Leandriel banked sharply, his turn sending him swooping around Allia, their wings a mere handbreadth apart.

Allia wobbled, then beat her wings furiously to stay upright.

Leandriel sighed and handled the violent air currents by increasing the speed of his own wingbeats.

They were not in synchronization, nor in harmony. It felt as if each stroke of his wings clashed against hers, making it an exhausting effort to stay aloft, let alone accomplish any of the complex maneuvers they were supposed to be performing.

Allia was a mage, her strength limited. Exhausted, her wings lost the battle to gravity and she was pulled inexorably to the ground. She managed to slow her descent enough to avoid injury, but her landing was nowhere near graceful. Stumbling, she dropped to her hands and knees, wings drooping to the ground with no care for the dirt that would mar her golden feathers.

Leandriel came to a precise landing just in front of the exhausted were-eagle. Crouching down, he held out a stamina potion. “Again.”

Allia lifted her head enough to glare at him, snatching the potion out of his grasp. He met the glare with equanimity, raising his eyebrows slightly.

Allia’s features rearranged themselves into a more pleasant expression. “Leander,” she said in a pleading tone, consistently failing to use his avatar’s name, “Can we take a break?”

“Generally, people take breaks when they have accomplished part of their work,” Leandriel answered, his tone neutral but his words cold.

It had been three days since Leandriel had started to work with Allia, and they still had not managed the maneuvers they were supposed to perform on the first day. Three days that his every minute in game was shadowed and observed. Three days since he had told Lacey he would ask Fey out.

Leandriel was not happy. At first, he had been annoyed, assuming that Allia was feigning clumsiness in order to draw out the time they had to spend together. As the number of painful and humiliating crashes accumulated, he realized that she was truly bad at flying. Annoyance was replaced with pity and frustration. He wanted this project over with, and at this rate of progress, it would never end.

There was nothing left to do but drill endlessly until Allia finally became accustomed to flight, and that was what he was intent on doing.

Allia put on a hurt expression. “You make it sound like I’m not trying.”

Some of his annoyance returned. Leandriel wanted results, not effort. Where he might normally be kind and encouraging, he was now hard and cold. “If you feel you are unable to complete the work, say so now and I will have Ms. Bosse arrange for a replacement.”

Allia stiffened. Forcing herself to her feet, she downed the stamina potion and launched herself into the air.

He knew she was angry, probably hurt as well. He wondered if it made him a bastard that his only thought was the hope that she would stop trying to flirt with him.

Leandriel took off from the ground and caught up to Allia, again curving his flight path to engage with her airspace. She stumbled in the air. He sighed, frustration building.

***

“Oh my god,” said Sirena.

“It’s…” Blade trailed off.

Fey chuckled. “So that’s where he went.”

Mimi looked at the profile information of the opposing team, then her team members’ faces, wondering what they were going on about.

The merman’s blue-tinged skin was similar to Sirena’s. “Do you know him?” Mimi asked.

“Hehehehe,” Sirena began laughing. The sound quickly morphed into something evil.

“Yes,” Fey answered. “He was in our party for a while.” At Mimi’s look, she elaborated, “He kind of accidentally left the party without being on any of our friend lists, and we lost contact with him a while before you came along. He also had a bit of a stress-induced infatuation with me.”

Mimi nodded as if she had received a coherent explanation.

Sirena draped herself over Fey’s shoulders. “You’re so popular!” She continued laughing.

“Ignore Sirena,” said Fey. “Requiem’s behaviour regularly makes her laugh enough to impair her thought processes.” (*drunk*)

Blade flipped through the other three profiles. A level 50 rogue, level 50 warrior, and level 49 mage, all female.

“Harem versus harem!” Sirena exclaimed happily.

Blade wore a pained expression. “A party of four is not a harem.”

“It is if all three girls have different hair colours,” Sirena replied cheerfully, now draping herself affectionately over Blade.

“She has a point,” said Fey.

Blade was still confused about his teammates’ willingness to accept the label of ‘harem’. They were such independent individuals that it would have made more sense to him if they angrily denied anything of the kind.

Either way, he was a guy who believed in monogamy. It was partly the way he was raised and partly because he could not imagine anyone enjoying the nightmarish scenario of multiple jealous females vying for romantic dominance. “This is not a harem,” he repeated.

Fey leaned in and looked up at him from under her eyelashes. “Would you like it to be?” she asked in a slightly breathy voice.

Blade froze.

Fey leaned back. “Too much?” she asked in her normal voice.

Sirena stared at her best friend with wide eyes, still draped over Blade’s shoulders. “You’re scary when you’re being sarcastic.”

Fey tsked and sighed. “I can’t seem to get the tone right.”

“Oh, you got the tone right. It just wasn’t sarcastic.” Turning to Blade, Sirena said, “Fey’s a really good liar when she thinks it’s obvious that she’s being sarcastic. Please ignore her.”

“…Sure.” Blade was going to do his damndest to forget that particular fifteen seconds of his life.

“Sooo…” Sirena said, forcibly changing the topic. “What’s the plan?”

“A,” said Fey. Mimi nodded, not seeing anything special about the opposing team that would warrant different tactics.

“Not that plan. The plan for the pre-match meeting.”

“Do we need a plan for that?” Fey asked.

“Well, yeah. We can mess with Requiem’s head so much, he’ll be useless for the whole game.”

“We don’t have enough information to make a plan.”

“Well, at the very least, we have to decide how we’re going to play his departure from our party. We could be angry he abandoned us, apathetic, or happy we found him again.”

“If he’s angry, we’ll play apathetic. If he’s apathetic, we’ll play happy. If he’s happy, we’ll play angry,” Fey said, like a rock-paper-scissors game of maximum emotional turmoil.

“I like the way you think,” Sirena said approvingly.

Requiem stared at Fey’s face and did not speak.

Sirena hissed over the party’s audio chat. “He’s confused! What’s the plan for confused?”

Requiem was indeed in emotional confusion. The amount of time since he had seen Fey had been long enough that his feelings of infatuation were gone. Since he was not a student of neuroscience, he did not understand how such intense emotion could fade to nothing within the space of a few months.

Fey felt rather sorry for the merman. She guessed he was having a minor emotional crisis about whether he had fickle feelings. She suppressed the urge to start explaining about neurotransmitters and reward pathways. “Hi,” she said gently.

“…Hi.”

“Let’s have a good match, okay?”

“…Yeah.”

Fey turned away.

“Wait!” Requiem called out.

She gave him a questioning look.

“Can I add you to my friend list?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Fey glanced over at Requiem’s team. Of the three girls, there was a blue-haired beauty who looked particularly unhappy that Requiem was fraternizing with the enemy.

“It’s just a friend list,” Requiem insisted.

Seeing no graceful way to decline, Fey accepted the friend request, bringing her total to five.

“Let’s start the match,” she suggested. If both teams agreed, they could waive the preliminary time before the match began.

“Okay,” Requiem agreed.

“That witch!” Fey swore. (The word definitely wasn’t ‘witch’ this time.)

“It’s okay,” Sirena soothed. “Mimi avenged your honour immediately.”

Fey’s pride was stung because she had been hit and eliminated. The opposing team’s mage had conjured some kind of intense light that nullified her Shadow Cloak. The blue-haired rogue had then made it her mission specifically to hunt Fey down. “Ugh,” she said in disgust.

“We still won,” Blade pointed out.

This was the team’s ninth official match, their win streak unbroken. However, Fey’s elimination severely affected their ranking in aggregate skill score. Where they were previously in the running for the second round of the tournament, they now dropped into the high 900s in rank. Their chances of ending up in the top 128 were basically zero.

Unaware of the repercussions of a single stray shot, the team admired their prize of a magical sighting aid. Mimi, given her Focused Aim ability, had no need of it, so the accessory went to Fey.