Solitaire POV: Day 85

  Current Wealth: 306 gold 0 silver 17 copper

  So we were fucked if we wanted to actually win the tournament, no surprise there. One did not worldbuild while one had a compulsive personality unless one compiled a list of what different kinds of characters could do at different points of the series’ power scale. I knew there were people out there who could pick up that bear we fought on day one, lift it fully over their head with a single arm, then forcibly insert it into the giant troll’s asshole while it tried, and failed, to stop them. Tearing the troll in half after the fact was doable, but entirely optional.

  The real question was how far might we get, and what might we manage to gain before inevitably dropping out. Argar wasn’t the best of us anymore, after all, and I’d be willing to put fifty gold on Beam over him in a heartbeat. With luck, we’d make a pretty penny off the bookies here.

  “We’ll get hurt.” Shango observed, once we got home. Argar’s chainmail had stopped the Soldier’s attacks, and his impossibly hard body had weathered the blunt force of them, but it still looked like he’d be coming away with bruises. “A stronger thrust and that would’ve gone through.”

  My friend held the coat of mail up for me to see, and I didn’t miss the section of links that had been mangled by the fight.

  Redaclan armour tended to be built thicker and heavier than real-world historical counterparts, but there was only so much you could do against a stab made by someone who’d have been in the running for Earht’s powerlifting champion. I took Shango’s point, making a habit of letting weapons get past his plate wouldn’t do Argar many favours.

  “We can make chainmail out of that new steel, right?” He asked, abruptly. I grinned. It’d been about half a day’s work for Ardin and me to figure that particular challenge out, but we’d managed it, and the look on Shango’s face when I told him as much was well worth the delayed sleep.

  “It was luck.” I chimed in. “That none of us fought except Argar for the first day, but we’ll almost definitely be seeing action tomorrow.”

  That put a bit of a downer on things, but then psychotically depressed paranoids had a tendency to do that.

  “We’ll have Helena’s armour ready by tomorrow.” I said, hopefully, “Which is a huge advantage to her. Not to mention the spear.” I’d watched the edge Beam and Ardin put on that do its work already, and it was nothing short of terrifying. The normal issue with making the sharpest weapons you could was that they wouldn’t stay sharp. Sharpness was, after all, just how thin the edge was, and a thinner edge would be easier to break and damage for all the reasons that it had an easier time breaking and damaging other things.

  And that was the convenient thing about a metal with quite possibly several times the strength of what most other weapons were made from here, it could survive several times the pressure, and thus be made several times as sharp. I had no doubt that if someone had skewered Argar with a tool-steel spear using the Soldier’s strength, it would’ve carved through that mail like it wasn’t even there.

  “We’ll have Helena’s by tomorrow.” Shango noted, slowly, “But what about Beam?”

  There was the question, the concern, Beam would be the one actually fighting if any of us did the next day, and we had made a start on his armour, indirectly. It’d be a lot easier to work the second set than the first, with Helena’s fit to be done within the hour, we might well have a full twelve hour crunch to prepare for his bout. Twelve hours wasn’t a great stretch by the standards of armour smithing though. If I recalled my research properly, it usually took around ten times longer than that for a single worker to manage a suit.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Ardin was fast, superhumanly so. His levels had all gone into Dexterity, smithing skills. Probably, he could work at double or triple the usual speed, and he had Beam actually helping, too. Not to mention Corvan providing heat and pressure with his sorcery. But twelve hours still seemed like a stretch too far to hope.

  I recalled the sight of The Challenger’s strength, and worked through the calculations in my head. If my friend went up against an enemy like that, he wouldn’t be getting very far.

  Night came shortly after, and I slept about as well as any other man worrying he might watch one of his best friends get cut in half. The fights weren’t to the death, I knew, but they weren’t exactly safe affairs either. Real steel was being used with real edges, and the digging I’d done had established that there were at least a few deaths every year. Short of skewering the other guy while he was down, people could get away with all sorts in the tourney.

  It wouldn’t take much for Beam to get killed. Bad luck, a superior enemy, his own moronic stubbornness, even. I made a mental note to hurl a rock at his head if he wasn’t quitting when I thought he should, getting disqualified for a foul was better than getting dead.

  Eventually sheer tiredness won, and I drifted off.

  I don’t dream like other people. I’d figured that much out when I was about two- oh, I can remember being two by the way- and mentioned to my mother how I’d replayed a particularly cool fight the previous night about ten times. She’d been confused, surprised. I’d been a toddler, so it was only looking back on it when my brain was finished hacking apart synapses and growing itself that I realised she’d not been capable of that herself. I asked around, subtly, and eventually figured out it was just me.

  When I dream, I’m still there. My senses are apart, and it’s hard to establish any real causal consistency between one event and the next, but my consciousness remains active. Anything I look at, focus on, solidifies. My dreams are an empty vacuum for me to build whatever I want in.

  Yeah, it was really fucking annoying watching Inception and knowing that I’d never be able to tell people this without getting accused of copying it.

  Anyway, that night I built a pyramid. There wasn’t any particular reason, I just felt like it. Pyramids were cool. Some of the most iconic, ancient structures mankind ever made, with a simplicity that had survived well into the age of modern geometry. They were the ultimate evidence that we’d not really changed in thousands of years, just updated our software on the same old caveman hardware. Humans loved our pyramids, hierarchies, orders. And we loved making sure all the wrong people ended up at the top even more.

  I made mine from skulls, eyeless, tongueless. Unable to watch, to whisper, empty and vacant. Perfect structures, inert and ready to be positioned by my will. As I built, I climbed, and as I climbed I looked out. I saw the landscape around me, and quickly plucked a suitable image from my memory.

  Redacle, odd. I saw it all, the hills, the landscapes. Copied directly from my cerebral cortex with a perfect accuracy just barely short of silicon. It was beautiful in a way, seen from such heights. But then I saw the maggots. The rot that fed them. Running across the land, putrefying and poisoning everything it touched, spreading. Spreading, always spreading. Multiplying. They just couldn’t help themselves, no matter what they were, no matter what fucking genes they carried, they had to make more of themselves. Had to narcissistically put themselves in the next generation.

  I watched the rot build their castles and cities, their laws and nations, their delusions and evils. I watched it all, and my dream was making me sick. I blinked, screamed, then the fire came, taking it all, purifying everything in that way only total obliteration could. Soon I was choking, lungs tortured by the carbonised gases and broiling atmosphere as smoke wafted around on thermally displaced gusts.

  My dream didn’t last long after that, ending briefly, time distorted as it so often was during unconsciousness. I woke up smiling.