(Strive 11:5)

“Fuck off!”

Even as the ogre and I tumbled down towards the ocean and certain death, the hulking brute was still swimming through the air to get at me. It was ridiculous. Here I was, trying to enjoy my act of noble self-sacrifice, and this lunk was ruining it.

I kicked at the ogre with a burning leg, and it latched onto me. Then it howled at the pain in its hands, but it refused to release me.

“Just let go, you stupid son of a bitch!”

My shield sizzled as we passed through a cloud, water droplets turning to steam. Sea and sky inverted as I twisted against the monster’s grip. With my kada hand, I signed I-N for inventory and began swiping through for anything that might help. I didn’t recall parachutes being on the packing list. Tent stakes, dry rations, water, bedding… I selected a large white bedsheet, and it bloomed in my hand, jerking me upward and righting me. That was enough, and the ogre, surprised, relinquished its grip on my leg as it fell past me.

Then the sheet burned to ashes in my hand, and I plummeted again, before summoning another one. Thank God for overpacking. I had a good dozen or so of the things in my inventory.

My vision threatened to fade as the shield continued to drain my energy, but I knew I couldn’t deactivate it. The detonation would probably cause me to pass out entirely, and then even if I survived the impact, I’d drown.

In this stop-start manner, I descended through the tropical sky until slapping down in the ocean. The impact sent a jet of boiling water outwards, and bubbles washed around me. Immediately, I felt cold and my last thought was something about the specific heat of water before I passed out.

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Bright white sunlight baking the asphalt. The laughter of children, the repetitive bounce of a slightly under-inflated basketball. It was an in-between time—right before summer break, when stresses seemed imaginary and the world itself relaxed into a slower rhythm.

I didn’t even panic much when my mother called out my name in that distinct, “you’re-in-trouble” voice. Sure, my heart leaped into my throat a bit, but that was normal. I rolled my eyes at my friends and went inside.

My mother was waiting at the dinner table. She threw a piece of paper from the mail down in front of me. “This is very not good,” she said in Chinese. “After we took you to all those classes, spent all that money, and you still can’t qualify for USAMO?”

So that was what this was about. I fought the urge to grin.

My father was there too, shaking his head in anger. “Whole this year,” he said in English. “Not concentrate on schoolwork. Brain always in game world.” He jabbed a finger at another sheet of paper. “How can you save world if you can’t even save GPA?”

“Science Bowl, Quiz Bowl. Not a single one passed.” My mother listed out the competitions as if they were charges brought against me. “USAMO, USABO, USACO.”

“You’s-a-ho,” I said mildly. “I didn’t qualify for that one either.” I didn’t expect the backhand swing from my father that struck me on the side of my face.

“You must get some punishment for this,” he said.

My jaw stung, but I put on a face as if I hadn’t felt anything at all. “You know, the latest research says corporal punishment doesn’t—”

Another slap cut me off. “Always talk smart, like you know more than us,” my mother cried. “If so smart, then why not qualify for competition?”

“When I was a kid, there was no such thing as ‘no hit children,’” my father added.

“Sounds rough,” I said. “I can’t imagine what that would’ve been like.”

My father was silent. He went over to the fish tank where Finneas swam about in his toy castle, none the wiser, and scooped him up.

“No,” I said. Finny wasn’t much for conversation, but I cared about him. I was the one that fed him every day, cleaned his tank. He would nibble at my fingers for food whenever I trailed them in the water.

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But now he was struggling, flopping in my father’s grip.

“Put him back,” I pleaded, rebelliousness forgotten. “I’ll do better, I’m sorry.”

But my father just stood there as if deciding what to do. With each passing second, Finneas’s flopping grew weaker. I rushed at him, and he put an arm out to hold me off, but my pinwheeling arms smacked him and he dropped Finneas on the hardwood floor. He lost his balance, and his foot came down on my pet with a sickening squish. Even my father looked stricken for a minute, and then his face turned to disgust as he tried to scrape the fishy mass from his sock.

“Better this way,” he said, as if it had all been part of a grand plan. “Less distraction from school.”

I cried. Not then, in front of them. Later, of course. It sounds fucking stupid, but part of me at that time resolved to harden my heart, to build a kind of barrier of uncaring around myself. So that I wouldn’t feel the pain I had on that early summer’s day, when I watched my father scrape the guts of my beloved Finny off his foot onto the laminated hardwood.

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(Strive 10:10)

I coughed and sputtered, vomiting out water from my lungs, and it streamed into the sky. Something was wrong. I looked up, expecting to see the sun, and saw instead, with a sudden sense of vertigo, the glowing light-spell of Shinar, the city hanging upside down above me. A steady stream of utensils, bowls, and half-eaten pieces of meat floated gently to the surface, then fell up toward the city.

Something pushed against my feet, and I jerked back to see that it was the ogre’s massive corpse, its eyes glazed over. I watched in horror as it breached the surface, hurtling upwards toward Shinar. A transparent disc flickered into existence, and the ogre evaporated as it struck the safety zone protecting the city.

Treading water, I pulled a broccoli-flavored refreshing soda from my inventory and slammed it, feeling its energy course through my body. Then I dove into the water, dodging dining tables and dead orcs as I followed the brighter tropical sun.

But it was too deep, too far away, and I soon flailed to get back to the Shinar side of the two-faced ocean. I came up, gasping for air. Checking my inventory, I saw that I still had some red Swedish Fish—Fish of Fortitude, my udjat called them.

One by one, I started eating. Each one was like a punch in the gut, but I forced myself to chew and swallow as more orcish corpses rose out of the water around me to break against Shinar’s shield. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a glowing figure in the distance with its arms crossed, but it vanished.

You feel strong! You feel strong! You feel strong! Your strength has increased to Unthreatening! You feel strong! You feel strong! You feel strong! You feel strong! You feel strong!

I lost count of the notifications as Shinar’s enchanted sun swapped out for a less-bright moon. By the measure of the Epoch command, it’d already been hours since I’d fallen here. I wondered if El and the others were looking for me, but I wasn’t hopeful. It was a big world.

I was absentmindedly chewing on one of my last red candies when my strength swelled. Your strength has increased to Milquetoast!

Your strength and Corpus aspect have unlocked a new technique!

You’ve learned the basic technique Power Strike, a spell of selective self-enhancement.

Energy consumption: Moderate.

Another six characters, and it ended with a clenched fist, like a suggestion of how to use it. But that wasn’t what I wanted it for.

Carefully, I made the signs, and my bracelet, now orange, flared. I wondered if for a brief moment, I looked like the birth of a red star, or like Mars, in the evening sky of Shinar. Then I turned away from the city and dove.

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(Strive 11:6)

Arms at my sides, I rocketed up toward the eleventh floor surface of the ocean. I pushed past orcish body parts as I went and broke the surface, gasping.

Something grabbed me.

I was going to scream before I realized it was Artem, his red glow illuminating the water. For his part, he seemed as surprised as I was.

“You’re alive,” he said in his low voice, not quite a question. “When Selene’s reading turned up your location underwater… we thought this was going to be body recovery.”

“You guys came back,” I said, rubbing water out of my eyes.

“Don’t get blubbery on me.” Artem turned and began paddling.

“I’m not,” I protested, but he didn’t listen. I sighed and started to follow.

El and Selene weren’t hard to spot; her Lux spell was like a floodlight in the evening sky. As I got closer, she snapped it off, and I saw both of them standing up, El on her hind legs. We waded out of the water, and I felt a weakness that didn’t feel like it could be cured by health bars or refreshing sodas.

“Don’t ever fucking do that again,” said El, and she seemed like she was almost crying. “That hero shit is so wack.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I swear—”

Selene punched me in the stomach half-heartedly. “That was for El.” Then, looking into my eyes, she punched me again.

“And that was for me.”

She readied another fist. “And this one’s for Artem—”

“Okay,” I gasped. “I get it, I get it.”

She pulled me in tight. El jumped on my shoulder, and it felt good to have her fuzzy warmth there. Artem stood aside, and I looked at him for a moment until he rolled his eyes and joined, patting me on the back.

For a brief moment, things were good.