A Fistful of Bonebits

Ashlan stared at the shrine’s flickering holoscreen, a cold pit in his stomach. The number of eliminated players kept rising, their avatars getting crossed out one by one.

He could almost see himself there. His own rank had slipped into the 14,000s. He’d been losing every match lately: unlucky matchmaking, bad spawns, all kinds of excuses he made for his lack of skill. The top-left corner of his HUD was filled with blinking alerts:
“WARNING: ELIMINATION IMMINENT.”

That’s when the acrid stench of synthetic tobacco hit his nose, smelling like burned plasma batteries mixed with vanilla. A shadow cut through the glow of the shrine, a garish white suit hoarding the light. It was overlaid with stripes, as if it were stolen from a casino. Smoke curled from the tip of a glowing cigar between the figure’s teeth. The shark-like grin never reached its eyes.

“Well, well. Bottom of the board. Tough luck, huh, Ashlan? Looking half-deleted already.”

The skeleton grinned as his jaw clicked, tipping his hat as he waggled his cigar. “You look quite tense! It’s just me, Lord Bonebags! Patron saint of lost causes, king of comebacks, and the wealthiest skeleton in the Arena. Still clinging to your spot, or planning to join the delists?"

Ashlan stiffened. “How do you know my name?”

“Please!” Bonebags fanned himself with a bundle of bonebills. “I know everyone who matters, and half who don’t. Can’t let talent slip away, now can we?”

He leaned in closer, lowering his booming voice. “You want to stop your little death spiral? Here’s your shot: custom lobby, my rules, one-on-one. You pop me, you bounce back up to the 8,000s. Free HP buff for your trouble. Otherwise… well, you know how the board bites.”

Ashlan tilted his head. “Isn’t that, like… rigged? Or illegal? Wouldn’t it hurt your own rank?”

Bonebags let out a creaking, musical laugh. “Nothing’s illegal in customs. My rank’s safe, kid. Board’s a lot slower up top.”

He blew the smoke right in Ashlan's face, making the HUD flash an air filtration alert. “One hundred bonebits. What’s a soul worth these days, hm? Better than vanishing, if you ask me.”

Ashlan glanced at the list of avatars again. Then at the alerts flooding his HUD. “Why are you even helping me?”

“Because I haaaate when good talent goes to waste.” Bonebags hunched, feigning sadness. “The board’s just so, so cruel! All those players there? Could’ve made it. If only they had a lifeline… Oh well.”

He hit Ashlan’s chestplate with a belittling tap.
“But you do, you lucky soul. Today’s your day.”
He turned around, pretending to leave.
“I’ve got places to be. Take it or leave it, Ash. Clock’s ticking, you know. Better decide soon.”

Ashlan clenched his fists, looking down. It felt so wrong. But the alerts were blinking, and the shrine kept flickering. Bonebags was already walking away, humming.

This feels like a trap.
But I can’t just—
“I-I’ll do it,” Ashlan blurted, hating how difficult it was to say.

“Thaaaat’s the spirit.” Bonebags patted Ashlan’s head, the sharkish grin only widening. “When you’re at the top, don’t forget who got you there.” He whipped an arm around Ashlan’s shoulder, leading him towards his custom portal.

The custom match loaded with no announcer. It looked like it had a few mutators enabled, but Ashlan couldn’t see all of them. There were no health or armor pickups anywhere, only weapons and ammo. The map seemed to be custom as well—the open air section of Charnel Pits, but with no jump pads, floating platforms or crowd. Half the lights weren’t on, nor was any music playing, making the ambience feel even more ominous. Especially with the red skybox.

Ashlan’s forehead grew hotter when he noticed his HP capped at 50. No armor, either.
He swallowed.
This is a trap. I’m such an idiot.

Something bad was waiting for him here. He sensed danger in the same way prey animals could sense predators. He felt death’s own presence in a far purer form, antithetical to the usual die-respawn cycle the Arena’s games were built upon. His fingers tightened around the grip of his plasma gun, regret setting in immediately.

Bonebags’ laughter echoed in front of him, skeletal hands clacking together in what was a frail imitation of a slow clap. “Why so scared? First custom match? Nothing to worry about… aside from a little house advantage.”

Ashlan bit his lip, realizing there was no way out but to win a match that was clearly rigged. If he lost here, that was it.
I can’t lose to him.
Even if the odds are entirely against me.

He sprung into movement, dashing for a nearby shotgun pickup.
What the—
He crashed backward onto the steel floor, his legs moving the wrong way.

Bonebags cackled as he began peppering the young player with micro-rockets.
“Legs in a tangle, bottomfeeder?”

Ashlan rolled to the right, but his body jerked left. Somehow, his movement had been inverted. That was the gameplay mutator he couldn’t see. His heart was thudding like a chaingun as he just barely rolled away from the volley.
I have to survive. I have to survive. I’m not letting this bastard wipe me out.

He forced himself off the ground, every thought in his brain moving the other way, trying and failing to dodge the flurry of micro-rockets, being forced to roll away as he crashed onto the platform again.

Bonebags never stopped laughing. “Keep dancing, rookie! Might live a minute or two longer.”

Ashlan’s HUD was already pulsing red:
Health: 24

Another micro-rocket scorched past his shoulder, singing his cloak. Bonebags cackled from across the dark arena, each shot landing closer.

Ashlan forced his legs to move, fighting for life and against instinct. It took every ounce of already fragile concentration just to strafe out of the rockets' path, let alone to jump, dodge and build speed. He unsteadily fired his plasma gun, his right hand no longer feeling dominant. Most of the shots missed, but three managed to connect. Bonebags jerked backward, but didn't stop laughing. In fact, he was laughing even louder.

“Loving the hope in those eyes.” Bonebags jeered. “Always looks so pretty when I snuff it out.”

Run. Think. Shoot. Live!
I don't want to get eliminated!
As he let a few more glowing shots of plasma loose, some hit Bonebags again. Ashlan noticed a light, flickering in the empty stands. An indistinct, glitching figure shining sky blue was watching from afar, not moving an inch. Text on Ashlan's HUD said:
“1 PLAYER SPECTATING”

Even Bonebags stopped to look at the observer. Ashlan used this as an opportunity to get a few direct plasma hits in.

Bonebags dodged. When he turned back to Ashlan, he became more aggressive, seemingly wanting to get this match over with sooner. His taunts went silent, the only sounds that remained were the mechanical clicks and rattles and explosions of the micro-rocket gun mixing with electrical blasts from Ashlan's plasma blaster. He was getting serious, but Ashlan wasn’t letting up. He was playing as dirty as possible. Faking being out of ammo, he ran for a nearby plasma battery pickup, only to make Bonebags fire his last remaining rockets at him. They detonated, making his HUD flash red.
Bonebags was ready for this to kill him. “Tell all those delists I said hi.”

Health: 3
Ashlan had just barely managed to roll out of the way, bleeding and burned. Despite his health being down to a sliver, he heard the distinctive click of an empty micro-rocket launcher. He picked the plasma battery up and shoved it into his gun backwards, overcharging it. The ammo counter in his HUD glitched out, showing 0x104 instead of the ammo count. He fired anyway.

“You filthy piece of—”
A blue-white bolt blasted straight through Bonebags. The launcher he’d raised up to bludgeon Ashlan was vaporized along with his upper half, leaving a mass of melted metal and bonemeal.

The arena glitched. Ashlan looked up at the red sky as it lost color. The spectator’s figure kept standing, watching. His vision fuzzed with code as the announcer’s glitched voice tried to call his victory.
The scoreboard flickered:
SPECTATORS (1): NIL

The arena began flickering out, the lobby began flickering back in. That’s all Ashlan remembered.

***

Sakuya and Cassie stood at Ashlan’s bedside in PN&P’s infirmary, both trying to make sense of the story. If Sakuya’s face weren’t stuck behind a perpetual helmet, his expression would probably match Cassie’s: eyebrows furrowed, mouth just slightly open. An unsaid, classic what the hell.

Cassie tapped her chin, nudging the goggles higher on her forehead. “So… okay. That greaseball yanked you into a custom, with a bunch of mutators, you pwned him and made it out alive, but…” She trailed off as if she was buffering. “That still doesn’t explain the head wound. Or why half your face looks like it needs to be recomped. Seriously, Ash, what happened in the lobby after that?”

Sakuya stood still, looking at Ashlan’s face. His left eye was nothing but a black void. The entire left hand side looked like it’d been burned or marked with a cyan and black mess of pixels. It looked just like the missing texture graphic Rezrektion liked to show back in the day. Slightly wrong version of Doors XD, slightly wrong registry entry and it’d glitch out. If you wanted all the textures to load in perfectly, you’d probably need to learn Lithuanian and suffer through the hundred-page manual.

The “burn” didn’t behave like a normal injury. Ashlan’s red hair barely looked singed, only a few strands caught in the digital mess. Occasionally, the pixels would flare up, like static skittering across an old CRT, then retreat. It hadn’t spread in days, but it was less a wound and more a mark, like a bug that just didn’t get patched. His left arm was suffering from the exact same affliction, albeit it seemed to be worse off: actively flickering and difficult to move.

Ashlan shifted in his bed, averting his gaze to the nearby window. “I’ve spent like a week sleeping. I can’t remember everything all at once.”

Cassie frowned, biting her lip. “You sure? ‘Cause seriously, you look like half of a corrupted .pak file. Sorry, the healing drone fixed everything but that.”

Hey, unlike a .pak file, he actually managed to get fixed. Sakuya wanted to retort, but kept it to himself.

“Did NIL do that, or is this a Bonebags thing?” Cassie continued.

Ashlan sighed. “I don’t know. But Richter thinks it’s Bonebags. Apparently NIL doesn’t damage players. Especially not in the lobby. He just watches.”

“Damn Bonebags… What I’d give to get my hands on him and take him apart bone-by-bone.” Cassie crossed her arms. “He’s responsible for the recent wave of random eliminations. Scamming players of their last hope and pushing them off the leaderboard. Apparently it was all within the rules until what he did to you. He’s been hiding since, sitting comfy at #200 on the board. Wild, huh?”

Ashlan let a small laugh loose. “Can’t believe I fell for it. I’m the only player who actually managed to climb the board after playing with him. Go figure.” He sighed. “I guess it doesn’t mean much, though. A week of no matches and I’m back basically where I’d started.”

Sakuya was acutely aware he looked more like a mobile barricade than a friend, so he stepped forward, speaking up. “But don’t lose hope. Don’t let him win.”

He was speaking from experience, remembering the nearly ten years he’d spent doing nothing: skipping lectures, letting everything slide, convinced nothing would change. Ashlan looked about the same age as he’d been back then, nineteen to early twenties.

“I’ll try to adjust, no matter how hard it may be.” Ashlan looked down at his left arm, then ran his right hand over the glitched side of his face, wincing slightly. “No matter how different I may be now…”

Cassie smiled, curling her gloved hand into a fist. “I’ll fix up that shotgun you’d requested a while back so you can use it one handed!” She checked her watch. “Oh! About time for me to open up shop. We’ll go back down, m’kay? Hope to catch ya tonight, Ash!” She waved to him by the door.

Sakuya waved as well. “Call me up for duels or duos if you feel like it. Later, kid.”

He followed Cassie down the echoing steps, boots clanging on the tiles. The drone of the bar began to filter back up. Players were sitting at the holo-terminals or talking together over their buffs. Some were looking at tablets, sharing their new leaderboard jumps, trading skins, pets, or just memes. A new emoji had gone viral—a catgirl mascot with full cheeks and the caption “eated it all.”

Cassie’s workshop sat behind a neon-taped door, half-shut and labeled “STAFF ONLY.” People just knew where to find her, apparently. The shop kept regular hours, a rarity in a place where most things, including the bar itself, never closed.

Sakuya checked his own tablet, nicely paid for with his match-rewarded bonebits.

Rank: #4525.
Not bad, considering he’d been in the danger zone just last week. It’d been nothing but deathmatches and shop duty: handing Cassie her tools or listening to her rants lately. Still waiting on leads from Richter and focusing on getting used to the Arena. All things considered, he was doing well, even getting 1st place in a few games. It was routine and mindless, without a single custom aside from the odd duel with a rando. Six thousand places up the board, and all it cost was a lot of his sense of surprise. Cassie’s rank had gone up as well, from #7692 to #4351. Still just a little better than him.

“You’ll help at the shop today, right, big guy?” Cassie tossed Sakuya a cute look, already fishing for favors.

Sakuya shrugged, playing along. ”If I said no, you’d probably lock me in there.”

“Loving the enthusiasm!” Cassie nudged the door open with her hip. “Mind the—”

He stepped straight into a nest of cables, computers and weapons. His leg snagged on the same wire as always, but this time, his HUD went sideways before he could even understand.

CRASH!
The entire building shook with the sound of metal crashing against the stone floor. Sakuya just barely managed not to fall helmet-first into Cassie’s fancy 3D printer, which was the only thing in the room that didn’t look like it’d been taken apart and put back together a thousand times.

Cassie grinned, her hands on her hips. “I told you to mind the cables... First time you actually fell, though. If I could mod the inside of that suit, I think I’d install airbags.”

“The inside’s already cushioned just fine.” Sakuya stood up, still embarrassed about the tumble.

Cassie sighed, digging through one of the many boxes. “Man, I’ve never been fully booked before. It’ll be next week before I finish all of these requests. Think everyone’s afraid of Bonebags?”

“Probably. Can’t blame them.”

Cassie’s workshop was chaotic in a way only she ever fully understood. Boxes were color-coded, but an orange box held anything from data discs to cables in knots to gun parts of all kinds. Thankfully, it was well-cooled, ventilated and lit surprisingly softly. The only smells in the air were soldering resin and heat from the printer’s vents.

She was already at her workbench, hunched over an open railgun, eyebrows slightly furrowed behind the goggles.

Sakuya sifted through the electronic junk, fiddling with the scrapped remains of a spider bot. “This thing used to be your pet or someone else’s?”

“Oh, the spiderbot? Yeah, used to have it follow me around, but ended up scrapping it for parts. Still have its CPU somewhere to put into something cuter.”

Someone knocked on the door, but Cassie retorted: “All booked today! Come back tomorrow!”

Whoever it was simply walked away without a response, but neither thought of it.

“Could’ve asked them to pay you extra.” Sakuya chuckled.

“I already do. Most of it goes on materials.” Cassie sighed, then called again without looking up. “Pass me the hex key? The stubby one.”

Sakuya shuffled through the green box of hex keys. “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

Cassie gave him a sideways look. “The short, angry-looking one.”

You mean yourself when you don’t sleep?
He held his tongue. No point in having the railgun test fired on him. He took out a key that looked vaguely angry and passed it over. Their gloved fingers brushed, but neither said a word. She hummed in thanks and twisted the bolts loose, taking off the railgun’s half-melted ventilation grates.

A tiny repair drone hovered around, trailing the resinous scent of solder. The hum of the drone and the printer were strangely calming, punctuated by metallic clicks and Cassie’s humming.

“Hey, Sakuya?” Cassie didn’t look up, continuing to clean the air filters.
“Yeah?”
“You’re not helping because you feel forced, right?”

He paused. “No. It’s nice here. I can sit around and nerd out about all the devices here, too.”

She giggled. “Wow. Maybe you’re secretly a craftsman.”

“I ran my own server back home, but don’t tell anyone.”

“Your server secret’s safe with me, big guy.” Cassie tapped her hand against her chest.

They kept working and chatting, isolated from the bar’s overlapping conversations, and talked about nothing in particular: Ashlan’s memes, Richter’s updates and “how are things?” messages, even upcoming fashion and pet shows in the lobby. It was the closest Sakuya had felt to relaxed ever since his arrival.

***

Somewhere in the lobby, in a condemned, barely moderated building, in a district where illegal matches and hacked buffs ran wild, the glow of a skeleton’s cigar gave a tinge of orange to a cold, dark room. It was lit only by the flickering and cracked screens of tablets scavenged from countless eliminated players. He didn’t keep them just as mementos.

Bonebags had heard a theory: some player tablets, running unpatched firmware, could jam, or even control admin drones. It took a while to check each one, but if it was true, it’d open up an entirely new world, putting control over the entire Arena into the hands of whoever held that one special device. He wanted it for himself. “Bonebags’ Arena.” He could almost taste the power.

Footsteps echoed through the shadows. A man in tattered robes walked in, one eye covered by black hair, veins purple and glowing with dark, forsaken magic.

Bonebags turned, spreading his arms. “Kinzorn! Bringing some lovely news to me, eh?”

Kinzorn rasped in response. “The aftermath of your most recent duel is playing out nicely. The glitched-face boy is now walking again, while the one in armor is always near the gunsmith. They’re both keeping busy. Paranoid maybe. And the bar itself? Well, you’re all they talk about.”

Bonebags leaned back in his chair, grinning as he puffed his cigar. “Ha! Can’t blame them. Everybody loves Bonebags, even if they’re a little too shy to say it. Or smart enough to lie.” He winked.

In a dark, unlit corner, a slab of meat and iron was hunched over, sharpening rivets made from scrap metal. His face was hidden behind a rusted steel mask, bolted directly to his skull. His armor was mismatched and grotesque, made up of discolored, bloodstained plates grafted right into flesh.

Bonebags grinned at him. “Time to shine, Kauter.”

The brute rose up, dragging a massive rivet gun across the floor, the sound a horrifying screech. Kinzorn stepped back, knowing better than to be too close to him.

Kauter’s breath was heavy and slow. His voice was like gravel and wire scraping together.  “TeLL mE... [click] WhAt yOu nEed...”

Bonebags' grin flickered slightly at the sound. Even he wasn't quite comfortable around the bodymodder. He lifted up his tablet, opening the profile of player #4351: Cassie.
“I need you to bring this lady to me. Alive, preferably not bleeding. Don’t want that weapon pass of yours to get taken away, now do we? She and I have some business to discuss: guns, Richter, and… our tin-can friend.”

Kauter took the tablet into his half-fleshy, half-aluminum hand, looking at Cassie’s picture with a horrific grin. Far too wide, far too eager, looking more like an animal baring its teeth.
“I'll... bR-InG h-hEr hErE... ALiVe. Mm-mostly.”
His words were a wet, metallic growl, interspersed with beeps and whirs from some artificial voice engine.

It was enough to make even Bonebags wince, but he quickly recovered, grinning again. “Bravo, bravo!" He applauded, then turned back to Kinzorn. “As for you, do keep our armored friend company. Make sure he doesn’t get in Kauter’s way.