07. [01/01/46] ; SURVIVING ROUND ONE

                                    

                                          
Suu's Tamer abilities were just as enchanting as he'd always imagined. The koi fish drew arches overhead, their shining, spotted scales diving into the ground as if it were liquid, and emerging once more ll across the field. 
"But familiars don't die," Hotaru said, "do they really count as kills?"
"Well, most of them don't. But these two count as living creatures," Suu led two of the smallest koi fish forward, swimming in the air and spiraling fun circles around his palm. "They're manifestations of the actual koi I have in my home. If I kill them here, they die in my pond, too. So they count, don't they?" 
"Euuh? But how do you know that—" 
"Oh, because when I gave them accessories, they showed up in real life. And when one of them got hit with a poison attack, I had to rush them to a fish doctor. It cost me half my savings." 
Sounds expensive.
"Ah, but don't worry. Familiars revive, after all— we've needed to put the fish down for a while now anyways," Suu assured. "I've been wanting to test if familiar revival works on them too." 
Hotaru remembered this detail in Suu's character design, of course. 
This fish was always meant to be just his first tamed monster that he and the protagonist nurtured together. And according to his character arc, the fish was supposed to die from sickness and live on forever in the Dreamscape.
There weren't supposed to be two of them. 
"Don't worry about it, hurry," Suu prompted, reaching into his inventory quickly for a dagger. With a quick slash he split one of the koi fish clean in half, bright red blood bursting forth as the creature was bisected, falling as two pieces to the ground. 
It vanished before it even hit the ground, and Suu cheered softly. His name above his head turned from red to green, the indication that they've cleared the conditions. 
"Alright, it worked!" 
Ah, this can't be real. You were supposed to lose that fish in a deep, character-building character arc with the main character about mortality, forever, and treasured past memories. You can't just lose it so nonchalantly.
(Just thinking about it made Hotaru's blood boil again. How dare these fucking archangels ruin everything about his story?)
"Firefly! Quick!" 
[Time Limit: 01:14]
Holding his breath, and moving before he could second-guess himself again, Suu draws the bow and fires it at the fish. It plunges right through the center, and the fish shatters into particles before it can go far, along with the disposable arrow. 
[Mission Condition Achieved: Kill at least one living creature to move onto the next round.]
His screen name overhead turned green. 
[If the number of survivors precede the number of dead by the time limit, all Dreamers in this zone will die.]
Hotaru sighed. He just wanted to go home and sleep at this point, but that condition was a problem. Not only did everyone have to kill at least one person, the survivor count couldn't be higher than the amount of people that died.
And the two familiars they just killed didn't contribute to the survivor count. 
They weren't given a count of how many people were here, either. What most people were doing now was kill as many people as they could. 
It made sense. More than half of the people here had to die or they all would. 
"There's not much we can do about it," Suu, seemingly reading Hotaru's mind, said.