Chapter 377: Streamer Vs Barbarian [2]

Leon hit the ground hard.

His lip split on impact.

Blood, finally something the forest allowed him to feel, ran over his chin.

He pushed up on an elbow and tasted it.

"Was I always this weak?"

Kane stood over him, red hair catching the smoke-hole light, and looked at his own blood-smeared palm with open disgust.

"What a disappointment I was. Stuck in a room all day, jerking off and streaming. Now I finally get somewhere I like, real place, real strength, women who understand a hammer, and my conscience walks in naked trying to trip me."

He drew his foot back.

"Stay down. The tribe is watching the tent whether you hear them or not."

The kick came for Leon’s face.

He rolled.

The foot grazed his ear instead of breaking his nose.

On the way past, he hooked the knife at Kane’s belt, the small one, not a warhammer, the tool for cutting rope and meat, and ripped it free.

Kane’s eyes widened a fraction.

Leon came up inside the next grab and smashed the pommel into the barbarian’s temple, hard enough to make the red-haired head snap sideways.

Kane froze, one hand going to the spot.

"You..."

Leon stood.

Spat blood on the dirt.

The streamer’s body was shaking.

His mind was not.

"What? You get a system, and suddenly you feel like the boss? I was you, idiot. Just experienced. I already played the raid you bragged about. I already watched Thora say she loved me while a red sea tore her out of my hands. You haven’t earned the right to call me a disappointment."

Kane lunged first.

Strength versus timing.

The barbarian body was denser, faster in a straight line, built for the layer.

Leon had none of that and all of the memory of every fight that body would later win by refusing to stay down.

He didn’t meet force with force.

He gave ground into the tent pole, let Kane’s shoulder hit hide instead of ribs, and cut, not deep, a line across the forearm that made the next punch clumsy.

Kane snarled and grabbed for the knife.

Leon let him have it and drove a thumb toward the eye.

Kane turned his head and took the jab on the cheekbone, then headbutted.

Leon staggered.

Kane’s fist found his stomach and folded him.

"You fight like a man who learned from screens," Kane panted.

"You fight like a man who hasn’t learned from consequences."

Leon drove upward from the crouch and put his shoulder into Kane’s knee the way he remembered a Giant’s mass teaching him: wrong angle for a clean break, right angle for a stumble.

Kane went down to one knee.

Leon climbed his back, forearm across the throat, weight on the spine, and locked on while the stronger body thrashed.

They hit the dirt together.

Kane rolled.

Leon went with the roll and came out on top, knees pinning the barbarian’s arms, knife recovered and held flat to the underside of Kane’s jaw.

Both of them breathing hard.

Blood on both mouths.

The tent was full of the smell of sweat and the first kill of a campaign.

"Yield," Leon said.

Kane’s eyes burned up at him: rage, curiosity, the beginning of something that might later become Hybrid Lock, and a refusal to stay dead.

"Or what? You cut your own throat in advance?"

"Or you listen for ten breaths before Thora and Sira walk through that flap and you treat them like a clear reward."

Footsteps.

Voices.

Leon looked up.

Thora stood in the open hide flap, younger, hard-eyed, one hand on Sira’s shoulder as if she had already decided the orange-haired girl was her responsibility and the new chief was a problem to be measured.

Sira’s mouth was open on a joke that had not landed.

They weren’t smiling the way the system’s affection flags would later teach them to smile.

They were assessing.

Choosing, or being forced to choose by a tribe that understood succession as a body on the dirt and a man in the tent.

Leon’s grip on Kane loosened without his permission.

He had thought, back then, after he forced himself, that they would like it when he came.

That protection was a fair trade.

That the glow of a bond window meant consent had been processed.

Looking at them now, before the first night, before the first forced binary of stay with the strong one or stay with the dying tribe, he saw the gap.

The system had made them enjoy it.

They hadn’t chosen the way a person chooses in a white room with a door.

He had stood in front of them with a bloody fist and a promise of safety and called the result a harem.

Every woman after, Misha with the weak heart, Firlia with the lists, Kessa with the heat, Marisa with the visions- had been handed the same shape of bargain.

I can protect you.

Therefore you are mine.

None of them had been asked what they would have been without the threat he arrived inside.

The sky above the smoke-hole turned red.

Not sunset.

The same wrong dome that had hung over the Giant quay when the fragment climbed, and the Hydra fled, and Ragnar walked into a mouth on purpose.

Kane, pinned, twisted his head enough to see the light change on the hide.

"Fuck. What is that?"

Leon stared up through the smoke-hole at a sky the layer should not have been able to render yet.

"So that’s what it is."

His voice came out quiet.

’Devil’s Mirror. One of the eight. The one that doesn’t break your bones; it shows you the emptiness. Your worst moments. The places you called a win while the board was empty underneath."

Thora’s hand tightened on Sira’s shoulder.

She was looking at Leon now, at the soft naked double of the man on the ground, and her expression was the one she wore when a fight had more than one threat in it.

Leon met her eyes across the tent.

"I’m sorry."

Thunder broke directly overhead.

[Congratulations on Achieving 100% of Blood Wild Chronicles]

[You have done what 99% of Players could not do]

[Thank You For Playing, Player MobyDick69]

Leon was sitting in his room.