Flesh and False Gods 
by Chloe Gong

Proceed with extreme caution! We meet August Shenzhi in the palace of Talin with Galipei Weisanna, his bodyguard. August’s uncle, who has adopted him, is the king. They’re about to have their games, which August has taken over the preliminary organization of. Kasa’s father had started the games, originally a one-on-one battle to the death, which now has several contests. But this year there are not as many applicants, even though winning brings riches to a person living in a city that doesn’t have enough space for its citizens, not to mention food. Of the applicants, the king chooses 88 competitors. This year, August has rigged it to get one very important name on the list of competitors. As he talks to Galipei, August instructs him to take his body inside and then August jumps from his body and into that of child walking below them. Jumping, transferring your qi from your birth body to the body of another, is now illegal, but it’s still prevalent. Most civilians cannot jump into a child, they’re not powerful enough, so children are trusted in the city of San-Er. August goes to a dangerous part of the city that the Crescent Societies watch, knocks on a specific door, and jumps into the body of the person who answers. The den-keeper of this gambling den is expecting him and leads him to the back to show him a photograph. A photo of his cousin, Princess Calla Tuoleimi. Calla sits weaving a bracelet of flax lily as she waits for a package to be delivered. Officially, Calla is dead, but she’s actually been in hiding for the last five years. She has grown out her bangs to hide her eyes, which are a distinct shade of yellow marking her royal stature. Only one other person in San-Er has eyes like hers and it is the king. The runner bearing her package arrives, but he won’t look at her. She takes the package and grabs his arm, suspicious that he’s actively avoiding looking at her, and sees silver eyes. Another bloodline color, this is a member of the Weisannas, whose bodies cannot be jumped into and because of that, make up all the royal guard and most of the palace guard (i.e. Galipei). She asks who he is and the boy responds by calling her by her real name before jumping into the body of a nearby woman and running for it. Calla pursues them but the Weisanna jumps without her noticing and Calla loses them. Now Calla is scared, if King Kasa knows where she is he will have her killed. She opens the package and finds a bracelet that will get her into the games. If the king refuses to come out of his palace, she will have to go to him to kill him. Anton Makusa also gets a wristband for the games. He’s currently residing in the body of a banker so he can use his luxury apartment. He’s had the body for several days, but it’s unwise to keep a body for too long, it could kill you. He’s living on the Er side of San-Er, which used to have a different Royal family before they were all killed and the cities of San and Er were merged. He plans to find another, fitter body before the games start. He can’t use his own since the palace took it when he was exiled. He gets a message on his pager from the hospital, he has a bill that must be paid next week. He will have to pay that bill before the hospital tosses the patient that he’s paying for back onto the streets. Anton jumps to a fit body on the next rooftop and prepares to go to the first event in the games. Prince August and King Kasa want to pretend he doesn’t exist and refuse to help him, but he is a member of the Makusa line of nobles, and he won’t be pushed aside. Lusi stands before the palace walls, he needed to be chosen for the games, it was his last hope. Nearby, someone wearing a palace uniform sees him and jumps into his body. Before her family was killed and her uncle took over their city of Er, Calla had two favorite attendants named Yilas and Chami. When Calla caused a massacre three years after they’d left, she went to them for help. Calla had been using Chami’s identification number as her own when she needs to, and Chami has used Yilas’ (her girlfriend). They’re the first people to question about how the Weisannas know who she is. Calla notices that Yilas and Chami now have a computer in their business and is about to yell about it when Chami is called away by an employee. A few minutes later, she returns and asks for Calla to come out. She’s pale as a ghost. August is here to speak with Calla. They aren’t friends. August only cares about climbing the palace ranks. He tells her he recognized Chami’s name on the games registration list and tracked her down on his own volition, he’s been looking for her for five years. He knew she was alive since the king would have no reason to hide himself away if she were dead. And August needs her help. Help killing the king. Turns out, Calla had planned to wipe out the thrones of San and Er, but only succeeded in killing her own parents and their guards, her uncle remained untouched and later claimed her father’s throne for himself. Calla asks what his plan is. He isn’t royalty by blood, the king is his uncle because August’s aunt married him and brought her family to the palace when he was 8. The divine crown could reject him if he tries to become king himself. If the crown finds him to be inadequate, legend says it will burst into sparks, but it’s never happened before. Or maybe just once. Not to mention August would have to win over the council too in order to become king. But August doesn’t seem worried. Calla doesn’t want there to be any king, but August thinks the people need one. And she knows he would rule well given the chance. He tells her that he wants what she wants, the people actually taken care of. For that to happen, it must look like he had nothing to do with it. He will help her win the games, she can kill Kasa, and when August is king, he can pardon her. Maybe she can become his advisor. But he won’t force her hand, the choice is hers. When she agrees, August gives her chip number 57 for her wristband. Anton jumps again before going to the games. The first event is the Daqun, which distributes chips for the wristbands they’ve already received. It assigns each of them a number, to log who is killing, who is dying, and report on the players. You’re disqualified if you don’t secure a chip. Palace guards come and throw beige bags to the ground of the coliseum, one for each of the competitors. Anton sees the bigger player grab the biggest bag and run for the exit. He jumps into the player’s body so hard he’s lucky he didn’t bounce back out. This is what happened to Otta and almost killed her, the reason he’s caring for her comatose body as it rests in the hospital. He throws the large bag to a shopkeeper, then jumps into his body and hides to fumble inside the bag. Rummaging through the coins, he finally finds the chip. Number 86. In the 24 hours after the Daqun, the players can purchase one single purchase. Calla pays for the shopkeeper to close his doors for 5 minutes, and asks for the sharpest, thinnest sword he has. As she is taking the sword, another competitor forces their way in, and Calla kills him. If he jumped out of his body, the body would sit, bloodless, until it was healed and could be reused. But if the qi does inside the body, the body will deteriorate as well. She leaves through the back door, but there are only 3 weapons shops in the whole city, so the competitors are converging on them, and she kills a second participant. She goes back to her apartment to rest, something that won’t be safe to do in a few days, and watches the news proclaim her the leading participant with 10 kills. That would be August’s helping hand. Anton visits the same weapons shop and picks up a pair of crescent moon knives. He sees the footage of 57 as well and knows she wasn’t at the Daqun. Not only did he count the people there, but he was paying attention to who would be good to jump into, and who would be a threat. We learn about Anton’s younger years as a noble. His father sat in the council, his mother’s father once did too. But then when he was 8, his father took their family on vacation and was attacked. His parents screamed for him to hide as they were stabbed repeatedly as he hid behind the cupboard. They took his 5-year-old sister, Buira, and the baby, Hana, less than a year. They were never found, likely trafficked to the rural areas to work as farmhands. Anton went back to the palace and his father’s council seat was given to another family. He stumbles upon a shopkeeper giving a lecture to a crowd and sees a wristband. He jumps into the player’s body, slits his own throat, and jumps back to the previous body before it’s too late. Leida Miliu, in charge of the entire palace guard, comes to see August (and Galileo). She tells August that there were 23 eliminations. 2 were killed of yaisu sickness, when one jumps from and back into the same body too many times in a short period, it can make the body sick and lock the qi inside before it burns up. Usually towards the end of the day when the person is too weak to push the other person’s qi out of the body. The strange part is that both bodies are making a triangle with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands pressed together, the Sican salute. Talin was once at war with Sica but defeated them, and Sicans cannot enter the cities of San-Er without an identity number. Instead, Sica started expanding in the opposite direction. Suddenly, they hear drums. King Kasa is coming. Kasa tells August to see him once the news reels are done playing. August tells him there have been yaisu deaths to investigate, but the king tells him to deal with the issue without listening. August turns back to Leida, who doesn’t know about his deal with Calla. She asks him if he looked over the list of contestants. When he says yes, she tells him to look closer, at contestant 86: named Cedar Yanshu. She informs August that Cedar is actually Anton (the three of them used to be friends before Anton was exiled). Just the year before, Anton used the same name to try to get money from the palace, money they refused to send to him. Money he would’ve used for Otta’s medical bills. If August had realized, he would not have allowed Anton in the games this year, when he needs Calla to win. Er’s 16 councilmembers over the provinces in the north, San’s 12, the south. When the war with Sica started, the councilmembers came to the cities for protection. The palaces were originally in the country: heaven to the north and earth to the south but were rebuilt in the cities and there was no need to move again. They were renamed when Kasa claimed both sides. The palace claims that once there was a third city, a third king, who fled when Sica came and was struck down as unfit. The gods asked him to step down, he refused, and the gods sank the entire city with everyone in it. The palace starts pinging players locations. Calla gets a ping on her wristband, there are 2 players nearby, she must choose which to pursue. It appears she and another player both have chosen to pursue the third because she walks in to see one competitor killing the other, she’s too late. The surviving player comes at her with his twin crescent blades. After a challenging fight, Calla stabs him in the chest, but he jumps quickly enough to survive. She waits outside the door, knowing the player will need to retrieve his knives and wristband but he outsmarts here, finding another door. She runs to the second door, but she can’t get it open, standing guard while trying to keep an eye on the first door. She feels her own wristband get lifted from her arm. She’s been eliminated, but she’s still alive. It’s been years since someone made a non-lethal elimination. But she knows that August will keep it active for her until she can get it back. Pampi Magnes works in the palace, sending out pings to contestants while her own secret wristband sits in her handbag under her desk. Player 2. Calla breaks the wristband news to August, and he asks who took it but she doesn’t know. He warns her the city may have been infiltrated by Sicans. She turns to notice a kid hiding behind a plant listening to her, wearing a wristband. He tells her he knows who took her wristband. She asks for his name, Eno, and he’s fifteen. He’s a new initiate of the Crescent Societies. The player that took her band was 86, Anton Makusa. She knows the name, but they never met. Eno knows his real name because he snooped through Anton’s mail once. In exchange for the information, Eno wants her help later in the game. His mother is deep in debt and he’s going to die eventually anyway, might as well take a chance on the games. He leaves Calla and walks away but she hears a scream a few moments later. She follows the sound to see Eno battling another player poorly. Calla steps in and kills the other player. Debt repaid. Anton goes to an Internet cafe and pulls up footage of one of Calla’s kills. Someone, Felo, asks why he’s watching footage of the Er Palace massacre, but then realizes their mistake. It just looked familiar. Anton was already out of the palace by the time of the massacre, and he’s never seen the footage. He pulls it up and watches the princess decapitate her parents. The princess is supposed to be dead, but her fighting style is identical to 57’s and Anton remembers a flash of yellow eyes while they fought. The princess is in the games. The councilmember for the Eigi province hasn’t reported to out answered the palace for a full day so August needs to make sure everything is okay. He takes Galipei abs Leida with him. When they get to the province capital, a man stumbles out of a building holding the councilperson hostage. They’ve walked into an ambush by rural civilians holding crude weapons. August quickly jumps into the man with the hostage and sets the councilmember free. The ambushes are quickly subdued. He calls the king to tell him what happened and that it’s been handled. The king orders the palace guards with August to burn the capital down. All because the citizens can’t afford their taxes anymore. Calla is trying to get to Big Well Street when she feels someone try, and fail, to jump into her body. The person then comes at her and Calla stabs them in the back. But when she frees her sword, it is clean. No blood. The body was empty of qi, they must have jumped before she stabbed them, but she didn’t see the flash of light that accompanies a jump. Shaken, she continues to Snowfall, a popular brothel. Anton’s apartment is upstairs, and Calla hopes he’s nearby. She thinks she’s found him, sitting in the corner writing instead of watching the dancers. When she indicates that she knows who she is and that she wants her wristband back, he jumps away. She follows him and he asks her to hear him out, calls her princess. He wants to collaborate. She agrees to team up, on her terms, but leaves before she calories what those terms are. She knows that Anton was in love with Otta, and she hopes that means he hates Kasa as much as she does. Pampi gets out of work and goes to the Hollow Temple, part of the Crescent Societies. Pampi has recently joined them. She’s the one who has been killing and posing the dead as if they were killed by Sicans. She’s been praying to the old gods but today she made a sacrifice to them, and now she has a new gift. She speaks to the temple cleric, Woya, and then pushes her hand out toward him. With the movement, he’s thrown against the wall. In the game, two more players died of yaisu sickness and were posed in the Sican salute. Calla calls August for a meeting and they go for a walk together. Galipei is there as well, and Calla correctly guesses that he is the Weisanna who found her and delivered her wristband. She lets August know about her deal with Anton and August confides that he and Anton were close when they both lived in the palace and even concocted an escape plan together. They and Leida were going to raid Kasa’s vault and flee. Anton wanted to bring Otta, but the others thought it was too dangerous and they backed out, planning to make a new idea for the next year. But Otta and Anton got impatient, and when the royal guard caught them, Otta tried to jump into a Weisanna repeatedly, and got yaisu sickness. They saved her, put her on life support and there she remains, in the hospital, with Anton paying to keep her alive. But there’s no recovering from yaisu sickness. In the palace observation rooms, someone sees player five. They aren’t moving for several minutes when another person enters the screen. They realize they just watched as five burned up from yaisu sickness and the other person starts to pose them. Pampi smirks inwardly and tells them to call the palace guards. Yilas goes to the Hollow Temple to see her brother Matiyu, who works as an accountant for the Crescent Societies. He asks her to look at their receipts because something isn’t adding up, but before she can she’s roughly escorted about by a senior member who tells her that Crescent Society business stays in the Crescent Societies. Calla tracks down Anton and they start their alliance, killing their first opponent together. The news loves that they’re working together, mostly passing them as lovers who both signed up for the games for the money, without the other knowing. The outlets have also noticed that Calla does not jump and assumes that she cannot jump, that’s an even better narrative for her. Kasa won’t even be worried when she meets him. But August is not pleased by the pairing because he wasn’t honest with Calla about Otta. He and Leida had plans to find a forgotten palace on the edges of Talin and wage war on San-Er, with Anton’s jumping they’d be unstoppable. But then Otta found out and threatened to tell Kasa and then Anton walked away, and war was no longer feasible. August orders Galipei to kill Otta but Galipei doesn’t know what happened back then, he wasn’t assigned to August at that point, and he tells August he’s a bodyguard not a servant. August pushes and asks him please, Galipei agrees but now their relationship is undeniably changed, fractured. Calla and Anton start hunting the other players down, with help from August. Galipei goes to see his aunt, who left the palace guard (taboo for the Weisannas) and now works in a shop selling minerals and the like. He asks her for cinnabar, a highly toxic mineral. She gives him what he needs and reminds him that he can always leave the palace if he wants to. His crown prince is more toxic than all of the cinnabar in the world. August directs Calla and Anton to a hotel where they can find player 79. He warns them to be careful but doesn’t warn them that the player has 10 bodyguards, one a Weisanna. It’s all they can do to fight their way out and evade the bodyguards until they lose them. Trying to regroup, they go to eat and rest at Anton’s apartment. They’re constantly testing each other in every possible way and this time, Calla baits him by asking what he liked about Otta. She calls Otta a sociopath and a bitch of a half-sister (August’s). Just as Anton is about to react, the flood sirens go off. It’s not the right season for floods, but Calla is unwilling to chance it, she must go to Yila and Chami. If something happens to Chami, Calla’s false identity will fall apart. As Calla gets close to their diner, she sees them standing outside and they see her. Then Calla is grabbed from behind. They try to stab her, but she isn’t hit, they hit her in the chest hard but not with their hand. It was with an invisible force. Chami comes to help her, and the attacker slices her throat. Chami jumps into the attacker’s body. They take her birth body into the diner to stitch it up. Chami checks the attacker’s body but doesn’t find a wristband for the games. Calla asks Chami to join Yilas in her body, but Yilas is under the impression that both Chami and the attacker are in the attacker’s body (the qi of two people can inhabit one body, but no more than that). When Chami vacates the body, no one else is in the vessel. But they didn’t see any light from the attacker jumping. Calla looks outside and there’s no water anywhere. She asks the other two to close the diner and lock the doors, keep it that way for a few days until she gets to the bottom of this. Pampi is at her portable computer, having connected to the sirens and causing them to go off. She hears footsteps just as she packs up and has enough time to grab her computer and hide before a woman comes in and investigates the sirens. She sees the woman’s wristband, number fifty-seven. When she looks up, Pampi recognizes her as Princess Calla. A message goes out to the citizens from the palace, telling them the city has been infiltrated by rural rebels. There’s no reason to panic, the palace guards are on the case. Calla gets the message while she’s in her apartment. She finds Anton hiding in her laundry room, waiting for her. He came to make sure she was safe. She tells him about the attack. He tells her that he tried to jump without light after she mentioned it, he failed but he feels like it was close. If only he was a little faster. She tells him that the first time she jumped, she was eight. It was awful and she never wanted to do it again. He tells her she was young; it might be different now that she’s older but she tells him to trust her, it’s not the speed that is causing the light. He asks her if the second time she jumped, back into her birth body, if it was easier but she doesn’t answer him. Another participant is found dead in the Sican salute. August runs into Galipei in the palace kitchen and asks how the assassination is going, Galipei tells him that it’s going. He asks August what Otta has on him that makes this necessary. He’s afraid that Anton will find a way to wake her, and she has evidence that August was trying to unseat the king. Yilas goes to check on her brother, Matiyu, who warns her to be careful since there are new prime in the Crescent Society acting weird. When she gets to the Hollow Temple she doesn’t see her brother. Not in his bedroom, not in the storage room he was working in last time. But she does find papers, maps, and screenshots from palace surveillance focusing on the movement of each player. She plans to take the map with her, but someone comes behind her, putting something dark over her face. King Kasa makes a television appearance from the palace addressing the recent rebel infiltrators. He announces that the games will be speeding up, to show the rebels that San-Er cannot be cowed. As Calla wonders how the games will be sped up, her wristband pings for the third time that day, which is not normal. She grabs her coat and sword and runs into her tiny laundry room and out the small window there before she’s ambushed. Anton, however, misses the proclamation since he’s visiting Otta in the hospital. He reflects on their time together. He didn’t know her for long before they tried to run and remember her better now than the her from before. But he cannot abandon her. He holds her hand and notices that her fingertips are purple. He notices that she’s sweating slightly. The doctors say that she will not get better but as long as she is cared for, she will not deteriorate. So why does she like weaker? He calls for a nurse, but they are called away again quickly and Anton leaves the hospital, jumping into a new body in his way out. August jumps into a different body and goes to a bar. He doesn’t believe the posed deaths are really by the Sicans, but he doesn’t think a rural rebel would be able to get into the city without discovery. Which leaves an inside job. He talks to every palace guard he sees, asking them questions as a worried civilian. One guard, Vaire, one of Leida’s closest men, has a strange reaction to August’s questions. Calla goes to Anton’s apartment and waits for him there, not knowing how else to find him. When he gets home, she tells him about Kasa’s announcement and then gets a message on her pager. Call the diner, it’s an emergency. They tell that Yilas is missing as Anton gets his mail from the bartender and the brothel under his apartment, where Calla is using the phone. She tells Anton to come along, since they’re still allies. As they leave, the bartender that gave Anton his mail makes a phone call of his own. He tells the receiver that Calla is on her way. The Crescent Societies pose as a religious sect to hide their underground, elicit businesses. The Hollow Temple, Anton tells Calla, is the central hub for vessel trafficking and is sure to be well guarded. But this is where Yilas was last seen, so this is where they’re starting. They sneak into the back, almost run into some guards, and hightail it to a lower floor where Calla sees Eno again. I’m assuming he’s in the same body and that’s how she recognizes him. Apparently, Anton knows him as well. Eno is in a room with a bunch of unconscious bodies. Calla realizes that there’re bodies underneath that are not unconscious. Their hearts have been removed. What is the Society doing? Calla sees Yilas’ body and luckily, it’s breathing. Yilas wakes up as Calla grabs her. Then their wristbands go off. Three players are in the room together, but it appears there is a fourth on the floor above. Calla hands Yilas over to Eno and charges him with getting her out while Calla and Anton handle the other player. Except more than ten Society members bust in and Pampi steps through the middle. Pampi, who Calla sees hit a man just by gesturing at him. Pampi blindfolds Anton as he’s held by guards, then goes toward Calla. Calla stabs her in the stomach with her sword, but Pampi just pulls it out and jumps, but there is no light to accompany it. The other members grab Calla’s arms and Calla sees two vertical lines of dried blood on the chest of the man holding her left arm. Same as on Pampi’s old vessel that Calla stabbed, she saw it when the vessel fell. Pampi yells that she wants Calla’s heart, she stabs a knife into Calla’s chest, intent on carving it out when Anton starts to fight back. He jumps and jumps and jumps, killing everyone he can, injuring the others, until he is next to Pampi and throws a chain around her neck, throwing her to the floor. He slashes a knife across her eyes, grabs Calla by the arm, and pulls her out of the room just before she passes out. She wakes up to find that Anton has cleaned and stitched her up and kept her active in the games. He’s figured out her secret. She’s in Calla’s body, but she is not Calla. When she was a girl, she jumped into Calla’s body when the royal family visited her village and threw her birth body into the water. She’s not sure if the real Calla is also in the body or not. She’s not been invaded, maybe it’s because she already has the qi of two people. A dormant occupant will usually fade after five years but Calla doesn’t know for sure. What if she leaves this body and can’t come back to it because the real Calla fights her off. No one else knows this secret and Calla is overwhelmed. She leaves his apartment and heads to the diner. She starts to grow weak when she gets there. She tells them to call August just before she collapses. Calla is sick for ten days. She springs a fever from her wound, but it eventually breaks, and her wound starts to heal. Her qi is strong, so she heals quickly, at least physically. August keeps her wristband active, but it is not receiving or sending any pings. Anton, meanwhile, starts fighting alone and if anything, his activity ramps up. When she rejoins the games, there are only nine players left. Calla has reported to August that it was Pampi who stabbed her, now leader of the Hollow Temple and number 2 in the games. That there is a run of dead bodies. That Yilas found that someone in the temple had palace surveillance printouts. That Yilas’ brother has left the temple because they were doing weird stuff. August decides to investigate, but he doesn’t have time to find another body, so he is in his own. He pulls Pampi’s identification number from the game’s rosters but the only other thing it is attached to is her employment at the palace. A ghost. He goes to the temple to speak to Pampi directly and asks who gave her the number, who got her into the palace. She refuses to name them and August slits her throat. Calla gets back in the street and is so out of practice that she almost loses the first fight she gets into. Luckily, Eno is there and helps her out. She encourages him to pull the chip from his wristband and leave the game before someone kills him, but until he does that, he can help her out. They go to the rooftop where August has said there will be another player. She sees no one and leaves Eno to wait while she looks around. She hears Eno cry out and there are two men coming at her with weapons, no wristbands. She kills one and questions the other, he’s been paid to kill her by a man with black eyes. She only knows two people with black eyes: August and Anton. And August needs Calla. Calla goes to Anton’s apartment to confront him. After some fighting, he tells her that he didn’t send anyone after her and she believes him. She sees her sword resting against his closet door and realizes that he went back into the Hollow Temple to get it for her, and she decides to trust him. The next morning, she tells Anton that she plans to kill King Kasa and asks him if he would pull his chip and leave the games but he refuses. He doesn’t know if he loves Otta, he thinks that he loves Calla, but he still cannot leave Otta to die. Calla has an idea, a way for them to both get what they want. When they get to the final three, Calla will pull her chip and they will call the Juedou, the fight at the end of the games that decides the winner. The day of the Juedou is busy and packed with people, the guards will be dispersed further than usual, and Calla will find Kasa at that time. And she will have August’s help. Anton warns her, he’s not she can trust August. She doesn’t think she really needs to trust him; this is something he wants too. Anton has always worried about August becoming king, it scared him when he was in the palace, and it still does. He asks Calla if she would rule but she doesn’t want that. She insists that August would be better than Kasa. She meets with August that morning and tells him that she wants to change the plan, she doesn’t want to kill all the other players. He knows she means Anton, but he doesn’t agree with the new plan, insisting that the original plan is best. She warns him that he may be crown prince but she gave up her throne for the good of the people, he can’t order her around. He tells her that what she has with Anton is not love, it’s obsession. She asks him what he would know about love and leaves. When there are six players left, Calla suggests she and Anton start avoiding the pings that bring the players together so they can make sure to get to the end on their terms. Meanwhile, Galipei has finished poisoning Otta and expects her to die by the following night and Anton gets a message to go to the hospital. Otta’s vitals are all over the place but the hospital doesn’t know what’s causing it. Calla, who has Anton with her, meets up with August, who has brought Galipei. August asks Anton how often he sees Otta (once every two weeks or so) and what was the last thing she thing she told Anton before succumbing to yaisu sickness (where to meet if they got separated trying to escape). Anton hears fighting and realizes that Calla and Galipei have been attacked. Except it’s all a ruse orchestrated by August to catch the traitor inside the palace. It’s Leida, she has been teaching the Crescent Society how to use their qi in ancient, forgotten ways. She tells August he may try to fix the problems with Kasa’s rule, but it wouldn’t take long before he became just like Kasa. The crown should be destroyed. August tells Galipei that Calla is not going to follow the plan, she’s going to do what she wants, and asks Galipei to put an end to it. Calla and Anton defeat another player and then get jumped, someone hits Calla on the back of the head to knock her out while knocking Anton out by putting a chloroform cloth over his mouth and nose. When Calla wakes up, she knows this was because of August and swears revenge. He wants her to fight Anton in the finale, not allowing her to pull her chip out. As she walks down the street, she is attacked by number twelve and kills her, suspecting that it is actually Galipei who fights her and jumps before dying. Either way, number twelve was the third of the last three competitors, she and Anton will be going to the Juedou. When he meets her in the coliseum, Anton asks her to pull her chip, they can disappear together. She refuses and attacks him. He continues to ask her to reconsider but she will not, she loves Talin more than she loves him. Finally, she gives in and drops her sword, going to her knees. He falls to his knees in front of her and embraces her, she pulls a dagger and stabs him in the back. He does not jump, she watches him die. They take Calla to see Kasa in the banquet hall, where he will congratulate her, give her the prize, and they will feast in her honor. Except when he shakes her hand, she doesn’t let go. She pulls him forward and cuts off his head with her sword. The king is dead, and Calla is seized. In the hospital morgue, where Otta’s body was taken after her heart stopped, Otta wakes up and demands to be taken to the palace. It’s coronation day for the new King August and Calla is brought out of her cell and cleaned up, she’s to have a pivotal role. She places the crown on August’s head, thinking of how she will leave San-Er once she is released, go to the beach, and join Anton in death. But August grabs her hand hard and says something that makes Calla look at him, the code that Anton used with her so she would know it was him in whatever body he used. It’s not August who was just crowned, it was Anton.