The silence lasted until it couldn't.
Then everybody moved. A hundred people choosing who they wanted beside them when the dying started. Groups tightened. Pairs grabbed a third. Strangers sized each other up across the room with the desperate math of people who had minutes to make a decision that would keep them alive.
Kitch was already standing beside them.
That was it.
Around them the room churned. The group of eight split into pairs and scrambled for thirds — Roden pulling Pol and a tall woman with chitin plating into a cluster, the others finding matches wherever they could. The three-sun woman grabbed two people Jake didn't recognize. The bark-skin woman sat alone against the wall with her eyes closed. Two people approached her, spoke. She opened her eyes, and that was apparently enough.
People shouted across the room. People argued. Someone was turned away from a pair and stood in the open with their hands at their sides, looking for anyone who'd take them. The math was clean — a hundred people, thirty-three teams of three, one person left over. Jake didn't want to think about the leftover.
"Thirty-three teams," Kitch said. His eyes tracked the room, both of them for once moving together. "Thirty-two fights in the first round. Sixteen teams advance."
"Sixteen teams," Jake said. "Forty-eight people."
"Forty-eight people survive the first round. Fifty-two don't."
A hundred people he'd been sitting with for days. Fifty-two of them would be dead after the first fights. He knew some of their faces. He'd talked to some of them. The three-sun woman. Roden. Pol.
"We need to talk about how we fight," Vauren said.
Vauren's face had settled into something precise, every feature arranged for the task ahead. His left arm hung at his side, healed, the shoulder rolling smoothly as he shifted his weight.
"Okay," Jake said. "How do we fight?"
"We have never fought together. The three of us." Vauren turned to Kitch. "I know what Jake does. I do not know what you do."
Kitch held up one hand. A single shard of glass appeared between his fingers, thin, clear. "Modus. Glass. I fill space with edges. Projectiles, barriers, distractions. Range."
"Range," Vauren said. "Jake is speed. I am pressure. You are range."
"That's the shape," Jake said. "I go in fast, you follow and lock them down, Kitch controls the outside."
"In theory," Kitch said. "We've never done it."
"We'll figure it out."
"In a fight where the losers die."
"Yeah." His eyes were steady. "We'll figure it out."
The plumage drew tight at Kitch's throat.
"Fine," he said.
The bunny reappeared.
It sat in the center of the room, cross-legged, and the noise died the way it had before — spreading outward from the center, conversations collapsing ring by ring until a hundred people were silent and watching.
"Teams," the bunny said.
People gathered. Thirty-three clusters of three. One person standing alone at the edge — a young man, thin, scaled, who hadn't found a team. He stood with his arms at his sides and his jaw tight.
The bunny regarded him. The dark eyes, the tilted ears.
"Thirty-three and one," it said. Something in the voice. "One is not three."
The young man said nothing. The room said nothing.
The bunny's hand extended toward him. The long fingers, the pale tips. The young man flinched. The bunny's hand stopped. Held. Then pulled back.
"You will watch," the bunny said. "When a team loses a member, you will fill the space."
The young man's breathing was audible from across the room.
The bunny's ears rotated. It surveyed the thirty-three teams. "First pair. Step forward."
Two teams moved to the center. Not Jake's — two groups he didn't know. Six people facing each other in the open space that had been the bunny's sitting spot. The bunny had moved to the edge, sitting against the wall, the dark eyes watching.
The room pressed back, giving space. A hundred people forming a ring around six. The silence was total.
"Begin," the bunny said.
It was fast. Messy. Six people who'd never fought in this room, on this stone, under this light. One team had a Modus user who threw arcs of something dark — shadow, maybe, or condensed Vincu — while the other two pressed forward. The opposing team had a Corpus fighter whose skin hardened into plates and two ranged users who kept distance.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
It lasted less than two minutes. The plate-skin fighter took the shadow user down with a straight rush through the arcs, absorbing what he couldn't dodge. The other two fell apart once their ranged cover was gone. One went down to a knee strike. The last one surrendered, hands up, breathing hard.
The room was silent.
The bunny stood. Walked to the center. The three losers were on the ground — one unconscious, one clutching their ribs, one on their knees with their hands still raised.
"Rest now," the bunny said. The voice was soft.
It touched each of them. One. Two. Three. The same hand that had healed Jake's ribs, the same long fingers.
Jake turned away.
He heard it. Three sounds, close together, that he would not describe to himself then or later. The quality of the silence that followed was different from any silence he'd heard in his life.
When he turned back the three bodies were on the stone. Still. The bunny was sitting in its spot again, cross-legged, ears up. The winning team stood where they were, breathing hard, staring at the floor.
The room didn't move.
"Next pair," the bunny said.
Jake's team was called fourth.
Three fights had happened. Three teams down. Nine people dead on the stone — the bunny had them moved to the far wall by the winners, lined up neatly, which was somehow the worst part. Neat. Organized. Like luggage.
Jake stood up. His legs worked. His hands were steady. The light at his feet was there, faint, warm on the stone.
Vauren stood beside him. Still. Composed. His sleeves straight.
Kitch stood on his other side. Feathers flat. Talons pressed into the stone. Both eyes forward.
They walked to the center.
The other team was already there. Three fighters — a woman with four legs and a low center of gravity, built like something that didn't get moved; a thin man whose hands were shaking and whose fingers trailed something that looked like smoke; and a third, heavyset, with skin that had a faint orange tint and forearms thicker than Jake's thighs.
Three people. They'd come through two links to be here. They'd survived the forest, the platforms, the climb. They had reasons to be in the Chain — families, brothers, curiosity, something. In a few minutes the bunny would touch them and they would be the next bodies against the wall.
Unless they won. In which case Jake would be.
"Begin," the bunny said.
Jake moved.
The light fired at his feet — instinct, the launch columns, the platforms. He closed the distance to the smoke-fingered man before anyone else moved. The man's hands came up, the smoke thickening into something solid, dark tendrils reaching for Jake's face. Jake ducked under them. His fist connected with the man's stomach. Light flared at the point of contact — bright, involuntary, the way it had in the forest. The man folded.
Behind him things went wrong.
The four-legged woman was faster than she looked. She hit Vauren from the side before Vauren could set — a full-body charge, low, driving. Vauren absorbed it, the water doing its work, his body rolling with the impact, but she kept pushing. She had leverage he didn't. Four legs on the stone, digging in.
The heavyset one came for Kitch. Kitch sent glass — a spray of shards, fast, glinting in the flat light. The shards hit the orange skin and shattered. The man kept coming. Kitch sent more. They broke on his forearms, his chest, his face. He didn't slow down.
"His skin," Kitch said. Flat. Calm. "I can't cut him."
Jake turned from the smoke man — down, gasping, done — and ran at the heavyset one. Light at his feet, closing fast. He hit him from the side. It was like hitting a wall. The orange skin absorbed the impact, the body barely shifting. A hand came around and caught Jake's arm. The grip was crushing. Jake felt the bones compress.
Vauren was on the ground. The four-legged woman had him pinned, her weight spread across four points. His body was absorbing the pressure — the water distributing her mass across his torso so nothing broke — but he couldn't move. She had position and she was heavier than him and four legs meant she could dig in from every angle.
Jake pulled against the grip on his arm. The heavyset man held him. The orange skin was warm under Jake's hand, dense, impenetrable. Glass shards littered the ground around them, broken, useless.
"Kitch!" Jake shouted.
Kitch did something different. Instead of shards he made a pane — a flat sheet of glass, thin, wide, directly in front of the heavyset man's face. The man flinched. His grip loosened for a half-second. Jake ripped his arm free, dropped low, and swept the man's legs.
He went down. Heavy. The stone cracked under him. Jake was on top of him before he could rise, the light at his hands flaring, hitting the man's face — the one place the orange skin was thinnest. The man's head rocked back. Jake hit him again. Again. The light was doing something it hadn't done before — concentrated, sharp, burning at the point of contact. The man's eyes rolled.
Vauren stopped struggling against the pin. His body went still — all the tension leaving at once, the water absorbing instead of resisting. The woman pressed harder, expecting the push back. It didn't come. Her weight shifted forward. Vauren's right arm came free and he hit her once in the throat. The strike was short. His whole body compressed behind it — every part of him driving force into that single point, the water pressurizing through his arm and releasing on contact. The sound it made was wrong. Too heavy for a fist.
She came off him. Choking, hands at her throat, her four legs scrambling on the stone. Vauren rolled clear and hit her again — ribs this time, another compressed strike, another sound that carried more than it should. She went down.
Vauren stood. His breathing was ragged. His arms were shaking.
Jake stood up. The heavyset man was unconscious beneath him. The smoke man was still on the ground, curled, breathing. Three bodies on the stone, all breathing, all alive.
For now.
Jake's knuckles were bleeding. His right arm ached where the grip had been. The light at his feet was flickering. Vauren's face gave nothing but his hands were open at his sides, the fingers spread, and Jake had never seen Vauren's hands not know what to do before.
Kitch stood where he'd been the whole fight. His feathers were spiked. His talons had gouged lines in the stone. The glass was gone.
"That was ugly," Kitch said.
"Yeah," Jake said.
"We won."
"Yeah."
"You hit the big one six times in the face. From a tactical standpoint, two would have been sufficient."
Jake checked his knuckles. "I'll keep that in mind."
"Please do. Your hands are a limited resource."
The bunny walked to the center of the room.
Jake didn't turn away this time. He tried. His body wouldn't move. He stood there, three meters from the three people he'd just beaten, and watched the bunny's hand extend.
Kitch's talons closed around his arm. The grip was firm, precise. "Don't watch."
Jake turned. He heard the sounds. The grey, featureless, shadowless wall. His hands were shaking.
The silence settled.
"Next pair," the bunny said.
Jake walked back to the wall. Sat down. Vauren sat beside him. Kitch on the other side.
"I want to say something about how we should have been better," Jake said. "But I don't actually know what better looks like yet."
Vauren was quiet for a moment. "Better is faster. Better is knowing where each of us will be before we are there. That will come."
"It will come because we will be fighting again tomorrow," Kitch said. "Which is an efficient learning environment, if nothing else."
Jake almost laughed. Almost. The sound didn't quite make it out, but something in his chest loosened a fraction. The room continued around them — more fights, more sounds, more silence.