So the sim was all a lie. No oversize Jackal this time. They made Beth into a giant monster for me to kill.

"And it seems... that Lori now has to deal with a close friend! Unbelievable!" belts Jamia.

How the fuck did you shit heads find my stuff? And now they've known about this for how long?

Now it's really time to quit. I look back to see the van already gone. There's nowhere to just disappear in the arena of salt flats and fog, just like the place they took me last Wednesday.

Well, this won't be the first beloved thing I had to kill to save myself.

The giant monster Beth is surrounded by around 50 Jackals. I don't even know how I'm going to manage this.

Beth roars, and swings a paw at me, just like in the sim. I try to jump at her right arm, only to feel the suit's joints freeze. "Hydraulic failure", the HUD says.

I struggle to move the suit on my own strength and fail to dodge the paw in time.

"That's it, Lori," I mutter to myself, not even bothering to move away. "It's your time."

That is, until I find my entire right side and head hitting my bedroom floor. I groan at the realization.

I'm almost disappointed it wasn't real.

After two hours of lying in bed like a worthless piece of shit, I give up on trying to sleep. Apparently during the nightmare I tore Beth's head off. White fiber is all over my bed. The beserk Lori also tore out her left button eye- the only eye left.

Now I feel something crush my chest, lungs, heart, entire abdomen, and ribs. I stare in horror of my own two hands.

Good job, you did it again.

I feel a twitch in my arms. One force is pulling my arms in one direction to tear Beth up even more. The other force is pushing me to sit and keep my hands down. The veins in my arms are trying to burst out of my skin.

Why did I do that?

All I felt was pain, all over, from my bones to my skin, and then I hurt myself more.

Who was I really tearing the head off of?

Clearly not Beth. Beth was only kind to me.

Why did you kill me, Lori?

I don't know.

What did I do to you?

You loved me and were kind to me. And for that I punished you.

"Lori! The fuck is the matter now?"

Adel is grabbing me by my shoulders. Beth's pieces are covered in black splats. Looks like I forgot to take off my makeup from last night and now it's running off my face with my tears. I've been sobbing for minutes. There's dents and cracks in the plaster walls around me.

"Lori!"

Why did you do that to me?

"Lori!"

Finally, a large, muscular hand grabs my jaw and Adel begins staring me in the eye, veins bulging from her neck, breathing like an angry bull.

"What the fuck is your problem here?"

Beth's remains are still strewn across the bed, Adel staring at it all in horror.

"Christ, Lori, get a grip!" she shouts, releasing me and collecting Beth's pieces and stuffing into her arms.

Suddenly, I decided to growl, chase down, and tackle her, knocking Beth's pieces all over the floor, and apparently I hit Adel hard enough to knock her off stance.

After a flurry of arms, hands, and my own hair whipping both of our faces, Adel grips both of my wrists together behind my back with one hand, holding my face to the floor in a full Nelson.

"Why?" Adel groans. "Nothing about you is making sense lately."

"I'm sorry, Adel. I have no idea. I woke up from another nightmare, and now here we are."

After Adel waits a few seconds before releasing me, I pick up Beth's head and body from the floor and start crying again.

She takes a long sigh and carries my shoulder, as I walk next to her, head hung in pity. "Come on."

In the hangar, on her workbench, her enormous fingers were dexterous enough to stitch Beth's pieces back together in 30 or so minutes.

"Showtime in 2 hours. We're talking to the shrink-bot after the show. I got done early, so just chill out." She hands Beth to me, with a small metal washer in place of her missing eye, now more stitches than some kind of horror villain. "Here's your friend. Don't kill him this time, please."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"It's a she," I mumble, head still hung. "But thank you."

~~

"Think you screwed your head back on in time?" Adel says over Earworm.

"Is it ever?"

"Fair enough," she sighs. "You seem ready, have fun."

"Thanks, pal."

Today a box truck took me to some kind of low density forest full of rotting tree stumps, partially cloudy; the scenario is about 1 to 1 with the simulations, except not in a desert.

"Welcome, and thank you grandly for your attendance and viewership! I'm your host, Jamia Janessen! And in today's installment of our malicious maiden's escapades, we are facing her off with a foe far larger than her..."

I don't even bother to wave this time.

"...an unbelievable beast found in the wild insanity outside our grand Fence, whom the Defense Force has named Olga!"

No way this thing exists in the wild. This has to be some EVAcorp science project gone wrong.

I charge forward as Jamia blabbers on, but only a few steps before my foot falls through a pile of dried sticks and leaves. I yank it back to see the amalgamation of dead foliage come back out with my foot, and kick it all loose to find a Jackal nursing a bunch of pups, lined up under her abdomen. The mommy slowly emerges and starts growling at me.

"Oh, look, the Lori Jackal," I mutter, slowly stepping backwards. "A bunch of pups she wanted, and no father around."

The mother snaps at me, strafing side by side, trying to fool me. I stand with one foot and fist forward. As she charges towards me, I kangaroo kick and send her back a few meters, and then land after a backflip.

"Hate to break apart your family," I mutter, "but it was your choice."

She charges again, missing a few teeth and dripping blood from her mouth. I roundhouse kick her to the side, fire a FMGH to reel her in, kick her to the ground, and point my left cannon at her head.

"Sorry," the cannon obliterates her head to a red mush. Shrapnel dusts my suit, and the body slowly twitches on its way to hell.

The blind pups behind us wiggle helplessly.

I remove a grenade from my launcher and drop one in the nest, running away and detonating it behind my back, a few meters away. The audio feed blasts a mixture of cheers and booing from the audience.

"I too wish I was a mom. But not like that."

Olga roars, trying to assess me as I zig-zag across the field. Rotting stumps disintegrate into mulch under the sheer mass of the suit's legs. Her left paw swings at me, thus now I have to mirror my procedure from the simulation.

About 30 regular Jackals flank Olga. I jump using one of their heads as a stepping stone, make it across the crowd, and keep running. 600 meters to go.

A couple of smaller Jackals dare to get in my way to Olga's right arm, which I swat away with one hand. Due to this, I could not manage to hit Olga with the autocannon fire on her belly, so I just barely made it to her right arm, make another jump, and latch on, as a few more inspired Jackals climb behind me. Olga tries to scratch me off with her rear right leg, which I then have to dodge and move towards the inside of the arm.

Scratching against the armor, one Jackal claw rips a few strands from my exposed ponytail. I angrily swat two more away with my left arm, then release the grip on my right to fire the .50cal at a few others.

"Move up, move up, you can't get them all," Adel hurriedly chimes.

I stomp on the heads of a few and try my damnedest to beat them up Olga's arm. They all dodge Olga's scratching foot, and I make it to her armpit, firing down again to keep the Jackals below away.

Olga's armpit is soft and fleshy, causing my claws to slash and rip rather than grip for my climb to her neck. I shoot an FMGH onto a breastplate of chitin at her sternum, only praying she won't decide to lay down on top of me.

The hook fails to connect and I reel it back in. I then fire my right FMGH onto her shoulder, and fire another, only while a Jackal tries to grab my left foot right as I try to reel myself up. I kick it off with my right foot, and start reeling, only to see my right hook come off. I re-fire, and then the same happens to the left hook. As more Jackals try to grab my feet, I Rabbit-Kick them, using their inertia to move me along a bump at a time, while skidding about on the arm-shoulder area, clawing with my hands as the FMGH reloads its propeller blanks.

Olga swats her right shoulder with her left paw. I get launched at least 5 meters from the surface, hanging by the FMGH ropes, and touch the shoulder on my feet, kicking another Jackal down.

"God damn it, I need bigger hooks!" I scream to anyone who bothers to listen.

"Forget the hooks. Just crawl. You make it quick, the flesh won't break off in time."

I scurry up the surface like a spider, feeling the slop of the sinew and blood under my claws. The lactate starts to build up in my arms and legs, and my heart begins to pound.

"And you questioned the need for your fitness," Adel quips. "Okay, now you're on the shoulder. Plant the charges."

"I only have three."

"Grenades?"

"Three."

"Blow a hole and plant the grenades there."

Olga roars and tries to shake me off like water on her back. I sink my claws in deeper, and must have hit an artery, with the blood splashing on my helmet and obstructing most of my view. I try to shake it off, to no avail.

"Start running opposite to Olga's movement."

I start zig-zagging across Olga's back. Jamia is mumbling something over the announcements, but I cannot comprehend. I try shooting a carveout in the back of Olga's neck, toss one H-charge, then two more, and frantically toss three of my grenades, then falling off the neck. I turn away as I tumble down, dizzy from the exertion and spinning.

H-charge, abracadabra, it blows up early, with a grenade detonating a bit closer than I expected. I start spinning as I continue the fall, shielding my head in my arms, and landing on my elbow. My helmet clangs against the neckbrace, and I recoil from a sprain running through my shoulder and neck.

I barely muster the strength to get back up, with a light shower of blood. Quiet cheers come from the audio feed.

"Let Olga bleed. She's done, you blew it up just close enough to the spinal cord," Adel applauses. "You did it, Lori. You did your best, better than anyone would have."

"...and in spite of more unforeseen mishaps, Lorianne is once again victorious!" Jamia belts, as the applause continues.

"Whatever. Ach," I moan, still in pain, falling to my knees.

~~

Adel blasts all the blood off with the pressure washer while I sit on a bench with a liquid CO2 cooling pad. The cold hurts almost as badly as the sprain.

A glass of carbonated limeade appears above my face.

"Come on, drink up, you deserve it," Adel shouts over the pressure washer while the bot waits for me to grab the glass.

I put my head back down.

Adel stops washing, and then I guess she hands it off to a bot to continue the job. She sits down on the bench next to me. "I don't care what you think, that was awesome. You kicked ass today, and I'm so fucking proud of you."

I try getting up, before stumbling in dizziness. "Hey, chill out." I glance at her, then reluctantly grasp the beverage, hand shaking.

"Hope this doesn't make your neck hurt, but oh, you're such a badass," she hugs me at my waist, avoiding my shoulder, and patting me at my sternum.

I look down at my limbs. Veins still bulge from my hands, forearms, and thighs.

After a gulp, I mutter, "Still need shrink?"

She looks at me for a couple seconds, then shrugs.