Late to the Party

by Ramy Vance

Stew hit Suzuki hard, their blades crashing together. The sheer strength behind Stew’s blow was enough to drive Suzuki off his feet, but he held his blade, all the same, watching the heat from his sword force beads of sweat on Stew’s forehead. It wasn’t slowing Stew down, though; he was still pushing Suzuki as hard as he could. It became apparent at that moment that if Suzuki’s knees went out, the fight would be over.

  Suzuki tried to push forward while Stew pushed downward. They were caught in an uncomfortable stalemate. Stew was stronger, but the flames from Suzuki’s sword were keeping Stew at bay. “Bet you were just thinking about how this fight was over,” Stew said. “Just gloating over how you already got everything figured out and how fucking smart and put together you are. Weren’t you?!”

  It was happening. Just what Suzuki was waiting for. Stew’s emotions were starting to get the better of him. It wouldn’t be long until Stew was a screeching tank, incapable of slowing down or thinking things through. All Suzuki had to do was get out from underneath Stew. Then he could slide his sword through his chest and move on to Sandy.

  Huh, Suzuki thought. Where is Sandy?

  There was a giant crack of thunder and a bolt of lightning struck the ground a few feet away from Suzuki and Stew, sending rubble and bits of the ground flying through the air as the fog around Stew and Suzuki dissipated. In the clear air, Suzuki could see Sandy floating down from the night sky, the tips of her toes scraping the ground as she levitated.

  Stew turned around to see Sandy.

  This was just the chance Suzuki needed. He kicked Stew in the kneecap as he fell backward, rolling out of the way of Stew’s sword as Stew fell forward, practically face-planting into the ground.

  Stew scrambled to his feet and turned to face Sandy.

  Lightning was crackling from Sandy’s eyes. Bolts of lightning jumped out of her palms.

  Suzuki was running through different contingency plans. He hadn’t fought a mage ‘in real life’ yet. A straightforward, magic battle wasn’t going to work. Sandy was a full-blown mage, not a battle mage. She had much more mana than Suzuki did, and she knew more magic than he did. There was no way around that, so the only option would be to play up his strengths. Weave his magic into his weapons, but rely on how much physically stronger he was than Sandy.

  Stew screamed and charged Sandy. Or I could wait for Stew, Suzuki thought.

  Sandy whipped a bolt of lightning at Stew, who barely managed to cast Stone Skin on himself before getting hit square in the chest. He went flying and hit one of the empty homes, crashing through the window, leaving a smoking trail. Then Sandy turned her eyes on Suzuki. “I have been looking forward to this for so long,” Sandy said. “I’m going to melt your face and crack open your chest. I’m gonna pull your guts out and separate them one by one.” Sandy raised her hand and drew it over her face. The death mask materialized as lightning flashed from behind her mask.

  “Fucking bring it,” Suzuki shouted.

  Stop this, Fred’s voice chimed in. Fred sounded very far away, like he was yelling from another room. They are your friends. Your friends.

  Suzuki’s head hurt. “They are my friends,” he muttered before looking up at Sandy and crying out, “What are we doing?”

  “I’m going to kill you.” She drew the Death Mask closer and put it on.

  “The fog,” Suzuki muttered. “It’s the same fog that was in the last place, only less.” Then a thought entered his fury-filled head. “Blow the fog away.”

  “I want to blow you away.”

  “The fog, Sandy. Then me. For honor, for glory. For XP.”

  “Fuck that.” Sandy raised her hand to throw another lightning bolt, then she stopped. She looked at her hand for a second before crouching and bolting straight up into the sky, right into the cloud of fog that now hung over the entire village stretching up toward the moon.

  Suzuki turned back to where Stew had landed. Whatever clarity he’d had was seeping away. Coating his sword in flames again, he figured that he could at least take care of Stew while Sandy was gone. Then he’d worry about her.

  Across the street, Stew climbed out of the broken window. His stomach was still smoking, but the skin only looked chafed, as if two stones had been rubbed against each other. “Where’d my girl go?” Stew shouted.

  A powerful gust of wind blew through the village, so strong that it sent Stew and Suzuki flying, along with a hurricane of broken glass and layer upon layer of thick fog. The streets were cleared out within a few seconds.

  For the first time that day, Suzuki breathed fresh air. The murderous rage left him instantly. He stared at Stew, surprised. How could he ever have wanted to kill Stew? He was his best friend. He couldn’t even imagine seriously raising his voice at the guy.

  Stew was staring at Suzuki as well. He dropped his sword, ran to Suzuki, and threw his arms around him. “Fuck, dude,” Stew sighed. “I was going to kill you. I fucking love you, man, and I was trying to kill you.”

  There was another gust of wind, this time weaker than before. Sandy landed beside Stew and Suzuki. “Jesus, Sandy,” Stew started. “I am so—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sandy interrupted “We can all pat each other on the backs and circle jerk later, but you need to pay attention right now. You were right about the fog, Suzuki. It was cursed. It’s blocking our familiars from talking to us.

  Suzuki nodded. “For some reason, Fred was able to get through, but barely.”

  Sandy pointed to her mask. There was a breathing apparatus built into the mouth. “And this mask is more badass than I thought. It also acts as a gas mask, and the moment I put it on, I could breathe, and all of those violent feelings vanished.”

  Sandy raised her hands and made a whooshing motion, and another gust of air blew through the village streets. “Fred told Niv that we gotta think happy thoughts,” Sandy said. “I’m going to keep cleansing the streets, but the fog is going to keep coming back until we find the witch who’s responsible for this. And I’m going to pull out her intestines through her fucking mouth.”

  Stew looked up at the mounting fog in the distance, dread palpable on his face. “Where are we going?” he asked. “Do you know where the mage is?”

  “The church steeple. I can feel the magic coming from there. Happy thoughts, remember? Happy.”

  “So we’re going to Neverland,” Suzuki said.

  Stew chuckled. “Dude, totes inappropriate.”

  “What? They think happy thoughts to fly! Didn’t you ever—”

  “Guys?” Sandy shouted.

  Suzuki put on his game face as he sheathed his sword. He pulled Sandy and Stew close to him and shouted, “For Honor!”

  “For glory!” Sandy added.

  “For XP,” the Mundanes shouted together.

  13

  The fog had not completely disappeared from the village. Wave after wave poured through the alleys and past buildings like a ghostly tidal wave as they made their way through the cobbled streets. Sandy led Stew and Suzuki down the darkened pathways, a ball of blue light flickering in front of them, occasionally raising her hands to cast a gust of wind to dispel the cursed fog.

  With the fog being held back by Sandy’s magic, it was easier to think, but not as easy as Suzuki would have hoped. He was getting annoyed at Sandy for taking so long to figure out where it was they were going although he knew that she was trying as hard as she could.

  Even further in the back of his head, he knew that she wasn’t lost, that they had not been walking that long, that she was leading because he couldn’t at the moment. That didn’t keep him from being severely annoyed.

  Think happy thoughts, Suzuki thought to himself. Just keep being positive.

  Suzuki couldn’t help but sigh internally. Being positive had never been his strong suit. Being positive wasn’t what helped him think of plan after plan, contingency after contingency. Being able to see the different ways that anything could go from simple to fucked was Suzuki’s specialty.

  T
hinking positively was going to be a challenge.

  Suzuki tapped the back of his neck as he tried to drum up a positive image. He turned to Stew and almost grabbed him until he thought better of it. Everyone was on edge. Being grabbed suddenly could have set him off in his current state. Stew probably wasn’t any different. “Hey, Stew,” Suzuki started. “What’s your happy thought?”

  Stew didn’t bother looking at Suzuki. Instead, he was looking at his fingers as they picked the skin on the back of his hands. “Huh, ” Stew murmured. “Happy thoughts?”

  “Yeah, we’re supposed to be thinking happy thoughts. You know, to keep the fog from getting to us.”

  “Oh. I’d forgotten.”

  Stew’s eyes had gone a little soft. It was as if they had been shimmering stones before, but were now covered with a thin layer of dust. Suzuki had never noticed Stew’s eyes before. Now that he thought about it, Stew’s eyes were always bright, always dancing, as if there were a fire burning behind them. That fire looked as if it were going out.

  “Sandy,” Suzuki shouted. “Stew doesn’t look right.”

  Sandy was waving her hands around, trying to steer the fog away with a small gust of wind. The fog detoured, but only after an extreme effort from Sandy, and when she turned around to address Suzuki, she looked exhausted. Her face had the complexion of someone who had just finished a triathlon after an inadequate training period. She swayed slightly as she asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Stew raised his hands defensively. He looked like he was trying to smile, but had forgotten how. “Guys,” he objected. “There isn’t anything wrong with me. I feel…I don’t know…okay, I guess.”

  Sandy didn’t waste any more time looking over her shoulder. She turned back to the street and the new wave of fog barreling toward them. “The emotions of the fog are changing,” Sandy shouted over the gusts of the wind. “This bitch of a witch couldn’t get us with anger, so she’s changing it up. It’s sadness now.”

  Stew shrugged his shoulders with a motion that seemed to last for an hour. Apparently, Suzuki thought, sadness completely sucks the life out of Stew.

  Sandy raised her fist and shook it in the direction of the church steeple they were slowly making their way toward. “Fuck you,” Sandy shouted. “I’m on Zoloft, bitch! It’s going to take more than a couple of sad feelings to keep me from ripping your fucking fingers from their sockets.”

  There was more than just irritation scratching at the back of Suzuki’s brain. He didn’t know what exactly Stew was feeling, but if it was anything like what was trying to sneak into his own brain, he hoped to hell that Stew was able to fight it off. There was something dark in there, something Suzuki had never realized was within him, something that he hadn’t known was watching him. All that he could sense was a blackness so deep that it could swallow him up if he let it.

  Then his feet went out from under him. He didn’t know when he fell, but it felt like he was falling for an eternity, as if he had been born to fall and been falling since then.

  “Suzuki, get the fuck up,” a voice shouted.

  The voice sounded far away. Maybe there wasn’t a voice at all. Suzuki knew he could stand up and check to see where the voice was coming from, but he didn’t see the point in it. The voice wasn’t coming from within him, and it wasn’t coming from the ground.

  It didn’t seem like anything else really mattered.

  At least he didn’t have to keep on walking, and the fog was actually kind of comfortable.

  It was a thick blanket.

  It’d be so nice to breathe in deeply.

  Let it fill up his lungs and rock him to sleep.

  “Get up!”

  Suzuki felt his body lifting into the air. He put his feet down. Not because he wanted to, but only because they were up. He’d have preferred to have stayed on the ground, the soft place where he could just melt away into the stone. Then a bright flash of pain spread across Suzuki’s face. His lips felt red and bloody, and he tasted iron in his mouth. When he looked up, Sandy was staring him in the eye, her own eyes bloodshot and rimmed with tears.

  “I’m running out of mana,” Sandy said. “We need to keep moving.”

  Stew was sitting at Sandy’s feet. He was bawling loudly, his hands pressed so tight to his forehead that his skin had gone white. His whole body was trembling. Whatever sound was coming from him didn’t sound human. It sounded like something small and frightened dying.

  Even though Suzuki was watching Stew, it didn’t feel as if he were really there. He could see Sandy too, but it was like Sandy wasn’t there. Or maybe he wasn’t there. Suzuki couldn’t tell now. He just knew that it would feel really good to sit down. So he did. Sandy tried to keep him from squatting beside Stew, but she couldn’t hold him up. Suzuki crashed to the ground, dragging Sandy along with him. They sat there, the three of them, the only sound being the rush of wind and Stew’s animalistic whimpering.

  Sandy took Suzuki’s hand in her own and squeezed it tightly. “Suzuki, I need you to listen to me,” she said.

  Suzuki looked up dreamily, his eyes hardly able to hold themselves open. “What?” he asked.

  “I can’t do this alone. I thought I could, but I can’t. I thought I was strong enough. I’m so fucking stupid. I keep trying to… I can’t fucking do this. I need help. You need to help me.”

  Sandy’s eyes were even more bloodshot. Her face was frantic. The edges of her lips quivered, and her pupils widened as her eyes shot back and forth. She looked like she was breaking apart, a porcelain figure cracking down the middle. “I can’t do this! I can’t fucking do this! We’re going to die! I’m going to die, I’m going to die here, and I’m never going to see Momma or Poppa. I’m going to die. Beth is going to die. Oh my God, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this, I don’t want to die like this.”

  Sandy’s words deteriorated to small whimpers as she cried.

  Suzuki was staring at his feet. He couldn’t imagine how they had ever moved before. “We are going to die, aren’t we?” he asked. “Right here.”

  Sandy was blubbering and nodding her head, as Stew continued to pick the skin on his hands raw.

  Suzuki nodded in agreement to whatever was conveyed in the blackness of each of their minds. “You know,” he said, “I’d rather die here with you two than anywhere else. Period.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, you guys are my best friends.” Suzuki wiped away a tear. “And it’s been an adventure. Something that no one’s ever gotten to do before. Not like this. Not like us. Dying beside you both would be an honor.”

  Stew stopped crying. He was still picking his skin, but he was no longer trembling. The foggy wind howled around them.

  “How many times did we die together in Middang3ard?”

  Stew looked up and muttered, “Hundreds.”

  “More than hundreds. Thousands. We have been dying together for years.”

  “Yeah, dying after you hogging all the good loot.”

  Stew put an innocent hand on his chest. “Me? I hardly ever took any loot when I played with you guys.”

  Sandy chuckled. It was soft, hardly louder than a guarded sneeze. “Stew, you know you used to throw tantrums if you didn’t get the gear you wanted.”

  Suzuki suddenly felt warm as if the blood had just started pumping through his body. It was like his heart had been frozen and had suddenly thawed. The warmth spread from his chest and to his feet and his hands. His whole body was warming up. He didn’t know why he was sitting. For some reason, his legs were very tired. His whole body, really. He didn’t think he’d ever been so tired in his whole life. But he was waking up. “Running into enemy territory right after you don’t get the loot you want is throwing a tantrum,” Suzuki lectured.

  “That’s not why I was running into enemy territory, ya dick,” Stew said as he leaned closer to Suzuki, lowered his eyes, and spoke in a terrible Scottish accent. “It’s the love of the fight, mate, of the glory, of the boot
y!”

  Sandy and Suzuki burst out laughing. The peals of laughter bounced around them and spread into a barrier around them that physically pushed the billowing fog away. Their laughter spread down the streets and up the alleys, and the whole village looked golden for a brief second.

  “I’m so glad you stopped doing that shit,” Suzuki said. “Do you know how stressful it was to pull you out of an undead boar’s lair?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  “Or getting your ass unstuck from those giant red ant colonies?” Sandy chimed in.

  “My ass was never—”

  “And that was before we even got to the real thing. Christ, Stew how did you not get us killed already?”

  Stew’s face was solemn, the face of royalty, of one who had looked out into the world and learned great wisdom. “Badass is an idea. You cannot kill an idea.”

  There was silence, brief and sweet, then laughter so hearty it hurt Suzuki’s sides. Hundreds of hours of videogames and online conversations, of late-night phone calls, of incomplete messages, of raids gone poorly and loot missed, of loss and triumph, of sincerely having known the others, to have seen them through the ridiculous and the painful, all of that erupted in laughter from the Mundanes as if it had been stored in their hearts for just this moment.

  Their laughter seemed to chase away the mist.

  The fog was gone.

  Suzuki could feel his legs again, and he wanted to use them. The deep blackness had withdrawn. He knew it was still in there somewhere, but he also knew there was something else, something that Stew and Sandy shared with him. It was too corny to think about. There was still something else though, something else that they all shared as well: the desire to kill whatever was trying to stop them.

  Suzuki pulled up his HUD inventory and selected a few mana potions. He passed them to Sandy, who swallowed them down. When she was done, she stretched out her fingers. A tiny, half-hearted flame floated in her palm. She shook her head and flicked the flame out of existence. “It’s not going to be enough. I burned through everything pushing back that fog. And it’s probably going to come back, so—”