Your favourite interplanar reporter

He stood in the Jukai Forest again. Once more, there were two of him.

The human was dropped to its hands and knees, tears streaming down its face. “Why do we keep fighting? We can’t do this anymore!”

“We can,” the oni said, kneeling beside the human. “And we will.”

“Why? What’s the point?” the human howled, echoing the pain of their whole.

“Because we are not fighting for us. We are fighting for so many more.”

The Dokuchi Reckoners and the family. The Order of Jukai. The Warren of Dragons. Satoru and Greasefang, Arturo and Lazaro, Vasro, Shregresha, Turrak, Gesserith, Leta, the Roxies, Kilik, Biilziebub, Eishi, Lady Hana and Steel-Ear, Headhunter and Hush...the list went on and on now.

“We can’t help them all,” the human whimpered.

“No,” the oni agreed, “but we can try.”

Koda slowly cracked his eyes open. He was laying on his back in some very comfortable moss, and he could hear Satoru’s voice. These were two things that did not go together. As he stirred more fully, more details came to him. The smell of tea. What seemed to be breakfast sitting nearby. Leta and Vasro and Turrak’s voices joining Satoru’s. A soft blanket covering him. A manapool filled with Black and Green, though it was not his. A feeling of feral rage from somewhere in his bond with Haruko.

He licked his dry lips. “Satoru...?”

He barely had time to blink before Satoru knelt down beside him. “Koda...” That was also new. Satoru didn’t let concern into his voice this much.

Koda braced himself. Though every movement hurt, he managed to prop himself up on his elbows just before Satoru pulled him into a surprisingly gentle hug. His limbs ached, but Koda returned the hug. All he could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologizes unless you’re going to do better,” Satoru whispered. Koda felt tears staining the shoulder of his armor. “Let me comfort you after your heart attack, you little jerk.”

Koda didn’t deserve the comfort. Especially not when he felt his stomach drop – metaphorically speaking, of course. Arturo and Lazaro would think that they did something to cause this. “Arturo and Lazaro-”

“-Were told about what happened,” Satoru finished. “Kid, what did you do that finally pushed you into a full near-death heart attack?”

Koda’s exhale shook. It hurt, like everything else. “I needed to fix things,” he whispered. The wards to protect Kilik in the communicators drained him quickly. But he still needed to help – help Torrezon against Aclazotz any way he could, help protect Kilik from the archangel hunting them, help get Biilziebub to listen. “I’m a weapon, I need to-”

“No you aren’t.”

Koda blinked a few times.

Satoru pulled back a little, keeping Koda upright by the shoulders. “You’re not a weapon, Koda. You’re a person. You’re worth protecting too. I see it, Arturo and Lazaro see it, Lethaltooth and Silentsign see it, Ghostmark and Goldenscar see it, I can go on and on. We love you, Koda. You pushing yourself like this – into a grave, regardless of how late you think it is – is going to hurt more than just you.”

Koda’s mouth felt dry again. “I...” He trailed off.

Satoru eased him back down so he was laying properly. “No arguing, little bro. You’re going to accept help, non-negotiable. And we’re probably going to talk to Vasro about getting you blood pressure medication.”

Blind panic, more rage from the other side of the bond. Koda’s nails dug into Satoru’s prosthetic hands. “No! No medication, please, not that, I can’t do that, not after Sakai-”

Satoru gently took and squeezed Koda’s hands, grounding him again with both touch and voice. “Okay, okay. No medication. But we need to do something about this.” He paused for a moment to pull the blanket back over Koda. “I need you to swear to me that you don’t use magic for a while. Please. Not until we reunite you properly with Haruko and calm you both down. And then bare minimum – and I do mean minimum – when we do.”

“No magic,” Koda promised. “On my life.”

“You’re suicidal, that doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

“Fine. On Mom’s memory, then.”

“Deal. Now, you focus on recovering, because as it stands, everyone else is trapped in Torrezon until you can stand up and reunite with Haruko.”

Fuck. Haruko in her current frenzy wouldn’t recognize any of them as friends. Not until she was reunited with Koda. Koda gently reached towards his bond with her and found her still rabid and furious. He recoiled mentally, not from Haruko, but from her fury. “Understood,” he whispered.

“And kid?”

“Yeah?”

“Please ask for our help more. Don’t think that just because you’re a Reckoner boss that you had to do everything yourself.”

Koda fixed Satoru with a glare. “That’s what you do.”

Satoru paused. His gaze flit back and forth a few times. “It really isn’t. It just looks like it from the outside. I have Nari, Thistlefur, and several lieutenants. I genuinely permit them to handle things on my behalf, which you’re still learning.”

Koda clenched his fists under the blanket now. “But if I don’t-”

“-Then you’re disrespecting the competence of those around you.” Satoru crossed his arms. “I don’t know what it is about having a spark that makes you think you need to become a superhero or the sole protector of a plane or whatever, but I promise that we don’t all need rescuing. Let us carry you too, little brother. We want to help you. We want to know what happened to you so we can help you like you help all of us. In order to do that, we need you to talk to us, not just bottle it all up until you die.” Satoru’s voice cracked, another thing Koda had never heard before. “Don’t make me outlive you, kid. Please.”

“...I won’t. I’m sorry, Satoru.” Koda took a deep breath. “I...I don’t want to...to relive what he did to me...”

Satoru’s voice grew a little firm again. “Avoiding it isn’t helping. Please, Hayashi. I need to know what he did to you. I need to know how to help.”

Koda took another deep breath and began to speak.

He had lost track of what they injected him with after the first week. He could feel his body changing, even when Sakai would cut him open. The gills were the first thing to appear outwardly, but he had swiftly discovered how to hide them. The second notable thing was the minute temporal blinking, which he could only rarely do and never long enough to be safe. The third thing was his teeth growing into fangs, though he didn’t know what the true cause of it was. So many poisons and venoms and drugs had been injected into him during those three months of hell that he had singlehandedly catalogued most of them for the Dokuchi Reckoners upon his escape. Any unauthorized sound was punished by his throat being slit, over and over and over. Frankly, Koda didn’t even remember everything they did to him, every chip they tried to put in his brain before each one failed, every memory they tore into and tried to take from him. It was only through their own technological failures that the last one failed. Though Koda physically survived, a lot of him died in the grasp of Sakai and his Saiba Futurists.

Satoru took Koda’s left hand in both of his. “I’m sorry, little brother,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I should have done something.”

“You would have just gotten caught too,” was Koda’s pragmatic answer. “At least while he was torturing me, he wasn’t paying attention to anyone else.” A tear ran down the side of his face.

“You shouldn’t have had to be a martyr. Not you, not Benkei, not any other Reckoner suffering by his hand.”

He shouldn’t have had to be a martyr. But he had been.

Her communicator was ringing. Nari permitted herself a single groan before she reached over and answered it. With it being one in the morning, there was only one person it could have been.

Satoru’s voice was quiet and firm. It lacked the rough edge of steel it typically had when he was dealing with the gang. “Nari. We need to talk.”

“Boss? Do you know how late it is-”

“I’m aware, and I’ve got bugs crawling on me and Koda leaning on my left shoulder in a way that’s making it numb.”

Nari picked up on the name. “Koda, not ‘Boss Hayashi’. Personal problem phone call then?”

“...You know me well. Were this any other case, I’d be pissed about that. But right now I need your expertise.”

“My expertise on what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Precisely.”

“Great. Alright, what prompted the phone call?”

“Finding out that my younger brother apparently had sex with the prince of a demon cult on a plane that paved over its oceans.”

“...Run that by me again?”

“Apparently they did it while Koda was experiencing a colorshift, so he definitely wasn’t in his right mind, as much as he pretends that he was.”

“Remind me, colorshift?”

“He basically had all of his morals and priorities rewritten for twenty-four straight hours.”

Nari was silent for a moment as she processed that.

“Yeah. I just scrolled back up in the communicator to try and find it when it happened, but there’s also two posts on the hellsite about it and Hayashi’s already making plans for round two.”

“...So are you concerned about your brother having sex or are you concerned about who he’s having sex with? Give me something to work with here, boss.”

“The who. I of all people can’t judge the kid for getting some tail. I just...okay, shit, how much did you read from my writeup of Thunder Junction and the failed heist?”

“Enough to figure out that you’re probably talking about a kid of that Rakdos guy.”

“Exactly.”

“So, significantly more dangerous than you banging the son of the Regent?”

“Considering he’s a planeswalker to boot, apparently knows a song that makes people all murder each other, and spontaneously combusts-”

“Ah, there’s part of why you called me. Your fear of fire’s run headlong into your concern for your little brother.”

“Right. And Koda’s been spiraling pretty hard lately. The depersonalization and suicidal ideation’s getting worse, it’s slipping a lot more into how he talks about himself.”

“And you think this prince is...what, encouraging it or making it worse?”

“...I don’t know.”

Nari paused. She had never heard Satoru use those three words together in that order. He never admitted to not knowing something, knowing it would come across as weakness to anyone other than Nari. What was going on on other planes to make him finally crack? She took a deep, silent breath.

That quiet breath was what allowed her to hear Satoru’s next whispered admission. “I hate the idea of anyone dehumanizing and using my brother like that.”

Nari rolled over onto her back in bed and was silently grateful that she wasn’t somewhere in the woods on another plane like Satoru was. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“...Revenge fuck the guy’s dad?”

“NO. By the kami, boss. What are you, eighteen?”

“Sorry, sorry. The stress is getting to me. Add on the shit with H- ...the Devouring Chaos, and I’m fairly certain that even if I did die, my heart would just keep beating.”

Nari didn’t need the name finished to know who Satoru meant. Hidetsugu, the ogre-oni, one of the founders of the Hyozan Reckoners alongside Satoru’s ancestor Toshiro. And the two had one hell of a falling out that has affected generations of Umezawas and numerous chaos cultists ever since.

Nari had been six years old when Thistlefur found Satoru, also merely six, among the smoldering ruins of the Umezawa family home, disabled and orphaned. It was how the two of them met, after all – both orphaned, both taken in by Thistlefur. They never considered each other siblings, like how Satoru had never considered Thistlefur to be his dad, but they were close friends through the years. When Satoru had killed Kyuso, the boss before him, it was Nari who became his second-in-command immediately. When Ayame Hayashi was murdered and Satoru had finished consoling Koda, it was Nari who consoled Satoru.

Nari pinched the bridge of her nose. “How bad is everything else on those communicators, boss?”

“There’s an angel from Xerex who’s dedicated to some kind of divine peace that’s putting them in direct conflict with everyone else, someone wants the Brokers to go to war with the Dokuchi Reckoners and they’re pulling strings about it, there are incredibly depressed Dimir agents – also I apparently slept with their boss on Thunder Junction, didn’t know that going in – and...honestly I could be here all day, but then we wouldn’t actually get back to Towashi. I’ll tell you the rest in person.”

“Sounds good, boss.” Nari smirked. “Grey hair check?”

Satoru sounded more exhausted now. “I found three new ones.”

“Old man.”

“Shady bitch.”

“See you when you get home, boss.”

“Shouldn’t be too long now... A little more hiking, a little falling down a mountain, and then getting back to the city and making good on a deal. Then you and I are putting our heads down and working. Hayashi needs our support for this to go well.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Nari let Satoru hang up first, then dropped her communicator back on her nightstand and stared up at the ceiling. She could feel Azamuki’s influence roiling within her, almost like Treachery Incarnate knew something it wouldn’t share with her.

Plxtwt walks on screen once more, behind them the gates of Valor's Reach. They wave at the camera before beggining to sign in kylem sign language, a button appears at the bottom of the screen reading "translations", upon clicking it there are four options, "Kamigawan" "Capennan" "Audio" and "Subtitles".

Clicking on Capennan or Kamigawan pops up a small display of Plxtwt in a dressing room signing "Thank you to Vasro for teaching me this language", before signing whatever the big screen Plxtwt signs in the respective sign language.

Pressing Audio results in a voice over, pressing Subtitles results in subtitles.

"Hello Multiverse, I am your host, Plxtwt, happy to announce that signups for the very first edition of "Kylem presents:Multiversal Deathgames" are now open. I will walk you trough the signup process! There are two ways to go about it, one in person and one digitally, trough your Izzet transmitter, or whichever other device you are accessing the network with. I shall begin with in person sign ups!"

They walk trough the gates of Valor's Reach, the camera following it closely. It turns left almost immediately after entering and approaches an information booth, a nervous looking human sitting behind it.

"Good afternoon! I would like to sign up for the death games! ^" Plxtwt chirps at the human.

"Y-yes, just fill in this form" The human sputters before shoving a piece of paper into the homunculus' hands.

"Thank you Kyle!" Plxtwt holds the paper up to the camera "These questions are the same as the ones you find in the digital form, the link to which can be found after this broadcast!" It turns back to the human, "Say, Kyle, this form asks for two to three members of a team, but I'm here by myself, whatever must I do? Will I be unable to participate?"

"No, you can fillinthisotherform to help us machtmake." Kyle mutters before handing Plxtwt another piece of paper, which it also holds up to the camera after briefly cringing. "Great job Kyle, indeed, if you are alone without a teammate or you're a group of two looking for a third there is a different form for you to fill in. After submitting it we will assign you a new partner or two to fight alongside with!"

The camera begins moving backwards until it leaves Valor's Reach once more, flying upwards so you get a clear view of the whole stadium, inside there are a bunch of people setting up what seems to be a small town, except all the houses are empty and have no windows or doors in the respective frames. The words "See you soon!" appear on screen before the footage cuts out.

Signup as a team (only needs to be filled in once per team)

If you have applied in the looking for member(s) form but not received any communication from us yet please hold on tight, this means we still haven't found a great match for you, you are guaranteed a spot in the games however. If we cannot find you a proper teammate in time we will assign you one of our many lovely Kylem participants.

Not sure if you signed up correctly?

The non-Kylem teams currently signed up are as follows:

Controlled Chaos

Placeholder Name

The Best Things Come Small

The last march

The participants signed up as looking for one or more members we have not yet found a match for are as follows:

Tordubiak ( @lotleth-centenarian-2 )

Shegresha ( @warrior-of-tol-angata )

Feel free to reach out of us if there are any questions or concerns!