Chapter 35: Off the Rails

  As I trotted down the dank, corpse-reeking tunnel beneath what I was pretty sure was stage two’s garbage disposal, I flicked a glance at my team’s portraits.

  Marked glared back at me in bloody script, and each of their HP bars ticked down another notch. My stomach lurched. No mistake. We were on a timer.

  I clenched my fists. I needed a way out. I needed to get back to them before I lost another teammate. Blue eyes flashed through my mind, and I gritted my teeth. I didn’t know what losing another would do to me.

  But I couldn’t ignore the prizes blinking at the top of my inventory forever. I’d avoided looking at them, afraid I’d get more awful shit like the Ashen Relic. So, looting the dead and negotiating with Zephyra had taken precedence, but enough was enough.

  Three epic blueprints for castle upgrades. Two more jade mask fragments. And a legendary… watch? Seriously?

  It was a homeward reward. An item designed, paid for, and sent from Earth. Inscribed with: For Victor.

  I chuckled and flipped off the imaginary camera, the watch winking onto the wrist of my raised hand. “For Victor, is it? I’m sure he won’t mind me borrowing it.”

  A faint giggle echoed off the polished obsidian walls of the tunnel, and my grin stretched. I was pretty sure Priorita would make sure the arseholes in charge of my planet saw that bit.

  Then I felt a sharp prick at my wrist. My HUD overlays glitched wildly, almost blinding me. Antivirus strobing. Black-box run commands popped up, populating and collapsing in rapid succession. I braced a hand against the glassy stone wall to stay upright.

  What the hell was that?!

  Multiple Prioritas whispered to each other, asking what was happening. Demanding answers. That makes two of us, I thought.

  I waited, leaning on the cool stone, breathing hard as I braced for the consequences of my rash move… but nothing came. Instead: one tiny icon blinked into existence on my HUD.

  Installation in progress.

  I fumbled at the watch strap, but it had fused into one seamless piece of shining steel. Strong as I was, it wouldn’t budge.

  I swapped hands, raising the sabre with my left. Its blade flared to incandescent brilliance, heat rolling off it and curling the little hairs on my arms and cheeks. I smelled them sizzle away. I remembered the pain of growing back my left arm—the one now blackened and covered in Gosporian chitin —and lowered the sabre. I couldn’t face that again.

  I considered pointing it out to Priorita, my last resort, but I had a suspicion she wasn’t aware of the program and didn’t want to find out what she might do if she tried to “fix” it.

  Whatever the hell was happening, I’d deal with it when the time came.

  The icon of Ariel’s HP dropped another notch, settling around ninety percent.

  No more distractions.

  I rolled my shoulders and set off at a run.

  The tunnel narrowed ahead, obsidian walls rippling and melted, pinching like Gazpacho’s puckered anus. The little bugger’s tiny tail had never quite managed to hide the thing.

  I hesitated, knowing the thought was ridiculous. A glance at Ariel’s portrait—her HP ticking one point lower got me moving.

  I popped through the opening and into a chamber. The walls were all carved with stylised imagery, different from the temple. These weren’t hieroglyphs or pictographs. No. These weren’t human. Odd angles and alien squiggles, illuminated by burning sconces.

  There was a dead body in this chamber. But unlike the trash heap of tangled bones above, this was a warrior—one who’d died a warrior’s death.

  Despite our quadrants still being locked, I knew three of the four civilisations on this stage: the Lutantha, like Zephyra; the U’l Ciacco, like SageMonarch; and us—the Human faction. That left one more race unaccounted for.

  I’d had this sick hunch that a Gosporian titan would be waiting when the barriers fell, and I’d avoided thinking about it. I mean, how the hell were we meant to fight something like that?

  But the body in front of me wasn’t Gosporian, nope, not even close. About eight feet tall, bipedal but with four arms, its flesh looked like frozen mercury and scattered light like a disco ball. A hole had been punched into its round head, as though it had taken a high-calibre round.

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  I looted the thing. Its body dissolved to dust, and I got nothing but a handful of BP. Was this the final enemy civilisation we’d be facing?

  There was a stone door set into the centre of each of the four walls of the square room, though one had already been twisted into the puckered hole I had entered through. I tried each in turn, but they were locked. I planted a boot into one, but even with my strength it didn’t rattle. So, eyeing the one I’d come through, I cranked up the heat on my sabre. It blazed white hot, so brilliant that it burned spots into my eyes. So hot that the air burned my lungs.

  I pressed the tip to the stone. After a moment, it sank in a fraction. Not enough. My clothes began to smoulder. I couldn’t take any more.

  The evolution menu popped open, an endless list of options populating. Just looking at it gave me a headache. I glanced at Ariel’s portrait, now at 80% and falling.

  At the top of the menu, a golden button danced, wriggling.

  Use Recommended Settings.

  I sighed. “Don’t screw me over Priorita… I’m going to trust you with this one.”

  She giggled.

  I clicked the button.

  And fell into darkness.

  I awoke on the floor. My face stuck to the glassy obsidian with a slick of drool.

  “Oh man…” I groaned, pushing to my hands and knees, then to my feet, one hand braced against the wall.

  “How long?” I croaked. It felt like I’d eaten a handful of glass. There was no response. But when I checked my team’s HP, they were below 60%, while the installation of the unknown program had climbed to 9%.

  Numerous notifications popped and pinged in my HUD, and I desperately wanted to find out what the hell had happened to me, but there was no time.

  My sabre burst into incandescent flame, glowing like the filament of an old tungsten bulb. I cranked it higher, hotter, until great waves of heat billowed from it, buffeting my hair. But the heat didn’t bother me in the least. Even when my clothes caught fire, all I felt was a pleasant warmth. I grinned, evolution eh? Not bloody bad!

  The tip of my sabre sank through the stone like I was carving a BBQ brisket. I cut a new doorway, leaving a glowing pool of magma that nearly set my boots aflame, then darted through, fully expecting that there would be a way out.

  But I was disappointed.

  The next room contained two more bodies. I cut a second doorway, then a third, only to find more identical chambers, each with another two dead aliens, their bodies broken and battered.

  I’d have thought them recycled, but my identify overlays told me otherwise.

  The four-armed, metal-skinned thing from the first room was a Boca-Chica. A squat, monkey-like thing with a turtle shell was a Vuhulios warrior. And the bloody-stained, fluffy, kitten-looking creature crushed beneath it? A Le Beignet. Priorita had seemed especially excited when she announced that one. Besides the weird tree-like Huevos with the ball-sack heads and one of the quokka-like Uzbeki, all the aliens were new.

  What the hell were they doing on this stage? Priorita had been clear. Four quadrants, four races.

  I crossed through room after room, a dozen or more. Each containing two dead contestants. Every door cost seconds my team didn’t have.

  Only the first chamber had been different — a single body instead of a pair. It made me wonder if there should have been a second corpse there, and whether that missing alien had somehow escaped. I found myself hoping it had.

  My stress levels were rising. Ariel’s HP sat just over halfway and I was no closer to finding the way out.

  I sank my sabre into another door, stone running down in viscous rivulets as I cut it free. I could hear Priorita breathing as I worked—the kind of panting that did not bode well for me.

  It made my damn skin crawl.

  The door fell inward with a boom that shook the walls. I ducked beneath the red-hot frame, entering quickly to avoid molten stone dripping onto the back of my neck. It was an instinct I no longer needed.

  I froze.

  A human. Face-down. Male. Mangled.

  My pulse thudded in my ears.

  Priorita was panting in the back of my mind, her excitement so strong I could almost taste it.

  I moved slowly, taking in the scene.

  One dead human. One dead alien. But while the human had been beaten bloody, almost beyond recognition, the little alien appeared as a withered husk. Had it starved to death?

  I jumped as Priorita spoke. “He didn’t even fight back, you know… just stood there and took it as the Haho Imico slowly beat him to death. It was the strangest thing! So boring!”

  “What is this place?” I demanded, though I felt like I already knew.

  “We lost a loooot of money on that one. I mean, you humans outweigh the Haho Imico five to one and your planet has half again the gravity of their world.” Her voice turned waspish. “Goodness, he could’ve just sat on the Haho Imico and squashed it! Instead we had to watch half an hour of boring, weak strikes until the human finally succumbed. Such a disappointment. You would have made a much better duellist.”

  “So that’s what this place is? A fighting pit?” I clenched my fists to stop them shaking. “And then what? If one survives, you just let it starve to death?”

  “Oh Allan, my dear, emotional Allan. This is a necessity… and a lot of fun! It’s how we figure out who’s predator and who’s prey. It’s how we balance the game. Remember how I said we normalise your stats?”

  I didn’t answer. Just stared at the dead man. Pale. Blond. Hiking boots. A T-shirt and zip-off trousers. Just some poor bastard with an implant, like me. He couldn’t have fought back even if he wanted to... Not until the game started and the implants were turned off.

  The poor bastard.

  It wasn't fair.

  That ember of anger that burned in my gut flared into bright, hot fury. I punched the wall as hard as I could, the little bones in my blackened fist creaking under the impac, but I wasnt hurt. In everything that had happened, I’d lost sight of what mattered. Of who the real enemy was. I wouldn’t forget again.

  “Why are you showing me this?” I whispered, because if I’d shouted, it would have torn out of me.

  Behind my ear, Priorita’s voice brightened with glee. “Hm, what? Oh Allan, you’re absolutely not meant to be in this area.” She giggled. “There was a secret button back in the main chamber and a riddle you had to solve. That tunnel would have taken you right back to the Vault you were challenging. Right back to your team.”

  She paused, delight bubbling in her tone. “And believe you me, dear Allan. Your team needs you right now!”

  She let out peals of demented toddler giggles, the scent of pine needles wafting over me.

  I was already running.

  Ariel’s portrait ticked just under fifty percent HP as I watched, and a new icon appeared:

  Ariel Du Bouchard: Human

  Level 8 Warcaster Cavalier

  Status: Unconscious, Marked, Tlek’Vohr’s Vessel.