“Welcome once more, pyers!” the image of Holt cried. His throne was empty, the would-be king’s presence non-existent, and yet still he pgued them. “It’s that time again.”

  If he were expecting appuse he did not get it. Maybe he was hoping for an intimidated silence. He should’ve known better to posture to a small crowd of people whose job was to vie for attention from uncaring masses.

  To call the response simple jeers would be to call the sinking of the Titanic a minor incident, or The Last Airbender movie adaptation an unfortunate mistake of cinema. Everyone yelled something at Holt, ranging from angry demands to be released to insults targeting his stupid hair to mismatching slurs that made no sense of the surface but were part of a Punch streamer’s regur day-to-day vocabury.

  “Death to the hipster fucklord!” Otter yelled.

  “Skulls for the Skull Throne!” Pandemona called.

  Holt took it all in with a bemused smile, and waited for the crowd to yell themselves out, but even his control began to slip when it didn’t seem to want to end and most of the insults began to turn very personal. Between insults about why he couldn’t hold down a retionship to attacks on his ability as a game dev and CEO, he finally began to lose patience and snapped.

  “Enough! Anyone still yelling in ten seconds gets to fight in the arena!”

  “Fart gobbler!” When Rua gave Otter a look, she shrugged. “What? It was within the time limit.”

  Holt watched them all, his arms crossed and his face grim. He apparently had an idea about how he should be received, and wasn’t getting the power trip he thought he would.

  “Get all that out of your systems?” he said. “Bet you feel real big now, huh. Bully the god.”

  Rua made a noise, somewhere back in her throat.

  “Oh my sweet Shiva,” Otter said. “Is he going to throw a tantrum?”

  Pan grunted, “Well, you know, it’s hard being all mighty and powerful.”

  The face on the screen looked in their direction, and they immediately quieted.

  Realizing that people were actually listening to him now, that dead smile of Holt’s returned. “Well. What a day I have pnned for you all. Two deaths. Ooof, am I right? Everyone’s gotta be wondering about their own impending doom right about now. But don’t worry. I am a kind and benevolent god. I honestly didn’t foresee death by dehydration, but I probably should’ve, huh? My bad. Don’t worry. I will be equipping all surviving pyers with travel packs today, filled with food, water, and a waterseeking glyph stone, as well as a firemaking kit, and one knife each. If you can’t survive with that, well, that’s not on me anymore. Should’ve picked a career that’d let you touch grass every once in a while.”

  Otter couldn’t tell if he believed his own psychopathic bullshit or not, and she was too afraid to ask Rua if he was lying or not. She didn’t need a fact check to let her know that something was wrong with him. A barometer for it would just make it worse.

  “Well, don’t all cheer at once,” Holt said, his eyes hardening.

  There were some scattered appuse, and a solitary, half-hearted whoop.

  “Fine, fine. I can read a room. You want the fights. Who lives, who dies, etcetera etcetera. Well, the original pn was to have the Risk Sve kill his girlfriend. But I see he’s been moping. Probably figured me out. That’s what you get when you pn these things out by committee.

  “So, I’m going to try a different avenue of attack. One fight. Chinchil versus Howlett. Whoever wins gets to live. Exciting, right?”

  “Woo,” Pan said in a ft tone.

  “Can any of us volunteer as tribute?” Rua yelled. “Like st time!”

  “Tempting. Very tempting. I’d love to see what our little anomaly can do. But… no. Can only accept so many st-minute script changes. Maybe next time.”

  “Bully! Coward! Everyone else might be afraid to say it, but I’m not! You’re not god,” she spat after saying the word, “and you’re not all powerful! You have a Pact! A powerful one, to be sure, but this is Pact magic. I felt the touch of a Dreamer the first time you Wayfared us here. But I wasn’t sure, so I waited, and now I’m certain!”

  In an instant, Holt disappeared from his safety behind the monitor, and reappeared before Rua. Before anyone could react, his hand was around her throat, and he lifted her from the ground, her feet dangling in the air. She gripped his arm, her fingers digging into it, and he didn’t budge.

  Otter stood, triggering her Thread of the Scourge, and a golden wire Manifested into her hands. She swung, and the thread looped around his neck, and she empowered it with a point of Will. The wire fshed, but Holt didn’t even seem to notice.

  Bare steel fshed in Rua’s hand, and a dagger descended at Holt’s face, gncing off an invisible shield around him. It didn’t stop her. She struck again and again, but he never lost the intensity or focus, the sheer anger in his eyes.

  Pandemona drew a dagger of her own, stabbing at Holt’s unprotected back, and encountered the same impassable shield. But none of the three let up. Otter jerked this way and that, trying to throw him off bance at the least if she couldn’t strangle him.

  And then, flying through the air, Sami came down like a falling meteor, two swords drawn. Otter had no idea where she’d come from, but it’d probably been a few sections upwards in the arena stands. She hit Holt hard, and finally he was pushed backwards a step and finally took notice that others were attacking him.

  “Oh, hey. Just having some fun, don’t mind me.” He even had the grace to look a little sheepish.

  Even so, Sami stabbed a sword at his head, the point deflecting off the unseen barrier mere centimetres from his skin.

  “Put her down,” Otter growled. “Or I will fucking rip your fucking head off.”

  Rua was beginning to gasp for breath, and Otter could feel her panic through the link. Something had to be done, something to get Holt to back down.

  She dismissed the thread, leaned in, and flicked Holt across the nose.

  “No!” she said. “Bad!”

  He reached to his face in surprise, pain flickering in his eyes, and in that moment, Rua tore herself free from his grip and stumbled backwards. Holt lunged, not at Rua, but at Otter, and then he was sent careening to the side as nearly seven feet of bulky muscled dragonkin tackled him. Everett hit Holt like a freight train, and sent him on his ass. And before he could recover, the Risk Sve was there, stomping downwards at his face.

  Holt rolled, surprisingly spry and agile for a do-nothing game dev, but it didn’t help. Others had shown up, more and more people realizing this was their best chance to get him down and maybe get free of the game. Gamers in all sizes and shapes were waiting for him. Next to none of them were armed, but it didn’t matter. If enough of them even so much as grazed him with punches, they were sure to whittle his Tenacity away and expose him to injury.

  And Holt realized it, too.

  There was a flicker of surprise, and then outright panic as he realized what he’d gotten himself into.

  Otter summoned another thread, shing it around one of his arms just as a big man who could only be STI smmed a fist into his chest. Pandemona threw her dagger, and it bounced off his shield as Digimane threw herself onto his back, screaming the entire time and wrapping an arm around his eyes to cover his vision.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Holt screamed. “Everyone, go back to your seats, and we can–”

  Apparently no one wanted to hear what he was about to suggest, because a roar grew from the increasingly rger crowd. Someone stabbed at him with a crude wooden spear, and someone else clipped his knee with a rock. Holt stumbled this way and that, and then finally managed to get a hold of Digimane before throwing her off him entirely and into a small group of three people who’d been getting close to attack.

  He looked more annoyed than anything. Someone else threw a rock, and he made a sharp gesture with his hand. The rock vanished. Another gesture, and then the sky darkened, and it began raining pebbles from above.

  Most were deflected by the various pyers’ Tenacity, and those that weren’t only hit with enough force to inflict small bruises. Even so, it left everyone ducking away, covering their heads with arms. When it finally stopped, Holt was gone, back on his throne, smiling at them behind the safety of a screen.

  A few people swore. Others shook their heads and wandered off aimlessly. One girl who Otter didn’t know broke down and cried, sitting on a bench and openly weeping.

  “Why antagonize him?” Sami hissed.

  Otter looked over to see Rua smiling faintly, a mirror to Holt’s expression.

  “Because I couldn’t tell if he was lying when he was behind a screen. I needed to get face-to-face with him.”

  “And?”

  “And now I know, he doesn’t actually want to kill us all. He was telling the truth.”

  DorenWinslowe