Nathan looked down at his wrist, cradled as it was in the grip of a six-foot-tall amazonian leonine warrior.

“Please let go of me,” he said calmly.

“Oh shit, sorry.” Tiffany released him instantly, taking a step back. “Sorry, that was rude. I’m excited and definitely want to seduce you, but that’s no reason to invade your personal space.”

“Apology accepted, but seducing me will not be an option,” Nathan replied automatically.

“Shit, are you—” Tiffany’s sheepish-sounding half-yowl half-purr hiccuped on the visor’s text display as it visibly cycled through words before landing on “homoexclusively inclined? Bob, land this guy for us! He’s our ticket to nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand more lives!”

“Tiffany, turn down the ovaries. He’s not interested in me either. Can’t you smell it?”

“I can’t smell shit,” she admitted easily. “Something about that implosion took it away and it hasn’t come back yet. But I never skip sense-dep training day, so I’m fine other than being socially blind and clueless.”

“As fascinating as this is,” Nathan interjected, “I’m ace. Asexual, I mean. Also aromantic, probably, but it’s a little bit hard to tell when so much about relationships in general centers on or around sex?”

His statement stunned both of his interlocutors, and they raised their heads to the sky and screamed in apparent frustration, judging by the which was all the visor displayed in translation. Awkwardly, Nathan tried to sidle away, but as if on cue the crackle of the broadcasting technology resumed while both Tiffany’s and Bob’s eyes snapped over to where he was shuffling his feet to make some distance.

“Well, that was a foul, alright!” Tamarind Rind’s voice was a reverberating bellow, shaking the ground below them and sending a mech in the distance toppling. “Whoops,” he added a moment later, “had the mic too high. Boombox, did you know that what just happened was legally classified as an act of corporate terrorism and a crime against capitalism?”

“Gosh, Tamarind, that would mean that everyone involved in it has a bounty on their heads that includes a full, unconditional pardon and a grant of Corporate Personhood.” The wrathful savagery in the other announcer’s voice was undisguised, in contrast to the first speaker’s dry almost-humor. “I can’t imagine they’ll last very long.”

“No, Boombox, but hopefully we’ll get some footage of their incredibly bloody demise that we can air. Anyway! Places, people, we go back to broadcasting in twelve seconds from… mark!”

“Listen,” Bob hissed rapidly, “we’ll play defense and ham it up. Your will carry you and we’ll sell it.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“You get three things,” Tiffany added while Nathan tried to reconcile the single phoneme Bob had said with the extended description the visor had displayed. “The is one, it’s your equipment, it’ll stay with you through all your lives.”

“Companions are the typical second.” Bob shook his head in a shockingly humanlike gesture, given that he was an alien wolfman. “We can’t qualify, you might never get one. You’ll probably get a skill and an ephemeron.”

“There’s a hundred and seventy two people left.” Tiffany started walking purposefully alongside the wall, and both Bob and Nathan followed in her wake. “You need to be in the top fifty. If it gets to fifty two and we have three seconds to stand still, Bob and I will tap out.”

“Kill, kill, kill,” Bob agreed. “Can you use that gun?”

“I have no idea,” Nathan started to say, and then he blinked a couple of times. “Wait, why are you able to understand me? I have to read what you’re saying on my visor.”

“Universal semiotic translator fish,” the wolfman said with a shrug.

“Lives in our ear canals,” Tiffany added. “Consumes the aetheric component of communication and translates it. Keeps us safe against carrier-wave attacks. Run!”

Nathan’s visor lit up in agreement, charting the paths of incoming ballistic fire. He broke into a dash, not quite a sprint, trailing the other two by a substantial margin until they slowed down their lope to let him catch up. The bullets skittered against the hard ground as they came in from on high, and he glanced over to where his HUD indicated the fire was coming from.

An octopedal armored vehicle of some sort stood there, three stories tall and with each leg a thick braid of colors from where it split away from the vaguely egg-shaped central body. It was dotted with weapon emplacements staffed by automatons—or rather, as Nathan realized, people, since one was waving excitedly at him—made out of fractal triangles, and one of those weapon emplacements tracked to the right and made ready to fill the air once more with bullets.

“An anti-aircraft emplacement? Being used as an antipersonnel gun? That’s just rude.” He shook his head in disapproval and raised his scavenged pistol. His visor and earpiece melted away from his right side, eliciting a shudder as the metal crawled out of his ear, and silver ran down his jaw, neck, shoulder, and arm to finally join with the gun. He closed his right eye, placing a freshly appearing reticule dead center on the gun about to fire at him as his sight zoomed in and his wrist magically stabilized.

He pulled the trigger, and absolutely nothing happened for a long moment other than the faint smell of ozone. Then, without fanfare or impressive effects, the gun emplacement sloughed off of the eight-legged machine along with the adjacent ones and most of the ones adjacent to them.

“Oh-ho! The newcomer grabbed a pingshot off of Robojam and managed to get it to fire!”

“That’s right, Boombox, he did! And now he’s exchanged shots with the Flatlanders, so it! Is! Time!”

“TO!”

“D-D-D-D-D—”

The stuttering of the speakers grew, as did a sudden squealing feedback, until Boombox screamed “DUEL! CUT THE SOUND! TECHNICIAN, CUT THE—”

But Nathan was not paying any attention to the words being displayed. A square of metal the size of a barn door had fallen outwards from the Flatlander machine, giving Nathan a clear view of the identical armor layer below the armor he’d removed… and the two new gunports that opened in that side.