Chương 59: Book Two - Chapter 9: "Fine. I promise."

Anti-piracy note: If you are reading this on any platform other than Royal Road or Amazon, this has been pirated/STOLEN. If the author who wrote it has any name other than ShawnD or ShawnDePasquale, it is STOLEN. Please report this book if you are reading it ANYWHERE other than Royal Road. Thank you for helping to fight piracy. I promise." ZONE TWO INCINERATION: 0 4: 55: 29 Dust settled around the corridor as the four of us groaned, doing a roll call of who was the most hurt.

"I thought hotwiring the door would shut the room down." Liam's chest heaved as he stared at the solid steel wall where the doorway used to be.

"That only bypassed the door, dude," Tre explained, coughing.

"It didn't stop the countdown. The timer was still ticking." I wasn't entirely sure, but I guessed a flaw in the design finally freed me. By spiking my Fear, my terrified brain forced the machine to speed-run the rest of the cycle, triggering the auto-release because the frame literally ran out of room to crush me further. Even with multiple salves, I was still under fifty percent health. If my math was right, we only had four salves left until we found one of those supply caches Plaxx mentioned.

I used my last Stabilizer Wrap instead. The wraps were unique in that they were meant to stop residual bleeding, hopefully that also meant internally, and they provided a small Fear reduction for ten minutes. After applying it, I didn't feel any less pain, but my heart stopped racing, and it was easier to catch my breath. I took a beat to simply enjoy being splayed out on the floor, relieved to no longer be compressed into an impossible shape as my insides were pulped. Tre sat up first.

"Everyone okay?"

"Alive," Isabel said as she pushed up on her elbows. Liam heaved himself over, onto his back.

"Good enough." A notification fired in my HUD, as the LifeLine simultaneously vibrated in my pocket. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! Auntie Anne's Best Yet" Slap some greasy butter on top, and you'd have made a delicious airport snack." Congratulations! You've earned your first build decision. In a moment, you'll receive two potential skill offers. What do they do? Are they active or passive? Will they help or hurt? You won't know until you've chosen. Maybe one is entirely useless! Remember: No take-backsies.

Pick one: NEW SKILL! NEW SKILL! Don't Mind the Extra Bleed Eyes in the Back of Your Head Choose wisely. Plaxx mentioned there would be limited information to help my decision. Still, looking at the two fairly inscrutable skill names, he grossly undersold how inadequate the info would be. Don't Mind the Extra Bleed jumped at me. Putting "Mind" and "Bleed" in the name made me think of the Mindbleed itself, the fairly useless one-way communication system Tre and I shared.

If this skill unlocked an upgrade path of some kind, that was the one to pick. There'd been so many times in the first zone, and even moments ago in the death machine, when I cursed not being able to respond to Tre mentally. It was an easy choice, if that's what it really did. Nothing in this place was ever what it seemed, so I didn't want to rush anything. Eyes in the Back of Your Head implied a second sight. Or maybe the ability to see behind me.

In the Grindhouse, that could mean I literally grew a third eyeball on the back of my skull, and I wasn't ready for that level of body horror. Skeleton fingers were more than enough for now.

"What're the choices?" Tre asked, now standing beside me. Everyone else had gotten up, brushing dust off their clothes, and I was still on the ground, staring off at the HUD menu. At this point, it was easy to tell when someone was looking at their HUD, eyes unfocused, moving back and forth reading invisible text.

"Two skill names. No other info," I said, grunting through the pain as I climbed to my feet.

"Don't Mind the Extra Bleed and… hnnnn …. Eyes in the Back of Your Head."

"First one is Mindbleed?"

"Same assumption. I'm picking it." SKILL GAINED! Don't Mind the Extra Bleed I (Passive) Effect: The Mindbleed is now available for the entire party. The channel only works one-way. Rank up to unlock two-way chat." Now you won't go quietly into the night."

"Motherfucker," I yelled at the narrow corridor's open ceiling. Tre read the description.

"At least we can all send you warnings and talk to each other." Isabel? Can you hear me? Tre asked over Mindbleed, the words vocalized in my head, without his mouth ever moving. I hear you, and I hate it. I don't want anyone in my head, Isabel replied. Same. This is trippy as hell, guys, Liam thought. My legs shook as I got to my feet, but I managed to stay upright. Isabel rushed over anyway, slipping herself under my right arm to stabilize me.

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"Here," she said as a salve pouch materialized in her hand. Part of me wanted to refuse it, knowing it would leave us with only three remaining, which meant one of us would go without if we got injured as a group. All the rest of me was in unrelenting agony, so I greedily snatched it from her hand, twisted off the top, and squeezed it into my mouth. I hadn't realized until now, but there was a major difference between being under half health and anywhere over.

I stood on my own after that and pulled out the LifeLine to check the Vitals app and see where, exactly, I was still hurting. The wireframe appeared, and I took stock. It was not ideal. My torso was a mess of overlapping indicators, mostly red and yellow flashing areas. A cluster of yellow tags crowded my ribcage on both sides. I could tap them, and they opened into smaller branches with warnings like FRACTURE: HEALING (4X) and BROKEN: HEALING (9X).

My ribs had knitted themselves back together while I was still in the crushing machine, leaving broken and misaligned pieces inside me. My left eye showed amber. OCULAR TRAUMA: RESIDUAL. Which explained why everything on that side was just slightly out of focus. Rotating the wireframe revealed that my upper back and both shoulders were burning a steady amber. SOFT TISSUE DAMAGE: MODERATE. From the needles. A single red tag pulsed at my lower spine. COMPRESSION INJURY: MODERATE-SEVERE.

That one had no healing qualifier attached. The rest of me was green, including my legs, my arms below the elbow, and my hands. Even my skeleton fingers were now just part of the wireframe's baseline. Health: 600% (Stable) I closed the app and slipped the LifeLine into my jacket as I was straightening up, and something in my lower back pulled. I bit my lip to avoid yelping in pain. Quickly shifting my weight helped me find my footing, and I managed to stay upright. It hurt like hell, though. Stable. Sure.

"Guess I owe you an apology," I said to Isabel. She held up a hand.

"I'm sure the opposite direction will be equally horrific." A scream in the distance expanded into the open air of the warehouse, carrying the exhausted rasp of a woman's throat gone raw. My own suddenly felt like sandpaper, my tongue too big for my mouth. Whoever she was, wherever in this maze she was, we needed to help, and we were already headed that direction. Isabel sighed.

"See?" No one else mentioned the distant screams. What was the point? We had to move toward them. Ten minutes brought us back to the T-junction, the same one where we'd turned right to get away from this heat the first time. Ahead was yet another narrow, metal-walled hallway. I was drenched in sweat before we'd even gone ten feet.

"Wanna do bets on where the heat's coming from?" Liam asked.

"We're in literal hell," Isabel said.

"That's my guess." Felt like the best answer to me too. Tre must have agreed because he said nothing. I glanced at him, walking behind me instead of hanging on like usual. The group lost the playful rhythm we'd found before that first trap, and Tre hadn't said anything since we'd started walking again. He caught me looking, and very human misery surfaced from his molded features, dragging his vinyl mouth down. He forced it back into a stiff grin, too late to fool me.

"Slick moves back there, Liam," Isabel said. The football player's face flushed, his hand scratching the back of his neck.

"No biggie." I turned to him.

"You literally saved my life." He chuckled.

"If I'd stayed in Zone One, I'd be recycled or whatever. We're even."

"This might not be the best time, but, uh," Liam started, "Did the, um, joints get all crushed?"

"I didn't have them," I said.

"Isabel does."

"Sick." He turned to her and held out a hand.

"Celebration smoke?" Isabel passed off the joints, which she'd been storing in pockets I didn't realize she had in her black pleated skirt. Click. Liam's lighter sparked a joint. A tug on my pants from Tre. He spoke in a hushed tone.

"You almost died again, Nora. Twice."

"Thankfully, we had the salves," I replied.

"Look, I get that you're the Final Girl or whatever, but I just watched your eyeball pop out of your head."

"Pretty sick, huh?" I joked. Tre didn't even smile.

"We only have three salves left between four of us. You're not even at full health."

"The rest are surface wounds," I said.

"Even so, you're speed-walking us toward wherever that screaming is coming from." I was doing that; I couldn't deny it. Gave it a shot anyway.

"I'm trying to get us through this heat."

"To look for supplies. Before we do anything else," Tre asserted. I gently massaged my lower back as we continued down the hall.

"Finding supplies is absolutely a priority." We walked quietly for a moment. I smelled weed.

"Do we even know what's in them?" Isabel's voice came from right behind us. Tre and I both jumped. Isabel put her palms out.

"Whoa. It's us."

"Sorry," I said, pulse racing.

"Little on edge." Liam held out the joint.

"You need this." I did. He handed it to me. On the exhale, I coughed so hard, my eyes watered as broken bones jostled in my chest. It was worth the high, and as a bonus, the Mild Euphoria status gave a -20% Fear reduction. I think we were all willing to take the minor perception hit in exchange.

"The red dude said the caches have like first aid and weapons and shit." Liam took the joint from my hand and offered it to Tre.

"I thought we were going to ration the joints," Tre said, taking the pre-roll.

"We said for emergencies only," Isabel corrected.

"This is an emergency." I tried to jog ahead, hoping to find the source of the screams we'd been hearing. My spine reminded me immediately that jogging was an overly optimistic activity for my current condition. I dialed it back to a speed walk, and the others fell in behind me without discussion. There was no doubt in my mind that this could be a trap. The thought sat at the forefront even as I walked as fast as my back would allow toward the screaming.

BK had already shown he could control the atmosphere of the maze, so a fake scream to lure us into danger wasn't beyond him. There was just… something under this one that I recognized as real. A specific frequency of sheer terror that you couldn't manufacture. I knew it well, because I'd been making it myself twenty-five minutes ago. If the person screaming was real, she belonged to a real body somewhere on Earth. Someone's daughter. Or friend. I thought about the cabin. Thirty-nine people gone in an instant.

I transitioned back into a jog; lower back pain be damned. Ahead, the hall ended in a hard right, down another long, dark corridor. A scream came from the other side of the dead end in front of me. I stopped, and the others pulled up beside me. Liam got the last, long drag off the joint, cherry flaring bright orange in the darkness, before dropping the roach and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his sneaker. A final, sweet cloud of delicious gray smoke drifted into the open ceiling.

"You can't be serious," Isabel said. I pointed to the wall.

"There's someone in there. What if she's stuck in a trap like I was?"

"Or," Liam said, "it's a monster pretending to be a girl." Tre was quiet, which was never a good sign.

"We don't know where the caches are. By the time we find one, she could already be dead." He paused, tilting his head toward Liam.

"Assuming it's a real person."

"Thank you," Liam said. Everyone gathered around to check out the map on my LifeLine. The fog had lifted enough to reveal a rectangular room on the other side of the wall. There was also a symbol for a door directly in front of our position, where all we could see was a solid wall. Pressing my palms against the cold, industrial plating revealed no hidden handle or keypad. I felt along the seamless, solid barrier, finding no obvious way through.

"Lemme shine the screen down at the floor," Tre suggested.

"If it's like the other room, there should be a seam in the ground." He took the LifeLine and the screen's dim, red glow was just enough light to find a clean slit cut directly into the cement.

"Yup. It's like the other door." We checked the map again, noting an icon of a square that had a grid of smaller squares inside, in the bottom left-hand corner of the room. The corridor to our right got foggy after the turn. Whatever was waiting for us that way, the map wasn't saying.

"Is that symbol the supply cache?" Isabel asked. Liam hovered behind me.

"It looks like graph paper."

"I think it's a cage," Tre said, now perched on Liam's shoulder.

"Nora," Isabel fumed.

"You're injured, we have three heals left, and no fucking idea what's inside."

"She's not even listening," Liam said. My focus remained on the wall, my fingers clawing futilely at the seamless metal plating, searching for a button or a latch.

"Yes, I am."

"Hey." Tre tugged the bottom of my jacket, and I turned to him." If we go in there and it's an instant shitstorm, you gotta promise me you won't do something stupid." Isabel huffed.

"Going in there at sixty percent health with a spinal injury is stupid." There was another cry of pain from behind the door. We were wasting time.

"We have to do something," I shouted.

"Nora. Promise me," Tre said, his glass eyes staring unblinking into mine.

"Fine." I backed away from the seamless wall, throwing my hands up in defeat.

"I promise." The words barely left my lips when a loud, mocking electronic ding chimed from a speaker hidden somewhere above. The wall hissed, and the door sank slowly into the floor.

"Dah fuck?" Liam said.

"I guess the Boargore King is always watching," Tre said, dropping into a bored monotone when he said that ridiculous name. And apparently, he loved a liar. None of us were ready for what, or rather, who was inside.