For the sake of not alerting every single Centurion in the mines all at once, Angel switched her rifles for a bow. She nocked an arrow and drew it back as I banged loudly on the door. A freckled face appeared. A teenage prison guard, maybe nineteen at the most. His lips parted with surprise, just before he took two ten-inch tentacle spikes right to the face.

“You know, I remember when my conscience used to bug me about killing humans.” I used his corpse for traction as I padded out, silent and deadly, and casually nailed two more Centurions to either side of the entryway. “About… ooh… two weeks ago? But then I realized that ninety-nine percent of the people here are either evil, stupid, or both.”

“Ooooh-hoo,” Lulu agreed softly.

We’d found the prison block. Four levels of crude six-by-four-foot cells hewn from rock, windowless, locked with heavy wooden doors. There were no bars. Maybe for the psychological effect, because none of the prisoners could see or talk to each other. Maybe it was just because the Cents didn’t want to waste the metal. Either way, it was grim. All the doors faced inward toward a central watchtower, connected by a wide wooden walkway that spiraled all the way around to the ground floor. It was late, so the doors were closed and the room was eerily quiet. The guards were still clueless. We had about ten seconds until that changed.

Angel nodded to me, dipped her bow, and ran quietly to the edge of the stairs. Reading her intent, I hunkered down close to the wall in a puddle of shadow. Below us, the warm glow of torchlight bobbed and flared, getting closer, faster: a guard. Angel dropped fluidly to one knee and aimed down, the muscles of her jaws flexing with concentration. When the soldier’s feathered helmet crested the rise, she fired. The arrow took him through the eye and sent him and his torch rolling back down the ramp.

"You start opening doors and distributing gear. I’ll handle the other guards." I threw almost everything out of my inventory onto the ground, a great big stack of guns, spears, bows and quarrels toppling to the dirt floor. Then I backed up until my butt was almost against the wall. “Hold on, Lulu. Get ready to stick us onto something if I miss.”

“If yoo mooss…?” Lulu trailed off in disbelief, because I was already sprinting toward the edge of the catwalk. “EEEEE-!”

She let out a little sob as I flung us off out into the open air, soaring toward the tower in the center of the prison. There were a pair of watchers inside, one male, one female. It was the woman who looked up from her book first. Her eyes widened as she beheld a ton of dragon-panther-octopus sailing gracefully toward her.

“What in the-?” Whatever four-letter word came after that was drowned out by the sound of a Reaper crashing into the walkway railing.

“Almost! Not quite, but almost!” Paws paddling, tentacles flailing, I hauled my big black ass up onto the walkway. The guards screamed, Lulu screamed. I screamed for the hell of it, yodeling as I charged the windows the woman was frantically trying to shutter. After my power boost from Karkinos, they offered the pair about as much protection as a paper bag. I tore them apart, roaring to drive the pair away from me. They had a pair of cutes with them, but no brutes. Both the cutes - some kind of flying cat and a lizard - were turned into kabobs as I nailed them to the floorboards.

"Hello ma’am! We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty!” I charged the woman down, raking her back with claws. The man somehow evaded the tentacle swipes, diving around me and coming up to frantically reach for a rope pull leading to the tower's alarm. Lulu screeched and lashed out at him - little more than a slap, but she'd leveled up since her t-rex suffocating days. Getting slapped upside the head by forty pounds of slime was enough to knock anyone off his feet. The guard squawked as he went to his ass, fumbling for the sword on his belt. Got his fingers barely around the hilt before I tore his arm off.

"Oops." I lunged forward, jaws gaping. A snap and a crunch, and the horror movie monster experience was complete.

There were shouts from outside, and then the lights went on: a series of cleverly designed braziers that lit from switches on the ground floor. I leaped back over to the shattered railing and peered down. The main door was open, while four Centurions ran up the stairs at full speed. They were packing shotguns and tridents, anti-riot gear. “Angel! They’re coming up on you from below. Don’t worry about noise, they’ve got guns.”

Angel’s head whipped around toward the stairwell. She left off the cell door she had been about to open and fled back to her sniping position. This time, she pulled her rifle. I tensed, wanting to yell at her to drop her head, but she knew what she was doing. The Centurions fired up at her, shot blasting uselessly off the walls as one, two, three Centurions went down.

"I am never not impressed by how good you are at shooting shit dead." I thought to her. I could only shake my head in wonder. "But we need to start opening these cell doors yesterday. We have slightly less than a minute until these guys respawn."

"I know. Grab them all and we’ll lock them in one of the cells." Angel signed from across the way, her expression hard, then turned and began to rack the bolts on the doors.

One by one, prisoners emerged into the open. Some were wary, others just confused. While Angel freed people, I leaped back from the watchtower to keep our guards from waking up from their dirt naps. But as it turned out, the torpor meter wound down slower than the respawn count. It was exactly sixty seconds before a player with spare lives revived. It took ninety to recover from unconsciousness.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Go to sleep, goo to sleeeeep, there’s a good li-ittle nazi.” I made up a song while I delicately choked the pair of guards out as soon as they spawned in. “Lullabyyy, say goodniiiight, soon you’ll… wake up in a cell~.”

Lulu bounced disapprovingly. She was bobbing up and down on the dead cutes, both small enough to be Absorbed at the same time. “Noo do rhyooom!”

“Do I look like a rapper to you? I couldn’t think of anything that rhymes with nazi, jeez.”

“Quoozoo,” Lulu said primly.

“... Quazi? That ain’t a real word, kid.”

“Uu too! Froom oo boook!”

[Lulu has learned Flash. Lulu has learned Razor Leaf.]

[Lulu has absorbed Felitaro. Lulu has absorbed a Coelonyx.]

“Nice. You just learned to, uh, flash. And throw leaves at people.” As soon as the humans were lights-out, I turned to her. “Okay… you glue these suckers to my back, and let’s start putting them away.”

This time, I had a better feel for the jump. Even loaded down with Lulu and the pair of guards, I was able to make the leap with a heavy landing. Together, we dragged other freshly-ganked Centurions into one of the open cells. They were miserable little rooms - nothing except a mat on the floor and a fist-sized latrine hole in the ground.

"Wait... you. Angel, right?"

I backpedaled, slamming the door closed on the pile of unconscious guards, and looked back to see one of Merc's fighters: a big black guy with a deeply scarred face. I vaguely recognized him, but didn’t know his name. Angel, busy racking bolts a few doors down, didn’t turn as he called out toward her. "Hey!"

“Someone wants your attention. On your nine o’clock,” I thought to her.

Angel’s head whipped around. "Oh, damn… you just scared the shit out of me. You’re one of Merc’s people, right? Help me open cells, then run upstairs to where Noodles is and grab a weapon. We have minutes before the Centurions figure out something's wrong and this place becomes a warzone."

"Roger that." He gave a curt nod and turned to bawl at the others. "MAROONS! YOU HEARD THE WOMAN! LET'S GO, LET'S GO!"

A yell went up among the freed prisoners, who flew into action: releasing their cellmates, or jogging upstairs to receive their armaments. Scarface was in the lead. His eyes got big when he saw the pile of hurt I'd left for everyone upstairs.

"One each! I catch anyone picking up more than what they need to break out of this shithole, I will personally shoot you in the head!" he grabbed a [Crude Shotgun] and racked it, turning to command the group following him. "For those who do not know me, I am Solomon Kosola! From now until we recover our commander, I am the effective commander of the Maroons!"

Solomon had the voice and bearing of an army man, his voice a magnet. Other senior Maroons, shaken and exhausted but riding a fresh wave of adrenaline now they were out of their cells, set up to either side of the pile and began handing out weapons. While he did that, I went down the stairs and dragged one of the Centurions up to throw him in a different room. But before I could, Solomon sighted down past me and blew the man’s head off.

"Damn. Solomon ain't fuckin' around." Shaking my head, I threw the corpse into the room. Lulu obligingly leaned over to push the bolt closed.

Once all the unconscious or dead Centurions were locked up, I went to join our newly formed Irregulars. I found myself looking at the wrists of everyone assembled - and realized that every person there had been cut to one life. Old, young, it didn’t matter. Many of the prisoners had bruises, cuts, missing nails. All signs of torture.

Angel was the last to join up with the growing column, leading a pair of freed girls barely older than the kid I’d seen while hunting jellies on the beach. She looked to Solomon. "Do you know what happened to Merc?"

"They singled her out. We… were forced to watch them torture her, execute her repeatedly. She was taken to the slave training facility outside this mine." he said. His voice still had that authoritative drill-instructor bark, but the light left his eyes as he recounted what happened. "Someone betrayed Eden. Led them right to us."

Angel gestured in disgust. "It was Hong. We saw him at Oil Town talking to Targent’s second-in-command after we defeated Karkinos."

"Motherfucker.” The muscles of Solomon’s jaw bunched, and he looked down to the side. "That piece of shit. Targent bragged that ‘one of our own’ had betrayed us. I thought he was just trying to screw with our morale. We all thought Hong had been killed on a recon mission."

"Who else would it be?" Angel asked.

Solomon scowled. "Could have been anyone."

"He means us," I thought to Angel. "He thought it was us."

"Right, yeah." Angel planted her hands on her hips. "As soon as we realized that Eden was in danger, I tried to warn Merc. When I didn’t get a reply, I rode straight there. Everyone who wasn’t captured is dead, other than Doc.”

Solomon’s head lifted, dark eyes boring into Angel’s pale one. “Wait. Doc’s alive?”

“He is. Not well, but alive. He’s holding down our camp while we free and arm everyone here." Her gaze swept over the loose, disconnected mob forming around the spiral walkway. The Maroons and the Pigs and Centurions prisoners had naturally gravitated to their own tribes. "And I’m sorry, but you're not in command for the moment. I am."

Solomon scowled, and opened his mouth to retort. But as he did, I stood up from the ground to loom by Angel’s side. He suddenly remembered she was one of the strongest Gladiators on the island. Maybe the strongest. And all because of lil’ ol me.

"Everyone! Listen up!" Angel didn't wait for his reply. Straight-backed, her motions efficient and confident, she reached out and lay a hand on my neck. "Whatever you've done in the past, whatever led to you being imprisoned here, none of it matters until Imperator Argent is defeated and the Sponsored's grip on this island is destroyed. Today is the day we take our freedom back. The Hell Pigs are planning an assault on Fortuna, and we’re going to make the most of the chaos. This is our mine, now. And we must hold it.”

That caused a stir to go around the now-crowded walkway. The freedmen and women were staggered on the ramp all the way around and down, most of them at the top with us and Solomon.

"Fortuna is currently weak and only partially defended. The bulk of the Centurions are on the Warfront a hundred and fifty miles to the west," Angel continued. "But we have to deal with the garrison outside. We have minutes before we’re overrun. So all of you: forget your clans, forget everything you thought you knew about this place. And while we smash them here, I swear that I and my Legions will ride into the heart of Fortuna and take care of the Sponsoreds once and for all!"

A roar went up. The Maroons, the most heavily armed of the convicts, thrust their rifles up and cheered - even Solomon, who put aside his reservations. The room erupted with battlecries, ululations, shouts and oaths. Angel couldn't hear it, but she could see the energy in the rebels. And their enthusiasm was right on time. Below us, the main entry to the cell block flung open. The three-headed dog and the giant bull brute I'd glimpsed before bounded in, along with close to fifty Centurions and half a dozen cutes.

The battle was on.