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Chapter 20: Pandaemonium
Phyr sets Scourge’s head down on the ground and stands over his limp body, still breathing but unable to so much as lift a finger. He looks around for Usher, strides purposefully to retrieve it, then carefully wipes off the blood and dirt before replacing it in the scabbard on his belt. Vector marches over to him, makes eye contact, then grabs Phyr’s wrist and raises it high into the air.
The crowd goes absolutely mad.
Phyr looks around, bewildered as the spectators cheer their hearts out and the menders set to restoring the arena - the going is slow, and the spells are expensive, but many hands make light work and they have mana potions to spare. Phyr wishes briefly that Pannych was there - and then immediately feels empty inside.
Edric, patched up from his tangle with Scourge, returns to the field. He walks with strained calm to Phyr and Vector, says, “Ply,” and tries to straighten out his revolver as best he can. He gets the barrel, trigger, and trigger guard mostly right; but the sight is still cockeyed, the cylinder is a crumpled mess, and the inner works are a hopeless tangle. A tremor ripples up his arm, hand to shoulder - then with a stiff sigh, he tosses his favorite revolver unceremoniously aside and says dryly, “Whatever. I’ll just have a new one made.”
Phyr tamps down his emotions, straightens his posture, then turns to Edric and asks, “What’s the play here, Your Supreme Highness?”
Edric strokes his chin and weighs the situation thoughtfully. He feels the unmistakable suspicion of being had. So why hasn’t Dale tried to kill me? Does he - he doesn’t know he blew his cover. Holy shit. OK. Back to business. I have a PR crisis brewing here. Can I get one last bit of goodwill advice out of them? He takes a sharp breath and says, “I think we can play this off - nobody was hurt, right?”
“Except for the two contestants, the announcer, and the hundred-and-something guards who all got Erased,” Alice protests loudly from her box on the sidelines.
Edric turns to her, bemused. “I’d have thought you’d make a break for it,” he says coolly.
“Well, not all of us capitalize on death and ruin,” she snaps.
Edric gives a haughty scoff, and Vector cuts in, “Play it straight. People died, so we’ll mourn them. This horrorshow popped up outta nowhere, and the High King and his pet god put him down. It’s good copy.”
“Hm.” Edric strokes his chin in thought. But now I need to verify. If this is all a misunderstanding, and I’m worried over nothing - heh, that would be bad. But if I’m right… As his thoughts spin off into endless possibilities, he cuts them short. Start with what you know. He says, “So that was Thorn, I take it?”
“Yeah,” Phyr says as Vector returns to his post. “Apparently,” he hastens to add, a tic late to be entirely natural.
Edric cocks an eyebrow, projecting innocent curiosity. “You said you had killed him, when you two were up in the air.”
“You heard that?” Phyr wracks his brain to think of how he can possibly keep his cover intact.
“He called you Phyr, the destined hero,” Edric says darkly. “Care to explain that.” It’s not a question.
“It’s… a long story.”
“Why don’t you come back up to the skybox, and you can start in on it?”
Phyr takes a deep breath, and the crowd gasps and clamors.
“Wait,” a weakened voice says, barely cutting through the din. Phyr and Edric turn to look, and see that Nathanael Thorn is rising to his feet.
Phyr looks daggers at the spellbreaker, then says coldly to Edric, “One sec,” before drawing Usher. The spectral flames flash green with his rage as he stalks toward his foe.
“Wait, please,” Thorn says.
“How many times do I have to defeat you,” Phyr roars, dispensing with the act that he’s never met Thorn before.
“Dale… it’s me…”
Phyr raises the blade high over his head and screams, “You’re! Not! HER!”
“Pause!”
Phyr blinks in surprise, frozen mid-swing. Unable to move anything besides his face, his jaw drops open, and after a beat he says, “Pannych?”
“Yes,” Pannych says, still breathing heavily, even during the Pause.
“I swear to Christ, if this is a trick-”
“No trick,” she interrupts. “But look out behind you.” Phyr couldn’t turn even if he wanted to, but his hackles raise in suspicion. “It’s Edric,” Pannych clarifies. “He's got a crotch holster.”
“But how did you-”
“Later!”
Pause wears off.
Phyr checks his swing, then wheels on Edric and sees him with a hand down his pants, looking like a kid caught at the cookie jar. “You can pause…” he trails off, absently drawing a snub-nosed .45 from the inside of his thigh. He asked if I could Pause on day one. And he clearly knows this Pannych, who evidently can - that’s the other ‘destined hero,’ and if they all fought Thorn together… He staggers back a step in shock, trying to process everything he has just seen and how it changes the last month or two of his life. He looks numbly from Phyr, to Pannych, and back to Phyr; then his gaze drops to the six-shooter in his hand, a lost puppy look in his eyes.
“So I read all these stories about best friends who betrayed each other, people they’d known their whole lives, or close enough. Part of that’s just human nature, I guess. Nobody’s perfect, and sometimes you hurt the person you love most. Sometimes without even meaning to. Cost of doing business on this whole ‘humanity’ project. But I’m talking about ‘meaning to’ here. Deliberately hurting someone you care about. But what ‘best friend’ means to me, is someone who’ll never sell you out. And I want that, so shouldn’t I also be willing to give it? But people who were supposed to have my back, people who were supposed to care about me that much - and yeah, I guess this also goes back to my mother, surprise - they’ve let me down in the past. So what would it take for me to betray my best friend? What do I care about that would be enough? Status? Power? Fame? What would make me think to myself, ‘Yeah, this person’s important to me - but that’s a whole lot of... whatever.’ I can understand how it happens, maybe. But I can’t imagine - I mean that I literally cannot honestly imagine - getting to a point where something is enough for me to betray someone I care about that much. There’s not enough money in the world, you know, Doc? Is it only because I’ve been let down by the people closest to me so badly, that loyalty matters so much to me? But that’s what I care about the most: having someone who’s always got my back. It’s about value - about being valued. I want to feel secure that someone values me enough that nothing’s worth betraying me. So it doesn’t matter how much is on the table - I care more about having people on my side, you know? How can I get that for myself?
“I thought once when I was little that if there was no such thing as money, then there’d be no more betrayals over money - but obviously, I can’t just take money out of the whole world. Even if I could, then what could I do about, like, fame or whatever? What kind of power would I need to make that happen? And what would be the cost of getting it?
“Do I even want to be the kind of person who operates that way?”
As Pannych stumbles to Phyr’s side, Edric looks up again at them both. “So… it was all a lie. All this…” he gestures to the wide world around, “All for nothing. No - not for nothing.” A viscous cloud of rage and confusion mixes on his face as he lowers the gun and stares at Phyr. “You didn’t ‘just show up’ here. No. I didn't 'just run into' my best friend, after almost two hundred years in here. You had a plan this whole time.” Phyr lowers his gaze and his sword. The confusion on Edric’s face fades smoothly into disappointment and regret. “So what was it? What was your Master Plan, O friend of mine? Your ‘endgame,’ as you put it?”
Edric’s eyes glisten and a tear falls down his cheek as Phyr stammers, “I was gonna - like - I dunno. Have you bet the farm on me in the finals, and throw the match?”
Edric scoffs in disgust, then laughs in naked disbelief as tears flow freely down his face. “That’s - that’s not even a good plan!” He stomps off, not toward anything in particular, just away, as he sobs openly in front of ninety-thousand onlookers. He makes no attempt to maintain his persona, seemingly blind to the crowd as he walks fitfully in a meandering circle.
Facing Phyr once again, Edric raises his pistol. Phyr winces, but sees that his finger is on the trigger guard, not the trigger itself: he is merely pointing, not actually aiming. “You… you backstabbing son of a bitch,” Edric shrieks, doubling over in heart-wrenching turmoil. “You sought me out - you helped me along - all to trick me into making one bad bet? Dead gods be damned! The one fucking person in this world who I thought would have my back - the one fucking person I thought I could truly trust - the one fucking person who… who… who wouldn’t...” He trails off into incoherent sobbing and screaming.
Phyr cannot help but hang his head, and Pannych places a hand on his shoulder. Vector and Alice stare awkwardly from the sidelines, comforted ever-so-slightly by the fact that the guards are also cringing at the scene their boss is making.
Edric’s tantrum continues unabated: “For fuck’s sake, man! You could have killed me the first fucking second you walked into my office! Just settled it all, right then and there! You could have tortured me to death, and it would’ve been less painful than this! You could’ve just offed me, called it a day, and gone home!” Well into fever pitch now, Edric realizes he has no more room to escalate - so he takes it all the way down. He levels his gaze at Phyr and hisses with acidic derision as he narrows his eyes, “But that wasn’t enough for you, now was it?” The beat hangs for a moment as ninety-thousand-and-four people hold their breath while Edric huffs and puffs in impotent rage. “Was it?!” Phyr starts at Edric’s sudden shriek, and he lowers his voice once more. “No, apparently death was too good for me… so you chose to utterly destroy me, instead.”
Phyr looks to Vector and Alice, shame-faced, as he realizes that after all the twists and turns of the last several weeks, this is Mission: Accomplished.
“Well, congratu-fuckin’-lations,” Edric spits, throwing his hands in the air. “You did it! I spent a hundred and seventy years building this all, and in just under two months you managed to place the capstone and break my heart. We executed my masterstroke together, and now it will be forever tainted by this day. For what? For him?” He waves his gun at Pannych, who does not bother to correct him. “Pannych? The other ‘destined hero’ of Noob Isle? Another nobody who got too big for his britches and fucked off to - to…”
As Edric trails off, a serious look crosses his face, and he seems to suddenly remember where he is. He stands up straight, un-cocks the hammer of the .45, and adjusts his clothes slightly as he takes a deep, calming breath. “Very well,” he says, his persona restored at last. “You may have tainted my victory, but you still helped me achieve it. For that, you may live. But the four of you are hereby banished - you have until sundown to gather your things and leave town. And if I ever see you in Thousand Bridges again, it’s war.” He turns with a flourish of his cape-
-and stops abruptly, then crumples to his knees. Before him stands Norissiel, a grim look on her face, a bloody dagger in her hands. Edric looks up at her and says weakly, “Et tu, Nori?”
“I told you a long time ago,” she says, “If I ever kill you, you’ll be facing me, you’ll be armed, and you’ll have done something to deserve it.” She flicks an eyebrow up briefly. “And here we are.”
“What… did I do?”
“You’re joking, right?” She slits his throat, and as he coughs and gags on his own blood, she says, “Starve the world just to win a fight? Not on my watch, sir.”
With a snap of her fingers, Norissiel disappears in a puff of smoke. There is a tense moment as the guards sort their priorities, but they swiftly conclude that full-on regicide is a greater crime than mere treason - and between fighting a god and catching a ninja, this is definitely a “choose one” situation. As a green-gold wisp of energy shimmers through the air from Edric to Pannych, a susurrus of chatter erupts from hundreds of speaking stones - except, of course, for those who were Erased during Scourge’s attack - and then the guards disappear, squad by squad, into the bowels of the stadium.
Their retinue departed, Alice and Vector hop the rail and weave through the menders hard at work to join Pannych and Phyr. “You think the guards will honor Edric’s promise,” Vector asks.
“I mean, they ought to,” Phyr says. “It’s not like we killed him.”
“I somewhat doubt they’re in the mood to negotiate,” Alice says, a look of concentration on her face. “But they’re definitely focused on chasing Nori. We should grab our shit and bug out.”
If you want to READ NORI’S ESCAPE FOR YOURSELF, then put a tally mark in the “Sneaky Peeky” box on the last page, and click here.
To CONTINUE READING CHAPTER 20, click here.
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