“You weren’t...supposed to...be able...to...hear that,” the girl wheezed.

    “I’m a special sort,” Aquila said, kneeling down beside her and putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I can’t fix this. I’m so very, very sorry. If I make the swords disappear, you’ll just bleed out faster.” She closed her eyes and swallowed. “I can do that if you want me to. It will still hurt, but it will be over faster.”

    “Please,” the girl sobbed, tears running down her cheeks, “just...don’t...leave. I don’t...want...to...die alone...”

    Aquila sat down and held her. “I want you to tell me everything about you. Everything. And I am going to remember every word. Every single word.”

    The girl looked up at her and smiled, and then began to talk. Aquila listened, occasionally nodding at what the girl said. As she spoke, the girl’s voice became quieter and quieter, until it was nothing more than a whisper. And then, she was silent.

    Aquila wiped tears from her eyes, and then closed the girl’s eyelids. Then she leaned down and kissed the girl on the forehead.

    Then she took off, heading back to the others.

Daiki shook his head, still trying to process everything that had happened. He remembered sitting down to rest, talking about how to secure the room, and then he found himself in the street with Aquila flying overhead.

    “She’s been gone for a while,” Cap said, looking out the last remaining opening in the room.

    “She’ll be fine,” Daiki said. “She had this ring of flying swords around her and she looked...very capable.” Daiki shook his head. The word that had actually come to mind was “terrifying,” but he didn’t want to say that in front of Kasumi.

    Aquila landed in front of the hole and stepped in, opening her coat. Kasumi looked at her with alarm, opening her mouth to speak, but Aquila waved her off.

    “We need to block it up,” Aquila said. “They’ve all got devices embedded in their brains that show them any people in the city, and where they’re located. And, each one was given some special power before the death game began. The one who lured Daiki away had some sort of musical hypnosis. Most of them seem to need line of sight, though.”

    “How do you know all this?” Cap asked.

    Aquila held up her hand. “Please, just...ask me sometime later.”

    “I’ll get drawing,” Kasumi said, starting to sketch.

    “Make sure we’ve got lights and some food as well,” Aquila said, sitting down beside Kasumi and hugging her knees to her chest.

    Kasumi held up the pad and showed it to Aquila. Daiki blinked. The hole was suddenly gone, the room illuminated by a pair of lanterns on the floor. A picnic basket sat between them.

    “Aquila, what–” Kasumi began.

    “Please, just hold me,” Aquila said. Kasumi nodded and embraced her.

    Cap looked at them, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. He turned to Daiki. “How long have we got left?”

    Daiki checked the timer. “About fifteen hours.”

    “Why do I get the feeling it’s going to be a long fifteen hours?” Cap said, stepping over the picnic basket and opening it. “Anybody want sandwiches?”

    “I’ll take one,” Daiki said. Cap handed one over.

    “What about you two?” Cap asked Kasumi and Aquila.

    “I’ll have one,” Kasumi said. Aquila just shook her head. “She’ll have one later.”

    They ate in silence. Then they sat in silence, Daiki watching the slight flicker of the lanterns against the wall. Daiki checked the timer. Twelve hours to go.

    Finally, Cap broke the silence. “So, I guess people are fighting out there right now?”

    Daiki shrugged. “Hard to say. What I remember of the pacing of these stories is that there’s a lot of character development scenes, and the action scenes are pretty infrequent.”

    “So maybe we were only likely to have the one attack, and that’s done now,” Cap suggested.

    “We can hope,” Daiki said.

    They sat in silence for a bit longer. Diaki checked the timer. Eleven hours left. Daiki stood and stretched.

    A tentacle burst out of the wall where he had been sitting, whipping out to strike at him. All Daiki saw was a flash from out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to send him diving out of the way. The others leapt to their feet.

    Daiki stared at the tentacle. It curled and writhed, a metal tendril studded with spikes.

    “Somebody doesn’t need line of sight,” Cap said, blasting it with his laser eyes. Severed from the wall, it fell to the ground, still.

    Daiki drew his sword.

    “Can you do anything?” Kasumi asked Aquila.

    Aquila shook her head. “Almost everything I do needs more space than this.”

    Kasumi shrieked as another tentacle burst from the wall behind her, Aquila pulling her out of the way. It whipped around, forcing Aquila to duck. Cap blasted it.

    “Whoever it is, they know we’re in the room and that we’re trapped,” Aquila said. “If I were them, I’d force us into the centre of the room, and then put a tentacle right into the middle of us.”

    “We need to get out of here,” Cap said.

    Aquila nodded. “Twenty-third stage,” she intoned, motioning to the wall facing the street. A wave of energy ripped through it, shattering it into particles.

    “Everybody out!” Cap declared. Daiki was already moving. He was almost to the street when a tentacle burst from the wall and whipped out at him, taking him in the side. He fell to the ground, clutching the wound. Warm blood coated his fingers.

    “Daiki!” he heard Cap cry, and felt hands drag him from the building. He gritted his teeth, trying to ignore the pain, and looked out at the street.

    Kasumi stood right behind Aquila, a circle of longswords spinning in the air around them both. Aquila glanced around. “He’s here somewhere,” she said. “As soon as I see him, I can do something about those tentacles.” A tentacle thrust out of the ground inside the circle of spinning swords. In a smooth motion, Aquila caught one of the swords and chopped the tentacle in half before it had a chance to start moving.

    “The good news is that this is shallow, so I can do something about it,” Daiki heard Cap say, his voice sounding far away. “The bad news is that it hit an artery, so you’re losing a lot of blood. I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt.” Daiki howled as a searing, burning pain ripped into the wound. “Okay, it’s cauterized.”

    “I’ve got him!” Aquila shouted. “Forty-sixth Stage!” From somewhere above, Daiki heard a howl of surprise and outrage. At the edge of his vision, the flailing tentacles in the room fell lifeless and disappeared.

    “I see him!” Cap said, firing a blast from his laser eyes. “Got him! Kasumi, Aquila, can you help Daiki? He’s lost about a quarter of a gallon of blood. Can you draw him an IV or something?”

    “On it!” Kasumi declared, dashing over to Daiki’s side as the ring of swords disappeared, pulling out her sketchbook, and starting to draw.

    “I’ll go take a look at our attacker,” Cap said, taking flight.

    Daiki shook his head, trying to think and failing. He felt pressure on his arm, and looked down to see a rudimentary IV running into it, connected to a blood bag.

    “That’s a neat trick” Daiki mumbled. “Could you always do that?”

    “You just rest,” Aquila said. “You’re going to be fine.”

    “Here’s our attacker,” Cap said, landing with a young man over his shoulder. He put the man on the ground. From where he was sitting, Daiki could see the scorch mark on the man’s shirt where Cap’s laser eyes had hit him. “What was that thing you did?” Cap asked Aquila.

    The young man rose to his feet and looked at them all, his eyes wide. “That was amazing!” he said. “If we teamed up, the others wouldn’t stand a chance! We could kill them all in no time!”

    “I restored his original character description,” Aquila said, stepping towards the young man and taking a hard look at him. “He’s now as he was before he joined the game.” The ring of spinning longswords flashed back into existence around her. “I’ll take care of him.”

    The young man raised his hands in alarm. “Now wait a minute...hear me out. We can force them to share the wish.”

    “Aquila,” Cap said, “think about this for a moment.”

    Aquila stared at Cap, and then looked at Kasumi and Daiki. “I killed a kid today,” she said. “Her name was Alice Yamada. She was only fifteen years old. The thing she wanted most of all was to become an idol singer, but that wasn’t her wish. The wish she wanted granted if she won this atrocity was for her grandmother to be able to come home from the hospital. She was young, and scared, and was still trying to work up the courage to put her finger on the trigger when I killed her. I was just trying to wound her. But I haven’t been in a fight for five years. I’m rusty, and I used too many swords. She deserved to live, and I killed her.”

    “You could use your wish to bring her back!” the young man declared, desperation in his voice. “You could bring everybody back!”

    “This one is a psychopath,” Aquila continued. “The wish he wants granted is be the greatest serial killer in history, and never get caught. He doesn’t deserve to live. He doesn’t even deserve to have his name remembered. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that Alice Yamada isn’t a protagonist, or even a primary character. She’s the sort of support character who dies to establish the stakes in the story. She was probably supposed to fight him today and lose. There’s no replacement coming for her in the next information stream update. She’s gone, and I’m the one who killed her.”

    “She’s making up wild stories, and they’re all lies!” the young man said. “I’m trying to help my sick parents – I’ve never hurt anybody before!”

    Aquila ignored him, the circle of swords accelerating. “This one is a primary antagonist. He’s here until the end of the story. When the next information stream update arrives, every single power I took away from him will be back. So you want me to spare the person who deserves to die, while the one who deserved to live died by my hand? I can’t do that.” Her lips curled into a sneer. “But it’s okay. It’s all coming back to me now.”

    Three swords slammed into the young man, impaling him in the stomach, chest, and head. He toppled over. The spinning circle of swords disappeared. Aquila’s shoulders hunched.

    “Daiki, Cap, thank you for trying to see the best in me,” she said. “I wish I could be like you. But, I’m not. I’m just a villain. That’s all. I’ll understand if you want to continue on without me.” Without meeting their gaze, she walked back into the building.

    “Kasumi, could you please help me move Daiki back inside?” Cap asked. “We need to be careful with the IV.”

    Cap picked Daiki up while Kasumi kept the IV elevated. Together, they moved him back to his place against the wall and set him down. Daiki looked over to Aquila. She sat quiet in a corner, hugging her knees. Cap sat down beside her.

    “You going to lecture me, superhero?” Aquila asked.

    “Doesn’t seem much point,” Cap said. “You seem to have that covered. I wish you’d stop, though. You don’t deserve it.”

    “I executed him,” Aquila stated. “What was it you said in the last story world? ‘A true superhero protects people from those who would harm them’?”

    Cap nodded. “I think that’s what I said, yes.”

    “So why didn’t you protect him from me?”

    “Because I wanted to kill him too. Frankly, I’m a bit jealous that you got to.”

    Aquila blinked and looked at him. “But, your promise...”

    “I wish I knew what was in those character descriptions you can read,” Cap said. “You see so much, but there’s so much that’s missing. I didn’t make my promise because of the people I killed in the war. I made it because of the families they left behind.

    “The people I killed...let’s just say that the Nazis were a special kind of evil. They were fighting to exterminate anybody who wasn’t in their particular ethnic group. This one type of unit – the SS – were so bad that we had orders not to take any of them prisoner. I’ve executed plenty of captured Nazis on the spot, just like you did to that young man here, and I can’t say that I feel bad about any of it. It got even easier once we found our first concentration camp. You...you don’t really want to know about those. I still have nightmares about them.”

    Aquila stared at the floor. “I had no idea.”

    “But then we won and occupied Germany, and I started seeing the families they left behind,” Cap continued. “All these poor children who would never see their fathers again, women who had lost their husbands, parents who had lost their children. As much as the men I killed deserved to die, their kids didn’t deserve to lose their fathers. So I decided that nobody would ever again lose a loved one at my hands. It didn’t matter how vile they were, or what they were trying to do, their family would still have them when the battle was done. Keeping that promise is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and it has never gotten easier.

    “But, there’s a price to pay, as well. I fight supervillains. A lot of them come back, and go on to hurt and terrorize more people – people who would have been safe if I had just ended them in the first place. Every single person who is hurt or terrorized because I didn’t kill a supervillain when I had the chance, their suffering happened because of me.”

    Cap took a deep breath. “As I said, I can’t condemn you for doing what I wanted to, particularly when if I had done it, I probably wouldn’t have felt bad about it later. My assessment of you stands, and I wouldn’t want to be exploring the story worlds without you.”

    “Thank you,” Aquila mumbled. A tear rolled down her cheek. “If I had just read her character description before I attacked, I...I...I would have tried to bring her with us and save her.”

    “I figured as much,” Cap said.

    “He’s just going to be replaced in the next information stream update,” she said. “I killed him for nothing.”

    “I know.”

    Daiki leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Sleep came quickly. He woke to sunlight streaming through the hole in the wall. Cap stood guard just inside it. Aquila and Kasumi leaned against each other on the other wall, awake but resting.

    “Good, you’re up,” Cap said, glancing at him. “Is that sword of yours good to go?”

    Daiki checked the timer. “Yes.”

    “Good,” Cap said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

NEXT: “Mistake”