The swap dropped me into cold air and the smell of scorched rock, and for a half-second I thought the transition had glitched, because instead of a street or a doorway I was falling.
Then my boots hit gravel hard enough to buckle my knees, and the quarry opened up around me in a bowl of broken stone terraces, each one strung with cable and crude wooden scaffolding as though someone had tried to rig a fishing operation for something that weighed several tons.
The wristband lit up before I even got my balance back.
SWAP COMPLETE.
Location: Kharvoss, Northern Quarry.
Assigned station: Winch 3.
Cable status: two of five severed.
Two of five.
I didn’t need the display to tell me that was bad math, but it told me anyway, flashing the number in a shade of red that the network probably licensed out to insurance companies as a warning color.
I was standing in the exact spot Sorn had vacated, one hand still curled around a lever slick with his sweat, the winch drum beside me groaning under tension I hadn’t put there and didn’t fully understand yet.
Above the terraces, chained by nothing but its own exhaustion and a decision it hadn’t made, the dragon thrashed against a slope of loose scree.
It couldn’t get airborne.
Somebody had figured out how to take that away from it, and judging by the splintered wagon wheels and scattered crates littering the base of the cliff, they’d done it with a supply convoy that never had any supplies in it to begin with.
A lure.
A good one, since the thing had chased empty crates halfway across a quarry it should have flown straight over.
A man in leather bracers and a face full of quarry dust jogged along the terrace toward me, boots skidding on gravel, and jabbed a finger at the lever under my hand without slowing down.
“That one. Don’t touch it till I say.”
“Copy,” I said, because arguing with a stranger who clearly understood the mechanism better than I did seemed like a poor use of the ten seconds I probably had before something important happened.
He kept moving, shouting numbers at two other stations farther along the rim, and I used the gap to actually look at what I’d inherited.
Winch 3 anchored a harpoon the length of a small boat, its barbed head resting in a wooden cradle bolted to the rock face.
The cable ran taut down to a second cradle near the dragon’s flank, threading through pulleys that had clearly been assembled in a hurry and were holding together on faith more than engineering.
Two other cables hung slack and frayed where they’d already given out, the harpoons they’d carried buried uselessly in stone or dangling broken against the cliff.
Three winches left.
Mine, and two others I couldn’t see from this angle.
The dragon reared, wings beating uselessly against a ground it couldn’t leave, and one of the slack harpoon lines whipped free with a crack loud enough to make my ears ring even from a distance.
Somewhere below, someone screamed a name I didn’t recognize, cut short by a second sound I didn’t want to think too hard about.
The hunter reappeared at the far end of the terrace, waving both arms in a signal that needed no translation.
Now.
I threw the lever.
The drum spun, the cable snapped taut, and the whole apparatus shuddered under a strain that traveled straight up through my palms and into my shoulder—the one that had been complaining since Odrance and had every right to keep complaining now—.
The harpoon didn’t fire.
It held, cable groaning, cradle creaking, waiting on a target that hadn’t dropped its head into position yet.
This was the part where letting go would have been the smart move, and also the part where letting go meant the cable slackened and the whole rig lost whatever tension it had built. This chapter is updated first at novelping(.)com.
So I didn’t let go.
I planted my feet, wrapped both hands around the lever, and did the one thing I actually had some control over.
Dead Grip locked my hands to the metal like they’d been welded there for its four-second duration.
No feeling past the wrists, no ability to release even if I wanted to, just raw mechanical hold that didn’t care what my tendons thought about the arrangement.
It was ugly and it was cheap and it worked exactly as advertised: I became, for those four seconds, a fixed point that outperformed my own grip strength by a wide and unpleasant margin.
The cost showed up almost immediately, a deep, grinding ache that started in my shoulder and crawled toward my spine, the kind of pain that promised to get worse the longer I let the joint hold weight it was never built for.
Across the terrace, a figure in cracked leather armor dropped into a crouch that looked deliberately, painfully wrong: spine curved, one arm twisted back at an angle no healthy body should manage.
Sivrel.
I’d heard the name shouted twice already without putting a face to it, but there was no mistaking what he was doing now.
The dragon’s head jerked in response, mirroring the stance against every instinct it had, neck dropping low and exposed as it fought some invisible compulsion to match a shape a man half its size was forcing his own body into.
He was in agony.
I could see it from here, the way his knees shook, the way his jaw locked around a sound he refused to let out.
And the dragon’s throat came down, right into the harpoon’s line of fire, right where the rig had been aimed the entire time.
“Fire three!” someone shouted, and I felt more than heard the answering command travel down the terrace.
I let go.
Dead Grip released the instant I willed it, and my hands came off that lever numb and useless, fingers curling into a claw shape I didn’t order them into.
The winch fired.
The harpoon streaked out on a line of tension that had been building since before I arrived, and it missed the heart by a wide margin, because hearts on a six-meter dragon apparently sit somewhere I had no reference for.
It hit the throat instead, punched clean through muscle and scale at the base of the neck, and pinned the beast to the scree slope with a sound like a felled tree hitting wet ground.
It didn’t die.
It screamed, wings hammering the air, one foreleg raking a trench through gravel as it tried to pull itself free of a spike that had gone all the way through.
But it wasn’t going anywhere, and that was apparently the entire point.
“Seal the exits!” The order came from somewhere below, relayed and re-relayed across the terraces until it reached squads I couldn’t see, positioned at gaps in the quarry wall I hadn’t even noticed were gaps.
Wooden barricades swung shut.
Iron grates dropped.
Within a few seconds, the only way out of that bowl of stone was through the thing pinned in the middle of it.
My wristband offered me the obvious way out of what came next.
A prompt sat waiting in the corner of my display, the familiar shape of a self-programming activation, the kind that would let me black out and wake up somewhere down the line having already survived whatever came next without having to feel it happen.
I looked at it for exactly as long as it took to decide I didn’t want it.
Not because I trusted my own hands more than whatever ran the program on the other end.
I didn’t know that yet, not really.
But there were people on this terrace who’d spent hours setting up a trap I hadn’t earned any part of, and disappearing into unconsciousness now, letting something else finish the job while my body went limp somewhere they’d have to protect, felt like showing up to split a bill I hadn’t paid into.
So I grabbed a length of rebar someone had left leaning against a supply crate, and I went down the terrace steps toward the fight instead of away from it.
The dragon was still dangerous while pinned.
Maybe more dangerous, since it had nothing left to lose and a tail that could still clear a ten-meter arc without warning.
Hunters closed in from three directions, coordinated in a way that told me this wasn’t their first cornered monster, striking at the joints where its scales thinned, retreating the instant its head swung their way. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
I found a gap in the rotation and took it, driving the rebar into a wound another strike had already opened, twisting it the way you’d twist a knife you didn’t want to pull back out cleanly.
It roared.
The sound hit me somewhere below the ribs, a physical pressure that made my teeth ache, and for a moment I thought the whole terrace might come down around us from the vibration alone.
Then Sivrel’s voice cut through it, hoarse and strained but still commanding.
“Necks are done bending! Hit the wing joints, drop it flat!”
We hit the wing joints.
I don’t know how many of us there were by that point, a dozen maybe, none of us pretty about it, all of us just working the same wound from different angles until something in that massive body finally gave out and the whole terrace shook again, this time from the impact of the dragon collapsing sideways into the scree it had been chained to for the better part of an hour.
It didn’t get back up.
Nobody cheered.
A few people sat down where they stood, the way you do when your legs decide the fight’s over before your brain fully agrees.
My wristband buzzed against skin gone raw from the Dead Grip, and I lifted it with hands that still weren’t entirely mine yet.
SECTOR MISSION VALIDATED: KHARVOSS.
Hour 41 of 168.
Programming ability upgraded to Level 3.
New operational cap: 45 seconds.
Forty-five seconds—not much on paper, but enough that I filed it away as an actual number worth remembering instead of the vague guesswork I’d been running on before.
Vassago’s voice arrived a beat later, threading through every device on the terrace at once, cheerful in the specific way that made my stomach turn a little every time.
“Congratulations, hunters! You’ve taken a six-meter apex predator with an estimated market value in the high-six figures and turned it into a one-time-only television event that will never, ever happen again. Some might call that a waste. We call it irreplaceable content, and irreplaceable content drives sponsorship, and sponsorship drives your prize pool. So really, you’re welcome. Kharvoss is officially validated, and the road to Namarre is open for foot traffic starting now.”
Nobody laughed.
A few people looked like they wanted to throw something at the nearest camera, and honestly, so did I, but my hands were still too numb to be trusted with anything sharper than the rebar I dropped somewhere back on the terrace.
I found Sivrel sitting on an overturned crate, cradling the arm he’d twisted into that impossible mirrored stance, jaw tight against pain he wasn’t bothering to hide anymore now that the cameras had moved on to survey the corpse.
“You forced its head down,” I said, because it seemed worth saying out loud once, even if he already knew.
“Wasn’t the first time I’ve broken something to make something else easier,” he said, flexing fingers that clearly didn’t want to flex.
“Won’t be the last, either. You held that winch through two failed cables. Not bad for someone who just fell out of the sky into it.”
“Wasn’t planning on being here,” I admitted.
“Sorn had the harder end of this before I showed up.”
“He usually does.” Sivrel pushed himself up off the crate with a grunt and nodded toward the quarry exit, where the wooden barricades were already being dragged aside to make room for a column of survivors, gear on their backs, moving with the particular slowness of people who’d used up everything they had and were now running on the idea that stopping was somehow worse than walking.
I fell in with them, since nobody had swapped me anywhere else yet and my legs seemed willing to keep going even if the rest of me had checked out somewhere around the third dragging step.
The road out of the quarry cut through a stretch of scorched brush that hadn’t burned recently enough to still smell like smoke, opening onto a wider path that the wristband labeled, without ceremony, as the transit route to Namarre.
Nobody talked much.
There wasn’t a lot left to say that the dead dragon and the sealed quarry hadn’t already covered, and every conversation that did start seemed to die out within a sentence or two, swallowed by the effort of just keeping pace.
I walked with them anyway, shoulder throbbing, hands slowly remembering how to close into fists, unswapped and exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the arena’s countdown and everything to do with holding a lever until it stopped being a choice.