The mountain began with a lie.
For two hundred meters past the desert section, the grade was almost reasonable—a steady incline that broken legs could manage. Jayson let himself believe the summit might be achievable. That belief lasted exactly until the trail turned upward and showed its true face.
The path didn't climb. It assaulted.
Fifty-four kilometers. Singapore's engineers had apparently decided that if they were building a mountain, they'd build all the mountain at once. The grade hit forty degrees, then steeper, trail switchbacking through manufactured suffering that made the desert seem friendly.
"Fuck me," an Australian athlete gasped ahead, his enhanced legs cycling through micro-adjustments to find purchase on the severe grade. "This isn't running. This is mountaineering."
He wasn't wrong. Within minutes, Jayson was using his hands, grabbing rocks and roots, anything to help pull his destroyed body upward. Around him, enhanced athletes discovered that servo-assisted power meant nothing when the angle exceeded their programming parameters.
The failures were immediate. Gyroscopic balance systems, designed for flat ground, couldn't compute the extreme angles. Athletes tumbled backward, million-dollar legs suddenly worse than useless. Others crawled, abandoning dignity for progress.
Jayson climbed ugly but steady. His natural inner ear, unaugmented and unconfused, kept him oriented. His lighter weight meant less to haul up the grade. His hands, already bloodied from the mud section, found holds by instinct rather than calculation.
"On your left," he called, passing an enhanced athlete who'd locked up mid-climb, servos unable to agree on optimal positioning.
"Natural athlete climbing faster than enhancement." The athlete's accent was Scandinavian, bitter. "Tell me again how we're evolved."
There was no answer that wouldn't sound like gloating. Jayson kept climbing, one handhold to the next, carrying his collection of failures and small victories up Singapore's manufactured impossibility.
Fifty-four-point-five kilometers. The altitude wasn't real—Singapore's highest point was barely a hill—but the exertion at this grade created the same effect. Thin air, or at least air that felt thin to lungs already pushed beyond reason. Hearts hammering to feed muscles that demanded more than biology could supply.
A sound ahead—mechanical whining that climbed to a shriek, then died. Jayson looked up to see an enhanced athlete's leg fold backward, servo joint failing catastrophically under the strain. The athlete tumbled past him, screaming, teammates lunging to catch her before she fell off the trail entirely.
"Medical!" they were shouting. "Structural failure! Complete servo breakdown!"
But medical was far below, probably dealing with desert casualties. Up here, above the worst of the heat but deep in gravity's domain, they were on their own.
Jayson kept climbing. What else was there to do? Stop and stare at another enhancement dream dying? He'd seen enough of those. His job was simpler—keep moving up until up ended or he did.
Fifty-five kilometers. The switchbacks were getting shorter, tighter, designed by someone who apparently thought suffering needed geometry. His legs had evolved past pain into something else—a constant signal of damage that he'd learned to interpret as background noise.
"Position?" he gasped to Maya.
"Ninety-first. Six more DNFs behind you. Only eighty-three still active." A pause. "Jayson, at this rate..."
"Don't jinx it."
"I'm just saying, top ninety is—"
"Maya. Please."
She went quiet, understanding. Hope was dangerous this deep in suffering. Better to just climb, just exist in the moment of hand-over-hand progress.
Another enhanced athlete passed him, powering up the grade with servo-assisted strides. But something was wrong with the gait—too forceful, overcorrecting. Jayson had seen enough failures to recognize the pattern.
Sure enough, fifty meters later the athlete's left leg locked mid-stride. The momentum carried him into the cliff face, then backward. Jayson barely dodged as the athlete tumbled past, systems failing in cascade.
The mountain was teaching brutal lessons about the gap between power and control.
"Natural athlete."
The voice came from above. Wei Chen sat on a narrow ledge, both legs extended, systems clearly struggling. His perfect features were twisted with something between exhaustion and revelation.
"Still failing?" Jayson asked as he climbed past.
"Still learning," Wei corrected. "My grandmother was right. Enhancement isn't evolution. It's just... expensive assumption."
"That's a hell of a place to figure that out."
"Hell of a place to figure anything out." Wei gestured at the carnage above and below—enhanced athletes in various stages of breakdown. "We spent fortunes becoming more than human. Forgot to ask if human was already enough."
Jayson wanted to stop, to explore this unexpected philosophy. But his legs had momentum, and momentum was all he had left. He kept climbing, leaving Wei to his expensive revelations.
Fifty-five-point-five kilometers. The air was definitely thinner—whether from altitude or exhaustion didn't matter. Each breath felt insufficient, lungs working overtime for diminishing returns. Around him, enhanced athletes' breathing regulators were screaming warnings, but what could they do? The mountain required oxygen that didn't exist.
A cluster of athletes ahead, moving slowly. As Jayson caught up, he saw why—they were navigating around another casualty. A Japanese athlete lay across the trail, both legs splayed at angles that suggested total system failure, neural crown blinking error codes.
"Can we move him?" someone was asking.
"His spinal support is locked. Moving him could—"
"Leaving him could—"
They argued while the athlete lay there, conscious but paralyzed by his own enhancements. Jayson squeezed past, met the fallen athlete's eyes. Terror there, and something worse—the realization that his improvements had become his prison.
"Medical's coming," Jayson said, not knowing if it was true.
"Natural athlete," the Japanese athlete whispered. "Still climbing. With nothing."
"With everything I started with."
"Yes. Everything." The athlete closed his eyes. "Maybe that was enough."
Fifty-six kilometers. The summit had to be close. Had to be. The grade was impossible to sustain, even for Singapore's sadistic designers. But each false summit revealed more climb, more suffering, more enhanced athletes learning that optimization had limits.
His world had shrunk to the next handhold, the next foot placement. There was no strategy anymore, no pacing, no race tactics. Just the simple binary of up or not-up. He chose up because down meant joining the scattered failures littering the mountainside.
"Summit in two hundred meters," Sarah's voice cut through his focus. "Final push. The descent is—"
Her voice cut off. Technical difficulties or emotional ones, he couldn't tell. Didn't matter. Two hundred meters might as well be two hundred kilometers when each meter cost everything.
The trail made a final, cruel joke—the last hundred meters went nearly vertical, more ladder than path. Enhanced athletes were backing up at the base, systems unable to compute the transition from running to climbing.
Jayson didn't compute. He just grabbed the first hold and pulled.
His destroyed muscles screamed in harmonies he didn't know existed. His hands, already bloodied, left red prints on the rocks. Each pull upward was a negotiation with physics that physics won, but somehow resulted in altitude gained.
"Natural's climbing." Voices below, amazed. "Look at him go."
He wasn't going. He was surviving upward, one hold at a time. But compared to enhanced athletes whose systems couldn't process the angle change, even his crawl looked like progress.
Fifty meters from the summit. Thirty. Twenty. The holds were getting polished from use, slick with sweat and desperation. His right hand slipped, leaving him dangling for a terrifying moment before his left found new purchase.
Ten meters. He could see the summit marker, the timing mat that would record his impossible arrival. Around it, photographers and officials watched with expressions of disbelief. They'd expected enhanced athletes to struggle. They hadn't expected a natural to be climbing through their failures.
Five meters. His legs were gone, arms doing all the work. Pull, hold, breathe. Pull, hold, breathe. The rhythm of the desperate, the tempo of those who'd passed through impossible and found more impossible waiting.
Three meters. Two. One.
He hauled himself over the edge with all the grace of a dying fish, flopping onto the summit platform as his muscles finally, completely, gave up. For a moment he lay there, tasting copper and victory and the thin air of improbable altitude.
"Summit achieved," Maya's voice was thick with emotion. "Fifty-six point one kilometers. Position... my god, Jayson. You're eighty-fourth. Eighty-fourth!"
He'd climbed from ninety-seventh to eighty-fourth. Passed thirteen enhanced athletes on a grade that should have killed him. The math was impossible, but math had stopped mattering somewhere around kilometer forty.
"Can't stay here," an official was saying. "Need to clear the summit. Descent starts immediately."
Descent. Right. Because what destroyed legs needed after climbing a mountain was to go down one.
Jayson rolled to his knees, then somehow to his feet. Everything hurt in new colors, painted suffering across his nervous system in shades he hadn't known existed. But he was vertical. Still moving. Still human in a race that had forgotten what that meant.
The descent trail beckoned—a different kind of hell, gravity working with instead of against, but destroyed muscles having to control what the climb had unleashed.
He took the first step down and immediately understood why Sarah had cut off mid-sentence. The descent was going to hurt in ways the climb hadn't imagined.
But that was the price of summits. You couldn't stay on top. You had to come down, had to return to earth, had to finish what altitude had started.
Eighty-fourth place. Top half of finishers if he could survive three more sections. The impossible becoming merely improbable with every system failure he passed.
Time to find out if what goes up could come down without breaking entirely.