The Hell Pigs were as subtle than their name implied. Their party crashed through the jungle like a carnival, plunging into forest that got thicker and wilder as it sloped down into marshland. I lost their scent in the brackish water, but Clive’s raiders left a trail of dead dinosaurs and Legions on their way home. I followed the blood.

Their need to kill slowed them down enough that I caught up. Crouched among mangroves, I watched the band approach a ruined city. Ziggurats, hewn from enormous blocks of black stone half-sunken into the earth, loomed over the dripping humid jungle. The towering front gate leaned almost forty degrees to one side in the mud, carved with stylized images of howling, wild-eyed apes. They wrung drops of blood from human hearts into their gaping mouths. From beyond, I smelled human and animal sweat, old food and woodsmoke. The stench of human misery.

Suddenly, the rolling boom of drums started up all around me. I just about shit myself.

[You have discovered the City of the Apes.]

“This place has theme music? That ain’t good.” I clamped my whole body against the ground and hissed, only belatedly realizing that no one else could hear the drums. Or me.

The crooked bamboo gate was manned by a team of four guards. Beyond them sprawled the filthy camp I’d scented on the wind. The Hell Pigs had set up in a big courtyard that probably contained about sixty or seventy people. The perimeter was surrounded by free-standing wooden spike walls. There were tiki torches planted at intervals to brighten the place up. It didn’t do a damn thing to disguise the fact the camp was made of little shit-shack buildings. Shanty huts cobbled together out of wood planks and thatch, teepees made of poorly tanned hides, lean-tos and bedrolls. As I studied the view from cover, I couldn’t help but note that many of the people working in the camp wore rags and heavy wooden collars.

The trail from Clive’s squad ended at the gate, but I had a pretty good idea of where to look: the ruined temple complex that stretched out behind the encampment. Torches lit a straight path from the camp into an ominous black stone complex further back.

Cattails slithered over my skin as I followed the outer wall of the complex, not daring to enter the light cast by the fires in the camp. Only once I was sure that I was concealed did I slink out of cover and look up. Each one of the massive hewn stones was thick with moss, the seams between them glowing bright green under the moonlight. I backed up, wiggled my butt, and sprinted forward into a bounding leap. Claws and tentacles found the cracks between the stones, punching in and pushing me up. I scrabbled with my back feet until my feet found purchase, and then jumped off, leaping up a second time. The jump was clumsy, and I landed half-on, half-over the wall on my belly. Kicking and struggling, I used all eight limbs to haul myself onto the edge, only to see one of the guards in front of the main building shade their eyes and peer in my direction.

I learned I had two hearts, because both of them hammered as I dropped down low, clamped the pud squad to my back, and narrowed my glowing eyes to thin slits.

“What? Something there?” The distant buzz of their voices carried to my ears.

“Maybe?” The Hell Pig craned his head, squinting in my direction. “Can’t see anything, but I swear I heard something.”

He was maybe fifty feet away. How the fuck could he miss me? I was a twenty-foot-long dragon-shark thing. But then I remembered: most animals had senses that were hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands keener than a human’s. It was no different here in the Jungle. Just because I could see and smell these guys didn’t mean they could see or smell me.

“Don’t worry about it. Worry about what we’re gonna do after Razor’s dead.” The guard’s companion said sourly.

“Razor? You think Vanara is going to niner him?”

“If Vanara doesn’t kill him, Clive will. Did you see the gear they were packing? He’s not in there to fight the boss.”

“Fuck, man, keep it down!” The first guard hissed. “Don’t say that too loud!”

“I’ll say it and I’ll stand by it. Razor cleared one lousy outpost and now he thinks he’s hot shit. Go check the odds on your channel. The bookie know what we don’t.”

There was a pause as the second guy looked over his menus. “The odds on my channel say they’re both gonna die tonight.”

“Shit, really?” Another pause. “Fuck, they updated. Dude, we need a plan to get out of here before the Centurions spooks notice. If Clive and Razor both die, no one else here has a Brute. The Centurions’ll crush us. I’m just about to hit Level 9; I don’t wanna die in this shithole.”

“Should we message the main camp?”

Each overheard detail added to the overall picture growing in my mind. The Hell Pigs had a rival guild, the Centurions. Clive and Razor were ambitious middle-management guys vying for a better position in the former, and the competition threatened to leave a power vacuum. There was a ‘main camp’ that was not this place, which implied that the Hell Pigs had more members than what I saw here. This was an outpost. I could deduce there was a war for territory in full swing in the Jungle. But was it a hot war, or a cold stalemate?

I relaxed as the door bitches continued their nervous chatter, and studied the building they guarded. It looked like a temple, or a church. The place was basically a cross with a big chamber in the middle, a rotunda capped by a domed roof. The roof was supported mostly by pillars all the way around, leaving an open space at the top. Judging by the sounds coming out of there – whoops and shrieks, screams of agony – I had a feeling that might be where I’d find Sam.

The spaces between the pillars looked big enough for me to squeeze through. There was also a way up: two big arches that had once linked the main temple to the outer walls. Carefully, quietly, I took the slow first step out onto the arch, then trotted and bounded across to the temple roof. The gap was about twenty feet up. I jumped up easily, anchoring myself to minimize sound, and crawled inside.

The first thing that hit me was the metallic, sweet odor of human blood. Lots and lots of blood, the blood of many different people all mixed together into one big sensory overload. I circled around until I could get a good view of the altar, and rumbled softly. "Oh jeez."

There were clearly two sub-factions of Hell Pigs here. Razor’s Reavers were all dressed in black and red, though their gear wasn’t much better than the mish-mash of trashy armor Clive and his men wore. Most of the Reavers were gathered around the giant altar at the back of the room. It was styled in the shape of a gaping gorilla’s mouth, with the tongue forming the table where they were busy brutalizing someone. Male, female, it was hard to say. I couldn't exactly see what was going on. By the garbled screeching and the spreading pool of blood on the floor, I got the gist.

There were two crude wagon cages to my right. One of them contained a little old woman dressed in dirty rags. She had her face buried against her knees. A mop of ragged white hair hung over her face and arms, obscuring everything but her size. The cage next to her contained a huge stag. It was a graceful, sad looking thing, with a brilliant copper hide that flexed with shimmering embers. Its crest of antlers burst from its skull like twin trees, the tips scraping the insides of the cage. They were made of orange crystal. As I gazed at it, a little magnifying glass sprung up in my HUD, along with a rapidly filling meter.

[You have identified a New Legion: Runtina.]

The Runtina wore a collar. It didn’t look like mine. This one was wider and spiked, and when I focused on it, it came up as a [Suppression Collar]. The item was flagged in orange text, not the usual white. It was a dark, evil-looking thing, flaring whenever the Runtina struggled against its magic. Staring at it earned me a tooltip:

[Suppression Collar: Used to control a Greater Legion without binding it to a specific master. Unlike Control Collars, Suppression Collars may be removed by people other than the trainer without destroying the Legion.]

Wait. If I someone who wasn’t me somehow got my collar off… I was dead? “Well, fuck.”

The Suppression Collar didn’t look like much fun. The Runtina’s muscles spasmed like it was being shocked, and every time his legs twitched, one or both of the guards watching over the cages looked back with visible anxiety. They did not want this guy getting loose.

"Number nine! Num-ber nine!" The Reavers took up a chant, drowning out the piteous screams of their victim as a wood-and-obsidian sword rose and fell, rose and fell above the heads of the crowd. Within seconds, a cheer went up, and the hooting gang of men parted to reveal the body of their sacrifice. It was Birch, the guy Clive had tied up. Clive and his warband were standing at the far side of the rotunda, watching with stony expressions. The Pigs closest to the altar were covered in gore.

"We're almost there, Piglets! All we need is one more, and we're off to boss town!" A tall, thin man with a black mohawk and the crazed dark eyes of a junkie thrust Birch’s severed head into the air with one hand, the other white-knuckled around the macuahuitl he'd used to butcher him. He was addressing an unseen camera, hamming it up for his audience. "And then, Razor’s Reavers will face Vanara for the first time, with Clive’s Hyena Boys waiting in the wings to back ‘em up!"

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

My stomach turned as laughter went up among the gang. They were all staring off into space, watching their stream chats. Only the guards were paying any kind of attention to the room: but the ones near the monster cages weren’t watching their own backs, trusting in the wall behind them.

"Thanks everyone! And thank you, Lorenzo_666, for your donation of a Bronze Tribute! Now, it’s time for our grand finale. Let's clear some space for the lovely lady, boys!" Razor dropped the head of his victim and threw his bloody arms in the air. “Chop chop! HAHAHA!”

Two Pigs went down the line and opened the cage with the woman inside. She flew up as the door swung out, but it was no contest. They grabbed her by the arms and wrenched them behind her back, revealing her face. I sucked in a deep breath. By her size and hair color, I'd mistaken her for an old lady. She was a lady, but she wasn’t old. She was albino: small and slim, her ice-blue eyes blazing with silent fury. Both hair and skin were both a pale, pure white that flooded with scarlet as she began to struggle, lashing her head from side to side.

Hell no. Fuck a whole lot of this. A soft rumble curled deep in my chest. I suppressed it, and flexed my claws into the stone instead.

"Well, well, well, look at this exotic little flower." The ringleader – Razor, I was guessing - purred. He leaned in to her as the guards dragged her struggling to the altar. "Sorry about dicing up your girlfriend before, sweet teats! But it’s so nice to… MEAT YOU! AHHAHAHA! Aww, c’mon – did I really lose viewers from one lousy pun?"

The girl didn't seem to hear him, thrashing soundlessly in the hands of her captives. Her hands were bound in front of her, but she was making the same repetitive gesture over and over again: chopping the blade of her right hand into the palm of her left, fast and desperate. She was deaf. Speaking sign language. A language I recognized like a native tongue.

"STOP! STOP STOP STOP STOP!"

The temple scene withdrew into a buzzing haze as a memory swallowed me, as vivid as a hallucination.

A woman, faceless, lunging toward me as I struggled with another man. I shouted in rage, banging his face down on a counter over and over again. The air was pungent with old alcohol and cigarettes and blood. She made a strangled, frightened sound, chopping her hand down into the other until I thought she'd bruise her own palms. “STOP IT! NO! STOP! THAT’S ENOUGH!!”

She pulled me away from the man by my shirt, screaming at me with her hands as he slumped to the ground. I couldn't see her face. It was like television snow, blanked out. But I knew who she was. She was the woman I'd die for. She was the woman I needed to help. The woman who talked with her hands.

My sister.

Sam.

A hot pain shot through my head, jerking me back to the present. The Hell Pigs had pressed the albino girl onto the altar, where she snarled and struggled, bucking against the circle of hands holding her down. Restrained from all sides, she couldn't sign as they bound her down. Her voiced scream was wordless, drowned out by the hooting and laughter of the men that surrounded her.

Adrenaline coursed through my body.

"Take a good long look, all of you!" Razor yelled over the rest of the pack. "Isn't she a beauty? I'm thinking it's almost a waste to sacrifice her to summon a boss as low tier as Vanara. Anyone who sends us, let's see... how about a Silver or higher tribute? Yeah! Anyone who sends us a Silver or higher tier tribute will spare the life of our little Snow White here!"

Adrenaline thrummed through my chest as I slipped down to the top floor of the auditorium, barely making a sound. A grunt sounded from the darkness ahead, and I froze. As my eyes adjusted, I spotted the man who'd made the noise: a lone Hell Pig who’d had been set up as a spotter behind the cages. His cruddy hide armor and crude wooden spear told me he was a junior member of the gang. He was busy taking a piss.

I padded forward, low to the ground. When I moved slowly, claws held off the floor, my steps were as silent as a panther's. It was disturbingly natural to assume the right posture, the right speed, and the right angle to kill. The target was oblivious, still draining the python when I lunged in, caught his head in my jaws, and crushed down.

My fangs went through bone and flesh with almost no effort at all. He didn't even have time to cry out. The body spun from the neck, which snapped with a muffled 'crunch' and then sagged in my jaws, twitching and hot. The second I realized that, I dropped him and backed away, breathing hard through all six vents in my muzzle. My mouth was full of a sweet metallic taste... a taste my predator's body yearned for, even as I scrabbled back and gagged as quietly as possible.

[Stealth Gladiator Kill. You gain 50 EXP.]

Fuck. Motherfucker. I really was a goddamn killing machine.

"Whaaaat?! Not a single tribute!? Not even a measly little crumb for our next contestant on 'Who's Blood is That Anyway'?" Razor let out a shrill, insane laugh. "Too bad, kid! Guess they want to see you die!"

I concentrated on the dead Pig, and thought 'Inventory'. Sure enough, a holographic window opened, revealing everything he'd been carrying. He had a surprising amount of stuff. Some crude [Musket Bullets] - strange, given he wasn't carrying a gun - a whole bunch of berries, [Flax Thread x 300], [Hide x 130], twine, rope and a few other survival basics. He was wearing [Poorly Tanned Buckskins] and carried a [Stone Spear]. I switched out the three hundred pounds of sticks and bracken in my Inventory into his, took all his stuff, then looked over the railing.

The Pigs were crowded over the girl. She struggled, still fighting. That was good – she just needed to hang onto her sanity. I tested the strength of the stone before leaping up, and then experimentally reached down and flexed my claws into the mossy wall. They sunk into the rotten mortar like pitons, anchoring me. Instinct told me to unfurl my tentacles and use them to assist my descent. The four prehensile limbs were strong enough to easily bear my entire weight, so I clambered down the wall like Doctor Octopus, as stealthy while vertical as I was while horizontal.

Neither the other monsters or the cowering humans in the cages seemed to notice me, either riveted to the scene on the altar or buried in their own little worlds. Any sound I made was drowned out by the howling of the Pigs. The two guards were watching the scene ahead, confident that their spotter was still alive and keeping an eye on their backs.

They didn't see what hit them. The tentacles lanced forward like harpoons, punching through the backs of their boiled leather armor and out the front of their chests. I hauled them around either side of the cage, whisking them off their feet and dragging them back into the shadows. Two quick bites. Two kills.

[Stealth Gladiator Kill. You gain 100 Exp. You are Level 8.]

[You have 1 Ability Points.]

[You have 5 new Subscribers.]

The pair of corpses collapsed as I drew the tentacles out of them with a wet sucking sound. These guys carried [Primitive Shortbows] and [Macuahuitls], as well as more ammunition - all different kinds - food, stone tools, and lots of other crafting materials and trinkets. Most importantly, they had the keys to the Runtina’s cage.

Now, the moment of truth. I could do almost everything a human player could do, other than crafting. But could I use keys?

There was a high-pitched sound of terror from the altar: a thin garbling cry that caused images of that rage-soaked kitchen to flash in my mind again. Broken teeth, blood, the angry slash of a woman chopping her left hand into the palm of her right.

My heart thumped I focused on the cage locks. As I did, the stag reared his head as much as the cage allowed for, ears flicking with curiosity. He stared at me with eyes like hot coals, smoldering with barely-suppressed anticipation as I pulled the key out of my Inventory: or tried to.

[Error: You do not have the ability to use this item.]

Fuck.

"Hey! Who the hell's Brute is that?!" It was Rooster, Clive’s lieutenant, leaning around the altar to peer across the room at me.

My pulse skipped a beat. In desperation, I latched onto the padlock with my teeth and bore all of the primal strength in my jaws down on the crude metal. As a human, the idea of biting through a lock was absurd. As Noodles the Reaper Nemesis, it was absurdly easy. The bronze broke apart in my mouth with a resounding CRACK, startling the onlookers not too wrapped up in whatever was going on at the altar.

Rooster’s eyes flew open. "What the- HEY! GUYS! THE-THE-THE FUCKING MURDER-DEER JUST-"

I bounded forward, seized the stag’s collar between my teeth, and chomped down a second time. The metal sharply heated, then shattered in my mouth. The blast cost me 233 HP and sent me reeling, even as the stag clambered to his feet. He put his head down, glaring at the panicking mass of Hell Pigs, and pawed the floor of his cage.

“Don’t worry, boys! Focus on Vanara! We got this!” Clive shouted. “BLAZE! Get over here, you big toothy bastard!”

The huge red sabertooth tore around from the other side of the altar, bellowing as he charged straight at me and Mr. Runtiya. The stag’s eyes constricted into brilliant points of light. He burst into pure white flames that roared around him like whips, slashing the bronze cages and slagging them into so much liquid metal. The sabertooth was driven back, but he had fire of his own. As the stag thundered toward the crowd of Hell Pigs, the big cat’s paws became incandescent, boiling with scarlet fire.

I flanked and charged into the melee from the side, shrugging off the blow of a machete against my hard skin and trampling a different man down with my claws. The albino woman was where I'd last seen her: chained to the altar, nude and bloody. She was straining her bonds to their limit, trying to shake them as men fought and screamed and died around her. And on her. Her face contorted in a soundless cry of horror as I slapped the head off the startled Razor and sent him tottering back toward the altar. He spun on his feet and fell over the girl's body like a ragdoll.

[Nine of Nine. You have made the last sacrifice.]

[The altar has been consecrated. Vanara has heard your summons!]

[The Daeva will spawn in 10, 9, 8...]

The altar flared with a sickly green light, and an unholy stench filled the air. I launched over to the mossy altar and grabbed the nearest chain in my jaws. My teeth creaked and cracked as the chains pulled apart like slow taffy, heating as the metal strained, then snapped.

The girl beat on my chest with her free fist as I reached over her with all four tentacles, seized the chain on the other side, and ripped the links apart. As I did, a ring of energy blasted out of the altar, bathing us in swamp-green energy. I shrugged it off and gave her ankle cuffs the same treatment. When she was free, she tried to roll over and bolt. Before she could, I seized her in my jaws and ran for the edge of the circle of crackling energy forming around us.

“No! Let go!” The girl shouted aloud, banging her fist on my snout. She could voice. That was good.

There was a deafening bang, the sound of a rifle going off, and a bullet took me in the shoulder. It shaved off a chunk of health and sent sticky blue-black blood gushing. The pain barely registered. My eyes were on the door as I charged my way to the edge of the circle, smashing people away from me left and right. As soon as we broke free of the melee, I started running.

A deep roar ripped through the hall of the temple, bouncing off the walls and drowning out the bellows of the monsters still brawling there. But now we were out of that mess, it was none of my business. The Hell Pigs wanted a boss fight? Well, they got one.

"GET IT! GET THAT BRUTE!" The panicked voice of Clive cut through the racket as the roar faded. "Rooster, you need to get that fucking Brute! The one with the girl! Before the fucking boss arena-"

[Vanara the Devourer rises once more!]

[All exits to the arena are sealed!]