Fort Hope at least offered the illusion of safety. To make it a little more real for Angel, I parked my giant black booty in the doorway of her tent to make sure she and Lulu weren’t disturbed.

Sleep came quickly, and with it, dreams: fractured, hyper-fast flickers of memory and sensation from the life I’d left behind. It was like trying to watch a movie that had been hacked to pieces and randomly spliced back together, sparks of imagery spaced between walls of heavy void. I could picture my sister’s bouncy, curly chestnut hair, but not her face. Her hands, pale and slim, with well-bitten nails. The smell of coffee and the city as her fingers flashed. Where were we? Seattle?

There were moments with other women, ones not related to me. Strippers and mob molls. The dream blurred into the rank darkness of a titty bar. I knew I wasn’t in the USA, but the name of the city was a crossed-out blur. An Asian girl in a gold bikini ground against my lap. She was packing so much cyberware she looked like a Barbie doll. I let her do her thing, slamming back a shot of watered-down vodka while a man across the table talked gibberish. His face was a shifting pixelated mess, but I listened with rapt attention. I was wearing a wire that transmitted his every word.

Keep it up, Vance. Keep him talking. A woman’s sultry purr on the other end of the line.

The sound of my name jolted me awake. My name, and the memory of the wire. My heart was pounding in double-time. You weren’t supposed to remember that.

Still half-asleep, I peered up at the sky. It was just before dawn. There was no wind to speak of, and the smoke from the early cooking fires rose in straight pillars toward the clouds. A deep violet haze hung over the jungle, tinged orange toward the east. If we hadn’t been trapped here against our wills, it’d have been pretty nice. A paradise where a man could find his way, start his life over.

Paradise. Jungle. The memory of the strip club blurred back into my mind’s eye, and I glimpsed the name on the blazing neon sign. Sugar Club. Paradise District, Phuket. The strip joint was in Thailand.

The surreal feeling of remembering something that should have been deleted from my memory grew stronger. Grunting, I got to my feet and shook myself out. The flimsy wooden platform under the tent wobbled.

Behind me, Angel shot upright in bed, looking around wildly. She came up with the rifle she’d been snuggling like a body pillow all night.

“Huh?” I turned back. “What’s the matter?”

“I felt something,” she signed. Her pale blue eyes were wide. “Like an earthquake.”

“Sorry. Just me.” I grunted, and sniffed around for anything or anyone that might be spying on us. Couldn’t smell Falks or her Legions.

Angel yawned and stretched, then drew her legs up to sit crosslegged in the bed. She opened her HUD and began to scroll through it.

“Hey, how about you get breakfast and some coffee before you start doing inventory?” I put my paws down against the dirt and stretched until my ribs touched the ground and my butt nearly touched the top of the doorframe. Then a million message pings from my channel.

“Not yet. I hit Level 10 after the duel. I can pick my class now,” Angel signed back. “I wanted to do it last night, but decided to sleep on it so I could look at it fresh first thing.”

“Excited?”

“I am, actually. Yeah.” Her eyes were scanning the interface, alight with interest and energy.

I turned back around and sat down. My stomach was rumbling, but the expression on Angel’s face was infectious. “What classes are on the menu?”

“I’ve got five options to pick from. The game matches a range of classes to your stats and skills,” Angel signed. “But I already know which one I’m going to take. It’s got a dumb name, though.”

“Are you about to become a Ghetto Fighterman? Mouseburgler? Or… OOH. What about ‘Paladin of Slaughter’?”

“It’s almost that bad,” Angel signed wryly. “The class is called ‘Gun Saint’.”

“Sounds…” I nearly said ‘suspiciously sexy,’ but held my tongue. Barely. “Uhh… interesting. Don’t suppose it comes with a latex nun outfit?”

Angel slowly looked up at me, her eyebrows inching up a little higher.

“Guess not.” I brought my hind leg up to scratch my neck. “But, you know, it might be cool and fashionable if it did.”

“It comes with dual-wield firearms,” Angel signed wryly. “Here, let me read this out. The main ability is called ‘Guns Akimbo,’ and it’s pretty good.”

“Go ahead.”

“Guns Akimbo: One gun not enough for you? Try two! Draw a second gun or crossbow. You instantly gain 50% speed, gain 10% damage reduction against enemy gladiator attacks, and regenerate health AND ammo. Does not apply to bows. Lasts for 20 seconds, 45 second cooldown.”

I rumbled. “That is… actually pretty fucking bad-ass. And wait: you can use this with any gun?”

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“Apparently.”

“Like, you could dual wield rifles?”

“I’m planning to test it if I can get another one, but that’s what it says. Only thing it specifies I CAN’T use are bows.”

I had the brief mental image of tiny Angel dual-wielding a pair of shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. “I can’t wait to see this. You’re going to buff this ability into infinity, right?”

“Absolutely. But there’s abilities further on the trees that I’ll be spending points on, like this one. ‘Pumped up Kicks’.” She paused to tuck a lock of white hair behind her ear. “‘Taking damage gives +10% movement speed and +15% reload speed for 10 seconds’. That’s at Level 1.”

“Nice.” I had a look at my own HUD. I was still Level 19: not quite enough to see my next tier of abilities. “How often do these new steps open up for you?”

“Every five levels. But humans have a max level cap of fifty instead of a hundred and fifty, like you guys.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got any insight as to why I’m a Legion with player status?” I asked. “Because the system recognizes me as a Gladiator, but I don’t have a class.”

Angel grimaced. “Beats me.”

“Well, I better not end up with the human level cap.” I flicked my tentacles into a neat line down my back. “Guess we won’t know until the next realm.”

“Nope.” Angel shrugged, unbraiding her hair. The FRAME was realistic enough that her plaits got frizzy after a while, but not so realistic that her hair stayed crimped and wavy after she let it loose. As soon as she brushed it out, it resumed its straight, long fall, like a pour of milk shielding her face. It flowed over her slim shoulders to her waist.

“Welp. Breakfast time.” I turned away, nearly banging my muzzle into the opening of the tent. “And then we head to… what was that place again?”

“Camp Goldrush,” Angel voiced from behind me. “There’s a supply road that will take us there. It’s a long trip, but not a slow one unless the weather turns.”

I looked up at the sky. The morning haze was lifting, and it looked like another beautiful sunny day in hell. “Are there weather events here?”

“Yeah. And the volcano is rumored to erupt any time someone fights the second Daeva. That might just be a superstition, though.”

“Well, get sleepyblob over there up and ready for adventure, and I’ll catch up in about thirty minutes.” Restless, I got to my feet and hopped off the tent platform to the lane between tents. Other women were stirring, getting ready for another day of soldiering. Our neighbor across the street, so to speak, emerged in nothing but a long shirt that just barely covered her ass.

As Targent had noted, the videogame stereotype of female toons being unrealistically gorgeous bore out here. This lady had long blonde hair, and as she stretched and yawned - oblivious to my presence - I felt my blood pressure spike. I needed to get out of the women’s section before I got chased out.

“Good morning, sis!” The woman next door burst out of her tent, waving to the red-head. She was Polynesian, tall and athletic… and shirtless. And gifted. I put my head down and ran towards the edge of the block, and didn’t stop until I was past the women’s camp gates and back in the lady-free zone.

Man… days like these, I miss being human. I trotted to the perimeter wall of the fort and flopped onto a patch of grass with a sigh. My Inventory was still full of Rex meat. I pulled out what was clearly one the Rex’s forearms, lay down with it, and began to gnaw. It was oddly relaxing, and after a few minutes of flexing my jaws against bone, I forgot all about my libido. Instead, I opened my HUD and got ready to do some housekeeping.

I had over two thousand subscribers now, but still only a handful of patrons. Of all the patrons, only Cold_Fox had actually put any money down. Curiously, the number of subs seemed to have plateaued: when I looked over the analytics, the growth had almost flattened out since our adventure into the lava tubes.

That was odd. Our battle with the Sponsored Pigs’ Elite should have increased our ratings, not flattened them out. Same with our battle against Targent. I doubted it was because I was boring. Maybe it was because I wasn’t paying attention to the audience, but that wasn’t likely. The unfucked parts of my memory recalled plenty of wildly popular streamers who ate food, gamed, popped zits, did survival stuff out in the wilderness, or even just slept in their bedrooms without saying a word to their subs. The human urge to gawk at people living their lives was powerful, and as long as you were consistent and good at what you did, the people would come.

My tail began to lash as I considered the possibilities. While I was sure the Paragon Society crooks made a profit off of patron subscriptions and loot boxes, it stood to reason that they made the lion’s share of their money from gambling. These crooks weren’t just exploiting us: they were milking our viewers for money under the guise of SotF being a real esports and role-playing platform. Which made me wonder: was someone, or something, manipulating my subscriber count? There was no reason to believe the system was fair. Casino games always favored the house.

I was still thinking about that when I returned to pick up Angel and Lulu. Angel’s outfit was fucking wild: she had her nice new Vigiles-grade pleated leather skirt and sandals on, but she was wearing the camouflaged brigandine vest we’d looted from the Hell Pigs Elite, along with her ghillie raptor skull helmet. She had both her rifles slung over her back. My face must’ve been more expressive than I thought it was, because she looked at me through the open tent door and scowled.

“I know. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the best combo of gear for stats.” She sighed. “I really wish that Centurions wore pants.”

“It’s fine,” I replied. “I don’t wear pants. Lulu doesn’t wear pants. Clearly, pants are for losers. We can be Team No-Pants.”

“No,” Angel signed back. “We really can’t.”

We didn’t have an actual saddle, so it was just Angel’s bare thighs against my back. I tried to remain undistracted by this as I padded for the gate. No such luck. They were they were warm and smooth and strong, they were pressed against my skin, and she was a woman and I was… well… male. But I’d made a vow and I had a lot of self-control. After a couple miles, I stopped noticing.

Our journey took us down a road along what was known as the Iron Front, the heavily guarded supply line behind Centurion lines that fed, housed and delivered weapons to the gladiators fighting the Hell Pigs. The road made for fast travel, and I discovered I could crank some serious speed: in barely ten seconds, I could accelerate from a walk to thirty, forty, then even fifty miles per hour at a flat sprint. Lulu meeped, and Angel let out a yelp the first time I launched forward, clamping down with her knees and grabbing the base of the tentacles she used for reins.

“Uh-oh,” I thought back at her. “Too fast?”

Angel laughed, and replied by digging her heels into my ribs: the universal sign for ‘giddy-up’.

“Okay, well, you asked for it. Hold onto your buttcheeks.” I tossed my head and bolted forward. My back flattened, my joints shifted back in their sockets, and my tentacles naturally split to funnel wind and balance me out as I churned up mud and dust. Angel and Lulu both squealed, and Angel began to laugh. Wildly, loudly, joyously, whooping as she bent over my back and clung on with the expertise of a trained rider.

It was a good sound. She sounded… free. Happy. Alive. And for the first time since I’d arrived here, I felt the same way.