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.

Quick Time

One thing after another, I thought as the flash of pain went through me. The bullet had pierced straight through my defenses—my Aura, the White Tiger's Hide, the barrier of screening air I'd been keeping around me since this began, and even my Adamant skin. Even with Grimm Slayer activated, it just wasn't enough to protect me fully against such a powerful attack.

I didn't need to look down to know how bad that was, but I did so anyway.

Your level has increased by one! Your level has increased by one!

You have received the Status Effect 'On A White Horse He Rides [Low].'

I was a bit cheered by the levels, but the latter news pretty much ruined it. It wasn't unexpected, really. That I'd been able to protect myself from Conquest thus far was mainly a matter of luck. My father hadn't tried to infect me and though Carmine had hit me many, many times, her own attack had vaporized any cells that weren't safely within her body. Other than that, I'd managed to avoid any direct exposure to the disease thus far, but I'd known it was only a matter of time. I'd wanted to gather all the information I could before I tried anything, but eventually I'd planned to expose myself to the virus, to see what I could learn from that perspective.

I'd just been…hesitant. Cautious, really. Conquest had seemed fairly sure that it wouldn't affect me and, well, I suppose that if anyone would know, it'd be him, right? But on the other hand, he'd been limited to the knowledge he could access in my father's brain and while I'd told my father everything I knew about my power, I…well, I didn't know all that much. Still, the basic theory held; the Gamer's Mind was inviolate—any status effect that tried to touch my mind failed. I was sure enough of that to rely on it even in a life or death situation and it had saved my life countless times by keeping me calm and in control.

What I wasn't certain of was how my power labeled such things. I mean, most effects that tried to make me someone's puppet should fail outright, of course—but what about effects that tried to control me through my body? I doubted the Gamer's Mind alone would protect me if someone attached strings to me and controlled me like a literal puppet, but how far did that go? I hadn't wanted to test it on Conquest until I knew how the bacterial Grimm controlled people; if he commanded people by directly seizing control of sections of the brain, did that count as a physical effect or a mental one? I'd had no way of really knowing. And though I'd learned a great deal…well, I still wasn't sure and had been reluctant to test it out of hand.

But I guess I'd be finding out now, huh?

I tried to think of this as an opportunity—because, in its own way, it was. Assuming Conquest didn't seize control of my body in the next few minutes, I'd be able to use this chance; I doubted anyone had ever been able to study Conquest like this before. That may have even been why my father hadn't attempted to infect me when we first met; perhaps he'd feared what I might learn from the experience. That was a pleasant though, I suppose. I tried to hold onto it as I saw black spots begin to appear on my skin.

But—and wow, but this kind of said everything you needed to know about my present situation—I had bigger things to worry about right now. Yes, I'd been infected and now it was just a worrying matter of time until I found out what that meant, but until then, I had work to do. Tenne had just shot and infected me which was what I really needed to worry about, for several reasons.

The most immediate, of course, was the fact that someone was shooting at us. If I hadn't stopped that bullet, it would have killed Nora or worse. Linked to that was the fact that Tenne, who I was pretty sure was the one attacking us, obviously had a vantage point from where they could shoot at us, meaning that it was likely other shots were coming our way quickly, a fact that I found somewhat concerning. I needed to deal with that, fast.

I also needed to get away from Ren and Nora. Not really so much to protect them if Conquest took control of me because, quite frankly, they were screwed one way or another if that happened—but even if I assumed I'd retain control of myself despite Conquest's infection, which is what I would be doing until proven otherwise, it could still be dangerous to keep them around me. For one thing, I could now serve as a carrier to the disease and in their weakened state, I might infect them accidentally. For another, if they saw me transform, they might take it…badly, considering the circumstances. And if they were to attack me, that itself might result in their infection. I couldn't risk that, which meant I couldn't stay near them or anyone else vulnerable to infection until I fixed this.

There was some good news there, at least potentially. As this was a status effect, I'd be cured of it by sleeping. Assuming that Conquest didn't taken me over and never go to sleep, I'd be able to cure myself at least. All of that was for later, though.

A moment after the bullet hit my skin my eyes snapped towards it, catching a glimpse of its original trajectory before it rebounded off of my skin and into the air. As it did, my hand of my infected arm quickly came up and snatched the bullet, holding it tight. I felt more of the infection spread from that touch, but it didn't matter much, since it was the same arm and it was more important to keep the bullet out of sight and to make sure it didn't touch anything else.

That done, my eyes traced the bullet back to its source. I'd glimpsed the initial trajectory—though that could have meant nothing with Tenne's Semblance—but more than that, I'd been alerted to the attack by a flicker of emotion. That had been the only reason I'd been able to react in time and now it gave me a marker that led me back to…there.

Most of a kilometer away, on top of the tallest building in town, Tenne stood watching. He looked different now, of course, as Conquest had warped his body to best make use of his abilities, though of all the completely changed Hunters I'd seen, he looked by far the most human. Though he'd been covered from head to toe in a layer of white armor that completely hid his skin and hair, the shape of his body was largely the same. He was even wearing most of the same clothes as before, including the belts of ammunition.

But then I saw his eyes—all eleven of them. He had five on each side of his mask, which was split vertically down the middle by a massive, eleventh eye. Which was…very, very bad.

I knew how Tenne's Semblance worked from the stories of my mother and sisters, as well as my own Observation—it was a limited but powerful form of telekinesis that effected small, light-weight objects. More specifically, he controlled objects visually; look to the left and the object follows, that type of thing. What made that power so dangerous was the fact that the bullets moved fast enough to stay wherever he was looking, which gave them great speed even at short distances…but as the range increased, so did the speed of the bullets. That is, if the bullet's a meter away and you look to the right, it'll stay where you're looking, covering that distance in the time it takes your gaze to…and it'll do the same thing at ten meters away or a hundred meters away or a kilometer away, even though that meant a drastic increase in speed each time.

Or that was the theory, at least. In practice, I also knew there were several limitations, both from what I'd heard and what I could guess—for one thing, there was the matter of energy and the fact that it had to come from somewhere. The faster the shots went and the heavier they were, the more energy they required; that's why he limited himself to small objects like bullets. Because of the physics behind it all, it was better to double something's speed then its weight, so he cut a balance with bullets that were heavy enough to hurt and held a useful amount of Dust, but also small enough to move at insane speeds. Still, even then it took a lot of energy.

It also took focus. The same dependency on his eyesight that gave the ability its power also imposed limits on it; he could only control one thing at a time because he could only look at one thing at a time. He also needed to be able to see it clearly, which put limits on its maximum range, and he needed to keep looking at it to control it, so blinking would disrupt it, as would losing track of it for more than a fraction of a second. Tenne, whether because of his Semblance or years of training, had really, really good eyes, but as a human, those limits remained to some extent.

The keywords being 'as a human.' Now that Conquest had gone to town, I was guessing he didn't need to blink much anymore. It seemed safe to assume those eyes could keep track of things independent of one another, too, what with the seven bullets floating in front of his face. The issue of energy should remain, however, and though that bullet had been unbelievably fast, I wasn't sure it was quite as fast as it could have been—though that might have been because of whatever Conquest had done to make his eyes able to focus on things the size of bullets from that far away. They were still horrifyingly fast, but not as impossibly fast as they could have been in the worst case scenario. That was the good news.

The bad news, of course, was the fact that there were only eight bullets, because it implied that up to three more were already in flight.

It took me a moment that felt like far longer to find them, my vision flickering quickly. Trails of light formed in the sky, each closing ground at speeds that, despite the distance, I could barely follow and each was aimed…where? I couldn't tell with Tenne's shots; he could be aiming at Ren, Nora, or even both, and he could change his mind at any time. I'd been alerted to the first shot by the emotion Tenne had felt when it was fired—and I'd still barely saved Nora. How was I going to block three more, especially now that Tenne was probably on the lookout for such attempts?

Simple. I couldn't. If the bullets moved in straight lines, maybe I could have done something, but I had to assume that wouldn't work on Tenne. If I could create cover—but no, I didn't have time for that, the bullets were already closing in.

That was the issue here; they were moving too fast for me to do anything to stop; by the time I reacted in a way that would matter, it would be over for Ren and Nora. I could save them, I knew I could, but I wasn't—

I needed more time. God, but wasn't that the story of my life? I always, always needed more time. What I wouldn't give for a second to think, but I didn't even had that. I didn't have any…

Time, I thought, power rising in me. It was a vague idea, more instinct than actual thought, but it came together like the shift in gravity before it and I poured every ounce of power I could spare into it. In a flickering moment, the face of a giant clock appeared beneath my feet, written in pure white light. With a musical sounding chime, its hands began to turn quickly, faster and faster and faster, until even my eyes couldn't follow them.

And time slowed to wait for me.

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

In an instant, everything around me began to slow, dragging to a relative crawl before my eyes. The bullets, illuminated by spinning trails of Aura in the sky above me seemed to put on the brakes, pulling down to speed I could actually keep up with—Ren and Nora, meanwhile, just seemed to stop.

Even without seeing the name of my new ability, it wasn't hard to grasp what was going on, at least not for me. I knew logically that I couldn't be slowing the world down; the sheer amount of energy that would be required to do something like that on an area that large was far, far beyond me—and, more than that, it was completely unnecessary when I could accomplish almost the same thing for far less power.

I wasn't slowing the world down; I was speeding myself up. Warping time in my immediate vicinity to change how it progressed for me as opposed to changing the world around me. It was all in the name, even—Acceleration was the change of something's velocity over time. I was just tampering with the denominator of that equation instead of the numerator.

And it gave me exactly what I needed. My eyes swept up to the bullets still speeding towards us, but from my perspective they'd been cut down to less than half their original speed—no, perhaps closer to a quarter of their speed, which meant I was moving nearly four times faster now. That carried with it more than its fair share of implications but first thing's first.

I spun back towards Ren, snatching a blue Dust crystal from my Inventory. Reaching out to him as gently as I could with my free hand, I saw the fabric of his shirt ripple out from where I touched his chest as even that soft contact was magnified by my speed. I healed him quickly and restored a healthy chunk of his Aura as his eyes slowly began to widen—and then pushed on his chest a bit harder, lifting his feet from the ground and leaving him moving slowly through the air. A quick pair of steps drew me close to Nora and I did the same thing to her, directing her back towards the demolished building.

Then I turned, my eyes landing on my Ice Elemental who stood, still as a statue. It didn't seem like my speed boost carried over to her, unfortunately, but that was okay, I supposed. I considered commanding her to create a layered wall of ice around the area, but no; I reached out mentally and unraveled the merged pattern that composed her new form. After a moment, I felt her presence in my mind separate back in Xihai and one of Levant's manifestations, though her body seemed to be a lot slower to come apart—it didn't matter. I touched her mind and told her what I intended.

"Onyx, Ren and Nora are above you now. We have dealt with the Hunters above but Tenne is now attacking us from a distance. I'm going after him, but I need you to get both of them out of here! I'll keep this area clean, so pull them down as soon as you can!" I sent the message to her, knowing she'd understand the words and communicate them properly. Even so, I knew that would take a while; slowed down enough to be intelligible, time would be required for the words to form—to say nothing of how long it would take for Onyx to hear them—and even now I didn't have time to waste waiting. In truth, with the amount of time it would take for all of that to happen, this would be over by the time Onyx finished obeying my commands. In fact, I hoped it would be.

Regardless, I needed to get Ren and Nora out of harm's way. They weren't safe up here and with everything that was happening, that could happen, I needed to get them both to safety. With any luck, Onyx would be able to do that before anything else happened. Because I knew what Conquest was doing with this, with the broken buildings and sudden attacks. He was making sure I was always on my toes, always in motion, always reacting fast and never having a moment to really stop and think. But if this was a game, and I knew it was to him, I needed to be able to look ahead.

Tenne's attack wasn't a coincidence; the timing was too convenient for that. He'd intended to shoot Nora right before my eyes, either killing her or infecting her right as I'd thought she was safe. Given his vantage point, he must have been watching all along, waiting for this moment as I'd fought Keppel and Carmine—perhaps as a backup plan incase Hui's plan failed?

Thinking about it that way, this whole thing reeked of a set up; Ren and Nora were the only people that Keppel and Carmine had seen me with in this village, so of course they were singled out. Collapse a building to draw my attention, reel me in, and then put their plan in motion. Hurt or kill them before my very eyes, make me kill the Hunters, whatever else they had in store; with in-depth knowledge of how Ren and Nora would behave through Hui and maybe a rundown of how I'd react from my father, I doubted it was hard to orchestrate.

And that meant that from the moment I'd arrived to fight them, I'd been playing into Conquest's hands, though I liked to think I'd been able to throw in a few curveballs. I wasn't going to win that way, though, running from planned encounter to planned encounter; I needed to think ahead. I still wasn't sure what Conquest was after, but I had an idea about what I needed to do, and it began with Tenne.

My arm throbbed as I danced a step back, draining a set of Dust crystal as I raised a pair of barriers around the collapsed building, making sure Ren, Nora, and my Elementals were inside. How long it would hold up under Tenne's shots, I wasn't sure, but I didn't intend to let him test it, either. Turning in place, I crouched down and prepared to move, though I spared a moment to cast a glance at my arm as I did so.

The skin around the impact continued to darken at the same rate, the sickness inside me accelerated as much as everything else. Even the drain of my powers seemed to have increased to keep up with the change in my personal time, but that wasn't a major concern right this moment. Conquest, though…

It didn't matter, I thought as I quickly mapped out a course in my head. I still had work to do.

The next moment, I was flying through the air, landing firmly upon a platform for a flickering instant and then flashing towards the nearest building. The Tiger loomed around me for a moment before shifting forward such that I could reach out a hand and grasp its back, sliding into place on top of it. As it came down on all fours upon a nearby street, I slide into place astride it, riding it as it leapt forward. I willed my Map to appear with a thought to check my work while a Vorpal Blade flicked into shape around my right arm and I flung it out the moment it appear, sinking it deep into the face of a nearby building to assist a sudden turn around a corner. Power gathered in the Tiger's jaws as we smashed through a doorway, tore across an empty living room and kitchen, and Lunged right out the other side of the building. Slamming into the side of another house we hung low for a beat of my heart and flung ourselves high, high into the air—right into the path of the nearest bullet.

I saw it move to turn, but the Tiger merely bucked under me, sliding me forward enough to make it join its brother in my right hand. Then the Tiger shifted beneath me, rising up through my body to loom behind me, Vorpal Blades forming around its arms and tail whilst I reached up with my left hand. It slide easily through the Tiger's jaws and I grasps the orb of light held between them, sliding control to my physical body as easily as if I were tossing an actual ball from hand to hand. I grasped it tightly, grinding it down until it was just a burning point of light shining through the flesh of my hand—and jerked as the Tiger pulled me along, Vorpal Blades flashing out quickly enough that we seemed to fly a crooked path straight down the center of a street, tail-blade anchoring us as we turned through the streets. Suddenly, both of its arm-blades sank into the upper edge of a nearby roof and reeled us in as quickly as it could, sending us flying up past it and high into the air with a bit of assistance from another Lunge as we flew by the roof. We rose into the air like we'd been shot from a cannon—

And then, just as quickly, we stopped. I made a vertical platform from the air and slammed into it on my hands and knees, the Tiger landing over me. Bouncing back, I made a second platform for my physical body to land on as the Tiger flipped backwards, our hands passed through each other Reaching behind me. Once again, I passed the ball, sliding control of the sphere back to him as he went by, and the Tiger thrust out its hand as he grasped the rim of my platform.

Shadows stretched out below us as a beam of light flashed through the sky at Tenne, wider around then his chest and aimed straight for his eyes. He reacted quickly—so quickly that he must have moved before I even fired—and lifted his arms to protect his face as he moved to the side. The blast barely nicked him as he sidestepped, but I chalked it up as a win anyways as I reached to one side and caught a third bullet. The platform beneath me had vanished the moment it had stopped the Tiger's motion and he pulled me the rest of the way down into his luminous body, tail-blade flickering out to draw us back down to the roof.

My eyes focused on the final bullet and we moved as one. This time, there were no tricks, no cover, nothing—it was pure and simple speed. I Lunged towards the bullet closest to Tenne, striding across the open air with all the speed I could muster, and closed the distance in an instant. Even so, despite the distraction I'd directed at Tenne, it moved in reaction as I drew near, bobbing sharply to the left before flashing right and dropping lowing, aiming to pass under me and out of my reach.

And for a moment, it did, weaving barely a centimeter out of my reach as it accelerated sharply—but I landed on the air and changed direction to follow, speeding up even further to match as I drew on more power. I Lunged again the moment I had the footing to do so, bounding after it, and swept it out of the air.

Then I turned again and set my sights on the bullets source. Less than half a kilometer away now, I had a straight line to him through the open air and I took it, draining a pair of crystals and pouring everything I had into Acceleration, speeding up faster and faster even as my body literally began to glow with the heat of friction. As I closed in, Tenne trained his eyes on me and the bullets he had on hand leapt to respond, flying towards me along over half a dozen different paths, each bright under the clarity of my sight, each aiming to hit me or get by me, each getting faster by the moment. Tenne flicked his wrist, tossing a handful of other bullets into the air for his free eyes to pick and choose from as well, and instantly I saw three of them begin to quiver.

But even as they began to put on speed…this close, the bullets seemed almost slow in comparison.

Without a trace of fear, I dove right into the midst of them.