Collide Gamer

John sat on a toppled block of concrete that had been catapulted on top of the entrance building of the barrier copy of Graz’ main train station by some explosion and watched the battlefield below. Eyes darting from one clash to another, he used the ability to zoom in on what his eyes lay on to take aim. Then a hail of Shardbound descended from his position.

He missed a couple of enemies due to dodges caused solely by unpredictable movements that were taken without knowledge of what was even about to happen. Aside from those lucky few, however, he maimed or killed pretty much everyone that he had tipped the thirty shards on.

‘I only need about 50 mana worth of an attack to kill someone with a headshot,’ John thought. ‘These guys are stupidly fragile. I guess I didn’t have particular much health as well at level 25… how much HP did I have?’ The question hovered in his head while he checked through Momo’s and Jack’s eyes on how the battle was going elsewhere.

Without turning around, he pulled the trigger on a Shardbound that had been sitting behind his back. It ended the life of yet another soldier trying to sneak up on him. “Why would you even try?” John shook his head. This was a battlefield; they actually could take prisoners for a change because there were people on their side here that could actually guide them off.

‘I think I had 70, but then again I also didn’t go into Endurance until way later. Then again, these folks don’t have Gamer’s Body. Then again, I am pretty sure I take more damage for hits towards vital areas,’ he pondered further as he watched Aclysia charge through the street below and ram full-force into one of the higher levelled officers.

There were a few of those on the battlefield, seven from what John had seen so far. On their own they were of no concern to the Gamer, but if they grouped up, they might have been a mild threat. To one of John’s summons at a time.

Which is why he had his familiars disperse and take them out one by one. They weren’t a big threat to John himself, but the forces Maximillian had hastily put together weren’t staffed with a number of similarly above-average individuals. Without a doubt he had them, just somewhere in the background.

Not that that put Maximillian’s forces on the backfoot. The average soldier the Blood employed was barely even qualified as one. They were largely disgruntled craftsmen and women who learned one or two combat techniques. Maximillian’s forces on the other hand were largely made up by nobles who had been training most of their life. While that didn’t necessarily allow them to punch up to the moderately talented people that made up the officer level of the Blood, people that had been sent there from the heartland of the enemy guild, they could very easily mop up the enemy soldiers.

Basically, it was mediocre quality infantry fighting a mass of peasants and some elite units. Without John, it would have been quite even handed. With John, they had yet to lose a single person on their side. Not a wonder with Undine creating small clones of herself, whenever she had mana for it, that healed their side back to full whenever they had any injury at all and the doubtless air superiority they had.

John saw something move in the corner of his vision. A movement like the air wavering over a summer sun heated street. Raising the hand that was clad in the Undine glove, he stopped the knife in his palm. He had deactivated Mana Protection to save himself the mana. Nothing around here was worth blocking, his HP pool could take the hit instead.

The knife uselessly sunk a millimetre into the hardened water surface. The man still was invisible, but John had fought his fair-share of invisible enemies. “That would make you number 8, huh?” he asked; “Sorry, I am going to use you for something. I might not be the worst person around, but I find my personal long-term well-being more important than your life. Especially as your associates literally tried to nuke me.”

‘Undine, unleash,’ he mentally commanded. He was met with uncertainty. ‘Your problems won’t vanish if you don’t face them. The envelope with the bad news won’t become any less real if you just leave it to dust on the counter. Do it, try to control yourself.’

John felt the glove shudder once, something like a deep breath being taken. Then the uncertainty was washed away. Slowly at first, then, like a dam of sand breaking, faster and faster, it was replaced with rage and hatred. “Drown in the tide!” the siren’s call rung out as the glove spilled forwards and around the invisible man.

The attacker was encapsulated in a sphere of water in a mere moment. A wrathful grin sat on the red-eyed grimace of the otherwise so mellow elemental. Her words changed to the speak of elemental, whispering lyrics as she flowed over the surface of the bubble.

First all John could see of the man inside were occasional splatters on the surface of the water. He knew that this was Undine allowing him these occasional breakthroughs to keep hope up. ‘Calm yourself,’ he tried to tell her, but he didn’t even reach her. “Undine!” he shouted out loud, jumping off his sitting place, when the guy inside the bubble became visible.

As expected it was yet another one of these green uniformed leader types. They were basically the elite encounters with face or minor colour swaps that many games liked to do to cut down on animation costs.

She still didn’t react, so John did what he hated to do most. He threw out his left in a straight punch, and a fireball flew forwards as the final stage of Echo of Destruction activated. It hit Undine’s shoulder with a sizzling noise, and she turned towards him. A whip of water formed out of one of her arms and lashed at him; John didn’t try to dodge.

‘IT’S ME, CALM DOWN!’ he mentally screamed at her; the whip stopped just before his eyes. The unleashed water spirit retracted her hand and sung a couple of syllables that John didn’t understand. Her red eyes still burned with otherworldly wrath, and the man inside the bubble was unable to close his mouth as water forcefully entered his body.

“Leave him alive,” John requested in a sober tone. Undine’s body stretched towards him, like a snake ending in a crystal ball; she looked at him with a clear struggle, a golden flicker appeared in her eyes, and a desperate snapping for air confirmed that she at least let the man at her mercy take a breath.

“I… am… veh… control…” she barely formulated a sung sentence, slipping into elemental speech for a moment. The water around the man in her grip rose again as that sliver of control slipped her again. They both decided that she best change back to normal at that moment.

“Good, very good,” John smiled and kissed her with pride after she had reformed next to him. “If you can control yourself once, it stands to reason you can again. We will train this until you can at least direct this rage.”

“Just like I taught you to direct your anger,” Undine reminisced a hand carefully touching her scars; “My mistakes will haunt me forever.”

“Give it a few years, and they will just be an unpleasant blemish on your memories,” John promised her.

“Years… it has only been months since I have been created,” Undine mumbled; “I wonder how you humans feel to reach maturity with so many memories already placed upon you.”

“We forget a lot of it,” John shrugged, “and according to my own country, I am not even mature yet. I am not legally allowed to drink beer after all. Only to die in wars.” Speaking of that, this battle was almost won.

A sound like cloth being torn echoed behind John as the man they had taken as knocked out by drowning suddenly teleported himself. It was a mere two metres, but now he actually got John in a bad situation.

The arm was halfway down, John ready to use any of his emergency tools, when all of that become unnecessary thanks to a pink streak spin-kicking the guy’s head. It catapulted the doubtlessly neck-broken man off the heightened place.

“Hey tiger, missed meow?” Rave asked, her left cat ear flickering as she dropped down into the comfortable gap in the concrete block that John had used as his seat.

“Every second of the day,” John said, “although I didn’t know it.” Sure, he hadn’t actively thought about her the whole time, but now that he saw her again, he felt so much better. Her voice was like perfectly temperate sunlight after spending the whole day in a cave. “I totally got that though, no reason to haste over.”

“Course ya did,” she giggled, twirling one of the longer strands of her hair around her index finger. She gave him a little wave to come closer with her other hand. John accepted the invitation, and they kissed at the highest point in the battlefield. The seriousness of the world could wait for them for a bit.

Sadly, not forever. The kiss broke and Rave cut straight to the chase. “We have been around the whole eastern districts, although we really only got stuff after there was that giant information dump ya made. No signs of Lydia.”

How she knew that the intel had come from him, John didn’t know. He decided to go with the great answer of female intuition. “No luck on my side either. Although we can attack their actual main base now,” he said.

This was the last battle in Graz. There may have been some more of the Blood around, in a city of 200’000 it was hard to get every individual, but every base had been raided, and this had been the last great push on their side to evacuate. The skirmishes were over and the countryside was hit by raiding teams as they spoke.

“We will have to wait with that until the morning,” the royal voice of Maximillian spoke up as his caped form slowly appeared over the rim of the flat-roofed building. Gracefully, as if he was walking down a red carpet, he stepped off the platform that hovered him up, then looked around without any elegance at all. “Where is Nariko?”

“You can’t sleep with my mother!”

“You can’t fuck my girlfriend’s mom!” the two of them shouted at the king simultaneously, who waved them off with a grin.

“I can try,” he declared.

“Yes, but ya shouldn’t, why does it have to be meow meowther anyway?” Rave cat-talked; “Yagottahav a whole slew of older gals just jabbering for your attention.”

“Yes, which makes trying to get one that could reject me that much more interesting,” Maximillian explained himself; “Surely you understand, Gamer.”

On a fundamental level, he did. There was just something nice about the span of time between meeting someone and fucking them for the first time. The hunting for their interest was a true test of one’s character. It didn’t feel great to be rejected by the end of it, not at all, but it was still a sport all humans had to partake in. Might as well try to enjoy it.

“Yeah I do…” he therefore admitted; “But still, not Nariko… but seriously where is she?”

“Making a booking at a local hotel for me to sleep in. Separated from you… I snuck off when she wasn’t looking,” Rave winked.

“She is going to be pissed,” John mused.

“Well, if she is going to try to jam my clam, I am going to run away with the good-looking guy I met a few months ago,” his girlfriend said.

“When did we become Romeo and Juliet?”

“When I died for a moment, then was revived by Than-Eliza’s blood healing the blunt trauma and ya went into a suicide commando to save me afterwards,” Rave theorized, “That sounds logical enough.”

“I don’t even know if Romeo and Juliet ran away to be honest…” John admitted.

“Do you two always banter like that?” Maximillian forced himself back into the conversation. Guy and girl looked at each other, then at the king.

“”Yes,”” they spoke in unison.

“Unbelievable,” Maximillian mumbled, rubbing his temples, “and I thought I had put my team together with a bunch of headache inducing people.”

“Anyway, what do you mean we can’t continue today?” John asked and checked his clock. Sure, it was late in the day, the sun had set hours ago, but if they caught a train and hurried over there, they could probably have gotten there in time.

“I had a unit of stealth specialist’s scout ahead. The enemies are hiding inside a fortified barrier. We have to either widdle the defences down by keeping up the attempts or wait for a Fateweaver to arrive here,” his brilliantly red cape fluttered unnaturally as Hawpler pulled at it with his gravitation powers like the bored ball of physical powers that he was.

“I am just going to assume that the Fateweaver solution will cost us less time,” John said, remembering that it took Nathalia several days to break into the barrier he trained in. That one hadn’t been fortified, just put together by a very skilled man, but still.

“Indeed, it will, so we have to wait for whoever Romulus trusts enough to let go,” Maximillian answered, just as Nariko joined them, ready to gnaw all four ears of her daughter with lectures.

Who would that be?