#this is in no way a combat optimized build. or an anything optimized build

[rodimissliveblogs]

I keep forgetting to make a proper post introducing the character I'm playing, but suffice it to say, "I need you alive, you need me strong" is honestly a pretty convincing argument for letting a vampire drink your blood to a woman who has one (1) more hp than the squishy wizard, and who has one (1) cantrip that does damage and zero (0) leveled spells that do damage. That's it. That's all she's got. She's got Eldritch Blast and a rapier. She is a support caster, and the spell of support she's cast tonight is "become juicebox".

[eoieopda]

FORCE QUIT // EPISODE III: SPIDER

somebody has to make sure you make it through the firefight alive.

pairing: lee minho x reader | series masterlist (3/4) | prev. episode series summary: it's 2077, and life's a fucking nightmare. corporate titans ate the state and shat it back out, leaving citizens of the new republic to fall in line, or fall to their knees. a reckoning is coming — where will you fall? au: series — dystopian, cyberpunk; episode — mutually-pining fuck buddies. ➢insp. by: cyberpunk 2077 + the true lives of the fabulous killjoys genre: smut + angst word count: 23.5k rating: 18+ — minors do not have my consent to interact. series warnings: violence (hand-to-hand, firearms, explosives), depictions of injuries (blood/bruising/burns), some characters have cybernetic modifications, class conflict + poverty, surprise - corporations are bad!, unethical medical/tech experimentation, self-indulgent references to non-skz idols, reader is afab and uses she/her pronouns. episode: above + combat leader!minho, disabled!hacker!reader, pov switches, time skips, loss of limb due to injury (not depicted, minimally described), ref. to hospitalization + recovery, sunshine/storm cloud dynamic, minho is kind of a dick, depictions of combat violence, minor character death(s), unprotected p in v penetration. reader notes: afab and uses she/her pronouns; has a prosthetic/cybernetic leg; wears minho’s shirt at one point. ➢ notes added/expanded upon during 8/6/24 inclusivity review a/n 1: this part required a lot more external resources than anything else i’ve written, so i’ve kind of… footnoted? what i used. see the note at the end of the fic for the list! a/n 2: each episode features a different member x reader pairing, but the plot is linear, so you'd need to read them (in order) to get the full picture! you can sign up for the taglist to be notified of the next uploads. thank you to my beloved @sailoryooons for beta'ing this and @jihopesjoint for being my emotional support internet wife even though she doesn't stan skz. ily both endlessly!

Yours is the Black Screen’s worst kept secret.

The irony of that isn’t lost on you. Professionally, your most marketable skill is your ability to lower others’ defenses; to build and break walls as needed to take what you want for keeps. With finesse few can imitate, you vault over boundaries. Unfortunately for you, you don’t personally have any of those.

You’ve always been this way — no poker face, no affinity for bluffing, no discernible self-preservation instinct — and just the same, you’ve always wished you weren’t.

Time and again, your cards are on the table the second they’re dealt. If that alone wasn’t shitty gameplay, you and that relentless optimism of yours raise the stakes, double down. There’s no hesitating before you go all in; and there’s no surprise when you lose it all, either. Nothing you’ve ever felt has shocked anyone because they saw it coming in the previous turn.

Like Seungmin, for example, who won’t stop rolling his eyes at you from the other side of the room.

“If I took a shot every time you looked up at the door…” He sighs, gesturing from your corner of the Hub to its entrance, “I’d have died of alcohol poisoning six times over by now.”

The grimace you don’t want to concede can’t be hidden, so you rein your gaze in and direct it back at the screen in front of you. You don’t absorb any of the information flickering in front of you, however, because Seungmin has a point. Any second you haven’t spent staring wistfully out of the room is wasted on glancing at the clock. 

It’s close to nine o’clock now, which means your not-so-secret distraction is due any minute.

That reminds me…

You check again, wondering how many minutes have passed since you last looked, only to learn that it’s been less than one. That’s when the reflex takes over. Without your permission, your eyes wander from the glowing, green digits on the wall to the door — just in case.

No dice.

Damn it.

In a feeble attempt to cover your chronic — terminal — hopefulness, you try to refocus on your work. All it takes is a few seconds of staring before your eyes glaze over again. That disinterest isn’t reflected in your rigid posture, though. Your brain may be a flat tire, but your body is a bow drawn back, ready to fire.

Anticipation is a hell of a drug, isn’t it?

Seungmin crosses his arms. From the corner of your eye, you can see the knowing look he shoots you. He may not speak his favorite words, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear them, loud and clear.

Told you so.

“It’s kind of funny, actually,” he says instead. 

You know better than to be thrown off by his trademark, flat affect. This is the most amused you’ve seen the weaponsmith in weeks. The corner of his mouth even twitches slightly; it might be the closest he’s ever been to smiling. “He only steps foot in here when you do.”

With all the heat you can muster, you aim to warn him — to puff out your chest a little, just this once — but it just sounds like a whine. “Seungmin…”

As if on cue, light footsteps sound off from down the hallway, shifting closer with every muffled step and cutting your would-be bickering off in the process.

Even with Seungmin’s judgment focused elsewhere, you continue to pretend that the glaring, blue light in front of your face has garnered any amount of your attention. It doesn’t. It hasn’t and won’t, so long as you can feel the seconds tick by in your chest.

He snorts. “Like clockwork.”

Damn it.

For being as light on his feet as he is, Minho tends to drag them more, the longer the day lasts. You never point that out to him; he doesn’t need to know that you’ve noticed. That fact sits among the million others you try to keep to yourself, just like your ability to identify him by gait alone.

Besides, you think, he’d never listen if you begged him to slow down, even if it’s just for a night. Rest doesn’t feature on the short list of things Minho wants from you. Come to think of it, neither does advice or concern for his well-being.

“Well, well, well. Look who it is,” Seungmin sings out when the shuffling stops short. “You lost, hyung?”

The way your head snaps up has nothing to do with Seungmin’s mocking tone and everything to do with the flutter in your chest. You’d attempt to keep that a secret, too, but then Minho walks in, and it’s game set. 

He’s fatal with his tattered, grey t-shirt half-tucked into ripped, black denim; and you have to clench your jaw to keep it from dropping. Before your dry throat can choke you, you clear it, swallowing down the thought that Minho and his jagged edges are the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen.

It gets easier to get a fucking grip on yourself when Seungmin starts needling again: “No, seriously, are you lost? What are you doing here?”

Dark, cat eyes flick to you, then back to their target. Deadly, you think, just like the rest of him.

“Wishing you weren’t,” Minho responds without missing a beat. 

As usual, his tone is carefully balanced between bored and annoyed. You suspect that’s purposeful. A tactic. It leaves listeners in the dark about his feelings, so they have to guess whether or not they should run.

Nine times out of ten, they guess wrong.

This time, Minho deigns to give a hint. It’s quick enough that you would’ve missed it if you hadn’t been staring. Thankfully, his target sees the microscopic flex of his eyebrow, too. 

All that bark leaves Seungmin in a hurry, no bite to follow. With his tail between his legs and his palms raised in defeat, he skirts around Minho before slipping wordlessly out the door. 

You frown slightly as you watch him flee, although you sure as shit won’t mind his absence.

“Seungmin’s harmless,” you remind Minho quietly, although you don’t know why you bother. He’s never felt threatened in his life, as far as you can tell. You don’t necessarily hate it when he flexes that fact in front of you, but that doesn’t mean he should. “You don’t need to scare him off.”

Minho crosses his arms and tilts his head in a way that makes you only the slightest bit insane. “I’m not scary,” he rebuts matter-of-factly, as if that’ll make it true.

You make the mistake of looking him in the eye then. Like it always does in moments like this, heat immediately rushes to your face like a backdraft.

Like he always does, Minho senses the spike in temperature. To crank it higher, he meanders his way across the room to you, eyes glittering impishly all the while. Your heart thuds harder with each footfall. Stupidly, you wonder if he can sense that, too.

“In fact, I’m offended,” he corrects you as he closes in.

His palms press down against the opposite side of your desk once he reaches it. This close, you can read the mischief scribbled all over his face, which only serves to tear you in two — equal parts fucked up by his assertiveness and the rare playfulness that only comes in flashes, only with you.

Minho looms over you now, his hardened stare softening just slightly. Whispering through what almost looks like a pout, he adds, “And you’re mean.”

For a second, you think that the hand inching its way across the tabletop is seeking yours. Anticipation makes your fingers twitch. Try as you might, you can’t think of a single fucking thing you want more than to slip them between his. 

Proving once again that you’ll never read him right, Minho’s hand darts out to your side instead. You watch in slow-motion as he snags the bag of honey twists from its resting spot near your left forearm, which is nowhere near fast enough to catch him before he pulls away. Useless, your empty hand drops back onto your desk. 

You stare longingly at the stolen packet, so dejected that you really could cry, and mumble, “It took so much effort to get those.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Minho counters with a shrug.

He isn’t wrong, and you hate that.

The Black Screen’s demolition expert, Lee Jihoon, is as hard to crack as the shit he blows to pieces. His footlocker full of snacks — a rarity, given the whole everything going on in the world — is even more impenetrable. Charming your way through his stony exterior had been your only option to gain access. It took months, as well as unrelenting friendliness administered in small, persistent doses.

Just like —

Minho wouldn’t have wasted his time with flattery or nuance. He never needs to open his mouth to get what he’s after because his presence — from his stance to his intense, vaguely violent gaze — does all the talking for him. All he would’ve needed to do is blink in Jihoon’s direction, then he would’ve walked out of there with the older man’s treasure trove and the jacket off his back.

Having just been robbed blind yourself, you keep your mouth shut about that.

Shrugging once again, Minho throws down the gauntlet: “Finish your shit quickly, and I might decide to share them with you.”

How thoughtful.

If he’s expecting a verbal response, he won’t get one, you decide. The most you give is a disgruntled sigh. Dying star that you are, you collapse in on yourself, sinking deeper into your chair until you wind up as a half-crumpled heap on the desk below your monitors. It’s a perfect picture of abject failure, making this the only thing you’ve gotten right all day.

You don’t expect Minho to ask after your current state, so you’re not disappointed when he doesn’t. Or, at least, you will yourself not to be. In reality, your bated breath is held for a second or two before you remember who you’re dealing with. 

He does speak, though, which surprises you. Your first guess would’ve been that he’d give a hard pass on your dramatics and wander back out the door while your face was buried in your arms.

“Spider,” he sighs, and his tone is so gentle that it shocks the hell out of you. Intimate, almost, even if it is just a caricature. “Call it a night.”

More curious than cautious, you lift your head enough to blink up at him. Between his eyebrows, there’s a small crease that you don’t see often enough to competently translate. You stare at the tension there for a beat longer than you mean to before your gaze drifts downward to meet his.

See? Beautiful.

The second Minho sees your eyebrows raise slightly in question, a switch flips. He shuts the light off, irons out his expression. Whatever softness you found there is gone as quickly as it came.

He clears his throat, then huffs, “Come on.”

You frown and gesture to the screen ahead, pointing out the program you’ve spent all goddamn day working on to no avail. The silent protest doesn’t work on Minho. His stare only becomes more expectant the longer he levels it at you.

“Seriously. Fuck it.”

Having chosen the hill you plan to die on, you envision roots tying your unmoving body to the floor beneath you. Your frown deepens. No, you think emphatically, as if making your internal monologue shout will make him listen.

Minho tries again. “It’ll be here to ruin your day tomorrow.”

You don’t budge, and it pulls an exasperated noise out of him. Curling his right hand into a loose fist, he taps the knuckle of his index finger lightly against your elbow, like the contact will force your mental task list to shut down. 

“I’m bored.”

You know exactly what that means.

“Come up to the roof with me.”

Strike that.

“The roof?” You peep, hardened expression smashed to bits before you can blink.

Minho looks a little too pleased by your sudden concession. He even makes one of his own, chuckling slightly before he rolls his eyes and elaborates, “It’s nice out.”

It’s nice out, so you want to fuck me… on the roof?

The hand at your elbow pulls away and re-routes towards the back pocket of his jeans. When it returns to the space between you, there’s a dented, silver flask glinting in his grip. He shakes it, arches one eyebrow, and tops it all off with a wolfish grin that makes your stomach flip. 

“Stolen whisky tastes best in restricted areas, I hear.”

He nods his head towards the door, beckoning you to give in, and you’re on your feet without needing the invitation to be repeated. 

The sudden movement after sitting for so long means that your body isn’t as enthusiastic as your brain. A sharp pinch pulls a slight gasp out of you. That’s the extent of your own reaction, but Minho isn’t used to this the way you are. Alert eyes flick down to where your residual limb slots into your manufactured one, then back up to search your face. 

Once again, he asks without saying a word. You answer with a wave of your hand, “All good.”

Minho’s concern doesn’t immediately dissipate. To prove that you meant what you said, you snatch the packet of honey twists out of his unsuspecting hand and circle around the desk until you’re face to face. 

“If I’m on my ass for too long, my leg forgets how to leg,” you explain, grinning more out of triumph than reassurance. Then, you dangle your reclaimed prize from your fingertips because you are nothing if not a little shit. “I’m not a doctor, but I think science says that food helps.”

“Science says?” Minho snorts. 

You nod authoritatively, then you turn to the spare folding chair near your work station. Your jacket waits for you there, carefully folded on the cracked, plastic-coated cushion. Shrugging it on, you shove the honey twists in your right pocket and tease, “Sure does.”

The corner of his mouth tugs slightly upwards, and you swear there’s an affectionate smile threatening to break loose.

It doesn’t.

Instead, after pushing off his palms, Minho stands fully upright, nods his head towards the door a second time, and starts making his way towards it. You follow because you always do, biting back your lips to keep your giddiness to yourself.

As the pair of you exit and head down the hallway in comfortable quiet, you note his proximity to you. It’s always the same; he’s always close by but never near enough to touch. The edge of his shirt sleeve brushes against your arm, although his skin never does. 

You stopped wondering about that a long time ago, unwilling to figure out if this is a tactic, too.

Halfway to the nearest stairwell, Jeongin appears in a doorway. The room he emerges from used to be an office for the human resources department, back when the factory was operational — back when employers bothered with pretending to give a shit. 

Now, the room’s function lands somewhere between a bar and a bedroom. The latter only comes into play when the former makes staggering upstairs to the residential area too much of a hassle. From what you can see over the younger man’s shoulder, that’ll likely be the case tonight.

Jeongin gives you a cursory smile before directing his full attention to the man keeping cursory distance at your side.

None of it makes sense to you, all this effort spent to hide intentions. Maybe, you think, that’s why you’re so fucking terrible at it.

“Hey, hyung!” Jeongin chirps as the pair of you approach. He lifts his hand to wave, but it just looks like he’s shaking the deck of cards in his hand at Minho. “Do you want to —”

Without slowing down, Minho cuts him off mid-ask and at the knees. “No.”

And then his finger slips into the belt loop of your jeans, tugging you along beside him as he keeps up the pace. You’re gone before you can see Jeongin’s face fall, but you’re sure it does. 

Yours would.

When you reach the stairs, Minho matches your careful pace, albeit much less awkwardly. For as life-saving as the chunk of metal and carbon fiber on your right side has been, there’s at least one problem it hasn’t solved: going up steps is a bitch. 

To compensate for your less dynamic knee, your left leg takes stairs two at a time so you can simply step straight up with your right. And even though you’re a bit out of breath from the extra effort, you open your mouth to comment on what you just witnessed.

Minho stops you before you can start. Shooting you a look you know far too well, he sighs, “Don’t.”

You’re as good a faker as you are a listener.

“He’s just trying to —”

He releases his grip on your belt loop. It’s the only reason you realize he’d still been holding on. Stopping at the landing, Minho turns to look back at you. “Can’t think of anything I want to do less than sit next to someone and have to hear about their fucking day.”

Eyebrows raised, you stare up at him. This time, you don’t say a word, letting your expression speak for you.

“With the ever-present risk that I’ll be murdered by the state tomorrow, forgive me if I’m not wasting today by listening to shit I don’t care about.”

There it is, you think.

The combat leader’s insistence that his life will only end one way: too soon and bloody.

That unexploded ordnance drops heavy between you. You step over it, joining him on the landing, and you don’t look back. Just at Minho, who watches you carefully for a reaction; whose tension leaves his muscles when the slight, upward curve of your mouth says, I understand.

Together, you climb the remaining flight until you reach the thick, steel door leading out to the roof. It’s barely functional, like the vast majority of the factory, and can’t shut all the way. With more force than is even remotely necessary, he kicks it fully open. The thick, rubber tread of his boot thuds against the metal. It’s quickly drowned out by the strangled squeak of its hinges.

You’re at least slightly thankful that those hinges don’t explode into a cloud of rust.

On his way to the ledge, Minho grabs two empty buckets from the pile of discarded odds-and-ends near the doorway. The rest of the pile — mainly two-by-four planks too busted to rehab and similarly spent range targets — threatens to collapse without its foundation, but neither of you stops to fix it. He leads, and you follow, ultimately coming to a stop near the ledge.

“So?” 

His insufficient question is underscored by the two buckets landing mouth-down on the concrete with twin thunks.

You’re still blinking through your confusion when he unceremoniously drops himself on the furthest bucket and when he stretches out his leg to tap the remaining one with the side of his boot. Coincidentally, you’re still waiting for the rest of his inquiry when you sit — much more gently — next to him. This time, it’s you who moves, nudging your chrome knee against his flesh-and-bone.

Minho finally takes the hint and continues, pulling out his flask as he does. “How was your day?”

The whiplash makes your neck ache.

Remind me again about the last thing you said to me.

After taking a swig without incident, he passes the flask to you. You take your sip — small, cautious — and immediately let out some clownish, choking noise when the strong notes of wooden barrel hit your taste buds.

“Oh, that’s —” You cough, nose scrunching. Whisky-laced breath slips out of your teeth in the form of a hiss. “Absolutely wretched, I fear.”

For the first time all night, Minho’s mask cracks, and a full-fledged laugh tumbles out of his mouth, high and clear as it cuts through the otherwise dead air.

“It’s not,” he counters. Without taking his eyes off your pout, he lifts a hand to catch the flask that you toss at him. “You’re just childish.”

In recompense, you swat his arm. 

He lets you.

“Shut up.” Your distinctly childish comeback is breathy because, like always, your laughter isn’t something you can successfully hide. “Am not.”

Another swig, no further incidents.

“Think you need to be demoted. Maybe I should start calling you baby instead of Spider.”

The violent flutter in your chest doesn’t seem to care that what it heard isn’t at all what he meant. For now, you let it happen. You focus instead on his creased eyes and barely-crooked smile; drink them in as quickly as you can, knowing that your window is closing.

As rare as it is, levity looks perfect on him.

While your laughter ebbs, the wind kicks up slightly, bringing a chill with it. You pull your jacket tighter around you as you watch browned leaves spin in pirouettes near your feet. Their presence here is surprising, given how devastating the War was to the ecosystem, but it’s welcomed. It’s a reminder sorely needed: nothing’s ever truly fucked beyond repair.

Minho pipes up suddenly, “You never answered me, you know.” And even though his voice is low, it startles you.

He’s too busy fiddling with the cap of his flask to see it when you turn your head to look quizzically at him. He probably missed the way you jolted just then, too, which is fine by you. Your goldfish brain is still trying to recall what he asked that went without a reply.

When you remain quiet, he supplies, “Your day.” 

As it turns out, you’re just as stunned by his question the second time he poses it. Part of you wants to remind him that he could be murdered by the state tomorrow, just in case he wants to reclaim his wasted time. The rest watches as his absentminded fidgeting stops, and his head lifts to look at you — not impatiently, not sardonically, but with the tiniest bit of insecurity scribbled into his slightly furrowed brow.

Oh.

Now, you’re frozen into silence for an entirely different, entirely devastating reason: he wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t genuinely want to know.

A self-effacing laugh serves as a smokescreen for how fucking flustered that realization makes you. 

“Well, I had plans to go phishing, but they fell through.”

“Beach advisory?” He feigns a frown, making your lips curve upwards at the corners. “Those hypocrites at Thanotech really need to stop dumping their shit into the reservoir.”

At this, you laugh outright. 

This is the Minho that no one but you could pick out of a lineup: the one that will take a bit and run with it, who lets his guard down and catches you off yours. This one may not be yours — you know he isn’t, not really — but at times like this, when it’s just the two of you alone, it feels like he is.

“I’ll make sure to tell them you said so.” You pat his thigh, which tenses slightly in the second your palm rests on it. Redirecting your thoughts from where they’re headed, you pull your hand back and tuck it into your jacket pocket. “I really think they’ll listen if they know Lee Minho’s the one asking.”

His eyes roll in response, but the amused smirk he wears doesn’t dissipate. It’s still there when he slowly leans closer, making your breath hitch. His hand shifts closer, too, and your pulse hammers harder with every millimeter that’s cast aside.

There’s an old saying about where the shame should fall when a person gets fooled twice. You practically feel it collide with your thick skull when, for the second time, Minho turns the tables. He nearly turns your pocket inside out in the process, hand snatching the yet-untouched packet of honey crisps before you even know what’s happening.

Just like last time, you put up no fight when he settles back into his own makeshift chair with a smug glint in his eyes. A forlorn sigh is covered by the racket of plastic ripping, followed soon after by a faint crunch.

“Speaking of bait,” he snickers once he’s swallowed. “What are you dangling?”

You really want to hate him for that segue, along with all the rest of his committed atrocities, but you can’t. So, you offer up the only thing you still have: 

Technobabble.

“The plan is to sneak in a program to mine data. So long as nobody interrupts me —” You pause to shoot him a pointed look. “— I’ll finish coding it tomorrow and fire it off at some grunt in Ulsan’s fiscal department using a cloned, corporate email account.”

“You think they’ll fall for it?” Minho asks, curiosity piqued.

You flash a grin. “I know they will. Nothing spooks a low-level employee quite like an overdue, mandatory, cybersecurity compliance attestation.”

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he looks almost proud when he hears about the form of your Trojan horse. It’s certainly what you feel blooming in your chest, especially when you pluck the crisp from between his unsuspecting fingers and pop it into your own mouth.

“Once the program installs, it’ll start reaping what they have access to,” you explain. “I’m sure it’ll be limited at the start, quarterly budget reports and such.” 

You shrug dismissively, then look down at your hands. There’s no way this is interesting to someone that isn’t you, but he asked, and you’re answering, and you can’t seem to stop talking. 

“But those point me in the direction of invoices and their line items, which gets me to payment accounts, recipients, and other shit they don’t want me to know. It’s a paper trail leading to a paper trail, honestly, but it’s —”

“— how you weave a web.”

It stops your brain in its tracks, leaves your would-be sentence to peter out. You can’t remember the last time anyone followed where your explanations led, let alone saw the importance of all the tiny, tedious steps you take. All the intricacies of your carefully plotted architecture.

With you stalled out, Minho finishes that thought where he left off. “Strand by strand.”

“Yeah,” you exhale, warmth creeping from your chest to your cheeks. “Strand by strand.”

You sit on that bucket on the roof for however long it takes for your ass to go numb, and then you sit some more. Hours, maybe a day or two — irrelevant, as far as you’re concerned. You have Minho next to you and a burgeoning sunrise ahead; and you’ll bask in the glow you’ve found there for as much time as you can.

Minho, it seems, has other plans.

He sighs and flattens his palms against his knees before standing, causing the bucket he’d been occupying to scrape against the concrete. The noise is what gets your attention, not the movement. You turn to look up at him. Your disappointment is more than likely broadcasted all over your face.

“Stay with me,” you whine before you can stop yourself.

Needy isn’t normally a word you’d use to describe yourself; you’re far from it. Now, though… In this moment, it might be written in blaring red letters on your forehead, judging by the extremely brief flash of surprise you see in front of you. It’s gone as quickly as it came. The twinge of embarrassment you feel sticks around to keep you warm.

Minho is quiet for a beat, like he’s got something to consider. Whatever he decides on, it makes his head tilt to the side. A devilish look takes over his features, washing from his narrowed eyes to his tilted lips. All mischief, he counters, “Fuck me.”

Why do those things have to be mutually exclusive?

You don’t voice your question out loud, even though you kind of want to scream it, because he holds his hand out to help you up, and instant gratification together feels so much better than waiting through a delay alone. So, you take his hand, just like he knew you would, and you follow. 

Back to the door, back down to the second level of the factory, back to your room in an otherwise unoccupied wing, until the door is shut softly behind you.

Every single one of your rendezvous has been different from the last. The time, location, everything varies, not unlike the version of himself that Minho lets you see. Even though the steps change completely from tryst to tryst, they still feel like they’ve been choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time.

For example, he’s never caged you against a wall and pinned your wrists one-handed above your head before, but your body reacts as if this is the sole position it was made to occupy in life.

His teeth nip at the side of your neck, and your head falls back instinctively. You don’t give a shit about the muted thump of your skull against the brick, but Minho seems to. 

“Watch yourself,” he murmurs, lips fluttering against your throat. Despite the muted volume, his tone carries an authority to it that makes even your chrome knee weak. “If you wind up with a concussion, I’m not explaining it to Doc.”

You gasp when his tongue flicks out to soothe the sting his teeth leave behind. Beyond desperate, you push up on your toes to bring yourself closer to his mouth. It’s further out of reach than you remember — it shouldn’t be. Barely a week has gone by since he last had you like this. 

Embarrassingly breathless already, you ask, “Have you gotten taller? What have they been feeding you?”

His knee comes forward slowly to nudge yours apart. You make room, letting his thigh press into the gap created. If his left hand wasn’t keeping you stretched up to your full height, you’d be riding that thigh by now.

“You know what I eat.”

Your eyes roll back. You’re not sure if that’s a reaction to his line or the way he clenches his thigh, shifting it further into the space between your spread legs. Either way, that taut muscle is only millimeters away from your cunt now; the low hum that rumbles from his chest says that he can feel the heat rolling off you in waves.

You want so badly to be able to touch him, cling to him, scratch your nails across his scalp and pull him in by his hair. You want him to touch you — really touch you — not just to tease you the way he is, threatening to mark you up with his mouth without following through. 

If you try to tug your arms down, will he let you?

Part of you hopes that he doesn’t. 

At least, not without consequences.

Minho can tell how fucking restless you are. You’re not surprised; you vibrate with want at a frequency he’s always been attuned to. Speaking any of it out loud would be redundant, so you save your breath. His fans warmth over the shell of your ear, pulling the hammer back: “What’s the matter, Spider? You don’t like being the one in the trap?”

You can’t help but tremble at that.

“Fine,” he tuts, finger on the trigger.

Your eyes widen in anticipation when his hand drops its hold on your wrists; and your arms fold slowly back down when he retracts. There’s a muted ache in your muscles from the strain they’d been put under. You can’t say that you mind.

His hands move next to his belt buckle, deft fingers making quick work of the metal before the two pieces dangle on either side of his zipper. That’s the image burned into your brain when he leans in close enough to kiss you. He doesn’t kiss you — he never does — but he finally fires at point blank range:

“Turn around.”

Bang!

It’s so unexpected that you don’t register it as real at first. Neither does Minho, whose demanding gaze stays glued to you. The noise comes again, louder than the first, and you hear the cry that comes with it through the door.

“Spider, are you there?”

Hyunjin.

It’s his voice, you know, but it doesn’t sound right at all. The air of self-assuredness he usually carries is long gone. Whatever’s replaced it sounds completely unlike him in a way that makes your stomach turn.

Minho puts distance between your bodies in the time it takes Hyunjin to push open the door. You notice that he forgot to address his belt buckle, but you suppose it doesn’t matter. The youngest among you is too visibly shaken to see it as he stumbles inside with red-rimmed eyes.

Oh, fuck.

Panicked, you shoot a quick glance at Minho, hoping he’ll see your alarm and know what to do with it. His eyes are locked onto Hyunjin, who comes to a stop in front of you; Minho’s expression is the definition of illegible.

Your hand lifts instinctively to Hyunjin’s shoulder. Apparently, that reassuring touch is all it takes to break the dam; to break him down into sobs.

“Hey!” You gasp, knitting your arms around his frame and hauling him towards you. His face slots into the space where your neck meets your shoulder, allowing his hyperventilated breaths to hit your skin directly. “Hey, it’s —”

You know better than to lie and say it’s okay. 

Minho may be fearless, but it’s Hyunjin that’s the least flappable in the entire group by a long shot. If you were to search back through the last decade, you wouldn’t be able to find a single moment where he seemed annoyed or anxious, let alone fucking devastated to the degree he currently is.

This is the farthest from okay things could possibly be.

You can’t tell if it’s heartbreak, nausea, or both that swells when you fill your fists with the back of his jacket and hold on tight.

From his spot two meters away, Minho cuts to the chase. “What happened to you?”

Hyunjin can’t answer, not at first. 

Maybe, you think, saying whatever it is out loud will confirm the reality of the situation. You don’t push him. Instead, you stop holding him long enough to pull him over to the far corner of your makeshift bedroom, where he drops down to sit on the mattress held off the floor by two wooden pallets. Despite his wiry frame, the force of his collapse makes the wood clatter against the concrete floor below.

When you take a spot beside him, it’s much less quickly, no more graceful. Hyunjin doesn’t mind the hand you place on his shoulder to keep yourself steady. If he hears the click at your manufactured joint over the sound of his own barely-regulated breathing, he doesn’t say so.

Still standing where he was left — where he left you, more like — Minho’s narrowed eyes hone in again on Hyunjin. The expression on his face is just as unreadable as before, and he still won’t look at you.

As much as that bothers you, your own feelings are never your first priority. You turn your head to look from Minho to Hyunjin, whose hands grip the black denim of his jeans like a lifeline. When the latter finally does speak, the explanation hemorrhages out of him, spilling and flooding until there isn’t much air left in the room to breathe.

Three things in particular hit you like a train:

The Bliss Beta is infinitely more insidious than you could’ve imagined — even for Ulsan — and its mass rollout is closer than you ever would’ve guessed.

You now have the data you need to find the servers running the Beta, which means there’s a chance that the way things currently are is the worst they’ll get.

There’s a guillotine blade looming over the Professor’s neck, and it’s your hand on the rope, obligated to let go. It’s your scale that’s tasked with weighing lives.

Nausea, you realize, almost too late.

You grab hold of the wastebasket near the foot of your mattress and squeeze your eyes shut while your honey twists leave you in a hurry.

He loves her.

He loves her, he loves her, he loves her, and there are fifty-one-million faceless reasons why he can’t have her. You feel the weighted stares of every single one of them on you when he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, silver datashard. It’s thin, flat with sharp edges, but it’s a bullet if you’ve ever seen one.

When Hyunjin places it in your hand, your fingers don’t close around it. You can’t even look at it without feeling faint; your body won’t accept the weight of it in your palm. You avert your eyes, praying that your object permanence disappears along with it. 

And then that reflex kicks in again, craving some semblance of safety.

Minho is already watching you intently when you turn your head his way. The relief you feel is immediate, and you don’t have the energy left to pretend that’s not the case.

You love him.

You love him, you love him, you love him, and this goddamn horror show you’re living through feels survivable while he’s around, even if it isn’t. 

Maybe, you think, if you live to see the end, his presence will help you hate yourself less for the things you’re about to do to get there. That’s been the case so far, anyway. You’ve got a decade’s worth of scorched bridges behind you, and the ash on your face has never made him see you any differently.

Hyunjin clears his throat, dragging you back into the moment you don’t want to be a part of. 

“She said there’s multi-level encryption on this thing,” he mumbles, voice weak. His hand envelops yours and gently folds your fingers over your palm, as if he knows damn well you won’t do it yourself. “I don’t have to tell you this, but be careful, Spider. One move too many, and we’re all dead.”

You freeze; he stands, wiping invisible dirt from the front of his jeans. Nothing he attempts will make him feel clean, you know, but you don’t fault him for trying.

Before he can take a single step back towards your door, you reach out and grab his hand, preventing him from leaving.

“Keys,” you croak.

His eyebrows knit together.

“Cryptographic keys — characters. Numbers, usually.” You shake your head to realign your thoughts. It doesn’t do much; your explanation still comes out sputtering. “Each encryption is going to have a different algorithm altering its data, and it’ll be faster if I don’t have to write a separate program to try and find the strings I need.”

Judging by his face, the explanation makes sense, but he still looks as if he has no fucking idea what the answers might be.

For the first time in nearly an hour, Minho speaks. The suddenness of his participation makes both you and Hyunjin flinch.

“Dates,” he offers gruffly. “Ones that are significant to the two of you, maybe.”

The suggestion cracks against your skull like a baseball bat. 

Of all the things you could’ve expected him to say in the presence of someone other than you, something sentimental didn’t even come close to making the list. Hyunjin, it seems, is just as startled by this — by the appearance of your invisible friend, who’s spent ten years refusing to let this side of him be seen.

You make a note to ask Minho where this idea came from. If there are any dates he holds onto, with no one the wiser.

Hyunjin’s brow furrows for a moment while he thinks. Then, the light bulb behind his eyes flashes.

Eureka.

Dashing now towards the door, he calls out to you over his shoulder. “I’ll make you a list,” he promises breathlessly before he disappears altogether.

Without Hyunjin’s voice to fill it, the silence of your room roars in your ears. You need to shrug it off you, physically; move around so that you stop feeling like you’re being hydraulically pressed. 

In a wordless request for help, you hold your hand out to Minho. The jury’s still out as to what you want when he takes it: to drag him down to you, to be hauled to your feet, or to simply have it held. 

For the first time — possibly ever — he doesn’t take it.

Well-practiced hands drop to his belt buckle instead of reaching out to you. He re-fastens it quickly, and over the clink of metal, he grunts, “Stop looking at me like that.”

You blink rapidly when that sucker-punch statement hits you. “Looking at you like what, Minho?” You ask gently, as if your excess will make up for his lack.

“Like I’m your future.”

And just like that, he’s gone without another word or a backwards glance.

Eleven days crawl by without you seeing or hearing from Minho. You struggle to keep count as they pass. You’re so preoccupied that there’s no real difference between them, leaving them all to bleed together. It doesn’t help that all ten nights so far have been more or less sleepless.

While you’d love to say that all your time awake has been productive, you’d be lying. Sure, you spend the vast majority of it with the bright light of your monitors boring into your retinas, but that doesn’t mean you’re actively engaging with the shit displayed there. Between your program and your spent brain, it’s your neural pathways that are most in need of re-writing.

“Goddammit,” you hiss when a shock jolts through your upper right thigh for the umpteenth time today alone. 

Halfway crazy from frustration, you glare down at your quad and see the remaining muscles there twitching violently. And even though it’s been over a year, your brain is still surprised to find that the source of your pain doesn’t exist at all.

That outburst from you certainly isn’t the first, yet it’s the one that catches Chan’s attention. Like you, he’s spent an unhealthy amount of his time in the Hub over the past week and a half, pouring over who knows what. It’s safe to assume that’s how he’d describe your work, too.

“Been especially bad lately, hasn’t it?” He asks, head popping up from behind a stack of files.

He probably doesn’t expect you to squeak out a laugh at the sight of him, but you can’t help yourself. 

“You look like a meerkat when you do that.” The frown you get in response only makes you giggle more, despite yourself. “Like an overworked, overtired, under-caffeinated meerkat.”

Chan works overtime to control his expression, steel himself. It doesn’t work. It never does, no matter how obnoxious you and your comrades are around him because at the end of the day, all he ever is, is fond.

He sighs as he sits up fully in his chair. “Spider.”

It’s funny, you think. He sounds just like your father when he takes that tone with you, although the name he uses is nowhere near the same.

“Talk to Doc.” Realizing he sounded more stern than he meant to, Chan’s mouth softens from a thin, straight line to a slight smile. He adds, “Please.”

And because you’re the best behaved of all his pseudo-children, you don’t put up a fight. You don’t roll your eyes the way Seungmin does, or do the exact opposite of what you’ve been told, like —

Don’t go there.

You just get up, ignoring the strong urge you feel to buckle at the knees and hit the floor, and push your chair back with the underside of your thighs. Chan sees the pained look on your face immediately and moves to stand up and help you. You wave him off.

“All good,” you lie through gritted teeth, bearing weight on your palm as you maneuver your way around your desk. 

Chan may not believe you, but he listens, nonetheless. While you guide yourself from your workstation on the far side of the room towards the door, you try very hard to ignore the thought that keeps ricocheting around your skull like a bullet, shredding whatever grey matter gets in its way.

There’s one person that line wouldn’t have worked on. 

It takes a considerable amount of time to hobble to Doc’s clinic, which is clear on the other side of the compound, but you eventually make it there without breaking too much of a sweat.

In a past life, the space was an employee locker room that featured shower stalls and toilets on one side, and numerous lockers and benches on the other. Jeongin tried his best, but the plumbing was fucked beyond repair; all the utilities were scrapped. Whatever useful parts remained were repurposed elsewhere, while the broken bits wound up in that pile of assorted garbage on the roof.

Don’t.

Due to the size of the space, there’d been a multi-day debate on what to use it for. In the end, the decision was made to give it new life as a makeshift field hospital because Minho was right. The tile and drainage system is ideal for —

Stop it.

When you push through the swinging, double doors and stagger inside, you learn that you’re not today’s only patient. On one of the cots up ahead, Doc’s nimble fingers work to stitch Scraps’ left eyebrow back together, while Felix paces in the background with his hands in his hair.

“I’m so —”

“Felix!” 

Scraps slaps her hands down onto her thigh. The sound echoes off the tile walls like a thunderclap, but she doesn’t flinch at the contact. Doc does, however. She freezes solid, needle-holder in hand.

If Doc is frustrated, she doesn’t show it. That bedside manner of hers is unparalleled. Her gentle voice sounds suspiciously like Chan’s when she pleads, “No violence until I’m done holding a needle near your eye.”

Scraps nods in acknowledgment, which only contributes to the panicked look on Doc’s face. You bite your lips to hold your laughter in as you amble closer and dump yourself onto a nearby cot.

“Seriously — stop apologizing,” Scraps calls over her shoulder. 

If it wasn’t for Doc’s gentle hold on her chin, you suspect that she’d turn her head to look at Felix outright. 

“I told you to raise the stakes, and you did. So, I owe you a gold star for being a good listener, I guess.”

The way he looks at her when she can’t even see him kind of makes you want to sob. That ache only grows when he puts his hands on either side of her head, leans down, and plants a kiss on her hair.

Meanwhile, Doc is muttering, “Please stop moving, please stop moving, please stop moving,” like those are the only words she knows. You feel as guilty as you do grateful; her distress is a sufficient distraction from your own.

“Done!” She chirps moments later. Relief washes over her in a heartbeat, releasing tension from every single muscle cell she has — like she’s successfully disarmed a bomb, rather than sutured a minor injury.

And even though she’s too polite to say it, you swear you can hear her thinking it:

Please leave now.

And they do. They fall into lockstep, with Scraps tucked under Felix’s arm and hers wrapped around his waist.

And you’re still staring at the door once it swings shut again, so lost in all your conflicting thoughts that Doc has to call your name twice to get your attention.

“You’re not due back in for another month or so.” She frowns. “What’s on your mind?”

As usual, you don’t know where to start. You don’t know how to turn the faucet on without overflowing the bathtub, either, so you just let it all pour out.

“Everything was fine — perfect, probably. Or the closest it’s going to get, I guess. Then — I don’t even know what happened, but he won’t fucking look at me now. Won’t talk to me, walks out of a room when I walk in, like he can’t even stand to ignore me in my presence.”

You suck in a breath through your teeth to make up for all the ones you skipped out on while you rambled on. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean you stop rambling.

“And I think it might be breaking my heart. I don’t know. I don’t — I don’t know what to do now. It’s very distracting,” you mutter, frowning. 

A laugh slips out to signal how uncomfortable you are with the sudden intentional vulnerability. It sounds more like the sort of hiccup that precedes a sob. 

“Stupid thing to fixate on when the world’s on fire, isn’t it?”

To say that Doc is taken aback would be an understatement. Her eyes go wide; her lips purse. She pauses for a moment before she ultimately whispers, “I meant your leg.”

You’d go dig your own grave out back if you could walk that far.

“Oh.”

Doc does you the favor of averting her eyes. She focuses instead on her lap, eyes widening without blinking, as if she’ll be able to see her way out of the conversation more easily that way.

Self-conscious now to the point of nausea, you play with the frayed edge of denim that lays over the end of your residual limb. You can’t help but wonder how many right-side pant legs you’ve chopped off over the last twelve months, and what those bits of fabric ended up being used for.

Maybe they’re in that pile on the roof.

“Is mirror therapy helping at all?”

You glance up at Doc. “Not as much as it used to,” you sigh. “I think my brain figured out I was trying to bamboozle it and threw another wall up. Those are all it has at this point — walls and holes.”

It’s quiet for a few moments. Now, you wonder if you’ve taken Doc out of her depth. You were her first — and thankfully remain her only — amputation. If anyone’s gonna stump her, it’s you.

You snicker at your own unspoken joke.

Get it?

“How much do you remember?” She asks, catching you off-guard. It was the fact that she asked you anything that surprised you, not the question itself, but she assumes she’s offended you. Quickly, she apologizes. “I’m sorry. You don’t need to talk about it.”

The truth is, the before and during are both incredibly vague. You know that you went with a small group to Ilsan, planning to fuck up one of WraithCo.’s supply lines, and that their ghouls caught wind of your plans. 

Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. The audio underscoring this montage in your mind is warped to all hell; the faces and voices are blurry, as if they’ve since been censored. Deleted, just like the lower two-thirds of your leg.

As for the after… All that comes to mind is pain, in one form or another.

Fighting off an infection, which left your waking hours in some fever-filled daze that only stopped when the various meds worked their magic and knocked you back unconscious.

Being bed-ridden for an eternity after that fever broke and the infection cleared, too exhausted and depressed to keep your eyes open. 

Aching all over as you forced your body to remember how to walk, too obsessed with your newfound crumb of independence to let anyone see you stumble.

Self-imposed isolation to hide the toll it’d all taken on you, and the frustration that came with knowing what you were doing but being unable to stop yourself.

“Nothing I wouldn’t mind forgetting,” you finally say.

Doc hums thoughtfully but offers nothing beyond a tiny frown. The part of you that wants to know why she’s asking is overrun by the part of you that fears what she’ll tell you; clearly, she’s similarly torn.

Add this to the list of things you’ll have to learn to live without.

Time continues to both slip and crawl by. Days are gone before you can blink; nights encase you in cement, trap you in place. You know it’s not a coincidence. You’re only alone after dark.

Still, it’s not all bad. You’ve certainly been more productive lately, whether or not you truly want to be. That’s not a coincidence, either. You’re capable of accomplishing quite a bit when the only person you truly want to talk to has no interest in listening.

If he did want to listen, you might tell Minho that he was right about the keys to the encryption being linked to dates. You could thank him, if he’d hear you out. Maybe you’d finally summon up the courage to ask where the idea came from.

What if…?

These little hypotheticals of yours only get more painful, the longer you steep in them, and you’re no good at reining your mind in when it starts wandering. It runs off in the same direction every time it goes — back to the night you finished peeling back all the layers.

You know there’s no point in imagining the ways Minho would’ve distracted you then because he didn’t. He was nowhere to be found; and you cried alone in your room, overwhelmed by both the relief of having answers and the all-consuming guilt of knowing what — and who — it cost to get them.

A familiar, prickling feeling at the corners of your eyes pulls you back to the present. You tilt your head back and blink rapidly to keep the dam from breaking. Part of you is proud. This might be the first time you’ve ever managed to keep your feelings to yourself.

“My halmoni always said that holding back your sneezes like that takes a year off your life.”

With a jolt, you snap to attention. Your neck does the same, head falling back down so quickly that your teeth click painfully against one another. The surprise — and the inadvertent scowl it prompts — melts away when you register Jeongin in the doorway.

You frown, although you laugh a little. “That’s horrifying, kid.”

If Jeongin sees you swipe the back of your thumb over your cheekbones, he doesn’t say so. He simply ambles into the Hub and finds his usual spot at the far side of the central table. 

“She said the same thing about being under streetlights when they burn out,” he tuts, taking a seat. He blinks through thoughtful silence for a moment before re-focusing newly-widened eyes on you. “Now that I think about it, she did die young...”

You would’ve loved to hear that theory play out, but the opportunity flies out the door as soon as Hyunjin walks through it. The comment you want to make about his surprising punctuality is swallowed down just as quickly as it bubbles up. His expression tells you that he’s not up for much of anything, let alone teasing. With a cursory nod, he acknowledges that he is, at the very least, capable of noticing his surroundings.

Unfortunately, you’re not capable of looking at him — seeing the state of him — without your bleeding heart cracking right in half.

Chan serves as a sufficient distraction, thankfully. He enters shortly after Hyunjin with both Seungmin and Doc in tow. He ignores the former’s nagging about who knows what and ushers the latter to the chair next to the head of the table. He doesn’t sit, though you wouldn’t have expected him to; he never does. Instead, he stands at the back of his chair with his eyes flicking expectantly over to the door.

In the time it takes you to cross from your workstation to your usual folding chair, the guest list doubles. Holding up the wall in the corner, Jihoon stands with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. To his right, Scraps sits on a rare patch of free space on Chan’s desk, legs swinging idly as they dangle; and to his left, you spy the cat-eyed girl whose name you still haven’t learned. All you know about her is that she works under Hyunjin, and they’re so in-sync that people have taken to calling them siblings.

You see no similarities between them now, however. She has light left in her eyes.

Several others filter in as the minutes pass, most of whom you haven’t yet crossed paths with. Well, you might have. Your days all run together; your short-term memory isn’t firing on all cylinders. You don’t take the opportunity to register their faces now, though. Your eyes only linger for the second it takes to confirm who they aren’t.

Chan turns his head to you, earning your attention. “Where’s —?”

Doc shoots him a look that interrupts his question before he can finish it. She knows what he doesn’t, after all: You’re currently the worst person to turn to for information on Minho’s whereabouts, even though you used to be the first.

Behind you, a heavily-accented voice chimes in, “He’s with little Yongbokie on an errand. They should be back soon.”

You don’t have to turn around to know who’s speaking. Sierra, as she’s known within the collective, has the sort of presence you can feel, even when she can’t be seen. It’s still unclear to you how she wound up a world away from the island she grew up on, but you’re glad that she did, and that she’s on your side. If she wasn’t —

Well…

Suffice it to say, there’s a reason why this foreign mercenary is called what she is — two reasons, actually, according to her native language — and neither bodes well for enemies. Specifically, there’s a mountain of bodies behind her, all of them hacked to bits by those blades she’s so fond of. 

Yeah, you think. Definitely better to keep her close.

“Just start without them,” she snaps at Chan, eye roll evident in her tone. 

Despite outranking her, Chan can’t hide the uneasiness that comes with being addressed by Sierra directly. You watch him swallow the lump in his throat before he clears it fully. “Everyone, listen up,” he says with the sort of gentle authority only he’s capable of. 

You can’t help the smile that tugs at the corner of your mouth. It’s such a stark contrast to the tone that goaded him to speak in the first place.

Still, a hush falls over the Hub immediately.

“I know some of you have heard whispers about this. I don’t necessarily trust that the rumors swirling are accurate —” 

Pointedly, Chan looks at Jeongin, who’s often the point in the relay where things go horribly wrong. The youngest never intends to pass on off-base gossip, but his attention span is about as poor as his audio processing. Jeongin ducks his head down; the tips of his ears go a dangerous shade of red.

“— so I’d like to make sure our record is straight.” Chan claps his hands, and as he rubs his palms together, he turns on his heel towards your side of the table. “Take it away, Spider,” he sings, beaming.

You turn your head quickly to the left and then to the right, searching for whoever the hell he’s truly cold-calling because it simply cannot be you. He knows better; he has to. For the decade you’ve worked together, you’ve hidden behind your screens because you don’t have the stomach for this leadership shit — especially not public speaking. It’s why you nominated him to run the show.

Eyebrows disappearing into your hairline, you stare incredulously back at him, silently begging him to pick the gauntlet back up.

Meanwhile, at least twenty pairs of eyes burn holes into you, like sun rays through a magnifying lens.

Fitting.

“Well,” you eventually manage to squeak out. “I — um… I spent the last month or so spelunking into confidential files relating to the — uhh — the Bliss Beta?”

It’s not a question. You don’t know why you made it sound like one.

Collapsing in on yourself, you knot your fingers on the table in front of you and stare down at your hands. “There’s a facility, it turns out, in — umm —”

“Is this going to take long? If it is, I can go and grab snacks.” Seungmin, from his spot across the table, smirks at you in such a way that you might — for the first time in your life — choose violence. 

That is, if his jokes at your expense didn’t have your nervous stomach churning even harder, sending bile up your throat.

That is, if a cold voice didn’t fly out of nowhere, primed to eviscerate Seungmin before you can even process your own reaction. 

“It’ll be a bit hard for you to chew after swallowing all your teeth, don’t you think?”

You hadn’t noticed Minho enter, but you find him easily now that he’s given himself away. He leans casually against the door frame with his hands in his pockets, leaving his tone as the only indication that he is, in fact, bothered. Everyone that had previously been standing near the door must’ve cleared a perimeter at some point — undoubtedly without being told to.

In response, Chan’s warning look is bifurcated, shot off to both men with equal, albeit subtle force. Seungmin’s face gives way to something apologetic. You can see it in his eyes that he thought he was being funny; that there’s no malice, only an inability to read a fucking room. To the contrary, Minho’s expression is pure venom, jaw set so tight that his teeth could crack.

He may have just interjected on your behalf, but he doesn’t look at you for more than a split second, as if he didn’t mean to concede even that much time.

And even though it feels illegal somehow, you keep your eyes fixed on him, as if you’ll catch another sliver of acknowledgement.

“In Cheongju,” you continue shakily. Your voice barely registers above a whisper, like you’re speaking to a single person, rather than a room full of them. “There’s a facility in Cheongju. All the servers currently associated with the Beta are operating out of there.”

Despite your anxiety, you manage to laugh. “They’re sitting ducks, really. Terrible planning from a security standpoint — either stupidity or arrogance.”

“Both,” Jihoon adds gruffly. If you’re not mistaken, he directs his next line at Seungmin. “Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

You know it wasn’t his intention, but you crack a tiny smile, nonetheless. “Comorbidities, aren’t they?” 

As soon as you say it out loud, your cheeks set to burning. You send a panicked glance to Doc and duck your head, like your fear of looking stupid isn’t on full display. “Please tell me I used that term correctly,” you mutter, feeling instant relief when she nods and a profound sense of comfort when she pats your still-clenched hands.

“So, what are we going to do about it?” Sierra cuts to the chase, as she often does. “Arson?”

Her eyes sparkle at the suggestion. You find yourself surprised that she’s offered something so tame. Only a week ago, her response to seeing a cockroach in the canteen was to shoot at it.

Not for nothing, you’re also surprised by how endearing you still find that little anecdote — but maybe you shouldn’t be. It’s not the first time you’ve developed a soft spot for someone so sharp.

Reflexively, you look over at Minho. You see his eyes flicker, like he’d averted them just in time to miss yours. It’s the only reason you have to believe that he’d been watching you, save for the inexplicable warmth you’d felt crawling up your neck.

You don’t know what to do with any of that.

“Destroying the servers would only be a bandage,” you sigh. “I want to fully eradicate the program itself, which means those servers need to remain intact — for now.”

“So, we do it like Daegu, then?” Felix suggests. Judging by his sudden participation, he’s overjoyed to have something to contribute to a conversation he wouldn’t normally follow. “We broke in and set up that…. thing for you, in that room that was like an…. air-conditioned microwave?”

You bite down on your lips to keep from laughing. It’s a miracle that he remembers the Thanotech raid at all with the concussion he sustained in the process. It’s even more incredible that he remembers the non-technical explanation you gave for the server room within that data center.

Shaking your head, you frown. “I need to be on-site for this one.”

“Absolutely not. Fuck no.”

Across the room, Minho now stands fully upright. His hands are no longer in his pockets; they hang at his sides, clenched tightly.

You can’t help the incredulous scoff you let out. Bold of him, you think, to write you off completely and then attempt to dictate where and when you get to exist. That slap in the face still stings, but you keep your tone as light as possible. 

“If something goes wrong, or if things have changed from the schematics I was able to access, I won’t be able to handle it remotely. I need to be there to troubleshoot.” And even though it goes without saying, you remind him anyway: “We’re not getting a second crack at this.”

“I know you don’t remember Ilsan, but I do,” Minho glowers, tone as dark as his eyes. The rest of the room falls into a charged silence; everyone is too tense to breathe, let alone speak. “I remember carrying three-quarters of your body out of Ilsan and spending weeks at your bedside.”

Just like that, the air in your lungs turns to cement. 

How do you admit to not knowing he was even there? 

And what the hell are you supposed to do with this information now that it’s reaching you for the first time — a year after the fact — in front of an audience? 

You try to start somewhere. “Minho —”

“No. I won’t do that again.” His voice is sharp when it cuts you off, but there’s a crack in the blade, so microscopic that you wonder if you’re imagining things. He clears his throat to try and keep himself even. “You don’t get to make that call.”

Here comes that prickling feeling again, causing tears to spring up at the corners of your eyes. You clench your jaw and try to wish them away.

It’s Chan that speaks next. “You’re right. Spider doesn’t get to make that call,” he concedes. Then, his expression turns to stone. “I do. She said there’s no way around it, so she’s going —”

Minho seeks to interrupt, but Chan raises his hand and stops him in his tracks. You want to argue, too, because you’re right here and don’t need to be spoken about, as if you’re not in the room. The leader plows through, unaffected.

“— and because you know what the stakes are, your only job is to keep her safe.”

If the anguished look on Minho’s face says anything, it’s that he wants nothing to do with the burden of keeping you — what’s left of you, rather — in one piece. 

The briefing continues after his outburst, but Minho doesn’t hear a word of it. It all flows past him, waterlogged and warped, without sinking in. He finds it hard to give a shit about that fact, though. 

Clearly, his input doesn’t matter. Worse, the sole order that’s been made of him is fucking redundant. He can’t imagine that the rest of them would mean much, so what does it matter if he didn’t pay attention?

He’s halfway out the door by the time Chan wraps up. Dodging eye contact, Minho turns to leave outright, to disappear somewhere and lick his wounds. One last lash manages to hit him as he goes: 

When you cross the room, you’re not headed his way. No, your quick steps take you straight to Jihoon.

Minho knows that he has no right to feel this bitter. He should be grateful that his pushing you away is having the intended effect — that you might’ve found someone other than him to lean on — but the relief he’s been waiting to feel is nowhere to be found.

It never is.

The quick fixes he’s gotten of you in back rooms and shadows didn’t satiate him, either. Cutting you out completely has only proven to be more of the same ache.

Unwilling to watch the consequences of his own actions unfold, Minho turns sharply out of the doorway. Automatically, his feet carry him down the hall, up the stairs towards the roof. His brain might tell him otherwise if it wasn’t currently swimming, but his body acts on its own, seeking out the last place and time where he didn’t feel like this.

It’s a bad call, he realizes as he ascends.

He’ll never be able to recreate a scene with half the cast absent. The stage directions are fucked now. There’s no reason to take the steps one at a time now that he’s alone, but he still does. Without context, his motivations make no sense; and his hands don’t know what the hell to do without a belt loop hooked underneath one of his fingers. They twitch in the absence of denim. 

With every step, he repeats his only line:

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And when he reaches that busted fucking door and kicks it with everything he has, no one looks at him with amused disapproval.

It’s all wrong.

Steel hits cement with a sickening clang that’s still ringing out as he stalks over to the ledge and drops himself down on a familiar, overturned bucket. Its counterpart sits unoccupied at his side. Minho can’t look at it, can’t get up to throw it off the fucking roof, can’t do anything except simmer in his rage because —

Your only job is to keep her safe.

He tilts his head back, closes his eyes, and shouts into the void above, “Fuck!”

As if he needs to be told. 

As if he hasn’t been trying to do exactly that for all the years he’s known you, driving nails further into his own goddam coffin with every second spent in your web.

Elbows come to rest on his knees. His face falls, too, until it drops into his palms. No matter how hard he tries to control his breathing, it comes out through gritted teeth, seething.

The fucking audacity.

Even if Minho hasn’t given you a reason to know better, Chan should. He’s seen better, firsthand.

Every time Chan stopped by the clinic to check in on you, he found Minho already sitting next to your glorified cot, watching your sleeping form like a hawk for any sign of distress. 

Chan didn’t need to ask how your hair ended up in poorly-executed braids because the unskilled hands that made them were wringing themselves at your side. He never needed to ask why, either. When you finally stopped thrashing through nightmares, you didn’t wake up to find yourself tangled in inescapable knots.

Keep her safe.

That’s the fucking problem, isn’t it? 

When his candle gets snuffed out — and he knows it will, can feel it in his bones that this is it — who’s going to keep you safe? 

Hyunjin doesn’t have the capacity — not anymore. Minho was there with you the night Hyunjin’s whole world exploded into pieces. You saw love, but Minho saw your future. He sees it every time he looks at Hyunjin, who’s still listless, still lingering on the periphery like a fucking ghost. Hyunjin will never be the same, and if Minho lets himself get any closer to you than he already has, you’ll wind up just as empty.

Then who?

Chan is too busy. Doc is just as preoccupied, and as kind as she is, she’s never understood you — not really. Felix and Scraps can barely manage themselves; you’ll fall through the cracks amidst their bullshit shenanigans. Neither Seungmin nor Jeongin can be trusted with anything —  or anyone — this important. They’re both fucking disasters in their own right, although Jeongin may eventually grow out of that. Changbin is too reclusive, and so is Jihoon; Jisung’s an anxious mess. Sierra is, at absolute minimum, insane.

And Minho may be the worst of them, but he tried his best for you. He’s still trying, even though that means keeping you as far away from him as possible.

“Fuck,” he repeats, albeit much less strongly.

That pathetic, choked-out word hits the air and dissipates quickly, leaving Minho alone in self-imposed exile. He stays there until sunrise, when the unoccupied bucket to his left becomes too visible to tolerate.

The next time Minho steps foot in the Hub, it’s much less crowded than the last. In fact, for what might be the first time ever, he’s beaten everyone else in. It’s no wonder; his stomach has been churning for hours now, and it was useless to keep laying in a bed he couldn’t sleep in.

Because life is far from fair, you’re the second to arrive. He doesn’t have to see you enter to know it; definitely doesn’t need to look up to confirm that it was your deliberate, slightly uneven footfalls he heard coming up the hall. It’s a reflex, though. His gaze lifts just in time to meet yours.

“Oh,” you peep, eyes bright despite the dark circles below them. “Hi.”

You seem startled to find Minho here ahead of you. Warranted, he thinks. The sunshine you cast on him isn’t, but you don’t try to withhold it — or maybe you can’t. As much as he loves that about you, it confuses the shit out of him and scares him just as badly. You either didn’t get the memo when you chose this life, or you don’t feel the crushing weight of it yet: 

Sparks like yours can’t last forever.

His voice sounds like gravel after last night’s anxious reflux, but he echoes you, nonetheless, “Hi.”

And then Chan walks in. He stops short when he sees the two of you, eyes flicking from your face to Minho’s with barely-hidden intrigue. Somehow, he misses the daggers Minho shoots at him with eyes alone.

“I re-routed everyone else to the vans and told them to load their shit. You ready?” Chan poses the question to both of you, but his focus is fixed solely on you. It lingers for a moment, settles in somewhere between the lines. 

Minho doesn't know what’s going on, but he does know that he hates whatever it is.

You nod. Whether that’s in response to what was asked or what wasn’t, he can’t say. Your mouth sits in a tight, straight line. That, Minho can easily translate to feigned confidence. You’re not ready; you’re not good at bluffing, either. 

He sees his window in that bit of doubt and tries to leap through it. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

It doesn’t sound as firm as he wants it to. If you listen closely — and you always do — it probably sounds like he’s pleading, which feels both alien and illegal to Minho. He clears his throat. “We can do this without you, Spider. I’m serious. Tell me how to get you set up for remote access, and I’ll —”

“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this for you to understand: You can’t do this without me. You need me.”

Despite what you say, there’s no heat in the way you say it. It sounds like you’re pleading, too — scratching at the door to be let in. He knows you well enough to catch the subtext; to know that you’re not just talking about the job. But Minho can’t make his mouth move. Likewise, he can’t turn away.

Stop looking at her like she’s your future.

Chan doesn’t have time for the thousands of things going unsaid, so he interjects with an exasperated grunt, “Vans.” He points to the clock before gesturing between you and Minho. “Ten minutes, or you’re both walking to Cheongju.”

Neither of you moves once he clears the threshold and disappears again. Say something, he tells himself. Say anything.

He doesn’t.

“You didn’t sleep last night,” you muse, eyes narrowing slightly with concern. It’s not a question. There’s no uncertainty in the way you look at him, although that’s nothing new. “I read somewhere that peppermint gum helps with reflux.” 

You shrug, like it’s simply a fact you’re sharing. It’s not. It’s the millionth way you’ve found to say “I love you” without using those words.

Minho slips off the empty workstation desk he’s been sitting on, dusts off the back of his jeans once he’s back at his full height. With a nod of his head, he gestures to your workstation. “Take what you need,” he advises quietly.

When he moves towards the door, you move forward into the room. Your paths cross in the middle, but Minho keeps his distance, too aware of that magnetism of yours to take any risks now. Upon reaching the door, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder to call out your name. As if you were anticipating it, you look up from the desk drawer you’re combing through.

He freezes for a moment, although he doesn’t mean to. You might be the only person capable of catching him off-guard. Once his brain stops lagging, he says only half of what he wants to: “Don’t forget your mask.

Hurriedly, like you really would’ve forgotten, you pull open a drawer and fish out a black gaiter, which you then tuck into the zippered pocket of your jacket. Instantly, Minho’s posture gets a little less rigid. Not for nothing, yours does, too.

“Thanks,” you sigh. The corners of your mouth raise slightly. From what he’s been hearing lately, this might be the closest you’ve been to smiling in weeks. Your reaction stops when you notice the way he’s halfway out of the room. “No need to wait on me. I’ll meet you in the loading dock in a minute.”

Minho stalls, feet unwilling to move, until you go back to gathering items. He nods once, as if you’ll even see his acknowledgment, then slips off into the hallway without you.

The loading dock he’s headed for is on the opposite side of the factory, but his anxiousness propels him there in half the usual time. His team is loitering around the two vans when he reaches them: one unmarked, one branded, both stolen.

Felix grins from the hood of the primary vehicle, where he sits cross-legged. He slaps his hands on the white metal below and proudly states, “I told you it would work.”

“Let me guess.” Minho looks over at Scraps. “You were the one who hot-wired them.”

She glances apologetically at Felix, then turns back to Minho with a shrug and a sheepish smile. “He tried his best,” she sighs. “If we had all day, he probably would’ve succeeded.”

At this, Felix’s grin droops into a cartoonish frown. “What do you mean probably?”

Minho rolls his eyes. “Enough — and go put a hat on, or you’re getting a full balaclava.” He points to the mess of blue hair spilling onto Felix’s shoulders. “If your fashion statement gets us pinged on a security camera, I’ll kill you myself —”

A laugh rings out behind him. He turns on his heel to find Sierra snickering at Felix’s reddening cheeks, both tattooed hands covering her mouth as she does.

“— and you know better,” Minho snarks, pointing straight at her. “Gloves. Now.”

Scraps’ eyes are as wide as the moon when Minho swivels back towards her. She doesn’t give him the opportunity to say it; she’s already shoving her decorated arms into the sleeves of a plain, black jacket and zipping it up as high as it’ll go. He hears relief leave her in a quiet sigh when his focus finds who he’s truly been looking for.

A few meters away, Jeongin is buried so far under the hood of the secondary van that his feet barely touch the ground. With his target now acquired, Minho crosses to the neighboring bay.

“Well?” He demands, “Did you find them?”

The younger one startles at the sudden questioning; there’s a dull thud when he smacks his head on the underside of the hood.

Jeongin groans, “Aigo,” and carefully ducks his head until it clears the obstacle above him. His cheeks are pink and smattered with both dirt and grease — and the mess only gets worse when he mindlessly wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his semi-blackened hand. 

“Behind the radiator on this one.” Jeongin then thumbs over his shoulder to the van Felix sits on. “That one was attached to the undercarriage, near the fuel tank.”

With a grunt, Jeongin exhumes himself from the engine compartment and hops to his feet. It’s completely unnecessary, but he drops the tracker he just detached onto the concrete and smashes it under his steel-toed boot. 

“You won’t need the GPS blocker anymore, so make sure to turn it off,” he advises. And he clearly didn’t learn his lesson thirty seconds ago because he taps one of his temples, leaving a dirty fingerprint behind. “Otherwise, it’ll interfere with your comms.”

Jeongin then blinks up at Minho like he’s expecting a pat on the head. 

Over my dead body. 

Minho instead points at the shards of plastic littering the ground. Affect flat, he tells his junior to clean that shit up, which is the closest he will ever fucking get to you did good, kid. The second Minho steps away, Jeongin drops down to hurriedly scoop the broken bits into his palm.

While he waits on the rest of the group — namely you — to roll up, Minho busies himself with checking supplies. 

The unmarked van will carry the backup team to a rendezvous point half a kilometer away from the Ulsan facility, just in case. For this reason, it’ll also carry the big guns, which — like the vans themselves — were nicked from corpo rats. The seats inside were gutted immediately to clear out a cargo area. The trip sure as shit won’t be comfortable, but six people and a few ammo bags will fit inside without much issue. 

Most importantly, there’s enough room for Minho’s crown jewel: a goddamn, motherfucking anti-tank gun. He’s been dying to try it out since the WraithCo. raid that brought it into his possession, but he has a sinking feeling that he never will.

Moving on to the primary van, Minho notes the logo emblazoned on the side. This one was harder to steal than its counterpart, but you stressed the necessity, and he made it happen. Now, when the infiltration team drives up to the facility, it’ll be under the guise of the outsourced IT company that Ulsan uses for routine maintenance. 

According to the data you managed to reap, Ulsan’s made two glaring security errors, likely because they assume they’re infallible — not handling their own shit in-house, and scheduling their tech contractors to pop by on the same dates every month. Both details were barely footnoted in the reports; anyone but you wouldn’t have thought twice about them.

Something twinges in his chest when his thoughts start wandering in your direction, so Minho shakes his head to clear them. It doesn’t work. Instead, it seems to summon you. You step onto the loading dock a few seconds later.

You’ve changed since Minho left the Hub. The lapse in time makes sense now that his eyes sweep over your frame. The black jeans you’re wearing now aren’t chopped halfway up the right side. In order to conceal that highly recognizable part of you, you struggled through the significant extra time it takes to get your artificial foot through the openings — and he didn’t have to tell you to do any of this, unlike the rest of the team.

It’s been so long since you’ve been one of the boots of the ground that he underestimated you. Clearly, he shouldn’t have because you haven’t skipped a single detail. The treads of your boots have been filed down; but the platform sole remains intact, concealing the brand and size, as well as your true height. Specially-designed black gloves cover your hands, so you can utilize whatever touchscreens and keys you come across without leaving your trace behind. Likewise, the gaiter you grabbed at the last minute rests just below your chin, ready to cover your mouth and nose.

His breath catches in his throat when he sees the long-sleeved black top hanging loosely and hiding your figure. He wants to ask if you remember, but he doubts you do. You borrowed it from him so many years ago that it might as well be yours now.

To stop himself from staring, Minho starts to address the group. “Now that our guest of honor has shown up —”

“We still need Jihoon,” you interject with one finger raised, gently asking Minho to wait.

“What?” Minho can’t keep the confusion off his face, and he can’t wrap his head around this curveball you’ve thrown. Incredulously, he scoffs, “It’s a covert break-in.”

There isn’t a single reason he can think of to include the demolitions expert in something requiring finesse.

You don’t respond with words; your eyes flick to Chan, which is enough of a hint. The two of you are planning something — keeping him in the dark about something — but Minho can’t figure out what or why. The leader doesn’t provide much in the way of explanation. All he offers is, “We need a driver and an extra pair of eyes,” as if that’s the whole truth.

Whatever.

The second Jihoon finally walks through the door, Minho immediately starts his briefing.

The main team — including you, Chan, Felix, Sierra, Jihoon, and Minho himself — will head straight to the facility. The reinforcements — Scraps, Changbin, Eunjae, Sunwoo, Hongjoong, and some fucker from Texas known only as “Cowboy” — will wait just outside the property line with range weapons, ready to party with any gatecrashers.

On site, Felix and Sierra will take out security at the gate; only two men guard that post at any given time. Meanwhile, you’ll slip in and disable the remaining security measures: cameras, mainly, although the alarm system is your biggest priority. To get everyone inside, you’ve cloned the badge of a mid-level researcher who, like the Professor, has authorization beyond the front desk.

From there, the interior group will divide into watchdogs and infiltrators. Given the relatively small size of the building, it shouldn’t take long to get you to the control room, where you’ll take a crack at the main computer housing the Beta’s program. If everything goes as planned, you’ll be in and out within 30 minutes.

Nothing ever goes as planned, though. That Ilsan mission was simpler with significantly lower stakes, and it was a fucking nightmare. Minho can’t think about anything else when he crawls into the back of the van next to you.

For over two hours, Minho has been sitting cross-legged on the floor of this godforsaken van. His brain, unlike his body, is wholly fucking incapable of staying still. No matter how hard he tries to ground himself, he can’t shake the chill running down his spine or the voice in his head. It just keeps repeating the same thought, over and over: 

This van will be missing passengers on the drive back.

“It’s your turn, Minho.”

His head snaps up. Instead of Atropos and her scissors, it’s Felix staring back at him, smiling curiously. Warmly. Minho’s pulse should ease up at the realization, but it doesn’t.

He clears his throat, although his voice still comes out jagged. “My turn?”

“He’s asking everyone what they’re going to do with their lives when this is all over,” you explain. Minho turns his head to look at you. For once, he can’t decipher the look on your face. You laugh when you squeeze his bent knee gently, adding, “Don't worry. I didn’t have an answer, either.”

But it’s not an answer that he lacks, it’s time.

Don’t you know that I’m already dead?

The van slows considerably, shifting from paved roads to gravel. Then, it stops entirely. Jihoon turns in his seat and squints through the holed, metal divider between the cabin and the back of the van. 

“Spider?” He calls out over his shoulder, and it’s no wonder he struggles to identify you. Everyone sitting in this unlit area is cloaked in black from head to toe. 

To help him out, you raise your hand and wave. Even if the dark gloves you’re wearing aren’t visible, your smile is. Your voice is just as bright when you chirp, “Over here!”

Minho sees Jihoon smile for the first time in all the years he’s known him. If he was anyone else, that flicker at the corner of his mouth wouldn’t count for shit; but Minho’s no stranger to steel or your uncanny ability to bend it. He knows your impact when he sees it.

“End of the line,” Jihoon reports. “The next time I stop, you’ll need to sneak out the side. I can see a camera positioned directly above the security vestibule, pointing downward from the left. The van will create a blind spot if you stay low to the ground.”

Now, Jihoon’s involvement is starting to make sense. He’s one of only four people who joined the Black Screen within the last year — after the Ilsan disaster, which led to the incorporation of masks into all field ops. Out of the entire organization, his face is one of the only ones that won’t tip off the guards.

Until the next news cycle, Minho thinks ruefully.

Once the driver is satisfied that the passengers are on the same page, he turns around and sets the van back into motion. Every dip in the uneven road below throws your shoulder against Minho’s; and every time you collide, he wants to wrap his arm around you to keep it from happening again. He doesn’t. Eventually, the opportunity disappears along with the faint crunch of gravel beneath the tires.

The brakes squeak slightly when the van stops a second time. Minho can’t hear the conversation Jihoon is making with the security staff from where he sits, just the slow-motion movements of you, Felix, and Sierra as the three of you inch the side door open and spill onto the driveway like molasses.

All Minho has left to do is wait — for you to come back or for shots to be fired. His pulse picks up when seconds slip by without either of those options playing out. 

It’s funny, he thinks as he pulls his rifle into his lap, that the thing bringing him comfort now is designed to take it away. His thumb hovers over the selective fire switch, flexing in anticipation. Any second now, all his best laid plans will explode. 

It’s only a matter of time until —

“All clear,” comes your voice through static.

Minho flinches. In all the tense silence, he’d completely forgotten about the earpiece he’s wearing. The breath he’d unknowingly been holding leaves him in a hurry, taking the tension in his shoulders with it as he deflates.

“Meet us at the fire exit on the northeast side. I shut off the emergency alert system, too, so we shouldn’t have any issues getting into that stairwell.”

Jihoon is already pulling the van around by the time you finish speaking. In a matter of seconds, he pulls up to the door in question and shifts gears to park. 

You’re standing in the doorway when Minho’s feet hit the ground, eyes crinkling when you see him with a smile he can’t otherwise see. He doesn’t know what to do with that, so he addresses Sierra first. She’s got blood on her temple, and Minho can’t tell whose it is. 

“You didn’t make a mess, did you?” He asks, frowning slightly.

“This is business, not pleasure, so no.” She rolls her eyes. The sigh she lets out reeks of disappointment. “Wrung out their necks like chickens and shoved their bodies into cabinets.”

Glancing quickly at Minho, Felix figures out where his leader’s eyes are focused. “Not hers,” he clarifies, nodding to Sierra. With the back of his sleeve, he reaches over and gently wipes the blood from her face, like he’s cleaning gochujang off a child. “Didn’t leave a trace, though.”

That’s all Minho cares about, so he asks no further questions. Instead, he checks his watch before looking up to check on you. He doesn’t pose the question, but you answer him, regardless; and when you do, you accompany it with your thumb raised.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“All good!”

You then gesture with that thumb to the stairwell over your shoulder and ask, “Shall we?”, as if you’re inviting him to dance.

“You two —” Minho points to Felix and Sierra respectively, drawing their attention. “Station yourselves along the main hallway. If anyone so much as pokes their head out of a doorway, blow it the fuck off. No witnesses.”

Both nod in acknowledgment, but it’s not enough, not when your life is in his hands. He glares expectantly at them, waits in silence until they get the hint.

In tandem, they repeat, “No witnesses.”

Good enough.

Wordlessly, Minho waves his hand and sends them on their way to the second floor. He doesn’t budge until he sees the tops of their heads through the window, disappearing past the landing. Seconds later, Felix’s voice sounds off in Minho’s ear to advise him that the area is clear.

He turns back to the three people standing behind him to ensure they’re ready to move in. The second he sees the pistol in your grip, his stomach lurches so violently that he really might vomit on his boots. 

It’s categorically fucked — so fundamentally, intrinsically wrong — that you’re standing here now with lethal force in your hands. Over ten long years, you’ve never fired a single shot in combat; never stolen the light from someone’s eyes while you’re staring into them. Still, no matter how nauseous the image makes him, the irony of it all can’t be ignored. 

You only know how to shoot because he taught you.

“Let’s move out,” Chan says when Minho doesn’t.

Minho takes point with you close behind him. Behind you, Jihoon follows with an inexplicable duffle bag strapped to his shoulder. By now, Minho knows better than to question what’s going on here. He wouldn’t get an honest answer if he did; and Chan makes no excuses for it as he trails after Jihoon up the stairs.

At the top of the landing, you tap Minho’s shoulder, prompting him to stop. When you gesture up ahead, his eyes follow, gaze sweeping down the long corridor towards the southwest side of the building. Near the end of the hall, a pair of glass doors interrupts the path to the server room, which sits further down on an intersecting corridor. Somewhere between that server room and the bulletproof barrier in front of you is your target: the main computer running the show.

All the signage he can spot declares the area secure and for authorized personnel only. You’re neither safe nor sanctioned, but the badge you pull from inside the neck of your — his — shirt will let you pretend to be. 

Lim Namseok, it reads.

That poor bastard will probably be dead before sunrise for the things you’re about to do. Minho doesn’t have any higher hopes for himself, but he wonders whether or not you’ll be able to sleep when this is over.

No, he ultimately decides. You won’t.

You keep glancing down at that man’s photograph, swallowing hard like you’re choking down an apology. Committing those features to memory, as if you’re obligated to remember each one of the creases in his forehead.

It’s not a question of if that face will pop up in your nightmares but when.

Minho’s both unwilling and unable to let you keep torturing yourself, so he shifts his assault rifle to his non-dominant hand and reaches out to you. Neither of you says a word as he gently removes the badge from between your fingers and lets the lanyard unfurl. You watch the ID flutter downwards until it rests against your chest; his eyes don’t leave your face.

“Come on,” he says softly. “There are fifty-one-million Namseoks out there that still need their asses saved.”

You don’t want to laugh. Your furrowed eyebrows inform him that you’re trying very hard not to, like your half-hearted glare will override the muted chuckle that slips through your mask. His attempt at levity worked, though. You start moving again when he does.

On the way to the first set of security doors, the four of you pass both of your lookouts, who’ve taken up posts half and three-quarters’ way up the corridor, respectively. Not for nothing, both look bored by the lack of action.

When Felix sees Minho, he complains, “Why is it always unpaid fucks like us who have to work on weekends? Shouldn’t these goons be here to justify their salaries?”

He’s not wrong. This place is a fucking ghost town, and although the datashard you combed through said this would be the case, the emptiness still makes the hairs on the back of Minho’s neck stand up. Whether or not he can put his finger on it, something feels off.

“Wouldn’t mind a desk job,” Chan muses, more to himself than to the rest of the group.

Minho leans into the assumption that he wasn’t meant to hear it. If he was, he’d have no choice but to point out that Chan hardly leaves his fucking desk as it is. So, to keep the peace, he keeps his smart mouth shut.

When several more meters come and go, the four of you reach the security checkpoint. With the badge back in hand and nerves evident in your tone, you hold it to the scanner and mutter, “Here goes nothing.”

Nothing is precisely what you get. No sirens wail, no trap doors give way to swallow you all down. The glass panels simply part with a click before sliding outwards along their respective tracks. Your shoulders sag with relief, unlike Minho’s. He carries tension in every single one of his muscle cells; and he only grows more rigid with each passing second.

To keep his pulse down, Minho counts each step he takes towards the control room. It’s an exercise in futility, of course. He’s a goddamn mess, no matter how hard he tries to hide it.

16…17…18…

Present moment excluded, he can only think of one other in which he’s ever experienced fear. Real fear, that is; the kind that begs his limbs to lock. It’s no coincidence that he can barely function now. How could he, with the common denominator trailing behind him like a shadow?

19….20…21 —

Suddenly, you hiss, “Shit!”

By the time he wheels himself around, you’re frozen in place with your pistol aimed through a doorway that wasn’t open when he passed it. A woman in a lab coat stands there with her hand still on the handle, eyes doubling in size when they land on you. Immediately, the coffee mug in her hand drops, sending both liquid and shards of ceramic flying. Both of her hands are in the air before the pieces can settle at her feet.

You fire once, panicked, and strike her in the upper arm. It’s a shit job, one that’ll give her time to call for help before she bleeds out on the floor, so Minho’s instinct takes over.

“Turn around,” he tells you. 

You do. 

From her knees, the woman clutches her bicep and begs Minho to lower his weapon. She still wants to have kids someday, she tells him, sobbing. She’s too young to die.

Unaffected, Minho aims at the space between her brows. “Aren’t we all?”

Bang!

Her body drops to the floor like a bag of cement, lifeless. Although the shot still echoes, it’s otherwise dead silent until you whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Stepping to the side to look at you, Minho furrows his brows. “Don’t be. We can’t leave witnesses.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do it right,” you clarify, voice wavering but louder than before. “You taught me better than that.”

For a minute, he forgets where he is; loses track of the two people standing on eggshells behind you both. There’s definitely still a corpse lying two meters away, but all he sees in his peripheral vision is proof: You may have chosen this life, but this life hasn’t chosen you.

Despite the bullets and the viscera making a mess of the tile nearby, you’re still the person he met a decade ago — someone with the instincts to do what’s needed but too much heart to be swallowed by them.

He hopes you never change.

“There may be more people that we haven’t accounted for.” Chan’s reminder forces three pairs of eyes to focus on him. He urges, “We need to get this done. Spider, where’s the control room?”

With his gun and without a word, Minho gestures to an office several doors down from where the group currently stands. In giant, black letters, it states, “CONTROL ROOM”. Your answer would be redundant at this point, so you don’t bother giving it. Moreover, Chan can fucking read.

“Oh,” is all the leader says before the group presses onward.

You swipe the badge again when you reach the control room. As was the case with the previous door, this one opens without any theatrics. All four of you slip inside before they close on their own, several moments later.

As soon as he steps foot inside, Jihoon whistles. “Damn.”

Damn is right.

The room feels even larger than the dimensions he saw on the blueprints; and with the forced air flowing from the overhead vent, it’s far less welcoming than Minho expected. Halfway between an operating theater and an airplane, the crisp whiteness of his surroundings seem both sterile and stale. He’d wash the feeling off himself if he could, but he can’t, so his skin continues to crawl.

Consuming the back half of the room, a U-shaped desk boasts multiple monitors, keyboards, and switches. Minho has no fucking clue what any of this equipment is supposed to do — he doesn’t give a shit, either — but he sees your eyes go wide with that childlike wonder he’s always been stupefied by.

Your hands twitch, likely from a desire to touch every surface they can find, so you hold them close to your chest while you look around. After studying all the options at your disposal, you take a seat behind the monitor at the left end of the desk.

Jihoon asks what everyone else is wondering: “Is the main computer not the one in the middle?”

Normally, this is the sort of thing you'd laugh at. You don’t, though; you barely seem to have heard it. Transfixed, you simply mumble something about that computer being hardwired to the server room. Minho doesn’t catch the rest of your explanation, but he hears the words “temperature control” and “ventilation” before concentration makes your voice peter out mid-sentence.

The next few minutes pass by without you noticing. Nobody speaks, nobody breathes too loudly for fear of interrupting your train of thought. That’s not to say it’s silent; far from it. Your rhythmic typing takes over the room, and the effect it has on Minho is borderline hypnotic.

A siren song, sort of.

In response to its call, Minho’s mind picks up and races from the room you’re in — back to the Hub, where this all started; to the countless hours he’s spent just like this, watching you work. As mundane as those moments might be in the grand scheme of things, they’re still his happiest.

Maybe he’d count this moment among them if the Sword of Damocles wasn’t swinging so blatantly overhead.

Out of nowhere, you slam your fist down on the desk, startling everyone else enough to flinch. It’s not just the noise that has Minho, Chan, and Jihoon on high alert; it’s the fact that none of them have ever seen you explode like this.

“Goddamn it!”

Immediately, Minho rushes over to where you’re sitting. His eyes dart from your face to the screen, then back again, finding no obvious answers for your distress. 

“What?” He demands, “What’s wrong?”

Eyes glued to the monitor, you continue to mutter, “No, no, no —“

“Spider, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on, so we can fix it.”

“They fucking —” You smack the desk again, like hitting something will knock your thoughts loose. “Fuck!”

For a second, you let the rage simmer. Then, the defeat you still haven’t articulated settles in. You slump down in your chair with your face in your hands, forcing your breathing to slow. 

“They must’ve added it after the Professor defected. I can’t — It wasn’t referenced anywhere on that datashard, Minho. There was nothing.” 

All your panic is funneled directly into the palms of your gloves, making it difficult to decipher what you’re saying. Minho leans closer just in time to hear you cry, “They built a failsafe.”

Minho is out of his fucking depth. In fact, he’s drowning. 

“A failsafe?” He asks, “What, like a back-up program?”

“No, as in, any attempts to delete or alter the program data will invalidate the study.” 

Based on your phrasing, Minho assumes you’re quoting something directly. Swallowing back the acid rising in his throat, he opens his mouth to ask you what the fuck that means. Before he can hurl his question out, you look up at him with abject hopelessness in your eyes; and suddenly, he can’t speak.

“All of their research subjects will be purged,” you spit.

On the other side of the desk, Chan and Jihoon exchange a look — a grim one, but not one of surprise. They’ve arrived at the conclusion before Minho can leap to it, and they’re still talking without saying a single goddamn thing out loud. 

Minho can’t take it anymore. He shouts, ��What the fuck does that mean?”

“If Spider wipes the beta, everyone with that chip goes with it,” Chan sighs. He scrubs his hands over his face until it’s red. “If they don’t drop dead immediately, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that their brains will be permanently and irreparably fucked as a result.”

Now what?

Now what?

Minho’s legs grow less steady by the second. He presses his palm flush against the desktop to keep his knees from buckling. He knows damn well it won’t make a difference; his spinning head will bring him down if his body doesn’t. Everything — including the pulse hammering in his ears — is simultaneously too quiet and too loud.

What the fuck was this all for? The time, the energy, the lives everyone keeps sacrificing to this fucking cause — any of it. 

All of it. 

What’s the point of fighting this hard if Ulsan will always be ten steps ahead?

“Minho!”

His head snaps in your direction only to see that you weren’t the one calling his name. He blinks, confused. Who —?

“Minho, they’re coming! Lim Namseok — terminated yesterday. His badge — it flagged —” 

Scraps’ voice comes shrouded in gunfire. The weak connection makes it even harder to hear her; whatever isn’t exploding is crackling due to the distance. Each word fizzles at the end, as if lit by a fuse.

“— to get out —”

Hand flying to his left ear, Minho presses down the button at the center of his ear piece. “Who’s coming?” He barks, “Scraps, what the fuck is going on?”

When she doesn’t respond, someone else takes over.

“It’s the fucking retention team. A sniper took Eunjae out before any of us even saw them coming,” Hongjoong yells. “They’ve got a unit on the ground and one in the air. I’ll try to shoot the chopper down, but you need to get out of there now.”

“Hongjoong, do as much as you can to tear them up, but don’t push your luck. If you’re outnumbered, fall back before we lose anybody else. Do you copy?”

He doesn’t get a response.

Jihoon moves closer to the door to listen for any incoming footsteps. Hearing none, he growls, “Who the fuck called the boogeymen? Don’t they only deal with defectors?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Chan waves him off, “They’re here, and we need to be anywhere else.”

Despite what he just said, the leader doesn’t move; doesn’t budge a centimeter in any direction. Chan simply glances across the room at you, and when you stare back at him, it’s with the same, eerie calmness. Some quiet resignation that makes no fucking sense under the circumstances.

“If I can’t kill the program entirely, I can make it inoperable long enough for the existing chips to be removed,” you say, like you’ve already had this idea in your pocket. “Force quit, so to speak.”

You don’t elaborate, leaving Minho’s frustration to drive him halfway out of his goddamn mind. Worse, you ignore the way he’s staring so fucking desperately at you and address the person standing several meters behind him. 

“Jihoon, did you bring the party favors?”

In response, Jihoon slips the duffel bag off his shoulder and holds it out to you. Only then do you move. Chan follows behind as you cross towards the door; neither one of you says a thing when you pass Minho, who’s still cemented in place.

“What the fuck are you planning?” He demands, although his voice shakes. “What fucking secrets have you been keeping, and why?” 

Once you secure the duffle bag on your own shoulder, you finally bring yourself to look at him. Above your mask, your eyes soften. They crinkle at the corners, as if you’re smiling, but there are tears brimming at your lash line, threatening to fall.

Please don’t look at me like you don’t have a future.

“For what it’s worth,” you start. Then, you sniffle, breath hitching as you try to get the rest out. “You’ve always had my heart. All of it — every stupid piece.”

And with nothing more than a nod to Jihoon, you’re gone, running out the door with Chan towards the server room before Minho can say a single word to you; before he can even think of chasing after you. 

In the blink of an eye, biceps wrap around him like a vice, pinning his arms behind his back and gripping tighter with every kick he tries to use for leverage.

“Spider!” Minho yells.

He fights with all he has to break free of Jihoon’s hold, to throw one or both of them to the ground, to get to you, but the older man doesn’t bat an eye. As if Minho weighs nothing at all, Jihoon begins hauling him back down the hallway towards the fire exit.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he grunts as he thrashes. “Let me — go —” 

Jihoon doesn’t say a word, doesn’t waste a breath, doesn’t stop pulling. Whatever strength he has left in the reserves, it’s wielded against Minho, not on making apologies. 

Minho bucks again, throwing all the weight from his legs to his back. It does nothing apart from exhaust him, but he can’t stop. He’ll never stop. 

“Spider!”

Close to feral, his anguished shouts devolve to desperate, growling noises. “I swear to god, I’ll bury you for this, Lee —”

He digs his heels into the ground to slow the older man’s momentum. His knees could snap at the force with which he’s resisting. He doesn’t give a shit if they do; he’ll crawl to you if he has to.

“I’ll splatter your brains against the fucking wall when I get my hands on you,” Minho spits. “I’m your commanding fucking officer!”

The next time he kicks, someone grabs him by the ankles to help carry his restless body down the stairs. Felix, judging by that pathetic, apologetic look in his eyes. Minho resolves to kill him, too, when he gets his limbs back. He’ll burn the whole goddamn compound to the ground for standing in his way; for letting you do this.

It should be me.

You’re the best of them, and they’re letting you die. 

It should be me.

They’re going to stand here, watching while you —

A sob he wasn’t prepared for bursts out of his chest in the form of your real name. With it, his threats dissolve into pleas, so goddamn pitiful in comparison to the violent way he still flails.

“Please!” He cries, voice raw. Making himself louder doesn’t make him heard. Incapable of doing anything else, he begs, “Please don’t let her do this. She’s all I have — All I want — Goddamnit, please! I need to get her out of there —”

So useless.

“I have to get her out,” he sobs with one final burst of energy rattling through otherwise spent limbs. 

The arms and hands around him still don’t relent. Over and over, he repeats his only thought in rapid succession until his voice gives out: 

“I have to get her out.”

Two seconds before they drag his body over the threshold, the whole facility shakes, like the earth below has opened up to swallow it down. Even from the opposite side of the building, Minho can hear shattered glass hitting the ground like sheets of rain. With the heavy, black cloud swirling over the southwest section of roof, he might’ve believed in some storm.

He might have.

But now, Minho sees the flames licking at the sky above, and he no longer believes in anything.

There are 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon. By car, the distance flies by in fewer than three hours, assuming the expressways aren’t clogged with corporate commuters. All things considered, it’s not a trip that disrupts a person’s day. It’s straightforward, and above all, it’s easy.

What isn’t easy is crawling on your stomach underneath a blanket of smoke, only to drag half of someone else’s body weight with you down a flight of stairs.

There’s nothing straightforward about slipping through alleyways and ditches, trying to avoid nearby police blockades as they pop up; or attempting to conceal clothes that are singed in some places and actively smoking in others.

That distance does not fly by in three hours, even though the expressways aren’t clogged, because there’s disruption after disruption: 

Starting on foot, only to steal — and later dump — a car when the walk becomes unbearable. 

Wandering blindly without a working mobile, unable to access assistance or a map, and learning that your best guesses are wrong turns more often than not.

Avoiding phones in general due to the localized surge in cell surveillance, knowing even a coded message could wind up with you and any recipients dead.

Stopping repeatedly with burning lungs to check on someone in far worse shape than you, pretending not to hurt for their sake.

No, the estimates are all fucked. 

It takes twenty-one hours to travel the 244 kilometers between Cheongju and Changwon; and you feel the weight of every single one of them when you hobble through the front doors of the factory just to drop, exhausted, onto the floor.

News of your survival spreads like dandelion seeds throughout the compound. Within minutes, it seems, everyone you’ve ever made eye-contact with swings by the clinic to pat you on the back. 

One of them — Sierra, of all people — does you the greatest kindness of all: bringing you a change of clothes and then refusing to stick around for a chat. 

Half of them have never spoken to you before now, though you try not to hold that fact against them. 

Almost all of them throw the word “brave” around like it’s weightless. 

You know better.

What you did was useless in the grand scheme of things, and knowing that is heavy. Crushing, even, so much so that you find it hard to catch your breath. No, you’re sure, what you did was peak cowardice.

You need to get out of this clinic. You need all of these well-wishers to stop looking at you like some tragic hero. You need —

You push off the cot you’re occupying without giving it a second thought. The lightheadedness threatens to take you right back down again, but the feeling passes as quickly as it comes. You stay on your feet, even though you sway, by sheer force of will.

That’s it. There you go.

Doc gave you a once-over when you were first hauled in. Neither one of you truly felt like you were a priority. She may have been justifiably distracted, but in forming her expert opinion, she saw your bruised — not broken — body and declared you “good enough”. You take that glowing assessment at face value now and promptly discard the bit about “needing to stay for observation”.

Her primary concern is that you shouldn’t sleep with your concussion. Baseless, you think ruefully. You’ve been awake for two days and don’t see that changing any time soon.

Before you attempt to make a break for it, you glance at the far end of the clinic. There, a white screen stretches longways across most of the area for privacy, leaving two exits on either side. You don’t see the point of it; it doesn’t hide a thing. Two work lights shine so brightly from their spots by the wall that every movement in front of them is broadcasted on the thin, nylon divider.

As expected, the shadow puppet you’re looking for is still hovering around an unmoving mass in the center of the screen.

Chan.

He’s alive, even though he doesn’t look it. He’s talking, too, which is a marked improvement from the state he was in just a few hours ago. The morphine drip must be helping, you figure. Until now, he had a belt between his teeth to quell the pain, which would’ve kept him quiet.

Otherwise, there’s only one explanation for the corner he’s turned over the past few hours: The love of his life hasn’t left his side since he was carried into the clinic; and he knows she’s there. 

You’ve learned the hard way that both of those conditions must be met to make a difference. 

One without the other isn’t enough.

You can’t hear what they’re murmuring to each other, and you don’t want to. It’s theirs. Thankfully, their hushed tones give you the only confirmation you need: neither of your pseudo-parents will catch and scold you for leaving against medical advice. They’re oblivious; they’re fine; they have each other. You have —

Do you, though?

The person you want to see is coincidentally the only one in the entire compound that hasn’t come by seeking proof of life.

At first, you feared the worst; ripped your cuticles to shreds when the faces passing by weren’t his. No one mentioned his name or asked you if you’d seen him, as if there was no him left to see.

Then, you saw Jihoon walking around with his cheekbone stitched together. There’s some sick comfort in knowing that Minho at least lived long enough to beat his knuckles bloody. You’ve apologized to Jihoon three times now for the effect you caused, but he’s shrugged off every single one of them, like yesterday was just another day at the office.

Wasn’t it?

You creep out the door undetected and make your way to the nearest stairwell. The quiet throughout the halls in the factory isn’t comforting in the way it used to be. No part of the deeply familiar landscape is. 

It should be.

It’s the only real home you’ve ever known — one you thought for sure you’d never see again.

But every empty doorway you pass may as well have a body in it. You still see that woman and her unspent aspirations everywhere you look. You still hear the way she begged for her life before she lost it.

And when the stairs ahead finally come into view — ones you’ve taken a million times — they’re insurmountable. Your body aches automatically, like you’re still pulling Chan’s phantom weight out of the fire. That memory is muscle-deep now, you fear. There’s no getting rid of it.

At the landing, you force yourself forward. The siren song only you can hear is far stronger than the call of your own bed. It lures you around the corner whether or not you’re ready to follow it.

You aren’t, you realize as your steps continue automatically. The guilt threatens to eat you alive, and frankly, you’re prepared to let it. You deserve it. 

Somehow, despite your bullshit insanity and your numerous violations of trust, you still managed to skate through with a life left to live. Considering what you did, you figure it’s only fair that you pay this price — feel this fucking awful — for the rest of your unearned years.

Maybe. 

You don’t know. 

You’re in uncharted territory now because your plan didn’t include an after. 

As your footsteps draw closer to Minho’s room, it dawns on you that you don’t have a plan at all now. You don’t know what the fuck to say to him, let alone where to start. You wonder whether or not you should bother at all. 

If Minho knows you’re back at the compound, that means he made a choice not to find you. You have no right — none whatsoever — to take away his options a second time.

He’ll never forgive you, you tell yourself. If the roles were reversed, you’d do the same.

Maybe.

You don’t know.

You can’t take those hypotheticals and draw conclusions because Minho has never — would never — put you in the position you stranded him in. He wouldn’t hijack a mission you created or exclude you from a half-baked, shittily-executed contingency plan. He’d never force a friend to make some destructive, deathbed promise; wouldn’t have you dragged out of blast radius, kicking and screaming and fighting and spitting, just to drop you in a front-row seat.

He’s the best of all of you, and you did your absolute worst to him.

It’s selfish, walking up to his door now. You know it is. Despite that, you can’t make your body stop moving now that it’s started; can’t keep that boulder from rolling down hill. One last look, you tell yourself. That’s all you need. 

Even if he never looks you in the eyes again, this can be enough.

You raise your hand and reach out to the scraped-up wood with your knuckles leading the way. They’re dirty, you note, caked with soot in every crease. They shouldn’t be. You scrubbed them raw to get the blood and plasma off your skin. It’s possible — likely, even — that your brain is fried beyond fixing, and that you’re imagining things.

Maybe.

You don’t know.

You don’t hear an answer when you finally bring yourself to knock. No, you correct yourself, that’s an answer in and of itself. Acting selfishly once again, you don’t heed that silent reply. You don’t knock again, either. Heart hammering against your ribs, you wrap your hand around the knob and twist.

Part of you wants to laugh. Of course, his is the only door in the whole fucking factory that doesn’t squeak horrifically on its hinges. His tolerance level for annoyance has always been low.

Inching your way over the threshold, you call out, “Minho?” 

And once again, you don’t hear a response.

Standing now inside his room, you don’t see him — not at first. He certainly doesn’t see you. His back leans against the window frame while he slumps on the ledge, presumably staring off in the opposite direction through the glass. His defeated posture is as telling as the position he’s in. 

The Minho you know never sits with his back to a door. It’s too big a risk and too broad a target; an invitation for a nasty surprise. He’s said it a thousand times: whoever kills him needs to look him in the eyes.

This is what it looks like when a person’s given up, you think. 

This is what you did.

Throat thick, you call his name again. This time around, it barely qualifies as a whisper; all your breath is caught up in that tangle in your chest. There’s no way he heard it because you barely did. Really, you should —

“Fuck off,” Minho growls without turning around. “I won’t tell you a third time.”

His words don’t carry the same venom they usually do in circumstances like this. He just sounds hollow, and it devastates you so completely to hear the emptiness that tears start falling without your permission. You don’t move from where you stand, too overwhelmed to process both ambulation and falling apart at the seams.

The lack of footsteps tips him off to your ongoing, unwanted presence.

“When will you people give up? ” After slamming his left fist against the window frame, he pushes himself abruptly off the ledge to his feet. “I don’t want your goddamn sympathy. All I’ve ever fucking wanted is —” 

He wheels around then, fists clenched and ready to swing. All the air in his lungs leaves him when he sees you standing there. The rest of that thought is strangled, and it drops lifeless on the floor.

“You.”

You can’t guess what comes next: screaming, blame, silence, violence. You don’t even know which of those things would be worst — just that he’s entitled to all of the above, and you’ve earned the lot.

What you end up with isn’t an outcome you ever would’ve anticipated. It’s him, his quivering mouth, and his exhausted, red-rimmed eyes taking several steps forward on shaky legs. It’s a desperate bid to close the distance, and a look built on so many conflicting emotions that you can’t even begin to take inventory.

At first, your hammering heart tells you to back away; that he may hate you enough to hurt you. 

But he doesn’t.

He falls to his knees in front of you when his legs ultimately give out. Boneless, he crumples forward onto his palms until his head hangs low between his arms. From where you’re standing, it almost looks like he’s praying. That is, until you notice the way his shoulders shake.

Of all the people you’ve met in your life, Minho is the only one who seemed to be incapable of crying. Nausea swells now that he proves you wrong. It feels like a violation to see him this way, especially knowing that you’re the reason for the state he’s in.

Through a clenched jaw, he begs for answers you didn’t anticipate needing to give: 

“I’m hallucinating, aren’t I? I’ve finally lost my fucking mind?”

Oh.

Without a second thought, you fall to your knees, too. Chrome and carbon fiber scrape against concrete as you scoot yourself closer, and you pray that your proximity will be proof enough that you’re here.

It’s not.

“I left you for dead, and now I’m seeing ghosts. Is that it?”

Heartbroken, you try your best to get through, “Minho, no.”

Tentatively, you reach out to touch his shoulder, thinking that you might be able to ground him, even if you can’t comfort him. Before your fingertips find him, he senses your movement and lifts his head. Your hands automatically reroute to claim either side of his face, fingers sliding into unkempt hair. To your surprise, he doesn’t pull away. Instead, Minho studies your features intently, like he’s ruling out translucence; like his sanity is on the line.

Maybe it is.

More desperately than you ever have before, you drink down the sight of him. Beautiful, you think, even like this. 

Now that you’re able to see his face in full, you find it tear-streaked. Somehow less alarmingly, his right temple is scraped to hell and back, while his left is black-and-blue. It’s a perfect portrait of the fist that struck him. The darkest shades of indigo demarcate where the knuckles dug in deepest; and the scabbed, scarlet lines on his other side illustrate the state of the ground he fell to.

Gravel.

You have to stop yourself from asking who hurt him. After all, it doesn’t fucking matter whose name he’d drop. You already know who’s to blame. 

Nevertheless, Minho sees the question in your eyes, and he tells you, “I tried to run in after you once the bomb went off. After the fire started.”

Of course he did. What did you expect?

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, as if that’ll ever be enough. It doesn’t and won’t erase what you did, yet you repeat it anyway, “I’m so sorry.”

Opening your mouth was a mistake, you quickly realize. The dam breaks, and you can’t keep the words from spilling out. They all pile up, overlapping in time and urgency. 

Every word you say comes out in one breath; sputtered, as if your head has finally broken through the surface of rushing water. “I should’ve told you about the contingency plan, but I knew you’d try to take my place, and I couldn’t —”

“I couldn’t leave you there,” he swears, as if you left him with any other choice. “Even if I was too late to save you, I needed to bring you home.” 

Minho suddenly shifts, prompting your hands to fall from his face. To erase the distance he’s created, he sits back on his knees and pulls you into the space between them. You melt into his body when his arms wrap around you. Just as easily, you give in to the thousandth conflicting reason you’ve found to cry:

He’s never held you like this before.

With his cheek pressed to the side of your bowed head, you can feel his runaway tears. Though his voice wavers, his intentions are rock solid. “I fought like hell to get back to you. They had to knock me out just to get me into the fucking van. I didn’t want to leave you. I swear, I wouldn’t —”

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t stop the rollout,” you cry. “Keeping you in the dark was the only way to keep you safe.” You bury your face into the front of his shirt and repeat it even more emphatically, “Minho, I’m so fucking sorry.”

For a moment, he stays quiet. As curious as you are about his silence, you don’t pull away to look up at him. You think you’d rather actually die than sacrifice a single second of the closeness you walked through hell and back to find.

Eventually, without prompting, Minho does speak. His voice is so soft that his question hardly reaches you. “Why did you do it?”

You pause, unsure of which part of your explanation he wants repeated. If he’s truly asking you to start over from the top, you will. You’re prepared to rake yourself over those coals forever, but you doubt he has the time. 

“In the control room,” he explains when you don’t arrive at the point yourself. “You told me that you love me, and then you ran off to blow yourself up. Why did you leave without letting me respond?”

Once again, you’re thrown; so disoriented that you can’t find the starting line. There were several reasons for running out the way you did: fear that he’d stop you if he caught on too quickly, or that he’d follow before Jihoon could drag him to safety. More than anything, as you sheepishly admit, “I didn’t think you’d say it back.”

He goes silent again. His arms pull you even closer, though you didn’t think it was possible. 

“I think Medusa had it easy,” he confesses, sounding almost self-conscious for the first time in his life. 

Though you’re caught off-guard, you don’t interrupt him. 

He hesitates for a moment, then adds, “I think my curse has it all backwards. I turn to stone when people look at me, not the other way around.”

At this, you finally unearth your face from where it’s buried in his t-shirt. His body goes slightly slack without your frame to hold him up; the look on his face is just as deflated. 

Turning in your spot to face him, you frown, but you tell him the truth. “I’m not as good at reading you as I thought I was.”

“Say it again.” 

You blink.

Minho lifts his hand and cups your cheek. “Please,” he begs, thumb brushing over your skin. “Say it again, so I can get it right this time.”

You lean into his palm, allowing the warmth of it to radiate until you feel it everywhere — feel him everywhere. From there, as is always the case, the reflex takes over. “I love you. I think I always have.”

“I love you,” Minho echoes emphatically. “And unfortunately for you, I think I always will.”

It strikes like a pickaxe, sending cracks through a well-built wall. You swear you can hear the pieces of it falling. If you look closely, you can see the light as it rushes in.

There you are, you think. I knew you were in there somewhere.

He kisses you then, scrambling your brain so thoroughly that you almost forget it’s the first time he ever has. But he’s no stranger to you, and he proves it. Calloused hands maneuver you into his lap without resistance, without interruption, and lean arms snake around you as you straddle him, pinning you against his chest.

In an instant, you thread your fingers through his hair, hellbent on clinging to whatever parts of him you can get your hands on. That desperate grip of yours has always made him lose his mind; tonight isn’t any different. He groans into your mouth when you tug those strands now, proving that you’re no stranger, either.

His tongue flicks over your bottom lip, like he’s scratching at the door to be let in. You let him, let out some needy, mewling sound as he licks into your mouth to claim it.

Yours, you think. Yours, yours, yours.

When he unexpectedly pulls away from you, those little whines of yours only get louder. Kiss-bitten, Minho’s lips flatten into a thin line that indicates he’s fighting off a smile. 

“Spider, I know vulnerability is your thing,” he sighs. His left hand releases its hold on the bottom of your thigh. With it, he gestures to the other side of the room. “But did you mean to leave the door open for this?”

Whipping your head around, you confirm that you did not, in fact, close the door behind you. Heat rises to your face before you can stop it. No matter how thoroughly you rack your brain, you come up short. There’s no excuse— not even a bad one — for a cybersecurity expert being this abysmally accessible offline.

You’re in the middle of questioning your qualifications for the role you occupy when Minho gently pats the side of your leg, wordlessly asking you to leave his lap. With great difficulty and a dash of awkwardness, you do. Just as soon as you’re back on your feet, your body riots. All the exhaustion and soreness you’ve been ignoring screams for acknowledgement.

Minho must hear it. 

“Bed,” he murmurs, punctuating his instruction with a quick kiss to your temple.

Also a first, you note. 

Despite your long history of entanglements, you’ve never once ended up in his sheets. Your heart flutters involuntarily at the prospect; the fever-grade burning in your cheeks only gets worse. Thankfully, with his back now turned to you, Minho doesn’t see how eagerly you stagger towards the stolen bed frame in the corner. You hope he doesn’t hear the relieved moan you let out when you collapse in an aching heap on his mattress.

Across the room, the lock clicks. Footsteps follow so quietly that you would’ve missed them if you didn’t have his gait committed to memory. The person walking back to you looks unfamiliar, though — somehow. There’s no trademark sharpness at the edges now. There’s no want darkening his eyes, but something delicate that softens them.

It’s need, you realize when he comes to drape himself over you. It’s gentle, the way he compensates for your strained muscles and takes it upon himself to shed your clothes, layer by layer. And it’s trust, finally letting him see the way you exist on your own — with your artificial leg removed from the equation and set carefully off to the side.

After positioning himself between your thighs, Minho pauses. His forearms rest on either side of your head, caging you in against the pillow below. Time doesn’t seem to pass while he gazes down at you, and you certainly don’t mind the delay. Of all your moments, this one — here, with him —  is your happiest.

“In case it doesn’t go without saying,” he murmurs, nudging the tip of his nose against yours. “I forgive you for doing what you had to do.”

Blinking quickly doesn’t do much to dispel the tears prickling in the corners of your eyes. You bite your bottom lip and nod to the extent that you can. “Thank you,” you whisper.

“Do me a favor, though?”

“Anything.”

“Kiss me,” he requests, and you do.

When your mouth is finally on his, he rolls his hips forward with deliberate precision, length sliding through your arousal until he enters you, groaning. He maintains that slow, careful pace; coaxes you open for him until the stretch melts from pain to pleasure.

Eloquent as ever, you mewl with your lips still pressed to his. It’s muffled, of course, but there’s no context to miss. “Oh, my god.”

Once you acclimate to his size, Minho could ramp up the intensity if he wanted to. He doesn’t. He takes his time, grinds against you so perfectly that you’d never dream of rushing through this. 

At this pace, every stroke hits deeper than the last; each languid drag of his cock along your walls converts more and more of your thoughts to static.

It’s such a change-up from every other time you’ve wound up underneath him. Part of you wishes that you could scrap all those trysts and pretend that this is your first. In a way, you suppose, it is. There’s a drastic difference between being fucked by Minho and being loved by him. For obvious reasons, you don’t plan on going back to the way it was before.

His length grazes your g-spot, pulling a whimper out of you. Dizzy from the sensation, you don’t notice the way your cunt clenches down on him until he curses under his breath.

“Shit,” he moans, “Wish you knew how perfect you feel wrapped around me. I swear, I’m not leaving this bed as long as you’re in it.”

Another stroke hits you exactly where you crave him most. 

“Please,” you gasp, back arching off the bed. He leans in to capitalize on the length of neck you’ve left exposed; the heat of his tongue on your flesh drives you absolutely insane. “R-right there, Minho. Please, I’m so close.”

Other people have described Minho as defiant, but you have to disagree. He does precisely what you beg of him, angling each thrust to get you gushing around him. And even after he has you shaking underneath him, he refuses to slack off.

The orgasm he pulls from you is so overwhelming that you feel it tingling in your scalp, resonating down your spine until every nerve in your body is a live wire. You’re still somewhere in the stratosphere when Minho unravels, twitching and spilling inside of you until he’s got nothing left to give.

Spent, he pulls out of your heat, maneuvers himself carefully around you, and collapses at your side to catch his breath.

His eyes are closed when you regain enough motor function to turn your head his way. Across his forehead, stray strands of black hair stick to a thin veil of sweat. The slow rise and fall of his chest says he’s halfway to sleep, and with how hypnotic you find it all, you’re nearly there yourself.

Just a few more minutes, you tell yourself. It’s too hard to look away from him. You’d never had the chance to see him this way before, and you know better now than to waste it. 

“Please don’t ever stop looking at me like that,” he mumbles with his eyes still closed.

Your quiet laughter doesn’t prompt him to look at you, but it does spark the hint of a smile. “Like what, Minho?”

“Like I’m your future.”

while likes are appreciated, comments/tags/reblogs with your thoughts are really what make my brain go brrrtt.

series taglist:

@saintriots, @mal-lunar-28, @dabiscrustyfeet @ldysmfrst @obeythemasters @moni-logue

stray kids permanent taglist:

@variety-is-the-joy-of-life @sourkimchi

multi permanent taglist:

@jihopesjoint @bahng-chrizz, @/variety-is-the-joy-of-life

resources used

regarding prosthetic limbs: tiktok users @/bren_hucks @/footlessjo @/alex1leg @/bionickick; amputee coalition regarding hacking + world-building: gurps: cyberpunk guidebook by loyd blankenship

[randomlywanderingmoth]

Part of the problem with Fate Grand Order is the core gameplay is fundamentally flawed, and it's very difficult to restore "a fun game" around a flawed core.

Quick and Buster and Arts were all interesting notions, and could have mapped into action gameplay (if we were to merge FGO's ideas with FSR's gameplay I would equate them to fast attacks, heavy attacks, and weaker attacks meant to charge your special bar, but I digress).

As it is, though, it just makes for unpleasant feelings in gameplay, demanding optimizations (I would point out that in the international release we only recently got the ability to combo all three together, and made Quick chains strong enough to consider independently). Those optimizations rise up around every aspect of the game; only a select few Servants have the ability to AoE without accessing their Noble Phantasm, and they haven't even made it to international. There's a wide range of Craft Essences, but only a few that ever matter. Creativity in builds is tamped down around increasingly narrowed build notions as the devs design with over-optimized teams in mind.

The end result is a game that, optimally, advises you to use your super rare fully powered optimized support, your friends' identically super rare fully powered optimized support, and a high power damage Servant, and repeatedly fire the damage dealer's Noble Phantasm to either clear waves or kill bosses.

Speaking of which, from a lore perspective, this is also completely messed up. By the lore of the Nasuverse, a Noble Phantasm is a Servant's super secret ultimate move, only meant for the final hour. This is fully incongruous with the gameplay, where you typically throw the same world-ending mythology-defining techniques three times in a row and call it a day. (Entertainingly, in the International release, we've also made it to Traum, where we see faceless Servants fire their Noble Phantasms like simple artillery, but that's its own commentary.)

Like, it's so effortless to imagine better systems than this! Servants deployed on a chessboard-like map, heralding back to the themes of Fate Apocrypha; suddenly we don't need anything as mechanically obtuse as Class Advantages when we could organically differentiate each Class by how they navigate the board or how they fight each other (Riders can leap over enemies like knight pieces in chess; Archers can attack at range without moving; Lancers do really well on Attack but have poor Defense; and Berserkers can be the units of terror that lore implies!)

Alternatively, the Grail Battlefronts we've already seen- rework the entire game to operate more organically like that; maybe Servants can use skills without entering combat, but it exhausts their actions. Then different forms of gameplay can exist beyond just "mulch the enemy"; like "defend this location" or "collect these resources" or "defeat This Particular Foe".

Or, even if we had to work with just the system we have! Change THAT! Rather than select three cards from a set of five, have it go down the list; each Servant gets One Action to either pick from "Quick, Buster, Arts, Use A Skill".

As for Servant Customization, walk it all the way back, all the way back up to the Attack/HP boosting. Make it so that players can individually optimize Servant performance in different ways- this Servant has better output in Arts, that Servant has higher Crit Star generation. And for folks who'd already spent their Fous, you could just say "right, so anybody with Fous spent can now allocate those points into these new Stats! No harm done!"

Of course, in order to do this, they would likely need to construct a whole new framework for their game, whilst preserving the progress people have made until now.

Then again, they are presently building castles in the sand during the rising tide with one hand and bandaging bullet wounds with the other, so maybe a long shot like that is what they need.

[fallout-lou-begas]

What is very interesting about the difference in Agnes Sands's and Murderfreak's in-game builds is that Agnes is high-intelligence with pretty poor direct martial skills and Murderfreak is low intelligence with almost exclusively high direct martial skills, but they both have absolutely terrible social skills (Charisma generally and Speech particularly, and in Murderfreak's case, also Barter). And so the result is that Agnes gets pretty good at a lot of things whereas Murderfreak gets exceptionally good at one specific thing (murdering, but also to the freak's credit, Survival crafting), but neither of them are good at settling anything diplomatically. It makes for a very dynamic dichotomy between the two of them as characters that I am playing as in the video game:

Agnes is significantly outmatched in most direct gunfights to where even just one guy with the drop on her is a disaster, and when outright aversion ("I am not fucking doing that") isn't an option, she has to sneak and skulk around for her life, being very careful about starting any kind of fights at all, praying that she doesn't piss any faction off enough to get hit squads sent after her, and relying primarily on lockpick, pickpocket, craftiness, exploration, terminal hacking, or big chunks of her personal finances to get out of trouble. As a result of resource scarcity, Agnes has to plan every excursion out of major settlements very carefully, and keep exceptional track of her food and water, and even has to straight up steal from people just to survive. And she has to do this very carefully, because getting caught stealing and attacked, or shunned by a community, is a great way to make things even fucking harder. However, since Agnes isn't much of a fighter, weapons barely take up any space in her inventory, so she can carry a lot of food, water, and medicine at least.

Murderfreak, meanwhile, can only thrive in direct combat engagements. Sneaking is just a means to an end, a matter of optimal positioning before combat begins. Murderfreak thinks of hit squads as random supply drops and food delivery. Murderfreak's primary method of forced entry is breaking through doors and containers with whatever melee weapons her most recent victims were carrying. Murderfreak does not "make" things, Murderfreak is a exclusively a destroyer. Murderfreak does not "hack" terminals but can get them open sometimes in four random guesses if the luck's there. Murderfreak does not carry money because Murderfreak simply doesn't need it. Murderfreak gets most of their food and healing from being a cannibal, but with all the weaponry in her inventory, they can only carry so much water, and it runs out fast.

And I love this. RPG gameplay tends to be split into roughly three distinct pillars of "Combat," "Stealth (or Exploration)," and "Speech," and the way that both Agnes and Murderfreak are complete ass at that last pillar both heightens their specializations into each of the first two pillars, and exaggerates the friction that manifests when they're forced to interface with the other ones. Neither of them have a "get out of jail free" card, ever. They handle the same situation in completely different ways by necessity, but it's a constant loop of emergent gameplay for the both of them: the stakes are constantly very high, I am constantly confronting obstacles that I am simply Not Built For, and the only way around those obstacles is either sheer ingenuity (strategy, attentive preparation, and resource management), or a mixture of good luck and brute force. Agnes is roleplay as a cunning but frail prey animal and Murderfreak is roleplay as a big dumb apex predator that's just barreling through the Mojave in a single-minded quest for more food. What I don't like as much about "Speech" (in FNV) is that it makes all of my most important gameplay decisions happen in dialogue menus, as opposed to in the moment, in the action, in my own inventory, or in the environment.

So, yeah, I'm having a lot of fun playing New Vegas again

[dailyadventureprompts]

We've known for a long while that people find different things about d&d to be fun and what archetypes they fall into, but I'd posit that within the framework of everything that is "Dungeons and Dragons" there exists several wildly different games/forms of fun that all from a part of the d&d ecosystem.

This was brought up during a discussion with my partner when we were talking about the build for her bard. She LOVES playing d&d, it's one of the highlights of her week, but her brain just doesn't give her the happy chemicals when it comes time to do anything related to character building: levelling up, managing her inventory and spell list, charting out what her abilities do, all these things are a chore she puts up with so she can play at the table with our friends. Compare that to me, who loves building characters so much that I have an ever growing stable of concepts I'm never going to get to play, some of which are so developed I not only have them planned out from low to high level but have gone so far as to make playlists about them.

My brain clearly does give me the happy chemicals when dealing with character stuff, to the point where one of my favourite things as a Dm is trawling through my vast archive of 3rd party content to help a player realize a mechanical/flavor concept that might otherwise be hard to nail. Further contrast that with the older generation of tabletop characters who invest almost nothing into characters and throw that into meat-grinder dungeons, or the folks who spend years debating build optimization on forums but seldom ever rolling dice at the table. We're all playing very different FORMS of d&d.

This variance applies to nearly every aspect of the game: dungeons, combat, roleplay, story, but because we don't have strong terms for as many of these variables as we should we end up with mismatches, especially when narrowmidned folks start talking about how the way they play d&d is the RIGHT or ONLY way to play it.

There's a lot of communities that are guilty of this ( anyone who's ever complained about the Critical role effect for instance) but strangely enough one of the biggest ones is WotC, who's trying to make OneDnD for a VERY specific group of people

They play online

They play official modules almost exclusively

They don't use much 3rd party material, if any

They are willing to accept limited character customization for sake of ease.

Not only does no one I play with fit inside that group of people, it's a profile that more accurately fits MMO players, a group of people that broke off from d&d's target audience somewhere around the 90s. You have to wonder how much of the shitshow OD&D has amounted to is all just a reaction to world of warcraft biting into Wotc's bottomline

[uvexar]

Dragon Discourse is back to 5e social media and I've realized that dragons form a really fascinating vertical slice of all the problems with the system. Not just technical problems, but problems in the culture of the game.

Dragons in 5e D&D are big sacks of hit points with deadly breath weapons. Large dragons have a Frightful Presence, which is like a fight-or-flight response effect triggered on everyone close enough to it. The largest get to slap people with their wings and knock them over with their tails. The most powerful dragons have Legendary Actions, giving them extra attacks on other people's turns, and if you fight them in their lair, their lair has effects too. A burst of fire might come out of a crack in a red dragon's cave, for instance.

It's not a bad setup. But the problem comes when dragons have to intersect with the rest of the game.

If you play a dragon like an intelligent creature (which you should - "intelligence" meaning not totally brain-dead), its abilities suggest a monster that outside of its lair will *never* let go of its areal advantage. It will fly down, use its fire breath on the player characters, then fly away until it recharges. This wouldn't be bad, except that 5e as a system encourages characters builds around specific aspects of combat. In this situation, melee-only characters are going to have to suck it up and use a bow, which they wouldn't be as optimized for, but which would still be effective.

But 5e as a culture? HATES this kind of scenario. You might be wondering, why is a tabletop game encouraging closing off an entire area of combat for the sake of optimization? The answer is, it isn't; however, the culture of 5e suggests that when a character specializes in something, they should be expected to be doing that thing *all the time* and *nothing else.* Players will get upset if they encounter a monster that hard-counters their focused character build!

This isn't necessarily their fault, of course. 5e is incredibly glued to the 2D grid/battlemap, only surpassed by 4e in that respect. Its range increments in all areas (weapons, spell areas, movement speeds) are set up for a space no wider than 150 feet or so across, and that's honestly being generous. And because streaming is absolutely enamored with rich territory maps and VTTs, and streaming is a cornerstone of 5e as a product, very few players have any reason to expect a battle with a vertical component larger than 30 feet. (Anything larger is increasingly abstract and hard to render on a grid map.) As a result, players are able to comfortably design builds that are "melee-only."

Dragons break the whole paradigm of 2D, VTT-focused combat in half. So what happens when you play a dragon intelligently in 5e? Simple: Players get frustrated, and characters die.

An analogy here that I think is appropriate is, imagine if enemies just inside your load range in Skyrim could spray fire at you with a 20% chance of nearly killing you. That wouldn't be fun! 5e doesn't have a literal load range, of course, but *effectively* it does.

There are three ways you can run a dragon in 5e. The first is to give it a death wish. Make it land like a Skyrim dragon at half health, or hell just treat it like a big dinosaur that can do some long jumps. What you're left with is a bag of hit points with no brain that can't fly. And that's a pretty easy fight - worse, it's *boring.*

The second way is to homebrew the shit out of it. 4e has this over 5e in terms of dragons: they escape the trap of the grid's event horizon by having a lot of cool abilities they can use. You can add a bunch of these cool abilities to a dragon in 5e, and it almost makes it a good fight! Except now you're fixing an issue with the game on your own time, in ways that are explicitly counter to the game's actual monster design paradigms. You are stapling 4e onto 5e. Which is fine until the contradictions become overwhelming.

The third way, of course, is to play it intelligently. How are players expected to respond to a real life dragon?

In myth and legend, heroes never meet dragons on even turf. Even Saint George, the classic knight on a lance facing down a fiery serpent, actually pacifies the dragon with the Cross in the story. So if a group of PCs wants to kill a dragon, they have to use every tool at their disposal. Find allies, place traps, seek it out in its lair where it has nowhere else to run, and keep it from getting airborne.

This is proactive play. And this is where the last and biggest issue with 5e comes in: *5e actively discourages proactive play.*

This is a problem both cultural and mechanical. Mechanically, 5e's adventure design is extremely reactive and railroad-y, almost scripted in some cases (Descent into Avernus comes to mind). Culturally, the fantasy games most often played by people nowadays are *incredibly* reactive and railroad-y, because that's how video games are programmed! Dragon Age and the Witcher and World of Warcraft and *especially* Skyrim aren't designed for you to be proactive, to build your own goals, or find your own solution to problems.

What this means is that very few players, unless they came up in an older game tradition (or are a horrible revanchist like me), expect the solution to a combat encounter to be found outside of that very combat encounter. And if they have no other choice? It's frustrating! The game isn't giving them the tools to succeed! *They haven't been taught to think this way.*

(This goes for DMs too - the game encourages DMs to design adventures and encounters in a video-game fashion, mechanically and culturally. So of course a dragon in that paradigm, using the 5e rules, is going to suck.)

What's the solution? Well, other than homebrewing (which let's be honest means you should just play 4e), the solution is a hard uphill battle against cultural and mechanical biases. So honestly the easiest way to play a dragon in 5e is to not play it at all.

And that sucks.

[dootmoon]

Some thoughts on Ex Astris

Okay so the TL;DR is: Go play it if you're someone who is mainly motivated by gameplay, it's one of the most enjoyable games i've played in like 10 years (im not kidding). the story is not bad, but it's very poorly told and leaves a lot to be desired. I should also warn that i'll probably spoil a couple of things, mainly on the gameplay side (because yes, I do believe some encounters are better if you dont know the gimmick).

Where do I even start, I only watched like 2 trailers before playting, i had 0 idea of what i was getting into, all i really knew about the game was that it was a full game release by the AK guys and that it was a turn based rpg. I legitimately bought it out of morbid curiosity, I was not expecting to find my favorite jrpg in a literal decade.

I'll go over what I liked the most and then explain the couple of issues I have with the game, it might sound like i loved it (which i did) but it's far from perfect and i think there's room for improvement. I think the combat is the real deal in this title, for those unfamiliar with it: it's a classic turn based jrpg but it has layers. The main 3 mechanics that make it stand out from other games is that each turn you have AP (action points) which limit what you can do each turn, however you can directly manipulate them with a combo system that gives you back AP. The second one is a parry system, during the enemy turn you can directly parry their attacks, you have 2 colors for parrying, both colors have different properties and there's certain attacks that can only be parried with the respective color. And lastly, theres a stagger bar, similar to FFXIII or posture bar in sekiro, although i think it's more akin to stagger in FFXIII. Once you break said bar you can enter hyper time for a few seconds where you have unlimited AP so you can combo them for massive damage. The combo system is very enjoyable, you will be blindly experimenting your combos for optimal damage each time you unlock new moves in the skill trees. Theres a very satisfying feeling to landing a big combo on an enemy that feels like it was entirely something you came up with. This sadly comes with a downside, once you figure out your big damage combos, there's not much of a reason to try anything different. It doesnt mean it stops being enjoyable but this is a wall most of games with combo systems have. Now the parry system, while it's fun, it sadly makes the game too easy. Sure theres enemies that will mix their timings to throw you off and a couple of unparriable attacks. But really, if you get good there's no reason to ever get hit. "But what about the unblockables?" yeah about that... Theres really just 3 enemies in the game that had them, and 2 of them were bosses, which you get a hard counter to the unblockable in the first boss that has it. I wish the game had more ways to work around you to make it more challenging. The only time the game REALLY tries to fuck you up is the final boss (this is a good thing) however it was still too easy. She really just makes the screen black and white and makes you parry based on the icon, then she makes you parry based on the color of the attack. This was sick and i wish there were more moments like this in the game. Now the dungeons were great, they feel like they belong in an older 3d zelda game. Sadly they dont get too crazy on the gimmicks, they were just box puzzles where you have to move them in the correct spots or point lasers to certain switches. Apparently this game has plans for DLCs so if theres something i wish upon to get explored more it would be this in particular. The rest of the game is the towns and the sidequests inside them, they're very usual stuff for a jrpg so you know what to expect, i cant elaborate much on it. Overall I think the game is meant to be replayed, by the end you're only able to fully build 3 characters out of 5 party members, sidequests expire and there's a bunch of stuff to mess around to make a playthrough different from the last one. The game changes a lot when you already know how it works or what really happens in the story.

Now the elephant in the room, the story: Yeah it's kinda just there, it's very poorly told. However it's HG and i can tell there was a lot of thought put into the wold building, it's very well made. It's just a shame that i could barely care about anything happening in it, even though I was kinda invested by the final hours i dont think that excuses the really bad storytelling. However starting my second playthrough is when I noticed it was indeed meant to be replayed. There's a bunch of stuff that feels so incredibly cryptic or really make no sense, once you go over it already having context it all makes sense and you just go like "oooh so that was they were talking about". I'm not excusing bad writing though, this is bad, but at least the story feels better on a second playthrough. Anyways, i'm kinda upset this was a mobile game, maybe if it wasnt, 10 people would've played it instead of just 5. I cant stress enough how this is a phone game that is way better than most of modern jrpgs in the market. it's like the devs went back and asked themselves what was the main appeal of the genre and what they thought made them fun to them and made an entire game around it. This is probably gonna be the biggest surprise of the entire year for me and i'm gonna have brainrot about this game for a while.

[samueldays]

Evil Undead, revisited

As a veteran GM, I feel that kids these days complain more about the brute fact or moral law of Evil Undead in D&D or similar games, and I get questions from people wanting to use necromancy for good purposes like having tireless skeletons plow a field. Shouldn't that make up for the [Evil] tag on spells like Animate Dead? Why is that tag there, anyway?

With a caveat that "Undead" in fantasy is a kinda vague category which can reasonably have some special cases and cosmological exceptions like repentant ghosts, here's an attempt at describing how "core" undead like skeletons and vampires still count as evil and can be smote with Smite Evil, and making them is evil even if the necromancer has good intent in contemporary terms. This is mostly written with reference to D&D 3.5, which I like for its SRD, but the principles can be used elsewhere.

TL;DR: Making undead is like a faustian bargain but with Death instead of Mephisto, and every hand you lend to Death in the world is a corrupting influence even if you get something good from it.

The TLDR is inaccurate because the implicit contract is with the negative energy plane instead of a demon or avatar. Now for the long version:

In the example of the plowing skeletons, the questioning wizard is presumably treating the plowed field as an end and the skeletons as a means to that end - he's not doing necromancy for its own sake.

So he could cut out the necromancy part. He could use Animate Objects instead of Animate Dead, and make the plow move itself. (Or build a golem, but that's another story.) But notice that Animate Objects is a higher level spell than Animate Dead, as well as being temporary. Making it permanent requires another high-level spell. Wizards (and D&D players) are prone to optimizing towards Animate Dead, because it seems to be an easier and better way to achieve the desired effect.

But why does this lower level spell work better? My answer is that when casting Animate Dead, something else is providing much of the power, and that "something else" is the Negative Energy Plane. It is the plane of annihilating everything that exists, and is not on your team. You should not be contracting with it for power. Casting Animate Dead is evil because it's teaming up with an omnicidal maniac in cosmological form.

The Negative Energy Plane is arguably not strictly speaking able to power anything, because it's negative. It's a convenient shorthand to speak of "negative energy" when referring to a drain on positive energy. An undead creature produced by Animate Dead or a similar spell contains a tiny portal-conduit to the Negative Energy Plane through which light and life and heat are sucked out of the world (=negative energy flowing in) powering a magic "turbine" that makes the undead go.

Some advanced undead creatures have the power or fine control to weaponize this conduit, thus the various life-drain and energy-drain abilities possessed by vampires and wraiths and such. Different undead have different configurations and need to feed on the living more or less often, while others get by with environmental drain. Even the environmental ones can be deadly in large quantities. The Libris Mortis splatbook hints at this, and I've taken some of my inspiration from a discussion thread on that book:

This has a bunch of fun implications that match up with other narrative roles of undead and horror tropes. That crypt (haunted) which seems unusually cold? Undead are sucking the heat out. Candles suddenly blowing out? Undead!

Even though the minor drain of a skeleton doesn't amount to hit-point-damage on the scale of combat-time (the usual metric of D&D effects), it's still a creature that leaks negative energy/sucks the life out of its surroundings. Using that to plow your field is a bad idea.

That's an immediate and practical impact; in a high fantasy setting you can get more fantastic about it. Perhaps the tiny negative-energy conduits in regular undead also serve as windows for necromancers and negative-energy-beings to look on the living world, or worse, perhaps the portal is two-way. A skeleton contains a tiny hole in the planar fabric through which The Unmaker can reach, whether to affect the world directly or to seize control of the undead.

Note: your players may still insist on trying to find a utilitarian use for this sort of life-draining undead, like a haunted refrigerator that stays cold because the ghosts are sucking the heat out of it. If they're insistent, I suggest saying "Yes, but" instead of "No", and then run with the fun implications and second-order effects of binding a dozen ghosts just to store food (obviously one ghost won't cool it enough) and what normal people will think of the Superhaunted Doomfridge. Maybe the paladins will send a complaint letter. Your PCs are Good enough that the paladins will send a letter rather than showing up to Smite Fridge immediately, right? ;-)

And now I'm imagining the Paladin Job Board posting, with the headline saying "Destruction of Evil Artifact" in big letters and the fact of "it's a fridge" in the small print.

[triviallytrue]

4e's problems are more complex - 4e had a lot more bloat. combat took longer, character building took longer, the rules were more complicated and less intuitive. it was also much more exploitable - truly optimized 4e builds could break the game in a way that just doesn't happen in 5e. don't even get me started on full-party optimization - i once toyed with making a ranger-fighter-bard-wizard-rogue party specializing in cold damage and sliding enemies that could essentially vaporize anything it came across

[tenleaguesbeneath]

some musings toward hacking together a system to run my home games

combat engine wise, I'm drawn to either one-roll (well, maybe more like one+each rolls, where you roll once to determine the outcome of the whole combat and then each player rolls to determine personal consequences) or a puzzle combat system where rather than the enemy's defenses adding up to give it an armor class that you roll against, each one is a real thing.

Like, for instance, a knight in articulated plate with a zweihander would have a reach advantage (explicitly: you can't get close enough to use your weapons against him because he'll cut you up and push you back) and the armor protects all areas except for gaps too small to be practical to hit while he's up and moving, especially at range, and those are real in the game system. Rather than AC just he no-sells your attacks until you figure out a way to negate those advantages.

At the same time I want something more concrete and real than PbtA stuff does. I like the illusion that the narrative isn't just the GM and players saying stuff, that there's something concrete under it that the rules govern, that successes and failures are the result of interactions with the world and the mechanics rather than something the GM hands out. I like strings though, strings are good. I'm particularly thinking about thydungeonguy's recent posts about systems where the different parts (social interaction and combat) all play in to each other, with a shared metacurrency between combat and non-combat encounters.

I've had a little experience with Torchbearer and there's a lot I'd borrow from it and a lot I wouldn't. I like the grind. Honestly I'd want to take some of the emphasis away from the Conflict engine it has (in particular how you can basically never get enough Checks to rest properly without conflicts); just making plain dungeon crawling arduous is good. But I think I'd still want an OSR-style turn system over Torchbearer's.

Explicitly tracking characters' emotional states (like Torchbearer does, with Angry and Afraid as status conditions) is good.

I'm especially thinking of this in conjunction with psionics, and in particular this twitter thread about psionic archetypes and how D&D gets them wrong. Since I'm lately playing sci-fi psionic stuff that's on my mind.

I want some degree of random character generation, though stars without number's thing of making that optional but then giving an expectation value somewhat higher than opting out (three rolls vs two picks for background skills, or the raise option if you roll stats 3d6 in order). Not sure how much compatibility with D&D I want; that'd be a nice-to-have though. Honestly, what I like from random character generation is having a process to go through to meet your character, rather than just creating someone tailor-made, and don't like characters who are entirely optimized around doing one thing well. The random boons after you pick your class in On A Red World Alone are good, although I like the option for a random class which that system doesn't have.

Likewise, I want progression to be a mix of organic and player-guided. I don't want you to plot out a build from first to max level and have all that set in stone before play begins. At the same time there is something appealing about being able to quickly generate NPCs with just class and level. Tough needle to thread. I'm not sure I even like classes for anything else. but also adventuring gets you seriously injured and you may have to retire due to that.

I also don't want high-level characters to be godlike and I don't even necessarily want them to be rich. Being the best there is at what you do but having whatever wealth you gain go as quickly as you get it is a staple story.

[clownculler]

hey, you guys know anything about Lancer?

I like mechs. I have been incredibly autistic about mechs at multiple points in my life. and through the ancient, well guarded, and infallible technique know as the "vibe check", I have determined that each and every Homestuck character is the appropriate type of autistic to also obsess over mechs. No, seriously, I want you to tell me you cannot picture them all grease monkeying about in a mech bay.

"but Io", you might say, "@vexwerewolf is already writing that shit."

to which I say, "yeah, duh, go check it out." but also, watch me tell you what mechs all the kids run, because to my knowledge they haven't done that, or at least haven't told anyone.

John/June: Our friend Egbert strikes me as someone who picked their mech based on what struck them at the time. That is to say, they pilot a Vlad and stumbled ass-backwards into the licenses to construct a terrifyingly effective melee-cqb build. Mostly IPSN with some bits and bobs from SSC and Harrison.

Rose: Mostly Metalmark and Mourning Cloak. She has, on multiple occasions, had to bite back frustration at having lied in the perfect sniper nest or ambush spot, waiting for the perfect moment to strike, only for John and Jade to steamroll the target while she's still out of range.

Dave: This one's a bit tricky. I figure Dave runs either a Raleigh, covering June's back in what is probably a pretty sick display, or a Nelson, running down anyone who tries to flee the Harleybert onslaught. I could also potentially see him forcing a Lich into a more combative role with core bonuses and mods, but that hinges on him getting mixed up with Horus in a way the other alpha kids aren't likely to (although I can totally see Bro pulling that kinda shit.)

Jade: The Monarch/Sherman/Barbarossa artillery platform run by Jade Harley is the stuff of legend, often talked of in excited tones from core worlds to the long rim. Imma be honest I'm not too clear on the build details. Hell, there's a chance she runs some Pegasus stuff too. Point is: she lays waste to the surrounding environs and often plays a role in breaking enemy formations.

Jane: Minotaur, oddly enough. She's been questioned on why she doesn't run a Lancaster and she replies that its lame as hell. She might be as close to objectively wrong as is possible in this assessment, but I respect her opinion. Roxy has a tendency to cackle like a madwoman when an enemy's movement gets fucked in this way.

Jake: Almost definitely a Raleigh but with the worst optimization you have ever seen. Imagine if John's strategy of "that looks cool" didn't have the safety net of narrative contrivance. This man has the most useless licenses he could get his hands on. He has no synergies, he has no combat loop. Okay that's not quite true; he actually is sitting on a god-tier build, but refuses to swap away from Raleigh.

Roxy: A couple possibilities. One is that she is a pure hacker, using Goblin and Minotaur to wreak havoc on the enemy positioning. Perhaps some Kobold if she feels like being more involved in the action. The other possibility is that she does what I do, and stacks a shit ton of nanocomposite mods on a Pegasus platform.

Dirk: Oh you already know. Get your MGRR memes and textmashes ready because this motherfucker is running Atlas. Also flicker field projector, because what else could a flash-step possibly be. Same goes for Dave btw, I just forgot to mention it. He will never admit the extent of his disappointment that Jane will not pilot the horse mech.

I'll probably come back for the trolls.

[blackjackkent]

OK, loading up the map in preparation to go hunt down Gortash, and I notice something veeeeeeeery interesting.

Wyrm's Rock waypoint no longer exists.

The quest journal also indicates that invading the Iron Throne and rescuing Ravengard et. al. was the point of no return on any possible alliance with Gortash, not that we were going to take that anyway.

So I'm going to take this to mean that probably everyone in Wyrm's Rock has been given orders to kill us on sight. We need to go there, however, because Gortash is hanging out in his office there waiting for us.

So this is a shame... for them. >:) Time to chug a hill giant potion and Get Down To Business.

Called it.

It looks like we basically have to fight every Flaming Fist between Basilisk Gate and the door of Enver's office - as well as their big metal buddies.

Combat highlights as we work through the fortress:

This is our first time trying to fight a Steel Watcher and goddamn do they have a lot of health. (206 HP on Balanced Difficulty) But they take a fist or a trident or an owlbear claw or a greatsword or a hamster to the face just as well as anybody.

We're trying out Jaheira's new build, which is super fun and allows us to summon a dryad until long rest to travel and fight with us, raise fungal zombies out of dead enemies, and turn into an owlbear and rampage with more or less the same rage mechanic that Karlach and Minsc have. Team Juggernaut now officially includes all four party members. :D

This is our first time trying to fight a Steel Watcher and goddamn do they have a lot of health. (206 HP on Balanced Difficulty) But they take a fist or a trident or an owlbear claw or a greatsword or a hamster to the face just as well as anybody.

They do however also do this when they start getting low health:

This definitely complicates the fight somewhat as it means they need to be finished off at range. They also start making the most incredibly anxiety-inducing noise once this condition is activated. O.O

The bright side is the damage from the explosion also hurts the Watcher's allies; one of the Fist got completely finished off this way.

Sent Jaheira running into the backline as an owlbear and she got this incredible low growl in her voice and went "I go hunting..." I love her.

Apparently her enrage mechanic, which can make nearby creatures Frightened, is also indiscriminate and could make our team afraid as well. I don't blame them but this does mean I need to be somewhat careful with her positioning. XD

Apparently killing a Steel Watcher triggers something called "Pursuit Protocol" which means for 20 turns every Steel Watcher in the city is hostile. This seems not particularly relevant to Hector's situation but I guess might be relevant if you were doing multiplayer and had split the party.

The somewhat nice thing about this team composition is that I've managed to reach a point where almost no one is using spell slots for anything significant. This is probably somewhere near the exact opposite of an optimal party setup, but it does mean short and long rest usage is basically entirely dependent on when the team gets too battered to continue. Which takes a while. XD

These are, however, definitely not easy fights. That self-destruction protocol really is quite devastating when it goes off, particularly combined with the fact that the Steel Watchers seem to be centered around CC skills. Their fundamental strategy seems to be "trap enemy in place and then explode on them".

I completely forgot I had given Karlach, many many moons ago, the Aspect of the Honey Badger, which auto-rages her as a reaction when she's Frightened, Charmed, or Poisoned. This is the first time I've actually seen it proc and it startled me. XD

(I did have to restart this fight once because I did some poor opening strategy before I understood how the Steel Watchers worked. o.o; RIP Tragically for Team Juggernaut, who excel in close quarters, range is very important here, so I don't really get to test out Jaheira's owlbear form. Better strategy: lots of zomber summons, Minsc throwing Nyrula, Hector opening with Stagger Flurry of Blows so he can back out after doing damage, and Karlach taking potshots with a crossbow. Boo keeps getting flattened immediately so we imagine him squeaking encouragement from the sidelines)

Look at me using Strategy and entangling the door where all the Fist are trying to come out of. \o/

This is actually a really hard fight jfc. Five watchers plus adds is no joke.

But we got through in the end, with everyone alive and only one reset! I think I'm getting better at this game. :D

[rawbertchase]

house post nobody asked for: house md characters if they had a minecraft smp. i wanted to give them gamertags but im not smart enough so if anyone has ideas please add them i will love u forever ❤️❤️ if u want to add later season characters or minor characters pls also feel welcome

btw i was not writing this with the idea that they are a youtube smp just a friend smp

lisa cuddy: server admin. not actually a huge minecraft fan she prefers games where you kill monsters a lot and build skill trees etc but likes the smp community aspect with her gaming friends. built her base in the nether. usually trades with people for supplies she needs instead of going out to mine for them.

greg house: Ass Hole. the reason explosions are now disabled. usually not online at the same time as anyone else and if he is it's to bother wilson into giving him his best gear (only to go throw it into lava). actually really good at building when he bothers to make anything tho. occasionally gives really heartfelt gifts to other server members too.

james wilson: LOVES going mining. awful at building bases. paid house to build him a base. with real life money. refuses to disclose the amount. he also has a huge animal farm. probably really bad at combat tho despite having really good gear. one of the highest death counts on the server.

robert chase: always doing something that looks cool followed by smth idiotic a second later. Slays a zombie epically then falls down massive hole. lol. only person on the server to have every advancement. mid builder. has like a little corner in everyone's home.

allison cameron: loves making intricate and epic builds. wilson gifted her a pair of feather falling iv boots cause he was sick of seeing her die of fall damage all the time cause she's always building high up with no cares in the world!!! she's just here to build and sometimes tame some animals!!!!

eric foreman: only person on the server smart enough to use redstone. not even like.. that complex of redstone he just uses it a little bit and everyone is like Oh my god ur a geniusss. he plays pretty averagely besides that. he does refuse to build his own enchanting table tho, he just steals wilson's whenever he needs to use one. also a big fan of trading with villagers.

lawrence kutner: Why is this man wearing a leather chestplate and diamond boots. good god. and is that.... a Gold sword???? this man always has something strange going on but his base is gorgeous and luxurious. Huh.

remy hadley: built the nether travel hub bc she was so irritated when she joined the server and nothing was optimized. also knows how to use redstone but hasn't shown it off bc she's amused by the way everyone treats foreman. someday she'll build some fancy resource farms with it and shock them all with her modern minecrafter skills. for now she's content with her beachfront base.

chris taub: not really sure how he ended up playing minecraft. kind of a noob. watched a bunch of videos but still doesn't understand what he's doing. tags along whenever people are doing stuff. house built him a base out of sheer pity and taub has just been vaguely building more on the back of it. it's .... interesting, to say the least.

[that-house]

wtf is field of white flowers

It's a tabletop roleplaying game system I've been designing on & off for about four months now!

Originally, it was an unarmed combat minigame I made for D&D, with the intention of making unarmed combat, like, actually interesting. Like, with D&D's default set of rules, there's two ways to handle unarmed combat: roll a contested skill check (or series of checks) or punch each other (for minimal damage unless you're a monk) until someone goes down

The way I decided to spice it up was with a series of Moves:

Swing (big damage but risky)

Jab (lower damage than Swing, but is, in fighting game terms, "plus on block")

Guard (weakest but safest move, and very good against Swing)

Taunt (forces enemies to Swing if successful)

Grapple (enters a grappling minigame where they try to escape while you choke them out)

Everything had a multilayered rock-paper-scissors relationship. For example, if I'm remembering correctly, Swing was good against Jab and great against Taunt, but bad against Grapple and terrible against Guard.

Both players would pick a Move simultaneously, then consult a 25-item table detailing all the possible matchups of Moves. Each player would then roll a skill check based on their Move & Matchup, and then the winner of the contested check would get an advantage based on their Move & Matchup: stuff like making progress towards winning, gaining a bonus on your next turn, stuff like that.

If you won the contest by 5+, it would be a crit and the bonus would be bigger, stuff like moves that don't normally hit your opponent now hitting, or moves that do hit now instantly end the fight in certain matchups

We played it once or twice, and it was pretty fun! Then I realized that if I just made it have its own character creation rules instead of using D&D's, I could make a pretty solid little martial arts game

I swapped out Grapple for the more generic debuff-inflicting Afflict, introduced what would eventually become 80 different special abilities to mix and match in the form of Powers, and allowed players to customize their Moves through the use of Modifiers and custom outcomes

It was originally meant to be a 1v1 "fighting game tournament" sort of game, as a sort of combination deckbuilder/rpg where you compete with friends to make the most optimal build, but then I decided that (a) it actually had a lot of potential as a more traditional rpg and (b) introducing allies would open up a lot of design space for more supportive gameplay

the first playtest was an incredibly unbalanced 1v1 test of white-room optimization that showed promise but revealed a lot of deep issues in the system. the second playtest, months later, was a fucking glorious traditional dungeon crawl through the expansive basement of a missing crime lord, and everyone had a blast with that. it still revealed a shitton of issues, because that's how playtesting goes!

it's gone through a shitload of changes in the time I've been working on it, with currently around 12k words of rules text and customization options, compared to the original "one page and a reference table" that I made for a D&D minigame

i'm gonna be running a bunch of playtests with friends over the summer, and hopefully some day the rulebook gets into a sufficiently organized state that I can post a playtest version that DOESN'T require me to be on speed dial to explain anything i forgot to mention in the rules (and hopefully later an illustrated and finished copy for sale)

[videogametako]

steam next fest jun 2024: die in the dungeon (+ origins)

dice, dungeon, frog, fun roguelike. link here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2026820/Die_in_the_Dungeon/

i had way too much fun with the earlier released demo/prologue. so i'll be talking about both, but more on the newer demo because it'll probably reflect the final product more accurately but first, the prologue

the board is a bit different here compared to the actual game, and you use d6s, which also means the numbers go higher (and boy, they do get higher with the right combos)

my best, i've seen others go much farther though

give it a try, i currently find it more fun to play this version. it's a battle every floor so you really get to get used to thinking about optimizing your dice placements

now, for the demo released this next fest. it's more reminiscent of the classic version on itch (link here if you're curious, i think it's worth a play)

overview

die in the dungeon is a roguelike deckbuilder except your cards are dice. dice have different properties, and it's easier to learn as you play. basic actions are attacking, defending, healing, and boosting. also you play as a frog fighting bugs. it's neat

a tutorial frog tells you what to do (and you can tell it to shut up). we're basically exploring a dungeon for some reason, i'm sure the story will be neat if it's as good as the aesthetics. right now though it's just a gameplay demo (and it's really good gameplay)

it's mainly what you expect, roguelike jazz. relics, events, branching map, etc. it's also fun

gameplay

you place the dice on a board to determine what actions you take for the round. dice typically cost energy, too, so you have to pick and choose for the best placement for the turn. your dice are discarded at the end of the turn (which i personally don't like coming from origins). it does make highroller strategies feel less bad though, since you aren't gonna use the 0 roll anyway

you get a choice of dice sometimes (after battles i think..? i didn't note it). some do more than just the basic actions (like, poison dealing DoT, or mirror dice copying a die at another square. prism dice enabled nutty strats in origins at least, i've not encountered them here much yet). as a side note, regeneration and barrier are really good for the boss (basically just healing and shielding over time, respectively)

some dice have special properties (see above). i find hollow to be the most useful the most often, free action is expectedly pretty good. another notable combo is flash and terrain, to essentially snapshot the boosts it gets to keep the really big terrain boost on the board (strat built around those and prisms carried me through origins)

enemies can have modifiers too (see above). they make the game a lot more interesting, and it's fun to play around the restrictions they may impose (see below)

the little square comes from the beetle-lookin guy, and boosts them when you boost that tile. y'know, aside from blocking your own dice from being played

this one is usually the run killer if you're not prepared for it. well, at least the way i play it, since i stack boosts a lot (which stacks boosts for them and their allies). it's not a problem later in the game if you have relics and good dice to burst it

other roguelike stuff

not sure what to title this section, but this is for those non-combat stuff

map with branching paths, it's the usual. you use movement dice to move (naturally). you're incentivized to think about how you use your dice so you land on event tiles, since most tiles don't do anything. some tiles give small effects (like healing or damaging you). you have to land on battle tiles, but get to move as much as you were supposed to right after. rerolls cost a soul (currency, typically get one after killing an enemy, understandably) and is honestly pretty worth doing

speaking of currency, they added shops. not much to say, it's a nice shop. the relics are usually worth it

relics seem to be given out a bit more sparsely here, so i feel it's worth to pick a few up from the shop

some tiles have dungeons, which are a gauntlet of a normal battle, a shop, an event, an elite battle (two waves), and treasure. i find these pretty worth to land on

this is from a different dungeon but its a lot of loot (there was souls too but did not screenshot)

rest tiles (campfires) are really good. if you have full hp it lets you increase it too

i really like this redistribute values thing

lets you play how you like (safer or more highrolly)

events are great, but i don't like how they're guaranteed passes now. in origins, you used the dice you have to roll to pass/fail a check (like in dnd or smth). now it's balanced by giving a drawback for the particularly strong ones, which, fair enough but i don't really like it as much

closing thoughts

i am very excited for the full game. i wanna try different builds (and hopefully the full game lets us get numbers as high as origins). i don't have much more to say about the game other than that i really enjoy it and i think the devs are doing a great job with it

if you like frogs and roguelikes and dice then you will probably like this game too. wishlist it and try the demo here if it seemed fun

[narwhalandchill]

wuwa rambles incoming, on the negative side ish (?)

so i also ended up downloading wuwa to test it out despite being fairly confident in the assessment that it Will not be a long term thing for me (and yeah stand behind that one after day 1 and some today) and like

firstly yes the state of the game is in shambles lmao like it really wasnt finished in time for release in terms of performance and polish At All. on my side luckily the overall experience has been more or less okay on medium graphics with some glitches and a total of two crashes but its still like. this isnt an optimized game at all. ppl rly have been taking genshin being incredibly cautious with new systems and additions (so that the game actually Functions) for granted i suppose 💀 and or consistently taken the most uncharitable angle towards it . like yes we shouldve had xyz since forever but i 100% believe theres actual spaghetti code behind things taking long and that hoyo genuinely wants to be very careful w it for good reason. but yeah artifact presets where still

secondly as much as the world is like, pretty and vast with many sceneries that make for a beautiful vignette to Look at and all kinds of trinkets to run towards and engage w for that quick dopamine release, i think the fact that the story and lore of the world is just so fucking inconsequential and terribly communicated makes it just. Incredibly hard to Feel anything for it. its like a cake with stunning decorations except u take a bite and realize its all just fondant and no actual flavor. its just there. i dont have any thoughts nor feelings for it bc the worldbuilding is such a failure that i care neither for this place nor the characters whose stories are supposed to be selling me on the entire game. and that really sucks bc this place really Does look stunning in places and i Wish they would give me something to care about but its just the backdrop for the (admittedly fun) pokemon echo farm and ur exploration progress and the combat system

character-wise i also just dont mesh with vast majority of them much. they dont stand out enough from one another and no one except for like scar has actually made me very intrigued about anything at all regarding the world. designs vary from ugh to fine with some that i do like but they still arent like . the kind of Instant recognizable design that just Hits. they look fine but they lack the (jenshin) impact that makes you want to forfeit ur mortal possessions to them

now there is One (1) exception to this to be fair and thats sanhua but thats Literally just bc she is so fucking gender envy to me design wise. like its almost perfect just like that. literally if only her top wasnt open in the back . Id wear that shit SO hard for My scifi fantasy waves that wuther self insert oh my god. she looks like a middle school OC id make JSJSKSKDKUSKDK i love herrr literally the only reason i continue playing tbh . And she has ice powers too she is literally made For Me 💀

(jen forbidden lore tldr a niche finnish Banger of a fantasy book series that rewired my brain at 10 had an Excellently written girl protag who among other things gained op draconic ice powers of eternal winter and since then that simply became My main character daydream self elemental power of choice Always hsjsjsjskvkd)

the combat i think is where wuwa stands out and it definitely lets u engage more with the enemies. like ultimate evasion and counters Feel satisfying and building up ur characters unique mechanic like sanhuas ice constructs for her powered up charge atk Feels satisfying i def think theres a lot of potential there but in terms of A Future Meta in a gacha that wants money idk where things would ultimarely go in the future. but ya that stuff is solid.

enemy designs are also cool but suffer from that same lack of context to make me intrigued w the world theyre a part of. like cool eldritch creature ig but it doesnt give heebie jeebies the same way as seeing like. the husks in the chasm for the first time. where u instantly go oh fuck How. Why. Who were they. bc u know there Will be a relevant answer . etc . which is a shame. make me fear for my life smh

anyway for me my pulls have been like ridiculously bad i am genuinely not joking that getting sanhua on my first starter banner multi is the only reason i stuck w it. like. prior to this morning and getting aalto from the 20 free pulls . i have not received a Single non f2p new 4*. i have chixia c3 who i do Not like. yangyang c2. baizhi c1. Literally i kid you not the other new 4* i pulled today was . Yuanwu. so like considering the event and log in thats also c1 yuanwu c1 sanhua (latter of which i obvi have no issue w). and then my starter 5* was the worst case scenario 💀 Walmart gaming i mean. if u think hes cute cool but i am not at All enthused. id have taken Anyone over him lmao

so thats fun . i mean its fine im not gonna play long term i like sanhua and playing her w baizhi and someone like yangyang or aalto its fine for what i intend to do w it for now. & none of the future 5* rly appeal to me either

ultimately the game definitely has potential but it just. released too soon in a shoddy state and in many ways (mostly relating to its open world) i think is too reliant on just resembling genshin without actually innovating on top of that foundation or distinguishing itself from it. and the failure of its story to make players care about its world At All doesnt help. Do i think the world and lore are shit w 0 potential? well obviously no bc its so poorly communicated i cant even fucking tell you what it is About. but any possible potential there was definitely not utilized how it should so eh

now personally i have absolutely no horse in this toxic drama clownfest of a gacha game war arms race other than its not worth the time nor effort. so i truly have no particular feelings of fervent support nor some schadenfreude about kuro and for competitions sake i Do hope they manage to salvage the situation and that wuwa manages to flourish in the end but ironically enough the genshin "killer" number two more or less seems to have went the way of the other one aka ToF. so thats something i suppose lmao

Like there is something very painfully ironic about it all and it is hysterical in that sense. at least that much i can admit hsiajsks. But truly if some ppl find that wuwa offers them sth better than genshin then good for em, dont let my highly lukewarm reception ruin ur enjoyment. just end the fucking drama farm and disingenuous claims to gas up ur own cope and hype

(and to be clear. i would Not have played like 8 hours yesterday if i wasnt genuinely engaged w trying the game out and having fun lol. its just very clear to me that this early rush of ADHD dopamine oh new game new things to burn through new exploration shinies short term quick fun is very likely all wuwa is going to have on offer for me personally)

anyway thats just me so feel free to share yalls thoughts too if ud like