Chapter Twenty-Eight: Chekhov’s Balcony

The Ranger Danger outfit wasn’t nearly as intimidating without the mask and hat.

But now I could see that crazed look in Nathan’s eyes as he edged toward me with his knife. He was being cautious as if I could hurt him. Did he not remember what happened in the tunnels?

As he prepared himself to slice, I thought that would be the end for me. I had played my part already. I would be in a morgue somewhere soon, surely.

But then I spotted the football player.

Antoine was still wearing much of the football uniform he had been given for the game. He had ditched the shoulder pads, but he still wore the leg pads and the cleats, and in his hand, was a football helmet.

He had managed to sneak out of the room that they had been holed up in. He was trying to walk on the hallway runner so that his cleats wouldn’t make a noise against the hardwood.

I needed to distract Nathan.

My main advantage in that pursuit was that he wanted to kill me. From that perspective, distracting him should have been easy. The disadvantage was that he could kill me very quickly. I needed to draw it out to give Antoine time to get into a better position.

“You told Evan that I was at the house when you killed Ruck,” I said. By now it was obvious, but I needed to get a reaction out of him. Hopefully, I could get him to monologue, to talk about his big killing plan.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He continued to creep closer.

So much for that. He wasn’t going to talk to me. Up until that point we hadn’t had any dialogue with each other that I remembered. There was nothing to discuss. No unsettled issues between us.

“The police are on their way right now,” I said.

I saw a glint of fear in his eyes. The walls were closing in.

“Then I better be quick.”

So that was the wrong thing to say. Now he was coming faster.

He lunged at me, but Antoine was close enough now, that just as Nathan managed to get his hands on me, Antoine hammered him in the back of the head with his helmet.

That must have done a lot of damage.

Antoine not only had a high Mettle, to begin with, but he had boosted it using his Gym Rat ability earlier in the storyline. Add on to that another buff he got from using a sports implement as a weapon, and that attack was enough to make Nathan nearly crumple to the ground. He caught himself and backed away from both of us, readying his knife to deal with the new threat.

Nathan was bleeding now. A cut had opened up on the top of his head. I wondered if enemies could have status ailments the same way we could. If so it shouldn’t take too many hits like that to make Nathan incapacitated.

Shortly after the scuffle, Anna emerged from a room they had been in, holding a small nightstand as a weapon. Now that they were working together, Anna’s Who’s With Me trope boosted Antoine’s Mettle even further.

He had a total of seven. I don’t know which tropes were responsible for which buffs, but at our level, seven Mettle was huge.

I could only guess what Nathan’s stat distribution was. He probably had significant points in Grit, Hustle, and Mettle, but I know he had to have at least some Savvy and Moxie in order to pull off his deception. With a total Plot Armor of 15, there was no way that his Grit was higher than Antoine’s Mettle.

The problem was, just because Antoine could take him out, didn’t mean Nathan couldn’t kill him right back.

It was all a matter of who got enough hits in against the other.

Antoine had a lot of Hustle but using the football helmet as a weapon wasn’t exactly something you could do swiftly. He had to put a lot of power into it and swing it in a high arch.

Nathan’s knife, however, was quick and every time Antoine would draw near, Nathan would have his blade out slicing at the air.

They were at an impasse.

I had an opportunity to get out of there. I had no place in the middle of a fight like that. I crawled on my hands and knees past the brawling trio toward the back of the house. On my way, I saw the door that they had barricaded to keep Ranger Danger out.

I assumed that Kimberly was somewhere in there hiding off-screen. In the room, I saw a mannequin laid out on the ground. That must have been dressed in the Ranger Danger costume when it was hanging from the front balcony.

Luckily, Kimberly had already done her job. Thanks to her, I had a pretty good idea of where this fight needed to go: the back of the house.

I heard Nathan start to monologue. It almost hurt my feelings how quickly he went into it with the right audience.

“Don’t you understand, Anna?” He pleaded.

“How could I understand killing people? Killing your—our—friends?” Anna was furious at him. She had lost a real friend in this storyline.

Nathan let out a frustrated cry. “I’m going to be a surgeon. I can’t have everything I’ve worked on for my entire life wasted because of one mistake. I am going to save lives. I’m going to save one life for the girl. Then I’ll save a life for…” he choked up for a moment, “Ruck. Then one for Mark, one for Evan, one for Camden…”

I stood up in the hallway so that I could move faster. I used the wall to hold myself up and every door frame I came across was a fingerhold.

To the audience, it must have looked like I was panicking and trying to get away. I was actually trying to get somewhere specific.

I got to the back of the hallway where two glass doors opened up onto the back balcony.

As I opened them I put every effort I could into turning the handle loudly and opening the doors with a bang as I fell against them.

“…and then when I’ve done that, I’m going to save a few more for all of you.”

With that, Nathan turned away from Anna and Antoine and rushed down the hallway at me. Now that he was done monologuing, I was the target again. And an easy target at that as I could barely hold myself up against the back doors.

He got to me quickly. He grabbed me and he moved his knife into my ribs. The pain was even worse than the one in my stomach as his knife scraped along my ribs.

He pulled out the blade. He repositioned it to plunge it into my heart. This time he was going for the kill.

Just as he was about to plunge his knife into me, Antoine caught up to him and tackled him out through the open doors onto the back balcony.

The same exact back balcony that Kimberly and Antoine had found yesterday at the party.

Do you remember that hunch that I had but didn’t tell you about yet?

This was it. When Kimberly and Antoine had found it, an obviously scripted response occurred. Everyone told them that the back balcony was rotten and not to go out there. It was so obvious that even my friends had picked up on it.

The Party Phase is the exploration phase and, thanks to her new “Get a Room!” trope, Kimberly had an increased chance of finding useful plot elements when exploring the setting with a romantic interest. Antoine was happy to fill that role, I’m sure.

There was only one thing that having NPCs point out a rotten back balcony could mean in a movie like this. It meant that somebody was going to fall through it.

That’s how I knew that the finale would happen at Delta Epsilon Delta. There was only one reason Kimberly would have been able to find something like this. When you’re watching a movie and you see a character put a gun into their waistband you can expect that that gun’s going to go off by the end of the movie.

The same idea applies to unsafe balconies.

This decrepit balcony was a weapon in our hands as much as any gun would be. We just had to find a way to use it.

As soon as Antoine tackled him onto the balcony, the entire thing gave way and fell off the back of the house.

There was a crunch of wood and dust that flew into the air as Antoine, Nathan, and about 10,000 termites fell to the ground below.

I had no way of knowing how much damage that fall would do to Nathan. I knew that in a movie like this, that fall would be a great ending blow.

I leaned over so that I could see down to where they had fallen. Antoine lay sprawled out reeling in pain. Nathan lay next to him completely still.

Not that I trusted that. We already knew that he had a lot of Moxie. He could be faking.

Anna had taken the stairs and had to run around the side of the house. She quickly grabbed Antoine and helped him to his feet. He was clearly dazed, and I could see that his Incapacitated status was going off occasionally, but otherwise, he just had the wind knocked out of him.

Then she approached Nathan and kicked him to turn him over.

His knife was sticking out of his sternum. Even he didn’t have enough Moxie to fake that.

He was breathing hard, but I saw a rage within him as he screamed.

“I was going to make up for it!”

He struggled, attempting to get to his feet. When he didn’t manage to do that he got on his knees and crawled toward Anna. She backed away. Still, he persisted.

I could tell he wanted to say something, but now he was the one that was bleeding out. He was losing the energy to hold himself up.

He made one last attempt to lunge at Anna, but she struck him with the nightstand, sending him falling sideways into the backyard pool.

The needle on the plot cycle was nearly to The End as the pool grew murky with blood.

In the distance, police sirens could be heard.

They came just in time to deal with the body.

When the needle struck The End, I felt myself taking an involuntary deep breath. It didn’t hurt this time. I reached toward my abdomen. No wound. No ripped shirt. No blood.

I even had my hoodie and sunglasses back.

Quickly the four of us left Delta Epsilon Delta. We ran down the road toward the stadium. I didn’t know if we had to pick up Camden from the hospital or if he’d be right where I left him.

Even though the storyline had ended I could tell that things were still not back to normal. Some police cruisers were still in the parking lot of the stadium along with one ambulance. But the people were gone.

As we approached, we saw Camden walking slowly toward us. His eyes were wide in shock.

We ran to him and piled on to him in a hug.

At that moment all I wanted to do was apologize for not being able to save him. I also wanted to ask him what it was like. Was he aware that he was dead? Was he watching us?

I didn’t do any of those things. I was just glad to have him back.

The group hug might have lasted longer except we were interrupted.

“Step right up,” Silas the Showman said. “You’ve won a ticket!”

The fortune-telling machine was in the middle of the street. Its lights were drowned out by those of the ambulance and police cars but it was still hard to miss the little animatronic man and his silver flashlight clicking off and on.

You know the drill.

Here’s what we got:

Each of us received two stat tickets. Our Plot Armor wasn’t going to grow this fast forever. Eventually, it would level off and then the grind would begin. For now, we were flush with stat points.

I put one into Moxie and one into Savvy to make sure that my Trope Master ability stayed up to snuff. So far, my Oblivious Bystander scouting strategy was working. At least there were promising signs. It wasn’t perfect yet, I wasn’t perfect at it yet, but I wasn’t going to give up on it if it helped me get to the end of the story to help my friends.

Here are our stat changes:

Player Stats

Riley

Antoine

Anna

Kimberly

Camden

Archetype

Film Buff

Athlete

Final Girl

Eye Candy

Scholar

Plot Armor

15

16

18

14

15

Mettle

1

4

4

1

2

Moxie

4 + 1

1 + 1

3 + 1

4 + 1

2

Hustle

2

4 + 1

2 + 1

3

2

Savvy

5 + 1

1

2

1

6

Grit

1

4

5

3 + 1

1 + 2

Each of us was just trying to make up for what we felt we lacked. Antoine wanted more Moxie so that he could scale his Gym Rat ability. Camden, as could be expected, wanted more Grit so he put both points into it. And so on and so forth.

Antoine got the Ranger Danger card. Well deserved. I mean really it was a team effort. Kimberly found the rotten balcony. I lured Nathan into position. Anna pushed him into the pool where he sank to his ambiguous demise. But it was Antoine that took the fall, activating the rotten balcony/plot device so he got the win.

Ranger Danger

???

Someone is out to kill Ruck Johnson. Donning a grim uniform stolen from a rival school, they become a killer who is unstoppable until they are unmasked. Armed with a knife and deception, Ranger Danger sets out to kill all those on his or her list.

Each of us also received a trope except for Kimberly. I suppose it was fair, she was already ahead.

Anna got a blue ticket:

A Kind Face

Player Trope

Can be equipped to the Final Girl

Stat Used: Moxie

Perhaps the most significant advantage that a Final Girl has is that everyone seems to trust them. As they seek information in order to survive, even strangers will go the extra mile to help them out.

When this ticket is equipped, NPCs will be more likely to share important plot information with the player during the Party Phase.

Antoine got a blue ticket:

The Playbook

Player Trope

Can be equipped to the Athlete

Stat Used: Grit

Unspoken communication is an important skill set for any survivor. Skills and teamwork learned on the field can apply in a fight.

When this ticket is equipped, the player will be able to perceive whenever the time to perform their role in a pre-planned strategy has come even without communication from a teammate.

Camden got a purple ticket:

Hide and Seek

Player Trope

Can be equipped to Any Player

Stat Used: Savvy

Sometimes you can’t run but you can hide. In a movie, the right hiding spot can mean the difference between life and death.

Normally when being chased, the player’s Hustle will be compared to the pursuer’s Hustle to determine whether the player is caught. When this ticket is equipped, a player who hides during a chase scene will be able to pit their Savvy against the opponent’s Savvy instead.

Beware, however, this effect will not last.

I received a blue ticket:

Casting Director

Player Trope

Can be equipped to the Film Buff

Stat Used: Savvy

The film buff can recognize the role that a character will play in a movie just from watching the trailer.

During the Party Phase, the player will perceive information about their team’s roles in the storyline.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep