A day and a night slipped away in a blur.
Ethan raced endlessly across the massive grid that stretched before him like a boundless board game, his Shatterstar mech flickering from one sector to another at full throttle. The speed was astonishing, yet no matter how many squares he crossed—three hundred and more in all—he still couldn't find a way out.
"Damn it, I give up! Let me out already!"
His frustration boiled over. That entire day and night had been a descent into madness. The longer he ran, the more he realized the truth: this wasn't a static field. Every fifteen minutes, without warning, the squares shifted. Anyone caught in the wrong place when the time expired was displaced, dropped at random somewhere else on the grid.
