Tarragon

Chapter Seventeen: Void of Motivation

-Mantis

-April 18th, 2024

Another game of Tarragon. It was the semi-finals, and I was dreading it. Not because I was afraid I would lose, but that I was afraid of everything other than the game. All throughout the bus ride to the stadium, countless anxieties pricked my neck, and made me afraid of what was going to happen. Last game I had almost been anticipating something to go wrong, but now I was dreading it.

We got to the stadium, I got in my Tarragon gear, and sat down, waiting for the others to finish. Hermes sat down next to me, "you remember the blast? The one you were caught in?"

"Yeah. I do."

"How did you survive it? I'm not complaining, but- you were unarmored and unprotected. You should have been burnt to a pile of ashes. Why weren't you?" he asked me, scratching the back of his head.

"I actually don't know. Now that I think about it, that blast barely hurt at all." I pulled off the gloves. There were no burns, or scarring from the blast. I squinted, and looked closely at my skin, bringing my hand up to my head and holding it steady with my other hand. It was completely unharmed.

I threw the glove back on, and headed out into the game. We were playing against the Snowspark team.

It was really all a blur- I took the first checkpoint in 40 seconds, the second after 2 minutes, third after four, and fourth after six. I was easily on track to beat my previous record. I moved onto the fifth.

"Mantis!" one of the Snowspark shouted, "How? How are you doing this? You started playing barely a few months ago, how are you so good at this?"

"Who knows. Maybe it's the Angel." I shouted back, landing in the area where I would take the fifth flag. I fended the Snowspark off until the checkpoint was claimed. I didn't feel proud- this felt like taking candy from a baby.

We went through the post-game commentary, and I hid in the locker room. I didn't feel like interacting with the fans. It was so easy at this point, it didn't feel fulfilling. I had always yearned to play Tarragon, but this wasn't what I had asked for. I didn't ask to be shoved into a conflict between world powers, I didn't ask to be possessed by an Angel, I didn't ASK TO HAVE MY FAMILY RIPPED APART BY A TITANIC ICE DRAGON-

I leaned against the wall, my arms up, and my head hung between them.

All I had ever wanted was to play Tarragon. All I had ever wanted was to be like my idols. I never could have imagined that this was what it would be like- so easy it's demotivating. It felt like turning on cheats in a game. You would feel so powerful for a short moment, but you would lose motivation to play so fast, because there was no struggle, there was no search, there was no challenge.

Deep down, I wished I had never made that shield. I wished that I hadn't killed Doramanthus, and instead just let it happen. Deep down, I felt like a failure, in every atom of my being. Everywhere I went, destruction and chaos followed. I had lost the most unique friend I had to Thorn, and my long-term friends felt distant, now.

I opened up my phone, looking at my group chat with my friends.

174 notifications. Regular messages wouldn't notify me, only the ones where they specifically made it notify me. I looked up at the top of them. It was about when Tykranaea had attacked the Stadium months ago. I scrolled through the messages.

"Where were you?" Ray asked me, to no response. He had sent this a few months ago, the game where I had been absent, freeing Fern and Dec from the New Order.

There were a few more notifications from the two, wondering where I was.

"MANTIS PLEASE TELL ME THOSE CLIPS ARE FAKE" Jaye had sent me in all caps. That was after the R&M attacks.