Last Light of the Gaming Legend Son-In-Law

Chapter 8: The Ghost in the Bracket

“You did what?” Maggie stared at me across the back room. “You told Blaze Vitale you’ll take off your mask if you lose?”

“I won’t lose.”

“Cole, three million people heard you say that!”

“Then three million people will watch him lose.” I sat down in the chair and pulled on the headset. “When does it start?”

“Quarterfinal first, against some American kid. Then Blaze in the semifinal, best of five. Then the final tonight at nine.” She threw up her hands. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”

“You’ve been saying that for eleven years.”

“And one day it’ll be true.”

The quarterfinal was quick. The American kid was good, but nervous, and I beat him 3-1 before two o’clock. I closed my eyes for ten minutes and put my drops in.

My phone buzzed. It was Dr. Morgan.

How are the eyes?

Fine, I typed.

Liar, she wrote back. Ten minutes every hour. And if the center goes dark, you STOP.

I put the phone face down, and then it was time.

Blaze came on camera first. The tournament put his face in a small window in the corner of the stream: dark curly hair, a gold chain, a grin like a shark.

“Hello, ghost!” he said in a thick Italian accent. “Today we see your face, yes? I hope you’re pretty!”

LastLight’s window showed only a black visor. Maggie had set up a small camera in the back room, and I’d put the helmet on for the stream; the dark glass hid everything.

I didn’t say anything. I’d decided long ago that Monarch didn’t talk, and LastLight didn’t either.

“No words?” Blaze laughed. “Scared already!” He leaned closer to his camera. “Listen, ghost. I play eleven years. I see every trick in this game. Nobody plays with eyes closed. Either you cheat, or you lie. Today, I find out which, and then the whole world sees your face.”

Maggie typed something into the stream chat for me: LastLight accepts. Same terms.

“Good!” Blaze clapped his hands. “Very good. Let’s go!”

Game one started.

Blaze was fast, faster than anyone I’d played all weekend, and for three minutes he pushed me back and back toward the edge of the map, where my eyes were weakest.

That was his plan. He’d watched my matches. He’d seen that I rarely fought at the edges, and he was trying to drag me there.

So I stopped running.

I stepped forward, into the middle of the screen, into the narrow window where I could still see everything clearly, and I made him come to me. He came, because he was angry, and angry players always come. Thirty seconds later, he was finished.

1-0.

In game two, he tried to be careful. He hid, waited, played slow, and the slower he played, the more mistakes he made, because careful wasn’t who he was.

2-0.

Between games, Blaze shouted at his camera in Italian, then in English. “Lucky! Lucky ghost! No more luck now!” His chat was full of laughing faces, and for the first time all weekend, they weren’t laughing at me.

In game three, he went quiet on camera. The grin was gone. He played the best he’d played all day, and for a moment, I was in real trouble. He’d hidden in the far corner, and the gray fog was creeping in again from the sides of my screen.

I closed my eyes.

A click from the south. A hum from the river.

I set the trap, opened my eyes, and watched it close.

3-0.

On the stream, Blaze sat frozen. His face had gone red, then white. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then, without a single word, he reached forward and ended his call. His window went black.

“He left,” Maggie whispered, staring at the chat. “He just… left. Cole, the chat’s going crazy. People are calling it the fastest shutdown of a top-five player in two years.”

I took off the helmet and leaned back. My hands were steady. My eyes weren’t.

“How long until the final?” I asked.

“Five hours. The other semifinal is still…” She stopped. “Wait. You’ve got a message.”

“From the tournament?”

“From someone using the tournament inbox.” She turned the laptop so the message sat in the center of the screen.

No name. No picture. Just a few words.

Lose the final tonight, if you know what’s good for you.

I read it twice.

“Kids send stuff like that all the time,” Maggie said, but her voice was tight. “Sore losers.”

“Sore losers sign their names.” I pushed the laptop back. “Whoever wrote that didn’t want me to know who he was. That’s not a kid.”

“Then who?”

I thought about it. “Someone who’s afraid of what happens if LastLight wins. Someone who knows who I might be.”

“Kai?”

“Maybe.” I pulled up Kai Tanaka’s stream page on my phone and held it close to my good eye. Last night, he’d been live for hours, watching my matches. Today, his channel said OFFLINE. It had been offline since noon.

“He went dark right when the semifinals started,” Maggie said slowly.

“Right when the other semifinal started,” I said.

Then the bracket on her screen updated. The second semifinal had just ended.

FINAL: LASTLIGHT VS. REAPER_0.

“Reaper_0?” Maggie frowned. “Never heard of him.”

“Show me his matches.”

She pulled up his games from the whole weekend, and we watched them side by side, in silence.

In his very first round, Reaper_0 had used a fake retreat followed by a sudden trap, a one-on-one version of Crown Fall.

In the second round, he’d baited his opponent toward a tower and split away at the last second. The Emperor’s Gambit, made small for a duel.

In the third, a fake surrender. In the fourth, the Silent Bell.

Every round. Every single round, he’d won with a trick from Team Titan’s private playbook, moves that only five people in the world had ever been taught.

And there was something else, something smaller, that made the skin on my arms go cold. Reaper_0 never rushed. He hung back, always half a step behind the fight, watching, waiting for his opponent to make the first mistake, the way a jungle player does, hiding in the trees until the perfect moment to strike.

I’d played next to a jungle player who moved exactly like that for five years. He had a small black hair knot and round silver glasses, and last night he had watched my win three times on his stream before he took those glasses off.

Maggie had gone very pale. “Cole…”

“I know.”

“He’s not just selling your moves to Iron Dynasty,” she said. “He’s showing off with them.”

“Worse.” I looked at the strange name on the screen, black letters on gold, waiting for me in the final. “He’s here. He entered the same tournament, the same weekend I came back, and he’s been waiting for me all along.”

A second message dropped into the tournament inbox while we were still staring at the bracket. No name, no picture, only four words.

See you at nine, King.

Maggie read it out loud, then looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “He called you King.”

“I saw.”

“Nobody calls LastLight King, Cole. They call you ghost, they call you cheater, they call you the masked guy.” Her voice dropped. “Only one kind of person calls you King.”

“Someone who used to say it every night,” I said, “in a locked room, after every win.”