For a wild moment of fear, I thought they were chasing her. Then Davi half-turned and flashed them a thumbs-up, and the crowd broke out in cheers.

I ran forward, scooping her up and spinning her into a hug before setting her down. “You’re alive! I was really worried you’d tried to fly over the maze and gotten pasted.”

“I did,” Davi said. She grimaced and looked down at herself. It was only then that I noticed the large hole in the thigh of her pants. Her leg itself looked fine, but the edges of the hole were charred and the fabric was stained with blood. “Chiyo-san and Kenji-san found me and healed me up. They don’t speak much English and I don’t speak much Japanese, but they were pretty insistent that I stick with them.”

“We must all stick together. Who knows what evils the…” The speaker was an older woman, her English accented but clear.

She paused, and Davi jumped in. “The aliens, Hana-san?”

“Yes. Who knows what evils the aliens will bring? Ah! I see your friend already understands this.” Hana nodded toward my arm. “Have you met others? Are they with you?”

I shifted uncomfortably, touching my black-and-white striped armband. “This? I honestly don’t really know what it means. I helped some people earlier and they gave it to me, but then we went our separate ways since we couldn’t really communicate with each other.”

“This reminds me. Can either of you speak any of the languages of India?”

I shook my head and Byron did the same.

Hana pursed her lips briefly in frustration, then shook her head. “Never mind. The stripes started appearing in my town six days ago. They are a… a uniform?”

“A uniform? For what organization? Who is in charge?” I asked. “Is your whole town under one leader?”

“No, no. There is no leader. Perhaps not a uniform. A promise? To wear the stripes is to say ‘I will help you, if you need it. I will not be the first to attack another human. I will work with you against the aliens.’”

Byron’s eyebrows rose. “No leader, but you’re all wearing the armbands anyway?”

Hana laughed lightly. “Not everyone, not yet, but they are popular and spreading. The idea that ningen - ah, humans - will succeed or fail together? It appeals to many of us. Besides, it is useful to know on sight that people are trustworthy.”

“I’m surprised no one’s tried to take advantage of that,” I said. “Seems like it would be easy to trick people… get close and then attack them, or steal their stuff.”

Hana frowned. “One man tried. We made it clear this was not acceptable.”

I peered at Hana curiously, but she didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. Oh well. I supposed it was none of my business.

Clearing my throat, I changed the topic. “I guess I don’t have a problem with traveling together. Byron and I have done well so far, but there’s safety in numbers. You know which way the center is?”

I didn’t mention how flash-freezing the enormous string monsters was clearly taking a toll on Byron. He was pretty strong these days, and I was sure he could handle a few more… but he couldn’t keep doing that indefinitely.

No need to expose our weaknesses, even to people who claimed to be friendly.

Hana nodded, turning and rattling off a quick query in Japanese to another member of the party, who closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and extended a flat hand off to her left.

“Clairvoyance?” Byron asked. “Uh, she can see from a distance?”

Hana nodded.

“Handy,” Byron said. “We’ve got mirrors we were holding up to find our way, but we kept going off-track.”

Hana gave us an apologetic smile. “The corridors are not straight, and the corners are not square. I cannot see this myself, but Kenji-san has a power for looking closely.”

“Probably Analyze,” Byron muttered.

Hana smiled, and bobbed in a bow. “Perhaps. If you will excuse me…”

As she departed, Davi shook her head with a smile on her face. “I met Hana’s group only a few minutes before I saw your Spotlight. I was kind of surprised they didn’t mind going off-track to find you guys, but I think their Clairvoyant has been keeping an eye out for people and they’ve been detouring to round them up. They’d already be at the center now, otherwise.”

“You think?” Byron asked skeptically. “This place is… huge. I’m glad we found you. Damn lucky. Even if we’re all close-ish to the center, it still would have been easy to miss each other.”

Davi smiled. “Yeah! Now we just need to find John and Kurt. At least we know John was okay a little while ago. I got a message from him after you said you spotted Byron, Vince.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

A tremendous crack interrupted our discussion, and I turned to see that a space had been made in the middle of the crowd. A burly man, covered in the red scales of Armored Skin, wound up a mace for another whack at the wall. His first strike had only made the slightest divot, but his second hit caused cracks to spiderweb away from that point of impact. The third strike spread those splinters further, and the fourth strike dislodged a large chunk.

The hole was too small for a person, but the mace-wielder stepped back anyway as others rushed forward. I wondered why for a moment - was he tired already? - but everything became clear as a cat-monster's head and shoulders appeared in the gap. It slowed for a second to squeeze through, offering those waiting an opportunity to sink their blades into its face and sides.

The monster didn’t quite die instantly, but the difference was academic. As soon as the corpse stopped twitching, the strongman came forward to drag it the rest of the way through, letting another cat monster follow. The hole was slightly enlarged during this process, so the second monster didn’t get stuck, but the whole pack - five monsters total - had to come through one at a time, making them easy pickings.

I watched the whole process, too surprised to jump in myself. I only realized my mouth was hanging open when Davi laughed at me. “Yeah. Second time I’ve seen that, but it’s pretty impressive, right? We’ll be at the center in no time. Well, if we don’t keep detouring.”

We did keep detouring, but we made good time regardless. It seemed that few people had made it through the maze faster and more accurately than Byron and I. We got only three more “made it to the center” announcements as we traveled, and the Clairvoyant spotted only two other groups to detour for.

The people we picked up were worth the detours, honestly. Almost everyone who’d made it this far this fast was really strong. The Indian man we ran into had a stone-shaping ability that made getting through the walls even faster: he’d remove a thin slice of wall around the outside, and then me or the Japanese strongman would ram the separated section and shove it into the next hall. The other people, a set of four Americans, had been traveling together and were happy to join our group.

We kept encountering new monsters; not just the string-thing and the angry haystack, but an acid-spitting skull-faced squirrel the size of a large dog, and some kind of eldritch nightmare with eyes and tentacles everywhere that could fire spikes and telekinetically deflect projectiles.

Byron asked Hana to pass along anything Kenji learned from his Analyze ability. She did, but sadly, it wasn’t much: we were doing our best to end the monsters with extreme prejudice. It made for safer travel, but less of a chance to learn anything new. Oh well. Maybe Albuquerque would be able to pass us more details?

Eventually we broke through one more wall to see a shimmering translucent barrier. On the other side, we could see a massive circular area. Near the wall was an empty zone, perhaps twenty feet wide, where there was nothing but the bare gray stone of the maze and a few strangers. Beyond that was a dense circle of alien plant life, shaggy brown and white fernlike things that grew almost as high as the walls of the maze.

In the middle, the portal towered above the plant life, safety finally visible and tantalizingly close.

Someone was running toward us. Padded clothes, and piecemeal armor made it hard to guess gender, but the smooth skin on the person's lower face that made me think

"woman." It was rare to find an adult man that clean-shaven, especially since the apocalypse. She was shouting something and waving frantically at us, but no sound was coming through.

I gingerly put a hand up to the barricade, but didn’t feel any pain or resistance.

Well, no reason not to, then, I figured, and stepped through.

“-op! Wait! Don’t come in! Fucking hell! Weren’t you listening?”

I shrugged. “We couldn’t hear a thing.”

She continued running toward me, but her pace slowed. “That… explains a lot, actually. But now you’re trapped in here!”

“That’s not the exit?” I asked.

“No! That’s fucking death!”

“The portal kills people? That’s a new low...”

“Not the portal, but when anyone - damnit, more of you idiots are coming through! Stop!” Belatedly, she held up her hands, realizing no one outside of the area could hear her.

Byron and Davi had followed me through. Behind them, I Hana was peering between the new woman and the bushes ahead, her face wrinkled in confusion and suspicion.

The woman half-turned toward us. “And don’t you dare start fucking with the center area. You’ll be dead in two seconds and the rest of us will suffer. Actually… wait, you guys came through a wall! Maybe…” She put up a hand to the shimmering barrier, clearly shoving her weight against it, but it didn’t budge. Well, that explained why she’d called us trapped. She let out a frustrated sob, and I revised my estimate of her age downward: if she was older than her teens, it wasn’t by much.

“A ward against sound…” Byron muttered. “Vince, would you peek into the middle with infrared?”

“Sure,” I said. My infrared had gotten better as I’d gotten new abilities: more sensitive to details, more precise, and better able to piece cool-temperature obstructions to detect the warmer objects behind.

In spite of myself, I took a step back when I turned my gaze to the center area.

The first thing I noticed was concealed by the nearest fern: a woman, or what had been one previously. Something had bisected her, leaving her legs and pelvis several feet too far from her torso.

I spotted more dismembered body parts: arms, legs, and even a head that appeared to be cradled in the leaves of a fern, held creepily upright. I found one body that seemed almost intact, but it wasn’t… wasn’t warm enough to be alive.

“Corpses,” I said. “Corpses everywhere.”

“Do you know what made them?” Byron asked.

“Demons!” moaned the teen girl. “Nightmares!”

I winced, peering deeper into the underbrush, trying to make certain of what I was seeing before I said anything. The nightmare comment was… unfortunately on-point. I realized I’d been trying not to recognize what I saw, trying to rationalize away a silhouette that had been haunting my sleep since I’d first encountered it.

I took a deep breath. “Hiding in the bushes near the portal are bigger versions of the mantis-monster from the first Mandatory Trial.”

“Versions?” Byron said. “More than one?”

“Six of them.”