Think fast. The fainter of the two sounds likely came from the fellow I’d been slowly stalking, while the louder clang originated from the north. No reason to assume they hadn’t heard each other. Backtracking was the safe play, hoping they’d meet up and clash on their own. With some luck, the timing might allow me to play kingmaker, followed by executioner. Unlikely.

Another option was to ‘hide’ and pray they wouldn’t meet here. It would keep me closer to the fight, but left me screwed if they randomly ended up in my room. My odds of escape were good against many classes, but a three-way with me in the middle was likely to complicate that. Time’s up.

I chose the third option and backed up to the hallway entrance. My sword rang, loudly, first against the wall, and then against another blade. “AAAHHH MY ARM, DIE YOU DISHONORABLE ERRANT BASTARD!” Fake war cry completed, I retreated and started eavesdropping in a corner again. My heart pounded and muddied the acoustics despite an inner sense of calm… and smugness. It didn’t take long until they walked into the trap. A wise man might have waited longer. Instead I sprinted, carried by instinct, the rushing air reflecting my rising adrenaline. But contained, for now.

The fighting continued while I raced down the hallway. Soon they entered view and a shit-eating grin spread across my face. One, robed with a helmet and a strap-on buckler on its arm, backpedalled into the hallway to my right while the other, wearing an even mix of plate and leather, was in the center of the room and mid-leap towards its opponent. I almost felt their attention shift to my sudden appearance, whereas each of the combatants found opportunity in the momentary distraction of the other and took advantage of it.

The charging outsider flicked its oddly chitinous wrist, strange joints in its dark hand unloading like a spring. A little line with a barbed point flew out spinning to the other ones shoulder while simultaneously an impossibly thin white panel appeared and sliced the aggressor nearly in half through the midsection. But not before insect-charger yanked the wire after it pierced the mages’ shoulder, reeling the caster right in. The armored dude was obviously a power fighter because the moment he got a solid, now long fingered, grip on the mage he crushed his shoulder and practically vaporized it in a gory splat of transparent blood, full of pieces that belonged on the inside, effectively severing the mage’s arm.

Their exchange bought me a moment and a trailing hand brushed my quiver while a final kick-off sent me airborne through the room. They both lined up as I passed right behind the fighter and time slowed, my vision tunneled. Two swords materialized in the air, a physical blade slightly ahead of the magical projectile, and then flashed with a hundred energy behind each. The green sword passed through the expanding gap in the fighters’ midsection as distinct cracks and pops sounded from the mage, followed by the scrape of a barrier block deflection while the white sword almost certainly killed the fighter. It blew clean through the nape of its neck in a cone of green-yellow blood and black exoskeleton, the mage died with much of the same when the arcane high velocity projectile cleaved through its chest.

I’d gone for clean hits rather than giving a thought to anything else, unfortunately that included any considerations about recovery, and watched my magical blade disappear into the darkness. A quick flick nabbed my magisteel blade and I backtracked once more, settling in for a long listen. After all, any party risked uninvited guests and mine made quite the racket, the barrier block had been like nails on chalkboard in the eerie silence of our little classroom. Heh.

Giddy reflection shocked me out of stupidity and prompted taking further distance. Stay in control, damn it. A good, long smoke commemorated my first victory in the games. With two out of ten gone, my odds of grabbing one of the five portals at the end improved dramatically. The slightly optimistic assurance opened up the door to waiting out the final hours, if need be.

I got a little bored while waiting and explored the other passages. The site of battle was to my north, I’d originally entered this room roughly from the east. The directions didn’t precisely line up with my mind-compass, but scouting revealed both the south and inward west were puzzles.

The first had some kind of expanded Sudoku with unfamiliar symbols - a really hard one at that. The other was a thingamajig where you had to guide a ball with a loose rope through the middle past a long series of shapes without it getting all tangled up, I’d seen similar ones in stores but never as contrived as this. Despite my goal of killing time, neither held any appeal. Instead, reflection on my first real fight against other System-empowered folks seemed prudent.

While things had gone well, my actions were far from optimal. I’d gotten a little too comfortable with the preparation and consideration afforded by a graceful sparring partner, and in retrospect was a little taken aback by how quickly everything happened. The scuffle was basically over in an instant and the level of violence involved had been extreme.

I’d been relying on momentum to carry me through the room quickly enough that I didn’t need to worry about defense, which now felt like an incredibly risky play since both outsiders only needed a moment of inattention to cripple their respective opponent. If both of them had swung at me instead, then I’d have been pasted and dissected mid-air for my carelessness.

The physical-magical feint had done its job, although I had a hard time deciding if the order would have been better the other way around. The thought ended up discarded since leading with the physical sword forced the mage to draw heavily to have a chance of stopping it – most magical types with a defensive skill or ability could tune it for physical protection but it was wildly inefficient, not that it mattered when you were about to die.

Polarity swap inefficiencies made it more difficult, and possibly crippling, to protect against the magical follow-up with either a new barrier or a pre-emptive double layer. Not much else had happened, although the unusual weaponry combined with strange anatomy and how devastating it was to get caught by a power fighter seemed noteworthy. Insect dude-slash-dudette’s class left little to the imagination, the other was an endurance mage most likely, similar to Kim. No clear skills displayed, everything was over too quickly. Doesn’t matter anymore anyway.

I finished the habitual reviewing which had been drilled into me, finally out of reasons to procrastinate. Moreover and more importantly, my greed was getting the better of me. A quiet leisurely walk brought me back to the scene of the double-tap double-kill and… Fuck.

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An armored figure casually stripped equipment off the victims, slightly off-center in the room, a dozen steps ahead. Tell-tale yellow plumes lined the armor of tweety, the terror everyone feared - too preoccupied looting to immediately notice my silent approach. I should’ve taken the opportunity to flee.

Instead I did the dumbest thing possible.

My thoughts raced. The smart money was on birdy over there. The initial reactions made it abundantly clear the real objective of this particular instance of the games was to avoid a battle with the feathered fuck. But Kris’ advice mixed with addictive need and fueled the fire in my veins. Even before that I’d resolved to stop backing down from fights unless they were hopeless. Why am I doing this?

I’d faced down a dragon, twice, although mostly because it ignored me. What could the real difference in strength between us be? We were both level 100. Sure, it was geared to the tits but there were gaps in all the expected places of its full-body armor. What does it matter now? I’d already sped up and was but a moment away from entering the room.

I jumped and flipped around in the air. Its head twitched like a crow’s to face me while it stood up and its whole body emanated the initial expansion of the familiar white pulse I’d seen Barry use a hundred times. My knees creaked when I landed horizontally on my shield, which took the brunt of the explosion even if some of it wrapped around and grazed me. I expected to dropkick the fucker and then shoot it in the face. Instead the shield came to a dead stop almost immediately. I managed to blink it away after pushing off towards the wall behind me, twisting again with room to spare despite only a few meters of leeway and shot off a deca purely on feel.

My knees suffered again and an intensely shiny orb appeared to intercept my magical projectile, paired with a little jump scare twitch in my opponent when my sword passed through it. My neck-aimed skewer snapped in half right where it overlapped with the floating explosion, accented by the tell-tale sound of breaking ice. I kicked off the wall with intent to run along the side of the room, while my opponent turned to ostensibly take a bunch of smoky shrapnel on its armor. Instead it continued the motion amidst shredded feathers and I had to sacrifice my balance, falling backwards after a single step to slide under a wide war pick swing aimed right for my face. Miniature suns winked into existence near my opponent and homed in on me.

Too slow, time to shift gears. I turned on auto-refill and escaped my tumble by double-deca-launching myself to pass right behind the bastard. It jerked as if startled and attempted a reaction to the shot I’d just sent up its armpit from point blank range, while another 100 mana sent my ass down the hallway opposite from my entrance. My evasive efforts were further bolstered by the impact from two new spheres exploding at close proximity.

Airborne, I bounced at high speed off the wall by shield-shouldering it, and then almost began shaking my right arm because of a coin shaped burning sensation and the lingering damage of blocking the homing bombs but stopped. Left arm won’t move, shit. Meanwhile the other guy cawed sharply. Leaking red blood followed the blade, poised to continue its trajectory from under the shoulder to the face. Alas, my blade failed to pierce the armor. Birdbrain was already turning towards me when I let the hastily grabbed brick slide out of my extended right hand and activate behind my tumbling arc through the air.

It was nothing more than an enchanted wall tuned to the estimated hallway dimensions here, sans curved ceiling but with a crescent of bars to make up for it and some structural stuff on the edges, cooked up by the nerds to help keep it in place. It fit rather well and it was a bit of a miracle that I managed to place it just right, and then I crashed into the floor.

My flight had been completely uncontrolled - the detonations had wrecked both sticky vials. I carried them on my left side and compacting against the wall essentially welded my left forearm to my hip, denying aerial control and worsened by my mid-flight sudden movements.

A few bounces, rolls and a skid later and I was as good as new, although my right arm hurt like hell because of both the blocking and the heavy energy draw. Any further manual interception would have to happen with my left. Luckily, one out of three grain alcohol vials survived, now used to carefully dissolve whatever remained of the grey-white goo. So much for a failsafe. Oh crap.

Sensations flooded, overpowering the rush. I felt stinging and a dull ache on half my face, my hands trembled while a deep soreness rose in my shoulders from yanking myself all over the place. The pain intensified and spread. A sharp intake of breath failed, reversed by stabbing ribs. I nearly followed a screw-cap to the floor and chugged an endurance potion with difficulty, spilling splotches. After a couple of seconds my veins cooled and the worst of it receded, while the acrid smell of burned skin and hair suffused the air. Need to get the fuck out of here. The enchanted wall wouldn’t stop boom-bird for long, an experimental jog turned into a run, driven by an entirely different kind of adrenaline. Christ, just from two hits.

Still, I’d gotten a lick in. Hopefully it did some serious damage because another exchange would put me in the ground. Salvation looked like a stairway, I had to pause for a few deep breaths after descending. My stamina held up fine, my agony was the real problem, steps were fucking evil. I mustered up the willpower for one more run and then gave up on it immediately, reverting to a shuffle with intervals of jogging and reached a dead end, well, sort of - a challenge room.

Backtracking was a really bad idea right now so I went in. A stone portcullis closed off my entry point and an Errant instantly appeared out of nowhere. It was a suspended, diamond shaped, black-tinged crystal of some kind and roughly the size of a large dog. It began reorienting. Fuck this. I blasted it for 400 energy.

Three things accompanied my sudden collapse; a rate-limit notification, a deafening metallic clink and a blue light enveloping me. I made pain-angels on the floor for a while and then had an annoyed lunch plus smoke because my sword hadn’t been teleported along with me. The rate limit would pass in an hour or so because I hadn’t gone overboard, another one would last for days though. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere for some time yet and instead settled in for some good old recovery.

At least the corpse came along for the trip, although little more than shards remained of it. My interface showed the Errant as ‘100’, no ‘out of’, and the material it dropped was ‘crystal’ so I selected it and pocketed the lighter-sized gemstone. It was a pretty little thing, a diamond bottle for frozen blue lightning.

I wasted some energy to scarf down fast-food and kept refreshing my hour-long endurance potion before it ran out, afraid for my life. Four hours had passed once I decided to get going again, still sore as hell but capable of combat at least. A nearby staircase, checked whenever my mana ticked up, allayed any worries about a time crunch. My current location aligned perfectly with the south side, deducted from the stairwell orientation.

Thanks to the short fights I actually hadn’t spent all that much energy. A quick check revealed an expenditure of 900 out of my roughly total expendable supply of 4240. Physically, I wasn’t in the best shape, but could probably survive at least one direct hit if it wasn’t too enthusiastically charged.

The outcome was decent enough, all things considered, but it limited my options a little. Just don’t get hit, sure, no problem. Well, nothing ever went according to plan. My armory was down three magical swords, which left me with 15 magical and 2 physical in total, plus a secret weapon.

At least my southern location was promising, even if I had no clue what floor this was. There were twenty three layers in total and I’d been screwed out of my riches, which resolved me to take one more stairway down and then work through a few treasure rooms.

Maybe I’d even try my hand at solving a puzzle or two.

Like how the hell I’m going to survive this shit.