Several people started cheering, but one person started yelling in Japanese. I didn’t know what they were saying, but they sounded panicked.

Moments later, the Information Assistant translated. “Uh, before we celebrate, can everyone please try to find the missing limbs? The Instant Prosthesis ability will start running out in about a minute, and we need to be ready to stick everyone back together and heal them.

In spite of the urgency, I sat there for a good three seconds, staring.

Find and match the limbs?

What a world.

The following three minutes were both gruesome and disturbing. Mechanical body parts faded away, leaving gushing wounds behind until we could slam their displaced parts up against the cuts and heal them back on. We managed it in all cases but two, where incidental damage to the limbs left them too mangled to reattach. The hammer-wielder was left without a foot and one Indian man lost his right arm. Shockingly, we repaired the woman who'd been cut in two without a problem, although it was tiring. The cut through her body was clean, trivial to repair. The blood she'd lost was a bigger problem, but fixable with enough uses of high-synergy Healing Touch.

The only total casualty was the Japanese man who’d drawn one of the monsters away. He’d been relying on our support to injure the monster or pull it off him in time.

We’d failed.

“You should take his body,” I told Hana. “He may have family who won’t know what happened to him. You should be able to carry back whatever you’re holding when you go through the portal.”

Hana nodded, her face troubled as she looked at the corpses of those who’d fought the mantises before us. “The same should be done for the rest. These two look American. Will you take them back?”

“We’re pretty rural right now. No one else around,” I said. “Even if we bring them back, their families almost certainly won’t find them.”

“If they get left here, their families definitely won’t find them,” Davi said.

I sighed. “Fair enough. If no one from America is in a town or city, we can take them.”

We’d done our fighting in the open area, where the plants wouldn’t obstruct our vision. I was impressed that no one bolted for the bushes the moment the fight was over, trying to be the first to claim one of the limited prizes. The move would have been understandable in some ways, but the prizes thus far had ranged the gamut from the critically-important Shops to some weird-ass bracelet thing an Indian woman showed us, that she'd supposedly claimed from the previous week’s challenge. She said it let her see the name and approximate synergy of someone’s strongest ability. It was useful, I guess, but hardly worth risking your life over.

Instead we prowled carefully into the middle as a group, checking for further dangers or traps and cutting down the plants to keep our line-of-sight clear. There was a little bit of jostling to be a step ahead of the others - I might have been guilty here myself - but it ended up being irrelevant. All of us were announced as part of the top 25%.

“Eight people before… 26 of us left…” Byron muttered. “There are over 128 people in our maze.”

There were only six bodies, so two of the eight people who’d reached the middle before us had actually made it out the portal in spite of its defenders.

“Dang, they must have been fast,” I said.

Byron shook his head. “My money’s on stealth. If someone could evade the targeting systems for the sniper guns, they could go straight over the maze. The same abilities might let them sneak by the monsters.”

A few people headed straight for the portal and vanished.

Davi craned her neck to watch. “We’re sticking around, right? At least until John gets here? Well, honestly, if the three of us are here, and we know John’s here, Kurt is probably here too.”

I nodded decisively. “Almost certainly. I’m not sure what we can do to help them, but we gotta be here. John has Mental Speech, at least. If he needs a rescue and tries to let us know, we better at least be able to hear him.”

“Ah… If you are staying, perhaps you will assist us?” Hana interrupted. “We believe we can make safe paths to the center, and help more people escape.”

I blinked. “Yeah. Absolutely.”

Byron tilted his head thoughtfully. “It shouldn't be too dangerous, if we stay in big enough groups. It’s a good opportunity to gather information about possible future monsters, and maybe we can find Kurt or John. The biggest risk will be other people.”

“We can always run if they seem hostile,” I said. “Besides, if we find a big pack of pavemimics, we can take them back with us. I found some earlier, but I didn’t feel like I could carry them with me. It’d be fine now, and it’d be rude to show up at your Grandma’s table empty-handed.”

Byron laughed. “I don’t think she cares if we bring anything.”

I snorted. “Only because she’s never tried pavemimic. Eggs and cookies sounds fine… but eggs, steak and cookies? That’s a feast. Oh! And you could freeze a chunk this time and we could toss it in the replicator! I could take it back for Meghan and the kids to try.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“You’re hopeless, Vince,” Davi said.

I shrugged. “More for me if you don’t want any.”

Davi’s eyes widened. “Let’s not go that far!”

…

We had two reasonable methods of getting through walls: the Shop-purchased hammer and the stoneshaper, so we split into two teams. Added to our initial entry route, that would make three safer paths through the last part of the maze.

I was swinging the hammer, which had been given to me as a gift. The original wielder was sitting on the ground near the portal and had claimed he could buy more… if he could stand and walk. He was clearly terrified about facing the apocalypse with a missing foot. I mentioned Rapid Regeneration to him, passing the information through the translator, but he hadn’t cheered up much.

“Thank you. This will take weeks or months, however? I will wait. Perhaps someone will come by who can heal me faster.”

I wished him luck.

Our progress wasn’t fast, but we were doing good work: the maze had definitely been the nastiest right near the middle. If we could provide a route past some of the yarn horrors and larger packs of monsters, we’d definitely be saving lives. Every so often, we got a message from John, so we knew he was still alive.

By and large, the people we ran into seemed more scared of us than we were of them. Sensible, since we had a group of six with me, Davi, Byron, and three other Americans. Most people seemed to be moving around solo or in groups of twos and threes.

There was one woman who tried to incinerate us, but when Byron snuffed out her flames the instant they appeared, she immediately fled.

Only the Japanese people didn’t seem terrified of us. Wary, certainly, but most were willing to extend cautious trust at the sight of black-and-white armbands.

Eventually, the prize announcements stopped.

“Seventy-two prizes,” Byron said. “So there are almost 300 of us in here, or there were. Honestly, fewer than I would have thought for the size of the maze.”

I slammed the hammer through another wall, sitting back to rest as the people around me poked their heads through the hole I’d made and wiped out the monsters.

“Just three of the bugdeer,” Davi said. “Should we turn back soon? We haven’t seen any huge packs or new monsters in a while.”

I stretched. “I think so. We’d probably be better off making another path than taking this one all the way to the walls. Especially since seeing us keeps making people run.”

There was a pleasant surprise waiting for us in the center.

“John! Good to see you, man!” I laughed, clapping him on the back in a hug. “Why didn’t you tell us you were safe?”

“Just got here! Was talking to this fine lady,” he said, nodding toward Hana. She’d remained in the center to share information. “Is… uh, Kurt here?”

I shook my head. “We haven’t seen him. I’m surprised you got here so quickly!”

John tapped the side of his head. “Clairvoyance! Made it easy to tell which way to go, and then I spotted one of the paths your buddies made. Just a lil’ too slow to get a prize, I guess.”

I shrugged. “Eh, whatever. Prize announcements just stopped, so you're probably in the middle 50%. You didn’t get a penalty, and you’re alive. That makes you a winner in my book.”

“I’m worried about Kurt,” Davi said. “If we’re all here, he has to be here too. Can you use your Clairvoyance to look for him?”

John nodded, closing his eyes. “Keep watch for me?”

He searched in vain for a tense hour as our spirits dropped. We’d been in a good mood after successfully dealing with the massive mantises, helping others, and finding John, but our worries about Kurt grew as each minute ticked by. I really regretted not having all my friends as Followers, but the Kirtland brass had insisted on keeping two of us as their Followers. That way, if something happened to me, there’d still be some level of communication possible between Alabama and New Mexico.

“Are you looking at the corpses, too?” Davi asked softly. “If… if something got him…”

John nodded. “Haven’t found him yet. Alive or, uh, hurt. Looking all the way out near the edge, now, so… wait!”

“Did you find him?”

“Found him! He’s alive, just lost as a liberal at a gun fair!”

Our relief was so great that no one even rolled an eye at John's phrasing. We immediately got to work on the difficult task of getting Kurt to safety.

John stayed in the middle - with Davi guarding him - and directed Kurt toward us and away from the worst hazards. Byron and I headed for the path nearest to his location and started expanding it outward.

“If we keep a clear line of sight to the middle, we won’t get lost,” Byron muttered.

You’re almost to him! One more wall!

I shook out my shoulders, grateful my regeneration ability seemed to keep any soreness from accumulating, and slammed the mace into the wall repeatedly, bashing through one final layer of stone.

There he was.

Byron grabbed Kurt in a hug, laughing as he lifted him into the air. “I can’t believe it! We’re all gonna make it to dinner. Come on!”

Kurt laughed, relief clear. “Thank God John found me. I was worried I’d never make it out of there. Thanks… for staying.”

“Are you kidding? We wouldn’t leave you!”

Kurt shook his head. “I mean… I didn’t think you would… but… these Challenges are nightmares. Let’s just get out of here.”

“Yeah! We’ve got dinner waiting. Guess what?” I asked. “I found some pavemimics when we were cutting through the maze. Three full monster bodies waiting with Davi and John.”

“Looking forward to it,” Kurt said.

We made it back to the middle without incident and said our farewells to Hana and confirmed that other people had taken the dead back with them. We headed through the portal in high spirits, glad to have made it out alive and to have avoided the penalties.

Or so we thought.

“Fuck,” Kurt said, the moment we were back in Texas. “I was in the last 25%. I can’t be healed or buffed by others for the next twelve days.”