28

  LEVEL ONE: THE DRAGON STONES

  REMAINING CONTESTANTS: 8,999,378

  TIME UNTIL CULLING: 48 days

  NAME: JACK REN

  CURRENT RANK: 160,399

  I am fury.

  I move through the opposition like a storm. My fists deliver thunder, deliver death. Blood splashes across my face as I strike one man down and then another. It stings my eyes. I can taste it—the thick, metallic tang in my mouth. I should find it disgusting. I should spit it out in revision. But I don’t. I savor it. I want more of it. I want to make all of these people bleed until they have nothing left.

  I twist, dodging a spearhead that flashes past my face. I punch a woman in the side of the head and cave her skull in. Head shots, I’m figuring out, are particularly useful, because they seem to partially bypass the added durability and healing that one acquires after enough levels. No recovery from my thunder knuckles delivered directly to the dome, though.

  Something cuts me along my side. I use the pain as a focal point. I stomp on someone’s knee—I don’t even see their face. I don’t see anyone’s face. They’re all just blurs, impersonal. The knee collapses, internal structures rupturing. The victim goes down screaming and as they do I deliver another kick to their mouth, which floods with their teeth.

  I kill and I kill and I kill. Laughter bubbles up inside of me. I’ve never moved so fast before, so gracefully, so easily. I see everything coming. Fighters will often talk about such a thing as a flow state. Your average fighter doesn’t get the chance to enter one very often. It’s a once-in-a-career sort of thing, maybe twice if you’re lucky. I’ve experienced it before, and this, right now, is a little like that—but more. So much more.

  Because at this moment, I feel like a god of war.

  I feel like violence made manifest. Like a storm personified.

  Someone shoves me. I stagger, use the stagger to my advantage by avoiding the edge of a sword that might’ve ripped out my throat. One man backs away from me, eyes blazing with a purple, internal light. Magic coalesces around him, the color of myriad, blooming flowers. I feel my limbs locking up, rebelling against me as the bastard works his strange sorcery on me.

  No, I think with a savage growl, I won’t fucking lose. I won’t let this happen.

  I break free from whatever stranglehold the magic has over me, and I see the man’s eyes go wide with shock and fear. I laugh. My laughter is unhinged, even to my own ears, the mad cackling of a warlord. I grab someone’s throat and lift them in the air, then punch them in the chest so that they catapult backward, ribs, lungs, and heart pulverized.

  A blade slides through the back of my left leg. I feel it scrape across bone—the raw sensation of it. But there’s no actual pain. The red haze that’s enveloping me protects me from the agony that I know is there waiting just above the surface.

  A woman is crying. A man is saying, “Please stop, please stop,” over and over again as though he’s been mentally broken. Or maybe he’s simply that terrified.

  It’s an odd feeling—that someone could be so afraid of me.

  Because until this game, until these last two weeks, I had never truly viewed myself as a frightening or intimidating person. I was just a guy. Yeah, I fought—but I was honestly a very normal person despite that.

  I don’t think that’s true anymore.

  I think there’s something wrong with me.

  I smash someone’s face apart with an elbow. I spin and throw a head kick at a woman with so much force that they’re catapulted backward—and immediately golden words float in front of my eyes.

  You have leveled up!

  Name: Jack Ren

  Contestant level: Nine

  Current rank: 96,001

  Reward: New skill

  Choose from one of the following:

  Faster Healing

  Phantom Hand

  Movement distracts me; figures lurch forward, blades swinging toward me, and just for a moment, I can’t see past the golden words—they’re obscuring my vision just enough that I don’t see whatever slams into my temple coming. My legs go out from beneath me. I hit the ground.

  Even as I fall, I manage to force out the words: “Faster healing.”

  The effect is immediate. Life and energy surge back into me. My body feels instantly stronger.

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  Yet it’s not quite enough.

  Someone shoves something through my shoulder. Someone else hits me in the head again—with a fist, with a club, with the pommel of a sword, I can’t even tell. Stars dance before my eyes. So many voices are shouting now. They’re surrounding me. Crowding me. Hitting me with everything they have, knowing that this is their one chance, that if they don’t finish me off now, if they give me a chance to recover, they’re dead.

  I can hardly see, can hardly breathe. The golden words are gone but my vision is blurring, eyes stinging with my own blood and sweat. My head snaps one way and then another. I’ve never felt so much pain. It all culminates and forms a haze I can hardly think through.

  Except I can still think.

  And I think a single thing: Sarah.

  Get up, I hear her whisper in my ear.

  She’s not there. I know she’s not. But it sounds so real. So very tangible.

  Get up, Jack.

  My right eye is swollen shut. I spit out a loose tooth, hands up in an attempt to cover my face. I lash out with a weak punch that still, with the aid of the thunder knuckles, snaps someone’s bones.

  Jack, you need to get up. Now.

  Get. Up.

  I don’t know where the strength comes from, but it comes.

  I surge to my feet.

  An ax chops into my right arm and bites deep, touching the bone. I stifle a scream and retaliate by elbowing the center of his face, which caves in. I follow through, pushing his falling corpse into someone else, leaping, using the Spring Boots to jump over the head of the neck person. I twist midair, manage to land somewhat gracefully, now out in the open.

  Six of them remain. Six out of thirty or so.

  I’ve killed so many of them. Their bodies are strewn across the dirt and the grass, bloody and broken. A few of them, I see, are not actually dead yet—just so badly injured that they probably wish they were.

  I see the last six hesitate. They exchange looks. One of them is Maras, covered in the blood of his fellows. He’s acquired a slight limp. He doesn’t look so confident now. He looks, in fact, like he’s torn between the desire to run, and the urge to finish me off. But there’s doubt there. He’s not sure he can finish me off.

  Two men, slightly behind the other four, look at each other for a long, silent moment. They communicate without words. They turn at the exact same time and sprint away in the opposite direction. This causes a woman to mutter, “Fuck this,” and join them in fleeing.

  So, only three of them remain.

  “Don’t fucking run,” Maras warns the other two. “I swear on the Old Gods. If either of you try, the last thing I’ll do will be to hunt you down. He’s injured. He’s weak. We can finish him.”

  Maras’s two companions don’t look even remotely convinced. Even still, bravely, foolishly, they stand their ground.

  I no longer have words. I have only animal sounds: grunts and growls.

  I charge them.

  I’m bleeding from a dozen wounds. I’m tired, I’m slowing, I’m more than a little light-headed. Despite all that, I still hit like a truck. I slam the first guy to get int my way. I lift him and send him crashing back down head-first into the ground. His neck snaps. The feeling is disconcerting, and I hear the crack of vertebrae, causing a burst of nausea—but I’m still deep in the berserker's rage, so all-consumed with a need to win this fight, to smash these last two opponents, that nothing can touch me.

  Afterward, if I survive, I know it will all come crashing back over me with a vengeance. I dread it. Yet I push it.

  Maras’s shield slams into my face. I feel my nose break. Hot blood jets down my face, filling my mouth. I’ve had a lot of broken noses in my time—this one is particularly bad. I stagger backward. Maras follows. I don’t know what class he is. What level he’s reached. I don’t know what abilities he possesses, nor what items. I simply know that he wants me dead.

  His other companion rushes me from the side, maybe thinking that I’m stunned, that I’m distracted—he’s woefully disappointed when I sweep his legs out from under him and then stomp down on his head, which cracks like an egg.

  Leaving just me and Maras.

  We circle each other. He tightens his grip on his sword, the blade of which, I notice, is faintly glowing. I decide that I very much don’t want to be cut by it—not even scratched.

  “I’ve killed them all,” I rasp. “You really think you can do what the rest of your people couldn’t?”

  Maras scowls. “You’ve done well, I’ll give you that. But they were weak. I am not.” His golden eyes watch my every movement. Then he stops and throws his shield aside. His left hand, now free, begins to glow with crackling, blue energy, causing the air around it to ripple and violently distort. Which I don’t like. Not even a little bit.

  “What did they take from you?” Maras asks, resuming his circling.

  “People keep asking me that.”

  “You learn a lot about a person when you figure out their primary motivation,” Maras sounds surprisingly conversational, as though we’re not about to engage in a fight to the death.

  “My woman,” I say simply.

  Maras pauses. His face twitches.

  “And what did they take from you?”

  “The very same,” Maras says quietly. “The love of my life.”

  I lower my fists, lightning still dancing across my knuckles. It shouldn’t be that surprising. Love is a powerful thing. It makes sense that a lot of us in here have had our spouses taken away and held hostage. There’s something about this, though, two men, each fighting for their loves, now forced to duel, that causes me to hesitate—just as I see Maras hesitating.

  Maras lowers his sword. His face is taut. “What’s her name?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Ela,” he says softly. “That’s the name of my wife.” He smiles, then, a rueful smile, and looks around at all the carnage, golden eyes traveling across the scattered remains of his people. “Sarah must be quite a woman.”

  I laugh bitterly. “The best I ever knew.” And yet I can’t help but feel that she would disapprove of everything I’ve already done.

  And I know, with absolute certainty, that the worst is yet to come.

  I bring my arms down by my sides.

  Maras sheaths his sword.

  Slowly, his eyes never leaving mine, he starts to back away.

  Until, at last, he turns. And strolls out of the town without another word to me.

  I let him go.

  We’ll meet again, I think. And maybe next time mutual mercy won’t be an option. Maybe next time one of us will kill the other. That is, after all, the curse of this place. Sooner or later, it simply can’t be avoided.

  But tonight, both of us get to live a little longer.

  For Sarah. And for Ela.

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