"By the way..." Miguel and Jones were too busy zig-zagging through the food stalls that they didn't really realize how far they've walked. Sung was tailing behind them while scrolling through experiment recruitment listings, but by the time he turned his attention away from the list, he's found themselves in the middle of a sprawling labyrinth of food stalls, with no recollection of how they got to where they are now, nor how to get themselves back out.

  "How do we get out of here?" The collective realization of the situation they've wandered themselves into struck hard. Turn around, more stalls. Turn again, even more stalls. Between the three of them, only one word came to mind.

  "Shit."

  It took them two hours to find their way out.

  Eventually, when they crawled their way back to their condo, Miguel hovered his card over the sensor to unlock the door. As the door slid open, standing right behind it was Rin, with cuts and bruises all over his body, and his hands bound together with nylon rope. Yoko, in equally bad shape, held Rin firmly by the shoulders with a rather menacing aura.

  "I- I see you two got close with each other..." Jones laughed awkwardly. "He's my brother." Growled Yoko. "Now, introduce yourself." Yoko tightened the rope further. "Ay ay ay AY OK FINE. I'm Rin, Suzuki Rin, Yoko's twin brother. Er- Yoko's a girl, I'm a boy." Rin clarified after seeing Jones' confused face.

  The five of them moved back to the sofas, Sung brewed some tea for all of them, As he sat down, Miguel pulled up the applications window. "Quick raise of hands, who here came in with a bank account that's worth half a damn?" Miguel started off bluntly. Awkward silence. "We need money, ASAP." "How many of us can actually fight though? All of these are combat experiments." Asked Yoko. She and Rin were students, Jones' just a child, Miguel was a janitor, Sung was a researcher, none of them exactly knew how to fight.

  "They do have a minimum pay, so long as we don't get absolutely folded we should be able to get at least something out of this." Said Rin. "We could try out melee experiments first," he pointed to the ones with a fist icon, "rather than those with actual guns," he moved his finger to the ones with a bullet icon.

  "They pay less though, and besides aren't guns easier to use?" Questioned Jones. "They're only easier when you already have experience with them, or else the recoil will throw you off. Besides, none of us have actual combat experience, we'd be dead before we found cover against any attacks." Rin answered.

  "We could probably earn more if we survive longer in melee experiments." Sung wondered out loud. "Then again we'd probably be running and hiding rather than actually killing anyone."

  "'Cording to the FAQ here," Miguel pointed at the wall of text on his screen, "the amount of money paid will be scaled according to how long ye survive. The amount of people yeh've killed will act more or less a bonus to individuals. I'll be puttin our names into this one then."

  With the application form filled and sent, everyone simultaneously got a notification from their phones. "Experiment starts in: 2 Days, 15 Hours, 24 Minutes. Get ready."

  "Whelp, with that done, I'm turnin' in for the night." Miguel stood up, stretched, slightly stumbled a bit, before wobbling over to his room, the steel door slid firmly shut behind him. Only now did Sung realize there aren't any windows in the common room, as he looked left and right for one to confirm that it is indeed nighttime - there isn't one.

  The large digital clock mounted on the wall can happily attest to the fact that it is midnight though. Everyone eventually returned to their own rooms, as the common room lights switched off on their own.

  Sung carefully climbed onto the cardboard bed and tried to sleep in it. The first few whiles seemed fine, the firmness is not unlike the pavement Sung's used to sleep on. Afterwards though, Sung had to move himself down onto the floor. The cardboard bed just lacks a certain... solidness to it.

  It just did not spark joy, there need not be a lengthier explanation.

  The other day, a couple of workers came to take Sung's bed with them. Sung had sold his bed for a tiny amount of cash, and although the room seemed even less accommodating now with the bed gone, at least he has more free space for something else.

  He's going to have to fight... When was the last time he ever fought? Sung pondered. Oh, right, that time another hobo stole his jacket and he tried to fight him for it back. Emphasis on "tried", Sung was quickly overpowered and slammed onto the ground.

  Sung turned his attention to the cloning vat sitting lifelessly next to his bedroom wall, he nitpicked at all the different places that he would've tinkered with back in his lab, but again his partner stole the blueprints of an immature vat and did not even bother to iterate on it.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Most notably, one of the major flaws of this particular revision of the clone vat, was that the consciousness transfer process was slightly lossy, causing the personality and memories of a cloned individual to slowly be altered, or even lost, after every clone attempt.

  He can fix it.

  The solution would be to just swap out the copper wires for silver wires, best if he could get his hands on some superconducting wires, but they're prohibitively expensive for the budget he has on hand right now - about 20 CAT, superconducting wires on the hypernet cost at least 100 CAT per foot.

  While artificially coding in stronger muscles into his clone save may be a quick and valid solution, orders on the hypernet take at least 3 business days to deliver, too late.

  With no other choice, Sung begrudgingly looked up the nearest gym. He figured he needed a gym buddy, but neither Jones nor Miguel were too stoked on the idea. "I don't like it when my legs hurt." "The hell you tryna accomplish within 2 days anyways?"

  Rin surprisingly agreed, "maybe there'll be pretty women to hit on." He said. Sung cared not to inform him that everyone looked exactly the same here. "...yeah," he agreed hesitantly, "sure."

  As they made their way down to the gym, Rin suddenly asked if Sung had a family. "I mean, you're an adult, right?" "Not all adults end up with a family." Replied Sung. Most of his time was either spent on research or on books, he had no time nor interest in chasing girls. He was fine with being a virgin forever, but something about Rin's tone irked him anyways.

  "Not all adults deserve a family." Added Rin. The duo fell quiet again. That remark came out of the left field, but as intrusive memories of Sung's childhood surfaced, he couldn't help but agree.

  "Must be tough." "Yeah."

  Arrays of machines loomed into view as they approached the gym. It's not the world's most extraordinary gym by any means, but it has what any gym should have, common equipment like steppers and treadmills and squat machines. The map did mention that it was a "beginner's gym", the better gyms probably have more exotic equipment.

  Rin was very disappointed when loomed into view along with the machines weren't sexy girls he probably came to expect watching movies and magazines, but just bald, androgynous figures. Not unlike himself, not unlike Sung.

  His disappointment was immeasurable and, though still early it was, his day was pretty much already ruined. He turned around and tried to go back to the condo, but he could not for the life of him remember the way back. Lost, he reluctantly threw himself on the treadmills with Sung.

  The two days went by without much fanfare, while Sung and Rin continued to torture themselves on the treadmills and benches, the rest of the group were trying to dig up archives of previous experiments.

  They do say "know thy enemies and know thyself, find naught in fear for 100 battles" after all.

  There were quite a number of libraries in the compound, with books hailing from a variety of different cultures and languages, telling stories of people from all walks of life, or information of all sorts of topics, opinions of all kinds of issues. Despite the gigantic archive though, there are only a scant few records of the complex's own experiments.

  The ones they did find, although clad in heavy files, were brief and undescriptive, almost as if they're intentionally redacting information out of these public reports. "What's with these reports? All of them just write the same thing, 'Performance satisfactory.' No introduction, no details on the experiment, they didn't even care to put quantitative results on these!" Yoko shouted frustratingly.

  They've been rummaging through libraries for the second day now, and still the only pieces of information they got about the experiments were that the performances were often satisfactory. The briefness of the records made it seem like the experiments had no objective at all, almost like they were hosted for the sole purpose of cruel entertainment. Overcome with frustration, they retreated into the common room.

  With little time left before this unknown ordeal starts, the five of them sat on the sofas, staring at their phone screens as the timer ticked down. That's all they could do - they knew absolutely nothing about what was to come. Fear paralyzed the room, they sat as still as statues, as if spellbound, a deafening pin-drop silence enveloped them.

  Five minutes. Do any of them know how to fight? They had chosen to do melee instead because of their lack of experience, but on second thought maybe guns were the newbie's best chance at performing good enough.

  Four minutes. Pain pains, even if they technically couldn't die, a sucker punch is still going to entail a world of suffering, and none of them like pain. Should they just run and hide at every turn? Would doing that earn them money? They don't know.

  Three minutes. What if they die? They get cloned back, but they did still die. Does dying hurt? From a stab, maybe. What about mental damage? Would it be traumatizing to experience death? Maybe not, everyone in this facility seems to be to some degree in their right minds anyway.

  Two minutes. Are they ready to kill? It seemed like such a trivial thing, to just put a hole into someone and let them bleed to death, but now that they think about it, it seems quite a bit more nuanced than just hole and death. Where should they stab? The heart, of course, but how are they going to get there? They have little to no martial arts experience, a little backstabbing will do, literally.

  One minute on the clock, is there anything else to think about? There must be, but Sung couldn't think of more. He's too preoccupied with the ticking time bomb in front of him to think of anything else. He climbed back into his clone bay for the teleportation, his head submerged into the pod fluid, a wave of artificial calmness took over his brain. Right, the fluid had tranquilizing properties.

  Sung remembered the first few cloning attempts he did without the tranquilizing pod fluid, every time felt like a new traumatizing experience'd been etched into his very soul. It was his partner who later on threw tranquilizers into the fluid mix, when Sung was still trying to figure out what caused the trauma.

  Under the effects of the tranquilizer, Sung quickly dozed off, right as the timer reached zero. The clone bay quickly dissolved the body, before opening up the drain and letting all the goop out nastily.

  On the fields, the clone bays reopened. Drafts of icy air crashed into Sung, forcibly waking him up.