The Ascendant Regional Open had eaten the entire block.
Karl came up out of the station into a wall of sound and had to stop on the top step to let his ears adjust.
There were vendors on the pavement selling hero keychains out of plastic bins. There was a van with a rig on the roof and a camera crew filming the queue for content nobody would ever watch twice. Somewhere inside the building, the login theme started, cut out, and started again, and every time it cut out the queue booed on reflex.
He pulled his hood forward and let the crowd carry him in.
The bracket board hung above the entrance to the main hall, eight names lit up in white, and he found theirs on the bottom left without much trouble because it was the only entry that wasn’t a name.
TBD.
Elsa had written that in a box on a registration form three weeks ago and drawn a small skull underneath it, and the organizers had printed it exactly as submitted, skull and all.
’She’s going to be unbearable about this.’
She was. She was already pointing at it when he found the group, jabbing a finger at the board like she was identifying a suspect.
"Look at it. Look at what they did. That’s us, that’s officially us, it’s on a screen and everything." She turned around and got about half a second of eye contact before her face did something and she looked at the board again.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"You’re a bit late, don’t you think?"
"I’m forty minutes early."
"Everyone else got here an hour ago, so you’re late."
Sana was sitting on a bench behind her with a bottle of water she had clearly been holding without drinking for some time, ponytail pulled so tight it looked painful.
She lifted two fingers off the bottle in greeting.
Karl nodded back.
Then the other two.
The tall one he recognized before he had a name for it, mostly from the shoulders and the way he stood with his weight on his back foot. Grey and blue jacket gone. Plain black shirt now.
The last time Karl had seen him he’d been standing beside an open pod listening to a gymnasium chant somebody else’s name.
"Dane Ferrow," he said, and stuck out a hand like he’d been practicing. "EXP lane. I know. You can say it."
Karl shook it. "Say what?"
"That I died nine times to a bleach-haired roamer in front of my entire school." Dane’s jaw worked once. "I’ve had it said to me a lot. Figured I’d get ahead of it."
"That’s...uhn, rough buddy." Karl said. "It does happen like that sometimes. I guess."
Dane blinked at him.
"Anyway. I left the Borors." He shrugged, and it came out stiffer than he probably wanted. "Everyone’s chasing the big rosters right now. I’d rather be on the small one before it gets big. You’re rank one and nobody knows your face, which means there’s a whole rise still coming, and I want to be standing in it when it happens. That’s the pitch. It’s a bit much when you say it out loud."
"It’s fine," Karl said.
"You don’t mind eh?"
"As long as you put up a good performanc, its all good for me."
The girl beside him had not said anything at all.
She was leaning against the pillar with her arms folded, chewing gum, wearing shorts and long socks and boots that had seen actual weather.
Pink hair, loose, falling most of the way down her back. No mask. Nothing on her face at all, which was the problem, because Karl had spent two weeks with a very specific pair of eyes filed away in his head and here they were, sitting in a whole face, looking right at him.
"Dori Calestina," she said. "Roam."
’You have got to be joking.’
[Notice: Hostile signature previously logged.]
’I heard you the first time.’
"Kazu," Karl said.
"I know." She blew a small bubble, popped it, and pushed off the pillar. "Elsa’s been saying your name for three days straight. It’s a lot of name for one guy."
Elsa made a noise of protest. Dori ignored it entirely and walked past Karl toward the hall entrance, and as she went by she said, without turning her head and without changing her voice at all:
"You don’t come to my street. I won’t come to yours. We’re fine."
Then she was three steps ahead and asking Sana whether the food stands took card, and the conversation closed over the top of it, and Karl stood there for a moment with his hands in his pockets.
’What is a gangster member doing in a gaming tornament?. ’ Karl wondered, fighing the urge to ask Elsa right there.
[Charlotte requests permission to be concerned.]
’Denied.’
[Charlotte is concerned regardless.]
...
They found seats in the upper block because the lower block was full by nine.
The format was brutal and simple. Eight teams, seven matches, one day. No best-of-threes until the final, which meant that every team in the building was one bad twenty minutes away from going home, and everyone in the building knew it.
"Right," Elsa said, dropping into the seat beside him with a paper tray of something fried. "Captain, Let’s hear it."
Karl looked at her. "Captain?"
"You’re captain. We already voted before you got there, you’re welcome."
"When?"
"On the group chat you’re not in." She waved a chip at him. "Talk, captain."
So he did.
He talked about the first ten minutes and how nobody in a single-elimination bracket plays them properly, because everyone is scared and being scared makes people farm.
For the next few minutes, he simply explainted stratrgy for the game, despite him knowing how he truly sucked at it.
"Cute," Dori said, around the gum. "You’ll be in my half of the map."
"I will."
"Sure." But she was watching him differently after that, and she’d stopped chewing for about a second, and Karl noticed both and said nothing.
The strange part was that they all just listened.
He had been playing this game for six years alone. Nobody had ever sat still while he explained a wave state. Nobody had ever nodded at him.
Sana had a notes app open. Dane was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and when Karl finished, Dane said "yeah, okay, that’s actually good," and Karl had to look at the stage for a while.
’This is what having a team feels like?’
...
The bracket started eating people.
The Eternal went first and finished in nineteen minutes. Their mid was a tall, bored-looking man called Ryo Vantel, and Karl knew the account instantly, because he had queued into it maybe forty times at three in the morning and lost more of those than he liked.
Seeing a face attached to it was deeply unpleasant.
Fire Squad went second and did it in seventeen. Their EXP laner was a guy named Kade who had held the top global spot on three separate bruisers in the same season and had never once posted a photograph of himself until this morning, when the tournament put his face on a banner four meters tall.
The Lost Wanderers took the longest, twenty-six minutes, and their roamer, a woman with a shaved head and a headset she never adjusted, spent the whole game standing exactly where the enemy jungler wanted to walk.
"Mira Solveig," Dori said, watching her. "She’s the only one here who scares me."
Karl watched all three matches without saying much, and the thing that kept turning over in him wasn’t the skill. It was that all of these people had names now. Faces on banners. A year ago they had been usernames on a ladder that only he cared about.
[Standing quest updated.]
[Quest: Find a new tournament. Earn money.]
[Condition one: fulfilled.]
[Condition two: pending. Reward will scale with final placement.]
’I know what the prize is.’
Moments later...
Their name came up on the board at ten past four.
TBD, in white, and the skull, which the arena’s graphics team had faithfully rendered in high definition.
Half the hall laughed.
The casters had already been making jokes about it for two hours, the placeholder team, the team the organizers forgot to name, and somewhere in the middle of the second match one of them had said, on air, that nobody had ever seen these five play together and there was probably a reason for that.
Then the opponent slid into place beside them.
Red jacket. A team with a Shark logo. Five names, and the one on top was James.
Nobody said anything for a second.
"Oh," Elsa said. "Oh, that’s convenient."
Dane stood up first. Sana screwed the cap back onto a bottle she still hadn’t opened. Dori spat her gum into a napkin, folded it once, and dropped it in the bin without looking, and Karl realized her hands were not entirely steady either, which somehow helped more than anything else could have.
A staff member appeared at the end of the row with a clipboard and said their name, or the thing that was standing in for their name, and asked them to follow her down.
Karl stood up. His ribs were fine. His hands were fine. He checked, the way he always did now.
Below them, the stage lights came up over ten pods, and the crowd started making a sound with no words in it at all.