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Technoblade woke up with a burst of adrenaline, scrambling upright and reaching for his axe in an uncoordinated stumble. His skull pulsed with agony, vision going white at the corners; he was pretty sure he recognized the symptoms, too, which made the situation a whole other level of confusing. This was cave spider venom. Cave spiders were only encountered this early if he did the hidden scenario Lair of the Death Arachnids, to get chorus fruit ahead of the crowd.
But the only way to beat cave spiders this soon in a loop, when the horror of the scenarios had barely begun, was to avoid getting bitten by them in the first place. The two times he'd been bitten this early before, he'd died and had to start the loop over, but that clearly hadn't happened this time. Techno had been blinded, disoriented, out of his mind from spider venom-- but he hadn't died.
He was in a corner of the quest cave, right by the barrier that rose up as soon as a competitor entered the scenario. His chest plate was loose, the spider bite in his chest bandaged and slathered with healing cream. His axe sat by his thigh, close enough to grab at.
There was a man crouched at the other side of the cavern, arms draped casually over his knees. Techno froze as soon as he saw him.
Pale chin-length hair, blue eyes, standard armor but scuffed and crooked, undersized. He had a sword Techno recognized from a loot chest he'd found empty this time around, and two dark shapes at his back that Techno's non-enhanced eyes couldn't make out in the dark.
He didn't recognize him. He'd lived through eight time loops of this cosmic game, six of them spanning years, and he'd never seen a survivor who looked like this one. Even a month past the start of the scenarios, that shouldn't have been possible. There should've been few enough survivors in the state that he could list them all by name.
Maybe this guy was wearing a disguise. Quackity did that sometimes, though he wasn't supposed to get the shapeshifting skill for another six months, and wouldn't have been around San Francisco this early on no matter what. Or he could be a fluke, someone who'd survived long enough to get a cosmic sponsor because of some little thing Techno had changed this time around, or an enemy taking a human form to get Techno's guard down for a hidden scenario he just hadn't triggered in any other timelines--
"Shit, you're actually awake," the stranger blurted, rising to his feet. Technoblade staggered to his feet, gripping his axe tight. Not the Axe of Peace yet. Not even the axe that Ranboo would give him, if he met Ranboo again and befriended him, if Ranboo didn't die a stupid death. "Are you-- wait, are you? 'Cause no offense, mate, but the past two times you've stood on your feet you've fallen over immediately after, I don't think you were all that conscious. Do you know where the fuck you are? Who you are? Can you name what scenario this is?"
"Uh," Technoblade said, blank. This was not an expected course of conversation. Usually someone would be attacking by now. "California, me, the spider one with the dumb name?"
"That's right." The man grinned, white and startling. "Good on you, mate, I knew you'd pull through it. I'm Phil, I'm here for chorus fruit same as you." He held out his hand. Technoblade stared at it, not moving. His voices murmured, bird dad E Technopoison, which wasn't helpful at all.
"Phil," he echoed. He didn't recognize the name, either. He had everyone who survived long enough to get a sponsor and some popularity memorized, even those he'd never met in person, but he'd never heard of a Phil. Especially not a British one. "Did you rescue me?"
"I picked you up when you got bit, if that's what you mean," Phil said with a shrug, "but I didn't do all that much, really. Didn't think you'd pull through with the resources I had on hand, but I guess main character syndrome's good for something. We've still got about six hours left before the scenario ends."
The barrier cast green light over Phil’s face, flickering eerily, like swamp gas set alight. Technoblade pulled up his attribute scanner, wondering if maybe he’d met the guy in a one-off adventure sometime in the past, but all the stats were blotted out, useless. “So I’m guessing you’re not a hallucination,” he ventured, and the man snorted out a laugh. “Mind telling me if you’re secretly an enemy or something? Not that I’m opposed to a fight to the death, but I try to not be poisoned before they happen, so if you’d be willing to substitute a tea party or intense round of Halo:Infinite, we should maybe start there.”
”Mate, I would kick your ass at Halo, don’t even try me,” Phil said. He stood up and stretched, going on tiptoes, and the shapes at his back flared out, fanning air in Technoblade’s face. Wings. The dude had wings. “But I’m no enemy. I’m just here to get some loot, same as you, and I figured we’d have a better chance at it if we gave each other backup. I’m fucking aces at support, and it seems like you’ve got an offensive skill or two that might be of use. You wanna team up, split the profits after?”
Technoblade said, wary, “Is that what you want for saving me?”
Phil’s smile faded. “Sure, we’ll say that,” he said easily. “Bit of teamwork and we’re even.”
Technoblade nodded. Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world working with someone else to clear this scenario, whether or not the guy turned on him later. “If you betray me, I’ll gut you alive,” he threw out, just to cover his bases, and Phil burst out laughing. Technoblade blinked at him.
“I’ll try not to pull a Starscream,” the stranger said, full of mirth.
Techno stared, trying to figure out what that was a reference to. He was pretty sure it sounded like a toy commercial. Was it the cartoon with the robots? Had there been a movie at some point? Crap. He should know this.
“Oh, come on, you’re not so young you don’t get that reference— betraying someone significantly stronger for stupid reasons?” Techno gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Eh, whatever. You good to walk? It’s alright if you need to sit for longer, catch your breath, I don’t think this should take all six hours.”
“You got any antivenins on you?”
“Nope, but I’m fast as fuck,” Phil said, and yeah, maybe that could be enough. “Guessing you don’t either, considering.” Techno shrugged again, kind of embarrassed this time. “No worries. We’ll get through this either way.”
The tunnels opened up into caverns the farther down they traveled, sickly green mist rising up from the venom pools and coiling around stalactites, filling the cave with an acidic stench. Spiders started crawling out towards them as they descended: at first no bigger than a hand, but soon reaching the size of small dogs. Techno slashed the first few apart, splattering spider guts across the floor; he looked back toward Phil after the second wave of dog-sized ones, half-expecting him to have been bitten already, but the guy seemed to be doing fine. He had a ranged weapon, one of those energy bows you got from the phantom hunting scenario, and he knew how to use it. Half the spiders coming at them died before they were close enough to leap.
The cave closed in stages, barriers forcing them to stay in the highest difficulties they reached; the lowest level spiders here had venom that killed instantly, unlike the irritating swarms earlier on, which meant Techno had run out of chances to make mistakes.
They hit a lull after the first hour, when another barrier had just risen and the scientifically-inaccurate chitter of the spiders had faded to an ominous drone. Techno took the chance to clean acidic blood from his sword, wiping it onto the ground where it hit and sizzled, and saw Phil do the same. His wings were tucked tight against his back, wavering at the edges like they were made of fog. Techno wanted to ask where he'd gotten them, but it felt kind of like cheating-- sure, he'd be able to yoink them in the next loop, but then he might be stealing from a dead guy. Or assuring his death. Neither of those seemed like good options.
“You from the San Francisco area originally?”
"Heh?"
"Before all this fuckery happened, I mean," Phil elaborated. He waved around at the acid cave and dismembered death arachnids. "During the, ah, free trial."
Before the cosmic beings watching their lives had shut down California and separated it from the rest of the world, he meant. Before they'd showed up and said, your free trial of life has ended, earn your keep by entertaining us, and had started with a scenario where only half of anyone trapped inside a building could survive. Take a life in the next five minutes, and Techno had been indoors but he'd had Apollo with him, and his dog hadn't even bitten him when he caught him around the throat, that first time when he hadn't known how to snap a neck to make it painless.
Who had Phil killed? Maybe he was one of the lucky ones who'd been outside, or who'd found a cockroach creeping along the edge of a wall. Or maybe he'd reveled in the excuse to kill one of the people around him. Techno couldn't tell for sure, this soon after meeting someone. People wore all sorts of masks when they were desperate for the strength to survive.
“Y—yeah,” he said eventually, when his mouth stopped being so dry and he remembered what the question had been. “Sort of. Had a convention there.” They'd been in cosplay. Him and Apollo, because Apollo had been trained for the groomer. He'd been well-behaved enough to suffer a costume.
Nerd, the voices crowed. Techno wondered if it'd look too weird if he took off the crown and threw it across the cave. Probably. Probably that was a strange thing to do in general.
“Hence the cape and crown?” Phil asked. “Or were those a later addition?”
“Nah, these are daily wear,” Techno drawled. “You’ll see me in these at the laundromat.” He didn't feel like explaining how the crown was supposed to be a boon, yet another blessing that his endlessly generous sponsor had bestowed on him. And anyway, the cape was 100% from cosplay. Sometimes you needed the cool factor.
Phil laughed. He seemed to enjoy laughing. “What, uh,” Techno started, then stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about this guy. Asking questions was how he got to know people— how he’d met Niki, the queen of the subways before she’d been slaughtered in a war scenario, and Quackity before he’d gotten vicious, and Ranboo before the mind control and Tubbo before the execution— but it ended badly. Every loop, it ended badly. Techno wasn’t good at keeping people alive.
“Yeah?” Phil prompted.
“Are you from around here?” Techno managed. Technolame. E. Social interaction fail. Friendship pog.
“Hm? Oh, no,” Phil said, mantling his wings. He did that a lot, Techno had noticed, like a fidget. The bird guy version of shaking a leg under your desk. “I work in natural resources, I was doing a survey in Alaska for— shit, months. Came down to California to see my son for the first time in forever and got caught up in this mess pretty much fucking immediately. Shit fucking luck, is what it was.”
A spider crept over the ceiling and dropped down over Phil’s head, fangs glistening with venom. Techno started forward, heart jumping in his chest, but Phil sliced it in half before he could reach either of them, stepping neatly to the side to avoid the viscera.
“Did you see any polar bears?” Techno asked before he thought better of it. He’d had a demon polar bear as a pet once. Had named him Steve. Maybe he’d find him again this loop, do better taking care of him this time.
“Some, but I tried not to get too close,” Phil said. “Mostly it was water samples, soil samples, lists of plants and shit. Checking on the effects of climate change, that kind of thing."
Techno asked, morbidly curious, “Did you even have Internet?”
“I had a satellite phone, but if I wanted to read anything, it was paper books or downloads.” Phil flashed another grin at him. “I read the weirdest shit, when I had connection. Anything that’d download fast."
"Ha, nerd," Techno said, like a guy who totally didn't attend conventions in full matching cosplay with his dog.
"Fuck off, they were good books!" Phil cackled. "Okay, they were fucking-- adequate books. Pretty cliche, if I'm being honest here, but they've come in a lot more handy in real life than I ever thought they would."
"What were they called?" Techno asked. "Not that I'm interested, mind you. Definitely not like that's the main reason a person would ask that question."
Something strange flashed in Phil's eyes. "Three Ways To Survive In A Ruined World," he said. "One of those web novels you can find online, with about a million fucking chapters and the screwiest fan translations imaginable. Took some deciphering, but it was a good way to keep entertained, especially in the middle of a blizzard. I got more interested than I thought I would. Even got attached to a few of the characters."
"Like, Wattpad attached, or--"
"Don't even finish that fucking sentence."
"'Cause I wouldn't blame you if you did, I understand the call of terrible fanfiction is its own siren song, but once you're looking at Wattpad I feel like maybe it's gone too--"
"Shut!" Phil said. Techno's lip quirked. "We aren't having this conversation. I refuse, I fucking refuse, it's time for spider murder!"
Techno brought up the notification screen and squinted at the tunnels they hadn't explored, trying to estimate travel time. Four hours left. If they gave it an hour, the boss spider would find them, but if they wanted to ambush it while dormant-- "There's a boss coming up soon," Techno said. "He's got ranged venom attacks, but he's a glass cannon, if we get in close and distract him he should be a piece of cake."
He waited for Phil to ask how he could possibly know that, or at least to make a quip about how Techno had been strung out on spider venom like two hours ago, so he was clearly not an expert on arachnids-- but all the dude did was ask, “How big’s the cavern he’s in? Or is he gonna follow us into the tunnels?”
”It’s a fairly big cavern,” Techno said, thinking back. “You wanna play ranged support and I'll do melee? I’ve got potions, if you have an eyesight buff we can smoke up the whole cave and blind it.”
”Do you have a sight buff?”
“I won’t need one," Techno said. The Blood God might've cursed him to a literal cycle of endless bloodshed, but at least it came with enhanced hearing and smell. Had to have priorities. "I mean, who needs to be able to see through a smoke bomb? Just sense everything, like a real gamer.”
“If you say so, mate.”
They reached the boss cavern after another thirty minutes, a webbed-up chamber as wide as a mausoleum with a hollow scooped out of the center. Phil slowed when it came into view, reaching out to stop Techno in his tracks.
"Yeah, I see it," Techno said, low. "It's not gonna wake up until we enter the room, though."
"Good chance for an ambush," Phil muttered. His wings spread out behind him, feathers brushing Techno's shoulder. "Like we discussed?"
"On my mark," Techno said, and Phil flapped up to the ceiling, soundless as an owl.
Techno waited until he was out of immediate range, accessing his Blood God attributes to strengthen his senses, then strode into the center of the cavern and kicked a rock at the hollow. It bounced against a stalagmite, an impact that rang loud as a gunshot in his enhanced ears.
The stalagmite twitched, throwing up gray dust, pulling at the cobwebs, sending ripples out across the massive webs throughout the cavern. Techno widened his stance. He could see Phil circling, glowing arrows at the ready.
The stalagmite tore out of the ground and stabbed into it, and the boss spider wrenched itself free with a shriek.
Techno threw a potion down and started running.
Smoke flooded the air, turning the boss spider's eyes into floating lights, and a few other lights shot down out of the gray, lodging into the spider's carapace. Phil's arrows. Techno activated his speed buff and went for the spider's legs first, cutting it down at the knees, and dodged a venom shot that would've hit him in the face. Unlike the smaller spiders, the boss was much less agile, so it relied on distance attacks. Mostly it attacked with its legs up close, and those were easy to avoid. Phil's volleys of arrows distracted it before most of the venom shots could leave its fangs.
The fight was criminally easy. The boss spider collapsed into experience orbs before ten minutes had passed, dissolving into pale light, and in its place grew thick purple vines, chorus fruit hanging heavy and glistening from their leaves. The voices cheered, a buzz in the back of his brain.
Phil landed beside him with a whoop and threw a chorus fruit at his head. Techno caught it, startled into smiling back, and felt the scenario break apart, barriers dissolving into nothingness. The remaining spiders melted into shadows, turning the cave back into a storm drain. Graffiti blossomed on the walls.
“Fuck, we’re awesome,” Phil exalted. "Did you see that shit? Holy fuck, you're fast, I-- here, mate, gather it up before it vanishes." He pulled off half the fruits, hiding them in his inventory, and started tossing the rest at Techno, grinning every time he snatched them out of the air. "That'll be useful later on, I bet."
"Teleportation is occasionally useful," Techno said, buoyed a little by the other guy's excitement. He had to admit it was slightly cool, living a video game instead of playing one in front of a screen. Would've been cooler if it wasn't usually fatal, though. "You know. Very rarely."
"Only on occasions which require escaping enemies," Phil said. "Can't fucking imagine any of those."
"Completely unfathomable," Techno agreed, and the certainty coalescing in his gut made the faint smile fall from his face.
The thing was, he couldn't have missed this guy in his other loops. A ranged fighter with wings and the reflexes to beat off hordes of spiders, who'd been based in San Francisco? Techno would've met him in the first couple days. He should've been tripping over him in every beginner scenario in existence, like how he always saw Tubbo and Ranboo in the distance even in loops where he hadn't yet met them directly. The only way he wouldn't have was if Phil had some secret weakness, some one-hit kill button that always killed him before too long-- or if he was an enemy after all, a hidden scenario in and of himself.
He wasn't sure which was worse. An enemy would be bad, but if he assumed his initial guess was the right one, and Phil was alive due to some kind of fluke in the timeline--
No one had saved his life before, not like Phil had the first time they'd met. He technically still owed him. It'd only be fair to tell him something, give him a tip to get him out of the line of fire. Maybe Phil could use it to keep his son safe, too, if the kid was still alive.
Yeah. That made sense. Techno breathed, forcing himself steady, and said, “You should go to San Diego.”
“San Diego?” Phil asked, glancing back at him. He'd started walking back to the storm drain entrance, sloshing through ankle-deep rainwater. Letting Techno cover his six like it was nothing, like he really didn't expect to be stabbed in the back. Or maybe he thought he could take Techno in a fight, who knew. He'd wrangled him while he was poisoned, he could've figured out some tricks. "That's seven hours by car, mate, it's not exactly a day trip. What the fuck's in San Diego?"
“Well, there's a zoo, but.” Techno had to stop before he tripped over his words. The graffiti behind Phil was a picture of a flying saucer, with the words I Want To Believe scrawled below it. That was interesting. He could focus on that, instead of the message he was mangling right now. “There’s— strong people there. The Badlands. It’ll be safe for the next year, they take care of the scenarios themselves. You wouldn’t have to do anything if you went there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Phil said, frowning at him, “but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. I’m familiar with life and death situations, I can handle myself.”
“If you say so,” Techno said, hiding a grimace. It was times like this he missed Niki's effortless persuasion. She would've found a way to make San Diego into a sales pitch. Techno couldn't insist without coming off like a serial killer. “You, uh. Going back alone?” Oh, god, that was even worse.
“You’re actually worried about me," Phil said, sounding surprised.
“Nah, just hedging my bets," Techno said. He was starting to wish a spider would jump out and bite him now, so he could end this conversation and start over in a new timeline. That would be helpful at the moment. "I wouldn’t mind having backup for a while longer, if you’re not too busy.”
They found the entrance to the storm drain. The sky had plummeted into evening while they'd been fighting, throwing long shadows across the ground. It made it hard to see Phil's expression, in the gloom, but Techno heard regret in his voice when he answered, “I shouldn’t keep you. There’s— you’ve got shit to do. Monsters to fight. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of friends to see you back home. And I’ve got to get back to my son.”
“Right," Techno said, and managed not to add anything dumb.
Phil grinned at him, warm and rueful, oddly knowing. “Chin up, Techno,” he said, reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. “I remember how this goes, you always make it out before anything seriously fucked happens. Things are gonna get better for you. The most you should need is a little help from behind the scenes.”
He spread his wings and leaped into the air, gaining altitude before Techno could ask what the heck he meant by that.
It took him a while to realize he’d never actually told the guy his name.