MULTIVERSE FIGHTERS — Episode 5: "Hide in Plain Sight"
The city reset like a bad habit. What the night stained, the morning only smeared. Music leaked out of cracked doorways, fighters staggered home or never left, and somewhere a drone hosed off a sidewalk that would be red again by dusk. The system didn't care. It pulsed in every skull, tallying sin and survival like a bookie.
Asia slept sideways across a booth, boots still on, smoke half-finished in an ashtray. Cody lay on the floor with his shirt as a pillow and a bottle for a blanket, snoring between laughs he didn't know he was making. X hadn't tried for sleep. He kept watch from the corner, hood down, eyes steady, listening to the building breathe.
His screen fluttered, a moth against glass.
X — L275 → L277 (After-Dark share)
Energy/Stamina cost per action: 3% → 3%
He closed it before anyone else stirred.
Up on a rail above the bar, the old coat watched him again. Prestige 100,000 flickered under the lapel like a secret eye. He lifted his cup in a lazy salute. X didn't return it.
A message blinked—no sender.
Hide in plain sight. Gift them the story they want.
He deleted it. He already had a plan.
⸻
They woke mean.
Asia rubbed at a headache like she wanted to peel it out. "Breakfast is a cigarette," she muttered, lighting one with hands that were steady only when someone was looking. Cody rolled to his feet with a wince and a grin.
"Tell me we're taking the small one today," he said. "My skull feels like it owes someone money."
X shrugged. "We'll make the small one inside the big one."
Cody blinked. "What?"
"Trust me."
The phones throbbed to life—same ice-cold text as always:
NEXT TRIAL AVAILABLE
1) 50-PLAYER HUNT
2) 100-PLAYER HUNT
EVENT MODIFIERS: MERGE • FOG FIELD • ALTITUDE SURGES
Asia arched a brow. "Merge means zones collapse mid-match. Fog means I'm going to break someone I can't see. Altitude surges means the sky will buck."
Cody cracked his neck. "So… fun."
X tapped 100-PLAYER without ceremony. The world folded, and the floor turned into sky.
⸻
They dropped into a dead arcology: a multi-level shopping maze long since cannibalized into bones. Escalators hung like snapped tendons. Fountain basins were black mirrors. Whole storefronts had been blown open into rooms of concrete ribs. A heavy haze rolled through the stack, all white glare and grit, swallowing distance, swallowing fighters.
The voice hit from everywhere: "HUNT COMMENCE. BARE HANDS PERMANENT. NO MERCY."
The fog breathed. Shapes lurched inside it.
"Formation Crown," X said, low.
Asia squinted. "We never named formations."
"We do now. I'm front. You two finish."
Cody snorted. "You mean we clean up—"
"—we finish," X repeated, looking him dead in the eye. "Trust me."
He stepped into the fog first.
Two fighters lunged from a cracked bakery—one high, one low. X let the high one swing through air and toe-hooked the low one's ankle, dumping him onto his own partner's knee. Before they untangled, X palmed the back of a skull and bounced it off a broken pastry case, then slid aside so Asia could crash an elbow into the temple that rose to meet her.
The second made it to his knees just in time for Cody to fold him with a short hook to the liver and a shove that smashed face to tile.
"Finishers," X said, and kept walking.
Squad EXP Awarded.
X — L277 → L282
Energy cost: 3% → 2%
Asia — L10 → L11
Cody — L10 → L11
Fog swallowed sound, then threw it back wrong—footsteps left when they were right, shouts from above that came from below. A fighter flew out of the haze at head height, tackled Asia to the floor. She rolled, bit a forearm, spat blood, hammered the back of the head with the side of her fist until the body went slack. She got to a knee and smiled like she hated it.
"Two on the left," X said, already moving.
They came as predicted. He took the first in the ribs with a shovel punch that cratered cartilage, shoved him into his partner, and let momentum stack them for Cody, who dove from a half-fallen escalator with fists first—one jaw, one throat.
"Finishers," X said again, his voice a calm metronome.
He kept breathing small and quiet, kept his screen tilted away, kept his body loose. Every time something ugly came out of the fog, he turned it, nudged it, and gave the last inch to Asia's knee, Cody's knuckles, a curb that didn't forgive. The system sang in their bones, tallying hits, awarding shares.
X — L282 → L291 → L298
Energy cost: 2% → 2%
Asia — L11 → L12
Cody — L11 → L12
The first Merge hit like a building shrug. Entire floors groaned, slid, and locked misaligned. The fog rippled. Distant shrieks clipped off mid-stream.
"Altitude surge incoming," Asia warned, breath frosting the air. "Hear that hum?"
X did. The pressure changed. Anything above mid-level was about to buck like a thrown horse.
"Down stairwell," he said. "Now."
They ran. People who tried to fly got flung into ceiling beams or rattled loose from the air like beads tossed from a string. Bodies thumped into pillars. X kept his stride measured, shoulders barely turning. He took a wild swing on his forearm, rode the shock down his hip, and let the man overcommit into Cody's waiting clinch.
Cody smiled a mean smile and squeezed until vertebrae talked. "Sleep."
Asia slid through a cluster, snatched a wrist, twisted fingers until a hand became noise, then forearm-checked a jaw until it forgot how to be a jaw. "Next."
REMAINING: 60.
They found an anchor point in a food court choked with broken tables. A dozen fighters had the same idea. For a second, everyone looked at everyone like no one wanted to be first. Then a man grabbed a woman's braid and dragged her head across a table edge, and the spell broke.
"Second wave," X said, and walked straight into it.
He took the big ones by breaking the small things—thumbs, feet, the rhythm of a breath—and he always, always lined his finishes up so someone else could own the moment. Asia's knees, Cody's forearms, strangers with bad intentions who could be lured into landing the last insult. The system didn't care who set the table if someone else cleared it. And if anyone glanced at X after a body dropped, his shoulders were sloped, his breathing measured like he'd just finished warming up.
X — L298 → L307
Energy cost: 2%
Asia — L12 → L13
Cody — L12 → L13
A squad with red bandanas spilled down the far stairs and tried an alliance with their chins up and their palms open.
"Temporary truce?" their lead asked. His smile was salesman bright.
"Until the next Merge," X said.
They fought back to back for five brutal minutes, bare hands only, the red bandanas good enough to be dangerous. When the Merge alarm began to whine again, X pivoted and watched the lead's eyes cut sideways to his own people, fingers twitching.
Asia saw it too. She didn't wait for betrayal. She slammed her palm under the lead's jaw and bounced his skull off a support column. His crew surged in confused, late, and angry. Cody caught one, hip-tossed him onto a table that broke wrong, and heel-dropped a sternum until it didn't rise again. X redirected the angriest one headfirst into an empty fryer basin, then fed two more into each other like gears until both squealed and stopped turning.
"No truce," Asia said, and spit.
REMAINING: 34.
The fog thinned on a gust, and the arcology showed a new shape in its ribs: a woman walking with a pack behind her, shoulders squared like she'd carried weight all her life and dared anyone to take it away. Stitched scars crossed her arms. Her eyes were the color of old iron. Badge blink: Prestige 27.
"Mother Scar," someone breathed. Fear and worship in it.
She stopped ten paces away. "Little orphans," she said, and the word sounded like a nursery rhyme broken on a nail. "All grown. I used to recruit from places like yours. Sometimes I dream the halls are still full."
Asia's chin lifted. Cody's hands curled. X stepped between them so it looked like protection, so it felt like leadership, so no one would think of counting how little breath he took.
"Last one standing," Mother Scar said. "That's the song. Sing."
She moved like ruin. Three of her pack went for Asia; two for Cody; she took X herself. Good choice—bad math.
Her first punch was a hammer. X didn't block it. He caught the edge with forearm and hip and turned so it scraped by him, the heat of it grazing his ribs. He answered with a short cross you could mistake for a tap if you weren't the one wearing it. She tasted blood and smiled.
"You're the hide-and-seek one," she said. "I respect that."
He said nothing. The trick wasn't words. The trick was the gift.
He pressed her into a broken railing and hit her in places that lied—ribs that could take it, muscle that sounded loud when it was really soft. He let her push him back in a way that looked like she'd won something. Then he side-stepped and let Asia's knee scythe where his fist had been, and Mother Scar's head snapped. She reeled, still on her feet, and Cody crashed her waist with a clinch that would've folded a lighter fighter.
Mother Scar pried him off and laughed without joy. She threw two hard ones at X—he slipped both, let one clip his hood so it looked dangerous, and gave her a body shot that'd pay dividends two seconds later. When it did—when her breath hitched—Asia pounced, elbows like knife handles, and Cody dragged her ankle at the same time so her knee sank deeper. Mother Scar toppled, rolled, rose into X's palm on her forehead.
He did not finish her.
He turned her head just enough that Asia's heel would be the end.
Asia took it. Mother Scar went still with her eyes open and a grin like she'd been surprised by something unfair and proud of it.
Cody stood panting, blood rivering from his eyebrow. "Teamwork," he rasped. "Ugly as sin."
"Finishers," X said.
X — L307 → L322
Energy cost: 2% → 1%
Asia — L13 → L15
Cody — L13 → L15
The fog closed again. The last twenty happened in pieces—shapes arriving with curses, leaving with silence. X steered, fed, gave away endings like tips to waiters. When an altitude surge hit and threw a cluster into a broken skylight, X grabbed a wrist, redirected a body, and let gravity teach someone about concrete while Asia and Cody collected two more on the way down.
REMAINING: 6.
REMAINING: 4.
REMAINING: 2.
The floor under the fountain cracked with a sound like a neck. From the gap, a man climbed—barefoot, bare-chested, eyes fever-clear. The badge on his shoulder blinked Prestige 35. He looked at X like he'd found the last piece in a set.
"I smelled you in the fog," he said softly. "You breathe different. The ones who last always do."
Asia and Cody flanked. X lifted his hands and made them look small.
Prestige 35 moved with a priest's patience and a butcher's certainty. He touched X's ribs, twice, like tapping a clock, and the pain rolled across X's organs in waves. Anyone else would have wilted. X let it register, let it show on his mouth without letting it live in his eyes.
He walked the man backward with nothing strikes until the man believed them little, then put a real one under the heart. The man's face changed. X let him clinch, let him torque, let him shove them both into the fountain rim. They went over in a clatter of tile. X came up first, not far enough to look like a miracle, just enough to look stubborn. The man rose, smiling with pink teeth.
"See?" he said. "Different."
X gave him the gift. He set the angle, fed the stance, and opened a window big enough to invite a storm. "Now," he said.
Asia didn't ask who to hit. She buried a knee into Prestige 35's belly so hard he folded over it like a door shutting. Cody came over the top with an axe-handle forearm that cracked somewhere important. X placed two fingers at the man's spine, found the lever under skin, and pressed, not enough to break, enough to fail him.
Prestige 35 collapsed across the fountain lip. Asia hammered the back of the head with her forearm until the lip wasn't white anymore. Cody kicked the ankle until it stopped twitching. X stood over all of it like someone watching rain.
REMAINING: 1.
Last one came screaming and didn't last a second. No one memorized his face.
HUNT COMPLETE.
SQUAD CLEARED.
After-Dark Engagements eligible.
The world stitched itself back into sin.
⸻
The undercity roared like a stadium trying to forget all it had seen. Bodies were everywhere: pressed into corners, swaying on tables, fighting simply because hands had learned only one language. Asia laughed too hard and too long, pulled two strangers into an alcove, and disappeared with a curse and a promise. Cody drank until he hugged an enemy and then punched him for accepting it. The system ticked along approvingly.
X found a shadow with a view of them both and let his breath slow.
X — L322 → L346 (After-Dark share + double EXP)
Energy cost: 1% → 1%
He wiped blood from his knuckles at a sink that coughed brown. His reflection looked like it wanted to argue. He didn't give it a chance.
The old coat was there when he turned. The eyes were amused. The number under the lapel made lies go quiet.
"You gift well," the Prestige said. "They think they saved you."
"They did."
He smiled without warmth. "That's how you hide forever—give them stories where they are the knife."
"I just want them alive."
"Then keep daring them to be heroes," the man said. "Heroes aren't curious."
X glanced back toward the booth where Asia reappeared, hair wild, grin feral, Cody pounding the table in a rhythm that made strangers cheer. They looked happy in the way people do when they refuse the bill. He wanted to keep it that way, even if it meant swallowing pieces of himself until he forgot their shape.
"Don't bleed on them," the old coat added, already fading into the crowd. "It makes people honest."
A new message flared.
You're climbing too fast. Slow your noise, not your rise.
X deleted it and headed back, shouldering through sweat and laughter and fists lifting in celebration. Asia slung an arm around his neck and kissed his cheek like a dare. Cody punched his shoulder like brothers do when the words are too heavy.
"No questions," Asia said, eyes bright. "We win, we live, we waste the night."
"No questions," Cody echoed, raising a bottle. "To finishing!"
X lifted his ghost of a glass and let it touch theirs.
"Finishers," he said.