What was the first rule of street fighting?
Last I checked, there wasn’t one. Street fighting had no rulebook, no referee, no agreed-upon limits. It was pure, unstructured violence, and anything within arm’s reach was a valid weapon. A bottle. A brick. A walking stick borrowed from a granny at a crosswalk.
Right now, it was a baseball bat.
And honestly, forget the bat. The look on Stone’s face was doing enough damage on its own. He had this expression, deep, settled, bitter— like a man who’d just watched a gambling site eat several months of savings and had decided, sowhere on the walk over, that I was going to absorb the consequences. He wasn’t even hiding it. The fury was just sitting there on his face, fully unpacked.
He kept patting the bat against his open palm. Patiently, obviously waiting for to do sothing first.
I would have. Except I was still trying to process the fact that any of this was real.
First there was Alia, an actual, interactive hologram who communicated with like a slightly judgntal personal assistant. Then a tournant that felt physical. Textured. I’d spent a considerable portion of my life reading system narratives, studying their interfaces, learning how they were structured. The good ones were precise, challenges designed to escalating specifications, everything slotted into a clean internal logic.
What made this one different was the imperfection. The glitching domain. The red sky that wasn’t quite right. The fact that my first tournant opponent was a man in a ripped tank top nad Stone, standing under a flickering streetlight with a bat and an unresolved gambling grievance.
Whoever built this system was either a genius or unwell. Possibly both.
"Alright," I muttered, pulling myself back. "Enough. How do I actually beat this guy?"
I ran a quick assessnt. Baseball bat. Jaw set like a closed door. Eyes that had stared at worse things than and co out the other side still angry. On appearance alone, Stone would put down in one good swing.
But maybe the answer wasn’t the swing. Maybe it wasn’t physical at all.
Maybe the system wanted to solve this differently. Perhaps through communication.
Right. That was it. Words. Humans responded to language — even the hostile ones, maybe especially the hostile ones. If I could reach past the anger, find whatever was underneath it, I might be able to talk him down without taking another hit to the skull.
Worth a shot. Literally anything was worth a shot.
"Hey. Stone." I started slow, keeping my voice even, spreading my hands in a gesture that was hopefully reading as non-threatening. "Look, you don’t have to do this. Whatever you’re carrying, whatever’s brought you here, I get it. Anger like that doesn’t co from nowhere. But taking it out on isn’t going to fix it. It’s just going to add to it."
I moved toward him, one step at a ti, watching his face for signals. He’d stopped patting the bat. That was sothing. His eyes hadn’t softened exactly, but the rhythm of him had shifted, less prid, more uncertain.
"So what I’m saying is —" I was two feet away now, hands still out, voice still level. "You can put the bat down. We don’t have to do this. Just put it down and we can actually talk."
I reached for the bat.
He growled. His grip tightened around it so hard I could see the tendons move.
I realised, in that specific mont, that every word I’d just said had landed on absolutely nothing.
But the realisation ca too late.
The bat ca up.
WHACK.
Then nothing.
Then everything again.
Sa spot. Sa red sky. Sa flickering streetlight stuttering through its two-second cycle. Stone approaching from the sa angle, bat in hand, that exact expression on his face — like none of the last three minutes had happened at all.
Did I just go back in ti?
[Lives Left: 2/3]
One hit. One hit was all it took.
So the system hadn’t been hiding a clever solution for to decode. It wasn’t testing my emotional intelligence or my ability to de-escalate. It wanted to fight this man. Actually fight him. Which was, to be completely honest, not great news given that I’d already tried that once today in a different context and ended up being held upright by two people while soone used my face for target practice.
I was going to burn through all three lives before I landed a single clean hit.
Unless.
Every man had a weak point. That was a biological constant, not an assumption. If I could identify Stone’s — find the specific spot where the armour cracked — I wouldn’t need to outlast him. I’d just need to get there once.
I scanned him properly this ti. Neck. Shoulder joints. Lower torso. The standard vulnerable regions. But he was solid everywhere I looked — the kind of build that suggested his body had long since stopped treating pain as useful information. Hitting this man in the chest or the ribs wasn’t going to do what it would do to a normal person.
Except.
The groin.
Yes. It was an undignified solution. It had a certain energy to it — desperate, a little embarrassing — but it worked. It worked on everyone. No amount of muscle mass changed the fundantal physics of that particular target.
Stone ca at .
The bat went up. I sidestepped with just enough margin to feel it pass, the air moving against my ear.
When he turned, and his face had shifted, less of the settled bitterness now, more of the active, focused anger of soone whose first swing had missed. He swung again. I moved backwards. Again. Each ti the bat missed, his expression grew tighter, more concentrated, like the frustration was sharpening him rather than slowing him down.
The groin. That’s the play. I just need to get there.
After the next wide swing I brought my right leg up as fast as I could manage, the plan being to kick the bat out of his grip, knock his hands loose, give myself an opening.
His left arm caught my leg in midair.
The smirk that appeared was slow and genuinely unpleasant.
BAM. The bat ca across my calf with the full weight of his other arm behind it.
The pain hit imdiately, warm, pulsing, radiating upward, and my stance collapsed. I hit the ground with all the grace of soone who had no functioning legs.
A cripple being crippled. Even my internal comntary was tired.
Through the inconsistent strobe of the streetlight, I could see Stone standing over . Satisfaction had settled into his posture, that specific, egoistic stillness of a man timing out the exact mont he decides to finish sothing.
He’s going to kill .
WHACK.
[Lives Left: 1/3]
"Aw, man."
The reversal happened again. Sa starting point. Sa everything.
I stood in the reset for a mont and just breathed.
One life left. Which, if it ant what I strongly suspected it ant, was considerably more alarming than just losing a tournant. I needed to confirm it imdiately.
"What do you think you’re doing?" Alia materialised beside like an unwanted calendar notification, her tone already thoroughly disapproving. "One life remaining."
"Yes, I can read, thank you." I held up a finger. "Quick question though, and I need you to be completely honest with here. Losing my last life in here doesn’t carry over to real life, right?" I laughed. It ca out nervous. "Like, that’s not a thing this system does."
The silence she gave was very specific. The kind of silence that soone gives you when the answer is yes and they’re trying to find a way to fra it.
"...Fuck."
"I assud you’d reviewed the terms and conditions before applying."
"You applied for !"
Before either of us could push that further, Stone ca in with another swing. I was moving before the thought was fully ford, the dodges were coming easier now, the reset having cleared whatever exhaustion I’d accumulated. But his energy was worse this ti. More vicious. Like each missed hit was being added to a running total he intended to collect at once.
He was going to kill . For the third ti. Permanently.
"Do you," I said, ducking under a wide arc, "have any practical advice on how I actually beat this man?"
"Rush him," Alia said. "Beat him until he goes down."
"I’m looking for sothing that doesn’t require to offer my last life as a deposit."
She was quiet. Long enough that I started to assu she’d logged off again, which was a pattern I was beginning to resent. But she ca back.
"Map his physical coordinates," she said. "You don’t need to wait for him to be open. You need to find where he’s already open."
Physical coordinates. I did that in P.E.
C-1: his head. Maximum impact, but his arms were between and his face at all tis and he’d swipe clean before I got there.
C-2: his torso. Solid, blocked by his reach, not worth the approach.
C-3: the groin. Still valid. Still the most reliable option. But close distance, which ant as long as he had the bat, getting there was a gamble I couldn’t afford.
C-4 wasn’t going to work until I solved the bat problem.
Which ant—
C-5. His legs.
I looked at them properly for the first ti. Thin. Genuinely, surprisingly thin, like the foundation of a building that hadn’t accounted for what was being built on top of it. Everything above the waist was Stone. Everything below was just... legs.
How did I not see that?
He swung again.
This ti I didn’t co back up into a stand. I dropped low, one leg extended behind , full Spiderman, and swept in a clean, tight arc just above the ground.
His feet went out.
Stone ca down hard, and the bat left his hand on the way, rolling across the gravel until it stopped directly in front of .
I picked it up. Slid my hands along the wood slowly, feeling the grain, the weight of it.
Sothing dark and genuinely satisfying settled in my chest. I looked at Stone on the ground, watching the anger drain out of his eyes and sothing else take its place. Sothing smaller and less certain.
"We could’ve talked this over," I said.
WHACK.
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