Chapter Text
Evbo wakes up too late, apparently. He rises as he always does, half-expecting to hear the banging fists on wood as his alarm, though all he can hear is rustling grass against the crowd of Pros whilst he rides on its coattails, the last spot in line always his place.
He clicks the button, receives his food and paper, the latter of which he cannot read. What?
The signs used down home only used the bare minimum vocabulary, and the most he knows is are the various synonyms for house. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t know what livestock could refer to, he’d just thought animal was another word for Noob, with how many times the Pros used to call him that.
His neighbor helps him enough with that though. Makes him recite the words, sound out each syllable after them, in that voice of theirs, like if Seawatt had just had a high pitch. It takes usually just thirty minutes, they being in a rush to get on with their task for reasons Evbo doesn’t understand.
The steak is something he avoids eating too much of. He only does once he cannot sprint, and then he suffers for it the rest of the day.
This time is no different.
Something wet drips down his chin, whilst he throws up into his unused chest. He should have waited until he was finished with his job, Evbo thinks. He should’ve just sucked up having no sprint and eaten the beef after. He’s going to be late.
Hopefully his neighbor won’t be waiting for him this time.
*
When Evbo is done, panting and heaving with a heavy feeling in his gut, he stands on wobbly feet. Wipes the remains of his sickness with the back of his palm, turning towards his house’s jump.
The streets are empty, without people when he goes to collect his task paper. He pockets the steak without any want for it. His mouth still tastes like nausea.
Food preparation. He wonders where that building is meant to be.
*
It’s so loud. Evbo can’t understand it. The Noob layer was quiet, silent, nice in that way. Why does everything have to be so noisy up here?
He follows the people, where they’re organized into neat lines. He’s beside the final person in the second row, right next to his neighbor.
They take a glance towards their left, doing a double take and turning their head to meet his gaze. They look worried.
“Hey, did you do your task?”
He shakes his head. “I was just going to,” he answers, imitating the volume of their whispers from lack of any other example. “What’s happening?”
They shake their head, avert their gaze, grit their teeth as they snap back, “Just shush, alright? Everything’s– everything’s going to be okay. Yeah.”
They sound like they’re trying to convince themselves of that more than him. They sound like they’re lying to him.
Tell me the truth, Evbo wants to beg, but he’s interrupted before he can try to spit out the words.
A splash draws his back straight and leads his eyes forward. Golden boots. A Master rank. Horror creeps up his spine.
What has he done?
*
“One of you hasn't done their task,” the Master starts, but Evbo cannot listen any further, the sound of their voice droning on as just mere background noise, despite their golden shoes.
Everyone’s eyes suddenly avoid looking at each other, no one interested in accusing a fellow Pro with just a stare. His neighbor’s head tilts just slightly, just enough that he can tell their eyes are directed towards him with blame. The Master, in the corner of his eye, blinks in his direction.
Snitch.
The paper in his pocket feels like it's smoldering through his pants, like it’s burning his skin, like it’s his death sentence. He watches in the corner of his eye, as every other person recites their task to the Master whilst they walk past.
Food preparation was meant to be Evbo’s. The Master’s voice is low, deep, as they talk to his neighbor, who had watched the livestock. They are dismissed as well. Now, he is all alone.
Come back, he wants to beg the other. Come back, at least stay with me when I am to die. Don’t be a coward, he wants to shout towards their retreating back.
But he can’t. Because it is now his turn, and this is it.
“So?” the Master urges, bringing Evbo’s attention back to the moment at hand. “What's yours?”
“I was supposed to do food preparation,” he answers, suppressing a wince at how shaky his voice is in his ears.
“Supposed to? You thought that you could slack off without consequence?” The Master’s voice is knowing, disappointed, almost amused at his foolishness.
He shakes his head, a desperation clawing its way up his throat and digging its fingers into his voice. “No sir, I just woke up late and–”
“Save the excuses. Go do your task. This won’t happen again, do you understand me?”
Evbo gives them a nod, but they don’t look satisfied at that.
“Do you?” they repeat, much more firmly than before. His lungs stall at their tone.
Apologies falling from his tongue, he runs his mouth in some half-formed attempt to stall his demise. “Yes, I understand sir, I swear. I’m sorry, I just haven’t gotten used to the daily tasks yet, I just got here, I won’t make this mistake again, I promise you sir.”
The silence that hangs when Evbo finally shuts his mouth is heavy. He feels like he will choke on it. What will the Master make him do? A chain of two-block jumps? A week’s worth of tasks? God forbid, that dreadful rumor of battles and the killings were true, and he will be next?
“So you’re the Noob who ranked up.”
Evbo blinks from his worries, almost looks up. “What?” he asks them, because he must have misheard.
He hears them sigh, in what seems to be frustration. He should’ve cut out his tongue with the metal of his boots. Still, they oblige in his rudeness, in that annoyed voice of theirs, that chokes his throat and squeezes the tear ducts in his eyes. “Are you not the Pro who came from the Noob level?”
“I–” he swallows past the dryness in his throat. He doesn’t quite appreciate the way the Master’s stare burns into him. Like he is an incessant bother, with his stutters and hesitation that have kept him alive for so long. “Yes. Yes I am.”
“How did you do it?”
With a stranger’s help. With a stolen ticket. With a corpse.
“With a 360,” he admits, forcing himself to speak past anxiety and the churning within his gut, to make his voice shy and innocent as he has done so many times before. He hopes it will save him this time too.
Evbo risks raising his gaze just to meet their eyes.
At that, the Master’s stare turns from something of disgust into what looks like interest. Evbo finds that he does not like it.
“I see. Won’t you demonstrate this 360 for me then?”
Of course, that is what they request of him. His one and only saving grace. Like Evbo is a mangy mutt who has just a single trick to his name. But he cannot go to the metaphorical pound that is just below, so he forces himself to spin onto the next block, where his neighbor had just been, to listen to the wind cracking through his ears, to become dizzy with the trick’s necessary motion.
He looks up, and he finds the Master has shifted, tensing at what? The show that Evbo has given him, at the brazenness he has done it with, not even bothering to give a yes sir?
He finds that he does not understand the customs of the layers higher up as well as he did the prayers down below.
“So?” he urges, and the huff of laughter the Master lets out sets his skin on edge.
“It is impressive,” are the only words they give him. The compliment does not warm his face, does not bloom flowers within his throat, does nothing but twist his gut in that knowing feeling that had occurred remembering Seawatt’s face after his 4-block jump.
Now he is another’s spectacle though. He hopes that whatever they give him will cure the aching feeling he has been born with, at the very least.
*
The totem is golden, shiny, heavy within his hands. He is scared to hold it, to waste it on something useless. An impossible jump, the Master had told him. Is he expected to overcome the impossible now?
The thought fills him with dread. Don't they know that the only reason he ranked up was luck? Don't they know that his hands are too dirty, too blood-stained to hold something like this? Evbo can do this, he knows he can. This does not mean that he truly wants it.
But Seawatt had worn gold. But Seawatt is your friend. And friends stick together. So Evbo will do it. Just for him.
*
“Are you okay?” is the first thing your neighbor asks of you when you reach your apartment with sore legs and a racing heart. The battle had been a thing of fear, of adrenaline, of a barely realized want of ranking up, of the blue sky and the warmness of the sun.
The grey block of concrete is not your home. That is reserved for the stone mansion which you’d lived in for what had felt like the entirety of your life.
You give a nod back, before you’re rushing through your door and locking the door behind you. Your old house never had a lock before. What would be the need? It was a rare thing, to find a house not empty and dead.
The totem sits heavy within your jean’s pocket. You don’t show it off, don’t exhibit it for them to see. You’ve seen people throw each other off for tickets, before they realized how futile of an effort ranking up was. Still, thievery is not something you can risk. Not now.
*
His home layer is not empty within Evbo’s dreams. This is the only thing which lets his delirious, half-asleep mind separate reality from fantasy. Because it is cramped, congested, infested within his wandering mind.
A figment of his imagination is all it is; the concept of the issue of overpopulation being one that the Noob layer would have to worry about is a laughable one at best. At least it was back when Evbo had been a Noob, just a week ago. If that ever had been within the realm of possibility, even in the slightest, then he thinks that not once would he have gone to bed hungry.
His home never held a lock. It was a thing of mercy, was what he thought of it before, that removal of a moment on should he or should he not leave himself up for grabs tonight. If he should tempt his fate or leave his hunger alone, let it twist and coil within himself for just another day.
Now he knows better. It is just a matter of deciding for them all now. It is truly just a matter of how much control the higher layers can have over them all, how many Noobs a door can doom to be a stomach’s filling.
His subconscious forces conversations to become audible, to become heard and known. There are edges of whispering and murmuring conversations that his ears can just barely pick up on. The pitter-patter of leather soles against grass is what strays through the quiet moments between conversation.
He can hear the barking orders of a Pro and the subsequent hush that follows the demands’ steps.
Evbo assumes these dreams to be a consequence.
After all, he has abandoned his home, his old and worn leather shoes. What right does he have to stand in iron and be allowed to eat good, cooked, filling food, when his neighbors and any other Noob had to stumble in leather and nourish themselves on just rawness and whatever else they could scavenge or steal away from the view of iron.
He thinks that the Master who’d gifted him that totem would have been an excellent Noob. They would have been confident, proud, assured in the things which they could prove. He doubts that they could ever have to worry about the possibility of biting off more than they could chew.
But they would not be gentle. Evbo cannot imagine them as being anything but cruel and needy. They would be instead just ripping and tearing through his flesh. Would they even bother to check his pulse’s stillness before they started their assault of teeth and tongue?
In the comfort of his mind’s privacy, it is not the case. No. Instead, they would just lay into him, using the jaws and canines that must be behind that mask of theirs to claw and drag through the soft meat of his in order to swallow it down and sustain themselves on. It’d be karma maybe. Maybe he’d taste like raw chicken to them.
Sweating bullets, blinking back wetness laced in his eyes, the sounds of muttering and tearing still in his ears, Evbo thinks that he needs to throw up. So he does, at whatever obscene hour that he has woken up at, retching his guts and barely disgusted steak into that empty chest beside his mattress, coughing back the burning at his throat.
His mouth is dry, bitter, coated in nausea and bile. He wipes past the spit, hugs his knees closer to his chest whilst he leans against his bed. Evbo risks a glance to his covered window. He watches the house right next to his, watches his neighbor click his light on and have it shine through the crevices of his own blinds, casting a glow which makes him need to squint for just a moment.
Evbo hopes sorely, despairingly, that his misery didn’t wake his neighbor up.
*
The air up here hurts your lungs. It burns your throat, your nose, your mouth with each breath of air you steal. Is it meant to be like this? Maybe it is.
After all, no one else complains, no one else coughs or chokes while inhaling, no one else struggles like you. You’re just being weak. You’re just showing them what you really are. When you peel back the skin, when you peel back the muscle and sinew, you know that the texture of your heart will be that of leather, damp and bloody with everything you have consumed and taken.
You’re a Pro, you tell yourself, reminders against those thoughts. You’re a Pro. Nevermind the 49 years where you are meant to be hung over lava, dried out, that you have skipped. Nevermind the pieces of raw chicken you still pick out of your teeth after years of eating nothing but that. Nevermind the fact that you can’t read the papers passed your way, thrown into the slot on your door. Not without help, anyways.
But you’d never ask your neighbor. You don’t need to read those scribblings and ramblings of ink. Besides, the only thing you need to know is what you are meant to do for the day. All you need to know is what you are meant to obey.