It’s time to kill some shit

John had to do a double take upon arriving in the Pit Fight I.D. They stood in a carbon copy of the courtyard John had trained in moments ago; the only noticeable difference being the lack of a suicidal undead soldier. But he was pleasantly surprise was that both Create and Escape I.D. had reached level four.

"Can't you create better-looking barriers than this shitty sty?" Saccharine asked with a grimace.

“If I progress in the Depths, I’ll unlock more options,” John explained. “Everything from the arena to some commentators, apparently.”

“Right…” the fairy huffed, “and we can’t go back there because it’s the first place Vulpis will look for your ass.”

“So what are we going to face now?” Red asked.

“The floor one enemies.”

“Okay then,” Red laughed, and John caught a glimpse of her canines extending into sharp fangs. “This’ll be a cakewalk,”

As she spoke, one of the iron gates shuddered and began to slowly rise. John drew his sword, Red extended her claws, and Saccharine… just examined her fingernails while idly floating in the air.

“What the fuck do you want?” she asked when she noticed John staring at her.

"Can you even fight?" John asked, thinking he probably should have investigated the matter much sooner. It was hard to imagine the tiny creature being all that helpful.

“I’m a Dessert Fae, you dunce!” Saccharine snapped and gestured at her frail body. “In what universe does that sound like a lethal thing to be?”

“Just moments ago you were advocating for us to ‘kill some shit’,” John pointed out.

“Of course!” the fairy threw her hands in the air. “Sever some heads! Let the blood rain and all that jazz; the both of you need to get stronger, remember? I’ll just be watching the entertainment from sidelines.”

Their conversation was cut short as the gate ceased rising and a piercing screech resounded from the darkened room beyond. Moments later, two boars charged into the arena and veered towards either John or Red. On instinct, John cast Evade and immediately followed up with a Counter. The boar squealed in pain as the critical hit connected, but by thrusting into the meaty flesh of the creature, John had erred. The momentum built by the boar’s charge wrenched the schiavona from John’s grip as the creature continued charging past John and collided with a heavy thud into the arena wall. ‘You fucker,’ John thought as he fired off a Mana Power Attack to finish off the creature.

33 DMG

The boar careened over into a pool of blood and with John’s sword still skewered in its hide.

Boar slain
+25 XP
+$3.50

‘Would you look at that: some money for the piggy bank,’ John thought dryly, before turning towards his sword. However, he didn’t have time to recollect it before more boars charged in, six of them this time. Evidently, they thought Red, who was currently picking boar meat from her claws, to be the bigger threat. Four of them circled her while the other two went after John.

Without his sword, things were a lot more tedious. The only method he had of dishing out damage was MPA. While that meant he could keep his distance from the boars, it was also taxing on his MP and was by no means dealing a great amount of damage. It was inevitable that he’d run out of MP, so recollecting his sword was imperative.

John focused all of his attacks on one of the boars while keeping out of reach of both. The boars were relentless in their pursuit of him, charging with their heads down and sharp tusks pointing out with the intent of tearing flesh. But with each step, dodge, and block, John moved closer to where his sword was stuck in the dead boar’s hide. As the first boar toppled over after a direct hit with MPA to the face, John sprung backwards and ripped his schiavona from its meaty pedestal. The second boar let out a squeal of fury, and you’d never guess what it did next. It charged at him!

Rest assured, John dispatched the fat beast swiftly. Looking up, John found Red to be casually sitting on a pile of slaughtered boars - there were a few more than four, mind you - and balancing a broken tusk on the tip of her finger. “Oh, you’re finally done, are you?” she smiled with sharp fangs.

“You’ve, uh… got something in your teeth,” John pointed out. Red frowned and with a clawed finger scraped out a sliver of meat before aimlessly flicking it away.

‘This is going to take some getting used to,’ John thought. A werewolf wasn’t exactly a foreign concept to John, and they were seldom portrayed as anything but feral, but it was another thing entirely to see one in person, let alone be dating her.

“Was that it?!” Saccharine cried in outrage. “Just twelve pigs? That was so boooooooaring!”

On cue, a new challenger entered the arena. The largest boar John had ever seen lumbered towards them. Its fur was as white as snow, and its bloodshot eyes darted wildly across the yard, screaming murderous intent.

John’s brow wrinkled as he read the Observe window. ‘What a lovely creature,’ he thought as he looked back up to meet its livid gaze. Looped around one of its mighty tusks was a familiar, black Ashcroft-Academy backpack. ‘Wait, what the fuck? Is that my backpack?’ John squinted at it but couldn’t be certain.

His wonder was interrupted by the entry of a second challenger, a man this time. The man looked bizarre, to say the least. He was tall and muscular, with a greasy wife-beater that looked like it hadn't been washed in months, and a pair of browned jeans with the fly undone. But the strangest thing about him was the brown paper bag he wore over his head, with two circular holes cut in it for vision.

‘Oh come on, Gaia!’ John sighed. ‘Why the fuck do you keep putting all this disgusting shit in my way?!’

Pigfucker’s eyes strayed wildly between the pile of dead boars, Red, and John. “Y’all gone ayn’ done murdurr’d mah preycious family!” he cried, his voice cracking with genuine grief.
“The wives’ll be distraught when I tell ‘em.”

“You won’t be telling them, buddy,” Red snarled as she pinched her nose.

The smell of booze and cum pervading from Pigfucker was even affecting John, so he couldn’t imagine how revolting it would be for Red’s sensitive nose.

Pigfucker stepped up to the albino boar and affectionately stroked its snout. “Imma feed y’all to Boaris, is what imma do,” he said as he gave the boar a slap on the hind.

The albino boar roared and charged at Red. Her body stiffened, and John screamed at her to get out of the way, but it was too late. John's vision of her was obstructed by the charging boar, which squealed triumphantly as it collided with her. Filled with concern, John summoned the party's status bar into his FOV and was surprised to find she'd taken very little damage. Moments later, the pig reared backwards as John saw a sizeable chunk of damage get chipped from its health bar. It was bleeding heavily as it staggered away, from a deep and ugly gash in its face that turned the white fur crimson.

Red gave the boar no chance to retreat out of her range. She was a beast out for blood. Her body was entirely covered in a golden coat of fur, and the only aspects of her that were not yet wolf were her human-shaped torso, that kept her standing on two legs, and her clawed hands which she used to viciously rip into the pig's face. It was the furthest along her transformation John had seen her, and it was mesmerising in its savagery.

A cry of fury drew John’s attention away from the spectacle and towards Pigfucker. “You're a mownstuurr!” he screamed at Red as he lumbered over to her with an oversized axe.

Red was too caught up in the fervour of ripping apart the albino boar to even notice the hillbilly, but John wasn't just going to sit by and let her be attacked. He intercepted with an MPA, which punched an extra hole into Pigfucker's stupid, paper-bag face and knocked him flat on his ass.

“What in tarnashun?!” the hillbilly swore as he stumbled to his feet to face John.

The hillbilly didn’t even hesitate to charge at John, axe brandished in the air and ready to crash down upon him. Despite the hillbilly’s goofy speech and low intellect score, he was still six levels stronger than John, and 46 strength was nothing to scoff at. He dodged out of the way of Pigfucker’s first few attacks to get a sense of the hillbilly’s ability. He was neither remarkably quick nor could he wield the axe with any sort of finesse, so he simply relied entirely on brute strength.

From there it became a simple dance of evade and strike. John was faster than Pigfucker, and Evade only made it easier to keep out of harm’s way before lunging in for a Counter. John couldn’t help but relax as the fight went on. Sure, the hillbilly was stronger when comparing their levels, but he was simply too stupid to apply it to their fight.

‘Alright then,’ John thought as he prepared to summon a Mana Shield, ‘time to test if Bagof knew his shit.’

As the axe was brought down, John summoned the shield. He almost buckled under the weight of the blow, and still suffered some chip damage, but the improvement to his Endurance kept John standing firm. The schiavona whirled through the air and slashed across the Pigfucker's meaty thigh. The hillbilly cried in agony and fell to his knee, now at the mercy of John.

It was an odd moment for John. Up until then, he'd been so thoughtless in his actions. He had gone into barriers and killed creatures… rats, goblins, wolves, boars…

It almost felt like he was watching himself in third person as he grabbed the cannibal by the neck and sheathed his blade in his chest. Pigfucker let out a splutter and coughed blood on the inside of his paper-bag before slumping in John’s grip.

Pigfucker defeated:
+200 XP.
+$250.00

… and now a human being. A concoction of feelings flooded John's mind. Shock, pleasure, grief, guilt, horror, satisfaction. He tried to unravel it all but found himself completely dumbfounded.

‘It was self-defence,' part of him rationalised. But he knew in his heart that was a poor excuse. They had come to ‘kill some shit’, and kill he had.

‘He’s just a character in a video game, an NPC. It’s okay to kill him,’

‘He was as real as Red. Is she just an NPC, then?’

‘No. She’s real. She has to be.’

‘But, you can’t dispute that Pigfucker deserved it,’ another voice raised. ‘Murderer, cannibal, ****…’

‘But did we have to be the one to kill him?’

‘God literally placed him in my path to slay.’

‘Careful now, you’re starting to sound like a zealot,’ the other side warned. ‘Is that really the path you want to follow?’

‘I don’t know… I got these powers for a reason… right?’ John would dearly have loved for Gaia to weigh in. To tell him it was okay and that he did or right thing, or even to tell him he shouldn’t have done what he did.