Chương 104: Bubbles

For someone who had both gills and lungs, River felt like he was suffocating. He had taken his daily dive, but this time decided to decompress in a different spot. Little did he know that, despite the Lord of Light not being a Triton, he had made it a habit to sit at the bottom of riverbeds during meditation.

Although the man had a rightful case to be furious with his calm meditation being interrupted in an incredibly abrupt way, he simply waved his hand as a greeting, then carried on without any other acknowledgment. He was in an uncomfortable dilemma of either running away from his boss and potentially being rude or biting the bullet and confidently doing whatever he was planning to do initially. River had decided to do the latter and awkwardly found a spot right next to June.

The Lord of Light didn't react outward, but River sensed a bit of irritation from the man. River had come here for the opposite reason of June; ironically enough, he had come here to scream his worries out while the other quietly parsed through them and silently settled them within his heart. He awkwardly imitated June's position and shut his eyes. Out of the thousands of people in Brighthaven, only five truly knew the Wendigo was still alive. The third event had already started.

At the turn of the week, the announcer had gotten lazy with their script this time around, since they simply said this event would be a surprise; they didn't even state the survivor count this time around. Surprisingly, nothing had happened since the week began. Some people assumed the surprise was nothing; others considered the potential of another hidden threat like the Wendigo, and with rumours flowing from ear to ear, people started getting anxious.

But June's quick plan to build interconnected cabins that had shared rooms and concentrate Brighthaven's population into one bubble had worked better than anyone could have imagined; the factions' sense of community through shared fear inadvertently tightened and bolstered their morale, and with only 8 people unaccounted for during the turn of the week, the casualty rates weren't as high as predicted.

'I think the organizers might be winging it.' No matter how much River racked his brain for answers, he didn't have the data pool to make predictions; the organizers, by now, would have changed significantly since the last sudden death event in the games.

'Thirty years is a long time.' River was born several years after the last sudden death event, and in fact, despite the games being a tri-year occurrence, most people, apart from the elderly, didn't even know what the twelfth month was before the organizers started bringing attention to it. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The members of the cohort were also born after the last sudden death, and despite the Lord of Light's tactile maturity and talent for violence, he was the youngest of the bunch. Most of the people who could remember it were either too young or the people who could properly remember it were either eliminated already or were currently with the Royal Faction. On the other hand, since the start of the twelfth month, Brighthaven hasn't encountered an aggressive unit as of yet, mainly defectors.

Both sides were functionally blind during the final month; scouts were basically moving buckets of chum, so they either were killed by something else or were too afraid to leave the camp. The cohort leading Brighthaven, along with the council, all agreed not to force the scouts into danger, meaning all information that came to Brighthaven came from defecting scouts or lucky souls who managed to escape their tyrannical faction. River suddenly felt the gentle current picking up and opened his eyes.

June stood on the riverbed and slowly practiced odd movements. River recognized this as the technique June created to manipulate water with spirit magic. River had seen him practicing his slow, sensual dance several times before and had occasionally mustered the courage to strike up a conversation using it as a starter topic. As weird as the dance was, it was oddly entrancing.

The Lord of Light was a strange Dreamer by standard; unlike others of his rank, he freely divulged information, and if someone asked him a question, regardless of their rank, he would earnestly answer. Dreamers were considered mysterious beings and sometimes myths, considering how rare they were.

Most of the time, Dreamers were people of high status or war heroes of sorts; no one truly understood why they came about or what their catalyst was for their transformations, and since some people would try to covet their power by any means necessary, they often gathered into sects or clans. Felicity and Felix were born into a warrior clan, and so they were trained to fight from the moment they were able to grab anything.

As Dreamers go, they were laid back, but even then, they were the type to heavily guard their secrets and get aggressive when people even insinuated knowing something. June, on the other hand, was not born into a warrior clan, someone of high status, or a decorated war hero. He freely shared anything about himself, even things that clans would kill another for simply hearing. The water suddenly slowed down, and the flow turned around.

River looked up through a snell's window and saw the water dancing around the air above the river. He both envied and pitied the Lord of Light; he single-handedly carried all the power in Brighthaven. While the people may respect the cohort and him from the bottom of their hearts, if any of them betrayed June, they themselves would attack them in an unending horde.

June was also free to laze around as he pleased; he was free to eat as much as he wished; he was free to choose a new person to wake up to every day, and the people of Brighthaven would likely accept it. But, despite having the power to do whatever, June never exercised it unless necessary, and while he may seem like the type who would laze around or gorge himself, he didn't eat much and constantly had something he was working towards.

Not to mention, he was the type to respectfully deny any advances on him since he was loyal to another. The people of Brighthaven owed him their lives, but even then, he was always the first to engage in anything dangerous in the stead of his people. As the lord of Brighthaven, he was constantly at odds with invisible foes, and while River felt like June got a clear schedule, he understood that, like he had to often work back-breaking hours, June was the one who got his back broken in the end.

He carried an impossible standard, embraced by impossible results again and again. River woke up in his tent and rang a bell, alerting Felicity and Felix to step in.

'Guess I fell asleep.'