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"So, how does it feel like being on the winning side?" Ray asks her once, giving her his usual light smile that doesn't hold an ounce of answers.
She has started to think he never really has them.
"Doing my best to keep the side winning." She tells him with a slight scoff. He puts a hand up to his chin and nods to himself more than her, as if satisfied.
She tends to pass his little tests perfectly, and she does know him better than a fair part of the world does. But he's still different from... No, he's still...
Let's put it this way, in the world of Nations, Ray is still the same person. What he is not, though, is her friend. That difference in him confuses her sometimes. He's... not not him.
Ray jjkay03 is the god of this world. She could say it, admin, but that's not exactly right either.
Nations is confusing, with its laws and unspoken rules, but Ivory's used to one thing, it's a death match. Survival of the fittest is something to understand easily, and she latches onto it and makes sure she's best. Because otherwise, she's dead. Yeah, that's the same thing as she remembers in every world. That one's easy.
She still ponders.
When she does, Ray might appear out of thin air and smile, as if he's all-knowing.
She asks. He may answer, leaving her to guess if the answer is right or not. It's usually not.
She still does. She has nothing left.
"How many people are there, in every nation?"
How many are there for him to enjoy watching, of the Snow, and the Jungle, and the Desert, and Planes?
They all have their own stories. She tries to forget about that, when that would make it so much simpler to survive, but she can't, more often than not.
Her fingers run on the netherite, the carvings in the chestplate seem intricate. High levels on every enchantment, Protection, Unbreaking, everything a fighter can need and more, rows of hieroglyphs. Too perfect. No player of a nation could make that, and they didn't, obviously. She doesn't need to ask to know where the armor in the loot chests of Exile Island came from.
"Why'd you care?" He smiles. "What does it do to you, the amount of players?"
He's not trying to turn the conversation, he's never trying to be rude. Ray is simply curious, and it's not enough for him to dig into a player's mind right with his hands and read every little thing that comes up.
Ray's laughter rings at her thoughts.
His image is really too peaceful for the god he is. One could mistake him for a benevolent one.
"Oh, I'm sorry, are the armor and tools not enough for you?" He scoffs. "There used to be god apples on this island, second chance totems. I'm not the one to blame you're here after it's all been raided. I am doing my best here."
Playing with people's lives.
"You all agreed." In some way or another.
Can he answer?
"Two hundred in total." He rolls his eyes. "Fifty per nation, but you know that doesn't hold anymore. Most people in the Jungle Nation are dead. Well, most people are just dead. You're lucky. Here, getting the last scraps of god armor on Exile Island, and all this other... junk." He gestures.
Ivory raises her head slightly to catch the white flash of her teammate to the side. She shouldn't relax.
As much as Ray likes to humor her, almost each time he's there ends in bloodshed. He's drawn to it, and when he knows it'll happen, and that he does, he comes to muse at the destruction.
Do all foxes eat the dead, or is it just him?
"Foxes are scavengers, yes." He laughs. "But I'm just here for the view of it. For the perfect story."
"Am I going to die today?"
She equips the chestplate and discards the cracked diamond piece. It rests in the dirt, with the grass. She doesn't feel safe.
"Maybe so." Ray tilts his head, like a lost fox puppy. "Maybe not."
He follows behind at a distance when she walks over to the other soldier and puts a hand on their shoulder, carefully so they don't fight back blindly, by reflex.
"Snow." She shakes them slightly when they jerk an eyebrow. "We've tempted fate long enough today. We should go."
"Is this..." They stammer a little. "This won't be enough, there's almost no gear left on here. Or, did you find anything good?" Their eyes still on her chestplate.
"Well, I'm definitely not in full netherite." She chuckles. "The most important thing is we come back alive, more gear or not. That's what Woogie's really expecting of us. And if we stay here for longer, we're risking all of it."
"Do you think we're..." Snow catches the flash of red fox ears that Ivory knows is behind her back. "Oh. Yeah. We're going, then, he's... he's there, that's bad news."
Ray gives them a polite smile.
The baggage is light when they leave Exile Island, and Snow counts it up again and again in the back while Ivory matches the numbers with every movement of the paddles to calm her heart. Ray is still there, gliding above the waves.
The boat hits ice, and they're home.
They're not safe. They're never safe.
It takes a certain kind of skill to roam the icy lands easily, and if it was anyone else, Ivory would have heard them instantly, the slipping steps or even the swears and screams as they fall. Only people of the Snow are perfectly able to sneak up on their enemies in this land, their land.
Or so it used to be, because as she feels the blade sharp against her neck and the light, almost unhearable breathing, she can't call her enemy a soldier of the Snow. He doesn't deserve that.
"We don't need to kill you." He says calmly.
"Well, what do you need?" She laughs.
"Your weapons, for one. A word you won't try and attack anyway, I'll add that."
Ivory meets the wide eyes of the admin, who's still high up in the air, watching silently, and he's not alone anymore. There's a new figure in the air, of the other god, and Ivory can't expect a single bit of help from Netti either. The sympathy of theirs will do her as much good as it did to the dead Jungle King.
Snow's sword has already clattered to the ground, ripped out of their hold when they try to attack, slipping away on the ice, and their life is threatened by another player, that other player Ivory knows of and feels the same disdain for.
"I could do that." She sighs and throws her axe as far as she can along the ice, so none of them can catch it.
"Alright."
He steps away from her, finally, never tearing his eyes from her, and she can take a good look too now. How he's changed, the former leader of the Snow military. The traitor who deserves his place on Exile Island, and who never got it because of who he betrayed his nation for.
"How does it feel?" She asks. "Was it worth it, Rasplin? All of it?"
Rasplin's eyes are two black holes on his face now, and they betray nothing through the splits in the mask.
"Do you have..." His voice is as calm as always, drawling the words. "Any information on where the leader of the rebels is currently hiding?"
She doesn't have anything except the thin, laughable faith in that infamous leader.
"He's the King of the Snow for you, you exiled trash." She laughs. "And there is no rebellion that's happening. We're protecting our land."
"I'm not going to argue with you. I just need to know where he is. Then I might... You know, Squid?" He turns at the other player, his teammate, another traitor, who has an iron grip on Snow's shoulder. "Maybe this one has better data for us, did you ask? Snowpiktu?"
Snow shakes their head in a jerk, like a marionette.
Rasplin closes his eyes.
Ivory knows she's going to die.
She's always known.
The end looks a little bit bitter, and she wishes they didn't catch her off her guard in her own lands, that this wasn't Rasplin at all and instead some rookies Snow and her could beat in no time, but that's excuses. And she's never called herself invulnerable. Really, she's gone on longer than expected in this world where you can only die once.
Rasplin's eyes are sharp back on her, and he seems to be expecting her to pull a trick here, smirk and say she has everything really covered and he's a fool. She doesn't.
"Was it worth it?" She asks again, bitterly.
"It..."
The words die on his tongue, with a shot to the shoulder.
She doesn't have anything covered.
She didn't know that, but her king does.
The quiet, cold air explodes with millions of shards into screaming and blood, and it's four... five... she can't make everyone out.
Loppezz taps on her shoulder with a grin and offers her the axe back.
She takes it.
Woogie is shouting in a wheeze, and it's not his best moment, with dried blood over his face, unkempt fur in his eyes, look darting, but she'd not think to choose any leader over him in this moment.
"We knew you'd get in trouble." Sven scoffs over his shoulder at her, but there's softness hiding in his tone. "Let's go."
They chase Rasplin and his subordinate to the border of the Snow, and there, his armor breaking on him, stumbling through impossibly cold water of his former nation, Rasplin dies.
"Squid, get back here, and I'll show you what a true soldier of the Snow is!" Woogie yells at the other running exile, but he never looks back.
Ivory never sees him again.
She wants to call this moment a major breakthrough in their war.
Woogie does just it. And he has a point, when Rasplin really has been such a vital asset, to both sides.
They're all down by a campfire in the middle of nowhere, but that nowhere is in their nation and that's enough. Ivory can count up every single person now, they all came after her and Snow in that attack, and that's comforting because she knows them all by name. She also can't see so many of who she used to know anymore, and she has no need to wonder where they've gone.
Their battle, the first and one of the last against the Western Empire, was on Exile Island, after all. Much of the loot Snow and her have gotten is from corpses.
It's just all trash. Which is why they're dead.
The remnants of the Snow Nation aren't much better off.
Woogie takes the news stoically over a hushed dialogue to the side and refuses the one netherite chestplate Ivory has on, that she found in a loot chest.
"If something saves us now..." He whispers to her, and there's bitterness hiding in his eyes when he can't hold up the act anymore under her fixed calm look. "Ivory, if something saves us, it won't be a one level higher Prot enchantment. We'd need a miracle."
She laughs, raw. "You said we're going to win."
He holds her gaze.
"I lied."
They come back to the fires, and Woogie grins again at everyone talking. Ivory jokes away the worried looks, smiling too, and it's so fake it hurts, and yet too sincere and comfortable in the faces of the people she loves.
She hears a disappointed shuffle of a sigh that could be mistaken for the wind blowing, and then, in a flicker of purple, a figure is gone from where it always is, to the side, and she doesn't feel watched anymore.
Between her good friends and former enemies, Ivory could almost call herself safe. If for a while.