15. Jae #2
I get the fourth kill. The fifth. The squad numbers flip. My kills sit above hers for the first time all night, and the satisfaction of it spreads through my ribs like warm liquor.
“Nice try, hotshot,” I say, and the nickname lands differently now—less teasing, more claim. “Maybe next time.”
She says nothing. Her jaw is set. Her breathing hasn’t changed.
The match ends. APEX CHAMPIONS flashes across both displays again. My name sits at the top of our squad summary. Fourteen kills to her nine. The numbers glow on the screen like a verdict I’ve been waiting to hear.
I set my controller down and reach for the garlic popcorn. The smell hits my nostrils, sharp and aggressive, and I pop a handful into my mouth without breaking eye contact with her screen.
“Good second match,” I say, and I can hear the smugness in my own voice. It’s not attractive. I don’t care.
Amiyah picks up her controller. Doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t say a word.
The third match loads.
I should have seen it coming.
The drop happens. The map materializes. I land, loot, push. Everything feels right. My thumbs are warm. My reflexes are dialed in. The first engagement goes my way—a clean two-shot with a Wingman that drops an enemy before they can even turn.
And then Amiyah moves.
It’s not faster. That’s the thing. It’s not about speed.
It’s about economy. She slides into a position I didn’t think was possible, uses a gravity lift I didn’t see her place, and from that impossible, punishing angle, she drops an entire squad in the span of eight seconds.
The kill feed lights up with her username three times in a row.
I push toward the next engagement. Find a squad. Take one down. Get flanked by the second. My shields crack. Health bar drains. I slide into cover, pop a shield battery, turn to re-engage—
She’s already there. Horizon’s tactical lifts her over the building. The Sentinel cracks once.
She finishes the match with twenty-three kills. I finish with four.
The victory screen paints her character in gold, and the silence that follows has weight.
She sets her controller down on the cushion beside her with deliberate care. Then she turns, slowly, and looks at me.
Her expression is patient. Satisfied. The particular calm of someone who has just proven a point they never needed to verbalize.
“Do you need a moment?” she asks.
I do not answer.
The summary screen sits on the display, glowing blue in the dim apartment. My teeth are clenched tightly, the muscle along the side of my face working. I reach for the chip bowl, select a salt and vinegar chip, and put it in my mouth without looking away.
The chip tastes like air at this point.
“Again,” I demand.
The fourth match loads.
And somewhere during the drop, something shifts.
I can’t pinpoint when it happens. One moment we’re playing with the focused intensity of people trying to establish dominance, and the next—
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Amiyah says, in an accent that sounds like a British sports commentator who has suffered a mild head injury, “we are witnessing a historic collapse of form from the challenger, who appears to have forgotten which buttons make the gun go bang.”
I snort, the sound escaping before I can stop it.
“And the defending champion,” I counter, dropping my voice an octave into a booming American sports announcer voice, “continues her ruthless campaign despite the clear disadvantage of those ridiculous cat slippers compromising her pedal mobility.”
“Pedal mobility is not compromised,” she says, dropping the accent. “The ears provide aerodynamic stability.”
“Sure they do.”
“They do. It’s basic physics.”
“Basic physics says fuzzy socks create friction.”
“Basic physics says you should worry about your own friction, because I’m about to beam this squad over here.”
She slides into cover, executes a perfect flank, and drops two enemies with a flatline spray that makes my eyebrows climb.
The conversation drifts.
I’m not sure how we get there—somewhere between a particularly ugly firefight in the central hub and a desperate final circle push—but suddenly we’re arguing about which anime has the superior fight choreography with the conviction of two people who have been holding these opinions in solitary confinement for years.
“Demon Slayer is visually stunning and completely weightless,” I say, sliding behind a rock to heal. “Every fight is just pretty colors and people yelling the names of their attacks. There’s no physics. There’s no consequence.”
“You’re out of your damn mind,” Amiyah says, and something in her voice has changed.
She’s sitting forward now, controller still in her hand, but she’s gesturing with it—pointing at me, at the screen, at nothing.
“The water breathing sequences alone—the way they map the fluid dynamics to actual sword technique—that’s not just pretty, that’s choreography with intentional—”
“It’s dancing with swords. That’s not fighting.”
“It is fighting if the swords are real and the people are dying, Jae.”
“Animation is not real!”
“You know what I mean!”
She does this thing when she’s passionate—her words get faster, her sentences stack on top of each other without pauses, and the careful performance of casual unbotheredness evaporates entirely.
She’s leaning forward, one knee drawn up on the couch, the pink cat slipper dangling from her toes, and she’s explaining the narrative significance of a specific fight scene from Jujutsu Kaisen with the fervor of someone defending a dissertation.
I keep the match running.
We’re both still playing, technically. Our characters move across the map on muscle memory while our attention lives somewhere else entirely.
She tells me about soundtrack composition—not vague preferences, actual opinions with specific timestamps and composer names and the way certain leitmotifs are reintroduced during character arcs.
She recites lore from memory, deploying dates and backstory details without pausing to check herself, and the armor is gone.
All of it. The calculation, the performance, the careful distance—it’s just her, lit blue by the twin screens, talking too fast and caring too much and not apologizing for either.
The match ends. Neither of us mentions the score.
We’re slouched at opposite ends of the couch now.
The controllers rest on our thighs, abandoned.
The game sits on the lobby screen, forgotten.
The snack wrappers have fully colonized the coffee table—chip bags folded into origami triangles, Oreo container emptied and crumpled, two empty sparkling water cans tipped on their sides.
The black throw pillow has migrated to the middle cushion between us, neither of us claiming it, both of us aware of its presence.
Amiyah says something—a joke about Horizon’s voice lines, delivered with a self-deprecating edge—and then she laughs at her own joke. Her head tips back, her eyes close, and it hits me in the chest with the force of something I didn’t see coming.
My breath catches. My fingertips go still on the leather couch.
I don’t say what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is complicated and dangerous and lives in a place I’m not ready to examine under this particular light.
Instead, I reach across the pillow. My hand finds the bag of salt and vinegar chips on her side of the table. I steal a handful, shove them into my mouth, and chew with exaggerated satisfaction.
“You got lucky,” I say.
She looks at me. Her eyes are bright, her cheeks flushed from laughing, and there’s something in her expression I haven’t seen before—something warm and open and slightly challenging.
“Luck,” she says, “had nothing to do with it. That was all skill, my guy.”
I smile at the ceiling.
“Whatever you say, hotshot,” I tease.
She picks up the throw pillow and hurls it directly at my face. It connects with a soft thump, and I don’t block it. I let it hit me.
I could get used to this.
I could get used to her throwing things at my head.