Torres came to in absolute darkness. There was no difference between closing and opening his eyes. He could see nothing, not even the hands in front of his face. This is what he believed, at least, as he was unable to lift his hands. They were pressed to his thighs by a strong fabric wound around his body like a funeral shroud. Only his head was free. He turned it back and forth and looked up and down.

Where was he? What had happened?

Though nothing was visible, he could still hear, feel, smell. Skittering noises and that cricket-like chirping echoed around him. It sounded like he was inside a cave. A faint cool wind was blowing everywhere, carrying a medley of thin chemical scents.

Memory returned. Giant ants had attacked him in the canyon. They must have brought him inside their hive. They had tied him to the wall.

Don’t want to think about why.

Keeping his panic at bay, Torres searched for his knife. He’d drawn it from his pocket just before they attacked. Was he still holding it? No. He must have dropped it.

Panic rose inside him again. He wanted to scream, but that would just piss off those giant ants. Then they would eat him!

So this was it. The end. He was ant food. Torres had always assumed that he would die of cancer or old age or in a car crash or something. Nuclear war, climate change, or the pandemic would get him. But being eaten by giant ants inside a game was not something he could have predicted.

For some reason, the skittering sounds grew, as did the cricket howls. Clangs echoed in the distance. Metal was chopping through flesh and bone, and heavy body parts were slamming onto the ground. Torres could almost see it, like his hearing was making up for the loss in sight. A grunting man was getting closer.

“Yo!” the old man shouted. “Anyone down there?”

Torres glanced back and forth in the darkness. “Uh, yeah someone’s down here! Please help me!”

“Thought I felt someone. I’ll be right there! The myrminkia are pissed off!”

Myrminkia, Torres thought. He must mean the giant ants.

The fighting sounds were drawing so near that Torres swore he could “see” with his ears the giant ant heads and legs and even the bobbing antennae lunging at a burly old man with a kind of Japanese sword of glowing metal that sparked blue and green and red every time it struck their carapaces—beheading them, tearing off their mandibles, carving through them so that their vast hulks crashed to the ground, their gaping wounds gushing fountains of hissing acid blood which burned the cave floor.

It took Torres a moment to realize, however, that he was seeing this with his own eyes. An old man dressed like a monk was leaping toward him along a cave which was writhing with gigantic insects. This didn’t seem to phase the man at all, however—he was even laughing! The man was hairy, his black and white beard was enormous, and his bushy eyebrows were vast.

The old man sliced open the tight silk cocoon that bound Torres to the cave wall. Gasping with relief, Torres tumbled onto the ground, as half his muscles were numb. The old man helped him up.

“Thanks,” Torres said.

“Don’t mention it,” the old man said. “I needed the XP anyway. My name’s Dionysios. What’s yours?”

Torres began to say his old name, then stopped himself.

“Alexios,” he said. He wanted to tell Dionysios that he’d spent the whole day looking for him, but the old monk spoke so quickly the high schooler couldn’t get a word in.

“Well, Alexios, it’s nice to meet you, but everything here is kind of fucked up. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Zhayedan fighting techniques, would you?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Alright, this is going to be interesting.”

Dionysios swung his sword around, using it like a torch, as it was glowing with heat. But Torres, as he took in the sights around him, almost wished that he still couldn’t see anything. They were inside an enormous stone amphitheater, the walls around them were covered with gigantic ants, and every single one was watching them. The cave floor, however, was packed with pupating ant larvae—baby ants emerging from white chrysalises, and being tended by the most horrifying nurses Torres had ever seen. At the amphitheater’s far end was the Queen—the size of a train, with a distended belly that was still laying one egg after another with her ovipositor. Warrior ants were taking up positions to defend the Queen and her brood.

“Easy to get into hell,” Dionysios said. “Not so easy getting out.”

Alexios nodded in the direction Dionysios had come from. “Isn’t that the way?”

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“They sealed off the entrance.”

“How do you know?”

“You didn’t notice? The breeze stopped.”

“Oh. So what do we do?”

“Find another way out and hope they haven’t blocked it up.”

“Well, after you, I guess,” Alexios said.

Dionysios licked his thumb and held it into the air, narrowing his thick eyebrows. The light from his katana was fading, and the myrminkia were chirping louder, and coming closer—the metal gleaming in their enormous compound eyes.

Dionysios gestured to the darkness on the left. “I feel like there’s a little breeze coming from there. What do you think?”

Alexios licked his thumb and held it up. He felt nothing.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Alexios said. “Actually, it’s probably better.”

“Alright, then. Let’s go!”

Seizing Alexios’s hand in his massive powerful stony grip, Dionysios ran in the direction he had indicated, holding the katana aloft so he could see. Ants attacked from everywhere, forcing Alexios to throw himself onto the ground while Dionysios dismembered his attackers. The sword rang and hummed in the air, spitting sparks and glowing so brightly now that it had turned white and was difficult to look at—its incandescence illuminating the amphitheater’s far edges. Even the Queen turned her head away and screeched so loudly Alexios covered his ears.

“Fuck you!” he shouted.

“You’re the one who trespassed in their territory,” Dionysios grunted. “They’re just defending themselves.”

“How was I supposed to know?”

“Ignorance is no excuse!”

Dionysios and Alexios worked their way to the edge of the amphitheater. The myrminkia backed off, but still lunged at them, chirping while snapping their mandibles. Dionysios was covered in sweat and gasping for breath. Yet he looked like an older marathon runner who loves exercising so much he can never get enough.

“Can you understand me?” Dionysios said to the giant ants. “We don’t want to fight. We just want to get out of here!”

The myrminkia hissed louder, lunged closer, snapped harder.

Dionysios shrugged at Alexios. “Worth a try. Run!”

Together they sprinted along the tunnel. At first Alexios told himself to slow down so he wouldn’t get ahead of the old man, but he was soon unable to keep up with Dionysios, who was so fast that he was running along the walls, darting out of the way of the stalactites and stalagmites that lay in their path. Behind them, the ants crashed through these obstacles, knocking them aside with their rock-hard exoskeletons.

“How can you run so fast?” Alexios gasped.

“Practice, my boy, practice!” Dionysios yelled.

“Slow down! Don’t leave me behind!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it! I didn’t come down here for nothing!”

Dionysios took Alexios’s hand once more and pulled him up, as the tunnel had started ascending, and a vague blue light was shining everywhere. Soon the tunnel was so steep it was almost vertical. Above their heads, the blue sky shone through an uneven gap in the darkness, and wisps of cloud unraveled in the wind.

Exhausted, Alexios was ready to give up. Though he kept urging his body on, he lacked the stamina to continue—even if he’d gained enough XP to level up to Apprentice Runner (4/10). This gave him the joy of a second wind which, in turn, petered out. But Dionysios was still pulling him—still leaping off the walls so nimbly Alexios almost thought that invisible wires were carrying the old monk. But Alexios needed to stop. He couldn’t continue. The voice was warning that his stamina was almost empty, at which point his health would decline.

“You have to go on without me,” he said.

“We never leave comrades behind,” Dionysios said. “Stop me if I asked you this before, but do you know anything about being a Zhayedan warrior?”

You asked me that before. Alexios shook his head. “Nope.”

“Well, no time to learn like the present!” Dionysios grunted as he brandished his sword at a myrminki which had gotten too close.

Above them, meanwhile, giant ants were looking down from the cave exit.

“They’ll try to seal us in again,” Dionysios said. “We killed a whole lot of these motherfuckers, so I see where they’re coming from. There’s no time. Listen. I need you to do something.”

“What?” Alexios gasped, sweat flying from his lips.

“I can’t teach you much in the way of theory,” Dionysios said, batting several pairs of lunging mandibles away. “Basically, there’s a bunch of these smart motherfuckers who figured out how to increase your luck, your divine favor, your power—it’s called farr. With enough knowledge and practice, anyone can use it.”

“Use it to do what?” Alexios said.

“Well, for one—get your ass out of this cave.”

At the cave mouth above, ants were knocking boulders down, and these crashed against the walls and tumbled toward them. Dionysios and Alexios needed to retreat to the sharp body parts swarming in the darkness at their backs. The humans winced, shut their eyes, and turned away as boulders exploded on the cave floor, shattering into shards and slivers that hurtled through the air.

“See the contradiction inherent to existence,” Dionysios said. “The interconnected nature of everything—the cycles of internal contradiction within external contradiction, everything constantly moving and changing.”

Sounds like hippy shit, Alexios thought.

He took some deep breaths. “Nothing’s happening.”

“Alright, it looks like I’m going to have to do the heavy lifting here.”

Dionysios seized his hand once more, but this time Alexios almost jerked his hand back. It was like touching a live electrical cable. Energy surged in his veins and almost boiled his blood. At the same time, he felt like he could do anything.

Farr percentage is at maximum, the voice said.

Dionysios yanked Alexios toward the cave mouth and leaped back and forth along the tunnel walls, dodging the falling boulders or slicing them with his screaming katana. The light in the metal had grown so bright that it was blinding like the sun, and even the ants at the top of the cave were backing off. Soon Dionysios had pulled him out of the cave. Together they were leaping across the mountaintops and soaring over the canyons with the wind in their faces—hurtling toward a little brick house built against Mount Ida’s flanks.