January 23, 2073, Old York, Alan Walker.
A hand grasps my arm tightly, yanking me with great strength
The blackness blinks back to light. I focus my eyes on the man who lassoed my arm.
For a second, I see it—a marvelously malicious grin.
No.
An ignorant grin.
Swaying haphazardly with a ceaseless, idiotically giddy grin.
Giddy is somehow alive, standing over me in a stance that's for once, undeniably advantageous. There's blood running from a fresh gash on the side of his head, but he's beaming—for a reason I'm not entirely sure I can articulate. For some reason a wave of pure, dumb relief crashes through me. The giddy fool's bite is as viscous as his bark is irksome.
He snatches me from the pile, his grip surprisingly strong, pulling me to my feet. my mind begins to calculate our next move, my new path to the GOAL.
I glance at his knuckles—raw and bloody. He made his kill. Advanced, same as me. He's hollering something—words of relief—maybe even encouragement, but they're swallowed by the sonic booming hymn of the dying.
I'm not sure how much more this body can take, how many more steps it can manage through this writhing sea of men. But I clasp his shoulder—a brief, uncharacteristic moment of contact. A silent thank you.
We press forward.
It is not a graceful partnership. We push, duck, and dodge the bombardment of bodies beyond the fleshy pyramid. Giddy, too large and cumbersome to be nimble, has resigned himself to a different strategy: choosing instead to put up his arms and roll his large legs through the abattoir, like an old tank in a bygone war.
As we plow forward, a clearing appears in the human wreckage—an unnatural circle of open asphalt, void of life except for five figures. Or what remains of them. Three are just mangled heaps, their Sigils unidentifiable. A fourth is about to join them.
A behemoth of a man, a Scarred, is mounted atop a struggling Adept. He is not merely killing him; he is performing a desecration. With hands like boulders, he brutally rips the silver 'A' Sigil from the man's face, a sick parody of the ritual that damned him. He discards the piece of flesh and metal, leaving his victim as just another unidentifiable corpse.
The rule was to kill one.
This... this is just gluttony.
He isn't bathing in the frenzy. He is drowning in it.
Some men deserve their scars.
I try to guide Giddy through to the open stretch, hoping it will give rest to my body enough to rejuvenate and finally make it to the GOAL. We step into the artificial circle made by terrified men repelled by the beast.
After brutalizing the man beneath, the Scarred whips his head towards me and Giddy—sensing immigrants in his carnage-colonized land.
The behemoth plants his back foot, the asphalt cracking under the pressure. He explodes forward, a bolt of pure, savage lightning, an overhand right—a descending meteor aimed directly at my face, his large frame blocking any attempt at evasion.
Too big. Too fast. Cannot block.
My desperation is a breeding ground for ingenuity. In a singular fluid motion, I slash my leg under an off-balance man behind me. I use his own momentum, whipping his inverted body up and over my rolling shoulder, reluctantly turning him into a human shield.
The Scarred's fist connects with the upside-down face of my tragic, nameless victim. The impact is a sinister crunch of flesh. My body is breaking—not as swift as it needs to be. The force of the blow still catches my shoulder, a glancing blow that strikes like a sledgehammer, sending me spinning along the circumference of the circle.
Imperfect. But it worked.
Giddy, who had smartly moved to the edge of the circle, reads the situation perfectly. He extends an arm—a solid, unmoving anchor point. Catching my momentum, he slingshots me—I whip forward and out the other side of the circle.
I can't waste the energy or time to look back. I can't. I simply plow through the final, desperate gauntlet of men, all of my focused attention on the metal doors at the end of the wall.
The gray at the end of this ever-dark tunnel.
I do not see if Giddy escaped the circle himself. A small part of my mind hopes he did—the good part of me, the one nurtured by my mother to live beyond myself.
However, my cold nature tells me he was a valuable pawn who served his purpose.
A phalanx of HWs blocks the exit, an unbreakable formation guarding the doors to salvation. Or what passes for it.
Temporary salvation.
Four more games after this. Four more circles of hell.
As I try to move through the unbreakable formation of ironclad, military-suited HWs, I am stopped dead in my tracks.
"Watch!" a man barks.
I double-tap the watch, showing a check mark on the screen displaying my passing.
As I do, I am shoved through the rippling open fortress of men. Only then, in guaranteed safety, do I throw a glance behind me—hoping for Giddy to appear...
And he does, wearing a giddy, naively optimistic expression.
After such carnage, the smile is profoundly unnerving.
The doors hiss shut behind us. space is blindingly white. While not as vast as the warehouse, the number of bloodied survivors makes it feel almost as claustrophobic. Men and women sit on cold metal benches, shoulders slumped. Some stare at their palms—the hands that just made them murderers—as if they were alien appendages. A few, like Giddy and me, are drawn to the one-way windows, peering back with morbid fascination into the hell we just escaped.
I try to keep my mind off my own death-threading hands, to be a detached observer. But it's no use. I am already just another ghost haunted by another massacre, a new memory fighting for space among the old.
Out there, the chaos has thinned. The initial storm of violence has given way to a grim, predatory mop-up. The sinisterly cheerful music now easily drowns out what were once yells, now just the wet, gurgling sounds of men being reduced to boys.
A surprising number of women have passed. AHM's 'Relinquishing' was a brutal equalizer. It seems the innate difference in physical strength, a rule as old as humanity, was simply rewritten. Now, only the biomechanical disadvantages remain, but whatever this new power is, it's clear that it makes such things all but irrelevant. Will and wit are the new rules of life.
My eyes catch on a figure—a boy, no, I suppose a young man like me, built slight like myself as well. He's plastered against the mid-right wall of the warehouse, clinging to the leg of a masked HW, his face wearing a tragic mask of terror, screeching, ignorantly begging for a mercy that doesn't exist here. He didn't make his kill. He didn't pass the trial.
["30 Seconds Remain!"]
The masked HW remains perfectly still, a silent statue of authority. He allows the boy to plead and beg, letting the final seconds of his life drain away. I guess even the system's wolves feel but a flicker of hesitation before a slaughter... a final pathetic luxury.
The boy drops to his knees in a final act of saddening supplication.
Then he explodes upward.
It is not a wild lunge; it is one smooth, practiced movement. His head snaps up, a nasty headbutt that breaks the HW's chin. In the same movement, his hand flashes out, a blur of movement, ripping the pulse rifle from the guard's stunned grasp. He spins, reverses the gun, and fires. One precision shot devastates the HW's neck. Blood sprays, covering the boy in a thin, red mist.
My eyes flicker to the edges of the room. The other HWs remain motionless. They don't even flinch.
I see.
A loophole. They are observers, bound by the rules. As long as the timer is active, they are forbidden from interfering. They are statues.
And the rule was just 'eliminate one other person.' It never specified a player.
A cold, brief admiration dawns on me. The man calmly aims around the room, taking out the other stationed HWs with the careful, unhurried precision of an exterminator.
The man, however, is still gluttonous in his killing.
Another wolf.
He swings his rifle towards the phalanx of guards at the goal, but the weapon clicks empty. Ammunition spent. He doesn't panic. He just drops the useless rifle and darts for the doors.
["Five..."]
As he passes in front of the window, his face becomes clearly visible—branded around his right eye like a crescent moon: pure marble white, stained by the blood of his kill.
A Cognate.
["Four..."]
A perfect plan, executed by a perfect predator.
["Three..."]
He makes it through the doors. The survivors in the white room instinctively part for him, creating a wide berth as if he were a leper king.
["Time!"]
The world outside the windows erupts. An automated armada of pulse fire tears through the abattoir, erasing all who remained with a series of brutal, impersonal flashes of light. No screams. Just a final, sweeping cleanse.
["Congratulations to all who have passed Beat Down Brawl: The Trial of Battle!"]
Over, I think. For now.
I look over at Giddy. He's still gazing through the one-way glass, his eyes still fixed on the bloodied wall that was so very nearly his own grave. Our eyes lock briefly, and we share a moment of what I can only think of as mutual survival. He saved me more often than I care to acknowledge, catching me, slingshotting me. Maybe he saw I was trying to save him. Maybe he felt duty-bound. A good man, a rare sight in this hell.
"Well," he half-smiles, finally stepping away from the window,
"Till the next one, I suppose."
I start to reply, but a monstrous figure catches my eye.
The giant—the Scarred who wallowed in his own brutality—draws my eye. Blood still drips from his boulderous knuckles. He treks to the side of the room, and the sea of men opens naturally, clearing a path like a school of fish fleeing a shark.
He sits. I find my feet moving, planting myself directly in front of him.
"Move, Bug," he rumbles.
"One other person," I hiss.
"Oh... you. Yes that was the requirement. Greedy bastard I am huh?"
"You were reveling in it. You're no better than the men running this damn game."
He laughs, scoffing at my words. I grit my teeth, seething with anger at the bastard.
"So lively, boy, yet so dull... has it not clicked?" He pounds his watch with his fingers, shooting out his display, swiping to the right... his position at 4, his Sigil a Scarred X, and his amount at...
"25 million, boy."
It's not a damn bet.
It's a prize.
"Entertain, and be paid, I suppose," He lets out a dark, growling laugh
"Is that what those men's lives are worth to you?" I snap.
"Those men were but bitches to be put down... they had it coming. Now don't you go and snap at me like you're on some moral pedestal, cockroach."
"Better man than you. Not bought out to be a damn whore in a sick play."
His eyes penetrate me—a silent pulse of killing intent, hoping to make me flinch. I don't. Not because I am not scared. I'm scared shit-less of the giant, but because I don't have any energy left to grant him the reaction he craves.
He laughs. "And didn't you cross that same threshold?"
"What are you—"
"A snake's move, cobra. Threw the poor bastard to my strike like a goat to be sacrificed... no you aren't better one bit. Just smaller and spooked, huh, boy." His tone dares me to submit.
"I'll take care of you next game," I promise, locking eyes with the giant. Was it a threat, or just stupidity? For now, it doesn't matter.
I turn to walk away from the man.
"Boy." His voice is no longer roaring but has developed a slightly imperceptible quiver.
I turn. Our eyes lock.
"Seven years... Seven goddamn years. So yes, the lives of sheep are meaningless to me—when I can drown the sorrow of only seven years left in a bottle of prestigious liquor I can't pronounce—in the names of bitches I don't remember—all until my life is blinked away by some faraway god I don't give a damn about."
"So yes boy. Yes. Think me a monster—for I am not fighting to be a blind, ignorantly hopeful Olympian..."
"You'd be a fucking fool to."