Team Chrome looks nothing like B.C. Their posture exudes confidence, their hands marked with previous battles. They withdraw their armaments, furthering my worry. The girl in the middle sports a tungsten suit of armor covering everything but her eyes, wrapping her small body in a cold red. The boy on the left wields a tall staff with a bright yellow gem at the top, its wood smooth, detailed carvings claiming the bottom half. The last girl withdraws a pair of boxing gloves, her body in peak condition.

“Amelia, you know who to shoot at,” Aku says, a smile taped to his face.

“One of the bullets has to hit the weak spot,” Amelia responds, matching Aku’s expression. Before I could ask about the obvious plan they had, Bruno starts the match. Aku and Amelia start the same as before, Aku charging the boy with the staff while Amelia bizarrely shoots at the armored girl. The woman sets her sights on me, eyeing me down from across the arena. The armored girl heads straight for Aku, pulling him off of the wizard boy, her cold hand knocking Aku on his ass. My attention is interrupted as the woman sprints behind me, putting me in a headlock, her huge biceps smothering my face.

“Amelia, shoot her,” I squeeze out, struggling to break free from the woman.

“Yeah Amelia, shoot me! Your aim is that good, right?” The woman taunts, her laugh echoing throughout my head. Amelia pays us no mind, continuing to shoot at the armored girl and wizard boy. “They can’t hear you. It looks like you’re just standing still right now.” Her grip tightens, forcing cracks in my mask from the pressure. Veins begin to bulge on my forehead as my mask shatters, revealing the bottom half of my face to the world. The woman continues to taunt me as dizziness consumes my vision, my consciousness being squeezed out of existence. My teeth sink into the woman’s forearm as a last stitch effort, her skin oozing her sweet red lifeline. She groans in pain, letting go of my head as my hands grasp the forearm in my mouth, my jaw only clenching down more as time passes. “Let go of my arm you filthy half-breed!” Her right fist connects with my temple, sending me directly into Amelia’s side, sending us both to the ground.

“Mofu what the fuck?!” She screams in frustration. I quickly rise to my feet, my mind completely captured by the woman’s red paradise. Her crimson honey rests on my tongue as she charges at me, adopting the same tactic as Aku. I meet her halfway, my arms wrapping around her waist as her feet divorce the ground. I hurl her into the armored girl, knocking both her and the wizard boy over like bowling pins. I make my way to the trio, towering over the casualties of gravity.

“Ba,” I murmur, pouncing on the armored girl. My teeth penetrates her right eye, the girl’s sweet nectar flooding into my orifice. My tongue laps up the liquid pleasure like a dog’s, Aku’s horrified screams sounding like background music to the euphoric sensation. Lead enters my head, piercing through my skull effortlessly before wreaking havoc in my brain, severing synapses before exiting through the other side, forcing my body into a lifeless state.

___________________________________________________

Nature is horrifying. It has an unrelenting ferocity only possible for the unbiased. Tsunami’s don’t have targets. Earthquakes don’t destroy because of a grudge. A tornado isn’t caused by an emotional outburst. Living things have an element of lenience embedded into their genetic code. Nature doesn’t. It doesn’t forgive mistakes. It is the ultimate equalizer, destroying anything. Whether rich or poor, famous or unknown, a murderer or a saint, nature does away with all. It isn’t a personal attack, if you fall victim to nature, you fall victim to pure circumstance. Wrong place, wrong time. The only thing scarier than nature is the things it makes you by default. There is no resisting. Fighting back is pointless, no matter how many battles you win you will always lose the war. Whatever nature decides you are is embedded into your genetic code, to change that would be to change your entire existence. Vampires suck blood, fairies are immortal, goblins are herbivores, avatars have three eyes. There is no amount of resistance, no amount of protest, no amount of intelligence, no amount of cross breeding that could change that fact. A Faun will always grow its antlers. A Toryufu will always grow its teeth. Nothing will change that.

“Are you done wallowing in nihilism?” A blonde woman asks me.

“I was talking aloud?” I respond in embarrassment.

“No, I’m a telepath. Name’s Sophie, Bruno probably told you about me,” Sophie guesses.

“Nothing other than your name and what you do.”

“Great. Well you’ll be pleased to know Amelia and Aku cleared the rank. You, on the other hand, are stuck at third to last. ”

“But my team cleared the rank.”

“No, AKU and AMELIA cleared the rank. If you get knocked out of The Gauntlet but your team proceeds, you have to fight through a losers bracket of sorts to catch up. Aku and Ame are stuck at the bottom of the next rank until you catch up. Bruno didn’t mention that, did he.”

“No he didn’t.”

“Well you have a chance two nights from now, but you’ll be fighting everyone who got knocked out, so mostly 3 v 1’s, but you got some blood in your system so you should be just fine. A faun and toryufu hybrid is quite the rare find, Olympia and Amelia got lucky with you.”

“Can you not address me like I’m a rare mineral?”

“I’m not addressing you like a rare mineral, I’m addressing you as a rare animal.”

“Which is arguably worse.”

“Well you’re not human. Humans don’t have baby antlers or sharp canines, and they can’t walk around blind because their hearing is so good it's essentially sight, so what would you like me to address you as?”

“Nevermind. Where is my mask?”

“In the incinerator with the rest of the trash. Erica shattered it, remember? If resisting your own species traits is so pointless, why do you want it?”

“I’d like to not kill anyone if I can help it.”

“Well now you just have to control those urges. You look and sound fine, so you can go if you’d like.”

“Sick of our conversation?”

“Not particularly, that nature monologue was way more teenage angst than I can handle, and I don’t want to laugh in your face.” I get up and leave the infirmary, not wanting to witness myself being laughed at either. Bruno and Olympia greet me on the other side, Olympia dragging me back into the training room.

“You know you fucked up right?” Bruno asks me.

“She shouldn’t have broken my mask,” I say, trying to shrug off the blame.

“No, we could give a fuck about that. You pissed Amelia off,” Olympia exclaims.

“Ok? I just want to fight my way back to Amelia and Aku, can this wait?” I ask, itching to get back into battle.

“That's the thing, you have to consent to fight in The Gauntlet. Nobody but team Chrome, Aku, and Amelia wants to enter because of you. That means you have to beat all of them to catch up, which means you have to fight Aku and Amelia one on one,” Bruno informs, panic in his voice.

“Ok, why is that such a big deal?” I ask.

“They were personally picked by Rafael and myself, just like how you were personally picked by Olympia. The only difference is they have been here since they were six, and you’ve been here for like ten days,” Bruno informs.

“Why don’t you give me all the information at once when I ask for it?” I ask, annoyed.

“You don’t need all the information at once, you need to focus on winning against Chrome for now,” Olympia snaps back.

“So you two are here to help me strategize?” I ask.

“No, I’m here to tell you to stop fucking around. We don’t have enough time for you to play around, and you weren’t brought here to play around. You need to catch up to Aku and Amelia so you three can graduate and go stop the royal crybabies from blowing the continent and everyone on it off the planet,” Olympia yells. She storms out of the room with Bruno chasing after her, leaving me alone to sit with her words. They encapsulate my mind like jail bars, bouncing off the walls of my brain. I lay on my back and pick up my korat, searching for answers in its golden eyes.

“Guess it's time to name you, huh,” I say to it. The korat tilts its head, its ears perking up with excitement. I wrack my brain in search of the perfect name, the organ failing to produce more than one. “Daedalus. You’re Daedalus.” He meows in agreeance, a smile creeping onto my lips. I get off the floor and begin to put myself to work, beginning with a warmup of three hundred pushups, followed by three hundred sit ups, and topped of with twenty minutes of suicides. Once finished, my focus diverges to Daedalus, who's been running with me. He stares back at me in understanding, almost as though he could read my mind. He prances out of the training room, me following behind. He leads me into The Mesa’s library, staring at the receptionist before glancing back at me. I take the hint, walking up to the woman.

“Excuse me, you wouldn’t happen to have the record of the pupils here, would you?” I ask.

“Oh, it depends on who you’re looking for,” She responds.

“Aku and Amelia?” I inform.

“Do they have any last names?” She fishes.

“I don’t know them. They were personally chosen by Rafael and Bruno?”

“Oh, we should have records on them. Let me look.” The woman walks into a door behind her desk chair, disappearing into the past. She emerges a couple minutes later with two folders. “Amelia hasn’t had many injuries or incidents, so her records are fairly short. But Aku was born in The Mesa, as well as being the resident trouble maker, so you can have a field day with this.” She hands me the folders, Aku’s weighing more than a gallon of milk. I rush back into the training room, going over Amelia’s records first. They are, in fact, relatively short and unhelpful. Most of her medical records consist of immunizations and small pains, while her sector records prove an insanely fast progression through the gunslinger and blacksmith sectors, showing she’s been completely maxed out for six years now. Her personal records are where the real money is, showing she’s been getting therapy from Sophie since arriving at six years old. Daedalus meows at me, also seeing the paper.

“It doesn’t say, man. I’m kind of glad it doesn’t, that’s not my information to know,” I say. The thought of using her own trauma against her to get into a higher position fills my lungs with disgust, sending shivers down my spine as I exhale it all out. Putting away Amelia’s information, I’m left more clueless than before, slightly impressed at how little there was in her medical documents. Aku’s information was a whole different story, pages upon pages of information holding anything I could ever want. Starting with the medical, the amount of paper here alone is able to print a novella. Sifting through the hefty amount of information proves to be a challenging task as his birth alone has three pages dedicated to it, showing Olympia’s thoroughness. My attention gets caught on one repeating injury, a broken collarbone. His unnatural levels of aggression in combat explain themselves when seeing this information, as even if you know about it, you can’t target it if you’re constantly on defense or just overwhelmed. His sector records read an incredibly slow advancement in both the berserker and cleric classes, while his personal records list six pages of rivalries or conflicts. Aku and Amelia’s records match their personalities, a perfect juxtaposition of each other. I dart back to the training room, improving my jabs and hooks while my brain cooks up a strategy for each of my opponents, each one getting more and more bizarre. For Team Chrome, brute forcing my way through the great sword and shield users seem to be the easiest, while the boxer will have to be beaten with her own tactic, cheating without getting caught. For Aku, I can just dodge until his sloppy fighting style opens itself up for retaliation, to which a nicely placed jab in the center of the collarbone should collapse it. For Amelia, however, I have to improve my summoner skills, which means contract forming and beast taming.

“I guess you can finally show me your true talents. Daedalus.”