47th of Season of Air, 59th year of the 32nd cycle

  “I’m spent, Newt,” Flare’s voice came from the other side of the fort. It was just the two of them, two gates destroyed and over a minute left until the end of the current wave.

  “Go into the jungle and try to find something that will help us. I’ll go fix the breached walls.”

  After filling the breaches, Newt waited in a lane without a pit trap, which killed an attacking monster every round. He guessed each section of the jungle had one wall upgrade kit, one pit trap, and a group of survivors.

  As Newt wondered whether their luck was horrible or whether the jungle simply had too few unique treasures, a pack of ten air-attributed deinonychus appeared. Newt swept his glaive, decapitating one, and burned through his spiritual energy supply like a madman, wasting nearly half his remaining reserve to unleash a massive wave of fire.

  Five more deinonychus disappeared, and he slew another before the three survivors bolted towards the fort. Newt rushed after them, but the beasts were impossibly fast. At peak realm with an air attribute focused on speed, even Newt had trouble catching up.

  In ten seconds they were upon the wall, slamming against it and splintering the wood. Newt slew one and jumped over them to enter the fort just as the wall of his second lane fell.

  A wave of fire with everything he had left surged through the gap, consuming all ten rushing deinonychuses and burning them to nothingness. Then, three more walls fell.

  Newt threw himself into the nearest breach, blocking the passage.

  The deinonychuses were swift and died even quicker as they assaulted Newt. Their speed specialization made them poor combatants. The helpless villagers behind Newt screamed, eighteen dying in a matter of moments, leaving behind forty-two.

  Newt slaughtered the last of the monsters before him and threw himself at the eighteen others, blocking their path to the four final villagers.

  Waving his spear and presenting himself as a threat seemed to work, as the deinonychuses pounced at him. Fortunately, Newt could slay them as quickly as they came, but then came the crashing from behind Newt’s back.

  The two surviving deinonychuses from his lane tore into the obnoxiously screaming villagers, silencing a pair of them. With nine left before him, Newt had no choice but to fight against the larger force.

  Then a miracle happened. Ten more villagers appeared, empowering the chorus of screams. Newt moved in a frenzy, slashing left and right until the screaming stopped and there was silence.

  He turned around; five villagers remained. Flare had bought them an extra round.

  “Great job, Flare.” Newt laughed. “We need to run around and repair the gates. There’s no way we’re making it through the next wave, but we should still give it our best.”

  ***

  “Unbelievable,” Sleek shouted, genuinely surprised for the first time in a long while. “Explorer’s Gate has made a comeback, snatching a meal from a spino’s jaw! Their feat bought them a place amongst the top eighteen, and they have even outlasted the Diamond Talisman’s team. The huge number of spawned beasts overwhelmed the grand sect’s defensive spell formations. Truly, this challenge did not favor them. None of the other grand sects have lost disciples, but the next round should be even more brutal.”

  “Their effort is admirable,” Northstar commented on Newt’s and Flares’ mad dash around the lanes to patch up the destroyed gates. “Seeing young people challenging fate and giving it their all despite the odds always inspires you to do better, doesn’t it?”

  Sleek did not know how to answer the stupid question. ‘No,’ was on his mind, but it would never reach the experienced broadcaster’s lips.

  “Truly heroic,” he said instead, letting his co-host ramble on in the short lull between the rounds. “Heavens! I don’t even know what that is!”

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  Sleek stared at the misshapen dinosaur. Bigger, meaner cousin of the tyrannosaurus came to mind, but with a body covered in armored plates and spikes.

  “That is a ponosaurus,” Northstar said, without skipping a beat. “The obsolete third realm evolution of tyrannosaurus used in arena combat cycles ago. The creature was a pain to deal with because of its defenses and…”

  Sleek listened, transfixed. The fact that someone would offer a lesson in history during a broadcast dazed him silent. Meanwhile, in a corner screen, Newt battled a ponosaurus, showcasing why the creature was called a pain dinosaur.

  ***

  When Newt first saw the monsters for the eleventh wave, he thought they would survive it. The lumbering beast was bulkier than a tyrannosaurus, its body covered in thick plates and long, wicked spikes.

  The added weight and the earth-attributed aura meant he might have enough time to deal with all of them before they breached the fort’s defenses and stomped dead the remaining five villagers.

  The problem was the creature’s size. With his spiritual energy spent, Newt could only hack at the dinosaur’s legs, and that’s what he decided to do. Newt dashed in, then jumped back out of reach as a barbed tail swished inches before his face.

  He darted in and out five times, but the monster’s defense was impenetrable, the whip-like tail striking like a viper whenever Newt entered its reach. He jumped back once more, gritting his teeth.

  Ten seconds wasted. The abominable dinosaur lunged, snapping its jaws at Newt, but in the corner of his eye, Newt caught the tail swishing towards him. He dodged the jaws and slashed his glaive at the incoming tail.

  The eighth realm weapon, combined with Newt’s fifth realm body, sundered the layer of rock which sprouted on the limb, and parted flesh and bone. The severed appendage kept flying towards Newt, who ducked before springing for the monstrous dinosaur.

  Newt slashed at the creature’s leg, hamstringing it. The dinosaur toppled with a generic tyrannosaurus roar and Newt moved away from it. The creature struggled to get up, but failed to move.

  Killing it would waste a handful of seconds, time Newt did not have. So he turned around and sprinted for the fortress. He had wasted around twenty seconds, but at least he knew how to eliminate the ponosauruses.

  Newt ran at eighty miles per hour, yet the going seemed painfully slow compared to flight and fireburst-assisted movement. And despite the prodigious speed of his body, he heard the palisade wall splintering under a monster’s attack.

  He ran around the fort, listening to the ponosaurus slamming the wooden wall with its tail. The creature struck the palisade of Flare’s lane one final time and broke through. Newt used the chance and jumped towards the creature, aiming to spear its eye. The ponosaurus turned to face him, opening its maw wide.

  It snarled at Newt just as the glaive speared into the roof of its mouth. The monster tried to snap its jaw closed, but disappeared before its teeth sank into Newt’s body.

  Once more the walls of the fortress shook, the sound coming from three directions at once, and Newt knew he had lost. Just for a moment, his shoulders drooped in defeat, then he forced himself to run. He would not surrender.

  He rounded the fortress and eliminated another monster when two walls crashed.

  I could make it, there’s five villagers.

  He jumped and scaled the wall, while the terrified villagers screamed. Newt leaped at a ponosaurus, thinking that the dying screams were probably the most accurate sound in the entire simulation.

  He speared the fourth dinosaur in a manner identical to how he managed the second one, but by the time he landed, the fort vanished, and Newt was on the bone square again.

  “Great job!”

  “We’re fifteenth!”

  Newt’s teammates cheered, when someone close by screamed identical congratulations, but for fourteenth place.

  We could’ve done better. I just had to last two more seconds.

  The thought was greedy and depressing, but Newt could not help it. With better planning and organization, they could have lasted longer and made it into the next round. All they needed was one more batch of villagers to buy him time.

  Newt saw that most of the people in the square were looking up, so he faced the sky and saw floating rectangles with ongoing battles. Dandelion ran through the jungle, searching for bonuses while Maelstrom ran towards the starting position, half her teammates jumping over shrubs and ducking under branches.

  One more team lost as Newt watched, bringing down the number of remaining participants to twelve. A part of Newt wanted to watch the event until the end, but there was no point in watching strangers fight, so he focused on the one person who interested him.

  Dandelion made it back to his lane a second before a pack of fifteen deinonychuses appeared. The staff slammed into one’s head even as it solidified, a pair of icicles pierced the eyes of two different beasts, and all three disappeared at the same time.

  Dandelion eliminated six before they moved away from him, wasting a minimal amount of spiritual energy. Deinonychuses ran, but Dandelion proved faster. One by one he picked off another three before they reached the wall, then three others as they struck the palisade. The final deinonychus fell just as it destroyed the reinforced wall, and Dandelion made for the jungle, making another sweep, reaching the repair tile just before the next wave spawned in what seemed like impossibly perfect timing.