Death Game
"AAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!!!"
"WHAT - THE - FUCK!!!??"
"Hang on to something!" Mist calls, but there's nothing to hang on to.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!" Neo and Ronin scream at the same time, flipping over and over.
I reach out midair and grab Neo's arm, holding him still, albeit upside down. Thankfully, I was falling feet first, but the dark walls were going by too fast to gauge any kind of distance.
And in the next second, I felt the strangest feeling.
"Sword!!" Mist yells, her voice sounding faraway.
"DON'T SPLIT UP!!" Elemental's voice pierces through, and grabs ahold of my shirt. "HANG ON TO EACH OTHER!!"
Artee grabs Ronin, who snags Kino. Mist reaches out between Kino and me, and grabs a handful of Kino's hair, who starts to protest.
"Grab my hand…!" she says, stretching out hers towards me.
I reach out, but there's barely a few inches between us. Then, suddenly, it feels like something shifts around us, my body gets propelled on its own, and Mist starts flying in the opposite direction.
"GUYS!!" Artee yells.
They go spiralling away, and the world turns into a whirling blue of grey and black. All I can feel is my hand clamped around Neo's arm, and Elemental's grip on my already torn shirt. For a few seconds, it feels like I'm being tossed around in a washing machine, then I slam against something painful and solid, and every bone in my body screeches in protest. My vision goes blurry and my muscles and skull throb, and my head falls backward onto solid ground.
"Uwwek," Neo says somewhere to my left, and then throws up.
Besides me, Elemental falls slowly onto his back, gasping and coughing.
For what seems like an age, we lie there, struggling, and eventually the aftershock clears up, and I prop myself groggily onto my elbows.
"What the fuck was that?" I demand, voice going up and down in pitch.
"Don't talk to me," Elemental grits out, lying on his side.
"I'm dead," Neo says, lying flat on his face. "Or rather, super fuckin' hungry…"
"Where's the others?" I ask, climbing shakily to my feet, and Elemental follows suit soon after.
"I… I don't know."
I look at him. His face is pale and strained, or I think it is in the dim blue light, and there are huge black welts under his eyes from exhaustion. I'm surprised he hasn't collapsed yet from hunger and fatigue with that normal human body of his.
"Any idea what just happened?" I ask, looking around, and seeing that we're in a completely new part of the cave - like some sort of underground cave-in?
It's littered with huge boulders mixed with smaller rocks everywhere, built up into piles all around, like some kind of war happened and the cave collapsed.
"…the Labyrinth…?" Elemental murmurs.
"What? Like a maze?2
"…in… in a myth, there was this maze built by a king under an island, which shifts and changes without warning. You can be walking in one section at some point, then suddenly get thrown into another or get crushed by the walls…"
"Oh," I say, bewildered. "I see."
Didn't know Elemental was the type of guy to get into all those snarky myths and legends - didn't exactly strike me as someone who'd be poring over old texts all the time.
"Never heard it before."
For a second, he stares at me, and as I meet his eyes I catch something inexplicable in them. Then it's gone and he says,
"Yeah, you wouldn't of heard of it. It's not a well-known myth."
"So you're saying this place is like the Labyrinth of your myths? Shifts places randomly at different times?"
"Yes," he agrees. "Though we still don't know anything. How large this place is, where we are, whether or not this is the same cave, where the others ended up…"
Suddenly, next to us, Neo springs up.
"Neo?"
"I heard something," he says. "While I was lying down just now, I felt like a tremor-"
Then the whole place starts shaking, and a terrible, ghastly rumbling reaches my ears.
"Get ready," Elemental says, voice quavering because of the shaking.
We do.
Then the whole fucking mountain of rubble behind us explodes.
A wedge of obsidian crystal as big as my body explodes up in a shower of rocks, and we run back out of the range of the hail.
"RUN!!!!" I scream.
If that thing's what I think it is, we're dead meat.
"CC!?" Neo demands, sprinting alongside me.
"You fuckin - don't jinx it you piece of shi-"
Behind us, the rest of the body comes out behind the black wedge of a head, it's front split open into a double-hinged jaw with interlocking blades of shimmering red quartz. A huge, long, serpentine, segmented body rears up after it, endlessly clanking and clicking as it pulls itself out of the floor. Behind its jaws, a frill of needle-thin crystal spines rise and fold like a fan, and greenish saliva drips from the maw. It pulls itself up and stairs down at us with a front full of hundreds of tiny red beady eyes.
Under its segmented armour, glimpses of flesh show through - dark, sinewy muscle streaked with glowing mineral threads. Each of its limbs, twice as thick as my arm and about as twice as long as I am tall, end in three glassy talons.
Scorpio Crystallinus, the Crystalline Crawler.
"Man," I say to Neo. "You jinxed it again."
The thing screeches, parting my air and sending my clothes whipping around my skin.
"Do we fight it?" Elemental asks, assuming a stance.
I grab him by the hair yank him along.
"RUN DUMBASS!!!!!!!!"
Right, the CC can't be compared to a fat leech. The CC's a different sort of threat - not a predator, but a freak of nature. It should be super rare to come across one in the wild so WHY IS ONE HERE!?!?!?!
It bears down on me from behind and in seconds it's breath is one my back.
I'm gonna die.
I wonder how many times I've though that.
I squeeze my eyes shut as I feel its jaw open behind me, Elemental's grit teeth, and Neo's screams.
"WAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH!!!!!!"
That doesn't sound like a giant arthropod with a thousand legs and four jaws.
Behind me, the head that was reared up ready to rip me to shreds suddenly slams into the ground, and the rest of the long body behind it follows, armour segments smashing against each other in an ear-tearing noise as it comes juddering to an abrupt halt.
I turn, dive to the ground out of its range, and watch a human being stand up on the Crawler's head.
"Who…?" Neo begins, but then he gets cut off with a deafening, booming clang.
The sound of metal striking the Crawler's carapace, as the guy standing on its head raises a huge arm, bulging with muscle and laced with veins, and brings it down in a brutal punch between the bug's eyes. Then he punches it again. And again. Again. Every time his fist moves in a flurry of movement, there's the glint of metal, and I realize he's got metal knuckledusters clenched between his fingers. The bug's steel-like carapace is splintering under his onslaught, and then explodes.
Shards of rocky armour spray upwards and clatter across the cave ground. Some hit me, and although it does no damage it does jolt me back to my senses.
"Let's move!" I tell Elemental and Neo, and we scramble to our feet and pull back further away from the fight.
The armour on top of the bug's head has been completely blown away, exposing a writhing mass of flesh within, but just before the attacker can pull through with a follow-up move it seems to remember that it's a multi-ton super-insect, and rears up, long-ass body undulating and writhing violently behind it. It crashes against the boulders, the cave roof and floor, dislodging stalactites and stalagmites and sending them flying in all directions.
"Dodge!"
I have to dive out the way before I'm impaled on a flying shard of stone, but glancing up the guy on its head is somehow still there, clinging on by his fingertips. He draws back a hand and plunges it deep into the bug's cranium, and with a cascade of purple blood tears out a handful of gooey stuff. The bug is now writhing back and forth in all directions, blood running into its eyes, emitting a thunderous screeching couples with the crashing and booming reverberating around.
Literally, I don't even know what's going on anymore.
Eventually, after what seems like an age of punching, clawing, tearing and violence, the giant bug stops moving and clamours to the ground in a storm of dust. Coughing, I peer through the haze and make out the figure of the guy who's just punched a Crystalline Crawler to death standing up on the corpse.
"Careful," Elemental says, eyes steady but glinting dangerously, as he stands in front of us.
I glance at him, and although he seems calm I can tell he is nervous. No surprises there. Me too. Will this monstrous guy turn on us, like that Exqua…?
The dust clears and we get a good look at him. Tall, broad-shouldered, chiselled with muscle and blood-spattered, crude steel knuckledusters. Dirty blonde hair, an ashen face covered with grime and dried blood, and a pair of scary green eyes. I shiver, they're locked straight with mine and filled with bloodlust.
"Yeah," I say. "I don't think he's friendly."
"Who are you?" Elemental asks.
"None of ya biz," the guy grins. "Cuz ya'll dead."
Then he jumps off the smashed-in head of the Crawler, and sails through the air right at me.
He moves like a monster. One second he's twenty feet away, next he's here. The first swing misses my face by inches, air whistling past my face, and I backstep out of range. He chases, but Elemental intercepts, dodges a swipe that probably would've taken off his head, pivots and grabs his wrist. He twists, but the blonde guy tears through the grip with raw strength, spins and counters with a heaving hook that nearly caves the air in.
I lunge in and deflect the punch with both my forearms, but the shock leaves both my hands numb.
Me and 004 back up as our opponent stretches his arms.
"One hit from those knuckledusters and we're dead," I tell Elemental.
I'm afraid. But I've gotta stay calm.
"How can he move that fast with that huge frame?" 004 mutters, lowering his centre of gravity, preparing.
"I know right? But-"
The opponent rushes in, driving a knee forwards. Elemental sidesteps it in a split second and scores an elbow to the ribs, and follows up with a sharp punch to the jaw that would've put anyone to sleep.
"-we're faster."
Except it did nothing. Like hitting a wall.
"Tag in!" Elemental shouts to me and Neo, but I find that I'm the only one rushing forwards.
Neo's struggling to stand, his leg shaking and trailing blood. He must've been struck by the flying rubble earlier. Grabbing a stray shard of rock from the cave floor, I charge towards the two of them fighting, feeling the world go streaky as my inhuman, enhanced muscles propel me forwards, and swing with everything I have. I see his eye widen, and the stone disintegrates on impact.
"Wha-"
My fingers go numb again. The monstrous guy in front of me starts grinning through a haze of blood, and a vice-like grip tightens on my collar.
Shit.
But before he can throw me, Elemental slams a kick into his temple and the grip loosens. Pulling myself free, we circle him like hunters.
We have two advantages in this brawl. We're fighting two-on-one, and we're faster, but we're stuck at a complete deadlock. Neither side can deal any proper damage to the other.
It's true. That kick from 004 would've been an instant lights-out for Neo or maybe me, but this guy just stumbles.
"Damn!"
I clench my fingers and hit him, again, again, and again. His skin splits under my knuckles but he just keeps coming. Every hit feels like punching a solid brick wall. How can a human even have this kind of physique? He's grinning, and laughing, and for a second I realize e's enjoying this.
That kinda pisses me off.
I was scared of this idiot? Don't play jokes with me. Compared to those guys with the metal bats that killed Kard, this meathead's nothing.
A rush of blood goes to my head, and suddenly I just wanna hit him. To hell with dodging. To hell with all that fancy stuff. I'll just destroy him.
The look in his eyes change.
"Oh?"
And then my knuckles collide brutally with his sinuses.
It felt good. He's still grinning, and draws back an arm to hit me, but I sweep him in the legs and he loses balance. I step into the next attack, grunt, and hit him again in the face. This time, he falls flat on his back in the ground, blood running down his chin.
"How about now?" I ask him. "Are you still having fun?"
"Hehe," he grins. "You bet."
Ah, shit.
He rears up of the ground and in half a second the knuckledusters flash in front of my eyes. At the same time, Elemental grabs my shirt from behind and yanks me backwards, and the cold metal barely grazes my forehead. There's a sharp stinging pain and a warm, trickling feeling starts up.
It only grazed me, but it cut me.
And now that that's happened, he's back on his feet.
"Don't go in without care for your body!" Elemental yells. "You're copying him!"
He's right. This guy we're fighting, it's as though he's only ever focused on making his punches connect, and ignores us punching and hitting him, like he has no care for his body at all. It's scary. Because no matter how much we damage him we can't be sure of a victory unless we… unless we kill him.
"RAAAARGH!!"
He and Elemental dash towards each other, but seconds before collision a new voice rings out across the cave that makes us all freeze.
"STOP!!"
I whirl around and there's a new person standing above us on a nearby boulder.
"Stop fighting!" he yells. "We aren't enemies. It's just that he's…"
His voice trails off, and instead he jumps down from the boulder and lands lightly close by.
"He's what?" Elemental demands, then looks at the musclehead.
"Uh, he has violent tendencies," the newcomer decides. "He's not a bad guy."
"He tried to kill us."
"All you need to know is that we don't want to fight," he says.
Now that he's closer to us, in the light, I get a good look at him. He's slightly shorter than me, but still tall, with a well-honed, athletic-looking build but nowhere near as ripped as the musclehead. A mop of messy, rust-coloured hair tops a slightly dark-skinned face, with strange, reddish-brown eyes. More people appear from the boulders, about five or six in total, and approach us, and it becomes evident that this guy's their leader.
"Luc," he says, exhaling. "Please."
"The meathead grumbles, but relents.
"You got off easy this time," he grumbles, wiping blood from his lip.
"Oh yeah?" I demand. "Wanna go for another round? I'll lay you out again, punk."
"You really wanna go?" he gets in my face, but then Elemental and the new guy push us apart.
"Didn't know you had that side," 004 mutters to me.
"What?"
"Nothing, forget it."
He turns to the rust-hair.
"So, who are you?"
"Krim," comes the reply. "010. The muscle-brain is Luc, he doesn't offer much besides ego and punches, and he's 009."
"Did you come up together?"
"Yeah."
Krim, who seems reasonable enough, introduces us to the rest of his group - 023 Cinder, 024 Jora, 034 Leon, 055 Kite and 092 Dread. They all seem nice enough to be around, and soon we agree to stick together for the time being until we could find Artee, Ronin, Mist and Kino.
And lastly, we noticed that all of them had weapons of some sort. Crude wooden swords, razors, blunt or rusting knives, and Luc's knuckledusters.
"We actually don't know," Krim explains as we keep trekking through the cave, Elemental and Leon supporting Neo between them. "We were attacked by a group of three that were carrying these, and two of our members were killed. We were able to get the better of them though."
"Pah!" Luc laughs. "Don't make it sound like a fight. We slaughtered them."
"For real," Cinder agrees.
"You killed them?" I ask in surprise.
I'm talking to a murderer.
"Yes," he says. "We did. We also got these off them."
He digs around in a batter leather pouch in his waist and hands me a flat piece of bread. I snarf it down instantly, and despite being drier than Elemental's personality it's the best food in the world for a moment. A dead man's food.
"How did it feel?" I ask. "Killing someone?"
He glances at me sharply.
"Don't tell me you haven't prepared yourself to do that yet? Y'know in this place, there are people who'd kill you on sight for the sake of lowering the head count or… food."
"Nah," I lie. "Of course I have. I'm not stupid."
"Yeah," he decides after studying me closely. "…because if you want to survive this death game, you have no other choice."