The next few days, or ‘cycles’ as the Competitors at large have taken to calling them, pass with a pleasant sort of routine. First, I wake up and visit with the elderly in the human common area, ignoring the influencers for the useless sacks of space they are. Especially Brody, the guy with the parenthetical level. He watches me every time I come into view, his gaze uncomfortably intense. I don’t know what the weird asshole wants, but I also don’t want to find out.

  The old folks somehow managed to procure a pack of normal playing cards. The few with their minds intact gather every morning to play cards, their banter a small spot of bright normalcy amidst a sea of alien uncertainty.

  Ben, a svelte old fox of 77, is an old Vietnam veteran who, by his own admission, survived a lot of shit and ‘didn’t care to do it again.’ Evelynn, an ancient woman somewhere past 90, is not all there but remains adroit enough to shuffle and sharp enough to remember strategy, if not the past hands. The fact that she’s a total bitch makes it all the better to play with her.

  And, of course, there’s Grettel, the kindly and mysterious assassin, a capable card player and consummate grandmother. Every morning, I sit with them and chat about mundane things, things like how certain sports teams are doing and whether certain elections went as we expected. Others far past their mental prime sit around us, occasionally interjecting opinions only vaguely connected to the conversation. It doesn’t matter. The whole thing’s pointless nonsense, but it makes me feel human. I’d fight for these relics of the past, even if I wouldn’t lift a finger for the idiots lounging across the glade.

  I avoid contact with the hunters out happily murdering ‘xenos.’ I know that rumors of my little crew have spread across all of Haven, but they haven’t made any moves against us. They also haven’t asked if I wanted to join their little group.

  My morning ends with a check of the leaderboards and the map of completed Challenges before we pick a direction and set out near whatever passes for midday.

  The gates of Haven are still nominally dangerous, but the Competitors waiting to waylay people exiting have dwindled for a couple of reasons. First, the vast majority of the ‘easy’ prey has elected never to leave Haven again, which leads to second, the only people heading out are confident they can fuck up anyone who steps to them, and lastly, a cycle or so after we arrived in Haven, the Ekinor decided they were tired of watching their backs and went out in force to purge all the gate snipers while the rest of us slept. By whispered rumor, the battle had been pretty epic, and the number of Competitors had dropped by over a thousand following the sortie.

  So it’s with reasonable confidence that we head out into the maze, watching our backs for ambushers and seeking Challenges worth completing. We fight a strange frog/man hybrid in a Combat Challenge, do a Toughness one involving enduring heat and cold, and find a random Intelligence Challenge that is, in the end, a somewhat elementary logic puzzle involving standing in the right place. I collect some cloth of Rare quality from the Aethid homeworld (of course) and a pair of tokens to be spent at Haven.

  The tokens offered for completing minor Challenges turn out to only allow the purchase of amenities like blankets and socks (something I’ve no use for with my magic shoes) and food (something I don’t particularly miss requiring). They’re only for comforts and pointless crap that I don’t feel the need to indulge in. I give all of my tokens to Burl, who stuffs his face to the point of absurdity. We’re lucky Burl’s magic crafts his armor to his body in real time, because he now has a little baby gut to defend.

  In the evening, before we return to Haven, we train. Zara finds us a safe clearing, and the three alien athletes spar and fight and perform what feels like circus tricks, often under the effects of my fields of gravity.

  At Zara’s insistence, we do teamwork exercises. At first, they laugh at me when I struggle, trembling, to manage a single push-up. They tell me to stop joking when I try to do a pull-up on a nearby tree branch and my body just kind of sways back and forth. By the time they tell me ‘no, we said run, Sam,’ the reality finally settles on them.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  My Strength actually is a 2.

  Threenut and Burl make it their personal goal to get me up to at least average. I don’t even pretend to try to keep up with them while they ‘work out’ by leaping flat footed into trees and racing in increasingly-convoluted paths between the trunks.

  Zara’s brand of athleticism is different from theirs, more precise and dedicated to the extraordinary balance and agility her many legs provide for her. But, despite lacking a Class dedicated to combat, she keeps up with them well enough.

  I spend most of the physical portions of our practices alternating between gasping and crying on the ground. The way the majority of Zara’s eyes twinkle as they look at me makes me think she’s enjoying the sight.

  And my Strength remains, stubbornly, a 2.

  I can do two push-ups now, though.

  At least the magical part is pretty good. While the others train their bodies and minds, I train my soul. Burl and Threenut compete to see who can stand the longest as I increase the power of Strengthen, then fight one another weightless in a Weaken field, kicking off trees to strike at one another before I throw them in unexpected directions with Gravity Manipulation.

  I can activate a dozen Gravity Manipulation fields without dropping below half my energy, a crazy improvement over my first forays into magic. I learn to modulate the power smoothly, strengthening and weakening activations, picking objects and targets and imagining fields with increasing speed and precision. How much power I need to use, how strong the field I need for a particular task, the strange ways I can combine my strength with my group to surprise our enemies…

  My control improves the most after Threenut has the dickish idea to throw things at me. Knowing that I don’t remotely have the Agility to dodge, the three of them gleefully pelt me with a stream of pebbles and sticks and whatever other small, annoying things they can find. At the start, I use my power like a sledgehammer, crushing thrown rocks to the ground or deflecting them high into the sky, but the precipitous rate at which my soul energy drops forces me to consider how to be more efficient.

  A bit of Strengthen shifts the angle of a low projectile so that it buries itself at my feet. Weaken makes another sail just high enough to miss. Gravity Manipulation is the easiest method of dealing with individual targets, but it is also the costliest.

  I’m definitely improving, which is one of the main reasons I put up with getting clocked in the back of the head with rotting sticks or well-thrown pebbles a dozen times in an hour. The other reason is that, when I inevitably get frustrated, I end the practice with a little revenge I like to call ‘return to sender.’ A bit of Manipulation, and whatever projectiles are in the air reverse course. Maaaybe with a bit of Strengthen, depending on how loudly Burl laughed when he managed to tag me.

  It feels like the best kind of group project in school, where everyone is committed, everyone brings something unique to the table, and you strangely like everyone involved. The practices are actually fun. It’s hard not to almost relax.

  At just under 30,000 remaining souls, this portion of the Tournament grinds to an uneasy stalemate. The leaderboards are largely unchanged; no one of note has died in over a week. The weak and the timid huddle in their species’ safe areas. The number of Competitor deaths slows as the number of Challenges dwindles. Many of the remaining ones carry a tally of the dozens of Competitors who entered and did not exit, the ubiquitous opaque white walls preventing anyone from learning what makes those particular Challenges so difficult.

  With each passing hour, there’s less reason to leave Haven and more to risk by doing so. Yet I’m sure this is not what the gods had in mind when they designed this Challenge.

  Something has to give. More of us have to die.

  A lot more.

  The proverbial other shoe is waiting, impatiently, to drop.

  Also, bounty on bounty, to keep a promise to a friend, I am going to offer an ADDITIONAL bonus chapter on Friday.