Chapter 90: 82. The End of Team Noir

Tim once heard from his twin to keep a careful eye on that Jay Uptowner. The kid seemed silly, jokey, and too soft to survive in Junkside or against monsters, but Jay had that glint of madness to him.

Tim's twin had always had that since Tim and his twin were kids, back when Tim nearly died to his twin over the good WWE toys. Tim was still sore about losing Undertaker to his twin. But Tim learned since then to choose his battles with Rick carefully.

For the most part, Tim grew up like any other Junker kid. Recycling stuff from the Junkyard and keeping his head out of trouble with the gangs. Things had changed a lot when he and Rick turned five, and their mom walked them up to their dad’s Junkyard mansion and demanded him to pay up child support or take them in.

They had gotten taken in, and the twins learned the business from there. Rick found more interest in it even though Tim was better at accounting and fudging numbers to keep the feds off their case. Other than Junker pit fights, gangster rivalries, street deals, and going to that fancy school, Tim hadn’t thought life would change much.

But right after accepting that magical offer from YoAnna last week (ignoring the weird timeline stuff), where Tim looked forward to facing something uniquely different, he’d participated in the genocide of an entire population of dungeon monsters. In his opinion, those monsters had it coming. They were all bastards. And they were all going to die, anyway, once the dungeon was defeated and the core was given to YoAnna for her absorption.

But that opinion changed over time as he slowly thought about the genocide run, Brit’s fear of going too deep into Multiverse madness bringing forth the eldritch, and Lilith’s murderous energy simmering under the surface. Before he could reform his opinion, Cutie called him down to deal with what sounded like the Zombie Boys starting gory and cannibalistic trouble again. But she described something inhuman and George’s juju going off bad.

The Zion Soldiers and O’Kelly Family got a good thing going, and Tim liked Cutie. She was from the streets, but she was a lot kinder deep down than other girls from those same streets. Since Rick and Dad got stuff with an uptown bigwig, Tim decided to take the case as the only O’Kelly.

Tim got together with Emily, a Divine babe with a crisis of faith and identity, and Jay, the [Slayer of Assassins] and all sorts of shit. Kleo, the out-of-this-world doll-sized babe, joined as well. Tim was glad to have them because the Divine sister was hot, and the gravity duo had that wildcard factor and major dominant power.

Then after a series of grisly and harrowing adventures, they wound up in a giant cavern facing what Tim could’ve sworn was YoAnna, but was actually the Yoroachian Queen.

Something happened with blood and a roach.

Whatever the hell that meant, Tim found himself further and further out of his depths as the ceiling fell down with more of those giant Yoroachians. Big hulking beasts that crashed in with an objective in mind. Destroying logistics. Tim wasn’t the smartest kid, but he’d been taught business. And the competition was trying to rub Noir Parade raw by smashing their stock of living but captive grunts.

Emily needed those things to keep healing the team up. But within a few blinks, their livestock got hammered to smithereens, murdered by their own giant sisters. That was some weird in-family murder spree, but Tim couldn’t judge.

He’d lost count of how many times he and Rick nearly killed each other when nobody was looking. They both had an agreement to settle whatever dispute outside of watching eyes. Twin uniformity mattered. Kept people from trying to split them apart or feel the O'Kelly Twins were easy prey.

Tim felt like easy prey right now, case and point.

He couldn’t do a thing about the hulking Yoroachians kicking and making a mess of their parade. This was a literal rain on their parade moment.

Tim was too busy picking up Malcolm on one shoulder, doing the same to Emily with the other, and running them out of there. Tim’s Skill [Swift and Slick] was the primary force keeping him alive against these increasingly outrageous challenges that made him wish he’d taken Jay's advice to stop and evolve to Rank 2. But the kid in the cabin needed rescuing from the Yoroachian monsters.

Tim would get to the kid later once he got behind some rocky mound cover. He was just about to drop the two off when Malcolm bucked all of a sudden. There was no way Malcolm could resist Tim if the [Fighter] had a bit more Strength like most [Fighters]. That little buck had Tim tripping up for some strange reason.

Somehow, someway, Tim found himself losing his footing when he shouldn’t. Like going on a constant streak of knowing your feet would always land like normal until they didn’t.

Tim probably had that freaking Chance Status to blame. All of a sudden it went from being cool to fuck you and trip on nothing but leveled floor.

Tim fell into a tumble, releasing Emily and Malcolm to keep from getting tangled up and hurting each other. Malcolm more than Emily since she was surprisingly tanky despite her looks. No matter. Getting to safety was only two dozen feet away. They were covered in soft dirt, but they had way worse gunk dried on their bodies and–

Oh, fuck.

They got Malcolm.

Tim stopped to assess the spike running through Malcolm’s abdomen. It looked close to his right side, too. Tim could tell it ripped the liver a new one and took out the kidney. That was close to a killing blow without outright killing the guy. And it looked painful as fuck, which made Tim careful when he checked Malcolm for any other injuries while looking out for more spikes.

A glance at the bizarre, disgusting, grisly undead fighting big bug monster battle revealed the Noir Parade was losing. Kind of badly. They had up to 350 of those corpses when they started. They’d already lost close to fifty of them.

Tim wanted to keep count to see how long they had. Because the guardians’ could shoot spikes from their wrists, soak damage like it was no big deal, and kick the shit out of anyone too close to their legs. Tim wouldn’t know how to deal with that as weak as he was now.

He was pretty much Systemless.

And those big Yoroachians were walking tanks.

“Tim, you need to get the kid,” Emily said, kneeling closely to Malcolm’s fallen form. The guy was turning white as a sheet fast. The blood loss was getting to him. And he wasn’t a spring chicken, either.

Did they really drag this guy through all this bullshit for him to die like this? Fucking hell, he may be a Narc, but nobody deserved this.

“I’ll go,” Tim said, wishing to say more, to let his thoughts and opinions free, but that always got him in trouble. Especially with Rick. Tim kept his words short and curt since people would respond better that way.

He didn’t have it like Rick. Tim couldn't peacock around and be found funny or lovable for it. God, he hated his twin sometimes, and nobody knew it.

Tim bottled up the horror, the sadness over Malcolm’s fate, and the awe and fear inspired by Jay dressed up like a cosmic superhero while facing Bug YoAnna and a guardian all by himself. Leaving Malcolm to Emily wasn’t a favored move, especially since they hadn’t been put behind cover, but moving Malcolm from the spot he was laying on would seal the deal on the guy. At least the two-foot spike sticking in and out of him would hold his blood in long enough for him to make a final request or something.

Tim ran a circle on the zippy, sword-swinging, trippy fight between Jay and the lair queen. That was way above Tim’s cred as a dungeon crawling, lair fighting Champion. He could barely understand the flips, aerial maneuvers, and mind-boggling acrobatic tricks the [Freak] could pull off that smacked physics around like it owed Jay money. And Tim prided himself on being [Swift and Slick], but Jay had a lot of tools in his bag that made Tim look like he was in part of the amateur hour.

But, hey, the uptown weirdo was doing YoAnna’s work, so Tim would root for him while creeping around the sides like a wimp. Jay and Kleo had saved Tim too many times so far to not support them all the way. The most the [Fighter] could do was make sure they got the goods Team Noir came here for, what Malcolm might die for, and what Tim had sacrificed a shirt for to receive Emily’s deathly blessing, Gloves of the Last Breath.

Tim swung open the door. He stood face to face with a Yoroachian Warrior standing guard over the kid. It stared at him, not making a move. If Tim backed away from the threshold and closed the door, the warrior would probably let him leave.

Tim walked inside instead, closing the door behind him, feeling his heart pound while he kept his fear, anxiety, and worries buried under cement. Just like the O’Kelly Patriarch demanded from his unloved boys.

Stay tough. Stay ready to fight. Go down swinging if the end was coming.

A few moments later, Tim flew like a bloody rag doll out the window and into the moist field. He landed in a roll before flopping onto his back. One big scar traced down from his shoulder to his hip across the front of his torso. He was down to a small amount of Health with nobody to heal him other than himself.

Slippery fingers fumbled with the bag of holding and drew out a Health Crystal. Saving himself was just another reminder of how he had failed to save Malcolm. The Systemless couldn’t use Health Crystals, so the System took some of the blame, too, but Tim believed he should’ve done more even if the Death Flag was guaranteed.

This game of diving into dungeons and killing monsters could be a cruel one sometimes.

At the very least, Tim was back to his feet again. He was not in tip-top shape. The scar across his chest was patchy at best, but he could move and fight again.

Over in the middle of the field, things weren’t looking good for Jay. He stopped being the cosmic superhero and was back to relying on his usual gravity tricks. It wasn’t doing him too much good.

YoAnna’s roach-double was talking smack to the guy as she beat him around. Every time he tried to fall up to get away, she flew up there with him like it was the most normal thing to do. She stayed on top of him as she talked his ear off.

Tim couldn’t tell if she wanted to screw Jay or eat him, but the monster queen definitely had eyes on Jay alone. And for some reason, Kleo wasn’t helping as much. She was up in the air, shining brightly. She was cooking up something. Her finger was glowing and gathering magic or whatever.

Welp! There was nothing Tim could do for them. Tim had to make a decision on how he wanted to approach the cabin again.

The whole He Who’ll Punch The Monsters moniker was pretty badass when Tim first heard it. But it had run its course, and Tim could tell he needed to go back to what he was good at. Fighting efficiently from a distance, or at least a couple of feet.

Tim took out his recurved elven bow and watched his Gloves of the Last Breath dissolve away from his hands, never to be seen again. Their loss was sad, but Tim moved on quickly, burying that sad feeling in imaginary cement.

He drew a magic arrow on his bow. He shot through the wood in the doorframe, thankful for its mundane material. The arrow struck the soft side of the warrior.

It screamed angrily, and Tim kept firing. If he could keep cutting through the cabin’s wood, he could continue pin-cushioning the monster until it died. He didn’t have endless Mana now, but the arrows cost very little to form. It was simple, straightforward, and required little investment other than making sure to hit.

But the warrior smashed its way out of the door. Tim had accounted for that and did the next best thing. He ran the hell away from the cabin lickety-split.

The warrior chased.

That damn monster could move!

It was pushing pure Agility Attribute while Tim had probably half as much. The [Fighter] had to abuse the hell out of [Swift and Slick].

On the bright side, Tim could dash ahead and shoot behind him without losing too much speed. The warrior slashed out to block an arrow and lost some of its running speed. That became the game for a few seconds until the warrior fanned out its wings and took to the air.

Tim dove through a mushroom patch, running under its huge umbrella tops. He lost sight of the monster, and since it made no noise, he couldn’t hear it coming. But Tim did the next best thing: double the fuck back. He had to get to the kid in the cabin anyway, so he ran that way.

The warrior was nowhere in sight. Probably up in the air. But Tim trusted his instincts would know when to look. He glanced over to the others.

He saw Jay standing without a sword, with two fists up, his creepy divine eye shining so bright it hurt Tim to look at that silver-gold light. Jay looked like he’d been put through the wringer, but the roach YoAnna copy… Roach YoAnna... RoAnna!

RoAnna wasn’t faring so well herself.

RoAnna was rocking a painful-looking and bright purple-gold slash across her torso from shoulder to hip. Her face was twisted with rage, pain, and something Rick would call freakish ecstasy. It was a weirdly pleasurable high you got when you were deep in the throes and passions of a fight and….

It was time for Tim to look back.

He tossed a glance over his shoulder. A blur of black and brown slashed at his back right on cue.

For the second time, Tim’s legs would fall from under him. He did it on purpose, tucking into a shoulder roll to dodge the scythes with his name on them.

All that momentum from a full-tilt sprint transferred into a roll would’ve had a normal person tumbling for a while. Not Tim, though. He transitioned to his knee and slid forward as he drew and loosened five arrows in the time it took someone to blink.

That was the cool side of [Swift and Slick]. It boosted the dexterity of his actions when paired with a slick move. It wasn’t just speed and reaction. You had to have some style with it. Make it look cool, basically.

Something Tim would never announce aloud, but he liked to think these things to himself as he landed three magic arrows out of five. The last two were swatted to the ground. Even if all five struck, they wouldn’t do much damage. The warrior was way too tough for Tim to fight all by himself. It had all that Poise, basically.

This was getting annoying. Tim didn’t have it in him to take this bastard out or do any significant damage. So, Tim got back to his feet and ran for the next best thing. Help!

The warrior trailed after him relentlessly, drawing pretty damn close. Tim leaned forward and led them right into the crazy melee of a re-dying parade versus brutal giants.

Tim juked aside a massive leg smashing through the kiddies. He vaulted over a gaggle of kiddies smashing themselves against those big legs. The chaos all around him nearly took him out half a dozen times. Desperation forced him to dig deep.

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“Honestly, I’m scared of what’s in store for my fate,” Tim incanted, dropping into a slide under kiddies. “YoAnna, whoever’s listening, help a brother out, Leap of Faith.”

Soon as he exited the slide, he jumped and felt magic like no other whisk him forward. He soared under the swinging arm of a giant Yoroachian. He flew under more flying kiddies. He hit the ground outside the battle, losing the living warrior trailing behind him. It got gang-tackled back there and given a hard lesson about trying to mess with the guy in league with the parade’s sometimes cute, sometimes scary, Divine, death momma Emily.

The warrior kiddies had this cool thing where they coat their blade arms with giant scythes of death energy and could shoot out rattling chains of deadly cold power that captured their enemies. They were the primary force doing damage to the guardians, but the guardians were stupidly strong. No matter, the kiddies were the type of servants that would re-die for their death momma.

Now that Tim was thinking more about that hottie, Tim rounded his run over to her and Malcolm’s dying body. Tim just caught the tail end of a conversation between them. Something about having Jay fulfill a final request for the old man.

“I could do that for you,” Emily offered.

“Nah,” Malcolm said, blood sputtering up from between his lips. “Call it petty revenge for making me suffer that kid. Besides… it’ll be a good lesson to depart on… your leader.”

Jay? The leader?

Tim had never realized Jay was the leader. But it kind of made sense, honestly. Emily and Tim just simply followed him and Kleo since those two were always a step ahead. If anyone qualified more as a leader based on longer leadership tenure and qualities, it should be Emily. But Tim was biased since he always looked at the Divine Four and YoAnna as those untouchables a lowly guy like him could never talk to even if he had money to spare.

But he was in the same Pantheon with them. And right now, Divine Emily was preparing to do something major that would slide her out of being attractive and back into what the junk did I sign myself up for by hanging around these psychos?

“Thank you, Malcolm,” Emily said quietly, “for your service to our Pantheon. I’ll make sure you are honored forever.”

Malcolm raised a shaky thumbs up and gave Emily a bloody smile. Then he looked at Tim and gave him a nod. The two of them bonded on being the most human guys in Team Noir.

That shook the cement foundations Tim had set to keep his feelings down in his mental basement. He didn’t have a crazy high Conviction like Emily or Jay. The fear, the anger, the horror, all of that shit rose up through the cracks in the cement. But Tim tried anyway. He would fight the monsters creeping out of the basement if he had to.

[Fighters] tried to fight regardless of how they felt, pushing to survive the impossible.

And [Mediums] did wonders both great and scary that made people question their faith.

“This is the end of the line, the end of your journey, the end of mortality,” Emily rasped, barely above a whisper. “Live on forever in the places beyond the void, where great boons and blessings are yours by right across the karmic sea, and leave us heathens, us wretches, us damned children of a damned child-goddess, to live on prayers of Noir, Unleash the Miracle of the Black Death Machine.”

Malcolm laid back and stopped moving, a bit of red floating out from between his lips. The red glow bumbled about in front of Emily’s face. She pursed her lips and blew out a wisp of black.

The black circled around the red, becoming a bubble. The red contracted, became a shiny bead pulsating rhythmically, and started to fizzle like a lit fireworks wick. Then it popped with a little red flash. The bubble broke apart right after.

It all dispersed into nothingness.

“That’s it?” Tim asked, looking around.

No reply from Emily. She looked up sharply.

Tim whirled around, expecting another spike.

Instead, he saw one of those big bitches drop with a ground thumping thoom. They were down to one hundred kiddies, but if they could spread the curse into a big Yoroachian and raise it, that would be huge for the Champions.

The surviving giants smashed their big arms down on the dead one. They smashed and smashed until nothing remained of the corpse before it even had the opportunity to rise.

Welp, that was disappointing.

And from the looks of things, the battle wasn’t getting any better. The surviving giants were covered in wounds. But they kicked, spiked, and punched through kiddies easier as the parade numbers dwindled.

As for Jay’s fight with RoAnna… it didn’t look like anything magical or special. They were literally punching… and laughing… and biting each other. They were… going at each other like animals.

Kleo was gone from sight. And Jay’s chest was glowing a bright purple while part of his face was all silver-gold light.

One punch from him snapped RoAnna's head around. The neck broke so loudly it sounded like a series of knuckle pops at max volume.

But she snapped her head back in place with a manic smile. Then she kicked up the middle and struck his–oof!

Tim winced.

Jay yelled with pain and nearly buckled to the floor, one hand nursing the jewels.

Damn, that kick was straight wrong. RoAnna wasn’t holding back.

But Jay had too much Special Stuff in his System that was keeping him going. Something about RoAnna was pushing Jay to keep fighting. It pushed him to return a punch right between her legs for the sake of equality.

RoAnna nearly buckled. The two went at each other like cats and dogs as the battle raged all over the chamber.

Tim had no idea what to do next. Now that Malcolm’s dead, Tim was the most human and in over his head guy here.

Being Rank 1 sucked.

“The child, Tim, you must go get the child,” Emily reminded him as she slowly stood to her feet.

Tim was pretty sure the kid was at the safest place here. Emily seemed like she needed more of Tim’s help. She looked more haunted than Tim had ever seen of her. She usually enjoyed the heck out of using her creepy death powers.

The human sacrifice of a dying man must’ve crossed the line.

“There’ll be a lot to answer for after this is done,” Emily said as she raised her hand. “But for this once, I just don’t care anymore. I’m a double-murderer, why not triple it, why not spread it and smear it and suffer all my sin of blood and flesh like rot inside the lungs, Great Necrosis Bolt.”

An incantation for boosting a great-quality spellcraft that was already strong. Yeah, sure, why not? Go ahead and make Tim feel like a nobody for choosing [Fighter] and being the magic arrow guy.

She could target the Yoroachian giants that were crushing the last of her kiddies and put a dent in that. Instead, she aimed the black and wispy and surprisingly small bolt at the back of the Yoroachian looming over Jay and RoAnna’s fight.

The guardian was about to intervene when Jay grabbed the queen’s head and kneed her in the face three times really fast, splattering her dark roach blood all over the place. Tim could see why the guardian would want to jump in. But Emily’s spellcraft struck with a small splash against the monster’s back, interrupting the monster before it could slam Jay.

The spellcraft corroded through the monster’s armor, through its flesh, through its organs, and spread out from there faster than the guardian could react to its sudden death. There was too little left of the guardian to get revived as a giant kiddie, but Emily scored a double kill. She killed a guardian almost instantly. And she killed what remained of Tim’s pride.

Two of the Yoroachian giants smashing kiddies to bits turned toward Tim and Emily. They charged with way more speed than monsters that size should have. They also raised their upper arms and shot those spikes that had led to Malcolm being human-sacrificed.

Oh.

Fuck.

Emily had human-sacrificed Malcolm.

What the fuck? It just occurred to Tim that human sacrifice was a thing that Emily had just committed.

Again, what the fuck?

Tim poured a truckload of cement on that delayed reaction to a cursed traumatic realization. He scooped up the Death [Medium] and ran away as spikes landed right behind his heels, seeking to pincushion him like they had done to Malcolm. Like Tim had done to plenty of monsters with arrows only to now fear the same happening to him.

Then Emily might human-sacrifice him.

No, Tim thought.

Cement that. Keep focused. Keep running.

Tim kept his head on a swivel, darting left and right as bug spikes rained down around him and Emily every few seconds. The Yoroachian giants weren’t dumb either. They didn’t chase side-by-side. They split off to corral the Champions and pin them.

Tim could see them doing that. And it was working. The giant Yoroachians boxed him and Emily toward a corner with no cover. The giants used their flying spikes to ward Tim from trying to slip through a gap, cutting him off each time as the giants drew closer and closer.

This might be the end. These monsters were big, fast, smart, and had ranged attacks. Tim was out of his league here. And he had a Divine in his arms, one of the two he’d always wanted to get with. The other was Hailey, of course. Casey and Macy were too crazy. More of Rick's types when he wasn't getting with holier-than-thou girls.

Tim felt incredibly bad that he couldn’t pull out a super move and save the day somehow.

Emily was way stronger than him, but she needed a protector that could outdo the bigger monsters for her. That was Jay’s wheelhouse. Not Tim’s. Tim could only fight, fight, and fight his way through smaller threats as quickly as he could. But sometimes that wasn’t enough.

It was times like these Tim appreciated his crazy peacock of a brother that would’ve thrown himself into an unwinnable fight because someone messed with his people, especially if they messed with Tim. The twins hated each other, sometimes. But they were still brothers.

“I don’t want to die, Emily,” Tim said with his back against the wall as the giants stalked forward. “Rick would get too drunk at my wake. He'd tell everyone embarrassing stuff about me.”

Emily turned to him. Her dark eyes looked through him in a way that made Tim concerned for his soul.

She smiled tiredly. A good look on her, even if it was all bravado. Everyone in Team Noir was dirty as hell. But she was a Divine. Those girls were always pretty.

“Our miracle is here,” she said. “A black death machine.”

“Whose that?” Tim wondered.

“[Horizondancer],” Jay said, his voice reverberating throughout the entire cavern as time slowed.

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