Eight cubes covered in a dark coat hover over green patches and ponds of the Playground, avoiding anything that stands in their pre-set route, avoiding them by turning corners at 90* angles. These were the replacements for the vans, which were used in the first games and trampled anything green that dared to grow in their path. It was quiet inside, except for a dull hum from the magnetic system.
Even the sudden stop was like a light push, but that wasn’t enough to stop the contestants' stomachs from jittering with anticipation. It was finally time for the round to begin.
One by one, each stepped out of the obsidian cubes into a dead area, filled only with small rocks and a fence forming an enclosed circle. The only out-of-the-ordinary object was a tall, thin metallic pole with a holographic projector attached to the top of it. Soon after, the pole transmitted a single, short, message - “10 minutes until we begin, any act of violence done until then will cause points deductions. Over”.
Each team tried to stretch their legs and check out the surroundings, and the other competitors. As soon as they made eye contact, two of them sprinted towards each other and embraced in a tight hug. This pair of siblings were brought by force in the competition. They were close in height, but had the same chemical-damaged hair with golden highlights that passed their knee; the twins, who were captured from the rows of the unemployed. The siblings were split apart right before the game, just as the Drum's fate was to be the pawns in two CEOs' plans until number 1 foiled it with a swift move.
After the siblings reunited, only two participants remained without a group, the first one was a small, unmoving man who stared into nothingness and didn’t blink that often. Whenever he did, though, it appeared calculated, and you could set your clock by the intervals. He was attached to the hip with his C.T.D., who towered over everyone there present, even Azin.
Alone was also a man, whose body stood out from the rest of the metallic menagerie of his society. While not the athletic type, he was the closest human there with a natural, muscular body, with no scars or protrusions, and signs of any enhancements. In any previous era, his face would have made him a superstar, but his demeanor was unsettling. His mouth kept moving, mumbling to the ground and his sunken eyes galloped from one participant to another, before finally settling on Savan. He whispered, remorsefully: “ I failed to release you?”
-----
Angie planned on forcing her new, imposed crew to meet her old one, but that wish vanished the moment she spotted Savan being carried around in the hands of their C.T.D., coughing. She rushed to them, screaming for them and medical help.
Angie - “ Savan, what happened, are you alright?”
The clopy groaned a bit, turning their head, and while their face was paler, with gray spots, it was impossible for them to not put on a bright smile and greet their friend in a chipper way. Savan even tried to downplay it a bit, but they became even more bright-eyed when they noticed the hacker.
Savan -“ Ohhhh”, they gasped as if they just met a famous person-” Don't tell me...those goggles...they're for accessing the virtual servers remotely?-” after which they coughed violently, but continued with more gushing for the gadgets. Syna wasn’t sure how to react around a C.E., so they just nervously laughed and shyly geeked out a bit as well.
Both Marc and Angie intervened simultaneously and slapped Savan on the forehead with the tip of their fingers.
-“ Introductions later, explain this. Both of you”, added Angie, scowling at Vivar.
A short retelling later, Syna and Sovereign were dismissed as suspects thanks to Angie’s vouch for them, so that left 4 other possible candidates. The hacker was curious that something like this could happen before the first round. “I should note this down, in case other rules can be broken in the future”. She then came up with the idea to check the roaster for C.T.Ds with sonic weapons or do a secret scan.
-“ I don’t think that’s necessary”, intervened Marc as he pointed towards contestant number 7- “He’s been eyeing us and talking to himself ever since he saw Savan. And he has Medusa with him, which I believe used some peculiar ranged weapon before, right?”
Vivar nodded, then put Savan in Azin’s care and strode menacingly towards them, followed shortly behind by Angie, who assured the others that they’d be careful and only going to have a chat with the two.
Medusa, as her name implied, had no legs, replaced by a long tail from the lower hip down, that allowed her to crawl on any semi-flat surfaces. She responded to the threatening knight by mimicking a cobra and hoisted her torso way above Vivar’s head, stretching a long shadow over him, then hunched her back so that her head could meet Vivar’s face to face. She exhausted hot air from a red stretch over her eyes, directly into Vivar’s yellow visor.
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-” Explain your actions at the cave”, Vivar demanded firmly. The serpent C.T.D ignored him, while her companion looked at him with a dark compassion, as if he was apologizing for something.
-“ You poor machine. You think you saved your patient, that keeping them alive was your duty, but for what means? After their life is saved, another round will threaten it again and again. The poor clone will be used like…well, let’s just say I feel some kinship with the plight of these workers…”
Vivar was left unsure of what to reply with, he didn’t expect the boy to come out with such outright vision. Angie, on the other hand, was fuming in silence, as she heard it from miners crushed by pressure.
-“ Vivar, how much time is left until it starts?” Five seconds she got in return. The woman then took some distance and then sprinted towards Vivar, using his shoulder as a jumping pad. She launched herself toward Medusa and punched the robot hard enough to push back the metallic snake a few meters, leaving a dent in the armor.
Angie then got closer to patient 7, Allan, who entered in a semi-panicked state the moment he saw her raising her arm as if to slap him. He instantly curved his spine, and covered his head with his hands, murmuring to himself, begging "the Lord" not to hurt him. She wanted to beat him up for attacking Savan, but also only admonish him for letting the pressure get him.
Pity was all that was left in their wake, as Allan broke down in a nervous state and started praying for forgiveness from an unseen figure- "Wait, Lord, no, I'm sorry. Please, I'm not tired, I'm not tired, I swear, I'll do as the Covenant demands of me", he cried out to his imaginary demander. Medusa then coiled around him and made her intent to protect as clear as possible.
Medusa -” The child of the Society needs to be kept safe. He could still be”, her speech then short-circuited and a recording of a choir of voices took over “-useful in ushering in more natural pleasures.”
-"Fuck”, Angie blurted under her breath. She felt uneasy about the whole affair and even gave the boy a compassionate glance. “Let's just go, Vivar. We’ll, we’ll deal with him another time.”
—
Syna, the most flabbergasted of all of them, cried out in shock- “You're an obsidian miner, right? Sorry, this is…surprising. I, well, I never thought I'd meet one of your kind. I thought your group never leaves that…”
Angie -” Pit? No, those are just stories. We come up from time to time, but we never or rarely leave our commune towers. Takes too long to get back in the mines, you know, and that would mean…”
-” Points deducted”, Angie and Savan said in unison, chuckling about it and then the clopy reeling from the pain it caused.
—-
The poles started glowing and the voice of a mousy woman came from the speakers, who fumbled a bit at her introduction as the 8 CEO, but regained composure while reading the traditional pleasantries written centuries ago. With each phrase, the arena changed little by little, walls coming out from the ground and taking the appearance of a target practice field in the middle of a void.
The void then took shape, a form, firstly as a shadow of a giant mouse manifesting in the background. The outline of the cartoony hard-working mice then picked up stones and stacked them together in a giant pile. Once Elina ended the speech, so did the mouse and took a mandatory smoke break, sponsored by Brand number 8.
-“ The game, dear viewers, is a simple one and is called - Show me your grit!”, after which she stopped and waited for the pre-recorded cheers and applause to be done.
Elina was actually a quick learner for someone who was forced into the job by her familial connections, which wouldn’t accept anything else from the only traditionally bred child of her family. But once the girl became the CEO, mistaken failures and mistakes & failures were the only things that defined her time as the chief. She tried to work like her peers and adopt their standard of thinking but he never managed to adapt to their directives.
As was in this case, she didn’t know how to bend the rules in her favor except for trying to relay them in a certain way.
Elina -” This lovely holographic vermin will hurl their rocks towards the competitors, between 5 and 10 pebbles, depending on the order. Oh, and there will be a small perimeter in which you can move, going outside of it will be punished with deduction.” She then took a short break, to see if her team reacted in any way to her words.
-“ We only want to see how you respond, so the pointing method will be displayed at the end. Just so you know, if the C.T.Ds use all of their abilities and equipment, you might get some extra there, at the end. Now, who is going to enter the circle and show me their grit?!”, she yelled out in her in an explosive cheer from the audience in the County.
The last part left everyone in self-imposed shackles, as neither expected to be asked to show their ace cards so soon, except for one group. Elina was squealing joyfully when she saw that her little maneuver worked- her team was the first to sprint towards the perimeter.
Right after she finished her speech, Savan whispered a slow command, “Run, Vivar”, which he followed before he could even finish his internal calculations for the correct action. While the rest of the humans were still pondering on the last rule, which slumped the C.T.D’s as well, the clopy was half-set to run from when ‘order’ was mentioned and fully set after ‘abilities’. They knew that everyone was mostly aware of what Vivar was capable of, and they had the least to lose here:
-“ I don’t think there was something else to think about”, said Savan to their companion after they reached the goal.
After them, Syna and Sovereign were the second to sprint, followed by Team 1, Billy and Serviceman; with the final order being set as:
8- 2- 1- 6- 5- 3- 4- 7