Rust flakes drifted down like dirty snow. The air tasted of dried blood and the thick, cloying exhaust of unventilated engines. Floodlights rigged to the decaying ceiling beams cast harsh, yellow cones of illumination onto the concrete floor below, carving out a brutal stage from the surrounding darkness.
Inside the ring, Shmuel ducked.
A chainsaw arm roared over his head. The heat of the engine radiated against his scalp.
His opponent swung the revving blade again in a clumsy slash. To the left, a second fighter with forearms replaced by jagged, serrated blades lunged low. A third, this one lighter, wired with hydraulic pistons in his legs for speed, circled behind, waiting for the blind spot.
Shmuel's mechanical left hand snapped up, catching the wrist of the chainsaw-wielder just below the spinning teeth. Metal groaned against metal. The servo-motors in Shmuel's arm whined, overpowering the augment's hydraulics. With a twist, he drove his shoulder into the man's chest. Ribs cracked audibly. The chainsaw sputtered and dropped as the man folded to the ground.
The blade-user struck. Shmuel pivoted on his heel. The serrated steel grazed his coat, shredding the fabric but missing the skin. Shmuel's right fist, heavy and cold, pistoned forward. It connected with the attacker's jaw. The impact lifted the man off his feet, spinning him mid-air before he crashed into the electrified mesh. Sparks showered the front row of the screaming crowd.
The piston-leg fighter hesitated.
That second of doubt cost him everything. Shmuel closed the distance in a blur. He didn't strike this time. He grabbed the fighter by the throat with his iron grip, lifted him one foot off the ground, and slammed him into the concrete floor. The fighter went limp instantly.
Silence held the room for a heartbeat.
Then the noise exploded.
A tidal wave of cheers, curses, and roar washed over the cage. Men in stained suits and women with desperate eyes slammed their hands against the wire mesh. Tickets were thrown into the air like confetti.
"PAY UP! PAY UP YOU BASTARDS!" a man screamed, grabbing the collar of the person next to him.
Further back, near the betting station, a woman fell to her knees, clutching the hem of a bookie's coat. "Please! Just one more loan! I swear he was supposed to win! My kid needs it!"
The bookie kicked her away without looking down.
High in the tiered seating, removed from the immediate filth of the pit, Kamina sat with one leg crossed over the other. His sheathed katana rested casually on his shoulder, the red scabbard a stark line of color in the gray gloom. Next to him, Imogen sat, her hood pulled up, the barrel of her rifle poking up behind her shoulder like an antenna.
"He's fighting angry," Imogen said, "He's not pacing himself."
Kamina watched Shmuel stand over the three unconscious bodies in the ring. The referee, a man wearing a mask made of duct tape, entered the cage to raise Shmuel's hand.
"Kid's got a lot burning inside him right now," Kamina said, his voice low enough to slide under the roar of the crowd. "Let him burn it off. Better he breaks some augmented jaws here than explodes later."
"Is this really the only way?" Imogen asked, her gaze drifting to the sobbing woman on the floor below. "This place… it's disgusting."
"It's a rat's nest," Kamina agreed, his lip curling in distaste. He scanned the upper boxes where the shadows were deeper and the observers stood stiller. "But rats know where the cheese is. And right now, we need to find the big cheese."
Kurt Kotler had been useful for exactly two things.
The location of this hellhole at the rear of the fallen L Corp Nest, and the password.
Never talk about fight club.
A stupid password for a stupid place. It had gotten them past the iron door, but it wouldn't get them into the inner sanctum where the Izan team kept their records and their "test subjects."
That was the plan. A reckless, stupid, dangerous plan Shmuel had concocted.
"I need to be a subject," Shmuel had said earlier, his face void of emotion. "They're looking for strong bodies. If I wipe the floor with their trash, they'll take me to the back. That's how we get in."
Kamina shifted in his plastic seat. The smell of stale beer and unwashed bodies rolled off the crowd in waves.
"Are you sure he's alright?" Imogen asked again. "He's… being irrational."
"Grief makes you stupid," Kamina said. "Or it makes you sharp. Right now, Shmuel is a razor blade without a handle. He cuts everything he touches." Kamina tapped the hilt of his sword against his shoulder rhythmically. "Our job is to make sure he doesn't snap in half before we find what we're looking for. Once they take him back… that's when we start the party."
Down in the ring, the announcer's voice boomed over a crackling PA system.
"AND THE WINNER IS… THE IRON HAND! BUT HE'S NOT DONE YET, FOLKS! HE'S REQUESTED THE GAUNTLET! TWO MORE FIGHTERS! TWO MORE BEFORE THE SET ENDS! WHO HAS THE GUTS TO STEP IN?"
Shmuel stood in the center of the ring. He didn't wave to the crowd. He didn't acknowledge the cheers. He stared straight up at the darkened glass of the VIP booth overlooking the arena. His mechanical hands dripped with oil and other people's blood.
Kamina cracked his neck. "Get ready, brat. Once he finishes these next two… things are gonna get loud."
Imogen tightened the strap of her rifle. Her white-red eyes glowed faintly in the shadow of her hood. "I hate this place."
"Good," Kamina grinned.
"How loud do you plan to make it?"
The voice was polite and dangerously close to the back of Kamina's neck.
Kamina and Imogen turned.
Standing directly behind their seats, in the narrow aisle of the VIP section, was a man who looked like he had walked out of a history book and into a nightmare. He wore a Field Tunic of field-gray wool, perfectly tailored, buttoned to the throat. A heavy Greatcoat draped over his shoulders like a cape, and his trousers were pressed into sharp, militaristic creases tucked into polished jackboots. He looked like an officer of an old, dead regime.
He was young, perhaps in his mid-twenties, with pale skin and hair slicked back with severe precision. His eyes were the color of slate, unblinking and devoid of warmth.
"I am Franz," he said, a faint smile touching his lips. "An officer of Izan. I couldn't help but overhear your ambitions regarding our establishment."
Imogen stiffened. Her hand drifted inch by inch toward the strap of her rifle, concealing the movement beneath her cloak.
"We were just speaking metaphorically," she said, her voice pitching up slightly into a feigned nervousness. "You know how betting gets. My big brother over here is just passionate. We didn't mean any…"
"I'm going to burn this place to the ground."
Imogen flinched. She looked at Kamina, eyes wide, silently screaming Shut up.
Kamina didn't look at her. He stared directly at Franz, his grin widening.
He leaned back.
"I'm going to wreck this cage," Kamina continued, his voice dropping an octave. "I'm going to shatter every bone in your little soldiers' bodies. And then, I'm going to kill as many of you as I can until my arm gets tired. And then I'll switch arms and kill the rest."
Franz blinked.
The silence stretched, tight and brittle.
"Wonderful."
He stepped down into the row, standing beside them now, looking out over the arena where Shmuel was waiting for his next opponent.
"You are more than welcome to try," Franz said, clasping his hands behind his back. "We do not fear violence here. At the end of the day, only the strong remain. If you have the strength to destroy us, then we deserve to be destroyed."
He paused, glancing sideways at Kamina.
"But do not mistake your confidence for capability. Many have come here with fire in their bellies. Most leave in buckets."
Franz lifted his hands and clapped twice. The sound cut through the murmuring of the crowd with unnatural clarity.
Immediately, the massive floodlights illuminating the ring swung upward. The beams cut through the gloom, bypassing the fighters, bypassing the cages, and fixing on a wide, wooden platform suspended high in the rafters above the center of the arena.
The crowd went silent.
On the platform, a row of figures stood lined up near the edge. Their hands were bound behind their backs. Black hoods covered their heads. Ropes were tied around their ankles, anchored to nothing.
The referee's voice crackled over the speakers, stripped of its earlier hype.
"ATTENTION. WE HONOR THE COST OF WEAKNESS. ABOVE YOU STAND THE MOTHERS, FATHERS, AND LOVERS OF THE FIGHTERS WHO FAILED TO ADVANCE IN THE PREVIOUS ROUND. THEY ARE THE COLLATERAL OF DEFEAT."
Imogen's breath hitched. She stood up, hand gripping her rifle.
"Look closely," Franz said, his eyes gleaming in the reflected light. "This is what motivates a Pawn to become a Queen."
The platform floor dropped.
There were no screams. The hoods muffled them.
The ropes snapped taut for a split second, not to catch them, but to orient them. Then the lines were severed from above.
Bodies rained down.
It wasn't a slow fall. Gravity claimed them instantly. They fell from the ceiling of the warehouse, a drop of fifty meters, plummeting past the lights, straight down onto the concrete floor surrounding the cage.
THUD.
THUD-CRACK.
SPLAT.
The sound was wet.
Blood sprayed across the front row of the audience. The impact shook the floorboards beneath Kamina's feet.
A twisted heap of broken limbs and shattered lives lay scattered around the ring.
The crowd erupted, a frenzy of cheering and jeering, throwing trash at the corpses.
The clang of the katana leaving its sheath.
The blade flashed aimed directly at Franz's neck, moving fast enough to sever the spine before the brain could register the impact.
CLANG.
The vibration traveled up Kamina's arm, rattling his bones.
Franz hadn't moved his feet. He hadn't drawn a weapon. He stood exactly where he was, his posture rigid, his left hand raised. His gloved fingers were wrapped around the sharp edge of Kamina's katana, stopping the strike dead inches from his collar.
The leather of the glove didn't tear. The hand beneath didn't tremble.
Franz looked at the blade, then up at Kamina. His expression was one of mild disappointment, like a teacher correcting a slow student.
"Discipline," Franz stated, his voice devoid of inflection. "It is the difference between a soldier and a rabble."
He shoved the blade aside with a flick of his wrist, the force enough to make Kamina take a step back to regain his balance. Franz smoothed the front of his field tunic, checking for imaginary dust.
"You strike out of emotion," Franz continued, staring past Kamina at the carnage on the floor. "Inefficient. The hierarchy has not yet been established. To act now is to waste energy. We wait for the crescendo."
Kamina gripped his sword with both hands, his knuckles white. The air around him seemed to warp with heat.
He hated the logic that treated human lives like arithmetic.
"Wait?" Kamina said. "Wait for what? For you to pile more bodies on the floor? I don't play by your timetable, you stiff-necked freak."
He looked at Imogen.
"Pop the flame thingy out right now, brat! Waiting only hurts us with this type of sicko!"
Imogen breathed in.
And the world around her ignited.
The air in the VIP section distorted, shimmering with sudden, blistering heat. Imogen's form cracked and rebuilt itself in a molten light. Her clothes burned away, replaced instantly by ceremonial robes of deep crimson that blackened into ash at the hems. Gold veins pulsed across the fabric like cooling lava.
A crown of blackened, burning wood manifested upon her head, the embers drifting upward into the stagnant air.
[Effloresced E.G.O :: Wedlocked]
Imogen raised the the Barrett-11, twisted fusion of metal and magma.
She aimed higher.
Toward the darkened glass of the observation booth where the order to cut the rope had come from.
Franz's eyes narrowed slightly.
BANG.
The sound wasn't a gunshot; it was the roar of a blast furnace. A spear of combustible light tore from the barrel, scorching the air as it flew. It punched through the reinforced glass of the VIP booth as if it were sugar.
Inside the booth, an Izan Enforcer standing guard barely had time to turn. The beam struck him in the chest.
He ignited from the inside out. Fire bloomed within his ribcage, devouring organs and bone in a split second before bursting outward in a horrific, silent flash. He was ash before he hit the carpet.
Panic erupted inside the booth. The wealthy patrons, the investors, the syndicate backers, scrambled over each other, screaming, overturning expensive chairs in a desperate bid to escape the line of fire.
But the other Izan Enforcers stood motionless. They watched their comrade burn with the same detached interest one might give a flickering lightbulb.
Down in the stands, Franz watched the flames reflect in the shattered glass above.
"Psychoment," he murmured, the word tasting strange on his tongue.
He looked at Imogen with the burning crown, the robes of ash.
He adjusted his gloves, turning his full attention to the girl burning in the aisle.
"It seems," he said, "we have underestimated the quality of your power."
The explosion caused a concussion that rattled the teeth in Shmuel's skull.
He had just finished wiping the oil from his mechanical knuckles, the third fighter lying in a groaning heap at his feet, when the air above the arena tore open. The heat hit him with a dry, searing wave that smelled of sulfur and burning ozone, followed by the blinding flash of combustible light.
Shmuel looked up.
High above, in the VIP section, the plan was dying a violent, fiery death.
Imogen stood in the aisle, a beacon of molten ruin. Her E.G.O. had manifested fully, the ceremonial robes of ash and flame swirling around her like a storm She was firing barrage after barrage of magma-infused rounds toward a squad of Izan enforcers rushing the stairs. Some shots connected, vaporizing limbs and melting armor in horrific splashes of gold and red. Others missed, carving scorching gouges into the walls and sending debris raining down.
And Kamina.
He was locked in a duel. His katana was crashing again and again against the defense of the Izan officer. Franz parried. Every strike Kamina threw was met with a rigid block or a deflection. They were stalemated, keeping the officer pinned and away from the burning girl.
Shmuel watched it all for a single, suspended second.
"Rationality," he muttered to himself. "I should have known better."
The plan had been simple. Fight. Win. Be noticed. Get dragged into the depths as a prize specimen. It was a strategy built on the logic of the City in which value is recognized and consumed.
But Kamina didn't operate on The City's logic nor common sense whatsoever.
Kamina operated on the logic of a man who sees a wall and decides the door is wherever he punches a hole.
Trusting Kamina to wait, to be subtle, to play the victim... that had been the irrationality. That had been Shmuel's mistake. He had tried to fit a hurricane into a bottle.
The crowd surged toward the exits, a stampede of desperate bodies trampling one another in the gloom. The referee had vanished.
The path of the "victim" was closed. The path of the intruder was wide open.
Shmuel turned his back on the cage. He didn't run toward the exits with the mob. He sprinted in the opposite direction, toward the heavy steel blast doors that marked the entrance to the Fighter's Dome—the staging area for the meat before it was thrown into the grinder.
He hit the door at full speed, his mechanical shoulder slamming into the latch mechanism. Metal screeched and buckled. With a grunt, he drove his left fist into the seam, servos whining as he pried the heavy slabs apart enough to slip through.
The hallway beyond was cooler, smelling of antiseptic and stale sweat. It was the backstage of the slaughterhouse.
"Hey! You!"
Two guards in Izan tactical gear turned from a station halfway down the hall. They held batons, their faces obscured by riot visors. They were shouting something about clearance, about unauthorized access.Two guards in Izan tactical gear turned from a station halfway down the hall. They held batons, their faces obscured by riot visors.
"Hold it right there!" one shouted, his voice muffled by the visor. "This sector is under restricted clearance. You have unauthorized access."
Shmuel didn't break stride.
Physics problems to be solved with kinetic energy.
The Ship, his mind whispered, a cold, detached thought running parallel to the violence. If you replace the hand that strikes, is the violence still yours?
The first guard lunged. Shmuel caught the baton mid-swing with his left hand. He twisted his wrist. The guard's arm snapped with a wet pop. Before the scream could leave the man's throat, Shmuel drove his right elbow into the visor, shattering the plastic and the nose beneath.
The second guard hesitated.
Shmuel didn't. He closed the distance in two steps, grabbing the man by the tactical vest and hurling him into the concrete wall. The impact knocked the wind, and likely the consciousness, out of him instantly.
Shmuel stepped over the bodies. He felt... nothing.
Was this what it meant to lose the self? If he replaced every part of himself with a weapon, would he still be Shmuel, or would he just be the Gun?
He reached the end of the corridor. A heavy security door blocked the way to the staff elevators. A keypad glowed red next to it.
"Damn it."
He heard footsteps behind him. Heavy boots. A squad.
He turned to see a man in a lab coat scrambling out of a side office, clutching a briefcase, eyes wide with panic at the sound of the alarm. The man saw Shmuel, saw the blood on the mechanical hands, and froze.
"The keycard," Shmuel said.
The researcher fumbled, backing away. "I... I can't... the protocol..."
Shmuel was on him in a breath.
He grabbed the man's lapel and slammed him against the doorframe. With his other hand, he reached into the man's pocket, guided by a cold intuition, and pulled out a lanyard with a magnetic strip.
"Thank you," Shmuel said.
He shoved the man aside and swiped the card.
Beep. Click.
The elevator doors groaned open. It was an industrial lift, large enough for cargo pallets or gurneys.
Shmuel stepped inside and hit the button for the lowest level.
As the doors began to slide shut, he saw the Izan enforcement squad round the corner at the far end of the hall.
Shmuel stood still, staring out from the closing gap.
He watched them as some of them started to throw knives and sharp objects toward him.
Sparked against the closing metal doors.Sharp objects and knives were thrown at him by some of the figures he watched. They sparked as they hit the metal doors closing shut.
Ding.
The lift began to descend.
The noise of the riot above faded, replaced by the clanking of chains and the hum of the descent. Shmuel leaned his head back against the cold metal wall. He looked at his hands watching the pistons expand and contract.
They were strong. Stronger than flesh. They didn't bleed.
Bruno, he thought. The name was a jagged shard in his mind.
He remembered the conversation with Yan. The fragility of the self. If Bruno was down here...?
And who was going down to meet her? Was it Shmuel, the boy who played chess and worried about budgets? Or was it this... this collection of parts, riding a steel box into the dark?
The elevator shuddered as it passed a sublevel.
It didn't matter, he decided.
Whatever walked out of this elevator would kill anything that stood between him and her.
The indicator light ticked down.
B1.
B2.
B3.
The doors prepared to open. Shmuel raised his fists.
The Ship of Theseus was arriving at its first port.