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