Death Game Tour - Works Death Game Tour - WorksBattler's worst pains are a little different, although Game Changer ends the same way.
references the ring scene, although only on a literal level.
"What is something you would describe as the third worst pain you've ever felt?"
What a ridiculous question. It's enough to make Battler scoff. As if suffering could be so cleanly ranked: a broken heart versus a broken bone, an ache that never goes away versus an agony that lasts just a blink of an eye.
But the Host just stares at him, smiling widely with closed lips, a threat behind the expression that Battler can only recognize from his experience with witches. Danny's expression is pained, but no less expectant, almost hurrying. Get it over with, please. It is a ridiculous question that she is expected to answer all the same.
"Does the question include emotional pain, or only physical?"
The Host laughs, broad and boisterous, and then they wink. "I certainly won't accept your high school heartache, if thats what you're asking!"
Battler grits her teeth. For a seemingly omniscient, all-powerful being, it's a dismissively human answer. But it's better this way. A witch can only be killed through her heart, after all, and a focus on the physical lets her guard hers. Besides, this is much easier to answer: strip away the grief and loss and fear and pick out what's left behind.
Most painful: the banquet at the end of the second game board. With her emotions attached, it's become almost a fond memory, Beato at her most deliciously cruel, but without them… well. Battler would be hard pressed to think of an experience worse than being torn limb from limb, devoured while fresh enough to still be sobbing.
The second most painful comes unwanted, unbidden, in the form of a sharpness rocketing through her chest, an echo of Lust's spear. She winces at the thought half as much as the phantom sensation. Thankfully, her assignment is different. She doesn't think she could say this one, could show Lust just how sharp the wound.
Third, then, would be…
Battler's body runs cold and clammy. His ring finger aches suddenly beneath his wedding band, and he flexes his hand, opening and closing it, to try to get some of the tension out. There's no divorcing that experience from the emotion of it, but if he tries his best, if he ignores the horror and shame and focuses on the bite of razor-sharp metal, the blinding pain that numbed his body except for his hand…
It's definitely the third worst pain she's ever experienced.
"Do you have your answer, or are you going to keep our audience waiting with baited breath?" the Host asks.
Battler swallows. What she's willing to say on live television stops somewhere just short of I was shoved down to my knees and had a demon's wedding ring forced on me. Not to her new friends, not to the faceless, bloodthirsty audience, and certainly not to the Host with their mock-pleasant smile.
She can't say the third or second. Would it better to lie higher, or lower? When she tries to think of what comes next, her deaths all bleed together, jamming up against the other memories of pain: a sword lanced through her heart, holding her suspended; red stakes driven through her side and limbs; explosive heat and pressure and force — there were a lot of those, actually —
The Host clicks their teeth and taps their foot. "I'm really starting to think we should install a time limit. How hard of a question is it, Battler?"
Fuck it. It’s not like he minds this memory. Battler stands ramrod straight and lies through his teeth. "Being torn apart by goats."