• • Sunset: Heroes of the Milky Way
• July 19, 2025

Sunset: Heroes of the Milky Way (Chapter 22)

Alloya Ra’non

The Mob Mentality

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Of course, I almost forgot, things always go bad.

The mob that enters the training place aren’t armed with anything besides rage and numbers, but that doesn’t make them that much less threatening.

I raise my open hands, the universal sign to calm down, as I plead with a mob in the making, “We are not here to harm anyone! Especially not Rom!” The yelling and clambering of the people do not quell, and because of their numerous numbers I can honestly say that I do not understand a word of what they are saying. As the mob inches closer and Hideo, Clay and I start inching closer to Rom, I turn to him and recommend out of the side of my mouth, “Want to tell them that we’re not here to hurt you? Please?”

Rom shrugs his shoulders before reminding me, “Well, you did rough me up a little.” 

“Rom!” I yell at him.

Then he jumps forward in front of us, motioning his hands the same way I am. He tells the mob, “People! Please! Calm down! No one is here to hurt any of us!” The mob focuses itself on Rom, listening for his explanation. “They just came to talk, and offer their help. Not hurt me or you.”

The people begin to look at each other in confusion. They don’t really have a leader, which makes this mob almost impressive.

An old man inquires, “What kind of help?”

I suggest that he’s old based on his appearance, but his voice sounds rather youthful. What working your butt off for little will do to you.

“Educational help. We want to prepare him to win the Mental challenge,” I reveal to them.

On the plus side, they stop getting so aggressive with us. On the other, they start to look us like we’re morons. The murmuring begins immediately among the people in the crowd, but they’re not quiet.. In minutes, the same people ready to fight and die for Rom start turning their backs, writing us off as charaltans. 

Good, the less the distractions the better.

Another Rivertan calls out to me above the rest. “That sounds like a waste of time. Let him continue training for the Battle challenge as planned.”

Clay counters sarcastically with, “You all know you can’t win a tournament with one out of three wins right?”

“Clay,” Hideo hisses at him.

“No, seriously, what’s the point in him training if they don’t plan on actually winning the tournament.”

Then an elderly Rivertan who is actually elderly walks away from the crowd so that he can hone in on Clay. While he is shorter, he talks down to Clay. “If Rom wins even the one challenge, it will mean more to us than you could ever understand, boy.”

“Who you callin—” 

Hideo raises his wing between Clay and the elder Rivertan.

Rom then tries to speak to the elder Rivertan. “Saleem, think about this. I’m already capable of winning the Battle challenge, hands down, why not spend the last week learning the information for the actual Mental challenge. You and I both know, we don’t have any kind of resources to educate someone to compete,” then while gesturing towards me he finishes, “she does.”

“Do you even have someone to compete in the Mental challenge?” I ask them. “How did Rom even get the position?”

“Other tournaments,” Rom says, “we have tournaments through the year, every year, the Ruleden is just the big one.” 

“But not for being a nerd, I bet?” Hideo asks.

“How would… how would that even work?” Rom asks, his confusion matching that of the others in attendance.

It must be how Watree can rise up the social ladder. Individuals can rise up by entertaining the masses, maybe even the overlords, but only as gladiators. Gladiators can be killed with bullets, but anyone with intelligence knows how to hide.

“The contestant for the Endurance challenge, I’m guessing they had to win a bunch of tournaments too?” I ask. 

“Yeah, she’s staying somewhere else,” Rom tells us.

“We’ve seen her swim, she can beat whoever the surface-dwellers through at us!” someone in the back starts yelling, which leads some rather obnoxious cheers. These poor people, they don’t even know what we do.

“She doesn’t stand a chance,” Clay says, threatening to let the cat out of the bag.

“What would you know, stardweller!” one immediately yells at him, and like any good mob, they start chanting.

“Clay, this is not the time or place,” I rell him.

“Don’t they deserve to know?”

“Know what?” Rom asks. “You can’t really expect to talk like that and assume no one is going to ask questions.”

“In all fairness, I didn’t expect anyone to listen based on…” I gesture to the crowd, who very much, has not been listening.

“Well, I heard, what do we need to know?” 

There’s a chance we heard wrong, that we were being fed wrong information, that we’re being manipulated, but knowing that Womby is going to be in the Endurance challenge feels like too good a move to stop. 

What do we do? Attack him? Try to bring him in? That’s a battle that can’t be contained, and then this whole world will be against us. If there’s one thing that Watree and Riverti will uniformly agree on, is that they don’t want outsiders messing with their world. I’d respect it more if their way of life didn’t trap them on a backwater planet.

“Your Guardian is going to compete in the Endurance challenge, there’s no Rivertan on the planet whose going to beat him,” I tell them. Enough of the mob was listening that they stop their self-congradulatory pats on the back to quietly tell the rest what they heard. “Wombinal is water, whatever obstacle course or relay race or cross-country feet your Endurance challenge calls for, Wombinal will win.”

Their silence speaks volumes of how they’re taking it. Somehow, silence became worse than their mob-talk. 

“So we can’t win the Ruleden.”

Rom appears to take it the hardest, or maybe I can just see the hope draining from his face better. He’s been training, fighting, and doing whatever he can likely because he thought they stood a chance. 

If only he would see that they do.

“You can,” Hideo beat me to it, “with the power of being a nerd on your side.”

“I’ve trained since I was a kid to fight,” Rom reminds us, letting out his frustration and rage as he does so, “and now you want me to learn years worth of bullshit in a week?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Clay says with the tact of a jock.

“We have ways to help you learn in days what could take months,” I do my best to assure him.

“I need years.”

“Listen me,” I tell him as I take him by his shoulder, steadying him in body and tricking him into thinking I’m steadyng in mind as well, “you didn’t train for years to fight, you trained to win, because winning meant a better life for your people.

“After all that work, you’re just going to give up now because it got tougher?”

Rom looked like he was ready to both punch me and hug. I preferred neither.

He answered with something in the middle. “How do we start?”