[Wolf Lord+ | Draft] Volume 2 - Interlude 109.1 - Mentality (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Welcome to the draft release of Volume 2 - Interlude 109.1 - Mentality for y'all.

As always, a quick reminder that this chapter is still in the process of being workshopped by me and that this is simply the first-draft.

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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Quick lil' Interlude, then we're back to our girl.

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Here is the link to the chapter:

GoogleDoc Chapter

Click me to get to the Doc!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f7a1fF8FJwmBslTEq2HJ9eUwtrEuVaD9oLBGRmIvD4o/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Interlude 109.1 - Mentality

VELDT: —aaaand we’re rolling! Welcome back to Pick/Ban, everybody. I’m Veldt, she’s Switchback—

SWITCHBACK: Hello, hello, helloooo!

VELDT: —and joining us today is Dr. Enna Irinas of the Intoresita Academic Institute, Department of Competitive Systems Analysis—whose newest paper has been absolutely tearing through the scene for roughly the past week. Doctor, welcome.

DR. IRINAS: Haha, thank you for having me!

VELDT: Okay—Doctor… The paper. For the three listeners who haven’t seen it: The title is “The Generalist Anomaly,” and it is about—who else—MissyMoonlightMayhem. What made you pick MMM, of all the legends you could’ve studied?

DR. IRINAS: Honestly? I didn’t set out to study her at all. The original project was a comparative analysis of specialization patterns across Galactic Championship winners—going back about one-hundred and sixty years. The goal was to map how dominant players dominate. I found that every one of them fit a very clear model, every single one, except her. 

She broke the model so badly that I spent two entire months assuming my data pipeline was somehow corrupted… The paper now exists because I realized after all that work, that the pipeline was actually completely fine.

VELDT: Walk us through this, please? Because when most people hear “MMM broke the models,” they assume it means she was just better. Bigger winrate, more titles, whatever, y’know?

DR. IRINAS: That’s the first misconception the paper addresses: In terms of raw winrate, MMM is not a statistical outlier among champions at all. She’s above average, considering her four—or five, counting the DQ incident—titles, but that’s about it. She’s nowhere near something like Felzir’s peak or Lykanthropy’s dominant years. What sets her apart has never been the height of her performance, but the overall shape of it.

SWITCHBACK: The shape? What does that mean, exactly?

DR. IRINAS: The breadth—the versatility. Let me frame it this way—take a builder like GravewallSutra. He’s been focused on vanguard-style builds for thirty years straight. He dips a toe into other archetypes maybe once a season, publishes something competent, and returns to the vanguard pool. That’s the normal, expected pattern for any professional. That’s what mastery looks like in every dataset we have—deep in detail but narrow in breadth. Every great player or builder has a “home”, of sorts.

SWITCHBACK: Absolutely! Mine’s skirmish-assault. Veldt’s is whatever the fuck’s broken this patch.

VELDT: Factually accurate, emotionally devastating… But carry on.

DR. IRINAS: [laughing] Yet MMM’s home—as far as eight years of recorded competitive data can establish—was “whatever the meta required.” I ran archetype-affinity scoring across her entire published catalogue and her tournament picks… There is no statistically meaningful “home” bias. None.

VELDT: Hold on a second there, Doctor… I played in two Championships she was at. Everybody there knew MMM absolutely loved glass cannons. Ranged glass cannons, specifically. That’s gotta be a bias, no?

DR. IRINAS: It’s technically a preference—a preference is an active choice, while a bias is a subconscious thing. But once you control for skill ceiling, the bias evaporates entirely. Glass-cannon ranged builds are, mechanically, the archetypes with the highest ceiling in Wildmaws—the most power available to someone actually capable of using them at that limit. What truly drove her to choosing them was that they were the correct choice for a player of her caliber. The moment the meta punished those builds, however? She’d immediately throw down in a vanguard role, full-tank, assault, support hybrid—whatever was optimal—without any measurable performance drop.

SWITCHBACK: Which, as someone who has had to learn dozens of off-role picks at Championship level—that drop always exists, trust me on this.

DR. IRINAS: That brings me to the finding that made me rerun the entire analysis four times... Her matchup statistics.

The developers publish expected matchup statistics—build-versus-build win probabilities under equal skill conditions. Every champion in history deviates from those expectations in a distinctly patterned way. Take Felzir for example. For all his dominance, had a documented soft spot against summoner-type Builds his entire career—he under-prepared for them, fourteen titles or not. All players have favourites. Favourite things to study, to counter, to remember. That bias is about as human as a heartbeat, and it shows up in every dataset.

Except hers.

Across eight years of recorded tournament play, MMM’s wins and losses track the developer-published matchup expectations almost exactly. She won when the matchups said she should win. She lost—at almost precisely the expected rate—against Builds designed to counter whatever she was using. The bias term—the fingerprint of human preference in preparation—is statistically absent. She appears to somehow be prepared for everything, equally, all the time.

SWITCHBACK: I—I need the listeners to understand just how insane that is... I keep a literal spreadsheet of matchups I fucking hate. Preparing for everything—that’s impossible.

DR. IRINAS: Which is why I state in the paper, very precisely, that I cannot explain the statistics that exist. I can only document that they exist for her, and that they exist nowhere else. Not in one-hundred and sixty years of champions. Terra’s own literature department has a term for players with wide competencies—“jack of all trades, master of none.” The data I looked at forced me to coin a variant.

VELDT: [leans into the mic] The line everybody’s quoting in the forums.

DR. IRINAS: “MMM is a true jack of all trades—a master of all.”

VELDT: [exhales] And then she just—vanished, huh? You spent a year in the guts of this woman’s data, Doctor. I have to ask... What’s your theory on all this?

DR. IRINAS: [pause] My professional answer is that speculation about a private individual’s whereabouts is outside the scope of my expertise.

SWITCHBACK: [leans in] And your unprofessional answer?

DR. IRINAS: [longer pause] My unprofessional answer is that somewhere out there is a person who prepares for every possible opponent, equally, all the time, without bias and without rest—and that I find it very hard to imagine a person like that ever actually stopping. So… Whatever she’s doing right now? I’d wager she’s doing exactly the same thing she’s always done: Preparing for everything.

VELDT: ...Yeah. Okay, fuck. Straight chills, Doctor.

[AD BREAK]

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[Shortened Excerpt from “The Pick/Ban Podcast”, Episode 312: ‘The MMM Paper, with Dr. Enna Irinas’” Hosted by Wildmaws professionals “Veldt” (Tonni Veldt, Hallion Hawks) and “Switchback” (Miira Oszeyk, Vespera Royals). Broadcast on the GalNet, PFC 943.]

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PoV: Evelyne Midra Sen

‘W—What?!’

Watching her Thea abruptly get up and immediately jump from the stands—without as much as a single word in reply to Evelyne’s attempt at giving a nuanced, genuinely helpful yet distinctly pro-Thea answer to her concerns—had not been part of any of Eve’s plans whatsoever.

She was still staring dumbfounded at the spot where Thea’s dirty-blonde hair had simply disappeared beyond the bannister, when she heard the loud, metallic impact of Super-Heavy-type armour hitting the sand five-odd meters below—kicking up a dust cloud so large that it managed to briefly obscure even Eve’s vision, all the way up in the stands.

“Lucas, tap out for now. Get some rest—and pay close attention,” she heard Thea order the big man around effortlessly, before stepping toward the start spot at the scenario’s center with heavy stomps. “Oh—and leave your equipment. I’ll need to wear it, or this won’t really work.”

Dealing with surprises was second nature to her. It had been drilled into her across countless Legacy training sessions as a child—yet something about her Thea’s occasionally, thoroughly erratic behavior still managed to rattle Eve enough to require a second or two of full processing.

By the time her brain had caught up with everything happening, she’d managed to assemble the pieces of the conversation Thea had not been having out loud.

‘My words made her realize that Callahan is a visual learner, of sorts… So now she’s going to show him how he’s meant to approach the scenario,’ she mentally narrated to herself, trying to reclaim a bit of self-confidence after the abrupt derailing of her plans. ‘So much for having plenty of time to get closer to my MMM and ask her as many questions as I want…’

It was only then that her brain truly caught up with everything that was happening.

‘Wait… She’s going to—Huh?! She’s going to show him how to approach the scenario? In his equipment?!’

She leaned forward over the bannister, looking down at the heavily armoured version of Thea walking up toward Callahan, who had already begun dutifully taking off his armour—before stopping mid-motion as Thea said something to him.

“Actually—I’m an idiot… I can just copy it. No need to take it off, sorry!”

A few moments later, just as Thea had said, she was wearing an exact copy of Callahan’s entire outfit—from armour over shield, down to the weapons, and even the AR-303 strapped onto the Stalwart’s inner side. Or rather, the Wildmaws equivalents of each of them.

“All good to go, then,” Eve heard Thea’s words waft up toward her, as she watched her shoo Callahan out of the arena—who, naturally, decided to head up directly toward Evelyne, given that she was the only other person left in the stands.

That, however, was not a major concern of hers.

What was, on the other hand, was the fact that Thea apparently intended to show Alpha Squad’s Defensive Heavy “how it’s done.” Which was… downright preposterous, given that her Thea was Alpha Squad’s Scout-Sniper.

Although…

‘In theory, my MMM is capable of playing any Build,’ she corrected herself after a moment, fingers drumming once against the bannister. ‘Her entire career was built on exactly that, after all. So I suppose it isn’t that crazy to think she could show Callahan how it’s done… Especially since she said she’d drilled this exact scenario herself, back in the day.’

Though, admittedly, Eve had initially assumed that “drilled” had simply meant Thea had seen the scenario before. Tried her hand at it a few times, perhaps, or maybe read through the technical manual for it to know its spawn patterns.

Not like… drilled drilled it. 

But apparently, she’d been wrong about that part as well.

‘Noted… You would think I’d have learned not to underestimate my MMM by now…’

Callahan finally made his way up the stands, just as Thea reached the center of the scenario’s start spot below. 

He looked properly winded. 

His entire face was sweat-drenched and flushed, now that he’d taken off his helmet—his matted hair sticking to his forehead in dark streaks—as he slumped into the seat next to Evelyne without any grace or form.

Recognizing the easy opportunity for further ingratiating herself with the big man for exactly what it was, Eve wordlessly held a bottle out toward him.

“Thanks,” he breathed hotly, taking it from her without even a moment’s hesitation. He downed a good portion of it in one go, then tipped the rest unceremoniously over his head, letting it run through his matted hair and down his neck into his armour. “Ahhh… That hit the spot.”

Eve watched the water droplets scatter off his hair and onto the seats and ground around him—a few landing dangerously close to her boots, and it took her quite a bit of active concentration not to reflexively pull them back.

‘Charming,’ she noted dryly, filing the behavior away as yet another entry in the “I don’t understand why my Thea wants this guy in her squad” category.

It wasn’t disgust she felt at the sight. Not exactly, at least. It was more… distaste.

Disgust was, as always, reserved for far more important things—such as Rachel’s behavior during the Awards Ceremony.

‘I still can’t believe she had such sloppy training—allowing her emotions to run wild like that. The Masters must truly be slacking on the decorum front these days…’

Returning her attention to the big man as he finally settled into the seat next to her, she offered him a congenial smile. “Good effort out there, Callahan. That scenario Thea put together looks truly tough to figure out.”

He waved her off with a big sigh. “Thanks, but I know a pity compliment when I hear one.”

Eve kept her eyes on him, but had to fight for a brief second to keep her eyebrows seated exactly where they were meant to be.

‘I’m fairly certain I did not slip up in my tone there… Interesting. Does he have more high-society training than he initially let on? Or am I starting to slip up more and more, the longer I’m around my MMM?’

It was a thought that had been coming to her more and more often recently—and the evidence suggested it was true, but thankfully exclusively when talking directly to her Thea. 

As far as her extensive reviews of recent meetings with the rest of Alpha Squad, Masters, and even the Proprietor were concerned, she had not slipped up in a single one of them. 

Not even a miniscule amount.

She briefly ran through her word choices once more, letting the conversation pass review through the myriad lessons and teachings that had been molded into her very being…

‘No. Not a misstep on my end… It seems a recalibration of Callahan’s profile is in order, then,’ Evelyne ultimately concluded. ‘Not a Legacy—some form of high society from his own planet, perhaps? Potential royalty, even? No… His bearing isn’t that of a royal, or of proper high society either… A runaway, then? What is it with Alpha Squad and having runaway high-society in this Drive…’

She updated her mental model of Callahan as her eyes fell back down to Thea, standing in the center of the scenario and going through a few exercise motions—the same ones Eve had seen her run when they’d first worked out Masters’ exact Build together.

‘I don’t understand why you want him to stay… Masters would be a far superior choice to have at your side,’ she quietly lamented, once more trying to wrap her head around her Thea’s strange insistence on pouring this much effort into a clearly talented, but ultimately doomed, individual like Callahan.

Abruptly, she froze entirely, as an errant thought forced its way into her head.

‘What if she likes him? What if none of this is related to a value judgement at all—her weighing Callahan against Masters and deciding accordingly… but an emotional one?’

Evelyne shook her head forcibly, trying to physically dislodge the nightmarish thought.

“Y—You okay there?” Callahan asked from beside her.

“Ah—Yes, my apologies,” she replied demurely, pushing a blush onto her face—banking on the big man’s inherent gentleness to carry her past the accidental blunder. “I simply can’t quite believe she’s actually down there now, about to start that scenario… I have no idea how she intends to do what she said she wants to do...”

‘Add a breadcrumb toward the next conversation topic—one he’s invested in as well—and…’

“I know, right?” the big man replied, right on schedule, leaning back into the stone-hewn seat, his armour scraping against it. “I mean… I’ve seen her fight in Rachel’s gear. I know what she’s capable of… so I have some idea of what she’s thinking here, but… it’s still crazy to see her be this confident about it, y’know? I mean, by Xagis, I was down there for like two damn hours, trying my best—and she just jumps down, having worn a copy of my equipment exactly one time before, and completely confidently claims she can show me how it’s done…”

He sighed heavily, then added after a few moments of silence, “The worst part is that I believe her… Actually, no—even worse—I have absolutely zero doubts that she’ll perform better than me. Which—”

He cut himself off, but Eve could fill in the blank just as easily.

‘—sucks.’

She knew that the empathetic, proper response would be to examine that thought with him—to potentially offer some solace. But… There were far more important things to think about in the awkward silence that ensued than scoring additional points with Callahan. 

After all, the nightmarish thought from earlier had not left—merely been delayed.

‘Does she like him?’

She forced herself to examine the hypothetical properly this time, just like she’d been taught to engage with theoreticals like this—cooly, exclusively based on evidence, and without letting the icy dread pooling in her stomach weigh the scales one way or another.

Thankfully, it did not take long for her to come to a conclusion: No.

She had seen absolutely zero indication—none, whatsoever—that her Thea had any romantic intentions toward Callahan. There had been no preferential physical orientation toward him, no change in her vocal register when addressing him, not even a slight lingering of her eyes that could have seemed out of character.

The effort she was pouring into retaining him was real, yes. But it was also tinged with the exact same brand of fanaticism that she’d observed in her MMM when they’d spent hours piecing together Masters’ Build—which was distinctly not affection for Callahan.

‘He’s not a love interest to her… He’s a project,’ Evelyne concluded, feeling a distinct sense of kinship with her Thea at the thought, and allowed a small smile to creep onto her face—

—before it abruptly froze, midway through.

Her mind—traitorous, undisciplined thing that it apparently became around anything Thea-related—had decided to conjure up an entirely different picture within her inner eye.

Faulkner’s face, specifically.

She remembered, vividly, the training session that Alpha Squad’s Squad Medic had been a part of—which had ended with Eve cornered in a hallway by whatever runaway Legacy beast that woman actually was… And, especially, how close she had been with her Thea throughout.

How her Thea had been practically glued to every word she said. How her Thea had looked to her on every decision, as if to double-check that it was the right one. How her Thea had—

She cut herself off, taking a quiet, deep breath to steady herself, before grabbing the irritation by the throat—just like Faulkner had done to her—and crushing it to dust.

‘Focus, Eve. You’re better than emotions,’ she reminded herself.

She ran the same hypothetical she’d just run for the question of Callahan… It came out differently this time, but still acceptable—if barely: It was not romantic interest that chained her Thea to the many-faced runaway, but emotional dependency.

This was an assessment she could trust. She knew this.

Her Perception was high enough to have picked up on most changes in the room at the time. 

Things like the Reimart boy’s consistent sexual interest in herself—loudly broadcast by his completely untamed heartbeat, his wandering eyes, his clumsy attempts at wooing her, and half a dozen other markers she was unwilling to further examine at this stage—were something she recognized, and allowed, for the sole reason that it made getting closer to Alpha Squad, and subsequently her Thea, all the simpler.

Yet even with that same Perception, she had picked up no such signs from Thea in regards to the runaway: No pupil dilation, no heart rate changes, no breath-hitches or hesitations before contact—nothing that would indicate any level of romantic attraction whatsoever.

While such things could be hidden—trained to change, even, into a hidden dagger aimed at any enemy trying to read you—Evelyne was also absolutely certain by now that, for all her impressiveness and singularity in regards to Builds, her MMM had no formal schooling in emotional control whatsoever.

‘I might even go as far as to say she’s not particularly experienced with emotions or social interactions at all. Which would line up with something Callahan said during our first meeting, as well…’

What she could read of her Thea—as strange as it still was to internalize this fact—was almost certainly the entirety of her social and emotional state.

‘Good. Very, very good,’ she concluded with a sigh that finally allowed her shoulders to relax once more, settling back into her seat with her composure fully restored.

Down in the arena, Thea started the scenario a few moments later—and both Eve and Callahan perked up in their seats at once, all attention snapping to the sand below.

It took mere moments for Evelyne to realize that she had—somehow, despite everything she knew about MMM—managed to underestimate her yet again.

At the very instant the starting buzzer sounded, Thea corralled the three marks into a corner of the arena—much like Callahan had done on every single one of his attempts. But then, instead of taking up position in front of them, she simply planted the Stalwart into the ground before them, expanded it to its full-coverage configuration, and grav-locked it in place.

Then she just… walked away from it.

Out from behind the shield, into the open, settling around three meters away from the Stalwart—with both the Havoc and the AR-303 equipped. One in each hand.

Mere moments later, the first of Reimart’s drones crested one of the walls off to the side—the arena’s layout resembling something like an open hedge-maze made of rockcrete walls—only to be immediately greeted by a hail of bullets.

For a few moments, the drone swerved left and right through the one-handed fire, evading in sharp, practiced zigzags and random-seeming, erratic movements—before finally getting clipped mid-dodge and dropping out of the sky, exploding on impact with the ground.

“Huh…” Callahan commented next to her—a thoroughly confused noise, by her reckoning.

‘You do not have to stay glued to your charges, Callahan…’ she thought, keeping the words to herself for now. ‘As long as they’re protected, you’re doing your job. The shield doesn’t need you standing behind it to be a wall. This should have been obvious to you far earlier—it’s one of the reasons you keep losing this scenario, and will lose to Masters... The grav-lock exists for reasons that go well beyond simply bracing against incoming fire.’

They continued watching Thea perform excellence down inside the arena—methodical, mobile, splitting the battlefield into her side and the Stalwart’s protective side, intercepting threats long before they ever developed into problems for her charges.

Abruptly, however, after around two minutes, the scenario simply… stopped.

Eve’s eyes snapped to the protection marks immediately, a cold flicker of alarm running through her at the thought that she’d somehow missed how her MMM could have possibly lost—but no. All three charges stood fully intact behind the locked Stalwart.

This was Thea stopping it—voluntarily.

“I—I actually didn’t know she could miss shots,” Callahan commented dryly from the side. “Like… I mean… Obviously she can. She’s only human and all... But, like… I don’t think I’ve ever seen her miss one, is all I’m saying.”

Evelyne’s lips parted slightly at that, without her say-so.

Did that statement even make any sense at all? How could he have never seen Thea miss a shot before? They had been in an entire Assessment together—a full month of combat. 

Especially since Evelyne had just watched her Thea miss several dozen shots with her own two eyes: First against Reimart’s drones, as the initial one had not remained alone for long—a second and third had come swerving in over different walls, each costing her a short burst of corrections before the kill. And, then again, against the second wave of Stalkers that had appeared—the first wave, she’d simply erased with the Havoc, bouncing two grenades off the maze walls at angles that had carried them around the corners and directly into the Stalkers’ actual spawn locations before they’d even finished materializing.

‘She stopped the scenario right after missing the Stalker,’ Evelyne pieced together, with the benefit of hindsight.

But she had absolutely no idea why that, of all things, would be a reason to stop the scenario altogether—as Callahan had said, everyone missed shots. It was nothing to get upset about, even for a sniper of her calibre—especially when using equipment she wasn’t accustomed to in the first place.

“You okay, Thea?” Callahan yelled down next to her.

Several seconds passed, in which Evelyne tried her best to appear only mildly curious about the proceedings—while her mind screamed at her to figure out what in the Emperor’s name was going on.

Thankfully, her Thea answered then, putting a lot of her concerns to rest. “Yeah! Sorry. Just figuring something out with the whole calibration here… Not really getting the hang of your equipment quite yet.”

—Or it would have put them to rest, had her training not immediately kicked Evelyne in the back of the head.

‘That’s not possible. She’s MMM,’ her mind automatically provided. ‘There is no equipment in existence she couldn’t “get the hang of quite yet”. Especially not after taking the time to test it out before the scenario even started… No. This is something different, isn’t it?’

“That’s good to hear! Sorry for my awkward stuff!” Callahan yelled back self-deprecatingly—entirely oblivious to the complete and utter breakdown of logic happening right in front of him. 

He then turned toward Evelyne and said, quieter, “She’ll get the hang of it in no time… Not to mention she’s already doing better than I was on my first attempt, even despite all that.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “It is good intel, though… I’m still sticking too close to my Stalwart. Too used to having to be the wall at all times, rather than trusting the equipment to be enough wherever there’s clear entryways for enemies to approach from. We didn’t really have grav-locks back on Quaris, so I never learned how to use them properly…”

Evelyne immediately noted that tidbit down inside her head, cross-referencing it against her mental map of the Galaxy… Only to come up empty.

‘Midworld, then? Or simply further toward the rim, somewhere in the Inner-sphere… Probably the latter. I would have heard if there was a third Midworlder in Alpha Squad for this Drive.’

She made a note to research Quaris after today’s session, then quickly shoved the thread aside to keep a close eye on her Thea—who was seemingly just standing down there, exactly where she’d paused the scenario, staring at the AR-303 in her hand like it had personally betrayed her, and doing not much else.

‘What’s going through your head right now? What is that singular mind of yours wrestling with? It can’t be the scenario—you clearly already have a bead on that one… So what is it?’

Yet no matter how much Evelyne racked her brain… She came up empty, once again…

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