Helen had never been the strongest girl in Vena Cava. She had come from humble origins, a family of peons living in the fourth ring of Vena Cava with nothing more to their name than a tent.

She had become the Knight of Change through sheer force of will and an inane amount of luck. She used her newfound fame and power to give back to the people that raised her, and she was a well-respected member of the community.

But everyone is willing to make sacrifices against their character for something they believe in.

Helen knew deep down in her heart that the knight tournament was rigged from the start. The winner was always some new up and comer with a powerful backstory to wow the audience into thinking they too had a chance at fame and power.

It was very different to know it was rigged than it was to actively participate in the rigging, but she just detested the look on the other man’s face.

She had been in the heat that Joy and Ryan had competed in for their spots in this tournament. Joy had just looked so dopey, like this was all some big game to him. It made all her hard work, all her sweat, all her pain, and all her misery seem like a joke.

So, the mysterious organizers had shown up to her door and asked if she wanted to destroy the man, she said yes. It was all for the pride and sanctity of knighthood of course, but someone had to do the dirty work.

They had provided her with as much detail as possible and told her this match should be an easy one for her. The organizer’s seers and consultants had analyzed the day that Ryan was defeated in detail, in hopes of making quick work of the phony who had bested him.

Helen had been informed that Joy’s gift seemed to revolve around touching people and gaining more power the more people he touched. This implied that any battle beyond the preliminary rounds would be an automatic loss for him since his gift only worked on large amounts of people. But Helen was not foolish enough to think that the organizers knew everything.

Her only plan walking into the arena was to take him out in an incredible blitz of violence.

Helen had received her gift and become an immediate star in the knightly world because of it. Her gift from Change had been the ability to change her own size. This came with certain limitations that she knew about and tried to work around.

Suddenly changing height was incredibly difficult and being able to move easily without tripping and falling took her an embarrassingly long time to get correct. She could be as small as an ant to the size of a giant. The only problem with being the size of a giant was that her weight didn’t change, she had found that she even felt physically weaker the larger she became.

Helen was sure she could ask some science-y people to figure it out for her, but all she knew was that it also applied in both directions; her weight didn’t change if she grew smaller too.

So, she had an arsenal of tricks to take care of some idiot like Joy.

Once the match started Helen suddenly grew to the size of a giant and dashed across the arena before the man could even react. Well, he did react, but it was only to smile and ask her about playing a game. The taunt made her even more enraged and that caused her wild blow to swing wide and clip him on the shoulder instead of in the face.

Her initial blitz seemed to go well, and she was sure that the man would be nursing a nasty headache or even a concussion for a long time after this match from the wallop that she had given him.

But she had heard a voice in her head say something about a game and she did not like hearing voices in her head. To compensate for the weakness she felt in her own mind, she decided to hit Joy even more.

The problem was that she knocked him far away and the voice came back to her head after she hit him. It simply said, “seen” then stopped talking.

Helen felt that the whole situation was insanely odd and decided right at that moment to assume that she knew nothing about Joy’s gift. Something was happening that was nothing like what had happened in the preliminary round, and she did not like it one bit.

She approached her opponent with a bit more wariness than he deserved, but she was not one to take chances. Helen threw out a testing punch and the man ducked below it. She threw a one-two combo, and he swayed back and forth between them.

Joy seemed to be acting very passive, so Helen decided to take it up a notch. She threw kicks and punches, changing the size of her body to keep him from guessing where she would attack him. A punch that seemed to be missing but changed sizes midair was incredibly tough to dodge.

But he dodged them nonetheless, he swayed and danced through the moves, not letting her touch a hair one his body.

“I can see you!” Joy laughed at her, he laughed, as she continued to throw out techniques.

Helen roared and tried to tackle the man to the ground, but he jumped at the perfect time and landed on her back, jumping off her and landing in a wonderful front flip. He staggered a bit to catch his balance, but she got the worst of it. The jump had pushed her face down into the sand.

The sand got stuck between her teeth and she started spitting on the ground in hopes of getting it out of her mouth.

She reassessed what was happening. While she had been trying to get the grit out of her mouth, Joy had been dragging one of his legs through the sand and drawing lines through the letters that were on the ground. She vaguely remembered the letters appearing after he had finished speaking, but she had put no thought into them.

As she was about to pounce on the impertinent man his eyes lit up and the voice spoke in her head again, “denied.” It said with authority and power.

Helen shook her head and tried to grow to an imposing size. The larger she was, the more threatened her opponents felt, which gave her more time to think. But as she reached into her soul and tried to touch on the gift that had defined her life, she found that it was blocked off from her.

She had been denied her gift.

Helen was so stunned that Joy crossed the field between them and punched her right between the eyes before she even processed what was happening.

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Her vision blurred, but Helen was no pansy to be taken out by one simple punch. She staggered back to her feet and fought Joy blow for blow. Each strike after the first landed on her armor, which protected her and must’ve hurt Joy to no end, but he was unstoppable. Bleeding knuckles and probably a concussion was nothing in his path towards beating Helen.

Helen ran. To be fair, it was a tactical retreat, but she would never be able to convince herself of it in the days to come. Helen had been brought against an insurmountable wall, something she couldn’t understand. In the face of the unknown, she ran away.

Joy tried to catch up, but he kept falling on his ass. Helen found it the tiniest bit funny, but she cut back the laugh in her throat; what this man was doing was a disservice to the group of people she had dedicated her life to.

But her self-control did not stop the audience. Helen could hear them laughing their asses off at what must have seemed the most ridiculous match to come out of the knight tournament in decades.

With a reasonable distance between them, Helen regained a calm head. She kept hearing a voice declaring things in her head, this implied one of two things. Either Joy had two gifts, one that let him use auditory hallucinations and another one that caused these games. Or it meant that his “gaming gift” had an inborn third party that enforced the rules of the game.

The first option was meaningless to Helen, so she banked on the second option. Helen screamed at the top of her lungs, “voice in my head, explain the stupid rules!”

Helen felt a voice in her head pause, she wasn’t sure how something that wasn’t talking could create such a vacuum of noise in her mind, but she was thankful because the voice in her head responded.

“Of course, you are playing word hunt… as I said before. In this game a four-by-four grid of letters are placed between the combatants’ feet. If a combatant draws one continuous line between the letters to form a word, the word is manifested into reality in the most feasible way possible. Also, these manifestations of words are given more power the more letters they contain.”

The voice explained the rules to her as if she were a child, but Helen was still thankful no matter how condescending the voice sounded.

Helen observed the field and tried to readjust her current plan. She had been planning to blitz her opponent and give him no opportunity to gain strength using his wily ways. But an opportunity had presented itself to her; she could take advantage of his insane abilities and make herself even stronger.

She saw the beginning of her new and improved plan.

Helen dashed across the arena; Joy still seemed drunk on his feet as he chased after her. But even without having the augmentations available from her gift she was able to swiftly get away.

She reached her target, the letter “B” on the ground, imposing in all its glory. She struck the letter with her left bootheel and dragged it through the sand, hitting the other three letters she needed to create the word of power.

“Bees.” The voice announced again. The denial of gifts disappeared from Helen, and she made her body swell in size. With her gargantuan body staring down at Joy, a swarm of bees animated in the air and started to surround Joy.

She started cackling at the poor man swatting at the thick heavy bees stinging him from every angle. Helen quite liked this; the battle had become a wonderfully difficult game with unique win condition. Not that any of this was fun or a game, she was incredibly serious about this tournament.

The man swung around wildly, trying to avoid the torrent of insects and their stinging rage.

Helen watched as her insects brought her closer and closer to victory. The man was crawling on the ground, he had to be close to giving in, and she was going to savor this moment from her gargantuan size, staring down on him.

“Mended.” Helen looked down at the hale and healthy man who started jumping up and down. The bees had disappeared, and Joy now looked healthier than he did at the start of the match.

His eyes also held a dangerous gleam, whatever head injury he sustained earlier was now gone. Joy had been mended and Helen was beyond frustrated that she had not seen this coming. She had as much access to the letters as him, she should have been able to see his plan from a mile away.

Helen leapt at him and then shrunk herself down to the smallest size that was possible. She rarely used the tactic because it was gruesome, but sometimes a job needed to be done properly.

Her hyper dense body collided with Joy at the incredible speed that she had generated from her original massive form.

Helen drilled a hole through Joy’s shoulder. Blood covered her body, and the impact took its toll on her as well. The great speed and the hyper density of her own body protected most of her, but the insides of a person were not meant for such incredible moves. Helen spat out a gob of her own blood that mixed with Joy’s own in the covering of her body.

She regrew back to her normal size, maybe a few inches taller than she truly was, but no one needed to know that. She stared down at Joy who was gaping at the bleeding hole in his shoulder. She didn’t enjoy doing that move, but she did what she had to.

Helen expected Joy to give up, she expected him to pass out and fall to the ground, she expected to have truly beaten him.

What she did not expect was for him to put on a dazzling red smile, the blood ruined the look a little, then started limping his way towards her. Joy was favoring the side without an injury as he approached her.

Blood was running down his arm and dripping onto the sand, the crowd roared their approval at Joy’s indomitable spirit. Helen was unimpressed, she was sure that the only thing holding him up was sheer determination and that a strong wind would knock him over.

Helen kindly waited for Joy to approach her. Once he was there, he stopped and looked around at the crowd, the cheered even louder for him and he brought his arms up in a defensive position, looking as if he was going to engage her.

Helen held back a snort as she booted him across the arena with a well-placed front kick. She even shrunk herself back down to a little smaller size than normal to increase the striking power of her technique.

He careened across the arena, sliding to a stop on one of the final letters that had been placed on the ground.

Helen stalked after him, she was a panther in the jungle, a hawk staring down at a mouse, a wolf with its jaws around a rabbit. She was the victor, and any time spent now was just a waste.

Helen kept striking Joy, and he kept being sent careening across the arena. His feet barely touched the ground, but Helen refused to give up. Her fists carved the story of her struggle into his bones.

By the ninth hit she realized something was wrong. He never dodged, but he was always sent flying away, even the strikes that were meant to just hurt him rather than gain distance were sending him flying across the arena.

But she figured it was just the final attempts of a losing man. Joy was a boat, and she was the roiling ocean. It did not matter what the boat did, it was at the mercy of the waves.

With one final strike she watched him collapse to the ground in a heap. He must have finally lost enough blood that no amount of willpower would keep him on his feet anymore.

He started crawling, it was in an odd direction, not directly towards or away from her, but he was going in a determined line towards something. He was moving towards one of the letters.

Every action hangs in the balance of one moment; if Helen had figured out Joy’s intentions a moment sooner, she would have been able to stop him, she would have been able to claim the victory she desperately wanted. But that was a different life, a different moment.

A voice sounded out Helen’s doom in her head, “feeblemindedness.” The word was simple, but it spelled her doom just the same. Her mind blanked, nothing was real, nothing existed, she was nothing, she was everything. Who was she?

The next coherent thought that Helen had was in the medical room after the battle had finished. She couldn’t’ remember how it had happened, but she knew that she had lost.

Tears for a different life, where she lived up to the expectations she put on herself, dripped down on cheeks.

Everyone let her cry in silence, except for the dickhead in the bed across from hers who grinned at her and said, “that was really fun, you’re an incredible fighter. I am lucky to have beaten you.”

His smile was like a knife through Helen’s heart.

The man who had destroyed her left the room a bit later with a spring in his step. Helen wished so desperately to be as free as he was, but that was not the life she had carved out for herself.

Duty and expectations were her burden to carry, just like the tears in her eyes, they were an ever-present companion.

She hated that man, and she hated herself.