Everyone Is My Enemy
Darius, the Axeblade Warrior—who had abandoned even a fighter's pride to cheaply measure the distance between us—had, until moments ago, been hanging back, merely testing the waters from afar.
Then, in a flash of light, he closed the gap and stretched out that massive battle-axe, angling the haft to drag me in.
Obvious. If a man who'd already died to me twice and spent the rest of the time watching for an opening suddenly picked a fight like this, it meant someone else had stuck their nose in.
Combat experience built from countless fights mapped an escape route in that split second, and this body—changed against my will—reflexively hammered the keys and issued orders to my Grandmaster-at-Arms.
Counter Strike. A skill that dodges every basic attack thrown at you and deals damage around you proportional to the number of hits blocked.
The instant I hit E and activated Counter Strike, Jaxson—the street fighter with the lamppost I was controlling—got yanked toward Darius.
That alone gutted half of the bastard's plan.
He'd meant to stack bleed on me with basic attacks during the brief airborne window after the pull.
But if you time Counter Strike to a grab that telegraphs itself that hard, the whole attempt goes up in smoke.
And the moment the Axeblade Warrior picked the fight, a scythe-wielding assassin stepped out of the brush below—Kayn.
Surviving here was simple. The Axeblade Warrior had already burned his contractor spell, Flash.
All I had to do was leap to our minions coming up the lane and get out.
The assassin who'd come to bail out the Axeblade Warrior would have wasted the trip, and our other players would get their turn to cash in on the advantage.
But why?
Why did I have to just sit there and take this humiliation?
Sure, if I slipped away clean, I'd have bought time for our side to grow safely. I just didn't want to.
Our jungler had already pinged me that it was dangerous—and was now filling chat with garbage.
If you knew he was coming, you could have counter-ganked.
Or if you knew their jungler was here, you could have at least taken the bot-side objective.
Hell, even showing your face on bot lane for a second would have been something.
All he was doing was wringing the neck of a chicken he'd been farming in our jungle camp, and only now was he ambling into the enemy jungle like he had all the time in the world.
I wished he'd play the game in the time he spent typing.
I wished that violence of his was pointed at the other team.
The way he went out of his way to scrape raw at his own teammate's nerves made my teeth grind.
It was like looking at my father.
No—like looking at the thing that used to be my father.
So I threw away the option that would have let me survive cleanly.
Instead, I used the pull against him and hit Darius right back.
Enemy minions, deciding I'd touched one of their own, immediately started swinging at me to cover the Axeblade Warrior.
Everyone was my enemy.
The Axeblade Warrior and the giant-scythe assassin who'd always been enemies.
My own teammates, sitting there in chat.
The people who had once been my family.
I knew this feeling. It was familiar.
And because of that, my heart went strangely calm.
Of course everyone hated me. Of course everyone blamed me. Of course it was all my fault.
So I poured out here the rage and the grudge I could never unleash in the real world.
I spat out the disgust.
Enraged by the enemy minions' attacks, the street fighter cracked his fishing rod even harder.
The recoil finished off a few of the minions already getting chewed up by ours.
The moment my Jaxson leveled up off that, I slammed the hotkey and learned his ultimate.
In that same breath, Darius started tracing a wide arc with his weapon.
Partly to dodge that axe blade, I leapt at Kayn—who'd been cheaply probing me from outside my Counter Strike range.
My ally's sniping didn't matter. Neither did the fact that Darius read my leap and raked me with the axe on the way in.
Darius was level five. Kayn was level four.
Kayn had probably come to give Darius a little breathing room before either of them hit six and learned their ultimates.
But now that I'd hit six myself, that call had turned into poison.
Darius was hurriedly picking off the minions he'd scraped with his axe, one by one, hoping to snag six and keep the fight going—
but I was already ahead on kills and experience.
There was no way a guy splitting XP with Kayn after the gank was going to hit six.
In the end, Kayn—beaten half to death under my hands—tried to Flash out of the fight.
But my own Flash, the one I'd used earlier to kill Darius in the early game, was off cooldown now.
Chasing him down and cutting his throat was the natural next step.
And once that was done, the only one left on my private battlefield was Darius.
He'd barely scraped together level six and was only lightly scratched. I, having tanked both of them, was sitting at about half health.
I'd already taken more than enough. Walking away here would have been fine.
I just didn't want to. Some bastard who'd been leeching XP in the backline this whole time was suddenly full of himself because he'd gotten help from his jungler.
Just leave him? Why the hell would I?
I walked straight at Darius.
He must have figured his higher health and matching level put him ahead, because he strode right toward me too.
His pull was on cooldown. So was my Counter Strike.
If we brawled it out like this, there was no telling who'd win.
But I fought anyway—before the attack-speed buff I'd stacked while beating Kayn to death could fade.
Darius seemed just as determined to end it here before I could run. The second we entered each other's auto range, he empowered a basic attack, slowed me, and eased back a step.
And there it was again—that arc blooming around him.
Get clipped by the axe blade and he heals, while bleed stacks on me.
Which, flipped around, just meant: don't get hit.
Running was an option.
Instead I used my leap the instant it came off cooldown and drove it straight down onto the crown of his head.
Taking the axe haft instead of the blade hurt less—and he couldn't heal off it either.
The swing animation for the blade actually kept him from fully stacking bleed on me.
And then he just sat there and took the beating.
I wasn't in great shape either. Our health bars shredded down to even in seconds.
Desperate to detonate the bleed stacks he'd managed to put on me, he hoisted the axe high—
and in the same instant, my street fighter smashed him with an empowered basic attack.
Before the axe blade could bury itself in my skull, Darius folded under that heavy blow, lost his grip on the weapon, and went down.
My fighter was bleeding out too, happily worked over by Darius the whole time—
but thanks to the rune that restores a scrap of health on a champion kill, he threw his head back with a roaring laugh and lived.
But my teammates' sniping didn't let up. Everything I'd done, they dismissed as cheating—or talked down like it was nothing special.
My father's words floated up.
That getting into a good university was only natural, since I'd inherited his smart genes.
But that becoming a woman had made all of it meaningless.
I hit the recall button, then wrapped both hands around my own throat.
I hated the brain that, while I sat there listening to garbage like that, kept dredging up the words of a father who'd beaten me every time he drank—and then died on his own terms without ever letting me have my revenge.
"Kh—kh."
My head felt like it would split. My clenched jaw shook.
A sound like laughter, or a moan, slipped out on its own.
My vision narrowed by degrees.
But I couldn't keep squeezing forever.
My strength gave out, and my body pitched straight onto the floor.
The impact jolted me up into a fit of raw, reflexive coughing.
The delayed pain of hitting the ground dragged my mind back into place.
Even sitting up was hard, thanks to the one leg that was nothing but dead weight.
Still—when it hurt this much, the worthless thoughts quieted down a little.
Breathing hard, I glanced around the room with my one good eye: the unmade blanket, clothes strewn everywhere. Nothing in me stirred.
…Laundry later. Game first.
It was the only place I could pour out the rage I couldn't touch in real life.
In reality I was too timid to even raise my voice in the corner of my own room—but in here, I could stomp my opponent's corpse and howl as much as I wanted.
So I'd play. Until the money ran out.
And when the money ran out, I'd just die.