Collide Gamer

Jane had never encountered anything like this.

A flurry of blows cut through the air, each imperceptible to most Abyssals. Ernst dodged them all with pinpoint precision, never moving more than he needed to. No matter how much Jane tried, she couldn’t put him on the backfoot. Indeed, it was her that stretched too far forwards.

An instant of imbalance was immediately punished. The old man’s knee slammed into her stomach, catapulting her upwards. A dripstone punctured the back of her pink bodysuit, piercing the legendary material with ridiculous ease. The indestructible environment broke her ribs, then had her drop back down.

Pain was a companion of every battle. Jane clenched her teeth and forced herself to focus. Barely, she managed to grip Ernst’s wrists before he clotheslined her. That he was so tall worked to her advantage for one moment. She swung herself under the moving arm like it was a crossbar, desperately making her way across the room.

A roll allowed her to land. She immediately jumped to her feet, never letting her enemy out of her line of sight. Warmth spread through her back, the enchantments of her bodysuit accelerating the healing.

Ernst chased after her, to the clapping and laughter of his allies. Every one of his punches was deliberate. An overhead swing forced her to duck. He was already stepping back while she committed to an uppercut. The tips of his long beard tickled her knuckles. He continued to tilt back. Jane did not fall for the invitation. A perfectly executed backwards somersault dragged his combat boots through the air.

Two turns and he was back on his feet. Jane turned into a streak of light, zapping to his left side. She was barely tangible again when his elbow crashed into her cheek. Dazed, she began to fall, Ernst caught her by the forearm, preventing her from hitting the cave floor.

“You can do better than that,” he said, a manic grin on his face. “Come on, try harder!”

Ernst yanked her back up, then let go. Jane put her fists up as she regained her bearings. It pulled on her to utilize her aura, her light claws, her golden-haired Unleashed form, perhaps even use the Eclipse enchantment to go all out for as long as she could.

‘Don’t,’ Copernicus reminded her.

‘Yeah… yeah, I know…’ Jane responded mentally, casting those temptations aside. They were solutions to a different problem, she was strategic enough to understand that much. She could boost herself up as much as she wanted, the playing field would remain level.

Ernst stroked his beard while he waited for her to make a move. “Catching your breath? I’ll be honest… bad strategy!”

Suddenly, he went into a roundhouse kick. Instincts delivered her from the spin. Ernst planted the flying foot down and channelled the momentum expertly into a second kick. It caught her in the stomach.

A diagonal surface allowed her a lucky landing. She crouched up against it, neutralizing the kinetic force that had flung her back, then reverted course like a compacted spring. Launching herself straight at Ernst, she forced the man to sidestep. Again, he dodged her with absolute precision. It felt like she was fighting against the human embodiment of trying to grab a tiny particle from a water’s surface.

Jane landed on all fours and kicked back. “Yes!” Ernst laughed, when he was forced to stop, her heel just short of connecting with his solar plexus. “Wild! Unpredictable!”

Barely, she pulled out of the reach of his hand when he tried to grasp her ankle. She had been swung overhead often enough for one day. Staying crouched, she aimed for Ernst’s legs. She knew she opened herself up to be kicked that way, but-

Ernst bent down and caught her by the back of the neck.

The motion was completely telegraphed. There was nothing rapid or unfair about it. He was no faster than her, no stronger than her. If anything, his Innate Ability had put him at a light disadvantage on both fronts to compensate for his height advantage. All that had happened was that he had read her next move and acted before she could go through with it.

Again.

Ernst forced her flat against the floor. “Christ almighty, what kind of ass is that?” he asked, laughing boisterously. “No wonder you’re wearing a bodysuit, I’d show that off too if I had it.”

“Guess that’s the reason ya don’t wear a shirt?” Jane managed to joke.

“You get it.” Ernst shifted around her, putting his knee between her shoulder blades. The still broken ribs filled her mind with flares of pain at the pressure. For a brief moment, she couldn’t feel anything but the pain. She came back to when he pulled the headphones from her ears. Head turned, she watched him hold one side against his own ear. “Techno, ey? Never got into it. Always been more of a metalhead myself.” He tossed the headphones over his shoulder. His mouth opened, then his gaze snapped to Jane’s hands. “Was about to say if you want to join this old bastard in having the time of your life, but I can see you’re married. Lucky guy.”

“The luckiest,” Jane hissed.

Ernst’s eyes dashed to the side, then he raised his left hand. Aclysia’s ice-clad blade was once more caught between the old man’s fingers, failing to cut. “Again,” he groaned. “If you fight me as a group, I just get too strong for any of you to even try to lay a finger on me. It gets pretty boring, pretty quick.”

“Get off her,” Aclysia demanded in an icy tone.

“I mean, I will, but not because you asked me,” Ernst grunted, released the weapon and then stood up. “Got one more try in you?”

“I guess.” Jane rose to her feet. Everything was hurting. She tried to put a smile on her face. She tried to summon forth that love she had for the thrill, for the fight. ‘I am not so cheap that I only enjoy winning!’ she chastised herself, embracing the challenge.

“That’s right!” Ernst roared when he attacked. “Try to get control of combat! Passivity is begging for defeat!”

“My husband…!” Even in this moment, the fact that she could say that put little butterflies in her stomach. “…Would disagree with you on that!”

“Then your husband is a boring man!”

Jane harnessed the annoyance she felt at those words to sharpen her instincts. There was no more music in her ears to guide her, just the pumping of her blood. She swung for Ernst’s annoying joyful face. He tilted to the side. She pulled back, expecting retaliation. Nothing happened. She swung again, a rapid series of strikes aiming at his chest. He stepped backwards, deflected, and remained on the defensive. Jane established a rhythm – then broke it.

She stomped down on Ernst’s foot.

He moved it to the side.

“Good try!” he said.

Jane jumped back, dodging another retaliation that never came. He only charged forwards when she was back on her feet, barrelling towards her in a tackle. She jumped to the side. He continued to run until he hit a stalactite, using it as a pole to spin around and continue running without pause.

Was he going to ram her again? Unlikely. He would stop and swing at her, so she just had to swing at him first.

Jane planted her feet and did exactly that. Like she had predicted, Ernst jumped, turning his momentum into… nothing. He jumped past her sailing fist, landed beside her and then kicked the back of her knee. He bent back when she tried to elbow his stomach, dodged the flailing strike that followed, then swatted away the weak attempt at an unbalanced uppercut.

Jane had never encountered anything like this.

The old man let her get back up. Just as she prepared for another offensive, he suddenly decided to attack. All free recoveries were forgotten. He was laying into her with a viciousness that she was entirely unprepared for, driving her back with every horrifically executed step. There were openings, but all of them were out of reach. Her balance was ruined. All she could do was keep ceding ground.

Ernst had no style to his combat. He wasn’t aggressive or defensive, not playful or serious, not to the point or improvisational. There was no predictable rhythm to what he did, not even a mild one that only her subconscious could get used to. At every given moment, Ernst’s move was the one she least wanted him to do.

Jane had never encountered someone fighting like this. Everyone had preferred moves. Jane knew her own preferences. One hand for magic, one hand for punching. She liked to kick. She liked to rely on speed and several impacts and an explosive finale. Everyone had preferences like that. Successful martial artists leaned into them, because it was better to master one's strengths and weaknesses than it was to ignore their existence. Some tried to be a jack of all trades. They sacrificed mastery for versatility..

Ernst was not a jack of all trades, he was a master of all.

As the fist approached Jane’s face, all she could think was, ‘This is terrifying. I am completely outclassed.’

Then, her world became a horrid show of stars and black dots. A vague awareness that she was falling was entirely overpowered by the rattling of her brain inside her skull. Hitting the back of her head on the unyielding stone did not help either. She tried to inhale reflexively, but only drew blood down her broken nostrils. She coughed it back up, while her superhuman endurance patched her awareness back together.

“Ernst! Ernst! Ernst! Ernst! Ernst!“ The chanting of the goons prompted the old man to flex, showing off his admittedly impressive physique. Beating his chest like a gorilla, he laughed loudly, then spun back to face his floored opponent.

Aclysia and Scarlett helped Jane sit back up. “Think ya can take him?” Jane asked the technomancer. It was redundant to ask Aclysia, her style of attrition combat didn’t work against someone who would just keep getting normalized to his opponent’s level.

“No,” Scarlett responded plainly. “This is a worst-case scenario.”

“No kiddin’.” Jane disliked how nasally she sounded, but with a busted nose that was just a natural consequence. She was very thankful that healing magic meant her face would look as pretty as ever when they made it out of this. ‘If we make it out of this,’ she corrected herself.

“Alright!” Ernst clapped his hands. “Let’s leave!”

‘When we make it out of this,’ Jane corrected her correction. Because she felt she was expected to ask, she said, “Ya just gonna leave us?”

“My guy told me I’ll get a better fight if I leave you alive.” Ernst shrugged. “Something about John Newman being more than fine with poisoning me if I’m going to kill one of you. Not that I mind. I come from a time where a man’s honour still meant a bit, you know?” He rolled his shoulder.

“We will need a hostage though,” the female prison guard that Ernst had used as his cocksleeve when they had entered remarked. Something about her was off. She behaved differently from the rest of the crowd, a beacon of calm in a crowd of maniacs. “We shouldn’t do everything like Judas prefers.”

“Hold up – Judas?” Jane asked.

“He asked us not to drop his name,” Ernst grunted.

“He asked you – I do not trust him in the slightest,” the prison guard responded with clearly stated disdain.

“Fair point.” Long strides towards the trio betrayed who, between the hot woman and that asshole Herman, Ernst was going to side with. Jane completely understood, she would have made the same choice. “Any volunteers?”

“Not the white-haired one,” the prison guard chimed in. “She can return to her Master at her leisure.”

“Alright then, how abou-“

Ernst stopped in his tracks, two steps removed from the trio. The jovial air in the room was replaced with an uncertain chill. Between the tall, old man and Jane now stood the pale form of the cutest embodiment of alien horror that Jane knew.

A void black blade cut through the air. Ernst stepped out of its trajectory a little faster than he did against the rest of them. Jane threw another Observe at Ernst.

The Stats displayed immediately fluctuated. Jane reckoned that, in the absence of being able to properly read the pariah, the Innate Ability simply went by Ernst’s perception. “What the fuck are you?!” he spat out.

“The Blue Maiden, Nia Fae,” she introduced herself.

“Christ, you’re creepy and I don’t even know why. Are you French? Because I always feel this way towards the frogs.”

Nia calmly raised her null-sword, pointing the weightless weapon at the tall man. “You have marred the face of my future sister-wife.”

Ernst laughed, though the sound was flat compared to his earlier, boisterous display. “Whatever kind of weird relationship you lot have going on, let your guy know that I am jealous.”

“We truly would benefit from a hostage,” the prison guard reiterated.

“Try.” Nia raised a hand to her eyepatch. The gesture remained as a threat. Ernst did not strike Jane as the kind of guy who would know what would happen if she pulled it off. All the same, he tensed up, anticipating something bad.

‘Can she back this up?’ Jane asked herself. Nia was the strongest pariah in the world, but even she could only neutralize so much magic. Worse, Ernst himself wasn’t really that much of a magical fighter. His Spellpower was just a reservoir to empower his body from the inside. It wasn’t the kind of magic Nia could just purge like that. In a pure physical confrontation, she would get crushed.

“We’re doing without the hostage,” Ernst decided. “Get us out of here, Nyala.”

“As you wish,” she groaned and raised a hand. The human hand transformed into a bone-clad gauntlet. Clawed, her index finger sunk into the space beside her and opened it up like a zipper. The edges of the portal were solid black and bronze, assorted in a manner that gave Jane a vaguely Egyptian sense of aesthetics. Unnatural violet radiated outwards.

One after another the goons stepped through the portal, disappearing into the inky black in its centre. Ernst and Nyala were the last two. The prison guard hissed when Jane tried to throw an Observe at her. Jane only heard that. Her vision was filled with distant stars, blinding her.

She only reclaimed her sight when they were all gone.