Chapter 129: Badges

Getting ready turned out to mean a great deal of sitting still, which suited neither of them.

Logan spent the stretch after the salt plain working the same two problems over and over. How long he could stand at four thousand stacks before the bill came due. How many of those seconds the Constitution column had actually bought him.

The answer was nineteen. Nineteen seconds, against a twenty second window, which meant he had been paying for one second of that skill he could never use.

Alice spent hers on the opposite problem, which was learning to be unsurprised by Velocity.

’She is not getting stronger,’ Logan thought, watching her put eleven arrows into a target in under two seconds. ’She is getting used to it. That is worse for whoever she points it at.’

He found the other thing while he was counting something else entirely.

He had been trying to work out what twenty-two badges converted to at double value, which was a pleasant sort of arithmetic, and the panel offered him a breakdown he had not asked for.

```

[ Warlord Badge Pool ]

[ Total badges generated this match: 100 ]

[ Currently held by surviving players: 41 ]

[ Permanently removed from the match: 9 ]

[ Not yet generated: 50 ]

```

He read the third line about six times.

"Alice."

"Mm."

"Come and look at this and tell me I am reading it wrong."

---

She read it. She did not tell him he was reading it wrong.

"Nine badges are gone," she said. "Not held by somebody. Gone."

"Because they walked out of the match in somebody’s pocket." Logan kept his eyes on the panel. "You read it off the forum before we ever came in here. Players do not drop badges if they surrender. Only if they are killed."

"I remember. I called it a cute little incentive."

"You did."

Alice sat down slowly on the rail.

"Who," she said.

Logan had already worked most of it out and did not particularly want to say it.

’Kaevan Dross took nine islands before he ever showed up at ours.’ He ran it anyway, because not running it would not make it untrue. ’And he said the word rather than let Solveig finish him.’

"Kaevan," he said. "Serai. Both of them walked. That is the biggest piece of it."

"They surrendered in the first raid. We did not know badges mattered then."

"No."

"Who else?"

Logan did not answer immediately.

"Logan."

"Idresh Kaan," he said.

---

Alice was quiet for long enough that he looked over.

"You gave him the choice twice," she said.

"I did."

"You told him to say it or you would do it."

"I did that too." Logan closed the panel and opened it again, which did not change anything.

"He was on his knees with nothing left. I could have taken his head off and I told him to say the word instead. At that point I was counting eliminations, and an elimination is an elimination."

"It was."

"It was then." He looked out at the water. "It is not now."

’Two badges. Maybe more.’ The number sat in him and did not move. ’He and his brother hunted together. Rakhan was carrying four. There is no version of that where Idresh was carrying none.’

"You could not have known," Alice said.

"I did know. I read the same forum post you did." Logan finally turned around.

"I filed it under things that would probably never come up. Then I spent this entire match building toward exactly the situation where it comes up."

---

They sat with it for a while.

"Ninety-one," Alice said eventually.

"What?"

"Ninety-one. That is the number." She had pulled the panel and was doing the arithmetic out loud, which was how she thought.

"We hold twenty-two. Vaerith holds nineteen. There are fifty Warlords still alive, and not one other player in this match has a single badge."

"You are sure about that last part?"

"Forty-one held by surviving players. We have twenty-two, Vaerith has nineteen." She looked up. "That is forty-one. There is no room for anybody else."

Logan ran it and she was right.

Twenty-two, plus nineteen off Vaerith, plus fifty off the remaining Warlords.

Ninety-one out of a hundred.

"Nine short," he said.

"Nine short, and you are going to be annoyed about those nine for the rest of your life."

"Probably."

---

Then Alice said the thing neither of them had said yet.

"Has anyone ever killed all hundred?"

Logan stopped.

He pulled the match records, which he had never once looked at in this match or any other, because match records were for people who cared about being remembered and he had spent most of his career caring about surviving.

```

[ Historical Record: Mayhem of Warlords ]

[ Highest Warlord elimination count, single match: 87 ]

[ All 100 Warlords eliminated: 0 recorded instances ]

```

Neither of them said anything.

"Zero," Alice said finally.

"Zero."

"Across every match of this game that has ever run."

"Across all of them." Logan read the eighty-seven again. "And I know exactly why."

He did not have to explain it and he explained it anyway, because saying it out loud made it real.

Every five Warlords that died made the rest five percent stronger. By eighty-seven dead the survivors were at eighty-five percent above baseline, and by ninety-five they would be near double.

’And nobody has ever had an army that grows faster than the wall does.’

"Every match ends the same way," he said. "Players kill Warlords until the Warlords get harder than the players get stronger, and then everybody stops and grinds each other down instead. That is the whole history of this game mode."

"And we can grow faster than the wall."

"We are the only people who have ever been able to."

---

Alice stood up off the rail.

"So we do it," she said. "All fifty. Every one that is left."

"They will be at double strength by the end. The last five will be worse than Ashkaran Vothul and Ashkaran nearly killed me at four thousand stacks."

"Yes."

"And we cannot take a single surrender from anybody carrying a badge, ever again." Logan said it flatly, because it needed saying flatly.

"Vaerith will not surrender. That is fine. But if anybody else picks up a badge between now and the end, they have to die holding it."

Alice did not answer straight away.

"I am not going to pretend I like that," she said.

"I am not asking you to."

"Vassk Orrun said the word and walked, and I was glad." She folded her arms. "He was not a monster. He was a large man who took a bad contract and worked out it was bad."

"He was carrying nothing. That one cost us nothing."

"That is luck, not a principle."

"I know." Logan met her eyes. "I am telling you what the ledger says, not what I am proud of."

---

They put the two Epic skill books on the ship’s table and looked at them for a while.

"Sell after," Alice said. "Same as before."

"Same as before." Logan put them back. "If there is an after."

Then he opened the summoning interface, because there was one more thing the ledger demanded and it was the only part of this he was actually looking forward to.

```

[ Tower Points: 214,700 ]

```

Eleven Warlords worth of accumulation since the island, and nothing to spend it on except the one thing that had never let him down.

```

[ Summon: Combat Unit x800 ] [ Cost: 80,000 Tower Points ]

```

```

[ Pull result: 288x Normal | 272x Uncommon | 232x Rare | 8x Epic ]

```

Alice watched eight hundred cards spill across the deck and shook her head slowly.

"Two hundred and thirty-two Rare out of eight hundred."

"Twenty-nine percent, same as always." Logan put both hands out. "And in about a minute it will not matter what any of them rolled."

```

[ 288x Normal merged into 144x Uncommon ]

[ 416x Uncommon merged into 208x Rare ]

[ 440x Rare merged into 220x Epic ]

[ 228x Epic merged into 114x Legendary ]

[ 114x Legendary merged into 57x Mythic ]

[ 57x Mythic merged into 28x Mythic+, 1x Mythic remaining ]

```

Twenty-eight more Mythic-plus units came up out of the light, and the deck was not large enough for them, and half of them ended up standing on the water because Xairon had built something for exactly that reason at some point and never mentioned it.

```

[ Remaining Tower Points: 134,700 ]

```

Thirty-seven Mythic-plus combat units in the field army. Billy, Solveig and Sonic on top of that.

"Right," Alice said faintly. "Right, that is a lot."

---

Logan looked north, where a blank spot on Nyriel’s map was not blank.

Fifty Warlords. Eighty-eight players. One man holding nineteen badges who had written an invitation into their deck and told them to come when they were ready and not before.

’Ninety-one,’ he thought. ’Nine of them are gone and they are gone because of choices I made with my eyes open.’

’So I take the other ninety-one and I do not miss one.’

"Alice."

"Mm."

"We start with him."