Vell Harlan actually whistled a tune as he marched straight towards enemy territory. The students of the Allied Schools were still fleeing from his approach everywhere he went.

“So is our strategy to just have them run away in circles until they all get too tired to fight,” Cane said. “Or is there an actual plan here?”

“I do have a plan,” Vell said. “I’m relatively confident in the plan too. I had Kanya’s help and everything.”

“Right, Kanya helped you plan the heist,” Cane said. “Vell, I’ve done a heist with you, this doesn’t feel very heisty.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Vell said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ll know when it’s time,” Vell said. He patted Cane on the shoulder and then returned to the front of the group as they made their way up the slope. Since the space by his side was free, Hanifa settled in and held Cane’s hand.

“You know, if anyone else was talking to you like that, you’d be arguing with them,” Hanifa said.

“Yeah, but not Vell,” Cane said. “That’s just how things are with Vell. They never make sense.”

Hanifa waited patiently for a second half of that sentence, and never got one.

“Until?”

“Until what?” Cane said. “There’s no ‘until’. Things never make sense. Sure, sometimes you get a nice wrap up and things get maybe ninety-nine percent to making sense, but there’s always at least one little thing that never fully adds up.”

“Hmm. I guess that makes sense.”

“Ninety-nine percent sense, anyway,” Cane said. Hanifa laughed at that, and they continued on.

Once the rocky slopes gave way to almost level ground, Vell took a moment to admire the view. They stood on the second highest peak of the island’s many rocky hills, giving them a panoramic view of most of the island. From here they could see the fortified laboratory’s, the boats far below, and even most of the structures at the peak that the Allied Forces had turned into their base of operations. Vell could see massive banners waving in the wind from here.

“How long do you think they’ve been planning this? Between the marching formations and the matching banners, it has to be at least two months, right?”

“I’d wager this has been more of an all-year endeavor,” Kim said. “This isn’t a casual thing for them, this is a massive undertaking.”

“Speaking of massive undertakings,” Hawke said. “Take a look at everything around us.”

He pointed downhill, towards the lab building where the anti-magic device is stored, then at the various buildings where defenses like the communications blocker and the electronics jammer were located. Vell was also taking a look at the labs, scrutinizing them for some odd detail only he could see.

“So, all around us, we have incredibly important strategic targets, and we currently have a good vantage point,” Hawke said. “And over there-”

Hawke pointed at the fortified war camp of the Allied Schools.

“-we have the incredibly dangerous, well guarded, and tactically inadvisable center of operations,” Hawke said. “Which I assume we are going to walk directly towards.”

“You assume correctly,” Vell said. He nodded in the direct of the defenses below them and then turned to face the war camp. “Let’s get to it. Oh, and take your hands off your guns.”

“So our plan is to walk directly into the center of the enemy war camp completely unarmed,” Kim said. “This better be one motherfucker of a scheme you’re cooking, Vell.”

“I’m pretty proud of it, yeah.”

Such confidence was a rare thing, so his friends followed him, and the many eyes of the Allied Schools followed in turn. Scouts, drones, and hacked cameras watched their every move as Vell led the march directly into the enemy camp. He waved at some of the gate guards as he walked right through, without a single shot being fired.

“Hey guys. Nice camp, love the banners,” Vell said. “So, I’m assuming you have some war council type thing? Can I talk to them?”

“We’re right here,” said one of the council members. Vell turned towards seven students who were not dressed any differently from the others.

“Oh. You should really get some heraldry, some tabards or something,” Vell said.

“We spent a lot of time on the banners alone,” one of them mumbled. “What do you want?”

“Well, I want a fight, obviously, where’s the action?” Vell said. He pointed towards some snipers who had their guns trained on his position. “I’ve been waltzing around your camp for like a minute now and nobody has so much as fired a warning shot.”

“We know what you’re doing, Harlan,” one the of the councilmen hissed. “We’ve studied you. Your first year in the paintball war you deliberately lost a game to spare yourself the trouble of attention, and you’re trying the same thing now. A victory you hand to us is no victory at all.”

“Draw your guns and fight.”

“Are you sure? Feels like you’re throwing away a golden opportunity here,” Vell said. “Last call for an easy win.”

“We don’t need your hand outs to win, you arrogant bastard. Stand and fight.”

“Well.”

Vell Harlan put one hand on a gun and the other one in his bookbag.

“If you insist.”

In a blur of motion faster than the eye could see, Vell drew one gun and fired six shots at the Council of Seven. The Last member standing turned to his troops and screamed.

“Fire now! He’ll need to reload-”

A seventh bullet struck the last council member in the back of the head. As he faced his troops, he could see them all splattered with multicolored paintballs, falling one by one in a blindingly fast barrage.

“-manually.”

The council member turned to see Vell Harlan, guns blazing, eliminating dozens of opponents every second. He never stopped to reload.

“How.”

The trademark glint of magic gleamed off Vell’s revolver. With his other hand, he reached into his bookbag and withdrew a few runes, protecting himself and his allies with a forcefield as the Allied Schools finally regained their wits and returned fire. Vell’s friends sheltered under the magic dome as they too got up to speed.

“Well, looks like the magic’s back on,” Kim said. “Fuck if I know how, though.”

“I’ll explain later, fight now,” Vell said. Samson didn’t need to be told twice. He reached into Vell’s extra-dimensional bookbag, which was now fully functional, and withdrew a little something he’d prepared for the occasion. Samson did not have Vell’s speed or accuracy with shooting, but a paintball minigun could compensate for both. Skill didn’t much matter when you were firing two-hundred rounds a second.

“Take cover and hold the line,” one of the Allied Students shouted. “We still have him surrounded. That shield can’t hold forever!”

“And on that note,” Hawke said. He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and called up Kanya, since apparently everything worked again. “Hi Kanya, I don’t know what happened but all the nonsense is back on.”

“I noticed,” Kanya said. “I’ll tell everyone to unleash the nonsense.”

From their hiding places, the forces of the Allied Schools were suddenly bombarded, not by multicolored paintballs, but by an equally multicolored array of lights. Spells were cast, portals were opened, and experimental devices were powered on as the Einstein-Odinson and Zeus-Stephanides forces were fully unleashed. The paint-stained commanders of the Council of Seven wandered to the edge of the hill and watched as pirate ships rolled out, harpies and jetpacks took to the sky, and portals flung paintballs from every possible angle.

“Now all comes to ruin,” one of the commanders mumbled.

“Okay, this is all embarrassing enough without us doing the shakespearean thing.”

“Sorry.”

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

Approximately fifteen minutes later, the Einstein-Odinson armies gathered at the top of the island peak to celebrate their victory. It had only taken them about seven minutes to win, but hiking uphill was hard.

“Whoof, I miss a flat campus,” Bruno said, as he rolled his wheelchair to the level summit.

“Don’t you have a power setting on that thing?”

“I blew out the battery with the built-in paintball cannon,” Bruno said. He tapped the side of his chair to redeploy the hidden gun. “Worth it.”

Bruno put his gun away and rolled past Vell to congratulate him on a job well done. The moment of camaraderie passed, and was swiftly replaced by outright hostility when the Council of Seven stormed up to Vell.

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“What’d you? How did you cheat?”

“I didn’t cheat at anything,” Vell said. “You just lost.”

“We had eyes on you and your friends every second,” a councilmember said. “We had every countermeasure prepared, we knew everything about you!”

“And there’s your problem,” Vell said. “You were prepared to defend against me and everyone I know. So-”

A young blonde man stepped off the sidelines and waved. Vell stepped up and put an arm around his shoulders.

“I asked somebody I didn’t know.”

“Hi, I’m Craig,” said Craig.

“Everybody, this is Craig, I’ve never met him before in my life.”

“Nice to meet you, Vell.”

“Nice to meet you too, Craig,” Vell said. “Once I realized how hyperfixated you guys were on me, I had Kanya cook up a heist plan and select a student at random to pull it off. You guys were so busy tracking my every move, nobody bothered to follow Craig’s moves.”

“Which made things really easy,” Craig said. “I pretty much just walked right in and disabled all your security without anyone even noticing.”

“Completely wasting my heist plans, by the way,” Kanya said.

“Why would I use a grappling hook to go through the air vents when they left the door open?”

“Because grappling hook!”

Vell gave Craig a grateful pat on the shoulder and then pushed him away as the grappling hook argument escalated out of control. He returned his attention to the Council of Seven.

“So, I hope you’ve all learned a valuable lesson.”

“What could we possibly have learned from this?”

“That being overlooked isn’t necessarily a bad thing?”

“Go fuck yourself, Harlan,” the council spat. “It’s easy to talk about how the bottom isn’t so bad when you’re on top.”

“Okay, fine, whatever,” Vell said. He started to walk away, but the Council wasn’t ready to let him have the last word.

“We’re not done yet, Harlan,” they snapped. “We’ll prove we deserve just as much -even more attention than you!”

Vell rolled his eyes and returned to his friends, who were relaxing as the battle ended.

“We just formally surrendered, so you guys are the undisputed victors,” Jay said. None of the Zeus-Stephanides students were that eager to cross paintballs with Vell again. They knew how that ended. “Sorry about those other guys.”

“Eh, I didn’t really expect it to go any other way,” Vell said. “I’m used to it by now.”

“Just one more problem for you to deal with,” Alex said.

It took her a few seconds to realize the conversation had not continued. Vell was staring at her, and everyone else was staring at Vell staring at her.

“Do I have paint on my face?”

“Yeah, Vell, what’s up?”

In reply, Vell unhooked his gun belt and let his paintball pistols fall to the floor.

“One second.”

He turned on his heel and started marching right towards the remnants of the Allied Schools alliance. They had stayed a while to lick their wounds (and wipe paint off their clothes), but they all froze when they saw Vell stomping his way towards them.

“Come to gloat?”

“No. Just ask a question,” Vell said. He stood before the paint-stained Council of Seven and crossed his arms. “Who built the first nuclear reactor?”

The baffled council members looked between each other for a second. They were caught off guard by the question in two ways.

“Are you a physicist? I’m not a physicist.”

“Was that also Oppenheimer?”

“No, no, that was just the bomb. I think like...Fermi, maybe?”

“Yeah, I think that’s right,” the council member said. “Fermi.”

“What about the rest of them?” Vell asked. “Fermi’s just one guy, can you name the entire team?”

Nobody even offered a guess this time.

“What about the people that created the smallpox vaccine? Do you know who built the first internal combustion engine?” Vell continued. He raised his voice and turned away from the council, towards all the thousands of students that had allied against him. “Can anyone here name the first caveman to carve a stone into a wheel?”

No one answered. Vell continued anyway.

“You can’t name them. Neither can I. Average person probably couldn’t either,” Vell said. “Is nuclear fission not important? Does that mean vaccination, engines and wheels aren’t important?”

Vell put his attention back on the council. They met his gaze, and were surprised to find that his eyes, while intense and focused, held no anger.

“The world we live in is built on the work of countless unsung heroes,” Vell continued. “Being unappreciated doesn’t make them unimportant. It doesn’t make you unimportant either.”

The students from every school had been milling about and making idle chitchat, but the conversations slowly died out one by one as Vell’s speech continued.

“I’m sorry you’re not getting the recognition you deserve, but we’re scientists,” Vell said. “Science shouldn’t be about fame, it should be about building a better tomorrow. And we can build a tomorrow that’s a hell of a lot better if we stop feuding over the limelight and start working together.”

Nobody responded. Nobody said anything. The members of the council cast sideways glances at him, but most averted their eyes from Vell. He let out a deep sigh.

“And also, if you really want that recognition so badly...people pay a hell of a lot more attention to my friends than my enemies.”

Vell held out his hand. The Coyote-Oppenheimer council member stared at his palm, then looked back up at Vell and raised her eyebrow.

“This is your plan? Say some nice things and hope this entire rivalry just goes away?”

Vell glanced at Alex for a second.

“It’s worked before.”

The Coyote-Oppenheimer representative took such a deep breath that her shoulders raised, and then drooped again when she sighed.

“And fuck me,” she said. “It’s working again.”

She stepped forward, took Vell’s hand, and shook it.

“I’m Adrienne.”

“And I’m Hua,” the Wukong-Wu representative said, as they too stepped up to shake Vell’s hand. She was not the last to shake Vell’s hand, though she was the first to ask him a question. “How do you do that, with the guns?”

“Honestly I don’t know, it sort of comes naturally to me,” Vell said. “Even Quenay once told me she doesn’t get how I do it.”

“He tried to train us once,” Hawke said. “Didn’t work. It’s really just inexplicable.”

“Huh.”

“So, followup question, how’d you build that magic suppression field?”

“I think we’re keeping that a secret until next year’s game, at least,” Adrienne said.

“Oh, come on, Vell’s graduating, you won’t need superweapons to put up a fight,” Kim said. “Tell us.”

“Hey, just because you’re losing your advantage doesn’t mean we have to give up ours,” Hua said.

“Hey, what’s this ‘our’ business,” the Anansi-Clerk representative, Kwame, said. “That’s an Anansi-Clerk original.”

“What about it?”

“If we’re not all teaming up against these guys next year,” Kwame said, pointing at Vell and Jay. “Then it’s a free-for-all. We’re keeping it for ourselves.”

“How quickly the bonds of brotherhood fail,” Adrienne said, feigning shock. “You know that means we’re keeping the communications jammer.”

“We’ll live without it.”

“Only because paintballs are nonlethal.”

The former council fell into semi-friendly bickering about the state of the next game. Vell excused himself and left them to their own devices. He wouldn’t be a part of next year’s war anyway. He felt no need to linger on that topic. He wandered off and took a seat on a large boulder facing one of the campus’s many cliffs, and was soon joined by his girlfriend.

“You do have a way of bringing people together, Vell,” Skye said. “Usually because they hate you, but they’re together in hating you.”

“I’m just glad I could turn it around,” Vell said.

“You sure fucking did,” Skye continued. “I am, for the record, incredibly impressed, but also: where the hell did that come from? You’re not usually the confrontational type.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Vell said. “I could’ve talked to those people from the beginning, but I avoided a confrontation, and that just let a confrontation happen.”

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

“It’s just like I handled Alex,” Vell admitted. “How much better off would we both have been if I’d tried to help her from the beginning?”

“You did help her from the beginning,” Skye said. “You’re the whole reason she still goes to school here. That happened day one.”

“I mean...more than that,” Vell said. “I didn’t do anything, I just put up with her. How many other problems am I just putting up with that I could be solving?”

“That’s a good question,” Skye said. “And a hard one to answer.”

“Well, when we get back home, I think I need to start trying.”

“I got your back every step of the way,” Skye said. “Though, usually your front, considering your preferences.”

“My prefer- ugh, come on,” Vell said. He gave Skye a playful shove. “I’m trying to have a moment here and you’re just being horny about it.”

“I like when you’re decisive,” Skye said. She shoved him right back. “The confidence is a turn on!”

Vell laughed it off and let her lean on his shoulder to enjoy the view.

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

The march downhill was much easier, much to everyone’s relief. The Einstein-Odinson students trekked downhill in a disorganized blob, mingling with students from other schools, until they all filed on to their ships and sailed off to their homes. The sun was setting now, and Cane and Hanifa stayed above decks to enjoy the view, although any romance was slightly spoiled by the presence of their undead Dean.

“You enjoy the show, Dean?”

“Somewhat. I will admit I also fell for Vell’s gambit,” Dean Lichman said. “Had my observation drone fixed squarely on him, completely missed the efforts of Mr. Craig.”

“Well, apparently you didn’t miss much,” Hanifa said. By all accounts, Craig’s “heist” had amounted to walking through a few doors and flipping a few switches. Even his most dramatic retellings could not make it sound exciting.

“I suppose that’s true,” Dean Lichman said. “It was a successful venture, in spite of the flaws.”

“What flaws?” Cane asked. “Everything went off without a hitch.”

“The closing ceremonies were meant to be quite different, you know,” Dean Lichman said. “Our patron, Loki, was supposed to appear, alongside the Trickster patrons of the other schools.”

“Really?”

All of the various trickster gods had founded their own schools to ensure they had a steady supply of clever people to outwit, thereby perpetuating their own existence. Aside from those rare attempts to trick or confound the students, the divine patrons rarely made appearances at the schools that bore their names.

“Yes, it was to be a grand display,” the Dean sighed. “But I suppose I should have known better than to expect Trickster gods to keep an appointment.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Hanifa said. “They’re probably off somewhere giggling at us right now.”

“Indeed.”

Dean Lichman stood and excused himself. Hanifa turned to Cane for some cuddling, but found him with a decidedly un-cuddly expression on his face.

“There’s always that one little thing that doesn’t make sense,” he mumbled.

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

“Whatever you hoped to accomplish feeding intel to those students, it didn’t work.”

“‘Whatever I hoped to accomplish’,” Kraid said, mocking the dry, dusty voice of the Board of Directors. “I hoped to accomplish annoying Vell Harlan for a few hours, an effort which was a resounding success.”

A few well-placed hints and some tactical information leaks had given the other schools plenty of reason and plenty of methods by which to torment Vell. A proper defeat would’ve been nice, but Kraid had never really expected it. Even he was a little wary of Vell’s cowboy bullshit.

“You are using our resources now, Alistair Kraid,” the Board croaked. “Our partnership would benefit from your discretion.”

“You’re already benefiting from it,” Kraid said. “Our little stunt got all the little has-been gods in one place.”

In the distance, a faint thumping could be heard, as Loki continued his struggle against the magically-sealed tank he was now held in. He was the only god still putting up a fight. The others had given up -or been silenced in other ways.

“They’re the closest thing we have to usable test subjects, after all,” Kraid said. “Or did you expect me to cage the only real God on the first try?”

“Frankly, we were expecting you to,” the Board said. “You rarely back down from a challenge.”

“I am not backing down, I am being a scientist,” Kraid said. He put on some gloves and slid goggles over his dark eyes. “Good experiments require repetition.”

“Still, was capturing all of them entirely necessary?”

“Yes,” Kraid said. “Even though they’re all tricksters, all these gods have their own unique subdomains and areas of influence. If I- we don’t accurately account for Quenay’s unique divine sphere, everything we do will be less than useless.”

Kraid tabbed through some of his most recent data, and analyzed the spectrum of divine power. Though considerably weaker than the last true Goddess, these smaller divinities were important clues to the real deal.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen,” Kraid said, sliding his goggles back into place. “It’s time for my favorite part of science: taking things apart to see how they work.”

He’d done it a thousand times over, but it never stopped being fun.