There were signs, nods and murmurs of agreement all around.

“Good.  Go.  Have fun.  Mop up the stragglers.  Don’t worry about leaving any alive.  They already know we’re here.  No more than five minutes before we leave.

But… what. Jack. Just about forty paragraphs ago you said, and I quote: 

“No. Let him go.  We need to leave some alive.”

…alright, fair enough, I guess in the time this meeting took, enough people – Scrub included – fled the area to satisfy that condition.

We can’t have our grand battle with the locals so soon.”

Hehe, that’s a good reason to leave, yeah. It’s not climactic battle time yet!

“In any case, we’ve hashed this out enough.  I’ll think it over tonight and have something proper to present to you and the capes of this city who will be our… opposition.  I can add some rules, to cover loopholes and keep this little event manageable.

Oddly enough, this whole thing has me feeling a lot better about the challenge than I did when it was first introduced. That’s the opposite of what I was expecting to happen here.

I wonder how much of this Tattletale saw coming.

It’s still concerning that she incentivized the S9 to be more brutal with their tests, but at least it resulted in more restrictions on their side. The turn-taking is one of the better ones – the recruits will only have to deal with one member trying to test them at a time.

Panacea, Armsmaster, Bitch, Regent, the buried girl and Hookwolf.

It seems they haven’t managed to find out Noelle’s name yet.

So wait, who are we missing here? Labyrinth wasn’t a nominee… right, Oni Lee. Got it.

Six nominees, eight Slaughterhouse members, and a bunch of people invested in helping the nominees. The game is on.

Burnscar didn’t nominate one, and I’ve already dispatched mine.  That’s six candidates, we need to remove five.  And when we’re done and we’ve established our superiority, we can kill this Tattletale, her friends, and everyone else, just to make our point.  Good?”

The fact that Tattletale seems to have made herself and the rest of the Undertravelers into primary targets for the Slaughterhouse Nine is another concerning detail.

Crawler tilted his head one way, then the other.  He rumbled, “Fine.”

“Which only leaves you, Cherish, our errant rookie.  You’re dejected because you know Bonesaw has a punishment in the works.  But you mustn’t lose heart.

“We’ve got something awful planned for you, but stop worrying so much!”

You’ll still have a chance to redeem yourself, and maybe even escape reprisal for your juvenile stunt.  I think Mannequin should start us off, and he’ll be penalized one day from his time limit for his loss tonight.

Huh. Well that ought to help motivate her.

As for Mannequin, is it fair to penalize him retroactively like that? I’m not sure either way.

And you’ll have to deal with the bug girl, to make up for this embarrassment.   Make her suffer.”

Hm. Either this is a hell of a coincidence, or Jack knew where Mannequin was. Mannequin hasn’t done anything to indicate who defeated him.

Mannequin tapped once on the blade.

I know we established already that this means yes, but I suspect he would very much like to use it on Skitter.

So Mannequin is now officially Skitter’s assigned enemy. Fair enough! I’m not sure I’m interested in a one-on-one rematch between them, but Wildbow could make it work. He certainly did with Lung, though Lung’s power is unusually well-suited for scaled-up rematches.

Lung has been quite thoroughly removed from the main setting and overshadowed in terms of threat level, but there’s still a small part of me that says we’ll be seeing him at full power for a round three.

“Ah, you feel your only road to self-improvement is your power.  While I would love to return to this particular debate, I can agree to disagree so you all can get back to your fun.

I guess they’ve discussed this a lot.

Look at it this way.  Our usual method has our quarry running scared.  To even get them to fight, you have to corner them, which you are admittedly very good at doing.  Like this, however, they have reason to band together, to fend us off, and protect the candidates who decide to eschew our tests and face our reprisals instead.

Of course, the Undersiders in particular are quite limited in who they can band together with right now.

More would fight you, and you’d have a higher chance of finding another individual who could harm you.”

That’s probably true, yeah.

There were nods or noises of agreement from Bonesaw, Burnscar, Siberian and Shatterbird.

Mannequin can’t exactly nod right now, even if he does trust Jack to make it fair.

“Mannequin?”

Mannequin tapped one finger on the blade that still extended from the base of his hand, drawing forth a single ‘clink’.

One clink for yes, two for no?

“That’s five of you in agreement.  Crawler?”

I guess that does mean yes, then.

…can Crawler speak? He does have a mouth, at least.

The monster stretched, his musculature rippling.  When he spoke, his voice was a rumble of broken sounds that only barely resembled words, “No point.”

Ahh. Not one for games, huh?

“True.  Would there be any complaints if we added another restriction?  Perhaps a time limit?  We take turns.  Three days each to carry out our tests.  A failure, such as the one that Mannequin evidently suffered tonight, and you’re penalized one day.

It seems they’re actually going to be on board with making things harder on themselves. They’re mostly in it all for fun, so they’re willing to turn up the difficulty of the game in order to make it more fun.

This might’ve been a better move on Tattle’s part than I thought.

A successful test might add some hours to your deadline, while the removal of one candidate buys you an extra day.”

I suppose this works.

“That’s not very fair to the first few of us to go,” Bonesaw said.  “They’ll have to test more people in less time.”

Oh yeah, good point – it’d work better if it wasn’t turn-based.

“They also have an easier time removing candidates from the list.  More chances at a longer run.  In fact, just to be fair, we may have to adjust the time awarded for a successful test, so there’s less for the first few of us to have a turn.

I guess that’s true too.

Do you all trust me to decide on something fair?”

Not really.