NOVPUBAs we walk up the metal stairs and head toward the elevator, Whitey lets out a little laugh. Just one, and then returns to stuffing his mouth with more pizza.
We reach the elevator and I press a single red button, which slowly brings us upward. The higher we go, the better a view he has of the shuttle and the nature of the land surrounding it. It’s a dry, mostly reddish, dust covered, rocky area. And somehow it still has a rough beauty to it.
The elevator shakes, creaks, and finally comes to a stop, and the door opens to a metal mesh ramp. We walk across and make our way into the space shuttle. Even on the inside, everything looks a bit worn, made in a style others from Earth might call NASA punk.
There are a multitude of white, leathery, cushioned panels covering the walls, and numerous important-looking buttons and monitors with green screens displaying white text. There’s also a barrage of chimes, beeps, and alerts, and the air is filled with a nostalgic smell.
I glance around, noticing scratches and faded stickers plastered randomly across the surfaces inside, some peeling at the edges. A few handwritten notes are stuck next to an array of buttons, containing warnings and hastily scribbled reminders.
Loose wires stick out from cracked panels at our feet and have been hastily taped over with silver tape. Some buttons are labeled with yellow sticky notes bearing words like "Don't press," "Maybe press," or simple question marks. This place feels chaotic but wonderfully alive.
I close the door and lock it just as I would lock the door to my house, with a key and everything. Surely, there had to be places where my imagination took the easy way out.
We continue to the cockpit and take our seats, lying horizontally in the pre-launch chairs, reclining in the chairs, and looking out through windows that are probably larger than anything a normal shuttle would have.
Neither of us bothers to buckle up, and then the countdown starts out of nowhere. Biscuit's voice counting down for us, emanating from the loudspeakers around us.
(Ten.)
(Eight.)
(Nine.)
(Seven.)
(Four.)
(Six.)
(Five.)
(Three.)
(Three.)
(Two.)
(One.)
(Food!)
And I cant help but to say, "Damn, I miss that corgi."
The space shuttle shakes wildly as we start off, defying logic and physical laws. This is merely an imagination, glued together from memories of movies, random facts, and videos from the internet.
We launch, and our bodies press into the chairs as the shuttle gathers more and more speed. The vibrations seem to pound at us through the air, until I can almost feel my bones shaking as if everything around could break apart at any point.
Outside the windows, the sky quickly darkens, fading from a pale shade of blue to near-black, briefly streaked with fiery oranges and reds. Clouds vanish below us, replaced by the dizzying curve of the planet, creating an image that’s both vast and impossibly small all at once. My grip tightens instinctively on the chair's armrests, my knuckles turn white, yet somehow I feel a thrill instead of fear as if my body had already accepted that this isn't quite real and has chosen instead to enjoy the chaos.
It should probably take longer, but in a mere 30 seconds, we’re already in space, where the vibrations stop and the fuel tanks fall off, left to their scorching re-entry.
I get out of the chair as a feeling of weightlessness hits us, and we find ourselves floating in the cabin. The shuttle slowly drives itself toward the moon, which honestly seems much closer than it should be.
Hitting the wall, I push myself toward the boxes tied to one of the chairs, take one of the boxes, and start eating the still hot pizza. I toss one of the boxes over to Whitey, who catches it.
For a moment, I allow myself to float in place, fascinated by the surreal quietness broken only by soft hums and creaks echoing within the shuttle's metal bones. I turn slowly, spinning once, then twice, and taking in the messy and somehow comforting sight of boxes and crumbs floating alongside us, already forming a miniature solar system of pizza debris.
Whitey floats by one of the massive circular windows that shouldn't exist, staring out at the empty space and the Earth below us while taking slow bites.
After a few minutes, he says without looking in my direction, "My name is Lioren."
"Thank you for telling me, Lioren. My name is Nathaniel."
Looking ahead, the moon grows rapidly larger, and its surface details sharpen: craters, mountains, and mysterious shadows become visible even from here.
Then silence ensues until the moment we crash into the moon's surface. The front of the shuttle hits it, and the shuttle jolts upward, throwing us against the walls. Gravity, though not as strong as it would be on Earth, hits us again. The shuttle slides for another dozen seconds, hitting rocks, bouncing off bumps in the ground, and emitting a series of loud screeching noises until it comes to a stop.
Lioren steps out first as the door opens, and I follow, jumping down onto the surface of the moon. Neither of us even bothers to wear a spacesuit.
Once outside, we can see a flag firmly planted in the surface, an American flag, in fact. And not far from that is a lunar car and a lunar module.
Nearby, an astronaut is sitting on the edge of a small lunar cliff, legs dangling over the drop. I walk up and take a seat beside the figure.
The astronaut is dressed in one of those old-school Apollo suits, bulky, white, and covered in the lunar dust. The gold visor reflects the curve of Earth and the black void beyond. Tubes cross the chest, and gloved hands rest quietly in the lap.
"Do you know a good pizza spot?" I ask.
The astronaut doesn’t answer, just slowly lifts their right arm to point off toward the horizon.
I follow the direction of the gloved finger. And of course, it's pointing straight at Earth, glowing like a marble against the blackness of space.
"Oh, you must think you're being funny, asshole," I mutter, smacking the back of the astronaut’s helmet with the back of my hand.
"I'm sorry, sir," comes the muffled voice from inside the suit. It’s NPCandra, and she begins sobbing quietly, her voice barely audible through the thick helmet.
I'm a bit disappointed to get the same reaction as before, but I guess it makes sense. It's not like I have the experience to “program” anything more elaborate. This is just an imitation, a looping clip of a scene from my imagination.
Lioren walks by without stopping, casually slapping the top of her helmet as well. Then he plops one of the empty pizza boxes on it and says, "You’ll have to balance it here for ten minutes, or I’ll cut off your air."
"N-no! I'm sorry!" she whimpers, her voice cracking as she tries to hold still. We keep walking, leaving her behind, arms stretched slightly for balance, the pizza box wobbling on top of her helmet as she sniffles and struggles to keep the box from falling.
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We walk away in silence, the moon's surface stretching endlessly around us. Each step feels slow and weightless, our bodies drifting slightly before settling back down, the low gravity turning every movement into a floaty sort of dance. The only sounds are the faint crunch of dust beneath our boots as the Earth hangs in the black sky, distant and quiet, as if it were watching over us.
After a while, Lioren begins to slow down. He stops beside a small slope, brushes some of the dust away with a boot, then lowers himself to the ground.
With a soft motion, he spreads a piece of white cloth over the moon’s surface and looks up at me, "Would you eat with me?"
"Gladly," I say and sit down.
I patiently wait as he sets his feet on the ground. In front of us lies a pizza box, a few cans of soda, some sweets, and pieces of fruit that I recognize as the ones he liked as a young demon.
Above us, the Earth hangs bright, impossibly vivid with its swirling clouds and blue oceans, almost glowing in the darkness. It feels strangely comforting to see it from here, like finding something familiar in a dream. I glance at Lioren, noticing how calm he looks, watching me closely as if he were committing this strange picnic to memory.
Then, while he waits, I devour all the food.
When it’s done, I look up and see Lioren smiling.
Then he kicks me out of our shared mental space, and I find myself back in my workshop on the tournament floor, knowing that if I leave things up to him, this will have been our goodbye.
In the last few hours leading up to the 4th event, I sit alone in my room and think. I think deeply and methodically, running through everything I know about Lissandra and her behavior. This time, even though it's not something I'm great at, I try to predict how she’ll react to what I plan to do.
But in the end, I stand up, open the door, and walk downstairs to the living room where some Group 4 members are waiting, especially Izzy.
"Izzy, do you have a moment?" I ask her.
With her green eyes, she looks up at me from the laptop, where I know she is often editing the videos that she made with the others.
"Sure!" She agrees without hesitation, and as she always does whenever she speaks to someone, her senses reach out to me in an attempt to connect to my feelings.
It's something she does almost instinctively, and it’s pretty hard to notice. There are probably only a few people in each round who would even be capable of doing so, and even fewer who can detect her surface scans. I'm not one of those people, even though I'm aware that that kind of thing even exists.
Izzy acts a bit surprised when I allow her to connect, but she follows me out of the house and into the garden.
I sit down with her and explain everything, then I ask about Lissandra. She listens closely, nodding a few times.
I then receive my answer and an unexpected hug.
"If you need help…"
"I know, I’ll ask," I confirm. "It's fine."
The 4th event starts, and I’m moved into the Great Labyrinth of Xyphos along with thousands more. It appears to be underground, with a wall made of smooth red rock imbued with white crystals that emit light. The walls are made of a pure, and stunningly smooth gray stone, as is the floor.
Other than that, I find myself in a single huge room, big enough to easily fit the hundreds of attendees currently surrounding me, and the ceiling itself rises as high as a two or three-story building.
Then there’s the door; there are no knobs or inscriptions, just a single huge slab of black wood. At its lowest point, within reach of a normal human, there’s a glowing white handprint.
I ignore the people around me and shut my eyes, forcing my way into my mind space despite a number of attempts to stop me.
This time, it is dark and empty here, and Lioren stands opposite me in the same clothes his lurker once wore.
"Fuck off," he greets me.
I smile at him and sit down patiently.
He stares me down, "What the fuck are you planning?"
"I’ve known since the start of the tournament that you were planning to disappear at its end," I say.
"So what?" he shrugs and sits down. "It's my decision to make."
"Why only after the tournament, and why not try to take over my body?"
"It's up to me if I want to cut things short, not the tutorial. I've shown you everything I could. Your untalented ass will have to figure out the rest. And look, Nathaniel, you're a fucking mess right now. Disappearing in the middle of that would just be a dick move."
"I'm fine."
"Sure," he snorts, "the real question is, why the hell are you here?"
He avoids answering the second question, unsurprisingly.
"It seems I have to be the mature one here," I sigh. "So, to say, you could always take over my mind and do it at any time. It would be easy, and the other option for you is to die. And yet you never did. You thought about it, I saw those memories, but you never did it."
"I just didn't feel like it."
"I know," I smile, "but I'm a dumb human with a weak heart and a pathetic talent for kinetic energy."
"Sounds like you."
"So, in my human idiocy, I always took it as a token of friendship, the greatest you could’ve shown."
Lioren snorts, "Dumb human, indeed. You know I'm just a fake created by the tutorial."
"Where you came from doesn’t matter to me. Now let me finish. You’ve got a few days left, but I’m an asshole, so I’m asking you to die today."
He watches me intently, "How cruel. Explain."
"As much as I dislike it, I know I can’t change your mind or convince you to stay longer. I’ve seen enough of your memories to respect your decision. But to explain myself, compared to some things, my life doesn’t mean all that much to me. So, Lioren, to show just how stupid I am for calling a random demon hallucination trapped in my head a friend, and to show just how much I actually trust you, I’m going to give you something I value even more than that."
I look straight at him. "I will put the life of my friend in your hands, and I will give you an opportunity to go wild one more time and crush the fourth event. I made some preparations, even as we speak, a part of my mind is deploying the arrays and inscriptions to modify my mana and kinetic flow.
"She won't like it."
"I’m aware. That’ll be something for me to deal with. It will be fine."
"What was that human saying, famous last words?"
"Indeed. I’ll be taking a step back, so please, one last time, show me the proper way to use kinetic energy. You have my permission to break my body in the process."
"Craziest fucking human I have ever met."
"I hear that a lot."
POV Brainiac
The huge room with hundreds of attendees is full of sound as they party up, plan out things, and examine the area around us.
Not many notice the white palm on the massive wooden door, but I think it might be the key to opening it, possibly leading to another room or the labyrinth proper.
It is not something I worry about too much. Most of my attention is on Noname.
He stands in the middle of the room, eyes closed, mana seeping from his body. I can follow it much better now than I could during the first tournament, and it's not like he's trying to hide it, but damn, if it isn’t wild.
The asshole moves his mana around himself, carving inscriptions into his own body, tracing them over his chest, across his hands and arms. The crown on his head flickers until it vanishes. The pressure of his mana builds, and he starts making even crazier changes I can barely follow. Since he's not hiding it, though, I can see more now. The way he moves his mana is chaotic, but there's a clear purpose in it.
It flashes, it beats, it moves, pulling into threads, and the space around him begins to feel oppressive. It flares up only to die off and send pulses of weaker mana through the area-
I don't think I'm that bad at handling mana, but the guy in front of me is batshit crazy. A single slip-up, a single mistake, and the amount of mana he's using would tear him apart. On top of that, he's even suppressing the waves around him so he doesn't kill anybody who might be below Hell difficulty.
Then his heart starts beating audibly, and more of his mana seeps into the area, forcing those from the lower difficulties to move away from him. That mana fills the room and bounces off the walls before returning to him.
His mana gradually fades as the dense inscriptions across his chest glow briefly before vanishing. I've never seen anything like them, not even on low arcane weapons.
All of his mana vanishes, followed by an audible thump. Then another, and another, until I realize it's his heartbeat. But that heart doesn't generate mana anymore; it generates something else, using all the mana to do so.
His black hair, drifting around his head in rhythm with his heartbeat, begins turning white at the roots until it's completely bright white. Noname opens his eyes as their color shifts from gray and brown to a vivid shade of red.
To my surprise, Noname smiles brightly and hops in place. He moves his arms and legs like he’s testing them, then a satisfied expression spreads across his face. He taps his chest over his heart and nods, smiling even more.
"Such a ridiculously insane output," he says. "Fucking dumb human brute."
