A stranger fled across the ravaged grounds of the arena, and two lunatic gunslingers followed him.
Reader, here is how this story arc could have ended: in death. Nathan could have lost himself in conversation with the announcers, or distracted himself by bantering with amazonian demihuman hunters.
Instead, this story arc will end in… well, in death. But it will not be for some chapters yet.
The angles and lines highlighted in Nathan’s field of view, estimations of arc and distance, firmed up from their previous fuzziness as he ran. He passed the point of minimal safety without slowing down, running through to the safe zone, or at least what his display was describing as a safe zone for the moment. He ran a hundred feet further, enough to comfortably pull the women chasing him into the safe zone as well, and then stopped.
Leaning against the wall of the arena, he breathed deeply and stretched his right calf, calming an incipient cramp.
“Hey,” a voice growled behind him, though the words themselves were intelligible only in written form, “what the hell was that? Why were you running—”
The leonine woman’s voice was interrupted by a complete void of sound. All perception dropped out of the world for everyone within the arena, though it would turn out that the spectators and recording equipment were sufficiently shielded to avoid that fate. The negabomb, weaponized unreality turned into artillery form, followed up the unsound-and-unsight burst with a vacuum that dragged on the three people who’d just stopped fleeing. And for a moment, all they could do was dig their heels in to resist the physical pressure and reiterate to themselves their inherent understanding of the Self in order to avoid being rent into whatever quantum of soulstuff might exist.
It was not the longest three and seven-tenths seconds of Nathan’s life. That descriptor remained dedicated to the moment when he realized that he was giving a televised graduation speech about the negligence and abuses both physical and emotional of the British-style boarding school system and his school in particular after factual truth had stopped being an absolute defense against defamation. It being only the second longest such span of time, he was adequately equipped to resist the effects and remain himself afterwards.
The negabomb’s negavoid exploded after those long seconds, sending the two strangers staggering as the direction and force of their bracing became suddenly counterproductive. Forewarned by his visor-shaped friend, Nathan merely sank down into a semi-controlled squat and felt the burn of it deep in five distinct muscles which he thought of only as his glutes.
And then, in the sudden silence—rather than soundlessnes—of the explosion, he stopped and surveyed the area once more.
Reader, let it be known: the ground they stood on had, prior to his flight and bare survival, been less plain than it was after. He could infer that from the lashing grasses that began hundreds of feet away from where he stood, from the shattered sculptures whose remaining pieces still rose into the sky and the doors into the ground. There were buildings in a riot of colors, most of them broken into rubble, and the ruins of not only two great fortresses but also an array of lesser fortifications.
Some of those even still stood, with brightly sparking blue shields steadying in the sudden moment of peace.
That was the ground hundreds of feet away from him. But for a thousand feet in every direction from the epicenter of the explosion, every detail and speck of matter above the perfectly level ground had been scoured from existence.
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Footsteps slapping dully against the featureless terrain he was standing on alerted Nathan to incoming company in the form of the two strangers who’d chased him. He assessed them more carefully now that he was no longer in a hurry, now that the visor was no longer giving him ballistic arcs to be wary of and a time-till-impact:
* One (1) lupine male, just over five feet tall and slender. Lightly furred in short, rippling waves of black and gray, he seemed human in almost every visible regard other than the fur and tail, allowing that the claws and fangs were obviously cybernetic and might have been implanted, and his feet were ensconced in sturdy boots rather than visible. He wore a loose bodysuit and helmet, charcoal-colored with glinting reds that were invisible when looking directly at them—in the corner of the eye, they looked like bloodstains.
* One (1) leonine female, just under six feet tall and rippling in muscles. She wore a skintight, blue bodysuit with diagonal purple stripes, which covered her from mid-thigh to mid-chest; her long red hair danced in a wind which failed to manifest in any other way, and which Nathan incorrectly attributed to additional cybernetic enhancements. Her fur was a rich yellow-amber and her skin was bronzed with faint traces of patina, particularly at her fingers and the tips of the rounded ears at the top of her head. A rifle rested across her back, secured by a strap which lay diagonally across her chest, and she tossed a humming sword that shed a trail of sparks and fire idly in one hand. Like her partner, she was remarkably human for someone who had never stepped foot in the same dimension in which the story began, which extended to her bare, remarkably dainty feet and her hearts-painted toenails.
“Well, uh,” the male began eloquently. He scratched the back of his head afterwards, shrugging. “That happened.”
“Thanks for the save, he means,” the female said with a snort. “I’m Tiffany. This is Oriuchi Johannes Rallenstein Firegod the Third, also known as Bob.”
“Some people call her Tank,” Bob informed Nathan slyly. “It’s because she’s very large and very tough.”
“Not tough enough to live through that.” Tiffany shuddered. “Anyway, are we friends now? It would feel weird to kill you.”
“It would probably feel weird to die,” Nathan quipped back reflexively. “I have no idea what’s going on. I just got pulled out of my world by some colorful girl in a mech and dumped in here.”
Bob and Tiffany exchanged a brief look, then burst into grins. “A Millionborn!” they both exclaimed in unison, almost squealing. “How many lives?”
“This is my first one?” Nathan shrugged genially. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t even know where I am, who the girl was, or why the announcer stopped talking.”
“Oh, that one’s easy.” Bob pointed, thumb-first, at the billboard hanging in the sky. “Whoever tried to kill us—”
“Tried to kill him,” Tiffany interjected.
“Whoever tried to kill you,” the wolfman amended, “broke all the arena’s cybertronics, because they’re shit and their shielding is shit and their connections to the remote servers are shit. They probably flushed their code when they couldn’t phone home for a few seconds, too. They need to reboot everything, so the scrum’s paused till then.”
“Oh.” Nathan blinked a few times, feeling like his brain was starting to catch up. “This is a game show of some sort, or a tournament? And they used futuristic Internet of Shit tech which just bit them in the ass, so everyone who was trying to kill each other went on pause.”
And it was obviously so. Everyone he could see in the arena, whether in hoverships, mecha, power armor, or fortresses, was just… taking a break. Some were lounging, others were chatting, and one quartet in particular within his line of sight had pulled a table and four chairs out of somewhere and were recognizably playing a board game, though it was a holographic one on a three-dimensional board.
“Wait.” Tiffany took another step towards Nathan, grabbing his wrist gently. “Your first one. This is your first? And you’re Realmless. Abyss and firmament, is it ever our lucky day.”