“That’s it?” Mark said. Feeling like it was a little anticlimactic after the endless days underground.

“What were you expecting, a heroic battle to the death?” Terra asked with a snicker, seemingly having read his mind. “We took the back way here, reaching that sphere the normal way is far passed our current abilities.”

“Can we please Go?” Tinker interjected, looking beyond agitated.

Mark looked at the dog sized ant person and compassion filled his eyes. It was annoying to the point he wanted to scream sometimes, but over the long journey he had grown fond of the Scree Tinker.

“Sure Tinker, we can go.” He said at last, turning his head over to Terra. “How are we doing this?” he asked her.

She looked at him with gratitude again before nodding her head and looking out at the swarming scree.

“This teleportation sphere is set up at the very end of the Hive. It’s supposed to be the end point of this particular simulated run…” she paused at the look on Mark’s face. “Never mind, it will become clear after we go through. Just Get ready to run, on the signal haul ass to that sphere and put your hand on it.”

Not seeing any reason to refuse, or any alternatives if he did, Mark nodded. Running his hand over his gear to check that everything was in place, he readied himself. The end had come a little unexpectedly, but he was looking forward to getting out of these tunnels.

“Now” Terra snapped, having made sure her companions were ready. The three of them rushed forward at a sprint, passing through the transparent wall like it didn’t exist.

Before their bodies had fully entered the scree hive, a horrendous scream rent the air. It was so loud that Mark nearly stumbled as the ground beneath him shook. Terra grabbed his arm to steady him as she continued forward, all but dragging him along in her wake.

Mark would have been annoyed at the treatment if at the same time each and every scree hadn’t snapped their head in their direction as the scream split the air. Without even a second of hesitation they all rushed them on mass.

“Shit” he screamed; voice drowned out completely by the scream still reverberating through the air. Without another second of hesitation, he ran faster, pushing himself with everything he had toward the sphere.

Mark cursed again. he hadn’t really understood his companions’ reactions at seeing the Bloody hive initially. The teleportation sphere was close, being only a handful of yards away. The nearest scree in contrast was more than double that distance away from both them and the sphere. He understood now though, they had only taken a handful of steps and the distance between the massing horde and themselves had decreased by half.

He looked at the frog elite sized soldier scree rushing him with raising fear. The speed was shocking on its own, but when he coupled it with the armored bulk of the red and black scree it became downright terrifying. He didn’t know if he could take on one of these creatures one on one, and there were thousands of them rushing his way. Gritting his teeth, Mark pushed his legs even harder. As he neared the sphere, he reached his hand out in anticipation. It was going to be close, but he thought they were going to make it.

They laid their hands on the transportation sphere at nearly the same time the fastest scree reached them. A blinding flash of light enveloped the area and Mark’s eardrums nearly burst as the scream rent the air again. The fury in that scream couldn’t be ignored, it was as if a primal force of nature was venting its anger on his mind and he felt his consciousness growing dim. Before he blacked out from the noise however, he was whisked away in a flash of light to…somewhere else.

The light dissipated nearly as quickly as it had flared up, leaving Mark to blink his eyes rapidly in order to clear them from the stars now dancing in his vision. It was much brighter here than he was used to, and if it wasn’t for how well lit the graveyard had been he would be left completely blinded.

“Down” Terra scream penetrated the ringing in his ears from somewhere to his side. Mark didn’t know if she was talking to him or Tinker, but he didn’t hesitate for a moment to throw himself onto the ground. Even so he wasn’t fast enough. His back exploded with pain as force like getting hit by a truck sped his descent to the ground.

“Ouff” The grunt of pain slipped out of his mouth along with a stream of blood. It looked like he managed to bite his tongue, but he didn’t have any time to spare on that as his face impacted the ground. He felt his nose crunching against gravel, and blood from his nose joined that from his mouth. Blinking away the pain he looked up, trying to get the license plate of the truck that had hit him. His blurry eyes focused on a scree soldier from the Bloody hive. It had its forelimb, reminiscent of a crab claw, held up ready to bring it down on him again.

The blow was deflected by a small explosion before it impacted him. That was good, had that spiked claw landed he would have died for sure. He rolled away with as much speed as his battered body could muster, trying to get clear. He had recognized that explosion as one of Terra’s handheld crossbow bolts. He had seen them in action before, once against the rat boss and again against the female frog. Both times the creature in question had simply exploded.

Mark didn’t expect anything different this time. So, when he came to his feet it was with the expectation of seeing a smoking corpse. Sadly, he was disappointed. The red and black exoskeleton was smoking and charred. A few cracks that leaked orange goo adorned its abdomen, but it was still intact. Not only was it intact, it was getting back up.

Mark stared in shock; he had wondered what the fuss was about when his friends saw these red and black scree. After he saw their speed, he thought he understood, but now, these creatures were on a whole other level then anything he had seen before. He just stood there; eyes fixed on the scree as it slowly drug itself back onto its four lower limbs. its eyes were blinking rapidly, having trouble adjusting to the bright light.

“Damn it Mark, Move!” Terra screamed at him again, and he looked up to see a second scree rushing him.

A thought sent his porter drone forward to intercept the charging scree as he jumped to the side. He didn’t place much hope in the porter drone, but he hoped it could at least shield him long enough for him to get away. The sound of tearing metal and the drone disappearing from his mental interface dashed that hope before he even landed.

“Damn it” he growled through the blood in his mouth. As the backlash of the drone’s destruction pierced his head. It felt like a piece of his mind had been cut away. He hadn’t realized that the drone’s destruction would cause him pain, and didn’t have time to ponder on it either. As his feet touched down, he triggered his last regeneration booster.

He was intending to wait as long as possible to use that last life saving measure. The pain that was currently ripping through his mind however; coupled with the throbbing from his mouth and nose and the likely broken ribs in his back had added up. he wasn’t able to resist the pain numbing effect the boosters had any longer.

As the pain subsided and his mind cleared, Mark took a look around. they had made it through the teleporter, but they hadn’t come through alone. Two of the scree had tagged along for the ride, and they were currently trying their best to kill Mark’s companions. Terra and Tinker were putting up a better struggle than he had managed so far at least.

Terra held her crossbow in one hand and her blade in the other, dancing around the damaged scree and aiming stabs at the cracks in its armor as she moved. Tinker was little better off; he had his small energy rifle in his hands and was firing as fast as he could along with his drones at the other scree. Most of his drones lay in mangled heaps around the smaller scree, only the ones that could fly had evaded destruction so far.

Mark stood there silently as the pain slowly faded from his mind. Rage bubbled up to fill the void as he watched his friends battling for their lives. His thoughts raced as he tried to think of a solution. He had used up the last of the pistol’s rounds and he couldn’t use the rifle very well with only one hand. His vision narrowed down to a point as he saw Terra rush in to stab the wounded scree, only to be sent flying with a backhanded swipe of the huge claw.

He stopped thinking then, cradling the Broken blade he was somehow holding in his right hand into his left elbow, he charged. His world had seemed to shrink when he saw Terra getting hurt, now it shrank down even further until all he could see was the cracked exoskeleton on the creature’s abdomen. lining up his Broken blade as best he could, he slammed bodily into the scree.

Mark was instantly thrown away, but he had succeeded. The foot long blade of his Broken blade disappeared into the already damaged armor. it came free of the wound as he was thrown away, his grip being too tight for even that blow to knock it from his hand. When it came free, a fountain of orange gore flew out behind it. The scree let out a howl of pain as it flailed around on the ground. It was already dead; it just didn’t know it yet.

The second scree stopped its attack on the Tinker when it heard the howl of its companion. Mark fumbled for his mark III rifle as it turned and closed in on him. The coal grey Tinker and its drones fired non stop into its back as it rushed him, but the smaller rounds did very little damage to the thick exoskeleton.

The soldier was only a person’s length away when he brought up and fired his rifle. The super-heated beam melted into the creature’s abdominal armor but didn’t quite pierce through. Mark readied himself for another shot when a flash of movement caught his eye, it was one of Terra’s exploding bolts. It pierced into the weakened patch of armor and detonated.

The armor was normally too sturdy for that bolt to do much damage, but it was weakened already from Mark’s shot and a fountain of gore shot out as the creature died. The rest of the armor acted like a funnel to aim the orange gore through the damaged section of armor, and thanks to his proximity, Mark was completely coated in the creature’s fluids.

The blast knocked him back, where he lay for a long second to catch his breath. As the healing booster did its job of putting him back together, he looked over at Terra. She was also on the ground, still holding her handheld crossbow aimed at the dead scree. She held the crossbow in her left hand, her right arm was bent at an odd angle and was clearly broken. The fact that she wasn’t screaming in pain indicated that she had also used a regeneration booster.

After looking her over to make sure she was ok, Mark looked her in the eye. She had seemed shaken at first glance but was already coming around. When she noticed him looking at her, she pulled herself together visibly and shot him a wink.

“Hey old man,” she said with a grunt pulling herself into a sitting position. “Congratulations, you got your battle to the death after all. Remind me to get you a metal, alright?” Mark just stared at her for a minute, almost unable to comprehend how bad that joke was. Before they both started laughing uncontrollably. Each holding their respective broken bones as the laughter caused pain to flare up again.

The Tinker looked back and forth between them, each bloody and broken, for a long moment before shaking its head.

“Surface dwellers are strange.” It mumbled, causing the pair to start laughing all over again.

* * *

It took them three hours before they were ready to move again. Terra and Mark took turns patching each other up, using the remnants of the first aid kits from the shuttles. Terra was in better shape, having had two boosters left from their time underground. Even still, she was moving slowly. It was all Mark could do to move at all, it turned out he had indeed broken a few ribs in his back. Thankfully the regeneration booster had knit them mostly back together. It was going to take them a long time to heal, unless they managed to find another regeneration booster syringe.

The Tinker had come out of the fight unharmed. Yet it wasn’t idle during the hours they spent recuperating. First it gathered up all the bits and pieces of broken drones, packing them away to work on later. Next it started to dismantle the bloody hive scree. Mark looked on in confusion as the smaller scree cut the larger ones apart.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked, not able to hold it back any longer as he watched the Tinker scraping the orange goo out of the red and black exoskeletons.

“I am collecting the spoils of war, fear not surface dweller Mark, the materials will be divided evenly.” Mark furrowed his brow at that response.

“But…” he began before he was silenced by Terra’s hand on his shoulder.

“Tinker’s a scree not a human,” she said voice low. “They are from different hives. These bloody screes are as alien to Tinker as the Frog people are to us. Besides,” here she paused with a rueful grin. “Their exoskeleton’s really do make fantastic armor.”

He looked at her a long moment after she finished speaking. He thought about his old life, and the changes he had seen since he started this one.

“So, I should just shut up and deal. Is that what your saying?” he asked at length, knowing he sounded like a petulant child but not being able to stop the words from coming out. he was tired, in body and soul. Having spent the last two years of his life in a grief fueled haze, all of these changes were starting to catch up to him.

“Not at all” Terra said, cuffing him on the back of the head. “If you want to rail against the universe, be my guest. You can’t change the scree, their behavior is hardwired on a genetic level. Honestly though, do you really care about what happens to the bodies of a few bugs that tried to kill us, or are you just mad you aren’t in control of your life anymore?”

At her words and the cuff to his head, anger started to bubble up in Marks chest again. It was a different anger than during the fight however. That was rage, born of fear and the potential loss of people who had become important to him. This anger in contrast felt somewhat, hollow. It was hard for him to be too angry at someone he had almost died to save. Even if she was being a bit of a bitch, she had a point. He really didn’t care what happened to these scree, and he could use some protection against the next life or death threat.

“Fine,” he sighed in defeat. “I guess it doesn’t really matter that much anyway.” He shakily got to his feet and looked around. “Now what, I thought we were going to go straight to Landing?”

He took in their environment for the first time since they arrived. They were at the end of a narrow valley surrounded on three sides by cliff walls. They were on a teleportation pad identical to the one they had just left, complete with softly glowing sphere.

“We are really close,” Terra said standing up as well. “We are at the base of the mountain, up there is the plateau we started at.” She continued pointing upwards, “The teleportation pad here is the exit to the underground high-level area. It doesn’t get much traffic anymore, since a person would have to pass through the Bloody hive to get here. Landing is only a few hours walk away.” She finished pointing at toward the exit of the valley.

Mark nodded, seeing Tinker still needed a little time he plopped back down. he wasn’t ready to walk for hours yet anyway so he figured he might as well check his status screen.

Tutorial Log

Survive 1st shuttle crash alive = 100 augmentation points Kill first enemy while suffering a surprise attack = 50 augmentation points Save aspirant Terra from death = 150 augmentation points Kill four frog people in fighting retreat = 8 augmentation points Kill one frog elite in surprise attack = 20 augmentation points Kill two juvenile roc, assist = 20 augmentation points Kill forty-eight rat folks in nest extermination = 96 augmentation points Kill three frog people in hunting traps = 3 augmentation points Repair badly damaged delivery drone = 75 augmentation points Massacre one thousand three hundred seventy-four fecal flies = 458 augmentation points Sneak attack frog kin elite alpha = 10 augmentation points Defeat frog elite in mortal combat = 200 augmentation points Kill forty-two frog kin with rifle = 22 augmentation points Massacre ninety-one frog kin in berserker rage = 182 augmentation points Defeat two bloody scree in mortal combat = 500 augmentation points Currant total = 1,894 augmentation points

It was another huge number. The largest amount he had gotten at any one time. He thought about opening it up to read the reasons why, but was too tired to bother.

“Hey Terra,” he said closing his screens. “I don’t get the system here. It really doesn’t make any sense to me. It seems like the point values I get are all arbitrary without any real correlation to it. Molly’s dad… My son, played games that had experience and levels and they were all quantifiable to a certain extent. This system…isn’t.”

She had a vacant look on her face when he started speaking, it looked like she was checking on her screens too. As he talked however, she closed out of them and looked at him with a sad smile.

“That’s because it is.” She said with a shrug, “arbitrary I mean. Look Mark, I don’t know everything. but from what I understand the artificial intelligence that pilots the ship is in charge of the tutorial. It actually watches each and everything we do in here and assigns augmentation points accordingly. If something wasn’t a challenge it won’t reward you, if you’re almost killed it will give you more points. Again though, try not to waste too much thought on it old man. Your close to passing the tutorial, and once you leave, contribution points don’t matter anyway.”

“Then why have them at all, if its only for a few weeks?” Mark asked, still confused.

“Because most people spend a lot more time in here then just a few weeks. You got lucky, without my help odds are you would still be wandering around the goblin forest. Assuming you didn’t die that is, then you would be going through crash after crash, losing points with every death.”

“I could still die though, right, what happens then?” he asked.

“You start over with a few less points in a new instance and everything that has happened will be erased…and we part ways for good.” she answered, looking him in the eye. there seemed to be something hidden deep within that look, but Mark couldn’t place it. So, after a moment he simply nodded and climbed back to his feet.

“Well, I don’t plan on dying anytime soon,” he said. “Looks like Tinker’s done, let’s get a move on.” He couldn’t wait to get to Landing, he needed to finish the tutorial and find Molly. First however, he needed to get to a shop and get his missing arm replaced.

They walked slowly. Due in part to their injuries, but also to the fact that his porter drone had been destroyed along with half of Tinker’s drones. They were forced to carry nearly everything they had, including the heavy exoskeletons. Mark looked over at the small scree as they walked.

“How you holding up buddy?” he asked at last, “I only lost one drone and the backlash nearly killed me, you lost a lot more than one. You need a break or anything?”

“I don’t understand the question.” The Tinker said, confusion evident even through the speaker it used to speak their language. Mark was about to reword his question when Terra cut in.

“Tinker didn’t suffer any backlash Mark,” she said. “It has a control implant, the only reason you felt any pain at all was that you had the drone hooked right into your mind. if you had run it through a control implant it wouldn’t have hurt at all.”

Mark just stared at her silently for a minute. He was getting really tired of not knowing things that were common knowledge to everyone else. He opened his mouth a few times, like he wanted to say something, but the look on his face must have been obvious because Terra only laughed.

“Don’t worry old man,” she said. “When we get to Landing, I will personally buy you a control implant. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to pick you out a good one, ok?” she said shaking her head, still giggling.

Mark wasn’t thrilled by other people laughing at his expense, but he was starting to get used to it. after all, it was either put up with his strange traveling companions or go it on his own. He was honest enough with himself to admit that he never would have made it this far if it hadn’t been for Terra. So, he held in his anger and simply nodded.

They walked in silence after. Eventually, they made it to the end of the valley. There, just a few short miles away was Landing. A massive building, completely surrounded by a stone wall. Around that wall was a sprawling city, not as big as he might have expected, but bustling with activity.

“Can you see it?” Terra asked from her position beside him.

“See what?” he asked, looking out where she indicated. “The inner city? Yea I see it. its kinda strange for the whole inner city to be just one giant building but not so strange” he said with some confusion.

“So, no you didn’t see it.” Terra said with a laugh, “look closer at that city sized building at the center. Anything strike you as odd?”

Mark looked again; he wasn’t sure what she was talking about at first but as he continued to look the building slowly formed a different impression in his mind. From the small windows and their placement, to the rounded design. It looked more like a giant pill laying on the ground then a building. As he continued to look, he saw spots of what he had taken for mold but was actually corrosion. What he took at first for grey stone might actually be a strange type of metal.

“Is that a…?” he started only to trail off.

“Yes, it is,” Terra said with a laugh. “The entire inner city of landing…was built from the hull of an ancient space ship”