Gauntlet

by Holly Jennings

  “By the way, Eon is already on their third respawn.”

  I nearly choked, and I wasn’t sure if it was because Eon had already been killed three times, or if it was because Damon was offering me insight into the game.

  “Third?” I repeated.

  He nodded. “K-Rig’s been hunting them, trying to get them out of the game. Eon is their biggest threat since they have respawns.”

  They were going after each other, just as we thought.

  “What about K-Rig?” I asked. “How many respawns do they have left?”

  He shrugged. “We haven’t taken them out. As far as we know, Eon hasn’t, either.”

  I traded looks with Lily.

  “We did,” I told him. “We took out K-Rig. Once.”

  “Bullshit.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “It’s your choice to believe it.”

  Damon crossed his arms as he studied us, trying to discern the truth. As he stared through the thin slits of his eyes, I realized what he was thinking. If we could take out K-Rig, we could take the whole game. My heart rate rose ten beats. Maybe they weren’t going to back away.

  “How many flags do you have?” he asked.

  I pressed my lips together. I wasn’t sure if we should tell them the truth. We had four. Five, if the boys had reached it on the other side of the map. For now, they were being silent.

  “We have—” Lily began.

  “Three,” I stated, taking a step forward. “We have three flags.”

  If they bought it, we’d look like less of a threat.

  Legacy traded looks with each other. Damon’s gaze turned back to us, flicking between me and Lily.

  “Is this all that’s left of you?”

  They were sizing us up.

  “No,” I said, hoping my voice wasn’t quivering as much as the rest of me. He took a step toward us, and my hand twitched for my sword.

  Easy, Kali.

  “But,” he began, “you’re all that’s here right now.”

  He said it more as a statement than a question. My gaze floated between the rest of Legacy. Jessica was staring at me with a neutral expression, and Joe looked like he was one twig-snap away from charging us.

  Damon took another step. “You’re all that’s here, aren’t you?”

  Behind me, gravel crunched on the road as Lily shifted her weight. Her breaths quickened. My own pulse beat against every nerve. I glanced down. Damon’s hand gripped the hilt of the dagger sheathed at his waist. Joe moved up behind him. Jessica did nothing.

  Damon’s sights narrowed on me, and he slid the dagger out an inch until I saw metal. Fuck it. If they were going to attack, we were going down fighting. I grabbed my sword and charged. Lily’s footsteps followed right behind me.

  Legacy bolted for us. We streamed toward one another on a collision course. No matter what happened, one of us would go down right now.

  Jessica threw herself between everyone.

  “Enough.”

  Her voice ripped through the air, grinding everyone to a halt. We all stared at each other, mere inches apart. Breaths were heavy. Weapons were in everyone’s hands. I watched Jessica’s movements, making sure this wasn’t some kind of trick to catch us off guard. Instead, she turned to Damon and pressed an open palm against his chest.

  “We should get going. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  Her voice was firm. Damon kept his sights fixed on me.

  “But—”

  “You know it’s best to leave them in the game for now. We can take them out later if no one else does.”

  Damon stared down at her a long time. It felt like minutes, maybe hours, had ticked by as they stared at each other. Finally, Damon nodded at me.

  “Back up,” he told us, pointing to the distance. “And keep walking.”

  We did.

  We backed up several yards, our feet moving as rapidly as they could without tripping. Legacy held their ground as they watched our retreat. We hit a crossroad and turned, breaking their line of sight. Just before I turned my back, I caught eyes with Jessica. Her expression said one thing.

  Good luck.

  Yeah. You, too.

  I disappeared around the corner and trotted down the street beside Lily. A shaky breath passed through my lips.

  “What’s going on?” Derek’s voice came through the mics. “You guys okay?”

  “We ran into Legacy,” I explained. I pushed out another uneven breath, my heartbeat still thrumming in my ears.

  “Legacy?” He sounded panicked. “Did you take them out?”

  “No. We held a truce. It’s for their benefit if they keep us in the game. If you run into them, remind them of it.”

  “Got it.”

  It went quiet then. Not just between us but across the entire game. It always felt so empty in here, but realizing how close we’d nearly come to being out of the game, the emptiness felt peaceful. Comforting. It was a reminder that we were still here, still pressing onward, still with work to do.

  Lily looked at me.

  “What’s next?”

  “Marsh.”

  • • •

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  Lily blinked several times as she stared down at the scene below us, as if her brain wouldn’t register what she was seeing. I stood next to her on a rooftop, overlooking the next flag; we were tucked between the rooftop’s corner and the building’s oversized generator. Down on the street, all five members of Eon were locked in battle with some kind of swamp monster. Dripping with moss and standing well over twenty feet tall, it swung its massive fists into Eon’s chests and stomachs, sending them catapulting across the street. Behind it, the flag shimmered in the center of a small pond.

  Yup, definitely a swamp monster.

  Just minutes before, the guys had retrieved their latest flag, Water, where they had to wade through a pool, sinking like quicksand to reach the flag. While it was a test of nerves, they certainly hadn’t faced anything like this.

  We watched as the monster pulverized Eon. All five of them attacked the monster together, but none got any closer than ten feet to the flag before the monster swatted them away. Lily was right. What the hell were we going to do?

  A distant noise snapped my attention away from the monster and across the rooftop behind us. It sounded like someone talking, and they weren’t speaking English. I stopped breathing.

  Lily kept her gaze on the fight below and opened her mouth.

  “What are we supposed to—?”

  Lily’s words became a muffled mess as I pressed my palm against her lips and shook my head. She understood immediately. Her eyes went wide, and she went silent.

  Footsteps echoed across the roof. They were only a few feet away.

  My stomach dropped out.

  Together, we scrambled away from the rooftop’s edge and pressed our backs to the generator, trying to shrink down in the shadows. K-Rig rounded the generator’s corner and approached the rooftop’s edge, muttering things in Korean to one another. I pressed myself harder against the generator as a silent prayer slipped between my lips. How could they not see us? Kim Jae stood within inches of me. I could have reached out and touched his leg.

  As his teammates surveyed the fight, Kim Jae took a step to the side, and his foot brushed against mine. My heart jumped into my throat. Kim Jae glanced down with a curious look on his face.

  Oh shit.

  Lily’s hand gripped her axe. I wrapped my fingers around hers and shook my head. She froze.

  He started to kneel, moving closer to the shadows. I released Lily’s hand, and my own went for my sword.

  I prepared myself for the attack.

  “Jae.”

  His head snapped around to his team, and he answered them. There were a few, sharp exchanges between th
em, and they started rushing to the edge of the roof. Kim Jae threw one last glance at the shadows and followed his teammates down.

  A rush of air passed through my lips, and I let my head fall back against the generator. Relief flushed through me until I felt like I was melting into a puddle out of my toes.

  Beside me, Lily scowled. “We should have taken them. We could have knocked half them off the roof in a second.”

  I pushed up to my feet. “They’d just respawn and come after us again.”

  Lily followed my lead and leaned over the roof’s edge again. “They’d come after us anyway. At least then they’d have to trek across the map again to pick up this flag.”

  “Or, we could just let Eon and K-Rig take each other out.” I pointed down at the flag. Below us, Eon, K-Rig, and the NPC were locked in a messy, three-way battle. Despite already going up against the monster, Eon fought against K-Rig with determination, slamming strike after strike into their swords. Swords plunged through K-Rig’s abdomens and necks, spraying blood, inking the pond with droplets of red. I blinked several times, and shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. Eon was winning.

  Lily gasped, and grabbed my arm.

  “We should take the flag.”

  “What?”

  “Right now. It’s our chance. We could sneak up from behind. There’s so much chaos, there’s a chance we’d never be seen.”

  I hesitated. “That’s not really sportsmanlike, is it? Stealing the flag like that?”

  Lily frowned at me. “What part of this competition has been sportsmanlike for us?”

  Good point.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We jumped down from the roof’s edge, landed on the street, and crept through the shadows. The sounds of the battle cries and clanging swords filled the air. We waded into the water behind the fight and ducked down up to our noses, just enough to breathe and keep our eyes on the attraction.

  We neared the flag.

  It stood tall on a small, circular platform just out of the water. The waves lapped up its sides. A body went flying past us and splashed into the water. We froze and submerged into the water up to our eyes. The body floated and didn’t move again. No one else entered the water.

  We surged forward, the flag shimmering within reach. Lily grabbed the flag. It flashed and consumed her in an orange glow. Then it faded.

  We had the flag.

  There was an enormous moaning sound. The swamp beast wavered, stumbled on its feet, and collapsed to the pavement. The ground shook with the impact. With the beast down, the rest of the battle revealed itself. All five members of K-Rig were on the ground, and three from Eon. The remaining two stood in the center of the fight, blood smeared across their bodies, gasping for air.

  My eyebrows went up. They’d survived. They’d taken out K-Rig and defeated the swamp monster.

  Then their eyes landed on us. Their expressions grew fierce, and they shouted things in Swedish. I had no idea what they were saying, but I doubted they were nice words.

  They charged.

  Lily backed away from the flag, but I grabbed her arm.

  “We make our stand here. It’s our best chance.”

  Lily nodded and drew her short axes. I did the same with my swords, gripping them tight in my hands. We clustered around the flag’s tiny platform. Eon hit the water, which slowed their assault. They continued to charge us, driven more by anger than reason.

  They neared us.

  Once the closest one was less than three feet away, I leapt from the platform, aiming both swords directly at his torso. I slammed home. My blades slid straight through his chest and out the other side. He seized, eyes wide, and collapsed to his knees. I ripped my blades out, and he face-planted into the water. Red clouds pillowed out beneath him, slowly turning the entire pool red.

  Lily appeared at my side. Her opponent floated in the water next to mine.

  “We need to get out of here.” She nodded behind me, where the swamp monster had faded from view. “Before that thing respawns.”

  I followed her and started wading over to the side of the pond. Behind us, the water began to ripple.

  “Go,” I shouted, shoving Lily out of the water.

  A massive hand closed around my foot, and I started sliding back down.

  “Lil!” I screeched.

  Lily grabbed my wrists and yanked hard. The grip tightened around my foot, and I slipped deeper into the water. A monstrous cry echoed from beneath the surface, morphing the ripples into churning waves. I slid lower. The waves slapped at my mouth. I coughed and gurgled.

  “Pull hard,” I shouted, wrapping my fingers around her wrists. “As hard as you can.”

  Lily heaved.

  My foot slipped out of the mossy hand. I scrambled onto land, and we took off running down the street. We didn’t stop running until we were several blocks away. Eventually, we slowed, panting hard. I pressed my lips to my mic.

  “You guys there?”

  “Yeah,” Derek answered. “What the hell happened to you?”

  I pushed the words out of my mouth, between my heavy breaths. “Count number six. We’re heading north now.”

  “Cool. We’re—”

  Derek’s voice cut out, and there was a commotion on their side of the comms. I pressed my fingers to my ears, trying to hear more.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Derek’s panicked voice came through the audio. “Eon’s here.”

  I went cold. We’d sent Eon back to their base, same side of the map as the guys. We’d screwed them over.

  “Kali, they’ve got Rooke. They’re going to—”

  The audio cut out.

  I pressed my finger harder against the mic, nearly driving it into my ear. “Derek?”

  Dead silence.

  “You alive?”

  Nothing.

  Then a voice came through Derek’s mic, but it wasn’t his voice and had a heavy Swedish accent.

  “This is for that last flag, you bitch.”

  “Next time I see you, I won’t be quick with my sword. I’ll rip out your throat with my bare hands, you fucking coward.”

  There was a snort, like he didn’t believe me. A cry echoed in the background. A woman’s scream. Not my teammates. There were shouts in English and Swedish, and clangs of swords, but it all jumbled together in an inaudible mess.

  “Guys? Anyone there?”

  I had no answer.

  The radio cut to white noise, then nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 26

  “We don’t know for sure if they’re out.”

  Lily trudged along behind me, trying to keep my spirits high. We headed north, sticking to the edges of the streets, surveying the shadows and sharp corners for the other teams.

  “Why wouldn’t they answer if they were still in the game?” I countered. I glanced back at her, and she shrugged.

  “Maybe their mics got damaged.”

  Or maybe they were out of the game.

  “We have to be realistic,” I told her as I pressed my back against another corner and peered around it. Clear. “If they’re gone, we’ll still have an extra flag to pick up.”

  “But if Derek and Rooke took out Eon,” she continued, rounding the corner with me, “then that was their final respawn. They’d be out of the game.”

  That was unlikely. A victory with two against five wasn’t unheard of, but with Eon’s respawns, they’d be coming back into every fight injury-free and fully stocked with weapons. The chance of my teammates’ survival was minimal at best.

  I glanced at the map in the corner of my visor. A red dot blinked two blocks ahead in the north. We were closing in on the final flag.

  When we arrived at the spot on the map, we were met by a single-story, flat platform, a perfect square, running a hundred
feet long on each side. A single set of oversized stone stairs led up to the platform. In each corner was an angel, cast in stone. Each was cloaked in a heavy hood to hide its face, and each was kneeling as if to pray. Wings spread out from their back and wrapped around them in a semicircle, each angel so large it could swallow you whole.

  Gripped in each of their praying hands was a sickle.

  “Maybe we should wait it out?” Lily offered, eyeing the angels. “See if another team shows up. Let them handle it first?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Our advantage in the game is speed. We need to stay ahead of the other teams. If we keep waiting around, they’ll catch up to us.”

  She considered that and nodded. “Okay, then. What do we do?”

  I sat on the alley floor and buried my face in my hands.

  “I have no idea,” I murmured against my palms.

  The sound of leather armor crunching together filled the air as Lily knelt in front of me.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “I’m tired, too.”

  I pulled my palms away from my eyes. “It’s not that . . .”

  My voice trailed off before I said anything more. I was tired, but that wasn’t the point. Doubt was creeping in, leaving a sinking feeling in my gut. All along, I’d thought we’d have a chance. Just a glimmer of a chance at making it through this game, maybe even winning. Once we were kicked out, we’d be right back in reality: where everyone hated us, and our dream of playing the games we loved would be over. No sponsor would touch us. No fan would follow.

  We were done.

  I met Lily’s eyes and felt my own begin to water.

  “We’re not going to make it.”

  Her expression went soft. “Don’t think like that. The guys could still—”

  “Cut the bullshit, Lil. They’re out, and you know it. We’re alone in here. It’s just me and you against K-Rig, Legacy, Eon, and the game. Nobody could survive those odds.”

  Lily blinked a few times as she processed that, and her shoulders sagged. She thought so, too.

  I covered my mic and pressed my lips to her ears.

  “The VGL wants us out,” I whispered. “They purposely set up the game like a bagua symbol, and I haven’t seen a trap yet. This is the last flag before the finale. Whatever they have planned, it’ll be on that platform.”