Chapter 186: Book 3 Chapter 29.1: Asymmetrical Warfare

“Welcome, welcome,” Dean Lichman said to their new guests. “Always glad to welcome our peers to the Einstein-Odinson campus.”

Students from the Zeus-Stephanides college were filing off of a boat and on to the shore, peering around the expansive island campus with curiosity and wonder. The ZS school was better funded than most schools, but still paled in comparison to the Einstein-Odinson’s impressive campus. Not all of the ZS students were impressed, however, because some of them were not visiting for the first time.

“Hello loves,” Zee said. She led her own group of friends up to face off with their counterparts from the other school. Each member of the two matched groups faced off with their duplicate, with Vell tailing on the end of the Einstein-Odinson line, still with no doppelganger to his name.

“Hello all,” Lee said, as she squared off with Zee. The dark-skinned doppelganger had cut her hair short, and Lee absentmindedly brushed a hand through her own hair, wondering how such a change might look on her.

“What brings y’all here?” Harley wondered. “And, followup question, do you know if the murder weirdos are also coming?”

“We don’t know, and probably not,” Holly said. “Apparently the Patschke-Puck guys got invited to whatever is happening, but we got a distress call on the way over. Their boat sank.”

“Oh god,” Vell said. “Are they okay?”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” Zee insisted. “If you can say one thing about those lunatics, it’s that they’re stubborn.”

“I’m not sure we could kill them if we tried,” Holly said.

“Not that we’re going to try,” Jay added.

“I believe it,” Harley said. “The only murderers in this weird little triad of doppelgangers are currently preoccupied swimming.”

Much to Harley and Samson’s relief. While they relaxed around the duplicates who didn’t want to murder them, Lee got things back on track.

“You all just hopped on a boat and sailed here from Greece without really knowing what you were doing?”

“Apparently it’s a bit of friendly academic competition between schools,” Zee said. “But that could be anything. Cooking competition, race, quiz bowl-”

“Paintball war!”

Harley’s triumphant cry caught them all off guard, and her exuberant point turned their attention towards a makeshift stage. Dean Lichman had taken the podium, alongside his counterpart from the Zeus-Stephanides school, and he had a paintball gun in hand.

“Hello to my students here, and to all of our visitors from the esteemed Zeus-Stephanides School,” Dean Lichman began. “As you might have guessed from my armament, it is time for the Einstein-Odinson’s traditional campus paintball war. With a twist!”

Dean Lichman made a grandiose gesture towards their visiting guests from the rival school.

“Based on some complaints that last years event was slightly spoiled by a paintball based blood feud between two cowboys-”

“My bad,” Vell said.

“-we have altered the format of the game to something slightly less likely to result in interstudent rivalries.”

Delivery drones began to file between the ranks of the students, and hand out basic paintball weaponry, along with the parts to make more. As a house of innovation, the Einstein-Odinson encouraged participants to invent wild new forms of paintball weaponry.

“This year, the students of the Einstein-Odinson College will be participating in all out warfare against the students of Zeus-Stephanides! May the best school win!”

The Zeus-Stephanides students were curiously examining the weapons they’d been given. Apparently they had no such tradition on their campus. However, Holly had already disassembled her gun and was tinkering with the spare parts, showing that they were capable of innovation in spite of their inexperience.

“Ho ho ho, you guys are so fucked,” Harley said.

“Well that’s a bit of a rude way to start off, dear,” Lee said. Harley continued her smug chuckling as she called upon Botley, who arrived with some dust-covered paintball revolvers. “Oh, right.”

Harley tossed the revolvers to Vell, and he effortlessly caught them and gave the twin guns a quick spin on his fingers to shake off the dust. After a bit more showboating, Vell holstered the guns and confidently put his hands on his hips.

“The power of Vell’s yeehaw bullshit can’t be beat,” Harley said. “But hey, we’ll ask him to go easy on you.”

Zee wanted to be confident in her friends, but something about the way Vell handled those revolvers unnerved her. Whenever they were in his hands, the plastic revolvers moved as if they were extensions of himself.

As the visiting Zeus-Stephanides students contemplated this new challenge, Dean Lichman announced a few new rules to even the odds in their favor. Firstly, the game would not start for several hours, giving their guests ample time to prepare, and secondly, to combat the homefield advantage, the visiting students would be able to pick their starting positions across campus, while Einstein-Odinson students would have to start in their dorms.

“Do you want my number?” Lee asked. “In case you need help, or have trouble getting around.”

Zee figured having a friendly bit of advice might be helpful, and the two exchanged numbers.

“Did you bring the eagle, by the way?”

“Nah, we left Aetos back at the island,” Zee said. “Good thing too. Little bugger would end up with paint all over his feathers, the way he acts.”

Much like the loopers, the students of Zeus-Stephanides also had a recurring daily problem to deal with. Unlike the loopers, their problem was that their mascot kept escaping, and not that the world kept ending. Hawke often envied the simplicity, and non-lethality, of his counterpart’s circumstances.

“On the other hand, you could have weaponized him,” Kim suggested. “Paintball eagle would be pretty dope.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Our ornithology department kitted up an entire flock of geese last year.”

“Oh.”

Zee took a quick look around, and spotted a group of Einstein-Odinson students wheeling past in what looked like a weaponized parade float in the shape of a large werewolf.

“Is anything not allowed?” Zee asked.

“While not technically illegal, it is considered unsporting to aim for the groin,” Lee said.

“Other than that, no holds barred,” Harley said. “If you can build it, you can use it. Just keep in mind any automated systems or drones or stuff get deactivated when their creator gets tagged out.”

“Noted,” Holly said. She had stopped dissecting the paintball gun and started scrawling some ideas in her notebook. Several diagrams of small humanoid figures dominated most of the pages. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s about it,” Harley said. “Also you are still technically our enemies, so I’m not helping you too much.”

“Oh, and on the note of competing, how about a wager?” Zee said. She looked over the two matched groups. “Whichever bunch wins this war gets to call themselves the originals. How about it?”

“Oh, about that,” Harley said. “We actually found out what’s going on. Turn’s out we’re the originals. Well, technically he’s the original-”

Harley pointed at Vell, who waved sheepishly. He had never been sure of what to do in these doppelgangers faceoffs, and he was even less sure of what to do now that he knew the real reason there were duplicates of all his friends.

“-and the rest of us just sort of exist around him. A butterfly-themed time god told us Vell’s super important and unique and the entire universe keeps trying to recreate the things around him to try and make another him, but it can’t,” Harley said. “So really it’s just Vell, and the rest of us exist around him.”

For a solid thirty seconds, the Zeus-Stephanides students stared at their counterparts, occasionally glancing towards Vell.

“What?”

“Just kidding,” Harley said. “Messing with you a bit before the game starts, and all.”

“Oh, heh,” Zee said. She seemed more relieved than amused. “Maybe work on your material a little. See you when the shooting starts.”

“Not before we see you,” Harley said. The two groups parted ways, and as they did so, Lee grabbed Harley by the collar and pulled her close.

“Why did you tell them that?”

“I wanted to see how they’d react,” Harley said. “I’m sure they want to know what’s going on with this clone shit as badly as we did.”

“Next loop we’re accepting the bet and leaving it at that,” Lee commanded. The ZS students lived a simpler life, one bereft of butterfly guys, goddesses, and time anomalies. Lee saw no reason to drag them into any chaos beyond the chaos of the paintball war.

----------------------------------------

“You know, you guys should at least try to prepare,” Harley scolded.

The Einstein-Odinson students had gathered in and around the junior dorm building, where Vell’s dorm was. Over the past two years, Vell’s skill with a paintball revolver had become notoriously well-known, and every student was glad to be fighting with him rather than against him. Though much of the student body was taking a very liberal approach to “with”. Most were sitting around waiting for the games to start, and some didn’t even have their guns on them.

“Why?” A random student asked. “Vell’s going to solo it all anyway.”

“Well yeah, but this is a school versus school thing,” Harley said. “We got to prove we’re all better. Everyone already knows Vell is rad.”

A surprising number of people nodded in agreement, and Vell started to blush.

‘This is about more than just winning,” Harley said. “This is about bragging rights! We need to be able to rub ZS’s nose in it every sporting event and academic decathalon for the next two years!”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Why two years?”

“Because Vell graduates after that and it’s going to get way more competitive,” Harley said. “Which is another reason you guys need to get off your butts! Especially you freshmen and sophomores! You guys are actually going to have to fight this war on your own someday.”

Harley’s provocation worked, and a few of the young students started to put some actual effort into preparations. One freshman even dared to raise his hand.

“Yes dear?”

“If Vell’s so good, can he give us lessons or something?”

“Oh, no, that’s a terrible idea,” Lee said. “No no no. Absolutely not.”

After last years efforts to impart his yeehaw bullshit on to others, all parties involved had given up on the idea of Vell as a teacher. His cowboy prowess was an anomaly never to be recreated.

“Oh. Then can someone make me a cool gun, or something?”

“Check with Harley or Freddy Frizzle,” Lee said. “I’m just the magic expert.”

The freshman shuffled off in hopes of acquiring the cool gun of his dreams, and Lee circled back to her friends. Vell had thoroughly cleaned and maintained his paintball guns already, and was now poking through social media on his phone. He was surprisingly relaxed, given the circumstances. The same incident that had proven he was a bad teacher had also proven he was not comfortable in the position of leader, and the entire school was now flocking to him.

“Doing alright, Vell?”

“Yeah, just fine,” Vell said. “Why, what’s up? Did something happen?”

A nervous edge crept into Vell’s voice, and Lee quickly shooed it away.

“No, nothing at all,” Lee said. “You’re just a bit relaxed. Historically speaking, you’re a bit nervous dealing with authority.”

“I guess, but, uh, this isn’t really ‘authority’, you know?” Vell said. “All I have to do is be good at shooting guns, and I’m really good at shooting guns. This is like, the one thing I’m actually kind of confident in.”

“I think you should be confident in quite a bit more, but I’m glad to hear it anyway,” Lee said. “You’ll make an excellent champion for our army.”

“Hell yeah I will,” Vell said, with an unusually confident grin on his face. He was in his element, with an entire school at his back and good friends by his side. There was almost nothing that could stop him.

Almost nothing.

----------------------------------------

A drone displayed a holographic timer, counting down the seconds. The timer hit ten, and Harley turned to look over her shoulder. A legion of students with an arsenal of high-tech paintball weaponry spread out behind her. Harley nodded approvingly and turned back to the countdown.

The clock ticked down to five, and Lee took a quick look at Vell. He gave the chamber of his revolvers a quick spin and started to count down out loud.

“Four, three, two, one,” Vell said.

A loud siren blared, signaling the start of the paintball war. With a triumphant cry, Vell and every student behind him charged out as one, guns at the ready. It took only a few seconds for them to encounter the first group of Zeus-Stephanides students -and about half a second for Vell to mow them all down in a flurry of paintball fire. The confused visitors tried to fire back, unaware that they’d already been shot down, and looked down at their paint-stained clothes in utter bewilderment.

“I’ll save some for the rest of you guys next time,” Vell said, as he gave his revolvers a quick spin. “I wanted to make a point.”

“Hell yeah brother, psychological warfare!”

“Teach them the meaning of fear!”

“That’s maybe a little overboard, but yes, sort of,” Vell said. He forgot how psyched up for violence people on this campus could get. “Let’s go!”

True to his word, Vell did save some for the rest of the army next time. The Zeus-Stephanides students had set up an admirable fortification in one of the laboratories, but it crumbled in mere moments under the onslaught of Vell and company. Vell’s lightning-quick gunslinging took out key defenses and eliminated leadership in seconds, leaving his followers to mop up the rest.

“Hey, I don’t want to be condescending, but does anyone want me to shoot less people?” Vell asked. “I feel like I’m still monopolizing a lot of the action.”

“Worry about sharing after we’ve got this in the bag,” Harley said. “We still got a few thousand students left.”

The ZS student body was roughly as large as their own, and the two encampments they’d already taken out only amounted to a few hundred. The army still had their work cut out for them, if only by law of large numbers.

“Security systems show a pretty sizable force on the western beach,” Freddy said. His surveillance capacities were surprisingly limited. Some of their rival students had managed to lock him out of the indoor security systems, leaving him with nothing but the outdoor cameras. “It’s not far.”

“Sounds like a good place to start,” Vell said. “Guns up, let’s go!”

The army readied their weapons for another round of combat, and followed Vell’s lead towards the beach. A few roving bands of ZS students tried to ambush them, but all met their match on the unbreakable wall of cowboy bullshit that was Vell. He never missed a step, and continued an unstoppable march until the beach was just around the corner. He gave his revolvers one more quick spin and stepped up to meet the enemy.

The Zeus-Stephanides students had built themselves a fortress, using the boat they’d arrived in as a base, with walls and automatic defenses set up on the beachfront. Vell did a quick scan of the defenses, and saw nothing to fear. Then he did a scan of the defenders.

A single student stood fearlessly outside the walls, with his hair done up in a topknot and a single paint-sword in his hands. Vell froze in place, and the lone samurai locked eyes with him.

“Fuck.”

It took the entire army a few seconds to catch up with the sudden terror that had locked Vell in its grip, but soon the entire force had come to a screeching halt behind him.

“The samurai,” Vell snapped. “Shoot the samurai!”

Vell raised his gun and fired a single shot. With a deft sweep of his blade, the samurai swatted aside the bullet.

“You missed?” Harley said. “Since when can you miss?”

“Shut up and shoot him!”

Harley shot him, or at least tried to. With a blindingly swift sidestep, the samurai evaded the shot -and every shot that came after it. The lone samurai was barely even visible as he surged past an entire army’s worth of bullets, and made a beeline for Vell.

“What the hell is happening, Vell?”

Vell ignored Lee’s desperate plea. He was still trying to shoot the samurai, though he knew his efforts were futile. He kept pulling the trigger, over and over, as fast as he could, until the sweep of a paint-edged blade knocked the revolver from his hand. He raised his second revolver, and it too was swatted down. The blindingly fast movements of the samurai stopped, and he stood to face Vell, blade at the ready.

“You knew it had to end this way.”

“I did,” Vell said.

“Embrace your defeat with honor,” the samurai said. “Cowboy.”

The samurai raised his blade, and swung, whacking Vell in the neck.

Vell then woke up in his own bed, thoroughly confused, and with a sore neck. He checked the clock, and found that he was back at the start of the loop.

“What the fuck?” he said to no one in particular. “Did that dude kill me?”

----------------------------------------

“Oh he was actually super broken up about it,” Harley said. “Like, really, just heartbroken. Shame, honestly, he kind of seemed like a nice guy.”

“He was apparently aiming for the shoulder,” Lee said. “And he just happened to miss in such a way as to strike your vagus nerve and cause an immediately lethal cardiac reaction.”

“Super fucked up that that can happen, by the way,” Hawke said. “I’m going to be so self conscious about people touching my neck for the next few months.”

Kim immediately poked him in the neck, and Hawke smacked her metallic hand away.

“That makes about as much sense as most apocalypses,” Vell said.

“Glad we’ve sorted that out,” Harley now. “Now, if I may ask.”

Harley jumped up, grabbed Vell by the head, and pulled him down to eye level with her to scream directly into his face.

“What the fuck was that, Vell? You got owned at paintball so hard that you died!”

“I’m not really sure how to explain it,” Vell said. “It’s just- actually, can we get the whole gang together first so I only have to explain this once?”

“Right. When the Zeus-Stephanides students arrive, I’ll try to bring up the samurai in conversation so we have plausible knowledge of him,” Lee said. “Then we’ll talk.”

----------------------------------------

The students of the Einstein-Odinson had gathered once again, though on this second loop, the mood was much more somber. Vell’s fear and hesitation had infected the rest of them.

“Okay. So,” Vell began. “About the paintball game. I was really hoping I could help carry you guys through it, but there’s a pretty big problem.”

Vell crossed his arms and let out a deep sigh.

“The other guys have a samurai.”

The gathered crowd burst into a chorus of understanding hums and nods. Harley was as baffled by their reaction as she was by Vell’s half-assed explanation.

“Wait, why the fuck do you all get that right away?”

“It’s the Classic Warrior Rock Paper Scissors Effect,” Luke explained. “Everybody knows that.”

Everyone around him nodded in agreement, acknowledging their shared understanding of the concept.

“The fucking what-what-what effect?”

“Every type of old school combatant is in a trinity with three other combatants, with each class always beating one and losing to the other,” someone else added. “In the case of cowboys, they always lose to samurai.”

Vell hung his head in shame, but nodded.

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Look, I don’t write the laws of physics, I just have to follow them,” Vell said.

“It’s not a law of physic!”

“It is, actually,” Luke said. He held up his physics textbook, opened up to one of the last chapters, and pointed to a triangular diagram of a crusader, a ninja, and a Zulu warrior.

“Well, fuck me I guess,” Harley said.

“Is there really no way for you to win?” Lee asked. “We make anti-gravity generators. Can’t we make an...anti-samurai generator, or something?”

All eyes turned to Freddy and Goldie, but they shook their heads. The Rock-Paper-Scissors effect was poorly understood, and impossible to manipulate.

“No matter what you do, Samurai always beat Cowboys,” Vell said. It was a fact of life as fundamental as gravity and nuclear fusion.

“Okay, hold on,” Kim added. “If it’s rock paper scissors, there has to be a third thing that always beats the Samurai, right? What’s the third thing?”

“Landsknecht.”

“Gesundheit. Now what’s the third thing?”

“No, that is the thing,” Vell said. “Landsknecht. They’re a type of germanic mercenary from the 1500’s or so.”

“Okay,” Harley said. They were all learning a lot of weird stuff today, apparently. “Anyone here a Landsknecht?”

Dead silence. Someone in the back of the room coughed.

“Shit.”

“We’re doomed!”

“How are we supposed to win now?”

The lamentations of the student body grew louder and more pathetic over time, until it was an intolerable cacophony of self-pity. Lee held up her hands and tried to shout over the crowd, and failed. As she continued to struggle to be heard, she even went as far as standing on a coffee table, and still couldn’t calm the crowd.

“Excuse me- If I may talk for a moment! Would you all just listen.”

After failing for a minute straight, Lee rolled her eyes.

“Kim, darling do you still have those speakers installed?”

“On it, boss,” Kim said. Then she unfolded two large speakers from her chest cavity and turned the volume to maximum. “Shut the fuck up!”

Every student standing within twenty feet of Kim took a step back as the booming shout made their ears ring. It may or may not have caused some minor hearing damage, but it also made everyone shut up, so Kim considered her mission accomplished.

“Thank you, Kim. Now, as I was saying: there is no need to panic. Yes, yes, samurai beat cowboys and all that, but, as last year made abundantly clear to us all,” Lee said. She leaned forward and emphasized her last few words. “No one else here is a cowboy.”

“Oh, right.”

The crowd started murmuring in agreement, and Lee put her hands on her hips in satisfaction.

“There are roughly seven-thousand students here, and only one samurai,” Lee continued. “And we have no reason to believe his skills are exceptional enough to be threatening without the inherent advantage of the cowboy versus samurai match up. Surely one of us can manage to hit a samurai with a paintball.”

The crowd continued to mumble. Lee was not satisfied with the half-hearted murmuring she heard. Victory required determination, not quiet acceptance.

“But you should not be fighting simply so that Vell can come and save you,” Lee commanded. “You should fight because you are students of the Einstein-Odinson academy, and you are the best there is! You may not be cowboys, but you are still geniuses! And far more importantly, you are lunatics!”

Any excitement in the crowd veered sharply into confusion at the last word. Calling someone insane was not usually a good hype tactic.

“Over the past four years I have seen all of your create things I never thought would exist,” Lee said. “And, to be frank, many things that should not exist.”

This time the murmurs of agreement were much much louder. The student body had made some fucked up things in their time, and they knew it.

“But they exist, and they exist because you are all brilliant and insane enough to make them,” Lee said. “It’s time to put that brilliance and insanity to work!”

“Yeah!”

The crowd liked being called brilliant, and they were starting to come around on being called insane too. Lee was making it sound cool.

“You have five hours to make the most ludicrous paintball weaponry the world has ever seen,” Lee said. “Now get out there and get crazy!”

The speech somehow succeeded in hyping up the crowd, and with an exuberant cheer, the gathered students of the Einstein-Odinson broke ranks and headed for their dorms. Though cut off from the full resources of their laboratories for the time being, the students had enough materials on hand to make some truly wondrous and horrifying things.

“And that is why you’re in charge,” Harley said, giving Lee a proud slap on the back.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Lee said.

“Are you sure you should be encouraging them to get weird?” Hawke wondered. “Like, a third of those people have ended the world at least once, and we already used up our loop for the day.”

“It’ll be fine,” Lee said. “Probably. We’ll be on hand to clean up any messes.”

“I’m going to go call my parents and tell them I love ‘em,” Samson said. “Just in case.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic.”

Someone ran down the hall with what Lee was fairly certain was a demonic summoning tome. She said nothing.