without their eyesight before. Joy felt that the trick to winning a fight with his eyes closed was to turn it into a grapple, force the other person to stay in one place.

So, Joy bided his time, letting blows strike him, moving erratically in the dark to confuse his opponent. Finally, the moment happened, as his opponent ducked their head to make a wild haymaker, her hair brushed by Joy’s fingers.

Joy caught them with an iron grasp. He cringed at it, knowing all too well the pain he was inflicting, since he himself had felt his hair walk out of his scalp a recently. But he did not let his internal cringing stop him from twisting her hair and yanking her off her feet.

A fight is decided in a moment. And for any other fighter this may have been that moment. But these women were not some weaklings, they were not new to this, and most of all they had the luck of a good gift on their side.

As Joy straddled the woman in hopes of getting clean strikes to her face, the lithe figure underneath him shifted into the form of a bear of a man. A beer gut appeared under Joy, and he suddenly rose up off the ground.

“What is this?” A gruff voice said, “you got a problem with me. I’ll show you a problem.” The breath stank of booze, but the man’s hands were like mitts, and they grabbed either side of Joy and threw him across the cobbled street.

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Joy bounced like a smooth rock upon a particularly calm lake.

The pain was overwhelming, but it was just bruises. Joy could live with some minor bruising.

Well, third time was the charm. Joy had finally figured out what their gift was. He assumed that both twins had the ability to switch places with any other person in their vicinity. He believed that normally they could switch with anyone they could see, so they were limited in their abilities because of the Marco Polo game.

The reason they were not just switching every time that Joy was about to hit them was because they needed to be able to have some sort of real knowledge of where the person they wanted to switch with was in space. And they had obviously never spent much time practicing with their gift in pitch blackness.

This revelation gave Joy some new options. He knew that it would be tough to truly pin them down, but he needed to blitz them. There could be no half measures, they needed to be taken entirely out of the fight, then the other twin would go down easily.

Joy grinned as he finally started working his way back to his feet. He could hear the twins quietly calling out to each other in the blackness, hoping the distant sounds of the other people on the street would muffle their position.

But Joy didn’t try to close the distance with them immediately, instead he waited. He let his intuition guide him to the optimal path.

Just as the world shifted around him, Joy released a powerful strike. The women were still hoping to take him unawares, using the pitch blackness to hide their gift. The twin who remained to fight Joy using their tactic was not prepared for the downward strike that slammed her into the ground.

The strike was so forceful that she bounced. And at the peak of her bounce, she was slammed with the second hand. And she was out of the fight.

All it ever takes is a single mistake, a single stroke of luck. People are so fragile that their bodies collapse after a single failure to keep up. Joy bemoaned the fact that the game ended so quickly, he couldn’t truly let loose and play when his opponents dropped at the slightest showing of his prowess.

“Did I get the blonde one, or the black haired one?” Joy said in a sing-songy voice, mocking the one twin still left standing.

He could hear her feet shuffling nervously on the ground. Fearful of him but dedicated to her mission. She wanted the glory of the arena, the adoration of the fanatics watching the knight games, it belonged to her.

So, she ran. Not to get away from Joy, but to gain tactical advantage. Without her twin, she needed to find more people to switch with.

She bounded toward the crowd that had been milling around the street. The massive fight breaking out on the street dispersed most of the pedestrians. They moved away from the fighting, but not away from the entertainment.

A rough circle had formed around the sextet of combatants and there were many people watching the show. There had been jeers when the first twin went down, and the other twin had heard them.

She bowled through the crowd, switching with people at random hoping to gain some distance and space from her attacker.

But Joy had been listening and waiting.

During his wait he had started kicking the cobblestones near his feet, and magically one of them dislodged itself from the rest. The street had been molded by someone with a gift from Earth nearly forty years ago, and never in those years had a stone come out of the ground.

But there was a first for everything, and these sorts of things always seemed to happen around Joy.

He hefted the stone in his hand. It was a nice weight, heavy enough to hurt, but light enough that he would have no trouble chucking it. Joy’s ears stayed open to the disruption caused by the other twin and after an eternal moment he grinned.

The air felt right, the breeze moved just the right way, and Joy could feel his perfect ending coming to fruition.

Joy threw the stone in the general direction of the noise. It was a beautiful lob that Joy was unable to see, a perfect parabolic arc.

“Heads up!” Joy screamed at the crowd.

Everyone bolted, no one knew whether the stone would hit them, but the crowd was a frenzy, hoping to avoid the great big stone barreling down towards their heads.

Within the confusion, the other twin reacted poorly. She started switching places with people at random, hoping to beat the stone by sheer probability.

The stone careened through the air and was about to impact an elderly woman in the head when the other twin finally switched with her. Putting her head directly in the path of the rock.

With a thunk that made everyone cringe, the woman was knocked to the ground and some blood started oozing out of her head from where the stone had struck her.

The final strike had been thrown and the veil was lifted from Joy’s eyes. He was free of the darkness and could see again.

A deep contented sigh escaped his lips as he looked at the night sky above him. It was a truly spectacular night, and he would have been regretful until the end of time if the blindness had made him miss that perfect moment.

Joy looked at the scuffle that had occurred and the damage that had been wrought from it. His battle had been quite tame, none of the combatants had any seriously destructive powers, so the street looked quite pristine other than a single missing cobblestone.

Lillian and Theo had been having a handful with the remaining enemy though. His gift seemed to be controlling a veritable army of hands that surrounded him. He masterfully conducted his hands to encircle them and strike from every unexpected angle. Sheer quantity had overwhelmed Lillian and Theo.

But the two of them were powerful and resourceful if a bit heavy-handed in Joy’s opinion. Lillian had dreamt up some sort of creature that only existed in the corner of your vision, and it had harassed the man with the hands. But the creature seemed to leave devastation in its wake. Breaking things without a care in the world.

Puddles filled the street from where Theo had tried to freeze the man in place. The puddles were murky, dark, and gross. An awful thing to look at in Joy’s opinion.

Joy started meandering over towards the other two’s fight. Shouts filled the area, and the flashy fight drew all the eyes of the crowd. There even seemed to be a betting pool on who would win.

Joy drew close to the man who was running the gambling stand and asked, “what are the odds?”

The man didn’t even look up to see who had asked, so he didn’t notice that it was one of the combatants.

“It’s two to one against the pair. They had the advantage at first since there was two of them, but we have seen the skill of the man with the hands and the betting changed accordingly.”

“Put me down for one hundred gold on the pair.” The man gave a blank stare to Joy, and nearly jumped out of his boots when he recognized the man who had been fighting the twins earlier.

“You got that kind of gold on you?” The man asked tentatively, then his back straightened as he found some gumption, “also, I won’t let you bet anything if you’re going to join the fight.”

Joy dug down in his pants and fished out a massive sack of gold that had been portioned far too close to his nether regions. Then he dropped it in front of the other man and shouted, “Looks like you two are kind of slow today. You two need a…” he took a meaningful pause, “hand?”

With a furious roar Theo released a wall of ice that encased every hand that their opponent had been controlling, and simultaneously Lillian caught the man himself in a pincer attack where he was stuck between her fist and the monster that only existed in the corner of your visions’ teeth.

The man thankfully chose to let Lillian’s fist knock him out gracefully, rather than face the monstrous teeth.

“I HATE YOUR PUNS, JOY!” Lillian yelled out and Theo looked on approvingly at her outburst.

Joy just smiled at them, “can I have my winnings now?” He asked the man who had just given a sack of gold to.

The man’s blank stare came back, and he just sighed at the trio of insane people. At least their insanity had made him a lot of money, was the only thing that the poor booky could think before he started divvying up the gold he had.