Zer...O...ne

It had been about an hour and a half since the gaming session began in the living room.

Dawn and Vito had just finished their 7th match and were left in utter silence as Dawn placed down his controller and put his hands together to think.

After thinking for a while, he looked toward Vito and asked, "Did you pick the beefiest character in the game, because you thought he would overpower my character or was that just a spur-of-the-moment pick?"

"Please, Vito, Tell me your thought process, because that match was absolutely terrible!"

Vito shamefully fiddled with his controller as he replied, "Well, I'm not good at fighting games. This is my first time trying one of these after all..."

"Yeah, it was also Edith's first time," Dawn said as he pointed toward the couch she was hiding behind. "And yet you somehow managed to play even worse than her. And all she did was grab and spam for all 10 of our matches!"

"H-hey!! That's not true! I also kicked you a couple of times," Edith muttered under her breath just loudly enough to be barely audible.

"Ah, yes, kicks. You hear that Vito? She can kick," Dawn mocked. "Tell me Edith, which character in the game, can't frickin kick!" he yelled as he threw his arms in the air.

"Well it's not fair," Edith complained. "You are supposed to go easy on new players, but you've been going all out on us from the start."

"Edith," Dawn said as slowly and gently as he could. "This is my first time touching this game as well, and I have been playing with one hand against you guys from the beginning."

"Should I get a blindfold? Then will you be able to try to get my health below 50%? Mhm?"

"Grh! I've had it with you!" Edith snapped. "You think you're all that just because you are good at the game? Then fine, be that way, I'm done playing with you. I'm out of here!" she yelled as she stormed outside the room.

"Well technically, it's against me not with me," Dawn corrected to the shadow of Edith that was left behind.

"Alright then, Vito you up for another round?" Dawn asked with a blissful smile on his face.

"Ahm actually, I'm gonna go ahead and take a breather. I need to freshen my mind from all the combos I just had to look at while trying to beat you for the past 7 games. You can go ahead and continue without me for a while. Good game though," Vito said as he tapped Dawn's shoulder in a friendly manner and smiled on his way out.

Behind the smile and inside Vito's mind, he spewed curses at Dawn like never before. 'Damnit I'm trash! I need to watch some YouTube tutorials on how to beat this guy. I can't allow Dawn of all people to talk smack to my face. I just can't live with that!' Vito yelled behind closed teeth.

"Well, maybe it's for the better," Dawn said. "At least I know that the bots will give me a better challenge than they could ever. But first, snack break."

****

Coming back from the kitchen, Dawn was surprised to find Cyrus sitting down on the couch and practicing some combos with the spare controller in the living room.

"Oh, you seem pretty good," Dawn said as he rested his arms atop the back of the couch and took a sip of soda.

"Well you know, I have dabbled in a few games before to pass the time. Nothing too serious," Cyrus answered as he just finished putting the sparring bot into a 12-hit combo that kept it in the air for more than 6 seconds.

"So are you down to have a little friendly competition?" Cyrus smiled.

'Hm, cute,' Dawn thought to himself. 'He thinks he can beat me, well this should be fun. I finally get a chance to put a sock in that smug face of his.'

"Sure, why not?" Dawn replied with the biggest grin on his face as he sat down next to him and picked up his controller. 'I'll have to go easy on him so as not to scare him off too quickly like with Vito and Edith,' he thought.

Dawn thought he was being subtle by holding in his laugh, but behind his face, Cyrus could sense the evil intentions leaking out of him all the way to his side of the couch. The aura was so dark, that he couldn't help but find irony in the fact that he was named Dawn.

'Geez this guy is a fighting game lunatic,' Cyrus thought as he was somewhat concerned about his friend's mental health. 'It's no wonder that he spoke about training through fighting games that one time.'

As they were on the character select screen, Dawn had an epiphany as he said, "That reminds me. There is this character I've been meaning to play for a while. There is something about them that just draws me in you know?"

When Cyrus saw which character Dawn had selected, he mentally sighed as he thought to himself, 'Of course, he picks the sweatiest character to go against me with.'

'But wait, hold on. I could definitely tease him about picking this character,' Cyrus thought.

"Draws you in huh? What do you mean by that?" Cyrus smirked. "Is it perhaps, the feet? Oh Dawn I had no idea you had such unique tastes."

"What!? Noo!!" Dawn yelled as he blushed lightly after the intrusive thoughts came in. "People always say crap whenever anybody picks this character just because the devs made her sexy to improve their marketing strategy. If anyone's a pervert it's them."

"What I meant drew me in were her combos, not her looks, her combos" he emphasized.

"Ok, ok calm down," Cyrus said as he laughed to himself on the side. "I was mostly joking. Mostly. Yeesh, why are you so upset?"

"It's just that what you said reminded me of a comment that pissed me off a long time ago," Dawn answered with his arms crossed, and Cyrus could almost swear he saw him pouting.

There was a brief silence in the room as the wind blew by the two of them.

"Is there some repressed trauma you wanna talk about?" Cyrus asked.

"Just hurry up and pick your character!!" Dawn said gently.

"Okay," Cyrus replied as he backed off a little and locked in his pick.

"You are going with that?" Dawn asked. "That's not even the character you were practicing your combos with."

"Oh? Do you mean my warm-up? That was just for show. Just like you, I'm also picking my character for their combos. They may start off slightly slow but once I fill their drunken meter then well... you'll see," Cyrus answered as he adjusted his glasses slightly.

"Pfft, whatever," Dawn commented as he leaned forward in his seat and brought both his feet on the chair together as though meditating, holding his controller tightly with his fingers just slightly on the buttons as he stared at the loading screen with anticipation.

As the match started, Dawn went all in from the jump, trying out any and every combo he could figure out on the spot. He didn't look at the combo list as that would be too unfair of an advantage, so he just mashed a couple of buttons to see what worked, and then would make a combo from that.

He was doing such a good job at button-mashing that he even made Cyrus doubt as to whether or not he had played this game before today.

"Huh," Cyrus said as he pressed some buttons to counter and block the offensive barrage that Dawn was bombarding him with. "You are really good at this game, which is strange to me because I thought that today was your first time ever touching it?"

What had made Cyrus so suspicious was the fact that he had secretly played this game before giving it to Dawn, so he could get a head start on everyone else who would play it later on.

But yet here Dawn was, playing better than him.

"Oh yeah, I have a lot of experience playing fighting games," Dawn replied. "So it kind of just comes naturally to me now," he said as he completed a combo that took away the remainder of Cyrus's health bar and won him the first round of their first-to-three match.

"Oh really, how so?" Cyrus asked as he focused on trying as much as possible to win the second match that they were going into.

"Well, I used to have a YouTube channel called Hardcore Gaming Warrior where I played a bunch of videogames, well-fighting games to be specific on that channel," Dawn answered.

'I see, that honestly explains a lot about Dawn,' Cyrus thought.

"It was my main thing until recently when I got dragged into this place," Dawn continued. "Everything back then was a lot more normal. I simply played a ton of fighting games, posted videos about it online, and made some money to keep myself with."

"Wait, you made enough money to sustain yourself off YouTube videos?" Cyrus asked. "How popular were you?"

"Not that much," Dawn said. "I only ever amounted to 100k followers on YouTube. Nothing too big. I think the biggest issue as to why I was so trendy back then was because I got into a lot of controversies."

"What sort?" Cyrus asked as he just so happened to win the second match that they were playing.

"I once beat a professional esports player in a ranked tournament by accident one time and because of that, every person and their mother wanted to fight me. It got so bad that a hacker somehow manipulated the system into matching me into a game with him, and after I won, the hacker called me a hacker because he was in disbelief that he could ever lose to, and I quote, "Someone like me."

"Later down the lie, one of the game developers made a public statement that showed that I was not hacking the system, I was simply that good at the game, and people went wild hearing that."

"It's one of my core memories because of how funny it is," Dawn said as he closed his eyes to remember the moment more clearly.

Cyrus also took this time to hurry up and win their third match of the game.

"I also took that time to change my name," Dawn grinned as he had a hand on his chin. "Since I was said to be so good that I must have been a hacker, I changed my name to Zerone. It's a combination of the numbers zero and one since hacking has something to do with binary I think."

"I thought it was pretty cool back then, but now that I say it out loud, it's kind of... eh," he shrugged.

"Because I was so good at fighting games, whenever a new one came out, I would always have early access gifted to me from game developers so I could promote their game, as well as a couple of other gifts that were sent along with it, asking me if I could simply please play their game and upload a video of it on my channel."

"All of this also led to some drama about me being in a relationship with some weird Vtuber and even a fake voice note being posted online about me confessing my love to her, which is crazy because I have never once spoken before online. I would always text in an in-game chat box or post my comments somewhere online."

"Those were some dark times."

"Anyways, aside from that, nothing too crazy has really happened in my life," Dawn muttered.

Cyrus was almost frozen. He was half staring at Dawn, half looking at the screen because he needed to win against him.

He had so many questions but was left stunned in disbelief because he had never expected Dawn to get THIS talkative with him about his life.

'I guess video games really make a guy open up, huh?' he thought. 'Nothing too crazy,' he repeated in his mind. 'This guy was basically a celebrity. What's not crazy about that?'

"Huh?" Dawn said out loud as he noticed the scoreboard at the top. Cyrus had won 2 matches in a row and Dawn had only won 1. This meant that Cyrus only needed one more win in order to seal the deal and defeat him.

Looking at his health bar, Dawn realized that one decently organized combo would be enough to put an end to him if he didn't lock in right now.

Dawn felt tricked by Cyrus who distracted him into telling stories about his past so that he could sneak some wins in from him. But not anymore. Dawn was done holding back.

In the next few seconds, it sounded like Dawn was about to break his controller. He was pressing so many buttons that Cyrus couldn't even react to most of them if he wanted to.

Cyrus was appalled at a sense of feeling that there was nothing he could do to one-up him anymore.

Shortly after, Cyrus's health bar had reached a critical state. Dawn had already dropped it low enough that he could kill him in 2 hits.

Cyrus panicked and activated his ultimate, the only move that could possibly kill Dawn right now if he could somehow get a hit in on him. But Dawn was ready and pressed the block button almost immediately after to put a stop to it.

The next thing that happened had Dawn hanging with his mouth, wide, open.

Dawn's eyes stretched out as he dropped his controller to the floor. His hands were shaking as he lifted them up and brought them to the back of his head. He watched as the special cinematic played to finalize his character's death.

He was in shambles to see that the ultimate had gone through and managed to hit him despite him pressing the block button.

"You cheated," he said out loud in a faint voice.

"What?" Cyrus asked with a jackal's smile on his face. "I have NO idea what it is you are talking about."

"Bullshit!" Dawn said very calmly. "I blocked that. You know I blocked that, you know I deserved that win. So how did you do it? What did you do to my controller!?"

Cyrus played the fool as he looked around the room trying to see who Dawn was yelling at and then he playfully pointed at himself when he saw no one else there with them.

Cyrus closed his eyes as he let out a fake sigh.

"Dawn, these things happen in life, and you just have to accept them and move on. It's okay to lose sometimes, okay lil bro?" Cyrus said as he put his controller down gently and placed his hand on Dawn's shoulder.

Dawn was NOT having this right now.

"But hey," Cyrus said with a cheer in his voice almost as though he had a bright idea. "Since I just won that game just now and it being our first and only match, then I guess that makes the score zero," he paused as he pointed at Dawn.

"One," he said with confidence as he pointed towards himself with his glasses glistening in the light.