The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryugii. This has been pulled from his Spacebattle publishment. Anyway on with the show...errr read.

Counting Down

I barely had a moment to process what that feeling might mean when Keppel twitched an overly long finger and razor sharp icicles formed in the air above us, falling towards us in gravity's hold. There were a number of ways I could have dealt with a tactic like that, but it was obviously a distraction so I went with simple and quick—I drew upon a small bit of the fire around me and channeled up upwards in quickly spreading curtain. The icicles fell through, melting slightly as they did, and then I simply reached out with Xihai to grab them by the water on their surface and fling them towards Keppel.

The shards slammed into the ice of his chest, most snapping on impact but several penetrating deeply enough to stick—none of which made him so much as hesitate in the process of lifting his hand. I crouched reflexively and drew closer to the Tiger's warmth as the temperature around me plummeted, dropping swiftly into three digits below. An instant later, my brain caught up with what he was doing and I skipped a step closer to Nora, the manifestation of my soul dropping down on all fours around her and opening his jaws.

Heat and light gathered between blazing teeth and I kept my eyes trained on Keppel as he dropped down on his hands and feet as well, bracing himself. Quickly, more and more ice grew around him, as if to shelter him within an iceberg, and soon there was little left but a massive pillar of ice with a vague shadow held within.

"Flare," I said quietly and the sphere exploded forth, not expanding until after it reached its target—and then exploding into a sphere of fire that dwarfed even the shielding iceberg. In held its shape for a moment before exploding in truth, shattering the ice as much as melting it and sending up massive columns of smoke and steam, waves of heat washing over us as it did.

My eyesight shifted briefly to compensate, cutting through the sudden covering and seeing the truth clearly. Wherever the sphere had touched, ice had melted except for a scarce few veins that still held out. The frozen tomb Keppel had tried to conceal himself in laid shattered, broken open by the attack to reveal…absolutely nothing.

I twitched once and then strode purposefully five steps to right, my Tiger leaving Nora and the melted ground around her behind to follow swiftly. The Tiger lifted an open hand before slamming it down on the surprisingly deep layers of ice to reach in and grab what lurked within. With a mighty pull, he tore a bone-white figure from the ice, lifting him high into air as he raised his other fist—

And suddenly his entire burning form was disrupted, the flames all around him flicking out in an instant. The sudden shock hit me like a knife of ice to the heart—and then I felt the real cold that went along with it. In an instant, I felt myself freeze solid, starting with Adamant skin and reaching quickly deeper to solidify liquid blood and freeze nerves. For a moment, I knew what it was like to feel truly, truly cold; a brief moment of agony followed by a numbness that had nothing to do with my ability to erase pain and everything to do with nerves too cold to keep working.

I stepped forward anyway, ignoring the feeling of brittle skin breaking and limbs shattering to draw nearer to the source. The cold increased with each step, but past a certain point it just didn't mean anything; too cold to feel anything was too cold to feel anything. The Tiger, form dying down to a vaguely glowing ember, continued to lift its hand as I reached out in turn—and the area around us abruptly exploded under our combined assault.

The temperature rose as rapidly as it had fallen, my power returning sensation to me mere moments after I'd lost it. Unfortunately, the first of such sensations was that of being broken and skinless, but I brushed it off, lunging back to Nora's side in an instant. Though the Gamer's Body and my Elemental Resistance had let me weather the worst of that extreme temperature shift without more than a large chunk of HP damage, Nora's organs had begun to fail swiftly, her Aura already taxed from the battle. I held onto her tightly and healed her as the Tiger drew close again, flames renewing in its figure.

As it did, though, I kept its eyes focused on Keppel as the taken Hunter slide easily to his feet with an alien sort of grace owing to his warped form. Long spikes of bone jutted out from the sides of his mask, all of them aimed backwards over the now smooth expanse of his skill. His body had been changed greatly by Conquest's touch, leaving him with a reptilian, almost serpentine appearance, with layered scales of bone stretching down his now far too long neck and body such that they all seemed to flow together. His limbs were stick thin, giving them an almost stretched appearance that almost seemed pasted onto his body, but even then, his fingers were far to long for his hands and each had too many joints. Already, a body of ice was growing over him again, like moss in fast-forward, but…

Without a doubt, I'd sensed his approach that time, finding him long before my eyes spotted him. I'd felt something, a flash of dread that I knew wasn't my own and I'd simply…known where it was coming from. It was new sense that I assumed I owed to my new skill Empathy, different from my elementals or enhanced vision in a way that was hard to truly explain. But it wasn't something I could see nor something being fed to me by another; I simply…knew. I could feel the Auras around me flickering in a way that I just understood, and I'd known Keppel was about to attack, that Nora was dying, that Ren was slowly succumbing and was distracted by what was happening to Nora, that all around me villagers were panicking, fleeing, succumbing—

At first I'd been unsure of what I was feeling, like I'd opened my eyes for the first time to a mix of color and shape but hadn't been able to understand what it meant. But now…I felt it all, something flowing and extreme and powerful. The immensity of it all should have been too much for a person to bear.

Thankfully, I was the Gamer—and the Gamer's Mind didn't do overwhelmed. I noted the new world of sensation around me, skimmed it quickly, and dismissed most of it as not immediately important. Then I focused on what was, thinking through the implications as I forced Nora's heart to keep beating.

The emotion I'd felt before had definitely come from Keppel, yet I couldn't imagine Conquest feeling such things—relief that I'd keep him from hurting people, dread that he was about to attack us. The obvious conclusion, then, was that it wasn't the thing running Keppel's body that felt that way, but rather Keppel himself, somewhere deep underneath it all. Perhaps it was his 'mind,' perhaps it was his 'soul,' but whatever it was, it knew what was happening to at least some extent—meaning he was trapped inside of a body that Conquest was using as he pleased. I wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing; while it lent credence to the theory that Conquest's host were alive in a sense that meant they could be saved, it had the unfortunate downside of meaning they were trapped within, forced to suffer and watch as he used them to slaughter innocent people.

Though thinking about it, I wasn't all that surprised. Even beyond the fact that Conquest was a sick fuck that didn't deserve to live, given how the Grimm were drawn to negative emotions, having such a captive audience must have been delicious to them all. From that perspective, it made complete sense to keep them alive and aware; it might have even served as a way to attract other Grimm.

But man did I really hate Conquest.

I finished healing the damage to Nora, who was gasping for breath like she was drowning in open air—which she sort of had been for a little bit there, when the cold had gotten to her lungs. I nabbed a blue crystal from my Inventory and healed her again, restoring much of her Aura even as I gave her Regeneration; it should be enough to keep her a bit safer for now. That done, I rose again, eyes on Keppel who'd made a new body for himself, this one significantly less human then the last. It had three arms on each side, no head, and everything below the waist was in the form of a snake—the front half of a snake, with another head where the tail should end.

"Fall back a bit," I murmured to Nora, who had a hand over her no longer struggling heart. Even so, her other hand grasped her war hammer tightly and she tried to rise quickly. I felt a flash of regret—I hadn't thought it wise to send Suryasta against Keppel given his ability to absorb heat in massive quantities, so instead I'd sent Levant and Xihai, hoping they'd be able to do something about the ice he created. But Keppel was too strong, even for the both of them, and between the area affected and her inability to draw close for fear of infection, Nora had been forced to burn her Aura just to protect herself against the dropping temperature. It must have been frustrating, to have such an enormous amount of raw power but to be unable to draw close and use it. "This will be over soon."

I lifted my eyes to meet Keppel's, once again embedded in his construct's chest.

"So," I said conversationally. "You can swim through ice? That's a neat trick—but I hope you didn't expect it to work on me."

"You're perceptive," He admitted. "I'd figured you'd catch on quickly, but I'd kind of hoped to get near enough to at least kill the girl. Oh well, though; if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, right?"

I said nothing for a moment, letting him talk as I reaching out to Xihai and Levant. This was something I'd tried before, though I'd never found anything like success—but suddenly, I knew I could do it. Taking a deep breath, I imagined two songs coming together; Air and Water merging to make Ice, as I'd done many times before. I felt that pattern inside me, a hum beneath the echoing song of the red Dust, too quiet to be heard or express itself.

But then I reached out to my Air and Water Elementals and did the same thing.

Levant unraveled in an instant, tilting her head at me inquisitively even as Xihai fell into a puddle of already-freezing water. But then the ice forming around me began to ripple and a figure began to rise from it, her shape larger than that of either of her component Elementals, perhaps ten centimeters shorter than me. Her hair was the pure white of freshly fallen snow and the rest of her body transparent and clear as purified ice until frost began to form on the surface like a second layer of skin. She had no eyes that I could see, but a thick, frozen mist rose from the sockets and hide everything but a dim light that seemed to glow from within each.

Water and Air in balance, she looked at me and smiled, revealing rows of neatly arranged icicles instead of teeth.

"Trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results?" I asked Keppel. "You must be insane."

Keppel made a strange sound, deep in his chest, like wind chimes in a storm—a sound that could only loosely be described as 'laughter.' Then, he slithered forward to the sound of ice on ice, moving swiftly especially for something so massive, ice spreading all around him as he drew nearer.

Levant and Xihai's combined form fell to one knee, hand falling to touch a smooth pane of ice by her feet. There was a ringing sound, like a bell—and abruptly a forest of jagged looking spikes of ice erupting between Keppel and I, growing from every frozen surface in sight. At the same time, snow began to fall around us in an enormous flurry, as if someone had flipped a switch from clear to blizzard. In moments, there was a concealing curtain of snow, drawn from the water I'd produced fighting Carmine, but my Clairvoyance cut through it as if it were still clear as day. And yet, the same should be true of—

Ah, I understood as my vision flickered. Yes, even in snow this thick, the Grimm-infected Keppel should be able to see my Aura—but my Aura was spread throughout this miniature storm, flecks of light in every frozen spike and snowflake. Against a trained Hunter like Keppel, I knew better than to write him off as helpless, but…

I Lunged forward, the Tiger following. A still flickering light in the cloaking snow and so bright an expression of my soul, I knew Keppel would see and focus on it as we came close—which was why I dropped lower as we did. As my hands hit the ice, I slipped slightly, but only for a moment; without even asking, without the slightest hesitation between thought and action, the ice shifted beneath me to steady me, wielding by my Elementals will. I stayed lower as the Tiger leapt at the Hunter, claws and fangs sinking deeply into melting ice-flesh. Keppel reached for my manifested soul with all six of his arms as the creature tore at his body, attention focusing on it for a moment as it's flame-body flickered—

And I rose, slipping neatly behind it with a band of fire around my forearm—the Tiger's tail. I lifted my sword in one hand and raised the thumb of the other, aiming briefly before Lunging forward and burying it deep in the Colossus back. With all the strength my enhanced body could muster, I plunged it to the hilt, point aimed for the shadow within. Keppel's construct spasmed briefly as his real body writhed and the Tiger took advantage of his distraction to grip him tightly and my heart pounded twice as a red glow pulsated within my chest.

At the second beat, the Tiger exploded in a wave of fire and force that momentarily cleared the storm. Flames washed over me but I stood against with no more than a shift in my stand, guiding it around me with my will. My four eyes focused, the light that threatened to blind us parting like a curtain as we shifted out focus beyond the visible spectrum.

There, I saw, eyes focusing in on Keppel—the explosion had shattered the front half of his body with enough force to throw him back and melt much of the rest. One of his arms had broken off and one had melted to the elbow, but I could see the others turning, even flailing, as new ice began to form in a protective shell around him.

I reached him before he could fall any further, the Tiger's claws curling around his throat. His other hand came up in a crushing punch to his face, smashing him hard enough to crumbled the earth for meters in every direction. I glanced down with my other set of eyes and saw my refection gleaming in the hide of his golem-body—my physical form, my manifested soul, and, between us, my newly combined Elemental. I turned my gaze to find her suddenly standing there in truth as well, falling to a knee swiftly even as she dipped a hand into Keppel's creation, arm sliding into it as if it had been liquid water as opposed to solid ice. I gave her a slight nod, understanding without a word needing to be exchanged.

Then I planted a boot firmly on Keppel's chest, pushing him down roughly as he tried to rise. Four arms reached up towards me, but the Tiger grabbed a pair of wrists in either hand and stopped hard on Keppel's mask, driving the spikes adorning it into the ground like nails. Leaning back, the ice broke under its fingers and he pulled hard.

Like brittle glass, Keppel's created limbs came free and I glanced down at him expressionlessly, eyes tracking thoughtfully as I picked my target. Lifting my sword again, I took a flickering instant to check my aim and then gathered my power, driving it downwards with all the force I could muster. Crocea Mors bit deeply into his armor and then into the flesh beneath, driving cleanly through him and the ice below him and then even down into the ground.

It figured, I mused as I placed a hand on the pommel of my sword. For him to have such a focus on layers of protective armor…it seemed he had reason not to rely on his Aura's defenses alone. Was this a natural feature of his abilities or some type of modification Conquest had wrought to allow for this indiscriminant temperature shift? I wasn't that familiar with Keppel's original abilities, so I wasn't sure. Nonetheless, it was a weakness I could exploit—trying to draw this out too long would be foolish. Keppel's power allowed for him to absorb heat energy to fuel himself in a number of ways, so there was no real chance of me just wearing him down; I'd need to disable him some other way.

To begin with, I reached out to Crocea Mors and shifted the shape of my blade with a thought. Smooth, polished steel vanished in an instant as hundreds of long, wicked barbs sprouted over every centimeter of the blade, driving into the earth, the ice, and, of course, Keppel's flesh. He jerked once, trying to draw away from the source of his pain, but motion in an direction just caused more. He was pinned quite brutally in place.

It was a start. But not nearly enough—I knew the threat I was facing and wasn't foolish enough to believe this would stop it for long. That's why the Tiger reached down and curled long fingers around Keppel's masked face, dragging him up the blade to make the next part easier. Keppel gave a pained scream that broke off into a coughing laugh.

"No mercy, eh, kid?" He asked, sounding like he was enjoying this.

"It's for your own good," I said dismissively. "Can't very well leave you like this, can I? You'll just grow some new limbs and leave."

He snickered again, breathing raggedly as he did so.

"What are you gonna do to me, then?" He asked mockingly.

"I'd like to try and cure you," I said. "But I can't imagine you'll be very cooperative, so it's probably best to rip off your arms and legs for now. She—"

My Ice Elemental sent shifting currents through his created body to remind him of her presence. He let out a pained gasp.

"—Will keep you an eye on you here for now," I continued as if nothing had happened. "At least until I finish a few other things. I'd advise you not to do anything I'll have to make you regret, but I imagine you'll do that one way or another. So know instead that I'm watching and I'm serious."

The Tiger reached out to grab his left arm in a hand, placing the other on his shoulder to hold him in place.

"Oh, I never doubt that," Keppel said, voice straining as he bit down a scream and a laugh. "But my, I see you inherited your family's renowned bedside manner. Or is this just for me?"

I said nothing, holding Keppel by the throat and waiting patiently as the Tiger dropped his arm. As he reached for the other arm, Keppel chuckled.

"Not that I don't appreciate it, don't get me wrong," He continued, pausing to grit his teeth as his other arm came loose. "You're even missing the show for my sake."

The show?

I barely had time to wonder what he was talking about when a sensed a sudden surge of fear behind me—two people abruptly terrified, one a bit more muted then the other, both moving in the same direction.

My human eyes stayed trained on Keppel's face, my expression firm and unchanging. But in his blind spot, the Tiger's head snapped up and through those eyes I saw.

The sources of fear were Lei Hui and Lei Ren. The body of the former, suddenly cloaked in a billowing black Aura, was dashing towards Nora who faced him down with a surge of emotion that was hard to shift through—pain, despair, love, and yet a quiet resolve. He hammer was rising but I didn't know if it would be fast enough. Behind Hui, Ren's expression was set in panic but his emotions were more complex, similar to Nora's. He was terrified, agonized, and yet I felt it the moment a decision was made.

Yet the strangest feeling was from Hui; a bottomless, depthless terror. I wasn't sure how to even describe it. It didn't show anywhere in his body, but…the sheer immensity of what he felt alarmed we. I tried to imagine what could make someone, even someone trapped by Conquest, feel that way.

And I succeeded. In that instant of thought, I knew. I knew why he was doing this, knew what he was planning, knew what he was trying to accomplish.

This was a trick, I thought. A trap on Keppel's part, an attempt to distract me, to get to me. I knew that.

I turned anyway, releasing him as I gathered my power in all four of my hands and even in the Tiger's mouth. Energy cackled for a moment and then leapt from my control like a living thing in its own right, taking a shifting course even as it rippled through the air. The black Aura around Lei Hui solidified into a might shield as he raised an arm in defense, taking the form of a dark shield. It stood up to the first blast, the second, the third, and then was shattered by the fourth. The Fifth, un hindered, slammed into his armored form, making him halt his advance and even pushing him back a step, some of the armor beneath chipping away. Lei Hui, for a moment, stopped.

It didn't matter—it wasn't enough. Or rather, it didn't make a difference.

Because Ren would have caught up anyway—exactly as he'd been intended to.

I gathered power again, dumping a huge amount into the first thing that came to mind, an only half-formed idea, but I knew I had to stop this. As someone who understood better than anyone, I drew in all the power I could to throw at Hui.

Which is naturally, and unsurprisingly, when Conquest sucker-punched me. That didn't exactly wow me, but I had to admit, I didn't expect the specifics.

It got cold, as expected of Keppel. But that didn't really do it justice. When I said it got cold, I meant it got cold. It hit two hundred and seventy below and I froze. The air froze. Everything around us just…stopped as Keppel's power was pushed to an inhuman extreme, beyond even his limits—a trump card held in reserve until now, perhaps specifically for this moment.

The energy I gathered fizzled. The Tiger vanished. Only my Elementals remained as I stopped utterly.

A skill has been created through a special action! By combining many elemental affinities, the skill 'Searing Light' has been created.

You have been 'Frozen Solid.' Duration: 10 minutes.

But even Frozen Solid, I was aware. I saw Hui's Aura shape itself again even as he drew a step closer to Nora, elongating into the form of a spear. My Ice Elemental rose from Keppel's side, immediately focusing on me, hands reaching out to draw me from the ice in a motion that might have been quick if things weren't happening so fast. And as she released Keppel, I felt him rise, a strange shape forming in the ice around me, lips against my ear.

"A preview," He whispered. "Of what's to come—"

I knew what he was trying to say.

I didn't give a shit.

Light rose around me, rising once more in the shape of a tiger. But it rose through the ice as if it were no more than air, stepping back through Keppel like a ghost—until the very last moment. Suddenly behind him and completely independent of me, fangs flashed.

The power of his Aura faded from the ice and my Elemental reached through the layers like they were no more than a doorway to seize me. In the same moment, a chunk of bloody vertebrae hit the snow. The Tiger ghosted back into the ice and I exploded out the other side, assisting my Elemental's pull and leaping past her to rush towards the others. I'd lost a second, maybe two, but—

Ren slipped in front of Nora as her hammer rose meaninglessly, for she wasn't the target. I watched as Ren's Aura flickered and gathered, the entirely of it pooling in his fist. Hui thrust his spear over Ren's head, seemingly ignoring him to attack Nora—and then the fist lashed out, striking at Hui's heart in a motion that reminded me bizarrely of a snake lashing out. There was a moment of rippling flesh and then armor broke on both his front and back.

I was less than twenty meters away when it began. Less than five by the time the blow hit. Perhaps a meter away when an organ I identified in midair as a heart exploded out of the back of Lei Hui's chest.

All of which just meant I got to stand right next to Ren as Conquest forced him to murder his grandfather to save a friend.

I had a moment to regret that failure, to understand that this was just to spite me and strike against me, and yet even still didn't have time to hesitate. I grabbed Ren roughly as blood sprayed, splattering roughly from the wound. I pulled him back, dragging the now defenseless boy out of their path and erecting a wall of air in the way even as I flung him down hard, barely holding back enough not to hurt him too badly. He slammed into the ground hard enough that I heard something break, but as I turned from the shield, it was only to lift my sword high once more and bring in down.

There was a moment of silence as blood finished splattering, Ren and Nora's eyes wide as they looked down at my sword—and the hand it had cut from Ren's arm. The Tiger reached down and snatched it up, pitching it away before he even began screaming.

"What the hell!?" Nora shouted, taking a step forward as he began to do so. I ignored her for the moment, kneeling down to heal Ren—and batting aside his rather pitiful attempts to push me away. Nora took another step forward and then seemed to hesitate, not sure what to do as she lifted her hammer.

"Infection," I explained after a moment. "Hui's blood on Ren's hand."

"W-what—" Ren tried to ask, sounding agonized even as I worked to dim the pain and stop the bleeding. "How—"

"He was moving too slow, too carelessly. He intended to make you kill him," I explained. "Then, while you were overwhelmed with the horror of it and unprotected, his blood infect you and force you to murder Nora. Or force her to murder you, I suppose."

There was another beat of silence at that, as wide eyes looked my way.

"Why?" Ren asked through gritted teeth, clutching his stump. I batted his hand away again.

"I assume he finds it funny," I answered, drawing a deep breath and staying focused. "I'll get you a new hand, later, but for now I'm going to need you two to—"

I sensed a flicker of something and as my eyes rose I saw a blur of motion. By the time I realized what it was, I didn't have any more time to think or come up with a real plan—I just moved, rising and shoving my fist past the right side of Nora's face with every ounce of speed I could muster.

A moment later, Tenne's silent bullet slammed straight into my forearm.