Valeria immediately brought her crossbow up, her weapon aimed at the Lady in the Yellow Raincoat. She squeezed the trigger before Hiro, Juan, or Rena could act. For his part, Samuel simply took a step back, his cloak covering him, the Australian not quite sure of who the woman was.
“Lucky me,” the Lady said as Valeria squeezed the trigger again and again to no avail.
The other Survivors around them all bristled in their own ways as Hiro tried to draw his katana and failed. It felt as if it had been cemented into his sheath. Something similar happened to Juan as he lifted his bat, the man’s arm trembling as if he were trying to pull a light post out of the ground with one hand.
Mana fizzled all around them as the gate began to open.
“It appears that we cannot fight at the moment,” the Lady said.
“Bitch, as soon as I get the chance, you’re fucking gone,” Valeria hissed. “I can squeeze a trigger faster than you can disappear.”
“Perhaps,” she told Valeria as light radiated above them.
“I’ll pin her down,” Bianca told Hiro, the shield now strapped to his arm. “I can’t move at the moment, though. It doesn’t look like anyone can.”
The Doom System spoke, its voice amplified all around them and sending a chill down Hiro’s spine as it often did:
[Congratulations, remaining Survivors. You have made it to the opening of the gate. If you survive the encounter that awaits, you will graduate to the Second Interim, where you will receive new Roulette Skills to tackle a challenge that I am certain all of you will enjoy. Your feedback is important to me, and it aids in the functionality of this experience. There have been tweaks along the way, and there are more to come. At the conclusion of this encounter, you will be provided with a customer survey. Remember, anything below five stars will be considered a failure on my part.]
Five stars? Hiro looked over to Valeria, who was already cursing under her breath.
He had heard something similar before with the rideshare companies he worked for about ratings; he knew how badly he would have been dinged if he had received anything less than five stars. But if we rate the Doom System poorly, it will retaliate…
While this hadn’t been confirmed, Hiro sensed it. Then what’s the point? he thought as the Doom System spoke again:
[I believe you will like where this goes next. Please await further destruction…]
“Destruction?” Samuel said. “Did I hear that right?”
“I heard it too,” Valeria told him, the woman alternating between aiming her crossbow at the hovering gate and at the Lady in the Yellow Raincoat. “Still can’t use my weapon,” she said after squeezing the trigger at the Lady.
“You’d be dead if you could,” the woman told her with a cackle.
The gate continued to fizzle, a few of the Survivors moving closer to it, but most moving back.
Hiro was one of the ones who continued to shy away from the portal, yet something also kept him from fully fleeing.
Deer in the headlights was how he would later describe how they all stood around the gate, intoxicated by its power. Maybe it was human nature to gather around the light, or maybe it was the Doom System was toying with their minds. Whatever the reason, the glow shattered as a massive leg ending in a hooked claw burst through the gate.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
tIt slammed into the head of one of the Survivors and sent another claw out, one that caused Valeria to yelp.
“Rena!”
A third claw tore out of the gate as Hiro scrambled backward, this one spearing the Lady in the Yellow Raincoat and killing her instantly.
“What the shit?” Bianca shouted, her form tensing.
By this point Hiro was already running for cover as an enormous spider emerged from the gate, spewing venom at Survivors and spearing others with the claw on the tips of its legs.
The Doom System’s voice clarified everything a few terrifying moments later:
[Defeat the spider, and your group will be rewarded with entry to the Second Interim.]
A massive health bar took shape over the spider and a new timer appeared.
00:29:59
00:29:58
00:29:57
“Shit!” Samuel said as the huge spider fired a web at a police car that happened to be on its side.
Rather than use the vehicle as some sort of leverage to propel itself forward, the spider yanked the police car back to its body, killing two Survivors in the process. After spitting a stick residue on it, the spider quickly fixed the police car on the abdomen and fired another web, this one at a nearby building, where it reached the roof and pulled the spider toward the East River.
Some of the Survivors took off after it, leaving Hiro, Samuel, Juan, and Valeria, who had already started firing bolt’s in the fleeing spider’s direction.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
She kept firing them, long after the spider was gone, long after the remaining Survivors had moved on in pursuit of the monster. Valeria turned to Juan, who stood dumbfounded as he looked down at Rena and the Lady in the Yellow Raincoat.
“Val,” Juan told her as she kept her crossbow at the ready, a crazed look in her eyes.
“Not a step closer. Rena. You…” Valeria lifted her crossbow. As Hiro has seen before, a bolt magically took shape, which she pressed into the bottom of her chin. “You… you didn’t…”
“Val, put your weapon down,” Juan said carefully in a tone that told Hiro that he had talked someone down from a ledge before. It was firm, yet there was a gentleness to it. “We all saw what just happened.”
“This is so fucked,” Bianca told Hiro.
At a loss for words, he merely stepped forward, his palms on display. “Val, I know it hurts. I can only imagine—”
“Why? Why are we doing this?” she asked, her eyes watering. “What’s the point in suffering like this?”
Samuel spoke. “The point is we make it to the end. We stop—”
“Stop? How do we stop something that can do what the Doom System does? It lies, it’s violent, it’s relentless, and it’s fucking insane,” she said, sobbing now. “What’s the point in trying?”
“I can’t answer that one for you,” he told her. “But I can tell you that giving up isn’t how we win.”
“Win what?” she asked the Australian.
“What would Rena—”
“Let me handle this,” Juan told Samuel. “Val, I’ve lost my brother and my sister in the last three days. Now, I’ve lost Rena, who was as nice as anyone could be to me. Not to mention my family, my neighbors, the people I worked with. Everyone is gone. But if I did something like kill myself, if you do something like that, then all of their deaths are worth nothing.”
“I don’t think we win against the Doom System,” Hiro told her. “I think we fight it until it gives up. It could beat us right now if it wanted. But if we, as humans, as Survivors, just keep pushing back, maybe there is something to that, a tainted hope. We’ve already proven to ourselves and the system that we have something in us—”
“That dog in us,” she said through more tears. “Only now, you have a demon dog.”
“I do. And yes, that. We have something, and together,” Hiro told her, “we have much more. It’s what humans do. Try as we might, we are social creatures. We thrive off community and… and taking care of each other, and caring for the outcomes of our lives. The Doom System can try all it wants to break us, but it will not break the human spirit.”
Valeria lowered her crossbow and took a deep breath in. “I didn’t know I needed a pep talk and I still don’t know if I need one. But thank you.”
“We’ll come back to bury the body,” Juan assured her, “but we have to deal with the spider first. And then? Then, I don’t know, but we’ve made it this far, and I ain’t giving up. Ain’t no fucking way.”
“Nah, yeah,” Samuel said. “Same here.”
“Same,” Hiro told them.
“Val?” Juan asked. “Are you with us?”
Valeria took a final look at her partner’s dead body, cursed, started to cry again, and then steeled herself. “Let’s get that fucking spider.”
“But before we do.” Hiro went for the metal bottle of Doom System Go Juice. He uncapped it, and tried to ignore the foul odor that followed. “We need to chug this.”