107. Perfectly Friendly
Before she knew it, Serac found herself elbows deep in a perfectly friendly game of Iskolle.
It soon became clear that the Tomasen twins’ celebrity status in Rotgard hadn’t lost its shine, even after their long service in the payroll of a Stamgardian bully. Three more children eagerly gave up their spots on their respective teams, all for a chance to watch a pair of local legends in action.
If the object was for the two opposing teams to be evenly matched, the sensible thing would’ve been to split up the twins and have each of them pair off with one of the outrealmer novices. Yet, so soon into the reunion, emotions ran high (well, Serac’s did, anyway), and the Rakshasa had no intention of working with the sturgeon boys. Today’s the day I show these big dummies what’s what—show them what they’ve been missing these last two months.
On this occasion, however, Serac’s [Ambition] far outstripped the [Substance] of her talents. For as soon as she traded in her cleats for a pair of skates, she understood Iskolle to be, well, a completely different game to anything she’d played before.
[31!]
Barely seconds into the game, she suffered her first self-inflicted HP loss, having slipped and fallen flat on her back. And as much as the fall had smarted, it was nothing compared to the damage to her ego.
She accepted a hand from a much younger teammate and got back on her feet/skates. For the next little while, she reined in her emotions and concentrated on learning how to keep her balance. The game went on around her, with the rest of her team having to play 5v6 while Serac doddered uselessly in the middle of the ice.
Said teammates didn’t seem to care, though. The children had gone right back to shouting and laughing, with some of them even arguing about switching teams so they could take turns playing with the sturgeon twins.
In response, the Tomasens played the dutiful entertainers, putting on a show while also keeping the children involved. Even Serac’s novice eyes could readily see what was happening. The twins ‘took it easy’ on everyone, weaving passes between themselves with casual precision before setting up one of the kids to finish off the plays. They even made sure to ‘assist’ a different child on each subsequent play, so everyone got their chance to shine.
Perhaps the worst part about all of this was that the Tomasens looked good doing it. Serac already knew that the twins were strong swimmers and skilled oarsmen. And now, she had a front-row seat to their speed, grace, and beauty as skaters.
Even Zacko appeared to know a thing or two about skating, perhaps from previous Manesferan experience. While showing nowhere near the smooth motion and manual dexterity of the Yakshas around him, he could at least skate up and down the ice and get involved in a play or two.
All that left Serac isolated and increasingly frustrated. It was a familiar feeling, one she’d most recently experienced during that crazy cave expedition. She ought to have matured enough to keep a lid on her emotions, but… it was precisely that cave expedition and the friendships forged therein that sparked anew her latest bout of anger.
“Hey, Sturgeons!” she shouted petulantly as Lars and Hans glided past on either side of her. “Don’t you have some explaining to do, or are you just gonna keep quiet like always?”
No response. Serac took several careful ‘steps’ to turn herself around, only to witness a goal scored by an opposing child (assisted by the Tomasens). That was when Zacko skated up from behind and gave her a light tap with his stick.
Serac spun again in a rage, ready to defend her righteous tantrum if need be, but then she was met by the Manusya’s smile of encouragement. Zacko could often be a good, counter-balancing influence on the occasional runaway train that was Serac. Not this time. This time, he’d leaned fully into his ‘troll’ persona and turned enabler.
“You two are nothing but hypocrites!” Serac allowed herself to be egged on. “Proud sons of Rotgard? Don’t make me laugh!”
The twins glided past again, but this time, at least Lars gave Serac a sidelong glare as he passed.
“It’s been two whole months since the unclogging of the Roots. Rotters everywhere are doing everything they can to pick up the pieces of their lives, all while the rest of the Realm carries on like nothing’s changed. The king and queen skipping straight back to their palace after their little PR stunt, I can understand. And I know we could never count on Mr Catfish or any of the other Stammer vendors to pitch in… but you?”
Even as Serac harshed the vibes something fierce, the game went on. Team Tomasens cruised up the ice again before scoring with ease. This time, however, as they turned back to defend, both twins’ glares trained squarely on one Rakshasa.
“What happened to all that stuff you said to Renate?” Serac, undeterred, twisted the knife. “Your hearts bleed for your homeland? What a load of shark-shit! Where were you when your fellow Roots-dwellers needed Wayfarers to fight off the Aberrants?”
“I warn you, Rakshasa.” Finally, a response—predictably from the slightly more talkative Lars. “Do not speak of things you do not understand.”
“I understand just fine!” The retort had only added fuel to the fire. “I understand that you and your brother are all talk! I understand that while your people toiled and slogged, you two sat pretty with your cushy jobs in your fancy store. Hell, compared to you, even Petey is more of a true Rotgardian! Renate was right about you. You two are nothing more than hounds lapping at the droppings of a fat, disgusting lee—”
Suddenly, something round, hard, and blinding fast whizzed past Serac’s head, grazing a part of her ear as it did.
[15!]
Along with that very modest damage number, the outside of Serac’s ear trickled with fresh blood. The coaster responsible for the tiny injury—imbued with ice and lightning—flew high into the air before disappearing into the distance, evidently never intended for goal-ward travel.
Serac had fallen too much in love with her own diatribe to have paid any attention to the game, but she implicitly understood what had happened. For one moment, this coaster from a children’s game had acted as an Instrument substitute for the Tomasens’ signature magic. The twins had produced a mere fraction of their normal powers, but it’d been more than enough to ‘make a point’.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I warn you second time,” Lars spoke in a low growl, with his glare darkening in anger. “Two months, you say? You come here, spend all of two months, and claim to have seen everything. What do you know about me and my brother? What do you know of Rotgard and all that we suffered? You know nothing!”
Compared to his ‘hot-headed’ brother, the gruff-voiced Hans was a little more diplomatic—but no less tolerant of Serac’s accusations: “You here to blow bubbles or play Iskolle? If you want to play, then play.”
By then, the vibes had been so thoroughly harshed that the poor children could only stand back in confusion and perhaps even a little fear. Seeing this, Serac had the grace to feel a stab of guilt, but then the now 2v2 game started up again, and she sensed right away that she had to go into self-defense mode.
A half-hearted face-off was handily won by Hans, who immediately passed it back to Lars. The twins then hung back on their half of the ice, where they rapidly pinged the coaster between themselves.
Both Serac and Zacko recognized the spell, with each reacting accordingly. Zacko, as the considerably better skater of the two, made an attempt to intercept a pass and thereby disrupt the ‘charge build-up’. He had no chance, however, against two of the best Iskolle players in the land.
As for Serac, she was determined to block the eventual shot, wherever it came from and however powerfully it might fly at her. She did her darnedest to follow the twins’ passing patterns and move her feet along with them, but this too was a tall order for a complete beginner like her.
[COASTER (substitute) Spell: BUZZER BEATER]
It was Hans who took the shot, a powerful swing from his bow-side (and therefore Serac’s right side). She took a desperate dive with arms and Iskolle stick outstretched, but all she achieved was to inflict herself with some ‘faceplant damage’.
[31!]
Ouch! To add insult to injury, Hans’s shot flew the length of the ice—low, accurate, and blinding fast—before burying itself in Team Serac’s net.
Face smarting as much as her backside, Serac nevertheless took Lars Tomasen’s erstwhile advice and kept a ‘cool head’. As she rose to her feet (with Zacko’s help), she pulled her teammate close and muttered instructions into his ear:
“Our problem is we’re trying to do too much at once, and we just end up failing at everything,” the instructions first began with a brutally honest assessment. Then, “So now, we’re gonna simplify things. Your job is to stick to Lars like a barnacle. Don’t let him feel comfortable for even a Ksana. We’re gonna nip the twins’ passing game in the bud.”
“And you?” Zacko asked, breaths heavy and eyebrows flat. He tried not to show it, but he was clearly taking this game just as seriously as Serac.
“Well, the object of the game is to put the coaster in the net, correct? Then that’s what I’m gonna focus on.”
Huddle over, game on. The next sequence began much like the last, with Hans winning the face-off to put the coaster into play. But as he spun to make a pass to his brother, he found the angle closed off by a Manusya-sized barnacle.
Lars tried to shake off Zacko with his superior everything: size, strength, and skating skills. But the NINEFOLD master wouldn’t go down without a fight—literally. The two men held each other in a furious tussle, with sticks, elbows, and knees flying everywhere.
If Hans waited for two more seconds, perhaps Lars would’ve prevailed in the battle of grit and Stamina attrition. But the cooler-headed twin was also the more decisive one of the two, and he decided then and there that he didn’t need his brother’s help to beat a Rakshasa who could barely stay on her skates. Not only that, but each of the twins already came equipped with a ‘special move’ just for this scenario, when one couldn’t rely on the other to activate their shared magic.
[Auxiliary Technique: POWERPLAY]
With Serac having parked herself in front of her net and out of contention to affect the evolving play in any way, the Tomasens were at a clear man advantage. Hans zoomed down the bow-side of the ice, unchecked. With every powerful stroke of his skates, he tapped into the lightning inherent to his magic and gained a noticeable burst of speed.
99 times of 100, Hans’s decision to go at it alone would’ve been the correct one. Yet, in this Ksana, unbeknownst to any of the players or onlookers, an outrealmer happened to be in the midst of inventing a whole new way to play the game.
Hans wound up for a finisher, a mere few yards away from where Serac ‘stood guard’ in front of her net. Despite her proximity, her scrawny Rakshasa frame had no chance in hell of covering the entire goal-face. There were plenty of openings for Hans to aim for: high, low, stick-side, or even the humiliating five-hole between the legs.
But even the cool-headed Hans had been a little rattled by the Rakshasa’s earlier ‘trash talk’. The thing to do now was to put all that to bed, with an emphatic slap-shot to end all slap-shots.
Grip it and rip it. A top shelf finish on Serac’s exposed left side—or what would come to be known after this game as her ‘rock-side’.
As for Serac, in this exact Ksana, she had her eyes closed. Yes, in this crucial moment where a fast-skating sturgeon was about to let rip a shot powerful enough to take her head off, she let go of the comfort and familiarity of her eyes and, instead, put all her trust in the reflex and sensitivity of her horns.
Sure enough, as the coaster exploded off the end of Hans’s stick, Serac read its flight as a violent wave of concentrated energy. No visuals, no thought. Only instinct. And on this occasion, Serac’s instincts guided her left arm directly and swiftly into the path of Hans’s shot.
[201!]
Even mitigated by PULVERIZER, Hans’s Auxiliary-only ‘attack’ still packed a hefty punch. Serac felt every point of its damage ripple through the juts, crags, and ridges of her rock-vambrace and deposit themselves as fresh pain in the fleshy portion of her arm. At the same time, she had to grit her teeth, as she fought off the jolts of electricity that threatened to [Paralyze] her.
The coaster, with all its momentum absorbed by PULVERIZER, dropped onto the ice and bounced fortuitously onto Serac’s stick-side. This was it. This was a Rakshasa novice’s chance to finally make an imprint on this perfectly friendly game of Iskolle.
She bent her knees and wound back her stick in a clumsy imitation of the Tomasen twins. Grip it and rip it. Or she tried to, anyway, with her attempt amounting to not much more than a ‘nudge’ to send the coaster on its way.
The coaster slid down the ice with reasonable speed, helped on mostly by the lack of friction. Its trajectory proved surprisingly advantageous, splitting the field of play straight down the middle. Which meant, in the absence of any interference, it might even slide all the way into the empty net on the other end!
Of course, the other twin—Lars—still loomed in center-ice. With a cold, almost contemptuous glare, he shoved Zacko aside and smoothly moved towards the coaster. It would’ve been child’s play for him to intercept Serac’s feeble ‘shot’ and start a counterattack. But then—
[The Fifth Dao—PAULDRON]
It was all happening now! Desperate to keep his team’s one scoring chance alive, the NINEFOLD master recovered in time to body-check Lars with a hefty shoulder barge. The two burly men both went tumbling in a mess of muscles, fish scales, and sallow Manusya skin. Crucially, they’d fallen away from and to the side of the coaster’s trajectory, which meant…
Serac, still kneeling, opened her eyes wide and watched. Hans beside her did the same, with his usual glare softened by open-mouthed astonishment. Even Zacko and Lars stopped their wrestling match long enough to follow the coaster’s progress. And as for the spectating children who’d borne witness to this historic event…
One small section of the frozen Netherpool rang with the children’s disbelieving cheers and pealing laughter, as the coaster—Serac’s shot—just barely squeaked past the goal line.
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