Davi laughed nervously. “Well… that’s no problem, right? Byron, you’ve got your specialty. Just fire it up, run in, and incinerate them.”

Byron sighed heavily. “I used it this morning, remember?”

Davi frowned. “Shit. What the hell were we thinking? That would have trivialized this.”

“It was probably a mistake,” Byron acknowledged. “I was focused on my family, not the Challenge. Still... It wouldn’t have made things as easy as you’re thinking.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, why don’t you just kill monsters by creating tiny Force Shields inside their hearts?”

“I would, but I can’t! My ability doesn’t work inside of living… Oh. That’s true even for your specialty? Even so, wouldn’t they cook instantly when you bring the air around them up a few thousand degrees?”

Byron waggled his hand. “They’ll cook, yeah, and pretty quickly… but not instantly. Each week, the monsters get a little harder to affect by affecting the air around them. It’s small, but meaningful… like, the new leeches? They’re a little smaller than the spacedogs, but they’re more tiring to kill with Freeze or Heat. I’m confident I could kill the mantises with my specialty, but it only extends about ten feet from my body. With how fast Vince and Kurt said these things are…”

“Ten feet? You’d have like, a third of a second at most,” I cut in. “Probably more like a tenth. Killing them without dying yourself would be… rough. Anyway, it’s academic since you don’t actually have Avatar of Flame available.”

“They’ve got a sound attack, too!” the teenager interjected. “Every time someone goes into the bushes, we get an announcement that they’ve reached the center, and then my ears start bleeding and I lose my balance until I heal myself. When the last guy tried to shoot at them, the monsters screamed, charged out, and killed him. I thought I was a goner until they just went back and hid.”

“So… this is the center. You said it wasn’t, before.” I turned and beckoned Hana and the others through.

“What are you doing?!” The teenager freaked out as our allies-of-the-moment joined us in the middle. “They’ll be trapped in here!”

I rolled my eyes, but tried to keep my voice calm and patient. I was increasingly convinced that under the armor she was just a kid. “They were trapped out there, too. If that’s the center, we have to find a way through to get home. We can’t live in the death maze forever.”

Technically, we could grill some delicious pavemimic filets, but… yeah, okay, water would be a problem, unless there was some kind of water-cooler monster I’d missed. So I hadn’t lied.

A Japanese man who’d been waiting in the center had an Information Assistant ability, a tiny glowing blue ball of light that followed him around. This was a huge boon, as it finally let us communicate with the contingent from India.

“We need to come up with a plan,” Byron said. “I can cover a 40-foot circle with Zone of Silence, which will help against the screaming. My specialty’s on cooldown, but I can still probably cool them pretty good if I dump everything I have into it. Anyone else got a specialty?”

It took some time to share information. About half of people hadn’t even heard of specialties before. No one had one available to use, but there were a ton of strong people in our group. For example, a Japanese woman insisted she’d be able to patch up anyone who suffered a catastrophic injury enough that they could keep fighting, as long as she could see them..

“I thought ranged healing didn’t exist!” I said.

After this was translated, the woman shook her head. She said her ability wasn’t healing, or not exactly: the people would still need healing within a few minutes, but her patch-up ability would stabilize them and keep them in the fight.

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There was an Indian man with a strange ability called Share Thoughts that allowed him to communicate by thought with a willing target he could touch. After the Information Assistant explained how the ability worked, I was able to share my memories of the mantis from the Trial with him. He used his Analyze ability to make better estimates of how fast the monsters could move. More importantly, he was able to pick out some potential weak points. I would have guessed that the joints were good targets, where even a minor injury would cause major debilitation, but it was good to have confirmation. I might have guessed that the yellowish orbs were eyes. I wouldn’t have thought to try blinding the fuckers without his suggestion.

The plants hiding the monsters were a big issue. I could see where they were - as could the Clairvoyant and a few others - but I didn’t have significant ranged firepower.

We found a workaround: a guy with an illusion ability created floating “targets” at the outskirts of the central circle. He couldn’t see where to put them, but he could adjust their position until I and the others who could spot our foes said they were in the right place. It wasn’t perfect, but it ought to let us land at least a few hits in our initial volley.

Lack of visibility caused problems in other ways, too. Our stone-shaper, for example, would have loved to open the fight by locking the monsters’ feet to the ground, but he couldn’t affect rock he couldn’t see. He was pessimistic about his odds of locking the monsters’ feet down after we started fighting.

“If you can get them to pause or hesitate, perhaps,” the information assistant translated. “But otherwise he expects the monsters to be able to move their feet faster than he moves the rock.”

With that option unreliable, he instead used his skills to create a kind of stone bunker against the wall of the area. It had a roof and chest-high walls. In between the walls and ceiling he left the shelter open, aside from thick stone pillars every few feet. Another member of the group was able to use their abilities to reinforce the construction, and we hoped it would stop the monster’s slices or - at minimum - slow them down. The analyst who’d peeked at my thoughts was confident the furry mantises favored slashing attacks over stabbing ones, so the bunker should give our less-mobile members a chance at survival if the mantises charged them directly.

Of course, no one expected the bunker to protect the people inside for an extended period. It was meant as a backup plan, to buy a few critical seconds if our other measures failed.

The other measures consisted of me and a handful of others who might have a chance of being fast enough to dodge.

Two people - Davi and a young American guy - could fly. We’d hoped that the defenses sniping anyone who poked over the walls of the maze would make an exception for the central area, but a test that left me healing a huge chunk blown out of my left forearm proved otherwise. Still, we weren’t totally out of luck: so far from the walls, our Analyst said it had taken over a second for the bullet to reach me. If our flyers kept moving and kept their flight erratic, they should be able to avoid being hit. They’d stay below the walls of the maze for the most part, only ascending if one of the mantises came for them.

Everyone with a physical focus - a good ten of the twenty-five people present - had done a brief sprint in front of the analyst, who’d narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. He picked out me and a Japanese woman as being “definitely faster” than the mantis I’d encountered before, and another five people as being “about as fast.” The remaining three, he said, were slower.

He’d tried to direct them inside the bunker, but one of the men, an older Japanese guy, refused to go. He’d communicated that he had an ability that would force the monster to focus on him, and that he intended to stand far away from the rest of us and use that ability if he saw anyone in danger, relying on us to take the monster out before it got to him.

“He’ll be outside of my Zone of Silence!” Byron said. “He’s going to get blasted by the screaming.”

The information assistant passed this along, but I didn’t even need the little ball of light to translate the man’s response: he was determined.

I could only be grateful. Each of the bladed nightmares was larger than a shed, and there were six of them. I was optimistic about my chances against one, but if I was up against two… or more…

Well, there were only seven of us approved for melee, plus two flyers. I appreciated the support.

“This is going to be quick,” Byron said. “Whether we kill them or they kill us, this will be decided in under a minute. No one hold anything back!”

His words were translated to the rest of the group, then the Information Assistant bobbled forward, projecting a numeric countdown on the ground ahead of us.

Three…

Two…

One…

Go!