Van.

A rush of memories struck me like a hammerblow to the back of the head.

I held my guts in, staggering over to a black SUV. My hand slapped the side of the car: immediately, my data swarm got to work, hacking the lock. An augmented reality display showed the progress, filling a bar from bottom to top. Too slow.

"Comms, its Van! I’m fucked!," I gasped, spitting blood on every word. "- just tried to fucking murder me. They're on my ass, I need-"

The names and images were scrambled. I hadn't realized I'd closed my eyes until I opened them, gasping a deep breath of crisp forest air. I shook my head, and turned to look back at Angel. The girl was making [Rattan Bedrolls]: a normal human-sized one for her, and a Noodles-sized one for me. When she caught me staring, she looked up.

“What?” She signed, holding a strip of rattan between her lips.

I took a moment to compose myself. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Say, I got some lootboxes with gear in it. Nice pair of poisoned knives, some schematics. I can't use them, so they're all yours.”

"Really? Hang on.” She held up a finger, then finished speed-weaving the mat. It was crazy to watch. Her hands moved many times faster than a normal person's could, flawlessly weaving the grass and leaves into a sheet. "Here. Come lay down on this and see if you can set your spawn point.”

I joined her and flopped down, trying to keep from shivering. Cold_Fox was well named, because chills were still rippling down my spine and through my belly as more flashes of memory intruded into my mind's eye. The section of I-5 between Seattle and Tacoma, foggy, the mist lit up with a hazy electric glow. The feeling of my car being rammed, skidding, flipping...

[Spawnpoint updated!]

"Looks good. Thanks." I shook my head and tried to relax, but couldn't chase the tension out of my shoulders. “Here. See what you can do with all this.”

I gave Angel all of the survival equipment, the schematics, the weapons, the Raptor Skull helmet, and half of the copper coins. There were only a few things I held onto for myself. I kept the Trophy of Vanara, the Devourer Venom, the Flesh of the Devourer, some oil... plus the rifle and the ammo for it. I wasn't sure I trusted Angel enough to give her a gun just yet. She still hadn't told me how she'd gotten tangled up with a cartel.

Angel’s eyes got big in her face as she dropped her primitive tools and collected it all up. “Noodles! Holy shit! How many boxes did you get?!”

"Five. Landed a patron and some subscribers. Guess the crowd loves to see them some Noods."

"A pressure plate schematic! Oh my god... this just taught me how to wire." Angel gasped, her hand fluttering to her mouth. "Thank you so much! I… I don’t know if you know how amazing this is.”

"Lets you make a dart trap, right?" Her enthusiasm cheered me up enough that my tail started wagging like a dog's, seemingly with a life of its own. I glared at it until it stopped.

"Not just that. Pressure plates can be used to trigger all sorts of things. You can build some really complex traps and machines, even in The Jungle... there are copper nodes here, that you can mine and use to wire and even make batteries. Have you ever heard of the Baghdad Battery?"

"Nope."

"Basically, you get a jar or some other kind of container and fill it with a weak acid. Giant Ant acid would work. Then you submerge a cylinder of copper housing an iron rod into the solution. It forms an acidic electrolyte solution that generates a current from the difference between the electrode potentials of the copper and iron electrodes," Angel enthused.

I blinked rapidly a few times. It was Angel's turn to pause awkwardly.

"If you're wondering how I know that, I was studying to be a chemical engineer," she signed sheepishly.

"Yeah. I actually was wondering, because..." I used a claw to sketch a Venn Diagram on the dirt. "On this side of the 'People who know how to make improvised electronics out of tin foil and cleaning products' diagram, we have chemical engineers, and on the other side of this diagram, we have terrorists."

"I was about to start the second year of my Master’s Degree." Angel's brief enthusiasm flickered and died, her blue eyes dulling as she looked down. "I'd just been accepted for a biochem development bootcamp in the NSF Innovation Corps, and... yeah."

Smart AND gorgeous. For the first time since arriving in The Jungle, I was regretting not being human.

"Don't worry about it. The point is, I have some skills I can put to use with this pressure plate schematic. It's one of those stupid items that I already technically knew how to make, but if I tried to do it without the blueprint, the game wouldn't register it as being functional." Angel scowled as she arranged the survival gear and stuffed it into the backpack. "Traps are how I've survived this long. Now if I could only find some iron."

I eyed the iron ingots in my inventory. "If we hypothetically came across some, you could make batteries, traps, and...?"

"If I could get enough iron to make steel, I could make a gun." She groaned with longing. "God help me. I wish I had a gun."

"Oh yeah?" I still had my Inventory open. The rifle was the second-heaviest thing in my items list after the iron ingots, sitting there in the top row of slots. "Know how to use them?"

Angel snorted. "Throw a rock. As high as you can."

"Huh?"

"Grab a rock and throw it up into the air." She picked up the bow and one of the arrows she'd made.

Oh yeah. Here we go. Grinning, I found a decent sized rock and curled the end of one tentacle around it before lazily tossing it up over the pond. Angel swung her bow around, tracking it with the point of the arrow. She loosed… and hit it out of the air with a dull crack.

Welp. That got my attention. I sat bolt upright, mouth hanging open.

“I’m better with a rifle. Even better with a shotgun." Now it was her turn to be smug.

“Where the hell did you learn to do that?” I asked, picking up another stone as she nocked a second arrow. This time, I threw it faster. The arrow hit it dead center and sent it careening into the cliff wall.

“Competitive shooter." She voiced this time, so she didn't have to put down the bow. "Trap, skeet, and three-gun, in that order. I was just heading into international competition. There was talk of sending me to the Paralympics."

Suddenly, I saw Angel in a whole new light. "I'm starting to understand why you've still got all nine lives."

“Nah... I survived because of traps. It took me ages to learn how to use a bow. Archery is a whole different skillset.” She set the bow down so she could speak the way she was comfortable doing, by using sign. "The stupid thing is that if I'd been sent straight to the second or third realm of the game, I'd actually have more of a chance to win. One thing I do know is that the further you get, the more advanced technology you have access to. The Jungle is nothing but bronze age bullshit. There might only a hundred rifles on the entire island. All up, there's probably less than two hundred tons of iron being circulated. It's more precious than gold."

"And the Iron Centurions control it," I finished. "Hence the name. Is that why you're joining them?"

Angel lifted her chin, flashing a hard, fierce look toward the sky. "If I can get my hands on a firearm, even a crude one, I'll rule this game. I'll capture any Legion I want. I'll kill the Daeva, and when I get to the next realm, I'll do it again. And again. And one day, I'll win, and get me and anyone else I can evacuate out of this hellhole."

'I'll capture any Legions I want'. I glanced at the gun in my Inventory, thought about it for a couple seconds, and closed the Inventory window. "Sounds like a plan to me. Anyway, I don't know about you, but I'm starving over here. You good for food? I'm going to go out and murder something for dinner. I’ll bring you back some meat."

Angel regarded me suspiciously for a moment.

“That was not a euphemism,” I added. “But it could have been.”