Chapter Text
The first thing Wemmbu felt was the door opening to his mansion- the one he acquired once he became second in command. He didn't open his eyes right away. He'd learned that much, at least—that consciousness came with a price, and the price was always Arachn1d's voice arriving before his vision did.
"Rise and shine."
Wemmbu don't wanna face arachn1d right now but Wemmbu opened his eyes anyway. There was no version of this where keeping them closed helped. He hated that voice.
I wonder where Jaden and that fish guy are right now- whose that guy again? Oh codmaster- what a silly name imagine signing in and decided ur username is codmaster- oh well whatever...
The room hadn't changed. It never did. Black walls that seemed to breathe faintly at the edges, threads of pale light strung from corner to corner like a web someone had grown bored of finishing. Arachn1d sat where he always sat, in the chair that was too large for any normal body, his too many joints folded at angles that made Wemmbu's stomach turn even after all this time.
"You're late," Arachn1d said, though there was no clock, no sun, nothing to measure lateness by except his own decree.
"Late for what?"
"For finding out what I need from you today." A smile spread slow across Arachn1d's face, patient and awful, like he was savoring the shape of Wemmbu's dread before he even gave him a reason for it. "Sit."
There was no chair for Wemmbu. There never was. He remained standing, because it was the only defiance available to him, and defiance, even small, useless, symbolic defiance, was the only currency he had left to spend.
Arachn1d didn't seem to mind. He reached to the side, into the dark beyond the reach of the pale threads, and drew something toward him. A shape. Small. Familiar in a way that made Wemmbu's whole body go cold before his mind had caught up to why.
"Eggchan," Wemmbu said, and hated how his voice cracked around the name.
"Breathing," Arachn1d said, almost gently, as if that gentleness cost him nothing and meant nothing. "For now."
Eggchan is probably writing something in that dark cell. Wemmbu's hands curled into fists at his sides. He knew better than to lunge forward. He'd tried that once, in the beginning, before he understood the rules. Arachn1d had let him get close enough to almost touch before something unseen had thrown him back against the wall hard enough to crack a rib.
"What do you want," Wemmbu said. Not a question. A demand dressed as a formality, because they both knew the answer was coming whether he asked for it or not.
"There's a king who's about to lose his crown," Arachn1d said, tilting his head, watching Wemmbu's face for the flinch he already knew was coming. "Saparata's forces are engaging him tonight. King Parrot. You've heard the name."
"I've heard it."
"Good. Then you understand the shape of what's coming. Saparata is strong, but not strong enough alone, and there are others converging on the same battlefield, new faces, unpredictable ones. I want you there. I want you to make sure the outcome bends the way I need it to bend."
"I'm not a soldier."
"No," Arachn1d agreed, almost fondly, "you're something more useful than a soldier. A soldier follows orders because he's told to. You follow them because you understand the cost of not following them."
"Isn't that right?"
"Don't touch him."
"I'm not going hurting him. I'm reminding you of something. There's a difference, though I understand it might not feel that way from where you're standing." Arachn1d's smile widened, showing teeth that weren't quite teeth, more like suggestions of teeth, dark and numerous. "You'll go to the field tonight. You'll fight. You'll make certain Parrot falls, one way or another, and you'll do it in a way that leaves my hands clean and yours- well. Yours were never going to be clean either way, were they?"
Wemmbu said nothing. There was nothing to say that hadn't already failed to change anything.
"When it's finished," Arachn1d continued, "you'll come back here, and Eggchan will be waiting, exactly as you left him. That's the arrangement. That's always been the arrangement."
"You said that last time."
"And here you both still are," Arachn1d said, spreading his hands as if the outcome proved his point rather than his lie. "Alive. Together, in a sense. Isn't that its own kind of mercy?"
"At least let me see him before I go. Let me see he's okay."
"No." The refusal came instant and flat, all the earlier warmth gone out of it in a single syllable. "You'll see him when you've earned the seeing. Go to the field, Wemmbu. Don't make me repeat myself."
_________
The battlefield announced itself before Wemmbu ever saw it, a wrongness in the air, a pressure that built against his eardrums like weather about to break. Smoke smudged the horizon into something the color of a bruise. Somewhere ahead, metal met metal in a rhythm too fast and too constant to be anything but a war already well underway.
He entered through the sky with an elytra, he could feel Parrots eyes on him but that didn't stop him from orbitaling the battleground. He flew down and started macing everyone in his sight.
He found Flamefrags at the tree line, crouched behind a shattered stone wall that had probably been part of something once, a fence, a foundation, the bones of a building nobody would ever bother rebuilding. Flamefrags turned at the sound of his approach, and Wemmbu watched the recognition cross his face, followed almost immediately by something sharper. Something that looked, uncomfortably, like alarm.
"Hey," Flamefrags said, and then, like the greeting had cost him something to say normally, "Wemmbu. You look—"
"Bro what?"
"Whatever bro." Flamefrags's eyes moved over him in a slow, cataloguing sweep, the hollows under his eyes, the way his hands weren't quite steady even braced against his own knees, the grey undertone to his skin that hadn't been there the last time they'd stood in the same place. "You look like you haven't slept in a week. You look like—" He stopped himself, jaw working, like he'd almost said something he didn't have the right to say yet.
"I'm here to fight, not to be looked at. And I literally just woke up."
"Nobody said you weren't here to fight." Flamefrags's voice gentled, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed harder. "I'm just saying I can see you bro. Whatever's been happening to you—"
"Nothing's been happening to me."
The lie came out too fast, and it's flat as hell, the same practiced flatness he'd used a hundred times in the dark room with the pale threads, and something about hearing it out here, under open sky, in front of someone who actually seemed to give a damn, made his stomach twist with a shame he didn't have time to examine.
"Parrot's forces are pushing from the east ridge," he said instead, before Flamefrags could ask again, before the concern in his friend's eyes could crack something open that he didn't have room to deal with right now. "That's what matters tonight. Are you with me or not?"
Flamefrags held his gaze a beat too long, long enough that Wemmbu felt the weight of being seen and not quite believed, and then he exhaled and nodded, because there wasn't time, because the ground under their feet had already started to tremble with the approach of something large.
"Yeah," Flamefrags said. "I'm with you. But this conversation isn't over."
"Fine. Later. Not now."
Theobald's voice cut through the smoke before either of them could say more, a bark of command that carried the particular authority of someone who'd already lost people tonight and didn't intend to lose more. "East ridge is breaking! I need bodies on that line before Parrot's second wave gets through the gap!"
Wemmbu was moving before he'd fully decided to. That was the thing about the mace in his hand, it made decisions easier, or maybe just faster, collapsing the space between thought and violence down to something almost peaceful in its simplicity. He didn't have to think about Arachn1d making him do his dirty work, or Eggchan's books, or the cave civilization in a whole, not while his body was doing the one thing it had always been unnervingly good at.
The ridge was chaos. Saparata's line had buckled under a push from Parrot's vanguard, armored figures moving with the kind of coordinated aggression that spoke of real training, real discipline, nothing like the scattered desperation Wemmbu had expected. A handful of new fighters he didn't recognize had thrown themselves into the gap, holding a line that shouldn't have held, buying time with a stubbornness that bordered on suicidal.
"Hold here!" Theobald shouted, planting himself at the center of the breach with a weapon Wemmbu didn't have time to identify, only to watch it work, crushing, deflecting, carving space out of a wall of enemies through sheer relentless force. "Flamefrags, flank left! Wemmbu—"
"I see it."
He saw it. A knot of Parrot's fighters had broken off from the main push, circling wide to try to collapse the line from behind, and if they succeeded, Theobald's stand would mean nothing, would just be a delay before the whole ridge folded in on itself.
Wemmbu went to meet them.
He fought the way pangyx had, in some ways, taught him to fight which is literally web players and drain them.
but the truth came natural to him- he's someone who'd stopped being afraid of what his hands were capable of doing. The mace came down and something that had been a person a second before was no longer standing. He didn't let himself think about that. Thinking about it was a luxury for later, if there was a later, and lately he'd stopped being entirely sure there would be.
"Wemmbu, your left!"
He turned in time, barely, catching a blade meant for his ribs on the haft of the mace, the impact jarring up through his arms hard enough to numb his fingers. The fighter who'd swung it was fast, faster than anyone he'd faced tonight, and for a disorienting second Wemmbu felt something close to relief at the prospect of losing, of finally being stopped by something other than his own exhaustion.
He didn't lose. He never lost anymore. That was the problem, wasn't it? Arachn1d had made very sure of that. Why else would he choose wemmbu?
The fight blurred into a series of block, strike, step, breathe, block again.. until the knot of flanking fighters had thinned to nothing and the ridge, against all reasonable expectation, held.
"Ridge is secure!" someone was shouting, one of the new fighters, a woman with blood on her face that Wemmbu didn't think was hers, and Theobald's booming shouts of command carried over the noise of the retreating fighting to fall back like parrot said.
"They're falling back to the second line!"
"Then we push," saparata said, already moving, already reforming the ragged line into something that could advance instead of merely survive. "Parrot's at the second line personally. If we can reach him—"
"I'll go," Wemmbu said.
Flamefrags's head turned sharply toward him. "Wemmbu—"
"I said I'll go."
There wasn't time for Flamefrags to argue, or maybe there was and he simply chose not to spend it, because a moment later he was falling into step at Wemmbu's shoulder instead, jaw tight, eyes flicking sideways every few strides like he was cataloguing every stumble, every hitch in Wemmbu's breathing, filing it away for the conversation he'd promised was coming later along side the 1v1 he promised flame.
King Parrot held the second line like a man who understood, on some fundamental level, that this might be the last line he ever held.
He was smaller than the stories made him sound a lot of players had expected something monstrous, something that filled a doorway, and instead found a wiry, sharp-eyed figure whose crown sat slightly askew, like even he hadn't quite believed he'd get to keep wearing it this long. But there was nothing small about the way he fought. His forces rallied around him with the desperate ferocity of people defending something they actually believed in, which was, Wemmbu thought distantly, more than could be said for his own reasons for being here.
"Wemmbu's on me!" Parrot said, when Wemmbu finally broke through the ring of guards separating them, breathing hard, mace slick with things he didn't want to name.
Parrot circled, blade low, eyes assessing in a way that felt uncomfortably familiar, an echo of another set of eyes that liked to search him for weaknesses. "You've got that look. The look of someone fighting because he's been told to, not because he wants to." I've seen it before. Usually right before that someone finally puts the weapon down.
"You don't know anything about me. Stop acting like you know me parrot."
"I know enough." Parrot's smile was thin, tired, oddly kind for a man in the middle of losing a war. "I know you're exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with tonight. I know whatever's driving you isn't loyalty. Loyalty doesn't look like that. Loyalty doesn't make a man's hands shake between fights."
"Fight or don't," Wemmbu said. "I don't need your commentary."
Parrot didn't fight he knows he's losing ever since wemmbu showed up.
He ran better than anyone else Wemmbu had faced that night, with a wiry economy that made up for whatever he lacked in raw strength, and for a handful of exchanges it felt almost even, almost like a real contest instead of the foregone conclusion the rest of the battle had been. Wemmbu felt something in himself waking up that had nothing to do with Arachn1d's leash, something that wanted, purely and simply, to win, to prove that he was more than a weapon someone else was pointing.
Then Parrot's foot slid in the mud, just slightly, just enough, and the balance of the fight tipped irreversibly.
Wemmbu had him down a moment later, Theo coming in to help parrot. Around them, the sounds of battle were thinning, the second line collapsing, that it was over, that Saparata's forces had won.
'Isn't that why im here? To defeat parrot? Isn't that the order?'
It was. That was exactly the order, unspoken but unmistakable in every word Arachn1d had said to him in that black room 'make certain Parrot falls, one way or another' Nobody had specified how. Nobody had needed to.
Wemmbu's arms trembled with the mace raised, every muscle screaming with the accumulated violence of the whole long night, and for one long terrible second he genuinely didn't know what he was about to do.
He looked at Parrot's face, tired and resigned, even now and thought about a room with black walls and pale light-threads, about a voice that told him what to do and called it kindness, about Eggchan being in that cell and small and waiting for a version of Wemmbu that might not come back the same.
'If I do this,' he thought, with a clarity that felt almost like standing outside his own body, 'I become exactly what he's turning me into- a weapon- all over again. There won't be anything left to argue with what was still mine.'
As that last totem of Parrots pop, wemmbu hesitates and-
He brought the mace into a full swing and landed down, close enough that anyone watching from a distance would assume the blow had landed and that Wemmbu missed his shot of killing Parrot. Parrot's eyes widened, he too thought wemmbu missed.
Parrot stared up at him, breath ragged, and he got 'hit' by Wemmbu making fly off to the sea with Theo.
'Because I'm apparently still allowed one thing that's mine,' Wemmbu said, straightening, already turning away before the words had fully left his mouth, before he had to see whatever expression came next. 'Don't waste it. You damn bird.'
He walked away without looking back, mace hanging loose and heavy at his side.