“Resuming termination of target anomaly,” the robot lady says even as I tighten my hands around her throat and pin her to the ground, “still unsure why target player believes it can win as a [acolyte].”

“Acolyte this, acolyte that,” I growl, shaking the lady in my frustration, “I have a name bitch. And sorry to break it you, but I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about or what acolyte means.”

With a small “ding!” a new system window appears, I send it a glance and groan.

Shocking no one the system is once more giving out unhelpful tips as it reads, [acolyte is a class!] ‘and here I was thinking it was a kind of sandwich! Silly me.’

“Really helpful,” I joke as I return my full attention back to the machine pinned under me, it’s a bit unnerving how she’s just letting me do this, not even really trying to fight me off, as if she’s positive I won’t be able to beat her. Its unsettling, but I’ve taken down enough cocky dude-bros in my day to know you should never count a victory as yours until the dust has settled.

I shift my weight to put even more pressure on my hands, glaring down at the unblinking eyes staring up at me. “Well, I don’t care why you or your creator is after me, nor do I care what you want. But I’m going to send a clear enough message back to your boss to make sure you never try again tin can.”

The robot’s eyes glow for a moment, the same system blue as the window floating next to me. “Reassessing threat level…” the blue of her eyes gets a bit brighter and I snarl in warning, tightening my hands enough that a normal person should be heaving for breath, but she continues talking as if everything is fine, only a slightly breathy quality to her voice now. “Unable to read anomaly character, only data on player [Nova] is player’s status as an [acolyte]. Anomaly should not be able to beat player [45327] as an [acolyte]. Unknown why anomaly continues to hold this false belief.”

“Brag all you want,” I snarl, “but I’m not the one pinned to the dirt, bitch.”

The woman frowns, but it is awkward, more of a spasm of a frown, as if the mind remembers but can’t make the body obey. ‘Seems whoever made these things did a piss poor job of making them act like humans even if she completely looks like one.’

“Resuming termination.”

I brace, digging in my knees to her sides and tightening my hands as hard as I can, but it's effortless how she shoves and dislodges me in one move. She had every right to be cocky, with strength like that there’s no way I could win in a battle of fists.

“Let go-!” but my protesting shout gets silenced as suddenly the tables are turned and I’m the one being pinned to the ground, cold bony fingers digging into my throat. I struggle to breathe, clawing at her hands, digging my nails into the soft joints of her fingers. It was a tried-and-true method, always worked on an opponent who hadn’t learned the trick, but she doesn’t waver at all, eyes glowing that eerily similar unnatural blue as she looms above me. What’s worse is that she looks like she couldn’t care less about my death. She isn’t even really seeing me, just the “anomaly” as she keeps calling me.

I snarl and kick as much as I’m able, but she just calmly pins me down like it's as easy as keeping a hold of a struggling hamster.
“No interference of outside forces detected. Conclusion. Target is not the outside anomaly, further cleansing necessary.”

I spit in her face, and for the briefest second it almost looks like she’s about to furrow her brows in disgust but then her expression evens out and she stares, “Anomaly has resorted to petty tricks, threat level lowered.”

“I’ll lower you!” it's not even a good insult, I’m not sure it even is an insult really, but it’s getting hard to think, hard to breathe with the hands clamped around my throat, even if I do manage to get out of this- ‘I will,’ I think frantically, ‘I have too.’

There’s still someone waiting out there for me. My little brother, my twin, the other half of our whole. Zeke is so effortlessly good in all the ways I can never be, so full of love and care and kindness. My stupidly endearingly, and selflessly good little brother, who is about as threatening as a daisy. ‘The tutorial hasn’t even started yet! There’s no way Zeke is going to make it unless I find him first.’

And for a brief moment a memory flashes in front of my eyes, one of that terrible summer day when our world ended. The echo of crickets drowning out the whispers of the caseworkers as we sat in the cheap lawn chairs in front the tombstone that held the dead body of the only adult to ever want us. The summer heat roasted us both in our borrowed black mourning clothes, neither of them fit us quite right, they were hand me downs from a neighbor’s kids we had to return after the event. The two of us were barely eight, the devasting grief from our grandfather’s funeral still processing in our minds, it’s the only time I can ever remember crying. Yet my brother, so so good, with a bleeding heart of gold had forced a smile for me through his own tears and grief and promised that we would always be together, two halves of a single whole.

Ever since that has been the rule of our existence. Foster home after foster home, fight after fight, escape after escape, the world always divided into “us” and “them”. No matter what, I can’t die here, I can’t be the one to go first, to break our only rule. ‘I can’t leave him alone again, never again.’

Rage and desperation and pure snarling need flood my veins, adrenaline kicking into overdrive, for it's not just my life on the line here. I am one half of a whole and if I die I know Zeke won’t be far behind. I tighten my hands, hard enough I feel something snap, and the robot flinches for the first time. Blue eyes stating, something close to fear, shining in them.

I smile, and it’s all teeth, ‘I can win, I can beat her.’ Kicking, clawing, and struggling with all my might, the hands around my neck start to loosen. I will not die here, not to a machine not before making sure my brother is safe.

“You’re not killing me that—!” And I don’t have enough breath to finish the threat, but it doesn’t matter, I can see her calm facade finally crack, panic leaking through her expressionless mask as she realizes she doesn’t have the upper hand.

But the panic is brief, before the blue glow of her eyes gets even sharper, to the point static and pixels are leaking from her skin. quickly she reaches behind her back, unsheathing a knife I had been too busy not dying to notice. She raises it, her other hand keeping me pinned even though I know her wrist is broken, her strength alone holds me in place. “Commencing termination—"

There’s a loud excited laugh, unhinged and echoey, like a voice coming from a bad speaker, a thousand little voices layered together. Fear grips my spine and a new window, a white one, flashes before my eyes, only one word.

[Move]

I turn my head as far as I can, something pulls in my neck at the sudden move, but I'm just in time to avoid the flash of silver that embeds itself into the stone floor right next to my head.

“Whoops!” the static voice laughs, but there’s no remorse, not even really glee, just… emotion; raw, unfiltered, too much all at once, and so deeply spine numbingly wrong.

The robot lady blinks, eyes shifting colors rapidly before becoming a normal earthen brown, and for a freighting moment, she looks normal and human, before her head tilts to the side and crashes onto the floor. My breath stops as warm blood spills over my shirt and skin with the strength of iron and death. Blood that is red.

The robot lady was a person after all, alive and yet acting as a machine. It’s a chilling thought, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of nightmares recalling this scene later, but the adrenaline and instincts honed over years of back-alley fights force my attention to the fact I’m not safe yet and there’s a new bigger threat now looming over me.

I wrangle out of the hold as my savior laughs to himself, a bit manic, “Sorry about that lady~ Oh wait, I’m not! You really had it coming! …Why did you have is coming?” and the guy looks just as confused as I feel at his rambling.

He’s the same bloodthirsty businessman from earlier, suit stained a dark red, smile wide and eyes unfocused. He looks completely different from just a few short minutes ago, no longer the otherworldly freighting mastermind. His carefully crafted persona in tatters, instead replaced with a feral mania. As if he reverted from man to a beast in a handful of minutes.

Even his shadows aren’t as terrifying, though they still are moving like a nest of snakes, the unnatural terror that had gripped me the last time I saw him is nonexistent. My best guess is the fear was some sort of spell, one that seems to have worn off. He’s at least alive, a little frenzied and covered in what looks like five other people’s blood, but a person I can take.

“You come to play hero crazy man?” I ask shoving the still bleeding corpse off of me, pointedly not looking at the body. Sure, I’ve fought and gotten into my fair share of trouble, but I’ve still never seen a person die before. But I force myself to not think about it and keep present, ‘panic later, not die right now’. I slowly shift into a crouch, cautiously eyeing the man who is still muttering to himself, eyes glazed with a dark shine. I keep close to the ground but ready to roll out of the way the moment he comes at me. “I don’t need rescuing from some idiot with knight delusions.”

“Oh? Oh!” and the man smiles, but it’s clear he’s not really seeing me, more like through me. It’s a tad unnerving, but it’s a look I’ve seen before, on junkies out of their mind on the high, unpredictable and erratic. One of the worst opponents you could ask for, lucky its seems the smart-minded villain from earlier is completely gone, IQ taking a sharp downward plummet. But if he is riding some junkie high there’s still a possibility that his physical abilities have had some steroid like surge.

“How funny!” he laughs to himself as I carefully pick myself off the floor, keeping one eye on him as I pick up the knife the robot lady tried to gut me with. ‘Not like she’s going to miss it anymore after all’.

The man keeps laughing and I don’t know what the hell is so funny, but this guy is totally off his rocker. “You know my-our-my name!”

I raise an eyebrow, trying to piece together if I ever said anything that sounded like a name, “Idiot?”

And I am ready to dash away once he strikes but he only laughs harder, can’t say it’s the first time I’ve made an opponent laugh so hard they forgot to kill me, but is the first time it has happened with what was supposed to be an insult.

“No. No!” he chuckles, struggling to breathe as his shadows writhe, “Night!”

“Your name is knight?”

“Yep! It is now! But not a knight in armor, the time of day! I wasn’t always Night though. I used to be—” the man suddenly stops, body jerking like a puppet whose strings suddenly tightened. A pained frantic look ghosts over his face before he laughs, shaking his head like a dog trying to dry out their fur from a sudden downpour, “Oh that would have been bad, can’t remember if I don’t want to break!”

I have no clue what he’s talking about but have no interest in finding out, ‘guy is super deep in the crazy clearly’ and I have no idea if crazy is contagious in this place. Not to mention I just watched him behead a person. “Okay,” I agree stretching out the ‘o’, because what else am I supposed to say to that bizarre comment?

“Well thanks, I guess,” because even if he is a murderer and the robot was actually a person, he did save my life and Zeke would throw a fit if I didn’t at least try and be nice. “But I’ll be going now—”

“No, no!” he protests and like a switch was flipped the giddy euphoria turns sharply into the familiar dark spine-numbing darkness, one that hungers with the intent to kill.

Only one thought races through my head as he raises his blade, ‘This fucking delusional knight is going to kill me!’