Ty brought his hand up and hooked his own thumb under his left eyelid.
"I'll do it myself."
It caught his wrist without moving the rest of its body. Yoko's fingers wrapped around his forearm and pressed it back down to the dirt, and Ty's arm went because there was no version of resisting that ended differently.
"No," it said. "You won't."
It sat over Ty's waist and sank the fingers into his left eye. The ligament connecting the eyeball required a harsher pull.
SQUELCH.
The other eyeball went before the blood flowed out of his empty left socket. Ty grabbed the thing's wrists and held taut.
There was nothing but darkness.
"Breathe," it said.
Then the new ones pressed in.
They pushed against the nerve endings from the outside and dug into his hollowed sockets. His body tried to reject them but the thing wearing Yoko pressed the cold orbs deeper into place.
"Witness my gift."
His vision came back as a blur, then colors, and finally shapes. The forest he lay in came back sharper than he'd left it. He could pick out individual leaves on branches twenty meters deep in the canopy, could see the texture of the bark on trees that had been nothing but dark shapes before.
The goblin corpses were still there, the sword goblin's neck open in twenty-three places, the wounds still leaking red.
And in the upper right corner of his vision, fixed in place and tracking with his gaze, was text rendered in pale green:
[CHAOS BROADCAST: UNNAMED CHANNEL]
[STATUS: OFFLINE]
Ty looked down at the thing still sitting on his lap, no longer wearing his sister's skin. It was a different woman, his age. That is, if he didn't count the emerald eyes that burned with an eternity of judgement. Tarnished-gold hair fell past her shoulders and covered her bare chest.
She looked more like a corpse if anything.
"Follow my movements," she said.
She blinked once, then twice. She looked up, showing the whites, then down and left and right.
Ty followed every beat.
"There we go," she said, her hands caressing his jaws. Her breath was warm against his neck.
"What is this?"
"Simply yours." She shrugged and stood up too passively for what she just did. "You were always going to blow something up anyway. Might as well have an audience."
She pointed behind him. "Look, boy." The half-eaten animal was still there, its ribs expanding in shallow bursts.
Above its head, in the same pale green text:
[HP: 10/25]
"Now you see it, don't you?" she said.
"I know what it is. A half-breed between a cow and sheep." Ty looked back at her. "A Baa-heifer. And the numbers. Homeostatic Potential."
The words left his mouth as naturally as blinking with his new eyes.
Ty pried for more information, and it came willingly. Baa-heifer was a lesser beast, bottom of the food chain.
As such, its HP was laughable.
The woman crossed her arms. "So?"
"It's instant, the information," Ty said, struggling to his feet. The potion did a shit job at stopping the pain, but at least now he wouldn't bleed to death. "I just know everything."
Naturally, Ty looked above the woman's head.
[???]
"What you're looking at is the real thing." She was picking at something under her fingernails, ignoring Ty's gaze. "The System in its purest form."
She appeared beside the dying animal, ran a hand along its side, and the meat from under its skin shriveled to bones.
[HP: 0/25]
"Everything in the world has been judged by the Engine. Every living creature. They just can't fathom it."
"But now I can."
She shook her head. "Now you can judge."
"Not my biggest strength," Ty admitted.
"Biggest? Your humor is funny. Didn't you kill three-hundred thousand innocent people?"
"Not exactly how I'd put it," he said after a moment. "But I'd do it all over again, if that's what you're implying."
Clap.
Clap.
Her palms slapping echoed in the freezing air.
"Oh I know, little Tyger."
"Don't call me that."
"The tiger bares its fangs." She bit her bottom lip hard enough to drop blood. "Mhm, don't look at me that way."
Ty leaned on a nearby tree to brace the coming headaches.
"Oh, that. Your body is still adjusting to the new eyes."
He coughed up more blood, the color darker than charcoal.
"Your gift comes with something else too," she continued. "A lens, one that follows you and records when and what you will."
She snapped her fingers and a floating, tiny human blinked into the air. Her wings flapped a million times a second, aiding her flight as she zipped around the woman and peeked out from behind her shoulder at Ty.
The tiny human was no bigger than the sphere Ty had crushed in his palms. She kept staring at him behind the woman's shoulders, her purple eyes wide and curious.
An actual fucking fairy? And she said my humor was funny.
"You're still withholding something else," Ty said. "Spit it out."
The headaches passed.
The woman held out her palm and the fairy sat criss-cross on the surface.
"Every time you broadcast with Fuka, it goes back to your world. Humans watch, you engage. You put on a show? Well, everyone wins."
"But you know I'm—"
"Already taken care of." She waved a hand. "Veil's on. They won't see you, won't hear the real you. The veil stays as long as you stay interesting. You bore me, and things I've put in place tend to come apart."
She whispered something to Fuka, and the fairy flew lazily in Ty's direction and sat on his head.
"Cya. I'm late, and the other gods already found their playthings." She turned around. "Best you not die again, got it?"
Ty stood straighter, his temples no longer pounding.
"Wait."
She turned an ear.
"If you ever pretend to be my sister again, I'll fucking kill you."
She slipped between one trunk and the next and was gone, and the space she left behind looked no different than the rest of the forest.
✦✦✦
Ty sat against the trunk and counted what he had left. His left arm was dead below the shoulder, the gashes from the goblins still bled through the jumpsuit, and the jumpsuit itself was dead weight without the fairy running its circulation. The fabric sat on his skin dead.
Above the canopy, the moons were further in the dark sky again.
The fairy on his head shifted her weight. She was lighter than the sphere had been, which was the only improvement so far.
"Fuka, reporting for duty!" She leaned over the edge of his hairline and stared at him upside down, her purple eyes too big for her face.
"You can talk?"
"That's a strange question, mister. Wouldn't it be weird if I said that to you?"
At least her voice didn't invade his skull the way the F.A.I.R.Y. did. She talked, the same way anything with a mouth talked.
Something moved in the trees behind him.
Ty turned and the sword goblin was standing again.
Its neck hung loose by two or three strands of flesh, its head dangling below the armor-plate. Its eyes were green now, unlike the yellow they'd been before. Necromancy, the woman's work at that.
The other two were getting up behind it. The one Ty had blinded dragged itself upright using a root, green light leaking from its empty sockets where his thumbs had been. The small one was already on its feet, headless but marching in his direction anyway, the stump of its neck glowing the same green.
Above each of their heads, or where there should be heads, in pale green text:
[HP: 35/20]
[HP: 35/20]
[HP: 20/15]
They were slower, more deliberate, walking shoulder to shoulder toward him in a line.
Even then, each goblin's combat output was at a 126% increase.
The sword was still lying in the dirt when the woman had pried it free from her chest. Ty picked it up with his right hand. The handle was too small for his grip and the blade was still dull.
Fuka tugged at a strand of his hair. "Mister, you're not gonna fight those things, are you?"
As long as it bled, he could kill it. That was true before the eyes and it was true now. That was the theory he could work with.
Ty spit old blood from his lips. "Be useful," he said to the fairy.
She sprung in the air, wings flapping, and stretched her tiny limbs.
"Ka-aay, going live!" Fuka said, and the broadcast status in the corner of his vision changed on its own. "Mister, look alive~!"
[STATUS: LIVE]
[VIEWERS: 0]
[VIEWERS: 1]