CHAPTER 162

The owl, using her clawed finger, had jammed the talon into the soft flesh of her orbital socket. With a yank, she pulled her eye free as light burst from her socket. She handed it over to Yuki.

"All my knowledge," she explained. "In exchange, someone must care for the forest children. Please..." she begged, blood now leaking from her beak.

Bigfoot put her hands together and placed them on her belly, his massive hand covering both of them.

"I will guide them, sister owl." He stroked the feathers on her head. "I regret that I couldn't know you better. Now sleep and be one with the woods."

Yuki took the bloody orb from the owl. Upon touching her fingers, it solidified into a crystalline sphere, which she tucked into her robes.

The owl gasped for air, and then fell silent. Her chest fell one last time and an ominous wind blew through the clearing. The feathers blew off her body and filled the air, blinding Mike temporarily.

When the wind was gone, so was the owl.

"Shit," he muttered to himself, then looked at Yuki. "She ripped out her own eye and just...handed it over. How does that even work?"

"It's an old-school thing you should be familiar with. Far preferable to having someone else rip it out for you." She stood and looked at everyone else. "Where are the others?"

"Chasing Leeds." Mike looked at Bigfoot. "We're good here if you want to try and track them down."

Bigfoot nodded, then stood.

"I'll try and bring him to you in one piece," he said. "But no promises. You can survive without a limb, right?"

With that, Bigfoot took off, vanishing into the woods. Mike sighed and looked down at the remaining feathers still on the ground. Everything had gone sideways fast, but he felt as though he should be used to it.

"Hey." Yuki put a calming hand on his shoulder. "We can still do this."

He put his hand on hers and sighed. "I sure hope you're right."

Though the battle for the fate of the world continued for countless millennia, Beth experienced it as a matter of hours.

Jenny's turns had become so long that the Earth rotated in fast forward from Beth's perspective. It was little more than a whirling blue and green mass, the landscape often changing drastically as a result of whatever hell the doll unleashed.

Pestilence, despite hours of pleading that sounded like a hive of caffeinated wasps, had been forced to continue playing. Every round they had lost always ended up with their body being separated into individual bugs and then spread apart. Beth got the impression that Pestilence, as a hive mind, was forced to endure everything that each insect experienced. Between rounds, Pestilence sat on the ground and rocked, hugging their legs close to their chest.

Famine lasted a bit longer, but Jenny's troops had developed a real taste for him. Jenny cackled in glee, forcing Famine to endure being consumed at the end of each of his rounds and then slowly digested for an amount of time that Famine was unable to describe to his siblings. Her real masterstroke had begun when she had the mimics become microscopic and eat him from the inside. This method of torment soon evolved into a single mimic eating Famine's brain cells while War and Pestilence were forced to care for him as he wasted away into madness.

War, true to his name, put up a much tougher fight. While Jenny found new and interesting ways to make him spend years with nothing to do, he attempted to fight back by doing the same. As the two of them tried to one-up each other, it was clear that Jenny was completely unphased.

Eventually, Famine and Pestilence lost the game. They were disheartened between rounds and made terrible decisions. Beth noticed that both of them started going all in, wagering the maximum number of troops regardless of strategy. Once beaten, neither of them spoke or even seemed to be paying attention to the game anymore, rather, they looked absolutely exhausted. Their former bluster was gone, as they seemed to know that they had been thoroughly beaten.

Beth thought back to how Murray had made sure to rebuild her mind each time to prevent her from going mad. For the horsemen, the sheer dread of starting each round seemed to have broken them.

As angry and bitter as War had become, it was clear that Jenny refused to give him what he wanted. In rounds she lost, she always showed up wherever he was. In rounds she won, she stole his troops away as silently as possible and then made War come looking for her.

The end came for War when he had the bright idea of encasing Jenny in a giant metal cube and then using a drill to bury her deep beneath the ground in Yellowstone National Park. He seemed extremely proud of the fact that Jenny would have to sit around for hundreds of thousands of years in quiet contemplation until the supervolcano beneath finally erupted.

Beth actually got to watch the blast from her viewing position and had been terrified that something had happened to the game itself. Murray had appeared to reassure everybody that all was well and then reminded them that only a couple of minutes had passed in the real world.

Beth had no idea what War had done while stuck on Earth for so long, and his shit-eating grin of victory turned sour when Jenny appeared in a blaze of golden light.

Boring, Jenny had exclaimed, then mimed a yawn. Beth was a hundred-percent convinced that Jenny was bouncing her consciousness out of the game, but didn't want to risk confirming it. But since you want to play dirty, let's do it.