The moment after Nathan’s sword left his hand, two things happened in quick succession. First, he took three lethal blows; then, he killed his target.

The order of these, and their technical specifics, were very important. If he had killed his target before receiving those blows, the Antagonist—for so he’d suddenly come to think of the androgynous figure, and so had his visor labeled them—would have been out of line to strike him. Equally, it was critical in many ways that they had been lethal blows, rather than fatal.

Three lethal blows left his throat crushed, his lungs collapsed, and his stomach internally hemorrhaging blood. But none of it killed him in the seconds before the sword that had once been Tiffany’s removed the head of the fifty-first-placed contestant in the games, and so Nathan did not, in fact, die.

Not that his death would have been the end of the matter for him. But the Antagonist had chosen not to be the one to kill him for reasons both considered and inherited, and broken and battered he staggered as nanites flooded his system and resuscitated him. They dove into the soft tissue of his throat and the bones of his neck, into the cartilage and connective tissue, into the veins and arteries of a large portion of his body. They restored him to a state that was no longer dying, and then they dove back in.

Eyestrain. Hearing damage. Damage to his teeth from having ground them, sprained and strained muscles. Joints over-stressed, tendons mistreated, microfractures in bones, and bacteria and viruses alike in cuts and scrapes. Poisons and toxins, both physical and metaphysical—a curseshard of geometrical nature was busily converting its surroundings, one molecule at a time, to something more cubist than was healthy for a human body. One of his fingernails had broken, and dust itched its way into the barest sliver of that wound.

Swarming through his body, that host of nanites treated every condition and ill. And not only the ones which postdated his entry into the deathgame which was the tournament—the microfracture in his hip from a bad fall while skiing, the wrist he’d injured windsurfing which had never quite healed right, and a vast array of microplastics, all of these and more were rectified.

This was, of course, ludicrous. There cannot be a biological or mechanical system which can infiltrate a cell, infiltrate a nucleus, and from there extract a microplasticine target which had been there since a childhood which had the occasional moment spent molding soft, shapeable clay. Even farther be it that such a system would have perfect precision, would have only negligible waste heat, would act swiftly and reliably… a thousand and eighteen reasons for its impossibility present itself. Nanites, these nanites, nanomachines which can serve to cure the ills he had suffered in past and further-past, have never existed and shall never exist upon the face of the Earth.

Of course, Nathan is, at this point in his narrative, not upon the face of the Earth. He stands, or his circumstances as described, collapses somewhere which is not at all the surface of the planet he was born on or possessed of any adjacency thereof. And on the planet Gehenna, where in this particular universe all deathgames are held by intergalactic covenant and agreement, there are nanites which meet that description—they work by means both metaphysical and mechanical, and they draw their behavior and power and guidance from great enchantments of unutterable complexity.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

All of this is to say, reader, that he was healed as much by magic as by machines, and restored to a haleness which he had never been possessed of during his previous years of life.

When he came back to full awareness from his momentary stupor of shock, pain, agony, and wretched misery, Nathan took a deep breath and prepared to look around curiously. He took another breath, and then another, as if—and indeed, he was—reminding himself that he possessed the capacity for breathing and was not at that moment dying. And then he took that look around, walked over to the nearest chair, and sat down.

The field of battle had been turned, almost immediately, into an impromptu afterparty for the show; which is to say, an afterparty for the time in which the contestants had been striving their not-precisely-utmost to kill one another, for though there were few official rules there were many guidelines and principles. Streamers hung in the air, proclaiming that this area of the field held beverages of all sorts; that area was where food could be held; therapy and companionship, of the non-sexual variety, were across the way; and these were but a few of the many regions.

And that is when our distracted and somewhat distressed protagonist realized that he was reading the signs, rather than a translation of them being displayed through his living visor.

“Huh,” he said eloquently, and then added, “I guess that’s not you anymore.”

“Oh hey, you’re awake again. That was… only middlingly slow.”

Nathan turned to face the speaker, tilting his head to the side. “How long?”

The newtman—for that is what he appeared to Nathan to be, if only imperfectly like a newt, and appearing as close as he did only because of how imprecise Nathan’s memory was—chuckled softly. “Eight minutes and three seconds. Welcome to Gehenna, kid. Name’s Newt, I’m a wizard who works for the Games.”

“Thanks, Newt. Nice to meet you! Call me Nathan. I’m a human who’s totally out of my depth.”

“Pleasure, Nathan. So, first time, yeah? How’d you come by here and your you-know-what, anyway?”

“A mysterious awesome-looking chick in a mech invoked my never-spoken secret,” the Earther said with a shrug. “So I got in her mech and she jumped through a portal just as something blew up behind us, which I think means she saved my life? And then I was falling into here.”

“So… time-traveling version of yourself?”

Nathan snorted, which was the correct response to the notion of time travel—such a thing was utterly impossible, and this was widely known to everyone in the broader multiverse.

“Don’t be absurd,” a new voice chimed in, a narrow-faced woman whose build might have been wiry if she weren’t in a broad suit of power armor. “Time travel is impossible. Everyone in the broader multiverse knows that. Samantha ‘Hooligan’ Smith, felon-conscript and contestant, call me Sam. I’d shake your hand, but they didn’t give my armor a governor that can actually do that safely.”

Nathan held out his hand, living metal flowing down to it to form a gauntlet. “A pleasure to meet you, Sam.”

She shook his hand, eyes going wide. “Marry me.”

“No.” He smirked. “But we can hold hands while I walk around like a tourist.”

“I don’t care if this is embarrassing,” Sam muttered. “I’m taking you up on that. Where are we going first?”

“Food,” Nathan and Newt said in firm unison, and in the shared laughter of the three of them it became prophecy.