Last Light of the Gaming Legend Son-In-Law

Chapter 9: Long Live the King

At 8:58 p.m. on Sunday, the back room at Respawn was so quiet I could hear Maggie’s heart pounding beside me.

Or maybe it was mine.

“Two million,” she whispered, staring at the viewer count on her laptop. “Two million people, Cole. That’s more than some Pro League finals.”

“Don’t tell me numbers.”

“Sorry.”

I pulled the black visor over my head and put the headset on over it. The small camera in the corner blinked red. On the stream, my window showed only dark glass, and Reaper_0’s window beside it showed nothing at all, a black square with his name in white letters. No face, no voice, no camera.

Somewhere across the city, I knew, the whole Lockwood family was sitting in front of the giant TV in the mansion, because Tyler had made them. He’d texted the family group chat three times since dinner. Final at 9!!! LastLight vs Reaper!!! History!!!

Brandon had answered with a picture of his PeakBet ticket. Twenty thousand dollars on Reaper_0.

Three minutes earlier, a private message had popped up from Sienna.

Tyler is forcing the whole family to watch some gaming final. Where are you?

Somewhere quiet, I typed. Watching it too.

You? Watching a match? A pause. Well. Cheer for the masked one. Tyler says he’s our only hope.

I looked at the black visor in the dark glass of the monitor, my own reflection staring back.

I will, I wrote.

“Eyes,” Maggie said.

I put the drops in. Counted to sixty. The world came back, a little smaller than it had been that morning.

At 9:00 p.m., the final began.

Reaper_0 didn’t rush. He never did. He waited at the edge of the map, in the trees, in the place where my eyes were weakest, and let me come to him; when I didn’t, he slipped behind me like smoke and hit me from a side I couldn’t see.

He took game one in nine minutes.

“Breathe,” Maggie said.

“I’m breathing.”

In game two, I stayed in the center, in my small window of sight, and made him fight me there. He was good, better than Blaze, better than the Korean, but in the middle of the screen, nobody in the world was better than me. I took game two.

1-1.

Game three was a war. Reaper_0 used the Emperor’s Gambit, then the Silent Bell, then a fake surrender so perfect that I believed it for one half of a second, which was all he needed. Every move felt like a hand reaching out of my own past to hit me in the face; he played my tricks better than anyone but me ever had, as if he’d practiced them in the dark for three years, waiting. He took game three.

2-1, Reaper_0.

“Cole,” Maggie said quietly. “Your hands.”

They were shaking. And the screen was getting brighter, or my eyes were getting worse; I couldn’t tell anymore. Everything had a soft white glow, like looking at the world through steam.

“Ten minutes,” Maggie said. “Take your break.”

“There’s only five between games.”

“Then take five!”

I closed my eyes. In for four, hold for four, out for six. When I opened them again, the glow was still there.

Game four started, and three minutes in, my eyes gave out.

It wasn’t the edges this time. It was the middle. The bright monitor turned into a flat gray blur, as if someone had smeared soap across the glass, and I couldn’t see my own character, or his, or anything at all.

“I can’t see,” I said.

“What?”

“Maggie, I can’t see the screen.”

“Stop,” she said at once. “Cole, stop. Dr. Morgan said if the center goes…”

“If I stop, I lose.” I could hear Reaper_0’s footsteps in my headset, soft and patient. “If I lose, Sienna loses everything tomorrow at nine.”

“And if you keep going, you might lose your eyes!”

I didn’t answer. I closed them.

The world went from gray to black, and in the black, everything got clearer.

A low bell, north. He was in the trees above me. A soft step, then another. He was circling left, the way he’d circled in game one, because he liked to come from the side I couldn’t see. Except I couldn’t see any side now, so every side was the same.

I listened to him come.

When the last footstep landed exactly where the north path met the river, I set my trap there, blind.

I heard it snap. I heard the sound of his character falling.

“Cole,” Maggie breathed. “You got him.”

I won game four with my eyes closed. 2-2.

During the break, I sat in the dark with a cold towel over my face while Maggie read the chat to me in a shaking voice. People were screaming. They were posting the clip of my blind trap over and over. Half of them said I was cheating. The other half said only one man in history had ever played like that.

Game five started.

My sight came back a little, enough to see a blurry shape in the middle of the screen, and I used every bit of it. Reaper_0 used everything too: every trick, every bait, every stolen move from the playbook I’d written. For twenty-two minutes, neither of us could break the other.

Then, with ten seconds left on the clock, both of us were almost dead, and only one hit would end it.

Ten seconds. I couldn’t see his character anymore. I closed my eyes.

I didn’t use Crown Fall. He knew Crown Fall. He knew all my moves, because he’d stolen them.

So I made a new one.

I listened for the bell, then the click, then the hum of the river, and I built a trap out of the sound alone, a trap that waited not where he was, but where his footsteps said he’d be in two seconds. I’d never done it before. Nobody had.

Five seconds. Three.

I heard the snap.

When I opened my eyes, the screen was blurry, but the word in the middle was big enough to read.

VICTORY.

LastLight had won the King’s Gauntlet, 3-2.

Maggie screamed so loud that someone in the bar outside dropped a glass. Then she grabbed my shoulders and shook me, laughing and crying at the same time.

I sat there with my hands in my lap, too tired to move.

A gold banner filled the middle of the stream. KING’S GAUNTLET CHAMPION: LASTLIGHT. PRIZE: $500,000.

Five hundred thousand dollars. Exactly enough. The tournament wouldn’t pay it out for thirty days, but that didn’t matter; Maggie had already told me what she’d do in the morning, and the trust had more than enough to cover it until then.

Minutes later, Maggie held her phone up to my good eye. Tyler had posted a video from the mansion: himself jumping on the white sofa, screaming LASTLIGHT! LASTLIGHT! while Vivian’s dog barked, and behind him, Brandon sat frozen, staring at his PeakBet app as twenty thousand dollars disappeared.

Nobody in that video noticed that I wasn’t home.

“Cole,” Maggie said suddenly, and her voice changed. “Look. He’s still here.”

On the stream, Reaper_0’s black window hadn’t closed. He’d lost, and he was still sitting there in the lobby, silent, while two million people watched.

Then, slowly, letter by letter, he typed into the chat.

Long live the King.

And his window went dark.