The skin of the sawfish’s hand was gray and mottled, its nails sharp and pointed. It pushed its fingers into the incision on Neb’s chest. Neb clamped his teeth together. He wanted to keep his eyes open, to not look away or cry out, and he focused on that. It was the only way he could express his hate. He stared at the creature, which held his gaze. It felt further inside his chest, pushing past the rib bones, and now Neb did scream, unable to hold it in. The sawfish smiled again.

Then in the shadows behind the sawfish, something stirred. It seemed to Neb like the wall was moving. Or perhaps it was just death coming, a mercy to spare him this hideous scene.

There was a stir of movement and disturbed air. It was too fast for Neb to be sure what it was.

The sawfish’s eyes widened in sudden shock and it jerked its hand back from Neb, the fingertips black with dripping blood.

Behind it, Neb saw the guardian. How had he ever seen this thing as an unmoving statre? It thrummed with life and power. Where before its eyes had been dark, now they were a bright yellow. In its hands it held its whip, and each strand was tinged with light.

The guardian had lashed the sawfish with its whip. Neb understood this in the same moment he saw what the whip had done. And the sawfish understood now, too. Its hands clasped to its chest with a look of dawning horror in its hugely wide eyes. Then the upper section of its body slid slightly sideways along the planes of the slices from the whip. The sawfish clutched its chest and abdomen with its arms, trying to literally hold itself together. But then at once everything yielded, and the sawfish collapsed on the ground in a pile of body parts. Neb retched, the sudden jerk sending waves of pain flooding through his damaged body.

Fuck me, he thought.

The huge guardian stood over Neb. Last moment flashed through his mind. But the thing ignored him. Instead it knelt beside Growl and reached out a huge hand with careful tenderness. There was a blue glow. A moment passed. Then behind him, Neb heard a small but defiant growl.

To his left Neb could see that the second guardian was also in motion, whip in one hand, sword in the other. The remaining two swordfish were firing at it with the energy-based heavy weapons that had been so effective against the humans, but it was only causing the guardian enough discomfort to make it even angrier. It was extraordinary how fluidly such a large thing moved, Neb thought -- not with the lumbering power of a wrestler, but with the quick controlled bursts of a dancer or a martial artist. It swung its whip and there was the cracking sound of raw energy to accompany the cruel tails, each one leaving a streak of white light. The first of the two sawfish was chopped into slices, and the strike was barely completed when the guardian stabbed its sword through the chest of the second sawfish and lifted it high into the air. It struggled and screamed, slapping its hands off the blade, blood and viscera splashing on the floor beneath. Then finally, mercifully, the red skull appeared.

Neb turned his head away. Everything had happened so fast, so brutally. He breathed carefully, trying to do it slowly. Each breath was an agony of fire on his partially-opened chest. A riot of emotion ran through him -- gladness at the death of the sawfish yet horror at how they had died, sadness at the death of Gray, and sadness for his own impending death. The last felt most distant and unreal. It was peaceful, in a way. Nothing left to do. Almost relaxing.

Except for the fucking noise. What the hell was it? He opened his eyes, only realizing as he did so that they had closed. This was probably the last time he would see anything at all, he realized, but he found himself less moved by the experience than he would have expected. Growl was standing over him, barking and barking and barking, almost to the point of howling.

‘Shhh, Growl,’ he tried to say. But no sound came out, just a bubble of blood on his lips.

Growl finally did shut up.

‘Thanks,’ he said, but this time there was not even the faintest disturbance of air.

Then a huge shadow was standing over him. A huge hand.

The blue glow of the guardian’s healing power swept over his body. It felt similar to the healing orb and yet different, like a more powerful version. There was an intense sensation in his chest where bones and tendons and muscles re-knitted. This cannot be a real world, he thought, and yet he did not doubt the Main’s power over the base universe of atoms and fields.

He coughed, half experimental, and while he would not say he felt good, exactly, he suddenly felt far from the death that had seemed imminent. The guardian still towered over him, as if still not quite convinced it would not be better to kill this creature too. But Growl was beside Neb, and he opened his terrifying mouth and gave him a great lick, which made Neb laugh and reach out and hug him.

As if satisfied, the guardian stood and returned to its alcove. Its partner was already back in position. The yellow light faded from their eyes, but more than that, life faded from them. Hard to define, but unmistakable. The guardians seemed like stone again, the reality of their movement as improbable as before.

Neb lay where feeling the gentle beating of his heart, the regularity of his breathing, looking up into the dimness. Growl licked his face again, and he patted the big animal, and with an effort of will he got to his feet.

The Temple Door was closed, but Neb didn’t bother thinking about that too much. And he tried not to look too closely at the ruined corpses of the sawfish as he went from one to the next checking their inventories for healing orbs. He found that each of the creatures had two orbs, and he sighed. The sawfish seemed to know a lot that the humans did not know.

Neb healed Anna, Buzz, Meathead and Mallory. It was a miracle that even five of the six humans had survived. They had been greatly helped, Neb thought, by the sawfish delaying to give them the worst possible death. He sat silently by Gray’s body while he waited for them to come around. Growl sat with him, and Neb patted him again.

‘Thanks, buddy,’ he said quietly, and Growl nuzzled his face.

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

Gray looked peaceful but distant. The heat of her body was already fading. Neb thought of crying, but did not. He was too numb. He just sat with her as the others regained consciousness one by one. They looked to Neb, looked to the dead sawfish, looked to the sealed door, looked to Gray, and said nothing. They were soldiers. They knew how the game was played. There was no need to hurry now.

Finally Buzz broke the silence. ‘What happened?’ he asked. His voice was still a growl, as it always was, but Neb knew it at its gentlest setting.

Neb sighed and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to relive it again to tell them about it. But he made himself answer. ‘I think the guardians saw Growl as a native of this place, like the Emorists,’ he said finally. ‘The overlay hinted at it. And so they defended him from attack. And then they decided we were part of Growl’s party, so they defended us too.’

‘But…’ Anna said. ‘How did the sawfish get here before us? And who was holding the River Door open with all that construction? Did the sawfish do that?’ She was looking slightly less poised than usual, but only slightly. She had been at two HP when Neb got to her, looking pale and ethereally beautiful but with an open gash in her chest and neck. Her uniform was still ripped at the spot where the wound had been.

‘I don’t know,’ Neb answered tiredly. ‘My guess is that he sawfish explored the side tunnels that are not marked on the map, and found a shortcut. As for the construction, maybe it’s part of some other story we did not fully intersect with. I don’t think we have any way to know.’

‘Story? What do you mean by that?’ Anna asked, seeming slightly irritated.

‘Game story. Some other narrative in the Game.’ Neb sighed again, too tired to go on. ‘I don’t know. No-one fucking knows.’

Anna looked like she might press for more answers, but Buzz cut in. ‘The only question that matters now,’ he said, ‘is how the fuck do we get out of this compound?’

No-one answered. Meathead and Mallory were checking the sawfish bodies for anything interesting, casting the occasional look up at the now-still guardians. Meathead took the sword from the first sawfish who had been sliced by the whip, and examined it. It was still intact. He called to Neb, ‘Hey Doc, want a new sword?’

Neb looked over, but shook his head. He had had some weird bond with the original sword, but he wanted no other connection with the sawfish. ‘No thanks, Meathead,’ he answered quietly.

To his surprise, Meathead threw the sword back on the ground where it landed with a clang in a pool of blood.

‘Then they can fucking keep it,’ the big man said.

‘Team,’ Buzz said. ‘We’ve been through some shit but we need to focus. How the fuck are we getting out of here?’

But it didn’t matter how often he asked the question. They were sealed into a space designed to remain closed for a thousand years with the most advanced technology that had ever existed. It could only be opened from inside on the authority of a person who was long gone. It was a miracle they were alive, Neb thought. But they were still fucked. No-one had an answer for Buzz.

‘Okay,’ Buzz said, once it became clear they simply didn’t have any options. ‘Let’s do the ceremony.’

Meathead lifted Gray gently, and Neb knew he would remember the expression on Meathead’s face until his own end came. Meathead brought her a hundred meters or so back down the tunnel, far away from the bloody carnage of the sawfish showdown. They laid her out in the center of the tunnel, her hands crossed over her sidearm. Then they stood in a line with arms around each other. It seemed to Neb like years had passed since they did this for Jasper at the Banker’s House, but it also seemed only a few moments. This fucking Game.

Buzz took the funeral belt from his inventory and held it in his hands for a long time.

‘Gray was my advisor and my friend,’ he said at last. ‘And she was a fucking warrior. The team is greatly weakened by her loss. I think in her life she was looking for some absolution, and I hope wherever she is now, she has found it.’

The silence was heavy. Buzz got down on his knees and kissed Gray on the forehead, then touched her hand for a moment in a final farewell. When he got to his feet he stood by her ramrod straight, as if on guard.

The others did the same one by one. ‘Sorry, Gray,’ Neb whispered to her, when his turn came. ‘I hope you journey well.’

When each had said goodbye, Buzz laid the device on Gray’s chest. They stood by her shoulder to shoulder as it ignited. The tunnel lit up brightly enough to reach the guardians at the door and they seemed to move in the dancing light as if they too were part of the ceremony. Gray was carried away by the flames until nothing remained.

Buzz said: ‘Let’s find somewhere to rest.’

They were slow moving out. They were all traumatized by the swordfish fight, Neb felt. Only luck had saved them. Well; luck, and Growl. Though maybe that was the same thing.

They moved cautiously back the way they had come, heading for the central space and the great tree. With the River Door closed no more centipedes could get in, but it was safe to assume that many were already inside the endless network of tunnels. Plus there could still be more sawfish. They walked slowly, and after some discussion they climbed up to the first major branch of the tree. It was so large it was like being on a brown, gnarled road. There was only eleven hours left on the Game clock, meaning, almost certainly, that there was only eleven hours left in their lives.

They ate and did not speak much. Growl had disappeared, but Neb was too tired to think about it. Maybe the creature’s own mission had been completed in some way, and they would not see him again. Neb closed his eyes, sitting back against the enormous tree trunk, listening to the others talk quietly and pointlessly about things they could do to try and escape. But there was no escape. That was the whole point of this compound. But fuck it, he thought. Let them figure it out for themselves.

All he wanted was sleep but it would not come. He closed his eyes but his mind spun and spun endlessly. So after a while he asked Buzz for the printer, and he sat with it and forced himself to engage. The device reminded him a lot of the non-gun, which he felt like he had not thought about in weeks. Having a problem to work on made him feel a little better. The frenetic whirl of thought and emotion started to slow at least a little. He settled into his work, carefully examining what was surely the most advanced technology he would ever touch. The fucking Main. So much to love about them, and now so much to hate. He activated the printer, and a three dimensional symbol field appeared which he could manipulate with his hands. The others glanced over at the golden light, but they didn’t approach. They were too deep into their discussions of tactics and approaches. That was their safe space, Neb thought, they way the printer was his. He found himself being drawn more deeply into his work, as he so often had been before. He focused on the symbol field and several of the symbols triggered his Main Scholar skill.

Around him the enormous tree and the endless space of the compound felt terrifying and yet somehow comforting, like being indoors when a storm raged outside. Was this where they would be when the clock ran down and the Game ended? What would happen then? That future did not seem as frightening as it should be because he was just too tired to care about it.

The printer, he discovered, would respond to verbal commands in Cluster Common, even though the interface used Main symbology. Interesting. It reminded him of the Earth Gate, seeming in different ways to be both conscious and unconscious.

As he worked, he found his thoughts turning back to the goblins and Favian and Edgetown, and the bargain they had struck there. They would never get to complete it now. Perhaps that was for the best. But if, somehow, they did… He found his mind running at full speed, as if by pure effort of thought he could see what the future held. He was not aware of falling asleep, lying back in the great tree’s embrace, the printer cradled to his chest.