Chapter 103: Illusion of Fairness

There is, and has never been, such a thing as a fair fight. In some very specific situations, the system has been known to try to equalize things as much as is possible, but there are limits to both what it can and is willing to do in pursuit of that goal. Adding to this the simple fact that the System appears to hate ties and stalemates, means that any competition that seems fair even rarely is, no matter how close it might seem to be.

And why should it be, after all? In any conflict, every side will bring whatever resources it has to the table, whether that be personnel, weapons, provisions, or some other asset suitable for the task at hand. Groups and individuals also grow, meaning that one’s unrealized potential must also be factored into the equation.

There is, in the end, always an edge to be had. The trick of the thing is to find that edge, and bring it into play.

 - Stal Mediana’s Meditations on the System, Chapter 9, Page 4.

Sean’s life had been unpredictable lately. Where he would have once foolishly bemoaned his life as boring and unchanging, he now regularly fought bears with knives. He blew stuff up, burned things down, and often found himself running full-tilt away from horrors he could have never imagined.

As much as he liked to think he had adapted to that kind of unpredictability, he now realized that all the adaptations he had gone through had a single commonality, a bit of normalcy that he had taken for granted. He had always had a body. And in that sense, as much as his body might have changed, he had always had a bit of the familiar right there with him, the comforting companionship of himself there to keep him calm and centered.

When he reawakened from whatever time-stop blackout the system had put him through, he found that was no longer true. Instead of a normal guy with the normal amount of fingers, toes, and ribs he had come to expect, he was now a glowing ball of light. And, as he found out at the exact same time, he wasn’t emotionally prepared for that at all. Sean was shook, to the extent a sentient person who had only recently found themselves orbified to be.

Somehow, his surroundings were worse. He wouldn’t exactly describe himself as suspended in a gas, despite the fact that it was cloud-like in nature. He could see through it OK, but everywhere he looked there was a kind of billowing, luminescent energy flowing through the entirety of the space he could see. Somehow, this was even worse than the orb thing.

And still, somehow, neither of those were the worst thing about his first few seconds in this new world.

It has to be Eike, Sean thought, looking across the swirling cloud of aether at the other floating orb that occupied it. Nobody else could manage to look smug as a ball of light.

Whether or not Eike had ever fought as a round, abstracted being of pure thought before, he had to know more about it that Sean did. They probably had classes for it whatever college for rich assholes he had gone to,  or something. His suspicion was immediately confirmed as he saw Eike’s orb start to twist a bit, then move around the space slightly.

He’s orienting himself. Sean might not have thought of it immediately, but he wasn’t dumb enough to not do the same thing. He put a little effort into moving slightly, finding that he was able to will this to happen. He didn’t move a lot at first, but after a few moments he was zipping back and forth a few feet every time he tried it. He also ruled a few things out. He couldn’t, apparently, shoot lasers. He couldn’t detach parts of his orb body to throw at Eike. But moving? That he could manage just fine.

He had just started to get the hang of it enough to consider getting the fight started in earnest when he suddenly felt a sense of something approaching, and darted to the side just in time to dodge Eike’s orb. Eike skidded through the quasi-nothingness past Sean several feet, then rebounded for another attack, one which Sean met head-on by propelling himself on a direct collision course through the crowd.

As the orbs collided, Sean’s whole being was shocked with pain, like he was being ground to dust at the same time that he himself ground away at Eike. The sensation only lasted a moment as the two orbs rebounded off each other, bouncing away before clashing again. After the agony of the clash replicated itself from the second engagement, Sean actively fled the confrontation, evading Eike as he tried his best to assess what was actually going on.

Somehow, even without a clear point of reference, Sean could tell his orb-form had shrunk somewhat during the conflict, and suspected Eike’s had as well, for the same reason. He could feel when his orb had ground away at Eike’s, and knew he couldn’t have come out of that completely unscathed.

But his shrunk less. That’s a problem.

It wasn’t just an issue of size, either. Sean’s size had reduced, but he also felt weaker. And slower. And less knowledgeable. Whatever was happening during those conflicts, it was grinding away at everything the system had given him. And, worse, Eike was winning, or at least looked like he was.

But if Sean couldn’t win on strength, he might be able to win on speed. He maneuvered out of the way of a few more of Eike’s ramming attacks, learning to move better in this form as he did. He was getting quicker every second, and it was only a few moments before he realized his maneuverability was actually better than Eike’s, now.

The next time Eike made a charge, he didn’t just dodge to the side. In one motion, he dodged up and arced back at where he predicted Eike would stop, essentially backflipping into him with a few feet’s worth of built up momentum just as Eike killed all of his own.

The impact was just as violent, but Sean thought it was just a little bit less painful now, as if he had shifted the line of who got the worst of the interaction firmly over to Eike’s side of things. Pulling away from the impact, he confirmed that while both of them had shrunk, the gap had closed somewhat.

If Sean was right, it was his DEX and SAV that made it happen. Eike had been pushing in straight lines, mostly, and Sean had found it easy to get out of the way of those strikes. He might be more powerful in a straight confrontation, but he wasn’t nearly as fast. At least not yet.

The next three confrontations closed the gap even further, eventually reducing Eike’s enough that he was almost the same size as Sean again. As far as Sean could tell, he was winning in a way Eike had no answer for.

Or at least that was true until the next attack, when Eike’s orb suddenly glinted with light mid-charge and his speed quadrupled, throwing Sean’s timing off and causing him to take the worst of a full-force glancing blow.

Shit, that hurt. Sean thought. He’s using skills. Has to be. The system said it was possible and I forgot. That was stupid.

Sean put as much distance between Eike and him as he could, suddenly aware that Eike’s full arsenal of combat skills was usable. In their melee fight, they had been at close range. For all he knew, Eike had any number of enhanced strikes he could throw to close distance, attacks he still hadn’t seen because Eike just hadn’t thought they’d be necessary in their melee battle until after Sean got the upper hand.

Sean took a few more hits and lost that much more size before he finally came up with an answer, managing to get Hard Time working by burning some tiny amount of his own mass to slow Eike down. The next few hits were his, and observing the size difference he could see he was catching up again, even with his new, expensive skill usage. And, best of all, it didn’t seem Hard Time had limited uses in this form. It cost what it cost, which meant he could spam it as much as he liked.

After that, he was winning consistently in almost every encounter. It wasn’t by much, but after several hits, he found himself in the lead, and slowly building the gap in his favor as time went on. Eike was desperately trying variations of the same few charge moves and finding them wholly ineffective against Sean’s ability to screw with his timing at will.

I’m going to win this. This stupid abstract battle is actually in my favor, somehow. I have this.

But Eike wasn’t entirely out of tricks, even if the few he had left were long shots. He had been consistently attacking Sean with a preference to certain directions of approach, pushing him further and further in a particular direction until finally Sean felt a slight but real catch on what amounted to his back as Eike came in for another strike. He had run into some sort of wall, some hard, invisible boundary

He tried to dodge upwards instead, only to find the wall curved to track the new direction. Without the ability to move backwards and the element of surprise working in Eike’s favor, he was unable to get out of the way at all. Eike’s charge pinned him to the wall like a Scarface poster in a college dorm room, and he was well and truly stuck.

Meanwhile, all the force of the charge was in Eike’s favor. Every attack in the whole messed up fight had come with an element of mutually destructive attacks, but this was by far the most in favor of one party of any of them yet, and Sean was powerless to get away from it. Eike seemed perfectly willing to burn as much of his own mass as it took to keep his forward momentum strong, and Sean couldn’t blame him. He was losing, and badly.

Why is this edge here? Why limit the size of the field like this?

It didn’t make sense, but none of it made sense. This space wasn’t thematic in any way Sean could decode. It was like Tron mixed with Pong on acid, at best. The clouds of energy contributed nothing to the fight besides being distracting and annoying in a way that didn’t actually disable him or Eike in any particular way. It wasn’t like anything else Sean had ever seen the Apocalypse System make, ever.

Sean would have screamed if he could. The pain was worse than anything else he had ever felt, but he had no way to express it. The frustration was worse. He was stuck and dying, and no amount of struggling would change that. There was no way out.

Seriously, what is this place? Why an edge? Why a round edge?

Almost too late, it all clicked. The Apocalypse System wouldn’t have built a place like this. If it had, it would be loaded to the gills with killer Mickey Mouses, or something. This had to be a place that existed already. A round place. A round place that it made sense to jam them into at the exact moment he and Eike touched the goal-orb for the whole competition.

They were inside that goal. It was the only thing that made much sense, even while Sean admitted it didn’t make that much sense anyway. And if the inside of the ball didn’t make sense for the Apocalypse System to build, it made more sense for the whole orb to be something that existed anyway, something the Apocalypse System couldn’t control very well in the first place.

He wasn’t sure, and he had no way to check. But Sean was suddenly very sure he was crammed directly into the orb containing the stored power of Earth. He wasn’t in a weird place, really. In some ways, he was as home as he could possibly be.