The half-mechanical beast leapt at me, bearing both fang and claw in an obvious attempt at my life. But this whelp was nowhere near the strength of its fallen brethren, and a shield bash directly between its eyes left a nasty smear of oil and blood across my shield’s deep purple material. I shoved the cymera off the narrow walkway and watched as it tumbled into the abyss below, peering over the edge of my shield at the tumbling creature while Ali counted how long it took to fall.

“Seven… eight… nine… ten… eleven… oh goodness, that’s one deep hole.” She whistled, stepping out into open air on small rings of bright blue electricity. “What do you think, Dee dearie? Is it still a good idea to jump?”

I turned to look at Dee, the diminutive man who was taking up the rear of our little four-man battalion. He shrugged while making a noise deep in his throat that sounded like he was about to cough something up, but I knew it was just him thinking a little harder than he was used to.

“I don’t see any other way down. Or up.” Dee said in his lilting, almost song-like voice. One that never matched up with the vitriol that could come out of his mouth. “So take your pick, and let’s either die quickly or finish up this one last hazard. These old bones don’t got many more adventures left in ‘em.”

The revving of a particularly stubborn engine stole all of our attention away from the pointless argument and up to the floating quarter of a tower we’d somehow found ourselves in. Vim shielded her eyes and pushed power into me, a night sky filled with multicolored stars filling my peripheral vision as her function worked its magic.

“Well that’s just fucked.” She laughed, seeing the results of her function before any of us did. “Any of you bastards willing to go down fighting? Because whatever’s coming at us’ll take all of my battery for a thirty-five percent chance at winning.”

I cursed inwardly as everyone else cursed out loud. The last time Vim’s core function didn’t give us at least a fifty percent chance of victory was when that damned hydra turned out to be half plant, hiding out under our feet while we hacked away at ten percent of its heads. We’d lost Poe that day, the final casualty our group had suffered for a very, very long time. And from my friends’ body language, they remembered that defeat all too well.

“As usual, the decision falls to the frontline.” Dee said with a grimace, tracing the trails of power with his visor as whatever was coming began to shake itself awake. “What’s the call, Seb? Stay and fight, or jump and hope?”

I paused for a moment, taking in both of our options for a brief second before realizing I needed more info. “Vim, what’re the chances of all of us surviving the jump?”

Vim glanced downwards, the stars in my peripheral vision shifting to show different foreign constellations while her function did its thing. “Ninety percent chance of everyone surviving, but only five percent of everyone coming out of it unharmed. It’ll fuck up my battery something fierce, but nowhere close to what taking on whatever this thing,” She gestured up at the swirling currents of power, “will do to me. You want my opinion, Seb?”

Ah, yes, Vim’s opinion. The woman had an obsession with dying a warrior’s death, whatever the hell that meant, and the only thing keeping her from it was that the rest of us preferred to be alive. Except maybe Dee, since his arthritis was almost bad enough that he couldn’t move when he wasn’t in his armor.

But I wasn’t about to gamble my friends’ lives away in a level 50 hazard. We’d worked for far too long to get here to throw it all away on a thirty-five percent chance gamble.

“I never want your opinion, Vim.” I sighed.

Vim nodded sagely, as if that was the right call, which worried me greatly. I shifted my shield to my back, feeling the tendrils from my chestplate wrap around it to keep it good and locked in place. I triple checked the clasps that held my sword in place and stole one last look up at the verdant sky, running my hand down the edge of my freakishly sharp shield and seeing a stream of 2-damage notifications pop up in the left corner of my view.

With my enigmatic defence core function primed and ready, I turned to my friends to see that they were all ready for my call. “We’re jumping.” I ordered, crossing my arms over my chest and spinning so I fell back-first into the abyss below.

A flare burned bright off to my right, illuminating the darkness as we fell. Dee muttered something unflattering about the architect of this hazard as he tumbled through the darkness, his head twitching around to look at every light that buzzed on as we fell.

“It’s like they’re spotlighting us falling to death.” The short old man spat angrily. “The watchers are real bastards, enjoying all the death and gloom they’ve put us through. Can’t wait to give them what they deserve once we clear this hazard.”

Dee had something of an obsession with the idea that whatever had happened thirty-five years ago wasn’t just a freak accident, but was the game of some sort of otherworldly being that was fucking with us. We’d ridiculed him for so long, even in the face of the game-like screens and leveling systems, but then we’d started to notice the same things he always had. Turns out when your core function was to observe things, you saw more than everyone else.

With two specific fingers raised, Dee spun around in mid-air to make sure each and every one of the lights knew exactly how he felt. “If you’re seeing this, kill yourselves! Save us the goddamn trouble!”

“Maybe don’t taunt the apocalypse bringers, dearie.” Ali chided.

“Not like they give a shit anyhow.” Vim said with a shrug, gently pushing me away from her as a long metal pole appeared where I’d just been.

I gave her a nod of thanks, and she returned it without saying anything. “Dee, how long until we hit the ground?”

“Oh, we aren’t hitting the ground. Can’t see anything like a bottom for at least another twenty minutes of falling, and that’s never a good sign.” Dee scratched his chestplate, a pointless nervous tic he’d had for as long as I’d known him. “I think we’re supposed to fight whatever the hell was up there while we’re falling.”

Dee paused, then laughed low and slow. “Scratch that; I know we’re supposed to fight that thing. It’s coming down after us now.”

That was nowhere close to ideal. Believe it or not, I’d never fought in free-fall before, and I had a bad feeling I wasn’t going to be a natural. “Shields up.” I ordered; a command that only resulted in Dee and I raising shields. Vim and Ali readied their own defensive functions, letting themselves fall a little faster to put them behind us.

“Any insight on what this thing is?” I asked.

“It’s big, it’s angry, and it’s spewing out more black smoke than a coal plant.” Dee said a little too quickly. If he was scared, then this thing was beyond dangerous. “Looks like a big-ass snake train to me, but you can be the judge of that in a handful of seconds.”

I was way beyond questioning Dee’s judgment, so I prepared myself for the inevitable runaway snake-train with my teeth clenched and my muscles tensed. The sound of constant explosions met my ears as two orbs of burning red appeared out of the darkness, a segmented body shedding black dust following behind them. I was ready to fight, spurred on by knowing that we had a good chance to survive the fall. Which also meant surviving this thing.

I gave my shield a command to hover between me and my enemy and reached down to draw my saw-toothed sword, my eyes locked on the approaching mass of flesh and steel. A warning popped up in the upper right of my vision, a bright green triangle denoting that a nearby enemy was at a much higher hazard level than I was prepared to deal with. Just like the boss of every hazard.

A blue-black tint coated the edges of my vision, and my power stat surged to triple it’s usual value. “Hit it really fucking hard.” Vim said seriously, twin lattices of blue and black bristling with power as she readied her functions. “We might not get another easy shot like this.”

Lightning crackled over my other shoulder, a bolt of bright yellow exploding towards the snake-train with a clap of thunder that shook me to my core. My battery overflowed to twice its maximum capacity in the lightning field that now surrounded us, Ali’s core skipping off the empty space towards the snake-train like a stone across a river. It left behind ripples of electricity wherever it skipped, and moments later each ripple solidified and exploded with a bolt of its own.

Ali wasn’t holding back in the slightest. The snake-train shrieked in pain as lightning blew away chunks of its body, black smoke billowing out from the wounds to obscure the thing as it accelerated down at me. The smell of the thing’s smoke made it through the air filter of my helmet for a second before my core recognized it as a foreign substance; a mixture of burnt oil and the acrid stench of stomach acid with an undertone of sickly sweetness.

I ripped my sword free of its scabbard, a saw-toothed obsidian blade tied down to a core of deep grey wood by leather straps that glimmered like diamonds under the midday sun. It was a mishmash of parts I’d forged myself, and it had served me well for over a decade. Teeth clasped around my shield, blood-oil spurted free from coal-black gums, and I readied myself to strike.

A flat surface of lightning slammed into my back, and I oriented my feet under myself before pushing off with a grunt of effort at the snake-train’s head. My blade cut deep into the meat of its face, catching on a molten-glass eye for a moment before scouring a jagged gash all the way up the snake’s head, coal-black smoke billowing out from a brand new wound as the snake turned its head–

//SYSTEM MESSAGE INCOMING.

//STANDBY FOR TRANSMISSION.

I froze in midair, suddenly unable to move. The smoke stopped flowing out from the snake’s body, equally suspended in time and space as I was. I could barely think through the unfathomable power that was keeping me from doing much of anything, and the words I tried to whisper came out as a series of short, quiet breaths.

No. This couldn’t be happening. The last time I’d seen anything like this was when the world ended the first time. When my core replaced my heart and I was thrust into the hellscape that was now my reality. It couldn’t be happening. Not again. I couldn’t lose everything again.

//THE FINAL CHOSEN HAS FALLEN. INITIATING SYSTEM RESET.