Chapter Text
"Welcome to your final challenge, stubnubs conchsnack!" Mituna spits. "Win this mega awesome boss battle and we get you hooked the fuck up with all the sick benefits of being part of the Knight Coalition. Healthcare! Free lunches! Yo-yo-yoga on Tuesdays! Hot magical bitches, linin’ up for your protection, far as the eye can see!"
"And remember this is try number numero dos-o!" Latula says, in fantasy-Spanglish. "The repeat! Second shot for the second coolest redblooded dude we know! And the last chance you get to pass the test!"
"'Tula, goddamn, that's false, wafflecup. Check your facts and check 'em hard, if he fucks this shit up again he actually gets 67 more tries, coming to a grand total of-"
"-69, dudes!" They both yell. They air-mandolin.
It takes all the self control you have to stop yourself from turning to Vriska and begging for sweet, sweet death. She's looking at them in a way that makes you think she wants to collapse the entire building just to play savior and rid the world of this life-sucking, joy-killing power couple. You wouldn’t blame her. You're certain this is the only time in the history of ever when you and fucking Vriska Serket were the sanest people in a room.
She offers you the popcorn, in solidarity. You’re too queasy to eat.
You are currently sitting on the bleachers in the prismatic grand dueling center of the Knight Coalition headquarters, #16 East 7th St, Porkmor-Khan, Alternia. You have spent a perigree in this hellhole, trying to regain the esteemed, government granted title of ‘Knight.’ You are about to begin your final test, which apparently involves beating up the Knight Captain and her mage, and you have officially changed your middle name to ‘Nervous.’ Your palms are sweaty, your lip thoroughly chewed, and you’re shivering, just a little. It’s because this test matters.
You’ve got to pass. You promised Jade you’d become a knight again, for her.
This is actually the second time you’ve ever taken this test. The first was when there were nine candles on your Sweeps Eve cake, and the Knight Captain/Mage Captain at the time went easy as hell on you because the Empire really wanted a “mage-slayer Vantas” in their wild array of military resources. Unfortunately, you got stripped of all your titles shortly after, since your body had the gall to get itself injured without permission, some things led to another and… thus, here you are again. More standardized testing, extra special for the disabled kid. Goddess bless discriminatory Alternian totalitarianism.
Ironically, you’re probably better equipped to pass the test now than you were a few sweeps ago with two able legs. Doesn’t make this thing any less nerve wracking.
“Here’s the cool rules of how we’re going to school you!” says Latula, performing more of her weird slam poetry gestures. “Stand at attention, Vantas! You gotta know about all the sixteen ways we’re totally murdering your patoot!”
You glance over at Vriska, who gives you a thumbs up and a wink between her popcorn gorging. You know if her mouth wasn’t full she’d be calling you a ‘stallion’ or something inane. You wish she’d stop pity-hitting on you, on the list of ‘things that will never happen’ it’s emblazoned at number eight in big blue glowing letters.
You stand up, rest your hands on your sickles, and saunter over as casually as you can. This is hard to do when your walking pattern makes the weirdest left-foot-scrape-click right-heel-heavy-thunk noises against the tile. You end up a couple yards away from them in the big empty room. You stand in a square of red light, which you find poetically appropriate.
There's twelve sheer banners for the twelve blood colors hanging over the gargantuan glass ceiling, coloring the sunlight shining through. This results in far too many rainbows on the floor which remind you of your forever-dead moirail, which is definitely a great, morale boosting thing to think of before a life changing test. Fuckin' miracles. Fuckin’ depressing.
The Vantas red banner is the only one symbolically ripped down the center, because the empire is still collectively pissed at your magic-immune god body for getting itself crippled. At least you aren't Kankri, who the empire is pissed at just because he's inherently terrible.
Speaking of, you have no idea why they eased up on the piss-levels to allow you to test back into the elite knight taskforce. If you pass, you even get to regain the mid-tier title you held (Knight-Escheladder level "Scarlet Pimperknucklesandwich") before your little leg-related accident(s), no strings attached. Calling the whole thing "suspicious" is painting it white and putting it lightly. You figure Jade must have pulled some favors with her mom, Patrician Crocker of Porkmor-Kahn, just so you could take the test. You don't actually know, you haven't communicated with Jade in half a perigree.
If she did, you almost wish she hadn't, because you have to deal with these two fuckheads.
“Rules schmools!” Mituna yells. “Kill one of us or knock one of us out and you win! Vice versa and you lose! Mini-Mindfang is going to take care of the corpse-y business for the wins.”
“You better call Mindfang ‘Mega-Vriska’ on a regular basis for that nickname to make any sense at all,” Vriska shouts in a disgruntled, popcorn-stuffed tone.
"So like, we know you're immune to magic and all," Latula says, grinning like Terezi. "So it wouldn't be any fair if I aimed to wound, 'cuz you can't be healed! So Mituna, bumblebee?” Her voice grows dark, and you grip the handles of your sickles.“We're gonna hafta to aim to kill. Let’s begin the examination."
Mituna cackles, and begins to levitate, his hands lighting up in red and blue. You’ve seen enough wacky psiionic magic to know where this is going, so you’re not keen to stick around. You drop to your knee, slide back your opposite leg, and take off in a dead-set sprint towards Latula.
You have to do this fast, get ‘em quick with your sickles. If you get hit once, even once, you’re fucking dead. Not just from the pragmatic standpoint of ‘it’s actually easier to kill and resurrect Karkat Vantas than it is to wait six months for him to heal naturally’ but also because you just suck. You suck. Suck suck suck. You have such a low constitution stat that if a butterfly landed on your nose, one of your ribs would shatter.
You reach her, but she’s Knight Captain so of course she’s primed and ready for you. Her rapier is drawn, dragon’s head on the basket handle, and she jabs at you with a godawful, “En Garde!” You sidestep, duck, swipe at her, she parries, you tuck and aim with your other sickle. You are so close you can see your terrified reflection in her red glasses. You are face to face, neck to neck, with one of the best fighters in Alternia, and you can’t even hope to compare to- Ugh, fuck, don’t think about that. You can’t think about it, or you’ll shut down. You have to live in the now, and every past and future iteration of yourself can deal with the consequences later.
You thought you’d be safe fighting Latula so close you can see the sparks fly off your metal, but apparently that assumption’s getting fucked thoroughly in the ass. You hear a couple hundred tiles detatch themselves from the floor behind you, and you can bet Mituna’s going to hurl them at you like discuses at a wizard fraternity party. You flit to the side and dodge another one of her rapier thrusts, then start booking it across the room.
Your gamble paid off, because you feel the whoosh of tiles behind you as you run. Latula yells, “Whoa, watch out, babe!” so you figure his ugly haircut isn’t doing any wonders for his aiming abilities. Latula’s heavy footsteps echo behind you, tiles whirr past your shoulders, and before you know it, you’re at the other end of the room. You hit the wall, use your momentum to push off, rotate, and face your attackers.
Mituna’s followed Latula, hovering over her like a ghostly lap dog. He stops tossing tiles at you so Latula can do some shitty flippy trick with her rapier and probably say some sort of vapid one liner.
“Aw, got you in a corner, little Kat?” she says. She brandishes her rapier, grinning. “Meet my sword, Curiosity.”
You blink a few times. "What? Was that supposed to be, fucking, 'curiosity killed the cat?' No, hell no, I am insulted, that was way too obtuse to possibly-”
Mituna interrupts you by trying to slam some tiles over your head, forcing you to block with both your sickles. You barely get your arms up fast enough, the wide flat of your blades shielding you from thin, shattered marble. You almost buckle under the impact. Your lower half is unguarded, Latula doesn’t miss a beat, and she attempts to slash across your waist. And if you were entirely flesh-and-blood, you would have lost right there and then. You would have literally been cut in half with her infinitely sharp Rapier of Bleeding +4.
Thankfully, part of you is titanium.
For every disadvantage your hook-shaped prosthetic comes with (everyone constantly staring so hard their eyes might pop in a burst of opaque yellow fluid, hard time with staircases, Vriska constantly hitting on you, can’t fucking step backwards), there’s an advantage that makes up for it. The particular advantage that comes in all sorts of handy at the moment is “Jade tricked out every inch of this shit.”
You swing your thigh up as though you were trying to roundhouse Latula in the head. Your prosthetic kicks up, out, backwards, like it’s on a hinge. It meets Latula’s sword before it can stick itself into your tender, tender waist. You twist your thigh, and the motion cascades down the rest of the prosthetic tenfold, entwining Latula’s arm and sword around the curve of it. You pull your leg back, and she staggers with, bent at the waist. She begins to say “Whoa! Radica-” as you bring down your sickle as hard as you can over her neck.
You slice her head clean off. It lands with a dull thud, bounces, her glasses fly off somewhere on the rebound. Teal spurts everywhere. Her body drops her sword and crumples down near her head. You regain your balance from your roundhouse kick-esque stunt with two cautious steps, trying not to faceplant into those cheerful dead Pyrope eyes.
You passed. You exhale for the first time in what feels like hours.
There’s a moment of silence, or as close to silence as possible with Vriska open-mouth chewing like she was hatched in a swamp, then Mituna wails. It’s the special sort of scream you hear when someone’s heart breaks, the sort of scream you’ve had passing affairs with. You hear his throat crack from how hoarse he screams. You'd cover your ears but your hands are covered in blood and there's no way you're wet willying yourself with this horrendous mess. Ugh, your outfit is going to have to be magically dry cleaned six times in a row and then burnt to be cleansed of all this highblood fluid.
"You killed my girl, you cock swallowing cunthole!” He tenses up in the air like he’s trying to eat his own foot. Do you look like that when you tantrum? Fuck. “I'll eat your face off! Kill ya an fuck yer mouth till it dissolves!"
If you’re the fine wine of insults, Mituna is a distillery in a manure pit which produces an alcohol so strong you go blind for five minutes. As your comeback, you just blow your blood-sticky bangs out of your eyes. It makes a wet, sloppy noise against your forehead that's delightfully juvenile.
The air around him grows black, crackles like static. He glows red and blue, his bangs lifting from his forehead to reveal two blind eyes broken through with cracks like the bulbous side of a glued together teapot. Goddamn it, he's doing some final boss attack shit isn't he?
"Look, do you really want to do this?" you say, twirling your sickle over your wrist. "I mean, the necromancer is literally *right here,* just let her do her thing, your so-called 'girl' returns from the grave, declare me winner, and la-de-da I go home to my own so-called 'girl' with a shiny new ring for all my efforts. Is that really so hard? Is that really so fucking hard?"
"Yes! Fuck!" he screams, doubling over and pulling at his hair. "Fuck! She dies I die too! I go with, always, always, fucking always, Vantas!"
You'd almost feel bad if he wasn't a complete idiot without any sort of foresight or self-awareness. Like if Jade got killed in front of you, you would... uh… definitely do something slightly different. Slightly. Maybe. Alright, fuck, you feel guilty.
Mituna throws his head back, screams with a voice that sounds like he shot his vocal box through with a blunderbuss pellet, and aims everything he has at you. Idols of the Doom God appear in front of you, stylized black-green skulls with eyes that open into terrible voids, surrounding you in a ring of overly-macabre imagery. Beams of light, hundreds of thousands of deadly crackling lasers fire down around you in a loud cacophony of deadly.
Fortunately, you're immune to all magic. Nothing happens. The dust settles, and every tile around you in a ten foot radius is completely decimated, only the yellowish dirt unearthed by that gaudy light show remaining. There’s a hole blown through the wall behind you, which leads into possibly the most generic storage closet you’ve seen in your entire life.
Mituna stares dumbfounded when he's done with the attack, the air clearing from his little trick. You're feeling even more guilty so you decide to go light on him. You sheathe your sickles, approach him, grab his flying ankle, and tug him down to your level. Mituna gapes at you. You just clock him in the face.
It's like punching a pillow filled with marshmallows, and Mituna hits the ground like a sack of feathers. You don't observe the scene long enough to watch him throw a tantrum or whatever, and you point across the grand rainbow hall to Vriska, who is currently picking popcorn out of her fangs like a total barbarian.
"Get Latula back up so Mituna can have his security blanket or whatever she is to him," you say, your voice booming in the hall.
"Haha, that's so awful, you asshole," she says, setting her popcorn to the side. She gets up from the bleachers, nearly skipping over to where you and the bodies are. "You attractive, pitiable, legless, asshole."
You sigh and pinch the bridge of your nose. "Stop trying, Vriska, it's still never happening."
She starts waving her hands around. Blue sparks begin to crackle along Latula's corpse. "Miss Starshine doesn't know how lucky she is. I bet her sweet human self won't even try to fill the role of a matesprit for you! Aren't you craving a good pity? Isn't there a void in your heart for some great pity fucking? The best, even?"
"No void. Only platonic hatred for you."
Vriska gets close enough for her necromancy to take effect, and Latula’s dead white eyes blink a couple times. She laughs, teal blood trickling sideways out of her mouth, and her body raises an arm to give a thumbs up.
“Oh man, that was radical, Karkat!” her head says. Her body, sloshing blood everywhere like a disgusting parody of a slurry bucket, gets up on its hands and knees and starts trying to find the head. You gingerly step around her to stand by Vriska. “You pass with flying colors! How’s it feel to be a knight again?”
Amazing. Relieving. Like a burden has been lifted off your shoulders, like you never failed the Empire long, long ago. You can’t wait to officially proclaim yourself as Jade’s knight. You want a big commitment ceremony with metric fucktons of decorations and flowers and romance and- “Terrible,” you say. “Do you have my knighthood funtime club membership ring?”
Her body paps around for her head, finds it, and tucks it under her arm. She stands up, and you find it unnerving to make eye contact with a head at waist level, although you guess it’s your own damn fault for making this anatomical paradox possible in the first place.
“Sure do!” she says, digging in one of the pouches on her belt. She takes out your knighthood ring and tosses it to you. You catch it. “You sure you don’t want your old one? That thing was badass! The blood sigil over the gray Vantas… handcuffs… thing. The thing that if you rotate looks like a-” She pauses, trying to shift her head somewhere more convenient, can’t, and gives up. “Mituna, you okay, bumblebee? Will you air mandolin for me?”
“-69, dudes,” says Mituna from the floor, weakly air-mandolining. “’Tula, my pity, my sweet titted pity, I’m sorry, shoulda died with you, I failed, fucked up, fucked up fucked up fucked up-”
"Aw, bumblebee, who'd go through all the trouble of resurrecting me if you weren't around? C'mon, lets go get my head reattached."
Mituna skitters up in a hurry, then bounces off after his undead knight as they exit the dueling hall. Vriska rolls her eyes, then trails the couple, hands raised and flickering with blue necromancy to keep Latula sentient. You can tell from that dead look in her eyes she’s only doing this because it’s her job and John would probably skin her if she fucked up an escort mission. Metaphorically skin, that is, as the guy couldn’t hurt an ancient lich summoned from the eighth final hell if he were convinced of the incorrect fact that ancient evil liches had some redeemable feature about them. Although if any such lich existed, it would probably be Vriska.
You examine the ring. A plain band, with a silver moon and golden star jutting out on the front, big enough for someone who cared about seals to identify from a distance-- just how you wanted it. You slip it on your right hand ring finger. You are never taking this bulge wettingly awesome ring off, ever.
You make your way to the big double doors with the intent of finally packing all your shit, getting the hell out of the Knight Coalition, and beginning your probably epic, novel-length fantasy quest for Jade Harley. You’ve only gotten one letter from her, one single letter from her in the perigree you’ve been here, which was a response to a seven page missive you sent pouring your feelings out about why she hasn’t communicated with you at all since she abandoned you in Porkmor-Kahn to try for your test. All she wrote back, in her cute-sy, swirly human language alphabet was:
< Sorry! Not dead! Just reaaaaaaalllyyy busy! I'll tell you later! I love you bunches! Promise! - J >
You wrote her a couple more times, but she didn’t reply. You trust her far more deeply than you’d ever admit to anyone, and you can’t shake the belief that she actually is busy and cannot write to you for some mystifying reason. That will not prevent you from chewing the fuck out of her when you get your hands on her. She can teleport, for gods’ sake, it shouldn’t have been difficult to visit once in a while. You miss her.
Before you can get out of rainbow hellhole hall and/or get unstuck from your thoughts, the double doors burst open. Future Condesce Feferi explodes through them like a cannon firing pink, bedazzled petunias. You haven’t talked to her in a while, but you’ve had passing contact with her a couple times due to the love of your life being in her inner royal posse.
“I’m here for Karkat’s- Oh, oh no, I missed it, didn’t I? Oh my cod, Jade’s gonna krill me!” says Feferi, stomping her foot and ruffling her shiny ballgown. “What was the best part? I need to give her a highlight reel.”
“I beheaded Latula? It was pretty badass,” says Karkat. “Wait, no, fuck that, that’s completely irrelevant. Do you mind explaining where the hell Jade is? I haven’t heard from her in half a perigree. If a series of six short sentences even counts as contact.”
“Codveniently, that’s another reason why I’m here!” says Feferi. She reaches out and grabs your hands, staring at you with big doe eyes through those goggles she insists on wearing.
"Jade's getting married!" squeals Feferi, like a stuck oinkbeast. "And we're gonna be < maids of honor >! I'm gonna be Erifin's and you're gonna be Jade's."
You forgot she was engaged as part of some arraigned marriage bargain between Jade’s mother and the Condesce. You were never bothered by it --besides the fact Eridan’s a massive douchebag who tried to murder you once and then tripped over his own shoelaces and you never want to come in contact with his smelly, ugly face ever again-- because you honestly don’t know much about the human concept of ‘marriage.’ The closest equivalent you can think of is a quadrant-locking ceremony, but that has romantic context behind it. You’re pretty sure marriage doesn’t have anything to do with romance whatsoever. You’ve been to some troll/human weddings before, and it’s all about politics. Marriage, all about politics, yup. Definitely 100% positive on that front.
"< Maid of honor >... There is no possible way that's the right term for it. That doesn't seem like the correct gendered vocab word. And you know humans, they piss themselves sideways over genders."
"Who cares! We gotta get going!” she tugs on your arm, and you stumble after her. “It takes two whole weeks to get to by carriage, and the wedding date is approaching fast! We’ll be going to Skalligre, for that neat country seadweller aesthetic.”
She pulls you out of the double doors, into the hallway. She apparently isn’t bothered by the fact you’re still covered in various Latula fluids. “Hold on, you can’t take me to the Alternian boondocks, those pureblood fanatics will cull anyone with-”
“And we gotta get everyone else too! The entourage, and escorts and guards of course! But mostly the people riding in our carriage. Jane, shell be riding with us. Equius going to drive. And John will be with us too… And Vriska!”
An unbearable rage builds up in the back of your head, and you have to bite your knuckle to keep from screaming at the thought of spending two weeks in a cramped space with these buffoons. It doesn’t help. You make a sound like Jade’s dog did whenever it had a stomach ache.
Out of the frying pan.