“But seriously: if everything’s a threat here, if the ability is limited, if the end result matters… why not try to deconstruct the whole building? It’s already falling apart. Let the weight of all that concrete do the work. Could you just use your sight like a stud-finder and dissolve support structures? Or sections of walls enough to make them fall and crush the occupants? No one would think twice about a building falling apart, shit like that happens all the time out here. I don’t really give a shit about blood, anyway. If you can reach into someone’s body and execute them from the inside with your own hands, then you can stand to smell some death.”
“I could, yeah—just bring the place down? But what if there’s some intelligence inside that we need?” Eyes flit to Eoran in an understated YOU’RE WELCOME.
Brint leveled a flat look on Kasse. “That wasn’t the mission though.”
“You can collapse the building,” Eoran reassured, his I LOVE YOU FOR TRYING gaze rolling from 18B to their LT, “But I want to know exactly how you’re going to do it and not crush yourself and then how you’re going to confirm your kill with that sniper now super alerted on the next building over and with a suddenly very clear shot.”
“Oh, right. Fuck… fuck,” Brint grumbled, finally reaching for the cigarettes to pull one from the pack. “I’ve never had to think like this before. I should’ve observed a couple of runs before jumping right into this, goddamn.”
“Okay, okay, just make the first decision,” the ghost Brint was currently roleplaying encouraged. “In the moment, we would’ve run through these scenarios already. We don’t have time, this is a warzone. Something is going to spot us soon.”
The mudblood slid the lighter across to Brint’s nerve wracked hands.
“It gets easier.”
Brint took up the lighter and sparked his cigarette to life. He looked to each boy in turn as he took a long drag, then continued. “Alright. Skip the third floor. What’s the fourth looking like?”
“Three men, four dogs,” Eoran explained, “Normal furniture. Sofa, desk with a computer chugging away on a hard-wired connection, wire draped long across the floor and out the south window where it terminates at a point that is probably too far away for you to tell. Chairs and a table. Two of the men are sitting there, one chatting on his phone. The third is at the desk. Dogs are resting on the floor, two near the couch, one by the window. Small charges everywhere, volatile powder, seems like they’re building IEDs in here. Money, metal, lots of coinage. Spring mattresses on the floor. Kitchen full of forks and knives.”
“How about the floor above?” Brint was back to his note-taking.
“Pretty bare accessory-wise, like it’s unfinished. Skeletal two by fours for walls with exposed pipes strung in between. Two men, pile of guns in the center of the room. They’re both on their cellphones. One is pacing and arguing. The other is near the door to the hallway, hand on and turning the handle. AKs strapped to their backs. There’s a row of bootleg antennas on the roof constantly relaying information. An aluminum foil plate is sitting by the window, probably a heliograph. The stairs dead end at this door.”
“Okay, so have another food then get rid of both of these guys before the one can get out here. Not dissolve them completely, just a piece of them enough to make them not alive anymore. Is that three moves, since it had to be done through the door?”
Kasse took one of the energy chews off the hood of the car and popped it into his mouth, smooth and under the radar. His hand returned for a second, but he paused over his hapless prey, hovering over the next chewy sweet in line to be devoured, caught in the shadow of its demise. “Did you ghost through the door? Or did you walk through like a person?”
“Ghosted through it,” Brint replied. “It’s passable until it’s fixed, right?”
“Yeah,” the boy hummed as he picked up the second chew, inspected it, then held it up for Eoran to take. “Three then.”
Honestly, Kasse thought Brint would’ve been more aware of the very apparent cell phone clue 18C had laid out for him, but at this point the deed was done.
“Lots of noise in the hallway, up the stairs. Dogs, dudes and they’re all headed for you.” When Eoran spoke now, his voice was only partially muddied by his teeth working that sweet.
“Well, I guess I’m fucked.” The laugh that accompanied Brint’s words was self-depreciating. “Anything to block the door?”
“There’s that pile of guns,” the engineering sergeant tilted his head.
“No chairs?”
“They sit on the floor.”
“How do I get to the roof?”
“Fire escape. You can get to it from the window at the back of the room.”
Brint pursed his lips, nodding to 18B. “Well, sorry this theoretical version of you is going to definitely get mauled by dogs this time.”
“You don’t need anything to barricade the door. Use a move to make the door solid, another to weld it shut, seal it to the frame. Make the stairs permeable for a second, then zip it up. When the rest are flushed up against the door, do the hall.” Kasse picked up another piece of candy, then another. “Eight moves total for breadth and control, but at least I’m not getting mauled by dogs.”
Kasse looked up to Eo as he distributed one candy to each man playing the Ossan’s well laid game. “…If the GM lets me bail you out, that is.”
18B was pretty sure 18C would allow it. He’d already started passing candy out, after all.
“Hmm, but these dogs are so hungry.” Eoran’s frown was a mockery of emotion. “Where is he getting all these moves from? He was conservative going into this and had two foods, four moves, and he’s used them all. He just took another, so that’s an additional two, but it hasn’t been ten minutes. What was the reserve? I’ll compromise, but eight is too generous.”
For all his inexperience in manipulating the angles of a wright’s ability, Brint was still taking things away from his miscalculations. It was very clear that supply and demand was a large obstacle with Kasse’s preternatural ability.
“Big breakfast? I mean, I’ve got moves in me when I start the day, but okay, okay—back it up. Just do the door then. It’ll be solid like a wall. That would buy time to get to that fire escape.” Kasse pouted as he put the appropriate candies back in line, leaving only the one he’d place in front of Brint. “You’ve gotta get me something better than energy bars, man.”
“Yeah,” Brint agreed, “Next base we end up in we’re going to raid the commissary and the PX. Just get a bunch of shit and see what works best. We’re going to have so much food that we’re gonna look like a humanitarian convoy. Toriet—what’s my move count?”
“You can have six,” the boy answered.
“Ok—solidify that door, glue it to the frame. That’s two. Drop the target through the roof. Are they standing or moving around?”
“Stationary.”
“Kill them by hand, no utility. Echolocate the shit out of that couch, drop onto it and… get the fuck out of there?” Brint looked to Kasse, hopeful that he’d managed to salvage the situation with the boy’s additional help.
18B nodded his blessing upon his CO’s course of action, but his gaze was on Eoran. He was expecting Eoran to activate his sniper or his watcher—after all, there was still what? Some fourteen, sixteen moves still available?
Kasse offered another chew to Eoran. He loved watching how much sheer joy he took in annihilating Brint’s confidence in WrightRP.
“Fuckin’… finally,” Brint sighed, cheek slumping into his cupped palm as his strong jaw worked the cigarette hanging between his teeth.
“But the dogs—” Eoran was quick to remind the older man while taking Kasse’s offering. The boy tilted his head askew, the softest glimmer of distant starshine stolen by his eyes that knew little of light. “They’re after you.”
The scene unfolded into a slow, methodical assassination. Not only of the speculative life that the lieutenant was maneuvering to his rendezvous spot, but the security he had come to suddenly embrace. The older man was conserving in all the wrong places. He wasn’t taking advantage of time, he was tripped up by distractions. When given the foresight of every option available and every variable left hanging in hypothesis, it was easy to get bogged down in all the things that didn’t matter. That was the long run of Eoran’s game: to give Brint so much information that he couldn’t keep up, to drown him in details and contingents always surfacing from the bottomless depths of his imagination. That beastly city built by words and convoluted theory was out to get Brint… and it did. It picked him clean of options and chased him into an alley with no end but his own.
Ten minutes later, the non-existent wright was face down dead in the street, mind blown from a shot to the head.
Eoran flipped the coin that had made the call between his hands. “So close…! At least you got the target this time.”
Brint chewed on the inside of his cheek.
“You’re playing too action hero, you gotta be more psychological. Think hunter, trapper—lay groundwork. That’s what you taught us to do, right?” Kasse grinned as he moved to the front of the car to face his dungeon master head on, palms flat on the truck’s hood, warm from the residual heat of a sun long gone. “You ready for me to solve your puzzle, Eo?”
He could have said it differently. He chose not to.
The boy’s eyes creased when he grinned at his lover, wide and true with his canines nipping the plush edge of his pallid lip. He always smiled like they were getting away with something when he fell into their obscure doublespeak, the evidence of intimacy clear only in the long line of his gaze.
“I’mma fuck up your building, Toriet.”
“We’ll see,” the boy replied like a tease, sing-song sweet on his tongue, obstinance shaping his gaze. Eoran pushed himself up, action intimating that somehow laying out the scenario for Kasse would require more dedication than it did for Brint—but the truth was that he just wanted to be more present. 18C wanted to look 18B in the eyes as his traps were picked apart. “I’m ready. Do your worst.”
“Hm,” Kasse murmured with the tilt of his head. “And here I was, ready to do my best.”
The ghost prepared himself. He lit a new cigarette off the cherry of the old, pulled a deep drag into his lungs, then squared his shoulders to Eoran’s position. He was confident in his ruse: the intensity of his manner at his most vile was similar to his behavior when he was determined to succeed.
“I find cover outside your building. No bodies on the first two floors, so, move one, I slip just inside from the alley. I seek out you, sentry, with your rabbit hearted pulse hammering hard in your throat and I, move two, break your femur. I want you immobile, I want you distracted, but I also want you making noise. Next, I cast out to you, sniper Move three, I tune your weapon, dissolve the firing pin and weld the bolt in place. I don’t obliterate the weapon. I don’t want you knowing how defenseless you are until the last moment. That moment when you’re trying to save your friends and you try to fire and suddenly you understand that you’re fucked. Until that moment, you think you still have power, you think your weapon is fine. Nothing is wrong until everything is wrong, that’s how it works.”
“Fuck you,” Eoran said on a breath. His laugh was airy, like the exhale of that barb-cum-quip was meant to be lessened with any lightheartedness; like the retort was anything other than a promise kept between them. He was already down his major pieces, those which had doomed the man that had come before, but he knew he was destined to lose when Kasse was playing his game. “The boy is shrieking into his handset; you can hear him across the way. Sniper is alert and looking. Above you, through layers of concrete and iron support systems, the building is teeming with life—the air is electric with pulses and neural static, all impulses frenzied and panicking and unsure but also hungry, incensed. Lots of telephonic relay. They seem comfortable to swarm in their spaces until they can determine what exactly is happening.”
Kasse grinned. To the uninitiated, it seemed like Kasse was alight at the crack in Eoran’s poker face, like his tell was evidence that he was heading in the right direction. In truth, it was a promise in turn.
This is how I’m going to savage you the next time you’re alone.
“I scale your shellshocked debris like a ladder you left propped up just for me, avoid your electrical deathtraps and make myself a temporary home on the remains of your second floor. I spend some time with you there, eat, recuperate, listen to the hum of the hornets frantic in your upper stories, casually observe the destruction of your ground floor. When I have the energy ready, move four and five, I weaken your landings, make the concrete slabs of your second, third, and fourth floor nothing but ghosts. I eat another bar while I wait for your noise to die down and, when I’m satisfied that you’ve calmed from the howl of your sentry, your warning systems all dialed back, move six and seven, I fire off an EMP large enough to knock out all electronics on the block, frying your electrical grid in the blip of a white noise whimper.”
18B tore his intense scrutiny from 18C for long enough to cheese a grin at Brint. He hinted at most of these things during his superior’s run, but the LT hadn’t heeded the advice.
Eoran’s voice beseeched the ghost return to him, an octave deeper, a degree more harsh. He looked down his nose, unamused that Kasse mustered the gall to sojourn in Brint’s company, even for a brief moment, while they were so occupied.
He said so much in the absence thereof, but to the older man, it simply seemed that Eoran Toriet was a sore loser.
“Heads or tails?” The engineering sergeant asked.
How Kasse loved it when Eoran demanded payment of his dues.
Leaning forward on his elbows, lit cigarette almost touching his friend’s crossed ankles, the ghost looked up at the bloodwright-in-hiding, tyrannical despot of his heart so thoroughly slighted. The adjunct was a mockery of the plaintive, play acting his submission so well.
“Tails,” he breathed like yes, fuck yes, tooth to lip in anticipation.
Eo’s lips curled at the corners, barely seen in the dark and illuminated only by the light in his lover’s awaiting eyes. He flicked his coin up into the air and let sortition determine his trespasser’s bounty.
“Floor three,” he began, voice sure like a verdict. “One man comes and falls through the stairwell floor. He hits his head on the way down, lands wrong, and breaks his neck.” Eoran’s catch and release process was relentless, repetitive and dealer-quick, a hypnotic flip-catch-read prolonged by each vermin the ghost’s trap caught. “Another comes, and another. One falls—dead. The other sees him disappear and turns back. Floor four. You get one man, one dog… mm, another dog… fuck, and another dog. Fifth floor. One man comes to the stairwell. He dies. The other remains and is now signaling the sniper with his tin plate.” Eoran sat the coin down next to him.
“Goddammit! What’s that kill count?” Brint asked, somehow more invested in the game now that it felt like a hostage situation unfolding in real time.
“Seven,” the map maker replied, his glance a flash to the side. He was back to Kasse in an instant. “Four men, three dogs down. You have one man on each floor, one dog on four, and two men working down the exterior fire escape to come get you. Target still on the roof. The aether is heavy with agonizing unison. The key of each man’s bloodrush is distress. Are you going to savor this or make it quick?” Eoran’s city was compliant to Kasse’s will, a beast efficiently tamed.
“I will make this unfold slowly.” Kasse was a double entendre dressed in the practical application of commando theory. “If you’ve given me the luxury of time, I will make full use of it.”
Kasse grinned wide up at the navigator who knew this better than anyone.
“I enter your stairwell and I jump over your compromised landing. I round your first set of stairs and climb up your railing so I don’t alert your third floor man by passing his doorway. Your defenses are in the dark. I can feel your fear in my veins like it’s my own, fingers on your pulse to monitor any hint of reprieve. I’m tracking your men, the ones working their way down the side of your crumbling facade. When they’re past the second floor, move eight and nine, I snap both ankles on both men, immobilizing both your units and casting doubt on my location and numbers. With the distraction, move ten, I make your fourth floor give way for the briefest of moments before zipping you back up again. I open you just long enough for man and dog to fall halfway through, scattering half their bodies in a wet tumble of viscera on the man still on your third floor. I continue climbing your railings to your fifth floor and kill that man with one shot on my way to your roof.”
“This man you’re on your way to knows nothing but the sound of your cruelty.” Eoran settled back on his elbows again, his recline lush and full of expectation for the climax of this exercise he no longer controlled. “He’s heard tales of you within the raw mire of a child’s overworked throat, your legend lives in the dull thumping of bodies landing atop each other in a hard stop stairwell. Your symphony of slush barely made its way to his ears, however, like a worshipper of a myriad godmind, his attention was devout and he was rewarded in echoes, bellchime carnage a call for final prayer. He paces. For a moment, he imagines that your body is nebulous, that your lines are soft and round and shaped by gore, that you are nothing but eyes, seeing everything at all times. He wonders if your butchery drags behind you in a cloak stained the most brilliant red, wet and long, a mop of mortality. He soon comes to his senses though—he doesn’t need to contemplate your appearance when he will soon know the truth of it.”
Eoran tilted his head, captivated by the bend of Kasse’s mouth. “He’s petrified. The sniper levels his sights on the fire escape to line up his already thwarted shot.”
Kasse wrapped himself in the warlord portrait Eoran painted of him. The boy took a long drag as he watched his lover recline, watched him abandon his autonomy, his will to defy. In any other moment, that hellion of a boy would have been up on the car’s hood tearing apart a zipper by now, but the maze-bound soldier held back.
His lover was far more inhumane than Kasse would ever be.
“I exit your window. I watch your sniper fail and I keep watching him until I find you, my target. You’ll get on your knees and you’ll beg that I let you pray.”
“Varakaiso,” said a trembling yelp, a plea from the man kneeling in the shrapnel littered roof of Eoran’s crumbling building. In Port Haven, Ossans were characterized by a near toxic level of bravado, but this man before 18B was cowering, face wet in the wake of the impossible. “Sirai, Varakaiso—“