No sooner had everything turned to white that I was blinking the sunlight out of my eyes.

I was on my back, squinting up at a sky that was about to strike noon, eyes flinching automatically in an attempt to protect themselves from the harshness of the sun.

Once the initial haze passed, I stood with a groan, rubbed the bright spots from my sight, dusted myself off, and scanned my surroundings. I was in a field of tall grass. Collapsed buildings of brick and cement sheet littered the area, overrun by ivies and creepers so that they looked like they ornamented the greenery rather than the other way around. In the distance was dense forest, the peaks of trees climbing high. Beyond that, a wall towered into the sky, hazy in the distance, that hooked around and away from me.

Giving my head a shake, I decided it was time to stop dawdling. If I stayed too long, I was guaranteed to be found by a demon. Depending on which Ring I’d been dumped in they might just kill me, or something much worse—

A popup invaded my sight again, preventing me from watching my surroundings. Frustrated, I read quickly but not for long, as the first line said more than enough: Ring of Betrayal. With a quick scan I realised that it was exactly the same as the popup boxes they showed when the Culling was televised. No need to read the lengthy rules list; I knew them inside out. And I was seething.

Collect points, pay to get to the next Ring, six days. That was it. The Ring of Betrayal was stupidly simple, except for the fact that hardly any demon could get enough points to pass on their own, which forced alliances. Therefore, staying low was not an option. I needed to hunt, I needed allies, and aside from Berlin, those allies would all be demons. I needed a weapon. Now. Or I’d be defenceless, easy prey, and as good as dead.

I started at a steady pace, heading for the nearest ruined building. I wanted to run, but I had no idea what threats were lurking out here. One such oddity that stood out to me was that there were occasional patches where the grass was missing. Not knowing why, I found it best to go slowly and keep my eyes on those spots. Furthermore, running would tire me out faster, and if I happened to be attacked when I was breathless, weaponless, and clueless, I’d be dead. If I didn’t keep my head on a swivel, I was good as dead. So many tiny problems to account for, so many dumb mistakes I could make, all complicating an act as simple as walking.

The first of the ruins came upon me. An old house, probably from before the demons first invaded Earth, judging by the mixture of rotted materials lying about. Wood, brick, tiles, cement; all those materials would have made it look really pretty back in its day but no longer fit the brutalist nature of demonic architecture.

I noticed something odd about the ruins, though. There were strange lines carved into it, like something had come through and bored out rivulets in brick and wood alike before disappearing into the grass. Strange, I thought, but again I figured it was consequence of the demon invasion.

After kicking the rubble around for a few minutes, I found nothing usable. I considered picking up a rock which I could use to smash a demon’s head in if need be, but for its weight and the power it provided? Not worth it. Completely outclassed by the usual weapons given out in the Culling.

In every Ring there are ways to collect weapons, and they vary in each place. There is always the usual method of eliminating another participant and stealing their gear but, unless you are a powerful demon, that’s difficult without a weapon. Even for a strong demon, if the other party has a weapon it would still be too risky. Good items tip the scales significantly.

You can’t just use any item, of course. A normal gun wouldn’t do much to a demon. What you need is a Hellforged item, a rabdos.

The Ring of Betrayal is as simple as it gets: look around, pick it up. If it bites, kill it. The administrators leave rabdoses lying around in convenient locations, meaning you never have to sift through, in this case, the long grass to find it.

I moved on, keeping my head on a swivel, pulse thumping in my ears despite maintaining a slow and steady pace. Trying not to go too fast so I didn’t make too much noise. Trying not to go too slow so that I could get—

My foot caught on something soft and heavy. I looked down and saw the toe of my black dress shoe stubbed into half a fox. As in, it was only the upper half. I had no idea what had happened to the rest of it, but its rear had been shorn off so cleanly that its torso ended in a smooth, curved line, from where its entrails emerged onto the dirt. It didn’t stink. It had barely begun to rot. A fresh kill.

Breath caught in my throat. My eyes darted round. My body was still. I’d come across the fox too late, thanks to the fact there were no flies anywhere to be seen. I’d been wasting seconds looking for a weapon when danger had been lurking about. Gritting teeth, I shaded my eyes and squinted into the distance, searching, looking for any trace of—shit!

Starting from the spots where grass was missing, lines were beginning to form. Sinuous streaks carved themselves into the field, like the grass was being clawed away by long, invisible claws. And the furrows were getting closer.

I whipped round to look for similar furrows, trying to assess the situation. It was just my luck that the entire field was scarring up, and those furrows were coming towards me.

I knew what they were before I even saw them. Digressers. Demonic beings of various size and shape that could never quite become demons, whose only purpose is to hunt, eat, and consume as all creatures did. The problem is, they never get full, because neither demons nor digressers need to eat. These things do nothing but kill.

This was exactly the sort of thing I’d been dreading. No weapon, no ally, and stuck in the middle of nowhere with things all around that wanted me dead. I panicked. The fuck else was I meant to do?

But somewhere in that hyperventilation, my hand slipped to the locket under my shirt and it brought calm, certainty. There was one thing I could do. Run.

Spinning wildly, I searched out each furrow, each digresser. Behind me, beside me, in front. There were at least ten of them, coming from every direction save one. The forest. Throwing caution aside, I bolted.

I tore through the grass, ripping blades from their stems in my rampage. As soon as I’d started running, the digressers picked up the pace. I kept glancing around, seeking out any digressers that were coming in from the sides. Good thing I did because the grass just to my left started disappearing out of nowhere. It didn’t look like it was being trampled like what I was doing. Rather, one second the grass was there, the next it wasn’t. I swerved to avoid it, then dodged to the side again as grass disappeared ten metres ahead.

As I swerved I caught sight of… something. It was dark as ink, and the length of its body kept distorting like someone was stroking black paint across the earth over and over. It didn’t slither towards me so much as it redrew itself on a spot nearer to me. Where its tail had once been remained barren earth, like reality had been drawn over then erased.

I couldn’t sidestep quickly enough. The digresser coiled into a black ball then lunged out of the grass. It’s mouth, or whatever passed for one, opened up to reveal emptiness.

“Shit!”

I dived forwards and it whizzed right over me. It didn’t make a sound. Not even the grass rustled. Whenever its long sinuous body touched the grass, the blades ceased to exist, not having a chance to make noise in a world it no longer belonged to. I realised if it touched me, my body would probably just disappear from reality in the same way. I scrambled up and kept running.

The grass evaporated around me. More and more digressers came. I zig-zagged through the field, doing everything I could to maintain a safe distance from the digressers. The constant detours made it slow progress to the forest, but soon the trees grew less sparse and the grass was replaced with undergrowth.

If the grass had been difficult to run through, this was much worse. Ferns popped up all over the place which I had to weave between. I was going far slower than before. I swivelled to look behind me and could see close to twenty furrows inching closer. There were less digressers here, but at this rate they’d catch me sooner. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

As I continued my endless struggle, another digresser crept up from the side. I decided to take a risk. I slowed my pace and kept my eyes on it. The squiggly drew closer and closer, until it was just a couple metres away from me. It stopped abruptly, then coiled in on itself. I gritted my teeth and commanded my legs to move like it was their last run.

The digresser unfurled and soared silently though the air. But rather than aiming at me, it lunged at where I would have been if I’d maintained my previous pace, sailing right behind me.

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I couldn’t help but wheeze a laugh. They were stupid, alright. Most digressers are. They just follow whatever programmed instincts they’d managed to acquire while stewing in the flames of Hell. Once the snake-like digressers thought to dive, they didn’t bother to change direction.

The stupid thing slammed into a tree, then kept going until it was partway through it. The digresser thrashed as its body carved downwards through the trunk. My laughter caught in my throat when the tree creaked and groaned. Then with a loud snap it started falling. Towards me.

“Shit shit shit!”

The thing was enormous and had branches sticking out everywhere. I had enough time to realise that dodging sideways would probably get me caught by a limb. No choice. I had to run faster. My lungs weren’t too happy but I’d rather them hate me than be dead.

The tree came down, down, creaking and moaning and rustling behind me. I didn’t bother looking back. If it hit me, it hit me. Leaves whistled close to my ears. Seeds trickled onto my shoulders. Then a branch clipped my arm, but it was small and bent back on impact. Finally, it came down, its tallest branch hitting the shrubs behind me, and then all went quiet. I’d made it somehow. No time to celebrate, only to run, and hope.

I ran forever. My lungs were on fire; I was breathing nothing but desperation. My legs felt like iron, dragging me closer to death. Every now and then I’d catch a furrow approaching and slowed to bait out the lunge. If it weren’t for the fact that I ran marathons on the regular and had once run a four-minute mile, I was pretty certain I’d have been long dead.

Nothing made sense anymore besides running and dodging. That was why I didn’t realise I’d burst out of the forest until I was carving through long grass again, flying towards the remains of a pre-Invasion town. There were more missing patches of grass here as well, of course. The digressers preferred the grass. Which meant there were just as many in front of me as behind. In other words, I couldn’t outrun them.

I stumbled to a halt and caught my breath. That was it. Goodbye to Algier. Twenty-six years old, no wife, a couple of bad relationships, three jobs that I’d hated equally, and about to die maybe an hour into the Culling. I figured that if death was certain, there was no point going out struggling.

Or so I tried to convince myself. A glint caught my eye in the distance, and when I squinted at it I could make out something metallic within an exposed concrete stairwell. Whatever building it had once serviced was rubble around it.

I knew it was futile. I was too tired to fight one, let alone, what, thirty, forty digressers? But there was a stubborn part of me that urged me on. There was a chance. There was always a chance. So why not try?

The grass in front was already disappearing. They were coming for me. The first one reached within a couple metres of me and I didn’t need to see the squiggly thing compress to know there was a lunge approaching. The undercooked demons were predictable. I ducked sideways and black ink glitched past. No sooner had it landed than it thrashed, reoriented itself, then slithered after me.

I steeled my resolved and ran. And so, the dance began. Dodging, zig-zagging, swerving every way. Digressers lunging from every side. As one missed me, I’d recollect myself to find another right in front of me. I’d have screamed if I had any air left in my lungs. That was the only thing that saved me from shouting out my desperate position to a demon.

Sluggishly, gasping for air, I clawed my way to the exposed stairwell. All that was left of it was a stairwell that went up a few flights, overgrown rubble forming a hill around it, and a concrete slab in the middle that had been weathered smooth. Atop it protruded the handle of a blade.

The climb up the mound was a struggle, but to my luck the digressers struggled more. Their bodies kept erasing the rubble so every time they got up a little ways they’d fall through and have to climb back up from the holes they carved for themselves. It gave me the few precious seconds I needed to throw myself onto the slab, wrap a hand around the blade, and yank with every fleeting bit of strength I had remaining.

It came out effortlessly. Because it wasn’t that long or stuck in too deep for that matter. From tip to hilt, it was as long as my forearm and looked pretty blunt. I held the blade—the knife—up to my face, stared at the thing, and slowly accepted my death.

To add insult to injury, another popup was shoved in my face.

Knife

Class 3-S

What were you expecting? It’s just a knife and always will be.

Yep. Class 3—general use rabdoses. This thing wasn’t even considered a weapon. Furthermore, the S stood for a Stoic type rabdos, meaning its effect was passive rather than activated. And it wasn’t fucking doing anything!

It was at that point that I’d made the decision to kill as many of the squiggly things as I could before they turned me into a sponge. I was done. I’d used everything I had to get up on this rock and grab a useless knife. The digressers were all around me and the hill was gradually being carved out. Soon they’d get close enough to lunge. A few I could probably dodge and dice up, but there were at least fifty of them now.

The first managed to step its way up the mound of rubble and was within lunging distance. I pivoted, waited for it to recoil, then dashed to the side. As it flew past I hacked down at it. The problem was, I didn’t want to risk touching it so I held back. The blade only nicked it.

When it hit the mound it writhed and started falling through. A thin stream of smog spirted out from where I’d cut. It wasn’t a serious injury. It didn’t writhe because it was injured—digressers felt no pain, as far as I was aware—but because it was struggling to right itself as the ground kept disappearing beneath it.

Taking the opportunity, I lunged down and stabbed at its tail. The hole restrained most of its movements, so I managed to stab it without issue. The knife went in easily and at once it stopped writhing. It raised its maw to the sky in imitation of a dying snake, but rather than a hiss protruding, everything went quiet, like I’d stuffed earphones over my ears. The wind didn’t whistle, the grass didn’t rush and shake, the trees didn’t shiver, and my panting sounded hollow in my ears.

Then, eventually, the digresser faded into a black mist that was carried off by the wind.

No time to celebrate, not that I was exactly impressed with killing one digresser. The rubble had done half the work for me, so it was nothing to be proud of. I prepared for the next lunge.

Two. Three. Four. All taken out the same way. I let them leap, let them trap themselves, then stabbed. Then five and six leaped at the same time. Desperate, I slashed one mid air and it exploded into smoke. I pivoted and finished off the other while it tried to get free. If running was hard, fighting was even worse. Everything was a blur. Just dodge and stab, dodge and stab.

Looking up, I realised it was no good. They were destroying every bit of human-made construction their inconsistent bodies touched; staying on top of the slab was quickly getting me surrounded. Nearly ten had made it up the hill and were close to jumping at me. I needed to thin them out. I needed to move to higher ground, onto the next floor of the stairwell, to make it harder for them to climb.

In my fatigued state, I made the stupid decision to leap at the stairwell. I landed hard against the railing, which knocked whatever air remained in my lungs. As I was struggling up, a digresser leapt up at me. I swung my legs away from it, nearly falling in the process. I didn’t see the second approach from the other side until it was too late.

It clipped my leg, or more like it’s glitchy form shifted as it flew and just happened to graze my leg. It left a shallow red gash which didn’t hurt or bleed at first, like a chunk of my body was just gone. Then my body seemed to catch on a second later and decided to spew out blood and radiate pain. Like, here’s your wound, you pathetic human. If this doesn’t kill you then the infection probably will.

No time to scream, though. I clutched my knife tightly and threw myself over the rail. The digressers changed course and started squiggling their way up the stairs.

Thinned out, I was able to bait them into leaping up one at a time and slamming into the wall. Each time they hit the wall they poked a hole in it and slowed as their bodies were partially caught, giving me an easy swing at their tails. One thrashed hard as it carved a line down the wall, and I reeled back as it almost clipped me. Cursing, I came back in to slash it but spotted another climbing up, recoiling and ready to strike.

I backed off and moved to the next flight. It turned out the digressers couldn’t carve through steel. After they had climbed up the stairs, they’d destroyed most of the concrete and exposed the rebar, which now acted as a ladder that they writhed up. And it wasn’t just one or two: the whole fucking field had decided to crawl up that one pathway, sliding their way over each other in a black glitching mass.

I managed to slice up one before the horde got dangerously close. I backed up another flight, slashing and hacking every time they got close. I still don’t know how I managed not to clip one with my hand and lose a finger or two, but I was dicing the squigglies up mid air like a samurai.

It was when I got to the second last flight that I realised how screwed I was. On the verge of collapse, moving sluggishly, facing off a horde that seemed to grow by the minute, and I was almost out of room to flee. For the twentieth time that day I accepted my death.

That was when I glimpsed something leaping above me, rising up from its hiding spot on the stairwell. It hopped onto the top of the broken wall and gripped on with taloned feet. Two golden eyes stared at its inky prey. It raised a knobbly wooden spear, whose tip was nothing but a point carved from the shaft. With one arm pointed forward, the demon aimed, then threw.

The spear blurred down and stuck into the concrete wall with a thunk. As though coming alive, its wooden shaft undulated, then burst into a thousand thorns. The wooden spikes didn’t stretch out in one direction. Rather, they twisted at sharp angles, hunting down and piercing through every digresser around it. In a flash, the spikes had grown from the javelin’s shaft until the entire bottom floor of the ruined building was filled with an enormous bramble. And then they grew some more, upwards.

The spikes burst through concrete floors, through walls, like a tree rapidly taking root, displacing everything by force, creaking and cracking like a thousand falling trees. And the thorns kept climbing.

I leapt back, as far away from the centre of the brambles as I could manage, forgetting there was a digresser right in front of me. My back hit the wall. The digresser lunged. At that same moment, a bramble climbed the stairs, turned its sharp tip to face me as though seeking out my blood, and shot straight for my eyes.

My vision was obscured by a gaping void, the digresser’s mouth. Then light burst through the middle as a thorn pierced the digresser’s head. The digresser exploded into mist, but the thorn kept approaching. It covered my vision and kept approaching.

It stopped right before my eye. One more centimetre and I’d have gone blind.

My back stayed pressed to the wall. My chest heaved rapidly as I gasped to catch my breath. As though reluctant to give up on my blood, the bramble shrunk back, creaking and groaning, and slowly, slowly slid down the stairs. The bramble ball at the bottom of the stairwell unwound itself, protesting its return to spear form with a sound like dozens of branches snapping underfoot.

The demon perched atop the wall considered me with the keen eyes of an eagle.

“Are you okay, Algier?” Toll asked.

I could barely breathe.

“Couldn’t… be… better,” I lied, trying not to piss my pants.