Humans needed water.

This was a fairly basic fact of their biology. Water was the foundation of their existence. Their body was composed of it and it was essential to their continued function.

Before humans could worry about food.

Before they could worry about danger.

Before they could worry about being thrown into an alien deathmatch.

They needed water.

And thus was why James was climbing the tallest tree in sight after a few minutes of cutting through the dense underbrush and exhausting himself in the process. Every single slash he took at the deep purple brush dulled his machete and stole vital energy from his body. His muscles had been working all day and were slowly starting to build fatigue.

He also had no idea where he was going or what lay ahead of him. The brush and fauna were so dense and colourful that he could hardly see ten metres in front of him. That was without taking into mind the crumbling uneven land he’d arrived on. Just slashing forward was much more likely to leave him dead tired before he found water.

It wasn’t smart.

But staying still and using up his remaining water canisters wasn’t smart either. In the law of the jungle, remaining in the same place for too long could prove deadly. James couldn’t risk it. But he also didn’t want to dumbly exhaust himself.

So, hanging his backpack off a branch and methodically climbing a tree for a greater view became his best option.

He kept one hand close enough to draw his gun and tried to move up the tree as quietly as possible. The bottom brown part of the tree proved no problem, but the brown part above was flakey and caused the looper more of a headache than he would’ve liked to admit.

How is this almost as intense as climbing skyscrapers? James wondered. The reason was rather simple. He was focused. Hyper focused. All his movements and swings were done cautiously, with an emphasis on stealth.

James' ears were trained, waiting for even the slightest sound of danger that broke through the perpetual background noise of wildlife and bugs. Bugs were another concern. The environment around him most resembled a jungle, and those places were a breeding ground for dangerous insects.

His eyes were wary of the creatures, although he hadn’t seen any real animal yet.

The climb was slow because of his caution but also proved uneventful. There were no sudden attacks or any suspicious noises that would worry him enough to return to the ground.

Finally, he broke through to the top of the tree, only daring to poke his eyes out through the leaves.

James was looking for water. He did not find water.

Instead, he saw Zenith. He saw the arena. Because that’s exactly what it was. Giant arching walls of stone or metal or something was behind him, stretching on around him farther than James could see. The closest wall was behind him, but that didn’t mean it was close. Just on a guess it looked at least six or seven kilometres away. They were giant. Bigger than anything James had ever seen besides maybe Archive’s library, reaching up all the way to…

…Are those clouds? They looked like clouds. Whisps of gentle white strung above, letting a soft light through but concealing the sky from view.

The next immediate thing that became clear to James was that he was on a slope. The whole thing was a slope. The ground behind him was higher and the ground ahead of him was lower. As it got lower the fauna changed colours. The leaves behind him closest to a wall were jet black, and only gained a purple hue as they got low enough to be on his altitude. Then, as the slope gradually went lower, the leaves changed more.

Going from peach coloured to red, to orange and eventually settling on yellow in the far distance. James couldn’t see beyond the yellow. But he could tell that it levelled out at yellow, becoming much more flat.

It’s designed to funnel you towards there. Where the yellow fauna was. Yellows the playing field. Which meant he was currently on the edge of the playing field. Yellow was clearly where the arena was designed to push you. It was where whoever designed the whole place wanted you to go.

And by the same train of logic, it’s where everything to survive will be. Which meant water. But also much, much more danger than James was currently in.

“And that’s not even accounting for that.” James thought, leering on a structure. The only one he could see besides the wilds of the jungle they were in.

It was a hulking grey mass of stone or metal same as the giant walls that surrounded them, sticking out not to high in amidst what seemed to be a clearing. James couldn’t tell very well, because he was so far away. But it was most definitely a building of some sort.

There were similar structures around it, but none nearly as big. Even from such a distance, it seemed to loom on James' horizon.

Warning him.

That’s a Conlave. He could feel it. The looper was sure he was looking at one of them. Come to think of it, if the arena is built in a circle, and there are four races then the Conclaves could be in segments. Akin to a pie chart. From what he inferred about the Trial’s description, that made sense.

Give each race a territory bordering two other races and have them fight it out. A simple way to provide some sense of order to the chaos. To make it feel less like a deathmatch, and more like a battle for the system’s favour.

And the best part is that the system offers us a way out. Through the Fractures that James had yet to spot. They served as an innocuous third party to the dispute between races. A way out without killing each other.

But that’s not what they’re for. The looper’s pessimism sometimes got the best of them, but when it came to the system he had learned to lean on it. The Fractures were an excuse. Sure, the races involved could hunt them down instead of each other. But there would be a catch.

Either it’s going to take a lot longer or…

The looper’s mind flashed with memories of the glass zombie Darrel had become. The system had called it a “Tier 0” Splintered. What did Tier 1 look like? James felt like he had a fuller picture now of what the system wanted to play out.

And it made him all the more disgusted that he had to take part in it.

A tiny bead of sweat dripped into James’ eyes as he surveyed the area around him again and again for any danger, making him aware of the suffocating heat once again. He tipped the last remains of his first water canister into his mouth, feeling the sweet cold release trickle down his throat.

He only had two canisters left.

He needed to find water.

James slowly swung down the tree and retrieved his backpack, lowering himself to the jagged ground softly. He’d taken stock of the situation. That was good.

Having a general grasp of the circumstance he found himself in was worth a canister of water. But it wasn’t worth two.

I’ve had a chance to think this through. There’s no getting out of here. I can’t just refuse to move and sit here to die of dehydration. He had to do something and he needed to do it soon. Sweat was soaking his padded clothes and making them heavier by the minute.

James hated every moment his feet stood on Zenith. The unease of not knowing what was happening on Earth was building tension inside of him. But he couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.

He had to get out.

And that started with water.

“Fine.” James conceded, gazing up at where he knew only clouds lay. “I’ll play along.”

For now. The looper kept to himself.

Golden words flickered in front of his face.

[Human Lumina Leader board]

[1. Wilt]

[5]

[2. Wendigo]

[3]

[3. Venom]

[3]

[4. X]

[3]

[5. …]

A list rolled out in front of him, courtesy of the golden words. Naming humans and recording the amount of Lumina they possessed. James felt no surprise that his fellow humans were already gathering it.

What did surprise him was the last name on the list.

Or rather, the lack of one.

[55. Jade]

[1]

[56. ?]

[1]

Is that me? It almost definitely was. The little leaderboard sat beside his goals, dangling at the top of his vision. The golden words didn’t prompt him to choose a name. They just listed him as a question mark.

He felt the question of why bloom in his mind and Paradox started to sparkle. He could see it still glimmering above his goals. His reward for all the hardship he’d endured. James focused on it, hoping to find some answers.

Instead, he only found more confusion.

[Paradox]

[Description: The walls are a lie. The clouds a surface. The Infection writhes on the fringe, waiting for the gates to fall]

That’s ominous and not a description. James thought, watching the golden words. They were usually static but these burned like fire, wavering as if the wind around him could blow them away. They existed almost as an illusion. Fleeting and singular.

The words made James nervous. Truly. Nothing else had since he’d escaped the Loop. The looper couldn’t place how, but he could feel them. Deep down in the place his Skills resided. The road untread responded to them.

He could feel the sensation as he squatted on the ground. His mind tried to slither around it and grasp the fleeting. Take a look at the path Paradox was paving inside his potential. The sensation only grew stranger to the looper. Foreign.

James felt a fact inside him stir. The fact. He felt Loop respond to his will for just a moment.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Then the connection faded with a snap. Something took his mind out of his inner workings and back to reality. James found himself squatting on the ground, with his backpack secured and his shotgun in his hand.

“Somethings off,” James whispered to himself, banishing his soul's desire to explore the path left by Paradox.

The looper turned slowly, getting a full detailed view of the environment around him, trying the find the source of his newfound paranoia.

The trees were the same. The leaves were the same. There was no wildlife disturbing the peace around him. No bugs buzzing towards him trying to infect him with who knew what. The dirt wasn’t trying to swallow him whole.

There were no monsters to see.

No humans either.

The ambient sound had ceased altogether at some point while James was focused on Paradox.

The jungle around him was silent.

Dead silent.

A small, ever so slight chill ran up James' back as he pressed his shotgun stock into his shoulder, aiming. He twisted, looking for whatever had stolen the noise from the jungle. Whatever had bloomed the terrible silence around him.

His hands held the gun tight, treating it as a lifeline. Something felt wrong. Insticually James could feel that a change was occurring around him. But he had no idea what to make of it. So he held his gun tight, and slowly towards the biggest tree near him, keeping his back to it.

What is it? James wondered, flicking his eyes around him. His body felt tight and firm, like stone. He was more than prepared for whatever was to come. The looper was sure of it. He could fight off anything.

The first thing to move in his vision wasn’t an animal or an alien. It wasn’t the trees or the leaves. It wasn’t the ground. It wasn’t even himself.

It was the words. Those golden flickering words, seeping in and out of existence changed. One moment they were a cryptic riddle.

The next they were a warning.

[Paradox]

[Description: Beware the mist]

James felt his nose twitch.

Cinnamon. His favourite. The scent caught on his nose and refused to let go. It was distracting. Engrossing. Intoxicating. Addictive.

A trap. The looper realised, shaking his head as his eyes stuck to the warning. Beware the mist. If Paradox’s first description was on the edge of ominous, the new one was on the deep end of dread-inducing.

Suddenly the silence made sense. The smell that drew you forward was cheese on a mouse trap. The sloping ground naturally pushed everything towards the centre. Everything. The reason the Conclaves weren’t on the edges of those massive walls. It all made sense.

It all came together in one horrifying picture.

Then he saw it.

A creeping, snaking substance of pitch black, laced with echoes of green trickled from the direction of the wall. He saw it at a distance barely, simply because it was all-encompassing, visible between every crack and crevice left unhidden by thick leaves and bush.

The smell of cinnamon grew stronger. The mist grew closer, rolling down the slope. Choking away James' options second by second.

Nope. Not messing with any of that.

James' feet hit the ground running before he had a chance to think. His boots stomped against the earth loud and hard, not an ounce of his previous subtlety. He swapped his shotgun for a machete, slashing through any growth that might impede his sprint.

I couldn’t see the Fractures. James thought, sprinting as hard as his body could. His muscles felt taunt and his breath was heavy, but he still bounded forward in a frenzy. Tearing through nature and riding the moment adrenaline brought him.

They weren’t there. Fractures mean Splintered. That much made sense to him. Fractures meant glass zombies. But he hadn’t seen any Fractures from the tree, which hadn’t made much sense.

Now it did. It wasn’t that there were no Fractures. It was just that they hadn’t been released yet. He put as much together from the vague warnings of Paradox.

The smell of cinnamon followed him like death. It was so welcoming that the looper knew weaker men and monsters would’ve succumbed. They would’ve tested the black mist rolling down the sloped jungle after him.

James was not that foolish.

He had seen that same colour of obsidian black infested with green. The goo that had seeped out of the meteor and turned Darrel into a Splintered had been that colour.

But I thought it was only liquid. A terrible understanding fueled his feet to run faster. What if not all the meteors were filled with just liquid? What if some of the meteors were filled with the mist behind him?

What if it got airborne?

How much havoc could that wreck?

The system said half. James didn’t doubt the system would commit a genocide of that scale. He just hadn’t seen anything that he felt could convincingly cause it.

His eyes stole a glance behind him.

The mist was closer. He’d know that it would be. His feet didn’t pedal as fast as the mist moved. But still, it was so much closer than he expected. The horrible obsidian wall of mist was less than twenty metres behind him, closing the distance in the same circular arc as the slope.

The looper could almost feel it lick his skin.

His eyes couldn’t penetrate the wall of darkness but James knew what lay behind it.

Death. Swift and merciless.

James ran harder. His body ached with pain that never settled, only accruing a further debt of exhaustion. Still, he ran faster.

His body was aflame with heat and sweat, yet his hands moved efficiently. With one hand, his machete cleaved a path. With the other, he reached into his bag a retrieved a gas mask.

He knew it would do little to stop the mist, but he needed every advantage he could get.

The looper's footfalls thundered against the jungle as the bush became less thick and the earth less jagged. The colour of the leaves around him started to switch from a deep purple to a much more welcoming peach colour.

The trees grew taller too. Their trunks almost doubly as thick as the tree he had climbed.

And yet the mist persisted. The smell of cinnamon turned from an alluring scent to a drowning odour.

His heart was racing so hard it drowned out all other noise. His feet pummeled against the ground, begging to get away. Everything was a blur of motion around him.

James felt his body slowly giving under the pressure. He’d spent most of his life living not even a whole day, never really having to deal with the concept of physical speed.

All the work he’d done that day was catching up to him.

Discipline and centuries of mastering his mind kept him moving, but the looper could feel his body beginning to falter under the strain.

He tore past bushes and swung over trees and still the wall of mist followed.

I won’t be able to keep this up. The peach trees were slowly fading to orange but still, James knew it wasn’t enough. His brain had pieced together the purpose of the mist.

And because of that, he knew its objective was to push him into the yellow centre of this arena. The wall of obsidian would not stop until that goal was accomplished.

Between the laboured breaths and the heavy steps, his mind searched for a way out. A way to combat this. He ultimately came up with two options.

The first was jamming himself full of the drug cocktail sitting snugly in his backpack. There was enough chemical stimulant in there to make him far faster than he was, and more importantly, a lot less likely to collapse. However, drugs came with a caveat. Mainly the backlash he’d face once they wore off.

James had never experienced it firsthand and thus was very hesitant to use it. Especially in on Zenith, where safety wasn’t exactly a plentiful currency.

The looper was confident the plan would work. But he wasn’t so sure taking the risk was necessary.

That brought him to his second idea, laid out neatly by the golden words that spelled doom.

Second Life called to him. A faint feeling the looper was very unfamiliar with. He could feel the answer to his problems, sitting there neatly in a corner of his mind. A road untread that welcomed him. No, beckoned him to walk down it. On the fringes of his mind, offering him salvation.

So why did he refuse?

I don’t trust it. James realised, feeling dumb at the thought of thinking so simply. But it was true. He trusted Second Life more than the Second Thought but still, the thought of using it vexed him for some reason.

Was it because he didn’t like the system?

Am I that much of an idiot? He felt like the answer was yes. At the same time, the looper still found it a hard pill to swallow. Using the system. The power it gifted should be welcome but after the Loop…

…It feels poisoned. James couldn’t deny that was how he felt. He couldn’t lie to himself, regardless of how paranoid that belief was.

But a wall of black death was chasing after him. He could feel it now. There was an atmosphere to it that was oppressive. No longer did it smell of cinnamon. It smelled of nothing. Somehow that was worse. James didn’t dare look behind him. He would not tempt fate.

Yet he knew he was standing on the edge of demise. James knew what would happen if he died. Things the looper simply could not accept.

Fuck it.

He would walk down the road his Skill paved for him. The drugs were a last resort. His Skill wasn’t.

As the looper ran, he let his mind slip into the inner place where his Skills resided. The centre of himself, that the system had made a nesting ground for all its changing. He felt the three roads inside of him wake as his will brushed against them. He felt the thing they all stemmed from turn to heed his presence.

James felt the Loop inside him greet him. Then he grasped ahold of the Skill he’d come to life.

The looper could akin the feeling of calling his Skill into being like suddenly becoming aware of a new limb. Or a new organ. A completely new part of himself that felt foreign, and yet he could not deny was a part of him.

Attached so intrinsically to him that nothing would ever be able to separate the two. The feeling of actually commanding his Skill was new and James recognised it immediately that he was well out of his depth.

It felt like he was… editing himself.

Just help with my exhaustion. James thought, trying to simplify his want into the Skill. He couldn’t command it properly but he sensed that he didn’t necessarily need to. The Skill could function on its own with minor direction. So long as he focused on using it.

So he did and the results were immediate.

Second Life felt like warmth. That was the best way James could describe it. His body was suddenly encompassed by a warmth that wasn’t there previously. The warmth travelled from his aching legs all the way up to his beating headache, slowly washing away some of the pain. Not all, unfortunately.

The looper could literally feel its limitations. It could not fix him. Not completely while he was adding more stress to the load. But it could mitigate the problem areas.

His lungs had more air in them. His feet felt less strain. James’ body started allowing him to keep pace with the wall of mist chasing after him.

And keep pace he did. Seconds of running had turned into minutes before he knew it and his body still felt light enough to keep up. His heart was thrumming like an engine instead of begging for mercy.

The looper bounded forward with each step, flying past tree after tree as they got taller and taller. The orange was morphing into that yellow he hoped was safe ever so slowly. But that didn’t mean James let up. He still ran as hard as he could, pushing the limits more and more of what his Skill could fix.

James' boots felt slippery on the inside.

And he kept running.

He stole all the air he could with every breath.

And he kept running.

He felt his newborn Skill start to fold under the weight of his ever-increasing exhaustion and injury.

And he kept running.

Everything was a blur. The pain was merely a distraction. Exhaustion a truth his Skill bent undone.

Then sound returned. The clicking and buzzing of insects. The rustling and scampering of wildlife.

The crackle of fire.

Huh? James stopped. It felt like a sin too but the distinct sound of fire woke him out of his delirium. Because it was fire. His eyes could catch the hints of it over a ridge ahead of him. Small flickers provided him ample reason not to go past that ridge.

Instead, he turned, hoping to find some other path around so he could keep escaping from the wall of mist.

James turned only to see the mist had crept away from him. It lurked in the distance, still. Inviting him with the same cinnamon smell.

For whatever reason, it didn’t come closer. It stopped where the orange leaves finally turned yellow, not daring to edge a step further.

Waiting.

The relief slowly killed all the adrenaline built up inside James, making him very aware of just how badly injured his feet were. His boots to wet socks and the looper didn’t even want to imagine how messed up his feet were beneath them.

His body felt light and his clothes felt heavy, drenched in sweat. His heart was thrumming like it was going to explode any second.

James felt awful.

And he also felt a smile curve on his face, knowing the mist had failed to kill him. He was in a horrible shape. But he’d gotten another win over the system. It had tried to kill him with the mist and failed.

That was something to smile about.

That was only the thing James had to smile about on Zenith.

[Your Skill has grown]

[Second Life]

[1 -> 2]