I edged out the next door into a glistening seaside canyon. A narrow walkway and slender river of what looked like normal water were wedged in between two irregular blue-gray cliffs. In the distance, near the blue exit door, the cliffs ended and the river fed into an ocean.
Seems empty. More stealth monsters?
Infrared Vision proved its worth once again, making three warm lumps stand out from the cool cliffside. I made my way slowly toward the first, not wanting to slip on the wet, uneven ground. When I got close enough, I lunged, easily piercing the monster with my pointed staff tip.
It flopped to the ground as I withdrew my weapon, hitting the ground with a wet slap. The monster’s chest had been caved in, but it still managed a choked vocalization, a sort of warbling coughing fit. The noise roused the other two new monsters from their rest, and both immediately abandoned cliffside roosts to launch themselves into the air.
That’s not good.
I didn’t have a ranged weapon, and the new monsters had put themselves out of easy reach. Huge batlike wings flapped, keeping aloft a rotund central body, dangerous-looking flexible tail, and swanlike neck.
The pair dived for me, seemingly working as a team. I executed a hasty back roll, trying to get out of their way. I almost succeeded: the second monster adjusted its flight enough to slice into my calf. One of my arms splashed into the river, and the spray along the damp path soaked my back and legs as I rolled. Hopefully it was just water?
No time to worry about it now. My arm wasn’t melting, burning, or itching, so whatever I had exposed myself to was a distant concern compared to the two malicious monsters already flapping back into the air to regain height.
This is a terrible place to fight them. No room to move, no room to swing my weapon… plenty of room for them to get out of reach. I could run for the exit… but crap, I don’t know if they can follow me. If they can, and gravity is high in there, I’ll just be serving myself up on a platter. But what if…?
I had only seconds before the monsters would be ready to dive again, so I made a snap decision, retreating back through the mist-door I’d used to enter the chamber. I hadn’t even been sure it would let me back out, but luck was on my side. Not only did it let me pass, the corridor was no longer doing its best Jupiter impression: my weight was normal. I took another few steps back and held my staff out like a spear, crouching as I did. Would the monsters follow?
The question had barely registered before it was answered, a monster sweeping through the aperture at a speed that seemed fast even to me. Unfortunately for the monster, it didn’t seem to be able to perceive things on the other side of the door, either. It tried to wheel aside from my weapon, but all I had to do was shift the point slightly to the left, and my reaction speed was damn good these days. I took another shallow cut, this time on my arm, but the monster got by far the worse deal, my length of rebar piercing all the way through its torso and out the other side.
When the third flyer followed, a bare second later, it twisted enough to avoid the point of my weapon, dodging up along the ceiling of the hallway… but its dying friend wasn’t quite dead, and its flailing wings clipped the newcomer as it passed overhead. The hallway was much narrower than the monsters’ wingspan, limiting my attackers’ options for recovery. The impact turned the predator’s graceful stoop into a panicked struggle to avoid crashing. It succeeded, sort of, flaring its wings as much as it could and getting its feet out in an awkward run. It managed to bleed off quite a bit of speed before falling.
But it did fall.
It was on the ground now, in a corridor where it couldn’t easily take flight again, and I was in between it and the exit.
My staff was still sheathed in dying monster, but I didn’t think I needed it. I dropped it and sprang to my feet, running toward my stunned foe and stomping my left foot to keep its bladed tail locked to the ground. I brought my right foot around in a kick to the monster’s torso, and was gratified to feel a series of popping snaps as my toe crunched home.
Was it dead? Didn’t know, didn’t care. Its left wing had an extra bend now, so I doubted it could fly or follow. I did take a second to glance at my wounds. The cut on my arm seemed superficial, but the one on my leg was bleeding more than I liked.
I don’t have a first aid kit with me. Damn. Too bad I didn’t take that regeneration ability.
Tearing strips from my shirt to tend the injuries would take time, time I initially didn’t want to take… but after I made my way through the flyers room and stuck my head into the next hallway, I found that the gravity had increased even further. The time it took to doctor myself started to look like a better investment.
Don’t know how much longer this is going to take, and I’ll bleed a lot more with all that pressing down on me.
I took off my shirt, and used my chef’s knives to cut the driest parts into strips as long as I could manage. Between my partial soak in the alien river and my own sweat, the driest parts were still kind of nasty… but if I made it back, John should be able to cure any diseases I’d picked up. Fingers crossed?
It took longer than I would have liked to bind my wounds, but with the gravity in the next hallway pushing me to the floor and forcing me to crawl forward, I didn’t see any other choice.
Strangely, shortly after I entered the hallway, the increased gravity disappeared. I didn’t believe it at first, and wasted nearly a second frozen in confusion before I remembered I was in a race and pushed myself up to a runner’s start. From there, I was off like a shot, bursting through the blue door ahead and onto a normal Earth hillside covered in normal Earth trees.
Well, a room that was pretending to be that, anyway. Infrared sight still revealed the walls and ceiling that were otherwise invisible.
That was irrelevant. What was relevant was the glittering beacon at the top of the hill, and the fact that no more doors were in evidence. This was it!
The scaled woman was here, too, about fifteen feet ahead of me. So what? She was moving like molasses. I hadn’t had many chances to cut loose with my full speed, but this was the time. I darted around, easily outpacing her up the hill. I made sure to cut around trees to block her line of sight, but didn’t bother looking back, keeping my eyes on sparkling crystal.
Congratulations! You are the winner of your race. Your prize has been awarded.
Yes! I crowed. Please be something to help me get home!
The clear casing snapped around me, but I didn’t peer into the depths of the higher dimensions this time, instead looking over my interface to find my prize. The aliens had said it would be a Blueprint right? Wall, Small Heater, Intrusion Alarm, Small Shelter… no, I’d had all those before… oh! There it was. A… Basic Shop?
I guess that could be helpful, if the shop sold weapons and armor, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed. A shop wasn’t something we could take with us. Maybe it would sell transportation? Or be a node for a portal network! That would be amazing. I didn’t have any evidence that it was likely, but a lot of this had been pretty videogame-like, and all videogames have fast travel, don’t they? And obviously it was within our tormentors' capabilities.
I was still looking at my interface when the clear casing disappeared, dumping me back into the real world, right where I’d left.
“Vince is back!” Avalanche yelled. “They can come back! They’re not gone forever.”
I dismissed the interface. “They? Twinkles is still gone too?”
“And JoeyT. And… Lily.” Avalanche gulped as she said the last name. She and Zephyr had been fairly discreet, but probably even John had picked up on the relationship between the two women. Friends don’t usually cuddle when sleeping. “Bolero and I are the only ones from TAF that stayed behind. I guess everyone else felt like they had something to prove.”
I looked around. “What about…?”
Davi hopped out of the truck cab. “We all stayed. I thought about going, but…”
“But your friends have half a brain!” Avalanche said. “This isn’t a damn game. We don’t need to top leaderboards. We don’t need a high rank. We’re not performing, we’re living.”
Davi put a hand on Avalanche’s shoulder. “Being cautious isn’t always the safest choice. You should know that better than anyone. You’re on a team with Bolero!”
Bolero threw an arm around Avalanche's shoulder. “She’s right, you know. It’s not like I really know where the enemy is all the time. I’m just a good guesser, so we can make them think we do. We’ve both watched the replays; there have been dozens of times we won because our opponents decided not to take risks they really should have taken.”
“In Legend Scramble. The game we played together. This is real life!”
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Bolero shrugged. “Right now, real life has a lot in common with games.”
Davi nodded. “We don’t know how big the risks or prizes are. Maybe the rest of us will regret not accepting.”
Avalanche glared. “If you think that, then why are you here?”
My friend shrugged. “I wasn’t brave enough. That doesn’t mean I think that the people who went are stupid or wrong. Vince, did you get the prize?”
“I did. It’s a basic shop. I don’t really want to plunk it down right here in the middle of nowhere, especially since putting it down will take pretty much all my Money, but I’d like to check it out soon. Who knows? Maybe it’ll sell teleports. It’s gotta at least sell weapons.”
“I wonder if everyone will get the same prize,” Davi said. “How dangerous was it?”
“Are you hurt?” John asked. Everyone else had piled out of the truck cab behind Davi, and I was happy to see that Bolero and John were already carrying bottles of water.
“Not… too bad? Mostly fighting monsters we fought already, plus some new flying bat-things. Then a footrace at the end. I got cut a few times by the bat-monsters.”
“Those have been here too,” Davi said, pointing skyward.
“Sit down,” said Bolero. “Let us look at your injuries.”
“A footrace? With who? Other people? I hope they don’t think Lily is a monster,” Avalanche said. “She can handle all the monsters we’ve seen. The new ones cut you, but they won’t cut her scales?”
I lowered myself to the pavement and let the healers look me over. “Probably?”
The cut on my arm had scabbed over, and Bolero shot me a look of apology as he scrubbed it back open. It hurt more than getting cut in the first place, but I tried not to complain, gritting my teeth as they rinsed my wounds and healed them up. I took a deep breath of relief as they finished. “Thanks, guys.”
“Why isn’t she back?” Avalanche asked.
I reached up to take Avalanche’s hand and pull myself to my feet, but the tall woman crossed her arms rather than help me up.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
“Twinkles wouldn’t have even gone if you didn’t tell him they’d send you back! Zephyr and JoeyT wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t.”
“They did send me back,” I said. “Anyway, I was going to say more, but they cut me off mid-sentence. The clear stuff made it so I couldn’t move at all.”
“So? You were still the first one to go for this stupid thing! Everyone else was just following your dumbass lead. You’re the reason they’re all in danger!”
I winced. Avalanche was clearly lashing out, but I felt guilty anyway. All of TAF was in their early twenties. Practically kids. Had seeing a middle-aged dad leap into danger pushed them to do the same? Maybe.
“They’ll be fine,” I told Avalanche. “They’re strong and smart.”
“Then why aren’t they back?”
“They’re not as fast as me, that’s all. It was a long course. It took time. They’ll be back soon.”
Avalanche bit her lip, looking around the empty road. No one took that moment to appear. “I hope you’re right.”
I hoped so too.
JoeyT was the next to return, only a few minutes later. He hadn’t seen anyone else in the earthscape, and had been able to reach the end unopposed, though he’d been cut up by the flyers as well.
“You saw someone at the beginning, right?” I asked as John and Bolero moved in to heal him.
“Yeah. Old guy, even older than John.”
“I’m not that old,” John said.
“Uh. Yeah. Sorry? Anyway, this guy was pretty old. Maybe in his seventies or eighties. I saw him at the beginning, but he didn’t seem to speak English. Didn’t see him again after that.”
“Huh. There goes that theory,” I said.
“What theory?” JoeyT asked.
“Well, they seemed to be using the hallways to slow me down. They stopped slowing me, right at the end, and I got to the last room just a few seconds after my opponent. I thought they were manipulating things to make us reach the end on time. They didn’t do that to you?”
“There was some weirdness in the second hallway, between the spacedogs and the pavemimics, but not after that.”
“Maybe the pavemimics got him,” Davi said softly.
JoeyT stared at Davi, stricken. “No! Do you think so? I didn’t know what he was saying, but he seemed so nice! Shit. I hope not.”
I grimaced. “The evidence fits.”
“Shit!” JoeyT repeated. A rock clattered across the ground as he kicked it, then I heard a heavy sigh. “I’m going on patrol. Gonna clear out the area.”
“I’ll go with you,” Davi offered. “The new things, the flyers? Force Shield is really good against them.”
JoeyT grunted something that could have been agreement.
The rest of us waited in near-silence, only broken when John started to climb back inside the cab and Avalanche begged him to stop.
“Even Vince took a few cuts! If Twinkles and Lily are taking this long to finish, I want you guys ready to heal them as soon as they get back. Just… in case.”
The rest of us sat in the shade of the truck as Avalanche paced. Time was hard to gauge, but it took long enough for anyone else to return that Avalanche’s near-panic was starting to seem reasonable.
With a flash of purple scales, Zephyr reappeared, stumbling as the clear casing vanished.
“Lily!” Avalanche yelled. She caught the purple-scaled woman in a tight hug, her voice nearly a sob. “You’re okay!”
“I didn’t get the… the thing… I lost. Sorry.”
“Who cares?! It doesn’t matter.” Avalanche caught the shorter woman’s face in her hands. “Don’t ever leave like that again, okay? I thought… I thought you were… gone.”
Zephyr rested her forehead on her partner’s chest. “Sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have left.”
“Are you hurt?” Bolero asked.
At his question, Avalanche pushed herself away to scan the smaller woman. “You are! I’m so sorry. I must have been hurting you. There are cuts all over your scales, and you’re not putting weight on your right leg.”
Zephyr grabbed Avalanche’s arm, not letting her escape. “You’re good. Good to have you close.” She turned to Bolero, jerking her chin toward her left shoulder. “Shallow cuts, except here. That one’s no good. Leg, too.”
He sighed. “Let’s get you sitting down. I’ll check you out. What happened? Did a ram get you?”
The short woman shook her head. “No. Had trou’le ‘ith new guys. And then, the leg…”
“It was another person, wasn’t it?” I asked.
She nodded. “They followed, in last area. Hit leg. I ran, after.”
Bolero frowned. “I’m no doctor. I don’t know a lot about broken bones, but don’t those need to be set? Especially if you run around on them after they’ve been broken?”
John patted him. “We should be good to go. I’m no sawbones either, but I talked to a lot of the people coming from the airport. There were a number who had broken bones and healed them before they got to ValuCo - usually from self-inflicted injuries - and they all turned out just fine. Looks like Healing Touch sorts that out for us, even if it doesn’t handle cleaning.”
Bolero still looked uncertain, but Zephyr patted his hand. “Try.”
The two healers traded off. Zephyr’s injuries were extensive, and since both men were trying to keep themselves fresh, the process took a long time.
Davi and JoeyT returned from their patrol. JoeyT’s face broke into a relieved smile when he saw his teammate. “Zephyr! Looks like the monsters did a number on you.”
The scaled woman shot him a rueful smile, waggling her hand in a “so-so” motion. JoeyT laughed. “Ah, let me guess. You got the prize anyway?”
Zephyr shook her head. “Got attacked.”
"By her competitor," Avalanche said. "Another human!"
The news wiped every trace of the laughter off of JoeyT’s face. “You’re shitting me. Really? Damn.” He craned his neck, peering around. “Where’s Twinkles? In the cab?”
“He’s not back yet,” I said.
“Still? It’s been like an hour!”
“Not that long,” I said, then thought about it. “But… it has been more than a half-hour since I got back.”
The relieved atmosphere that had spread through the group at Zephyr’s return vanished.
Davi turned to me. “Why would it take him this long?”
I scratched my head, not liking the situation, not liking being put on the spot. “Well… he is a caster. Maybe he’s taking things slow, resting in between fights, trying to conserve his energy. His opponent could be doing the same things, or maybe they couldn’t handle the monsters at all.”
Byron had been quiet while we waited, but he spoke up now. “Takes Twinkles about five spells to kill a monster these days, more or less. Less if he finishes it off with a weapon, but let’s say he’s being cautious. Twelve monsters, five spells each, 15 minutes recovery time in between monsters. We could be waiting a long-ass time for him to get back. That’s three hours right there, if he’s taking his time.”
“Would he be taking his time in a race?” Davi asked.
The rest of TAF exchanged worried looks.
“No…” Bolero said. “But maybe he’s not treating it like a race. He might just be trying to scout things out and gather data. If that’s the case, he might take even longer than that.”
“There was a lot to investigate,” JoeyT offered, his voice tight with forced determination. “I didn’t really stop to look, but all the monster areas had a bunch of weird stuff. Alien plants and terrain. Oh! And the monsters didn’t disappear either, when I killed them. I could have probably learned a ton by looking at their corpses, if I’d slowed down. That… might have been the smart thing to do.”
“Twinkles is a smart guy,” I said.
“The smartest!” JoeyT said. “Don’t write him off yet.”
“We might be here a while,” said Davi. “I’ll try to find something we can set up for shade.”
“I’ll heat up some snacks,” Byron offered, flames dancing above his fingertips.
“We just need to wait,” Bolero said. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
I made myself smile and nod.