Most of the Einstein-Odinson student body was not enjoying the long boat ride. Vell Harlan, on the other hand, was having a great time. He’d studied, gotten some sleep, and even had a half-decent dinner with Skye, all with minimal disruption. He was almost sad to see the long cruise finally come to an end as they docked at their destination. It helped that he’d been wanting to see their destination for a while.

“So this is what other campuses look like,” Vell said, as he stepped off the docks onto the Zeus-Stephanides campus.

Much like their own school, the Zeus-Stephanides College was located on an island, though unlike their own, the island was natural rather than artificial. Rather than a flat expanse, it had a high, almost mountainous peak, with buildings scattered across rocky hills and ledges. The architecture of the central faculty building had a facade mimicking ancient Greek architecture, but every other structure was deliberately more modern -most of the buildings were even newer than the Einstein-Odinson’s own.

“Man am I glad we don’t go to school here,” Samson said. “Can you imagine all the running back and forth across campus we do on these hills?”

The jagged island looked hard enough to navigate under normal circumstances, much less under the pressure of an apocalyptic time loop.

“Be good exercise for you, at least,” Kim said. “You’d get some killer thighs.”

“Easy for the girl with no muscles to talk about what’s good exercise,” Samson scoffed.

The loopers marched uphill, and Samson’s thighs were already sore by the time they reached the dining hall. The student bodies of the two school’s were already intermingling, and the loopers had to cut through a large crowd to find Jay, Moses, and K.I.M. waiting for them.

“Hey there,” Jay said. “Welcome to our neck of the woods.”

“It’s pretty nice,” Vell said. “I’m shocked how new everything looks.”

“Well, don’t be too impressed, we have to remodel a lot because buildings keep getting damaged by experiments,” Moses said. “I really don’t know how you guys keep your campus so safe.”

Vell tried not to look too dead inside.

“Anyway,” Kim said, trying to rapidly change the subject. “How is this going to work as far as the paintball game?”

Unlike last year, where the inter-campus conflict had been a surprise, the faculty of both schools held no secrets about the coming paintball war. Vell already had his paintball guns on his belt, and many of the Zeus-Stephanides students were giving him a wide berth

“I mean, does it matter?” Jay said. “You’re just going to cowboy the whole campus anyway.”

The only advantage the ZS students had possessed was a samurai-esque student named Akira, who could singlehandedly defeat Vell thanks to an obscure interaction of various archaic warriors locked in a trinity of rock-paper-scissors style matchups, but he had graduated last year. While Akira had tried to train his fellow students in the way of the blade, none had successfully grasped bushido, leaving them utterly defenseless against Vell’s cowboying skills.

“We still need to know if there’s any rules,” Samson said. “I don’t want anyone trying to eliminate Vell on a technicality because he didn’t untie his shoelaces every thirty-seven shots or whatever.”

“Nothing like that,” Jay said. “We’re going to divide the island up into different ‘bases’ for each of us. We got the home field advantage, you guys get to use your boat as a safe zone. You can’t be eliminated while you’re on it, but you also can’t eliminate anyone else.”

“Okay, does the same go for your boat?”

“Our boat?”

Vell pointed downhill, at the docks. Another large vessel was parked right alongside theirs at the dock.

“Oh, no, that’s not ours,” Jay said. “I assumed it was here to deliver all the paintball stuff.”

“No, we manufactured all that stuff on-site,” Moses said. Kim took another look at the mystery vessel.

“Well then whose boat is that?”

Alex was the only one not looking at the boat -though she was still looking at a boat. Or boats, to be exact.

“Guys?”

She pointed towards the other end of the island, and everyone else turned to look.

“Oh, motherfucker.”

An entire fleet of fourteen vessels was rapidly approaching the island, flying strange and unfamiliar flags as they approached the docks.

“Who the fuck are these guys?”

“Probably the other schools,” Vell said.

“Other schools?”

“Yeah, the other schools,” Vell said. “What, you didn’t think more than three trickster god/scientist sponsored schools of magic and scientific research out there?”

Upon taking a moment to think about it, Alex thought it was weird there was one, much less three or more. Vell, for whom this was apparently normal, pointed out the various flags flying on the vessels.

“That’s Coyote-Oppenheimer from America, there’s Anansi-Clark from Ghana, Sun Wukong-Wu from China, and I think...Yeah, that’s Crow-Oliphant, from Australia. The other ones are a little hard to see, it’s-”

“Why do you even know all those guys, Vell?”

“Did none of you search around for schools?” Vell said. “Einstein-Odinson is very exclusive, you should’ve had backup plans in case you didn’t make the cut.”

“I thought we were the backup plan,” Jay said. Most of the Zeus-Stephanides student body was made of people whose applications to Einstein-Odinson had been denied.

“Well some people need backup backup plans,” Vell said. “Or they just want to go somewhere closer to home. Seriously, none of you applied to any other schools?”

“Why would I pursue mediocrity?” Samson said.

“Yeah, I started at the top,” Hawke said. “Why would I want to go to a third-rate school?”

“Coyote-Oppenheimer has one of the best rune-tech labs in the world, they were figuring out six-lined runes while most people were struggling with four,” Vell said. “I was pretty close to going there.”

“Well thank god you didn’t, we’d be fucked,” Hawke said. The last of the boats docked, and students started filing out in orderly formations. “What do you think they’re here for?”

“Probably nothing good,” Vell said. The students coming off the boat started forming into orderly formations and then marched up the hills. “Oh, definitely nothing good.”

“They’re just walking off the boat,” Jay said.

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

“In a perfectly executed phalanx? Marching in lockstep?” Vell scoffed. He pointed at the formations marching up the hill. “You can’t just pull off that kind of stuff overnight, they rehearsed this.”

Vell’s concerns about their marching in formation only intensified as it became apparent they were marching in formation in his direction. As the last phalanx stopped in place and stood at attention, Vell sighed heavily. The otherwise orderly ranks were being led by a few people perpetually out of step with the rest.

“Hey, Leanna,” Kim said, as Vell was too busy being miserable. “I see you ditched the robot costume.”

“It was not a costume,” Leanna lied. The other two Patschke-Puck doppelgangers following on her heels nodded in agreement. “L.I.M.’s just...in the shop.”

“Which shop?”

“The shop,” Leanna said. “The robot shop. For preparing robots.”

“Very convincing.”

“It’s a real thing, and-”

“Get out of here!”

Someone broke stepped out of the legionnaire's ranks and shooed Leanna and her minions away, chasing them away from the other school’s students.

“You’re not affiliated with us,” they shouted. The Patschke-Puck gang scampered off and vanished down the rocky slopes of the island.

“Oh, good, those losers aren’t involved,” Samson said. While he initially had a smile on his face, it quickly gave way to a look of concern. “Wait. Those losers aren’t involved.”

While the schemes of the Patschke-Puck students were always annoying, they were also always unsuccessful. If someone else was running today’s show, there was a chance it would actually be a competent, effective scheme.

“That’s right,” the newly arrived stranger said. “You’re not dealing with them. You’re dealing with us.”

The assembled students let out a loud war cry. That was not a good sign, but Vell tried to be optimistic.

“Well, it’ll be nice to have some friendly competition between-”

“It’s not friendly.”

“Fuck.”

“We are sick of being overshadowed by you people,” the student spokesman said. “Every academic journal, every headline, every news story, it’s always about what’s going on at the Einstein-Odinson, and whatever attention isn’t immediately snatched up by you goes right to Zeus-Stephanides. People barely know our schools exist, and even the people who do know think we’re just a bunch of rejects from your schools!”

“Did you get rejected from our schools?”

“That’s not the point,” the spokesman said with suspicious speed. “The point is we’re done being overshadowed by you! The problem was bad enough before, but now the whole world revolves around this guy and his stupid rune.”

Vell rolled his eyes. Of course it came back to him. It always came back to him.

“Once we beat you at this stupid paintball contest, we’ll prove to the world we’re just as good as you are, if not better!”

“Oh man, you have chosen the worst possible thing to try and compete with us on,” Hawke said. “Like there are so, so many things you could’ve stood a chance at beating us at, but paintball is not one of them.”

“Right, right, because Vell Harlan is completely undefeatable at paintball, yeah?” The spokesman said. “How good do you think he is without any bullets?”

After the taunt, Vell grabbed his gun, examined it for a moment, then aimed at the ground and fired. He got nothing but a puff of air. His guns were supposed to magically reload from an extra-dimensional ammo storage, but that had somehow been disrupted. He reached into his bookbag to reload manually, but his hand found nothing but the empty interior of a mundane bag.

“Extraspacial barriers,” the spokesman said. “No magical reloading, no summoning, no pocket dimensions, nothing.”

Vell looked around at his friends, and even at Jay and Moses. All he got was a few shrugs. Most of them had been relying on similar means to keep their guns loaded, or at least to keep their ammo stockpiles. Few people were lugging around containers of physical ammo during the games nowadays.

“And don’t think we aren’t prepared for the rest of you, either. Communications tech, robotics, computer engineering, magic -we’ve done our research, and we’re prepared for every single one of you. Even your friends, from Freddy Frizzle to Bruno.”

A few feet back in the crowd of spectators, Bruno made a confused grunt. He didn’t even talk to Vell that much. Every couple of weeks, at most.

“We’ll see you at noon. Great ready to lose.”

The ranks of students from different schools turned on their heels and filed back to the ship. Vell looked at his useless gun, then slid it back into the holster with a sigh.

“Sometimes I hate being alive.”

----------------------------------------

After scouring the ranks of both the Zeus-Stephanides and Einstein-Odinson schools, they had managed to tally up and gather roughly one-thousand physical paintballs. A respectable number, in other circumstances, but the armies of the other schools combined numbered more than forty-thousand.

“Maybe Vell could learn how to ricochet a paintball so it hits four-hundred people at once,” Hanifa said. The cosplayers held the vast majority of Einstein-Odinson’s physical paintball reserves, so they had been placed in charge of the stockpiles.

“Even he can’t do that,” Cane said. “Best case scenario we combine all these into some kind of bomb and somehow lure enough of the bad guys into one place that we can finish off what’s left with paint swords.”

Both schools had a decent stockpile of melee weapons that were still functional, unlike their magic and science-based weaponry that was currently being disrupted by various means. The cosplayers had held onto their swords to match up with various anime-inspired costumes, while the Zeus-Stephanides students had held on to them in a desperate attempt to channel any amount of the samurai energy needed to defeat Vell. Hanifa thought it was a little ironic that those same resources would now be used to help Vell. The alliance of the other schools had forced ZS and the EOC to cooperate, at least for now.

Cane and his girlfriend continued to speculate on ways to utilize their minuscule paintball supplies right up until Jay and Moses returned to the deck of the ship. The start of the game was now only half an hour away, and they had cut their scouting mission short just in time. The two marched up to Vell as the rest of his friends and allies gathered.

“Okay, we found the ammo stockpile,” Jay said. As part of their prepwork, the Allied Schools had somehow hijacked the Zeus-Stephanides paintball stockpile for their own purposes. “They’ve got it hooked up to their own magical reloading system that bypasses the block they put up.”

Jay put his phone down on the table, showcasing a massive basin full of paintballs, with a sequence of runes carved into the side. Vell snatched up the phone to examine the photo up close.

“Oh, that’s pretty good,” he said. “Coyote-Oppenheimer must’ve done that.”

“Can you undo it?”

“I could, if I had any shit to work with,” Vell said. He turned his extra-dimensional bookbag inside out to demonstrate that it was a normal bookbag now. “I can’t even make new runes, since nobody here can cast spells.”

Alex held up her hands and let out a few pitiful sparks. Even in the midst of her crisis a few weeks ago, she had been able to muster more than that. Whatever the Allied Schools were doing was disrupting magic across the entire island.

“Our first priority needs to be getting that anti-magic field down,” Hawke said. “That opens up the most options for us.”

“It has to be somewhere on the island,” Jay said. “Everything that affects the game has to be accessible to the other players. We didn’t see it in the paintball storage facility, though.”

“And even if we knew where it was, we don’t have the ammo for any kind of open warfare,” Moses added.

“We’ve got limited resources and a lot of obstacles,” Vell said. “We can’t use conventional tactics. We’re going to need to get tactical, have a plan, get in and out with-”

Vell paused mid-sentence, and his forehead started to wrinkle with intense concentration. After a second, he looked up at Kim.

“Is your shielding holding up well enough to send a message off the island?”

“So far,” Kim said. The communications shutdown affected everyone else on the island, but her shielded core could still connect elsewhere in the world. “Who am I texting?”

“Kanya,” Vell said. “Tell her we’re doing a heist.”

Kim looked up and made the call. After a few seconds, she looked back down and shrugged.

“No response so far,” she said.

“Really?”

“She’s got a job, Vell, she might be busy.”

“Well she’s usually down for heists,” Vell said. “I thought for sure she’d-”

A series of frantic splashes approached the side of the boat, followed by a soaking wet Kanya Bhaduri hauling herself over the edge of the boat and onto the deck. Still panting with exertion, she stomped right up to the planning table, dripping sea water as she went.

“Okay, I’m here,” Kanya said. “What’s the heist?”

“How- never mind,” Vell said. He pointed up the hill at the building the paintballs were stored in. “We need to break into that building and hijack a supply of paintballs. Our biggest obstacle is some kind of anti-magic field generator, we don’t know where. Can you help?”

“I’m going to need school blueprints, a list of all our available resources and personnel, estimates on the enemy security forces...and some granola,” Kanya said. “Maybe a bottle of water too. I am exhausted.”

“Do you want a towel too?”

Kanya looked down at the puddle of seawater forming at her feet. She had a starfish clinging to her pants too.

“Yeah that’d be good.”

“We’ll get you everything you need,” Vell said. “And in the meantime, why don’t you and I catch up?”

Vell put an arm around Kanya’s very damp shoulder and led her away from the planning table, towards an isolated portion of the deck.

“Oh, yeah, we’ve got a lot to talk about, we just finished clearing out your office and getting the R&D department set up, there’s-”

“That’s great Kanya,” Vell said, his voice hushed so no one could overhear. “But I kind of have something else in mind right now.”

Kanya was confused for a moment before seeing the sly smile on Vell’s face.

“Vell Harlan,” she began, aghast. “Are you up to something?”

“I’ve been getting really into scheming this year,” Vell said. “I think I’m kind of good at it. Anyway, here’s the plan…”