The sun was starting to rise. And the Gamers kept running through the forest.

  “Don’t stop!” Arthur shouted, going back a few steps to encourage the slower Gamers. “Keep going!”

  Tobias and Wyatt, both clearly unused to exercise, tried to keep up with the rest, but they seemed close to collapsing.

  They had all been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, constantly on the move. They were on their last fumes. It was a miracle none of them had gotten a cramp.

  The Mongols had dispersed to track them down. For a moment, it had seemed possible to lose them, to escape into the forest. But eventually, a scouting Mongol finally found them and shouted to attract the rest of his comrades.

  Hearing the Mongols regrouping nearby, Arthur decided to risk descending a dangerous ridge, watching their steps on the rocky slope.

  “They’ll have a harder time following us with their horses,” he said, trying to hurry the exhausted gamers. “We might even lose them, with a little luck.”

  Eventually, only Mark and Arthur remained up the ridge. They exchanged a meaningful look—they were fucked, and they knew it.

  “We could try on our own…” Mark said, not very convinced.

  Arthur dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

  “I’ve thought about it. But they would get us anyway, and we would die as cowards.”

  “True…”

  Mark looked back for a moment and saw the Mongol riders approaching in the distance, between the trees. There seemed to be about sixty of them. So their stunt with the undead in the battlefield seemed to have taken a decent toll…

  Fuck you, he thought, I hope all of you were eaten alive, motherfuckers.

  Then he thought about it, and saw no reason not to share his feelings, so he shouted at them:

  “Fuck you, bitches! I hope you enjoyed seeing your little bitch friends being eaten alive!”

  Feeling a bit relieved after speaking his mind, he started to follow the other Gamers, who were going down the rocky terrain. They forced themselves to go down as fast as possible, but the terrain was complicated, with very few places to hold on to.

  Wyatt, on the other hand, took the fastest route down. He slipped on a loose rock and rolled down the slope in a mess of dust and rock. At some point, he made an impressive pirouette that ended with a sickening crack, and a leg twisted at an unnatural angle.

  He started screaming in pain, his voice carrying through the forest. Nobody tried to stop him; their enemies already knew where they were. Emily approached him and tried to help him get in a more comfortable position. The rest of the Gamers took the opportunity to breathe a little and share some of their remaining water.

  “Jackson wasn’t crazy,” Tobias said.

  “He believed that our survival,” answered Gustav, “depended on whether Johan had been a backend or a frontend developer. If that’s not crazy, I don’t know what is.”

  “What about full-stack developers?” Liam asked. “Those exist too, right?”

  Gustav laughed.

  “We told him. And he literally spat on the ground and said that if he was a full-stack developer we should drink the Kool-Aid and kill ourselves because we were all doomed.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Really?” Tobias asked. “Maybe he was a little crazy.”

  “Didn’t you see his fucking eyes when he was dying? He clearly wanted to know before the end—did I die for a powerful, almighty backend developer, or a weak, good-for-nothing frontend bitch? Was my death worth it?”

  Both started laughing a little too much, as if they were trying too hard. Mark understood them. They weren’t laughing at the dead Gamer; they were just trying to find some humor to cope with all that had happened.

  “Oh…” Gustav said, sobering a little. “I just thought that maybe he’ll become a zombie too, right?”

  “Fuck,” Tobias answered. “You’re right… In this world, either every dead awakens, or every resurrected soldier awakens, or maybe it’s the accumulation of too many dead that awakens the zombies.”

  “Or maybe some other completely different, crazy reason.”

  “I know…” Tobias said, looking at the strange world they had been brought to, and smiling. “Pretty exciting, right?”

  Gustav looked at him as if looking at a crazy person and gave him for a lost cause.

  Arthur had been ignoring their chattering, studying the surrounding area in silence. His shirt was covered in blood from the injuries he had received from the undead. Next to him, Wyatt seemed to have controlled his pain a little, he was breathing deeply, forcing himself not to see his broken leg.

  “Let’s carry him to that cave,” Arthur eventually said. His tone of voice was resigned, and he pointed to a cave about two hundred yards away.

  Everybody knew what that meant.

  End of the line.

  “If somebody wants to try escaping on their own, they can do that,” Arthur said. “But I don’t think there’s a way out. Our best option is to barricade ourselves in the cave, and make the fuckers pay for it.”

  Nobody disagreed, and after they finished drinking, they organized how to carry the injured Wyatt.

  “Leave me! Don’t stop because of me!” Wyatt said, and he tried to resist when Arthur and Gustav lifted him and started to carry him.

  Mark sighed, walking next to him.

  “There’s no way we’ll be able to outrun them. It’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault, really. Just bad luck. Bad fucking luck…”

  “I’ll take any option, as long as I don’t have to keep fucking running”, Tobias said, completely exhausted, his face red and covered with sweat, but still trying to force a smile.

  “Yeah, this day has been brutal,” Liam said.

  Tobias looked at the young man, who was only sixteen. He had mostly kept to himself, but as the situation had gotten more and more desperate, he hadn’t muttered a single complaint.

  “My god… I wish I’d had your balls at your age. How the hell are you holding up so well?”

  Liam laughed.

  “This is not my first rodeo with death, I guess. This isn’t scarier than being twelve years old and learning that a supervolcano is going to kill you.”

  The Mongols began circling the ridge, finding a way to get to the Gamers. A couple of them stayed up the ridge, keeping an eye on them, maybe fearing they would manage to pull some other stunt.

  They didn’t bother shooting arrows at them. Apparently, they were okay with making this last stand close and personal.

  The Gamers started to walk into the cave. The sun was already visible, and it was starting to rise higher into the sky. All of them turned around to look at the sun, expecting that to be the last time they would see it.

  It would have been a beautiful morning.

  Eventually, only Mark and Emily remained outside the cave. Emily was on the verge of tears, her lower lip quivering. But she didn’t complain, and forced herself to put on a brave face.

  “Mark, can I speak with you?” she said, gesturing so they would stay out of the cave for a few more seconds.

  Mark suspected what she wanted. He stayed anyway.

  And Emily looked into his eyes and said:

  “We’re both adults. We know what would happen if I’m captured. I don’t want them to take me alive. If the moment arrives, will you do it?”

  Mark felt heartbroken about the idea of plunging his dagger and finishing the life of that young, beautiful woman. He had once killed a man for doing such a thing: Tito’s lieutenant. The murder that had ended with Arthur aiming a gun to Mark’s head.

  Emily still waited for an answer.

  “If the moment arrives, I’ll do it,” Mark muttered.

  “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Thank you.”

  And they entered the cave, preparing to make their last stand.

  The rest of the Gamers were standing in the middle of the cave, silently staring deeper into its shadows. Mark walked next to them, curious about what they were looking at.

  “Oh…” he said when he saw it.

  They weren’t alone.

  The cave was already occupied, and Erik Bloodaxe and his nine remaining Vikings were staring back at them.

  The Vikings had been sitting around, exhausted, checking their weapons with taciturn faces, eating some cold food, and tending to some injuries. Now they were standing up, ready to fight—Erik Bloodaxe was holding his massive axe, now clean and devoid of any blood—but the surprise of being ambushed by a crying young woman, a man with a broken leg, a sixteen-year-old, and some exhausted Gamers was holding them back.

  And so the Gamers found themselves with Erik Bloodaxe and his Vikings on one side.

  And the Mongols starting to organize to assault the cave on the other….

  And Mark started laughing like a maniac.

  He laughed at the absurdity of it all.

  He laughed at the unfairness of it all.

  He laughed… because he had found a way out.