Deep breath, I thought. You will not break me. You will not fucking break me.
“Can that other guy hear me right now?” I asked.
A pause. “No, he cannot,” Mukta said.
“As long as I don’t talk shit about you guys, will there be consequences for what I say? As long as I participate, I mean?”
Another pause, and this one was longer than before. “They have paid for your appearance. Nothing else.”
“All right,” I said, “Tell him we want on the show. Now. Before this Death Watch segment ends.” Without waiting for an answer, I returned to my seat. The table once again pushed itself out, and the holo resumed.
“Carl, what are you doing?” Donut asked as she settled back in place.
“I’m the one who talks this time,” I said.
The studio reformed. The crowd was screaming and laughing. On the screen, a dead man convulsed on the ground as a group of baby-faced winged fairies splashed about in his corpse like it was a kiddie pool.
“Sorry, it looks like you got that one wrong, too. You have two teleport points,” the Maestro said. “I need a decision.”
Neither of the men said anything.
The Maestro leaned forward in his ornate chair. He smiled wickedly. “I need a decision, or nobody gets saved.”
“Then nobody gets saved,” Li Jun said. He looked at Zhang. “We die together.”
“Aw, isn’t that fucking sweet?” the Maestro said. “Very well, if that’s what you want. Piglets, should we give them what they want?”
“Death Watch! Death Watch!”
“No, wait,” Zhang said. “Save Li Jun and Li Na.”
“No,” Li Jun said. He reached out and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We stand together.”
A sour look passed across the Maestro’s face. He said something, but it was muted. He paused, then nodded. A moment passed, and the cruel smile reappeared on his face.
“We’re going to do something a little different, piglets. Our VIP guests have been watching backstage, and it seems like they have something to say.”
The crowd screamed its approval.
ON AIR IN TEN SECONDS.
The Maestro was playing this off like this was his idea. “Okay, piglets, my next two guests do not need any introduction. The last you probably saw of these two, they were stuck in a room with a bunch of old fucks. Are they going to escape? Spoiler alert, they just got out. We were going to show what these crazy assholes did to get free, but since they want to suck on it so bad, we’re going to bring them on early.”
“Glurp, glurp! Glurp, glurp!”
YOU ARE NOW ON AIR.
The studio became brighter, and the crowd went berserk. Donut made a show of licking her paw, looking aloof.
“Crawler Carl and Princess Donut,” the Maestro said. He drew out the word “Princess,” and it dripped with sarcasm. “Piglets, you probably don’t know this. These two just broke a record for the most-watched second floor battle in the history of Dungeon Crawler World. If it were me, I would’ve killed every last one of those geriatric sandbags and reaped the experience, but you know how it is with humans.” He looked down at Donut. “And cats, apparently. All that effort, and what did they get? No experience, no real loot.” He shrugged. “But you can’t argue with results. Carl and Donut, say hello to my piglets.”
“We want in on the game,” I said, not bothering to greet the crowd. “We want to play Death Watch, too.”
The Maestro laughed, an uncertain timbre to it. “That’s not how it works, Carl. I knew you were a crazy mother…”
“They have two points. Let’s use them to transfer me and Donut to that spot.” I looked at the crowd. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
The crowd roared. “Death watch! Death watch!”
It took a moment for the large orc to recover. “People talk about how stupid you are, Carl. But I never realized you were this stupid. If you’re feeling suicidal, then…”
I leaned in, pointing my finger. “No, you listen to me, pork boy. If you’re going to fuck with people like this, then at least make it fair. They played your game, and they won two points. You said they can use those two points to transfer people away. I don’t see why it can’t be used to transfer people in, either.”
The crowd seemed to love this idea.
“It doesn’t work that way,” the Maestro repeated. “You’re not part of the game. It’s against the rules.”
“Yeah, fuck the rules.” I looked at the crowd. “I think we should tell the rules to suck it. What do you think?”
“Glurp, glurp! Glurp, glurp!”
The Maestro did not like his audience glurping for someone else. I recognized that look on his face, of fulminating, under-the-surface rage. I felt a deep satisfaction at that. I didn’t know if this was a good idea or an incredibly dumb one, but I felt the urge to keep poking at him.
The truth was, I didn’t really want to be transferred to this battle, likely halfway across the world. I felt for these guys, and I wanted to help them. But if helping Brandon and crew taught me anything, it was that I needed to balance it out. There was a difference between giving aid and sacrificing yourself for people you didn’t even know. Still, this felt like the right thing. I knew my argument was nonsensical. I also knew how this sort of crowd thought. This Maestro guy was the worst kind of a bully. A bully with an audience. I had to do something. For the moment I didn’t have a plan other than pissing him off as much as I could.
I looked over at the two empty chairs to the right of Zhang and Li Jun. A thought struck me. What had he said? Two more surprise guests for our VIPs. So it was somebody we knew. I had a sudden, strong suspicion who it was. If I was right, then I knew I could push the Maestro even further. He had a plan. A cruel plan, and going down this path was doing nothing but detracting from the narrative he was attempting to build. That meant the more I pushed, the more it would piss him off, and the more desperate he’d get to get to steer the conversation back on track.
On television shows and in kids’ books, they always repeated the “Bullies will back down when stood up to” mantra. That was utter horseshit. It always has been. That only worked when the one standing up to the bully was stronger than them. The Maestro and I were not on equal footing. But my short confrontation in the production trailer taught me something important. I didn’t need to be stronger than him. Donut and I were something better. We were expensive.
I had a hunch that they’d spent a lot of money to get me and Donut on this show, maybe even overextended themselves. We were popular, and Donut had proven herself a reliable guest. The fact they were using a shitty rental trailer and didn’t have their own suggested this production ran on the same sort of shoestring budget most YouTube shows had.
The Maestro, seething, said, “You dumb shit. These guys were dead! I saved them. I’m giving them a second chance. Maybe I will transfer you into that fight. How would you like that? And we’ll transfer the other four out, so you have no backup at all. Your ridiculous luck wouldn’t save you then. I don’t think you’ve fought a Brindled Vespa yet. In a second, there’ll be five of them in that hallway. You’ll be utterly fucked.”
I smiled. “You’re too much of a pussy to do it. I dare you.”
“Death watch! Death watch!”
The Maestro looked so angry I thought he might actually cry. I suspected—and hoped—he couldn’t do it. If I knew one thing about Borant, it was that they nickel and dimed everything. This Death Watch segment probably cost a lot of money, and that was with regular, low-view crawlers. There was no way they’d be able to send one of the game’s highest-value streams into danger like that.
When people became red-zone angry, they were, in general, unpredictable. That wasn’t true with bullies. I knew this from experience. It was the opposite with bullies. I knew exactly what was about to happen.