Stifling a yawn, Mai realised that she’d been on her feet for at least eighteen hours straight. Add the stress of combat and all of the levels she’d gone up and down, and her body was starting to tell her enough was enough.

Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t actually clarified whether the rules of the Culling prohibited cullers from holing up to sleep.

They can’t expect us to keep going without sleep can they?

Ducking into an alcove off the corridor she was walking along, she called up the rules, using a keyword search for sleep. Back in the barracks she’d skimmed them, but there had been pages and pages of rules, laws, and byelaw listing what she could and couldn’t do, including laws that she could break without a social score penalty.

It had bored her. Too tired after training to do more than shovel food into her mouth and collapse onto her bunk, she’d skimmed them, then given up. For her the most important rule had been ‘don’t die’. And that one hadn’t even been written.

Still, better late than never I suppose. At least it’s taken me less time to do this than it did to read the Primer. Ha!

The search only returned one result.

CULLERS MUST NOT REMAIN IN ONE POSITION FOR MORE THAN TWO HOURS. THIS INCLUDES SLEEPING. THEY MAY NOT RETURN TO THAT AREA WITHIN FOUR HOURS. THEY MUST MOVE AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED METRES FROM THEIR ORIGINAL POSITION BEFORE THEY CAN STOP AGAIN.

“Bloody hell,” she sighed. “They want us so tired that we’re falling asleep on our feet.” Looking at the rules again she realised that she could get at least one hour forty-five minutes of sleep before having to wake and move.

Another search using the keywords of remain and one position didn’t return anything else. Nothing defined what ‘one position’ actually meant.

Does one pace to the left or right count?

“If I then take five minutes to get into another position, I nab another sleep, wake and move.” She muttered, wishing she had someone she could discuss this with. Without all the shouting and killing such a companion would no doubt cause.

When she did the maths she actually felt slightly better. Although her sleep would be broken, she could still rack up the hours.

I wonder if others will just keep moving until they drop of exhaustion or wander into a trap?

She didn’t really care. That was their issue. Whilst she didn’t really have a game plan beyond not dying, she reckoned that getting as much sleep as possible would give her an advantage over those who didn’t.

Looking around at the corridor she was in she could easily see that it would be tactical suicide to get trapped in it.

She’d been wandering around a technical district for the last couple of hours since the brutal fight without much thought as to what she was going to do.

Now though she had a plan. Find somewhere to sleep and do so. Her jaw cracked as she yawned. Calling up her minimap she looked at the area she’d walked through.

Mind made up she turned around and strode back the way she’d come.

***

The rooms were a series of operations centres, a shower block, and another staff canteen. As before they’d been mothballed, but she still searched every nook and cranny.

“Pretty good haul,” Mai smiled as she finished stuffing her new backpack with what she found. It seemed that workers wherever they were liked to bring snacks to their work.

Reading the packaging of the various snacks, she was able to total up the BIO-MASS, grinning when she realised that she could fully replenish her BIO-MASS at least twice over.

The last room in the block was what she’d been hoping to find. It was filled with bunk racks. Mattresses were piled in the corner and rather than take one and put it onto a bed she decided to tip the pile over and sleep underneath them.

Hides me, keeps me warm and I won’t feel so damn exposed.

Creating three mines she then placed them in different rooms and just outside the one she was in. Settling into her ad-hoc sleeping area, next she opened up her retinal display, chose the clock and programmed it to go off precisely one hour and forty-five minutes later. Utterly exhausted, she’d barely closed her eyes before she was asleep.

***

When the alarm went off – she’d programmed it to buzz quietly – she suffered a moment of panic as her mind tried to work out where she was and why she was buried.

When it all came back to her she didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more scared.

She hadn’t thought that she’d actually be able to go to sleep but had fallen asleep pretty much as soon as she was settled in the nest.

Emerging from the nest, she took an energy bar out of her backpack and ate it hastily whilst opening up her minimap.

“Arse knuckles,” she whispered as she saw a cluster of kill markers on the map. They stretched along the corridor she’d been in previously.

Zooming out to see if there were any more she gasped at how the line of dead curved towards her hiding place.

Without thought her arm formed into the shotgun.

The mines haven’t gone off. Does that mean that they’ve found them, or that they haven’t entered this part of the complex yet?

Slinging her backpack onto both shoulders, an act made more difficult than it should have been because one of her arms was now a shotgun, she took a series of calming breaths and made her way to the bunk room door.

Activating her LARCENY skill, she used the sneak aspect of it to slowly open the door to the bunk room. As soon as it was a hand’s width open, she lay on her belly.

Now comes the tricky part. Mai slowly and carefully slid her hand forward, keeping it perfectly flat on the floor. If she raised it so much as an inch she risked breaking the beam of the mine she’d placed outside. At least she had thought this out before actually placing the mine here. Good on me for planning ahead.

As soon as her fingers brushed the cold metal of the mine she re-absorbed it. Shaking her arm at the lingering pain, she stood and exited the room.

Where the hell are they? Mouth dry she moved through the old staff canteen and repeated the process with the next mine.

She kept moving. Quicker this time. Keen to bring things to an end. If there was going to be a fight, she wanted it over and done with.

Reaching her final mine she re-absorbed it and then stepped into the main atrium of the complex. Nothing.

Where the hells are they? Even more worrying was the fact that she hadn’t heard the battle. She didn’t think that she could have been that deeply asleep. Or that the mattress would act as such efficient barriers. But still.

Looking at the minimap, she followed the plan until she reached the first body.

It looked as though it had once been a man, but the damage was so severe she couldn’t be sure. In its hand was the Culling knife. Huge chunks of flesh had been torn out of his face and neck. Any one of the wounds would have been fatal.

But there were more, all over his body.

They used his BIO-MASS, Mai felt physically sick. They’d been told about this but had never thought that someone would be so desperate, or so sick as to actually do it.

Seeing that there was nothing of value on the body she crept forward to the next one. A woman, she lay face down, a huge hole in her neck clearly what killed her.

Kneeling, Mai took a better look at the wound.

Bite. It’s a bloody bite wound! She sprang back in horror, hand clasped over her mouth as she realised not only what had killed the woman, but who.

Sharktooth. He’d killed these players with his bite. Nothing else. Literally torn them to pieces with those awful teeth of his. Moving slowly into a patch of shadow, Mai tried to slow her breathing.

Breath coming in panicked gasps, she glanced up at her glyphs. INTIMIDATION hung clearly above her.

He’s here. He’s hunting. And he’s gained a skill or ability which is causing this INTIMIDATION, she thought. It didn’t matter that she’d fought him, and defeated him, during the training for the Culling. Then he’d just been scary and intimidating because of his size and appearance. But that had been scary and intimidating in lower case.

Now, somehow, he’d managed to become INTIMIDATING and, for all she knew, might also be able to cause PANIC. Just thinking about that raised her heartbeat even further.

And now he’s eating people.

There were at least five other bodies strung out along the corridor. Focussing on the bodies, and the way they were laid out she started to piece together what had happened.

From the way the first two were laid it was clear they had been taken by surprise, lured by Sharktooth into an ambush. Then, he’d moved on to engage the rest of the group. Seeing their friends torn to pieces by a cannibal had definitely intimidated them. With a sinking heart she saw that they had dropped their weapons and that a lot of the wounds were to their backs.

They PANICKED. He really had gained the ability.

As they’d panicked he’d picked them off one at a time. And the more he killed the more they panicked.

Poor bastards, what a way to go.

A sound. Metal upon metal. Just a clink. Her heart felt as though it was going to burst out of her chest.

I can’t beat him! And with that she was off and running.