“Matt?” Nick’s jaw hung open, and he stared agape. Slowly, the dark-red aura that was so reminiscent of the Crimson Nosferatu’s drained away, until he finally resembled Nick again.

I didn’t know what to say. Despite knowing this was a possibility, I hadn’t planned this far, and at the moment, came up empty.

“What the fuck.” Nick passed a hand through his hair, his face conflicted. “No. No, no no. This is a trick. Hastur’s testing me.”

“We met in the rehab center. You were there for your leg, I was there for my mom.”

Nick shook his head vehemently. “No—”

I went down the list. “The passcode on your phone is six nine repeating. Your favorite game is Resident Evil 4—the original, not the remake, seeing as how, in your opinion, they cut too much of the campiness. You’d pick Waffle House over IHOP any day.”

“Shut up.”

“You say your greatest fear is being alone—but I’d argue it’s not actually that. I think given the excess of flings you try to keep on as friends, and how tightly you’ve clung to me, I think your greatest fear is being irrelevant, but more than that, being unloved. And until today, if someone put a gun to my fucking head and asked me to pick out the one good fucking person in the fucking world, I would have pointed at you.” I realized, belatedly, that I was shouting. And I didn’t care. “Past fucking tense.”

The punch came quicker than I expected, and the entire left side of my face went numb as Nick’s fist slammed into my jaw. I spun like a top and went down. Nick stood over me, his fist trembling. “Fuck you, Matt. You have no idea what it was like.”

“Then tell me.” I gestured at myself wildly. “Because I’m right goddamn here, and personally, I’d love an explanation for that. Because that wasn’t you.” I pointed to the cliffs.

This was it. The last chance. If he was being manipulated or controlled through profound means that even Azure could not detect, this was where he’d offer a rational explanation. Something that was well-thought out and made sense. Some premeditated bullshit about a mental break, or a Macguffin, or some trumped-up needs-of-the-many equivocations. Anything.

Shame and anger warred on Nick’s face. “Where were you?”

You did not just ask me that.

“While I was neck-deep in the deepest, darkest hole imaginable, where the fuck were you?” Nick shouted, spittle flying. “Cause from where I’m standing, it looks like all you’ve been working is spinning that class I gave you into something better. Glad you could run around touring the Flauros realms playing swashbuckling rogue and advancing while Jinny and Sae rotted and I fended for my fucking self.”

In ordinary circumstances, I might have understood. He’d lost someone he loved and was held prisoner by the people who took her from him, and he’d been through a series of traumatic experiences one after another.

“I-I-I-I—” I clamped down on the stutter, hating myself for it. “No. That’s what you think of me. Okay. Great. Glad we’re clearing the air.” A thousand biting rebuttals cycled through my mind, but in the end, I said nothing, just reached in my inventory and withdrew an object.

“Is that?”

“Yeah.” The User core glinted violet in my gloved hand. Nick took a step backward. When I spoke, my voice was monotone. “Snatched it off her while you were busy ruining any chance we had to de-escalate.” I tossed it underhanded, and Nick caught it. He stared at it, cradling it in his hands, his anger replaced with sadness.

I removed my dagger and crossbow first, stripping them from my belt and tossing them aside.

His eyes narrowed as he watched me. “What are you doing?”

“Giving you what you asked for,” I muttered, dark anger still coursing through my veins.

“The hell?”

“Back at the house, you said you wanted to see what I could do in a straight fight.” I finished unbuckling my gauntlet and tossed it into the sand. Then undid my other gauntlet and continued removing my armor piece by piece until I was down to my hoodie and jeans. “And you’re spoiling for one. So, now’s your chance.”

For a second, I thought Nick would argue. Instead, he stood, pocketing the orb, and followed suit, removing his sword from his belt and placing it onto the sand. “No weapons, spells, or active abilities?”

“Yep,” I confirmed.

“Anything else?”

“I’ll do my best not to break anything.”

A dark cloud overtook his expression—only to be immediately replaced by confusion and pain as I threw a fistful of sand in his face. “You bastard—”

I weaved under his flailing arms, venting all my frustration, anger, and fear, and drove my elbow into Nick’s chin.

He stumbled backward, trying to right himself.

I advanced. “You have no fucking idea what I’ve been through, trying to get to you. And you know what’s funny? I was about to tell you. Couldn’t do it right away, as I wasn’t sure if you were being influenced and still hadn’t figured out a way around the geas, but if you’d kept it together for just one more fucking day—Oof.”

Nick’s body blow hit hard enough to lift me off my feet and leave my stomach a writhing knot of pain and spasms. I ducked under the follow-up haymaker. He panted and sneered. “Must be nice up there in that ivory tower you judge the rest of us from.”

I defended myself as well as I could, using <Unsparing Fang> to turn away his heavy blows. “I’ve never judged you.”

“No. You just never said it out loud.” Nick jabbed at me twice, testing my reaction. Now that the element of surprise had faded, he’d settled into something that resembled a boxing stance.

The first few blows had comprised wild swings, fueled by anger and fear. But it’d gone on long enough that we both fell back onto experience, and the fight settled into a rhythm. <Unsparing Fang> thrived on capitalizing when your opponent over-committed, and Nick—despite his anger—did a devilishly good job maintaining an iron defense. Ordinarily I’d change tact, go on the offensive, but I couldn’t do that when every strike he threw packed enough individual power to put me down. By the same token, with my enhanced agility, Nick couldn’t land a solid hit.

Unstoppable force met immovable object. Neither making any real headway as the wind rustled our clothes, sodden sand glittering beneath advancing and retreating feet beneath a sun that would never set, until we were both staggering and our movements grew sloppy in the unrelenting tide of push and pull.

There was a sensation of mana discharging, draining color from my vision. I panicked for a moment, terrified I casted something accidentally, only realizing shortly after that the drain came from far to my right, beneath the ocean’s surface. Audrey had used an ability. My summon was still tangling with whatever was down there.

But the split-second lapse was all it took to tip the balance.

Nick charged forward, lifting me up by my legs and slamming onto my back, pinning my shoulder with one arm and cocking his fist back. I closed my eyes, bracing for the blow.

It never came.

“Why… did you have to stop me?” Nick choked out. When I opened my eyes, there were tears streaming down his face. “I know you. If the tables were turned, if Iris or Ellison died in that tunnel—you wouldn’t have stopped at his brother. You’d make him radioactive. Shred through everyone he cared about until there was no one left.”

Nick deserved the truth. Not something I thought he needed to hear. So I let myself think about it. Really consider it. “If someone killed my brother or sister—or hurt them to get to me—I’d spend a very long time driving home how profound of a fuck-up that was before I let it end.”

Nick’s expression grew more confused.

“So, maybe you’ve got it right,” I murmured. “Maybe I would do that. But you wouldn’t.”

Slowly, Nick pushed himself up and collapsed on the sand beside me, expression defeated. He looked like he’d aged ten years in an hour. “Yeah. Yeah.” He leaned his head back and stared at the sky. “Would have regretted it, no matter what Hastur said. And of course I went and screwed it all up before I figured that out.”

“Not… necessarily,” I hedged, feeling tangible relief at Nick’s confirmation that Hastur had a hand in this unexpected turn.

Nick peered at me. “With the geas, he won’t have any choice in the matter. He’ll have to report it.”

“Not if he’s convinced he nodded off on the bluffs and everything that happened after was a dream.” That, and the directive to find Halima, were the last orders I gave Keith, and he’d accepted them with no issue. I neglected to mention that Nick being forced by Aaron or Sunny to make a report now that he knew my Ordinator role was just as much, if not more, of an issue.

“As if.” Nick scoffed. When I didn’t laugh, he gaped openly. “You can actually do that?”

“There’s a lot I can do,” I deflected. <Subjugation> was order of magnitudes more powerful than <Suggestion>, but without testing—which was problematic in its own right—I had to assume the same rules applied. The biggest limiter was immediacy. If I’d waited hours after the altercation with Nick to give Keith the order, it was entirely possible the command would fail or Keith would reject it outright. There was no point in telling Nick anything if he wasn’t stable and I might need to use <Subjugation> to wipe his memories to obscure my identity. As much as I hated it, that was the simpler option. If he kept his memories, we’d need to either quickly find a solution to the geas, or abandon the Order entirely and bunker Nick down somewhere with constant <Squelch> coverage so he couldn’t receive orders or be forced to report.

Before I decided anything, I needed the piece I was missing. “I’ll tell you everything. But first, I need to know what happened with Hastur to put you on the warpath. The whole truth, Nick. This is important.”

Nick suddenly looked very far away. “Might as well. Got nowhere else to be.”