Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  I was going to make it. No one could compete with my advantage.

  Something wrapped around my ankle mid-stride and nearly threw me onto my face. If my serpents hadn’t burst from my shoulders and thrust themselves between my head and the ground, I’d have finished the challenge with at least a nasty concussion.

  I kicked the chain off my ankle and rolled onto my feet, just in time to dodge away from another chain that tried to rip my face off.

  The chain-wielding Disciples that Clem and I had defeated in the Grand Melee approached me from the left and right, their weapons whirling, eyes cold and dark.

  “I guess it’s time for a rematch.” I summoned my fusion sword and prepared myself for a bad time. “Ready when you are.”

  The Push

  THE DISCIPLE ON MY right attacked first.

  His chain swept toward my legs in a blur of blue light that my shadow serpents could have easily deflected.

  Sadly, I didn’t have my speedy, agile shadow serpents. Instead, I had a pair of bulky blue serpents with craggy skin covered in plates of armor as wide as my palm and thick as my finger. The one on my left moved to block the attack at what felt like a glacial pace I knew would be far, far too slow.

  The hooked chain struck my shin. The blow was almost hard enough to knock my leg out from under me. Pain shot through my injured limb, and clouds of jinsei burst out of their channels to diffuse the impact.

  The next attack came at my face.

  The serpent on my left shoulder bunched itself into a thick knot of jinsei-powered armor. It moved just enough to intercept the hook coming at my face.

  The weapon slammed into the serpent’s hide and bounced off in a spray of sacred energy. The impact traveled up the chain and jarred the Disciple’s hands so hard he nearly dropped it. Before he could recover, the weapon lost its momentum and fell to the ground, where it lay like a crippled snake.

  My fusion sword whistled through the air to slam into the motionless chain with a resounding clang. An explosion of jinsei hurled me backward and flung splinters of stone shrapnel at my face. Fortunately, my armored blue serpents had understood my tactic and shielded my face from the slivers that would have otherwise cut my face to ribbons. The flash of light would have blinded me, too, if I hadn’t expected it and shielded my eyes in the last second before impact.

  My opponents hadn’t been so fortunate.

  The Disciple whose chain I’d shattered was out cold, his core mauled and his body battered by the backlash from my attack. His ally was on his knees, hands clamped to his eyes, blood running down his face from dozens of small cuts. His chain lay limp and useless on the ground beside him.

  “Should have banished your fusion weapon.” I braced myself, gathered my serpents around my head like a helmet, and destroyed the second Disciple’s blade.

  The explosion hardly fazed me that time. When it had passed, I kneeled next to the fallen initiate and found the bag of tokens that hung from his gi’s belt. I cut through the belt with the razor-sharp tip of my fusion blade and collected the bag for my troubles. I took his friend’s coin pouch, too, then knotted their drawstrings around my belt.

  “Your current ranking is ninety-nine. The next highest-ranking initiate has forty tokens, seventeen more than your current total of twenty-three tokens.” The voice in my head was annoyingly chipper despite its bad news.

  It also distracted me from the all the attention I’d drawn to myself when I’d wiped out the Disciples of Jade Flame and their weapons. Every initiate in the main arena had seen the twin explosions, and a bunch of them were headed in my direction to investigate.

  Two-on-one, that I could handle.

  Twenty-on-one?

  No thanks.

  The map my little beast friends had drawn showed me there were six tunnels leading out of the main arena. The two nearest tunnels were thirty or so feet from where I’d dropped the initiates, and I chose the one that would lead me the farthest away from the mob headed toward me.

  The tunnels weren’t hidden, exactly, but they were disguised by the intricate carvings that lined the walls. If I hadn’t known exactly where to look for them, I’m not sure I would have found them. With any luck, the other initiates wouldn’t be able to figure out where I’d gone. That would give me time to snatch up some more tokens.

  While I’d battled the chain Disciples, my weird little friends had put their heads together and built a picture of the arena that showed much more than just the location of tokens.

  They’d found Abi, Eric, and Clem.

  And some very, very impressive balls of jinsei that blocked the paths to huge stockpiles of jinsei tokens.

  The location of those concentrated sources of sacred energy told me they were either traps or guardians meant to keep initiates away from the treasure troves of tokens beyond them. I didn’t think I could take them on my own, but if I had some friends along for the ride...

  Of course, the three people who might be inclined to help me were scattered all over the arena. Clem and Eric were in tunnels far off to my right. Abi, though, was much closer.

  Great.

  “Maybe he won’t try to kill me immediately,” I muttered as I headed toward the Titan.

  I reached the tunnel Abi had hunkered down in just before the voice chimed in my head again.

  “Your current ranking has fallen to one hundred.” The voice seemed a little too smug for my liking. “The next nearest competitor has fifty-three tokens, thirty more than your current total of twenty-three.”

  That wasn’t good at all. The map from my bonded companions didn’t show me any missing troves; whoever had jumped up in the rankings had done it by taking tokens from someone else. The brutal infighting would force every initiate to make a tough choice: stay and try to increase their lead or escape with the tokens they had before someone stole them.

  “Who’s there?” Abi held his hammer over his shoulder, ready to brain anyone stupid enough to pick a fight with him.

  “It’s me.” I stepped forward and peeled the serpents from around my head so my onetime friend could see my face. “Can we talk?”

  “Here?” Abi shrugged. “Make it fast.”

  “I’m coming closer,” I said. “No one else needs to hear this.”

  Abi nodded. He didn’t lower his hammer, though, and raised his hand to stop me as soon as I got within a few feet.

  “I found a bunch of tokens.” Abi raised an eyebrow, curious as to why I’d let him in on that secret. “And I can’t get to them on my own.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Abi hefted his hammer to emphasize the fact that he’d smash me flat as a bug if I tried anything dumb. “You could stab me in the back and take the tokens I have now.”

  “I could,” I admitted. “But I won’t. Whatever you think you know about me, Abi, I’m not the bad guy here.”

  “So you say.” He didn’t look impressed.

  “So I say.” It was my turn to shrug. “If it will make you feel better, we’ll need Eric and Clem, too.”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  “I do.”

  Abi blew out an annoyed breath and weighed me with his eyes. He didn’t want to trust me. He also didn’t want to pass up on a chance to score some tokens. He was the most straightlaced person I’d ever met, but he was also the most loyal and honor-bound. To Abi, this final challenge wasn’t about staying out of the bottom ten percent. He wanted to win for the honor and glory of his clan. At fifteen years old, he was more obsessed with his legacy than most men in their fifties.

  “Your core is still empty.” He said it the same way you’d tell someone their fly was down. He waited for me to explain. When I didn’t, Abi pursed his lips and gave me a sharp nod. “Fine. I’ll go with you. You lead, I’ll follow.”

  “So you can bash my brains out if I do something you don’t like?” I chuckled and wrapped my glowing blue serpents around my head. I doubted even Abi could smash his way thro
ugh their armored bodies before I could fight back. “Fine, have it your way. Let’s go.”

  I ran to Clem’s position. She’d found a secluded hallway strewn with tokens and had been busily loading them into a backpack. It was hard to tell how many tokens she had, exactly, but her haul glowed brighter to my spirit sight than mine.

  “Clem,” Abi said in a quiet, grave voice.

  She whirled to face him, her fusion sword ablaze in her right hand. Her left fist clutched the strap of her backpack to make sure no one sneaked up on her blind side to snatch it. Her face softened into obvious relief at the sight of the two of us.

  “You scared the poop out of me,” Clem gasped and shook her sword at us. “I oughta stab you both.”

  “You’d miss out on my fabulous plan if you did that,” I said through a grin. Despite the tension between Abi and me, I felt good. The old team was coming back together, if only for a few hours. Maybe they’d see I wasn’t such a bad guy after all, and we could be friends again.

  “I have to hear this.” Clem snatched a token from under a rock and held it up for us to see. “Talk while we gather. I’m stuck in fifty-second place.”

  “Sixty-five for me,” Abi grumbled. “But Jace says he can help.”

  “I found a trove of tokens.” The bonded creatures kept adding details to my mental map, and I had a rough estimate of the trove’s size. “A hundred tokens. Maybe more.”

  “Let’s go!” Clem pumped her fist. “Even split three ways—”

  “Four ways.” I raised a finger for each of us on my right hand. “There’s a guardian. Maybe a trap. We’ll need Eric’s help. And, yes, I know where he is.”

  “See?” Clem stuck her tongue out at Abi. “I told you this guy would be good to know.”

  Abi snorted and shook his head. He didn’t argue the point, though, and I took that as a solid win.

  “Let’s go.” I gestured for them to follow me. “We need to get there before someone else steals it.”

  “Lead the way.” Clem gave me a sweeping bow and urged me on.

  Eric was on the other end of a series of narrow passages that ran around the perimeter of the main arena floor. My bonded creatures told me that he hadn’t managed to gather many more tokens than I had, despite his head start. When we caught up to him, we saw why.

  An ugly red gash crossed Eric’s face from above his left eye, across the bridge of his nose, and through his right cheek. His torso was crisscrossed with bloody wounds that had left his core almost empty. His legs wobbled when he shuffled around to face us. If we’d been bad guys, he’d have already been dead.

  “Oh, Eric.” Clem covered her mouth with one hand to stifle a sob. “What happened?”

  The Resplendent Sun visibly sagged when he recognized us.

  “Too many fights.” He grinned, but the wound across his face left the expression lopsided and jagged. “I’m hurt. Bad.”

  “I’ll take him back to the portal.” Abi’s voice was calm and firm, like this was a foregone conclusion.

  “Nope.” I shut that idea down quick. Eric might not be much use in his current condition, but I wasn’t going to let either of my friends leave the competition. Coming with us would also give him a chance to recover without worrying about getting picked off. “He’s coming with us.”

  “What about the guardians?” Clem asked. “You said—”

  “I’ll figure it out.” I turned my attention to Eric. “Can you cycle your breathing while we walk?”

  “I think so.” Eric nodded. He took an experimental breath, held it, and let it out. “Yeah, I can.”

  “Do it. Fill your core, reinforce your channels.” I motioned for the other two to help Eric stay on his feet. “Heal yourself as best you can. We’ll need you.”

  “Thank you.” Eric’s words were for me, but his swollen eyes shifted to Abi as he spoke. “I thought I was done.”

  “Let’s move,” Abi said, voice gruff. “The sooner we get to these tokens, the sooner we can all get out of here.”

  We were closer to the trove than I’d dared to hope. Eric had retreated to an isolated portion of the tunnels without any tokens to stay away from the other initiates. The same barren patch that had prevented other initiates from finding Eric would hopefully keep them from finding us.

  I followed the map laid out for me by my bonded critters. I wanted to see one of the little dudes, but they were so good at hiding I had yet to lay eyes on one. That hadn’t changed by the time we reached the massive stone door that barred our path to the tokens.

  “Nice door.” Clem eyeballed the barrier. “That is a lot of scrivenings.”

  The door was a ten-foot square of stone set into a wall of darker stone. I couldn’t see any hinges or a handle, but I did see what Clem was talking about. The entire door was covered by an enormous engraved pattern that spiraled in from the edges to a dense swirl of scrivenings around a round depression at its center.

  “Looks dangerous.” Eric leaned heavily on Abi and took a deep breath. “You want me to see if it’s got a trap on it?”

  “Stop.” Abi grabbed Eric’s hand before the Sun could touch the door. “Cycle your breathing. No one’s touching the door until we figure out what this scrivening does.”

  Clem summoned a blazing ball of jinsei to get a better look at the scrivening. Her eyes followed one path through its many convoluted loops and bridges etched into the door’s frame.

  “Your current position has fallen to one hundred and two.” My heart sank at the chipper voice’s bad news. “The next-highest competitor has sixty-six tokens, forty-three more than your current total of twenty-three.”

  I stifled a curse and paced away from my friends so I wouldn’t distract Clem. I’d fallen so far behind I’d need a vault of tokens to catch up.

  “The scrivening isn’t a trap,” Clem said with relief. “It’s just a warning.”

  Abi glanced nervously from Clem to me and back again.

  “What does it say?”

  “Beyond this portal lies the Vault of the Forsaken. All may enter, none may leave.”

  “That sounds cheery,” Eric said.

  “There’s more.” Clem leaned in closer for a better look. “Pray for those souls who traded redemption for greed. Their cores are forfeit, and here they shall remain until the end of days.”

  “We’re done here.” Abi shook his head fiercely. “None of us signed up for that kind of danger.”

  “It’s probably just there to scare people off,” Clem said. “The professors wouldn’t want this challenge to be too easy.”

  “This place is thousands of years old, Clem.” Abi’s stare burned into me. “The professors didn’t come in here and add warnings to doors to scare people away.”

  “There are tokens behind this door,” I said. At least I was pretty sure all that jinsei meant there was a big pile of tokens waiting for us. “A lot of them. If the teachers didn’t put them here, then who did? And if the teachers put them there, why couldn’t they also have added a spooky inscription to convince people to go the other way?”

  “I don’t like it. How do we know which of us is right?” Abi looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

  “We open the door.”

  I grabbed a fistful of tokens out of my belt pouch and looked at them. Each of the coin-shaped objects was nothing more than pure jinsei wrapped in a few scrivenings to hold their shape. They were similar to oboli, though not nearly as sturdy.

  I shoved the whole handful into my mouth and bit down on them.

  The scrivenings shattered and pure jinsei flowed into me like a shot of adrenaline, and the voice informed me I’d just lost six tokens. I pushed my fingertip into the depression at the heart of the door, closed my eyes, and forced jinsei through my channels. White light flowed through my flesh and into the scrivening, where it raced around the intricate design at dizzying speed.

  With a sudden grinding sound, the door disappeared into the floor. Dust rained down from the ceiling with
in the passage I’d just revealed, and the floor shook beneath our feet.

  Something surged out of the gloom, and I laughed when I realized that Abi and I were both right. This place was very old, and the professors had made it very, very dangerous.

  Then a very bad thing was up in my face, and it was time to fight.

  The Trove

  THE SPIRIT EXPLODED out of the darkness, mouth spread wide and fangs glistening with green, venom-aspected jinsei. It raced at us with a cheetah’s speed and the ground-shaking power of an enraged rhinoceros. I’d never seen anything like it, and never wanted to again.

  Because I’d opened the door, the beast saw me first. Its fist-sized eyes were locked on mine as it charged. It was only a few yards away, which left me with nowhere to run or hide.

  I raised my fusion sword into a defensive posture and hoped the jinsei still in my channels would be enough to save me from the bone-crushing impact headed my way.

  “Jace!” Clem shouted. She whipped her sword up and jabbed its tip toward the spirit, but it was no good. She wasn’t close enough to the monster to do anything. Even if she’d been in range, her blade wouldn’t have accomplished much beyond irritating the thing. My friend was strong, but not as strong as this thing.

  I wasn’t sure anything was.

  The spirit beast crashed through the open doorway with a triumphant roar. The light from Clem’s jinsei orb lit up its demonic face in the instant before it ran me down. The creature’s eyes were the size of softballs, and its oversized face was a twisted mockery of a human woman. A single horn jutted from the right side of her forehead, and her nose drooped down over a pair of thin, worm-like lips. It opened its mouth to roar again, revealing twin rows of gray stumps crowned with lacy patches of decay. Icy breath blasted into my face.