Lancelot's chest heaved.
He knelt in the blood-soaked dirt, one hand pressed against the ground, the other still reaching toward Aronde where it lay twenty feet away. His body screamed at him every muscle, every joint, every breath. The giant's blows had cracked something inside him. He could feel it with each inhale, a sharp, stabbing protest from his ribs.
Not enough.
The thought came unbidden, rising from somewhere deep and dark.
Why am I so weak? What's the reason?
He looked at his hands. They trembled. The hands of the greatest knight in Camelot, trembling like a boy's.
Perhaps I've been wrong about it since the very beginning. Perhaps I was never strong. Perhaps I only pretended. Perhaps everyone only pretended.
He raised his head, looking across the battlefield. Gawain and the giant were still clashing, their battle shaking the very ground. Percival danced with the winged messenger, a blur of motion and steel. Tristan fought surrounded, his spear a whirlwind of death, but the Romans kept coming, kept pressing, kept dying and still there were more.
I'm weak.
His hand closed on empty air.
I'm not strong.
He looked at Aronde, gleaming in the dust. His blade. His partner. His curse.
What do I give you? The thought was a prayer, a demand, a desperate plea. What shall I give you to obtain power? I need power. POWER.
Power. Power. Power. Power.
The word echoed in his skull, bouncing off the walls of his despair, growing louder, more desperate, more insane.
Above him, invisible, Darlington watched.
And on Darlington's face, something shifted.
It was the expression of a man seeing himself in a mirror. The same desperation. The same hunger. The same need that had consumed him since the park, since the pops, since the white void. He had worn that face. He had been that face.
He remained silent. But inside, something dark and satisfied uncurled.
That's right, he thought. Despair. Fall to your lowest low. Only then will a god matter to you.
He remembered the white void. The golden mask. The cold, clinical words: An equivalent exchange. He remembered falling, begging, screaming and no one coming. No god. No savior. No mercy.
When I fell into great despair, caused by those filthy gods, no one came. Not a single god gave me grace. His mental voice was cold, hard, sharp as broken glass. But you, Lancelot. You have given me my only silver thread against those bastards. So I want you to feel the same thing toward me. That greed. That need. Feel it.
Down below, Lancelot's hand finally closed around Aronde's hilt.
He gripped it tightly. So tightly his knuckles went white. So tightly the leather wrapping creaked. He pulled himself upright, ignoring the screaming of his body, ignoring the blood that ran down his face, ignoring everything except the blade in his hand and the battle before him.
He took a step forward.
FWIP.
The sound was tiny almost nothing. A mosquito's whine. A whisper.
But Lancelot's instincts, honed by a lifetime of combat, screamed.
He twisted. Threw himself sideways. The needle because that's what it was, a thin silver needle pierced his right ear instead of his eye, instead of his brain. Pain exploded through the side of his head, hot and sharp.
"Another one!" he gasped, stumbling.
There! Darlington's mental voice was sharp with warning.
Lancelot's eyes snapped toward movement. A figure small, fast, impossibly fast materialized from the dust and smoke. In one heartbeat she wasn't there. In the next, she stood before him.
A woman.
She wore a mask that covered her entire face smooth, white, expressionless. Her armor was light, almost nonexistent: leather and cloth, built for speed, for stealth, for killing without being seen. No weapon visible. No blade, no spear, no dagger.
Such speed, Lancelot thought, raising Aronde. I need to block
BLOCK IT! Darlington shouted.
But block what? What weapon? What attack?
She moved.
Her hand snapped out not with a blade, but with a whip. Thin, black, almost invisible, it snaked through the air and wrapped around Aronde's blade. Before Lancelot could react, she yanked.
The sword flew from his grip.
He stared, uncomprehending, as his blade his partner, his curse, his self spun through the air and landed twenty feet away, buried point-first in the dirt.
Then her foot connected with his abdomen.
The kick lifted him off the ground, folded him around her leg, and slammed him into the dirt. Air exploded from his lungs. Blood sprayed from his mouth. He lay there, gasping, choking, dying.
"Ugh" He coughed, tasted copper. His vision swam. "Oh… oh, you Romans…"
He pushed himself up, spitting blood.
"Now you've made me mad."
So that's the kind of fighter she is, Darlington observed, his mental voice calm and analytical despite the chaos. I didn't see her coming at all. That means she's good at stealth. Really good.
He paused, calculating.
How many players like this do you think the Roman army has, Lancelot?
Lancelot didn't answer aloud. But his thoughts were loud enough: It doesn't matter how many. It only matters that she's here, and I don't have my sword.
He looked at her really looked, forcing his pain-addled mind to see. Small frame. Light armor. No visible weapons except the whip, now retracted and coiled at her hip. She moved differently from the giant, differently from the winged messenger. Lighter. Quicker. More fluid.
She moves fast, he thought. Well, that's normal for a woman body weight and shape are smaller than men, so
Do you have any other weapons on you? Darlington interrupted.
Lancelot's hand moved instinctively to his legs. To the small scabbards strapped there, hidden beneath his armor. The ones he never used. The ones he'd forgotten he had.
I don't think it's wise to stick to your current fighting style, Darlington continued. It's time for you to evolve. To change. She'll defeat you the way you are now. But we can trick her. Kill her in one blow.
Lancelot's fingers found the hilts. Short blades barely longer than daggers. He'd carried them for years, never used them. Never needed them.
He drew them.
His arms crossed over his chest, blades pointing outward. A fighting stance he'd seen once, in a far eastern land, from a traveler who claimed to practice an art called silat.
"Hey, bitch," he said, his voice calm despite the blood on his lips.
She tilted her masked head.
"Fuck you. "
He moved.
Not fast not by her standards. But unpredictably. His path wavered, shifted, changed direction mid-step. She tracked him easily, but there was something in her posture now uncertainty. He wasn't fighting like a knight anymore.
Her body type is built for swiftness, Darlington narrated, his voice a calm counterpoint to the violence. She's designed to dodge attacks easily, parry them against normal forces, assassinate, find weak points in your attacks. That's why she was able to steal your weapon without you reacting.
Lancelot reached her. Stabbed right a simple, direct attack.
She bent backward, the blade passing inches from her masked face, and in the same motion her hand wrapped around his extended arm. She used his momentum, his center of gravity, threw him to the ground.
Because of this, Darlington continued, unbothered, we need a fighting style that can adapt to hers. And it seems you're already onto that.
Lancelot hit the ground and moved. His leg came up, folding his body against hers. His hand found her neck. He slammed her jaw into the dirt, reversing their positions in a single, fluid motion.
She adapted instantly. Her fingers found the weak points in his arm the nerves, the tendons and pressed. Pain shot through him, his grip loosening.
We can't use the first ability of your weapon, Darlington mused. She's probably seen it. If I had to guess, she's a fail-safe. Deployed if the original method the giant didn't work. But
"But she made a huge fucking mistake," Lancelot growled, rolling to his feet.
He looked toward Darlington's invisible presence not at him, but toward him. Acknowledgment.
"Hey, god. You seem all-knowing, right?" A bloody smile crossed his face. "Well, let me shock you. Let me just shock you for a moment."
He dashed at her again. Threw the first short blade not to kill, but to distract. She caught it easily, her hand snapping up, her fingers closing around the hilt.
But on her arm the arm that caught the blade a thin rope had wrapped itself. She hadn't noticed. Hadn't felt it.
She rushed him.
They met in the middle short blade against empty hands, flesh against flesh, will against will. She was faster, stronger in her way, her limbs moving in ways that shouldn't be possible. But Lancelot matched her, move for move, his body remembering fights from decades past, from worlds gone.
My blade, he thought, and the thought was for Darlington alone, doesn't have two abilities.
He blocked her strike. Countered. She twisted away.
It has four.
He threw the second short blade. She dodged easily, contemptuously. It spun past her head and embedded in the dirt behind her.
The third ability. I call it Hype.
She moved in for the kill.
And stopped.
Her masked head turned. Her body tensed. She raised her hands to block, to defend against nothing. Against empty air.
A fail-safe, Darlington realized, amazement coloring his mental voice. An ability he can only use when the enemy holds his weapon. Bearer of bad news. Bringer of all failures.
It causes the user to enter a state of illusion.
The woman was fighting. Really fighting striking, dodging, parrying against an enemy only she could see. Her movements were perfect, beautiful, wasted on phantoms.
Lancelot walked up behind her.
He picked up Aronde from where it lay in the dirt.
He raised it.
And he drove it through the top of her masked head.
The blade entered cleanly—through the mask, through the skull, through and stopped only when the hilt met her crown. She froze. Her body shuddered once. Then, slowly, she crumpled, sliding off the blade to lie in a heap on the ground.
Her mask broke as she fell. Cracks spiderwebbed across the white surface, and pieces fell away, revealing
A face. Young. Pretty, in a sharp, angular way. Dark hair, now matted with blood. Brown eyes, open and staring at nothing.
She looked like she could have been anyone's daughter. Anyone's sister. Anyone's friend.
Lancelot stood over her, breathing hard. He bent down, picked up his short blades from where they'd fallen. Sheathed them. Then he picked up Aronde and swung it once, twice, cleaning the blood from its edge.
"There is no honor in Valhalla," he said quietly.
Above him, Darlington stared at the dead woman. At the blade in Lancelot's hand. At the knight who had just used an ability he hadn't known existed.
Four abilities, he thought. Connect. Curse. Hype.
He looked at Aronde, gleaming red in the fading light.
I wonder what the fourth is.
The battle raged on around them Gawain's clash with the giant, Percival's dance with the messenger, Tristan's fight against impossible numbers. But in this small pocket of the battlefield, there was only Lancelot, and the body of the woman he'd killed, and the invisible god who watched from above.
Lancelot looked up not at Darlington, but at the sky. At the grey, endless sky of Valhalla.
"Next," he said.
And he walked toward the sound of clashing steel.