25

  LEVEL ONE: THE DRAGON STONES

  REMAINING CONTESTANTS: 9,087,994

  TIME UNTIL CULLING: 48 days

  NAME: JACK REN

  CURRENT RANK: 311,405

  I wait until the sun has set. I wait until the world is dark.

  And then I’m in motion.

  I descend a tree and slip forward through the bushes, aiming for the nearest of the stone buildings. I’ve been watching the town, such as it is, for the last two hours, and in that time I’ve figured certain things out. I know, for instance, that there are roughly three people to each of these stone buildings. I know that, at all times, they have six people on patrol around the town’s perimeter, meaning that in some of these buildings, including the one I’m now advancing toward, there are only two people inside.

  At least, there would’ve been two people inside my target building—but one of them is by the fire, tending to the roasting deer.

  So, there’s actually only one person inside. Which, I tell myself, is a good start.

  Assuming I can get the job done quietly, without alerting the rest of them to my presence. Because if that happens, and they all immediately figure out I’m there and something is wrong, they’ll race to the building and surround it. They’ll trap me. I’ll be fucked, to say the very least, and Cole and the others will be well and truly doomed.

  So. I can’t make any mistakes. I have to be perfect.

  Easier said than done.

  Because when you’re a fighter, you realize it’s almost impossible to be perfect. Even when you feel like you’re fighting perfectly, when you’re in a flow state—afterward, sitting in your hotel room, you’ll rewatch the fight and see all the openings you left, all the opportunities you missed.

  Problematically for me, the door that serves as the single entrance into the stone building faces the fire around which now several others are standing. The one good thing is that all of them are facing away from the door—I can, I hope, slip in before any of them notice me. But it’s risky. If one happens to turn at the wrong time, to glance over their shoulder…or if the one person still inside sees me before I can do anything about them and screams for help…

  There’s so much that can go wrong. Just for a second, before breaking from the cover, I hesitate. I tell myself that this is a bad idea. A stupid, foolish thing to do, which will only serve to risk Sarah’s life.

  But I push aside these thoughts. Sometimes you have to commit. Sometimes you have to be tenacious.

  I sprint out of the undergrowth before I have any more time to further doubt myself. I cross the ground between the bushes and the building within seconds, reaching the front door, every muscle in my body tensing. I slow down. The key is to enter calmly. If I simply burst in, then whoever’s inside will immediately know that something is wrong. Act like you belong is the name of the game.

  I push the door open, then immediately close it gently behind me. I don’t have time to truly take in my surroundings. There’s a man maybe eight feet away, and I’m lucky, so fucking lucky, because his back to me. He’s playing with something in his hands. A weapon?

  “Back already, Liv?” He says without turning.

  I lunge for him, a burst of sudden, furious movement.

  The floorboards creak beneath me. He detects the movement, starts to spin around with a confused look on his face, but then my hands are on him, pulling him to the ground, and I wrap my arms around his neck in a guillotine choke that immediately cuts off his flow of oxygen. He tries to say something, to call out, but all that emerges from him is a choked gasp. I squeeze harder. Harder than I’ve ever squeezed in my life. My enhanced muscles bulge. Most people think you choke with your arms, but the truth is, the squeeze itself, the sheer force of it, comes mostly from the back—and right now, I apply all those muscles to the sole task of putting this man unconscious.

  Instead of putting him unconscious, I snap his neck.

  I hear the sudden, loud crack, like the breaking of a tree branch. It fills the room. I feel the sudden limpness of his neck, followed by all his weight pulling down as the life goes out of him. I let go, shocked, and watch as he slumps against the floorboards, his bladder automatically loosening in death and filling the room with the acrid stench of piss.

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  I swallow hard. I hadn’t meant to do that. Ordinarily, it’s impossible to break someone’s neck like that—necks are a lot stronger than what movies would lead one to think. But I’m level seven now, and I have to keep reminding myself that my body is no longer operating in accordance with familiar rules.

  I steel myself against the sight of the dead man. I’m still not used to this—to killing, to being so close to corpses. The slackness of his features is off putting. I try not to think too much about who he was, about what they took from him to “motivate” him. I try not to think about the fact that, if things had been just a little different, it might be me on the floor instead, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, with Sarah forever doomed.

  But things aren’t different. This is how it is. This is reality.

  And this is simply what needs to happen.

  I take a deep breath and move to the window. The others are still standing around the window and, as far as I can tell, none of them have noticed that anything is amiss.

  Someone knocks at the door of the building.

  Shit.

  My heart flutters in my chest. I look around, searching for some place to hide, before realizing that I can’t hide, because there’s a fucking body on the floor. Instead, I advance toward the door, keeping my steps measured and calm so that, if the person on the other side of the door can hear me coming, they’ll at least think it’s their friend instead of me.

  Whoever’s at the day knocks again, harder and louder. I stand off to the side of the door, where I hope I’ll be out of sight as they enter. My heart is racing. The situation isn’t ideal, could easily go sideways—but it could also, I tell myself, be a blessing, a chance to take out another member of their group.

  The door creaks open.

  A single, heavy boot step.

  “Hello?” A woman calls. Young, by the sound of it. The open door is positioned between us, a flimsy barrier. “Era—are you in here?”

  I kick the door shut and grab her by the throat from behind, squeezing with both hands, applying as much pressure to the sides and front of her neck as I can manage.

  It feels wrong. So, so wrong—and the difference, I know, is that this is a young pretty woman, and here I am behind a closed door, silently strangling her like some kind of serial killer.

  But I tell myself that it isn’t like that. I tell myself that she’s just like the rest of us—a killer, here to kill, here to win no matter the cost. I can’t let myself be blinded to the harsh reality of the situation. Only the strongest will survive. There’s nothing else to it.

  She’s croaking, grunting, struggling—and then she does something that catches me off-guard.

  She bends at the knees and, with savage, shocking force, hoists me over her, flipping me through the air.

  I slam into the ground, the air knocked out of my lungs, seeing stars. Then she’s on top of me, teeth gritted, her long, red hair framing an angular face. Her eyes, like bright emeralds, peer down at me with malicious intentions.

  “Big mistake,” she hisses, and shoves a knife between my ribs.

  I let out a gasp. It’s like a shard of pure ice has just entered my body. It’s so cold, so sharp, so painful, that for a moment, I’m paralyzed.

  I take a deep breath—and it hurts. It hurts so much that it brings me fully back into the present. I hit the woman as hard as I can, a right hook to the jaw that has the immediate effect of rendering her unconscious. She sags, mouth full of broken teeth and blood, and then, as gently as I can, I pull out the knife she’s just plunged into me—wincing the whole time—and thrust it through her neck. I do so with more malice than I intended—I’m angry, but mostly with myself for allowing her to put me in this situation.

  I look down at the wound. Maybe I’m dead, maybe I’m not. Some armor, I think idly, might actually come in handy—I’ve seen my own blood far too much for my own liking lately. I watch as torrents of red flow out of me…but the bleeding is slowing before my very eyes, which at least tells me that my body is trying to heal. I stand, a little wobbly, and once again peer out through the window. Still no one appears to have noticed that something is amiss. A part of me expects another knock at the door. That’d be just my luck.

  There is no knock. So, I wait in the room for my wound to heal, which doesn’t happen even half as fast as I’d like it to. At the very least, I soon start to feel as though I’m probably not going to die.

  The other issue, though, is that now I’m covered in blood. A lot of blood.

  Meaning anyone that sees me is going to immediately be alerted.

  I sigh, pacing the length of the room, my mind racing as I try to come up with a plan. But there is none.

  Instead, I must rely on my instincts. My reflexes. Be primal, I tell myself.

  I clench my fists. I need to get out of the building. And I need to get out without anyone seeing me. I’ve killed two of them. That’s a start. I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t leveled up again yet—I have to assume these two weren’t very high level themselves—but that’s fine, I have to be close now. Another level and I can speed up the healing.

  At the door, I hesitate.

  There are some moments in life that you can recognize as hinge moments, isolated points in time when everything might be determined by the tiniest variables. The future stands before me, divided into two paths.

  One that ends here and now in my death.

  And another that stretches onward, into the murky depths of the future.

  It’s time to find out which path I’ll walk.

  I open the door.

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