Chương 60: Book Two - Chapter 10: The Little Things You Do Together

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. PART II … Those Are Silver, These Are Gold ZONE TWO INCINERATION: 0 4: 10: 27" Scheiße.

I'll never hear the end of this," said the gray-haired creature in the blue T-shirt reading: World's Best Dad.

"Ignore him." The redhead girl who replied was strapped to an operating table in the middle of the room.

"He's just pissed 'cause I was right." This exchange happened while the four of us were still gathered in the open doorway, giving our brains time to process what we were seeing. Just as the map had promised, it was a rectangular space. What the map hadn't revealed was that the room looked like a back-alley medical school. The walls were exposed brick, water-stained in random places, and dimly lit by two bare bulbs. One bulb hung over the redhead, and the other was in the southwest corner of the room.

A surgical lamp was the only other light source, glaringly bright, also positioned over the girl strapped to the table.

"Who the hell are you?" The redhead asked in her thick Irish accent.

"D'ya know, you lot absolutely stink of smoke." Tre examined his hands, pretending to check for dirt under painted-on fingernails. Liam busied himself staring at the ground. The girl twisted around, struggling against her restraints to get a look at us.

"Get me out of these, will yeh!"

"Hey, hey, take it easy." I slowly entered the room, hands up.

"We're here to help." Beside the table, there was a dirty tray of surgical tools. Most of them I couldn't name if I tried. The bloody scalpel and retractors I'd seen plenty of times on TV medical dramas. The implications of backroom surgery were there, despite my rough examination of the redhead showing no sign she'd been operated on.

"See, Kane? I told you it would work!" She yelled at the creature in the corner, pulling on her restraints.

"Ja, ja. You were right. Screaming for thirty minutes straight was a sound strategy," Kane replied.

"Bist du jetzt glücklich, Gen?"

"I'll be happy when I'm off this feckin' table," Gen, the redhead, replied. Liam and Isabel hovered by the door. Tre hopped off Liam's back and made his way past me, beelining to the end of the room.

"Stop," Kane commanded.

"No closer." Tre paused a few feet from the green creature, Kane. He was seated on a small, metal chair, low to the ground, and bolted to the floor. Saw-toothed metal fasteners were clasped tightly to the four yellowed claws on his tiny hands and the three on his feet. They were spring-loaded, like the world's most aggressive binder clip.

"Stay away from him!" Gen struggled again.

"Don't touch a hair on his—" She cut herself off mid-sentence. She'd raised her head off the table enough to catch a glimpse of Tre's doll body, and her eyes went wide.

"Aww, shite," she grumbled, head falling back to the table. She met my eyes.

"You're like me."

"She's not strapped to a gurney, Pug," Kane interjected.

"True," I said.

"But I was recently almost crushed into paste by a death machine." Gen puffed air past her lower lip.

"Whoopty-fuckin'-doo. Am I hearin' your whole life story or do yeh plan on helpin' me anytime soon?"

"She's normally very nice," Kane said apologetically.

"We've been stuck like this for thirty minutes or so, at least, I think. Hard to keep count with all the screamin'." Without a reply, I went to work on the leather restraints around Gen's arms and legs. There was no lock or trick; they simply unlatched and loosened. While I worked, I tried to find any marks on the visible parts of the redhead's body.

She was wearing dirt- and blood-streaked dark blue jeans and a simple gray T-shirt that looked like she'd worn it through a warzone, which had been bunched up just below her breasts, exposing her bare stomach. She was banged up, but her limbs were whole, and she was breathing. Isabel and Liam stepped further into the room. She joined me on the other side of the operating table, helping to loosen Gen's restraints. Liam walked over to assist with Tre and Kane.

"I'm Isabel," she said as she worked on freeing Gen's left arm. The redhead calmed down a bit as we removed her restraints.

"Genevieve. Everyone calls me Gen."

"I'm Nora. The doll is my friend Tre, and the big guy is Liam." Isabel finished with the other restraint.

"Grand. Cheers for that." With her arms free, Gen sat up while we worked on the leg straps.

"Green guy's my husband, Kane." No one reacted to the reveal that these two were married.

"He's not always been a monster." Gen shoved her hands into the pockets of her light blue denim jeans.

"The wee man wasn't always like that, was he?"

"No." I finished loosening her left leg.

"He wasn't." The implications of Gen likening Kane to Tre lit up my brain, and I understood something she'd already figured out.

"Wait. Are you also a—""Aye, suppose so," Gen said, cutting me off. She swung her legs to the side and stepped down. Her legs wobbled, forcing her to grip the edge of the table for support.

"Fuck this game." SHE'S ANOTHER PLAYER?! Tre screamed in my mind. Like Summer? Liam asked, alarmed. Isabel winced. New Rule: Do not yell like that ever again. My head almost exploded. My thoughts drifted to ranking up the Mindbleed branch; the system's early warning about abilities mutating felt a lot less abstract now. But it raised more questions: did three people chatting over Mindbleed count more towards hitting another rank? And if so, how much use before we hit the next one?

Isabel and I had rushed to help steady Gen so her legs didn't collapse under her. She shrugged us away.

"I'm fine. Help him!" When we let go, she tipped forward, and we hurried to grab her arms, steadying the woman once again. She accepted our help with a mildly annoyed grunt. The three of us crowded around Liam and Tre, who examined Kane's chair as if either one had expertise in disarming torture traps.

"Little light, please," Tre said without looking up. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. I swung the surgical lamp around with my free hand, turning the spotlight toward their corner of the room. My eyes had gotten so used to darkness that I had to squint for a moment to allow my vision to adjust. Once it did, I had a significantly clearer view of the chair and the creature seated on it.

Kane's tired eyes bulged out in a way that made me see him as a green-skinned Steve Buscemi exhausted after pulling an all-nighter. A combover of gray, thinning hair filled out his head between two pointy ears. Physically, he appeared to be only a hair smaller than Tre's two feet.

"World's Best Dad" shirt aside, he wore the smallest pair of black Dickies shorts I'd ever seen. They were torn in a few places and cut off just above his knees. As I tried to place exactly what type of creature he was, a pop-up appeared next to him on my HUD. It was a rectangular box that simply said "KANE." I mentally clicked on the box, and it opened to reveal additional details. Well shit. I didn't know I could do that. KANE GRUNER Form: Gremlin Role: Assigned Companion Health: 80% He's a gremlin?!

The thought was quickly absorbed by anger at myself for not being more curious about the system during Zone One. Dr. Boivin's voice popped into my head to firmly remind me of the river." Watch it all pass you by, and remember you're safe on the shore." Taking a deep breath, I watched my frustration float down that river and out of sight. I needed to push the system more if I wanted to keep surviving whatever it threw at us next. Not that I could do much about it right now.

I added it to the list in my Journal, then took a beat to examine Kane thoroughly. All the serrated clips on Kane's nails tied into a lattice of rigid metal rods threading beneath the seat.

I quickly understood the clips were pins, and the chair was the grenade. Tre was under the chair on his back, looking up at the underside of the seat.

"Damn. You're a low-key mechanical genius, Liam."

"It's there?"

"Just like you thought. A tension bar. And everything connects to it," Tre confirmed. Tension bar. Rods at strange, outward angles. Clips with teeth that sank into Kane's nail beds. Kane had been sitting there, unmoving, this entire time because the moment his weight shifted off that seat, or pulled on the clips, the tension would release, and all his claws would be torn off at once. It wasn't even meant to kill him. The torture was sitting there forever, thinking about what would happen if he moved.

We can't move him at all, Liam warned via Mindbleed. Why not? Isabel asked. Tre had crawled out from under the chair and now spun around to shoot her an "Are you seriously asking that?" look. Then he scolded her in my head, too. Do you not see the things on his claws? Isabel released her hold on Gen and inched closer to the chair to understand what she wasn't seeing that we were.

"I do, ass," she said to Tre.

"I'm asking why he can't move at all?"

"The tension bar. It's all based on weight," Liam said.

"Yah. Tried moving, and heard a click," Kane added.

"Last time I moved." The redhead seemed steady on her feet, so I, too, released my grip on her arm and examined her in the HUD while she massaged her wrists where the restraints had rubbed her skin raw. GENEVIEVE GRUNER Form: Human Role: Final Girl Health: 100% She sidled up beside our newest party member.

"Liam, is it?"

"Hi…er… I mean... Yes!" He nodded vigorously, cheeks flushed.

"I'm him. Liam." Poor boy stumbled over every word by being in simple proximity to a girl. However, I understood why this girl in particular left him tongue-tied. Gen was a classic Irish ginger lass with piercing green eyes and soft features. The thing was, and Liam should probably have understood this by now, that's just what Maltheris wanted her to appear as. And if he did the same with her as he did with me, he likely augmented certain attributes to his personal taste. Ick.

"Figures a decent Irish lad's got the brains we need." Gen patted his back.

"I'm still in the chair, Pug." Kane's accent was a bizarre mix of German and Irish, two accents that seemed to fight for domination when he spoke. Sometimes his words came out in a soft lilt, and other times they were accompanied by a jarring Germanic harshness.

"The little one and the big guy seem to know what they're doing."

"He's hopeless with names," Gen said reflexively in a bored tone. A warm smile spread across Liam's face.

"No worries, green dude. I'm bad with names, too. The little guy is Tre, and I'm Liam."

"Großartig! Ist mir eine Freude," Kane said stiffly.

"Liam, Tre, do you think we can focus on me not having my claws torn out?"

"Why don't you just take off the clips?" Isabel asked in a mildly condescending way.

"If you look closely, the whole rig is tension-loaded," Liam explained warmly, either not noticing or caring about her tone.

"Those metal rods connect it all to a release. If we tried to open a clip, it would trigger the rest to fire." Isabel gently rubbed her collarbone.

"How do you know all of this?" Liam nodded.

"I know, right? It just, like… started coming to me all of a sudden. Do you think I'm getting superpowers like Nora?" I clapped my hands together, hoping to refocus on the issue at hand. A glance at the green zone timer in my HUD had just lit a fire under my ass.

"So, what's the answer? Time's wasting."

"Time?" Gen searched the air with her eyes.

"What'd you mean?" Liam and Tre's rapid mental crosstalk became a distracting static that made Gen's actual voice hard to pay attention to.

"Huh?"

"What'd you mean time's wasting?" Gen repeated.

"Zone Two's timed," I said.

"Bollocks!" Gen kicked over the surgical tray, sending the instruments flying across the room.

"Didja hear it, love? We're still in the feckin' game."

"Easy, Pug," Kane responded calmly.

"How long have you guys been in here?"

"The Grindhouse? Since a bug crawled in my ear, which I think was a day or so ago. Hard to keep track of the days, as I'm sure you've noticed."

"Yeah," I said.

"I meant how long in this room?"

"Unclear. We—I… failed zone one, right at the end." Her eyes got glassy, and she quickly blinked back whatever was about to come up.

"We woke up in the dark. Little while later, the lights came on, the place turned into an oven, and that's when I started screaming for help."

"Hang on, you lost?" Tre asked, seated on the floor with the Bowie knife in his hands.

"Shouldn't you be recycled or whatever they call it?"

"I thought we were. Yet here we are." Liam tilted his head, examining Gen, suddenly skeptical.

"And you're still you?"

"Explain?"

"Like you're still you, as in, you you, and not like an NPC you?"

"If that's even possible, then I don't know what anything is anymore. But no, to the best of my knowledge, I'm still a forty-five-year-old mother of four trapped in a death game run by some demon with a hard-on for young girls."

"She's still her, alright," Kane confirmed, loving grin plastered on his green face. The smile dropped.

"And I'm still in this torture device, oh, by the way."

"We gotchu, homie." Tre was back under the chair.

"What am I looking for again, Liam?"

"You gotta wedge the knife in to physically block the bar from moving." Tre grunted as he shifted beneath the chair.

"Okay… my concern is that it's very tight under there, and I don't wanna jostle anything."

"Hör auf zu drängeln," Kane said. Liam came around, positioning himself directly in front of the chair, facing Kane.

"I'm gonna put my hands on your shoulders to hold you down on that pressure plate. That cool?" Sweat streaked from Kane's gray hairline, down his wrinkled green face.

"Uh-huh."

"Good?" Tre called up.

"Yup." Squatting down so I could get a good look at what Tre was going through sent another stabbing spasm shooting up my spine. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold in a scream, comforting myself that the pain was worth the clear view. Tre slowly worked the Bowie knife between the tension bar and the underside of the chair, to the grinding sound of metal-on-metal, theoretically jamming the trigger closed.

"It's in." Liam kept his hands on Kane.

"Someone gently unclip him. But fast." Gen started with the clip on Kane's left hand. She pressed the release catch, and it popped off with a metallic ping that made me flinch. Kane whimpered, eyes squeezed shut.

"Easy, love."

"I can get the feet," Tre said, carefully shifting his position out from under the chair. I felt weird just standing there. It was the first time since we'd started the Grindhouse that I wasn't directly involved with whatever the present danger was, and it left me with useless nervous energy. My spine spasmed suddenly, and my body stiffened until Isabel reached out to steady me.

"They've got it handled," she said. Gen had removed all the clips from Kane's left hand and two from his right. Tre was moving a bit slower, his size putting him at a slight leverage disadvantage that made it harder for him to open the clips. He'd only removed the first two on Kane's left leg.

"Tre, can I help—""I've got it," he grunted, cutting me off. Gen finished with Kane's right hand and moved down to his right foot.

"You're almost free. A few more."

"Steady, Tre," I cautioned. Hands steady, Tre eased the final clip off Kane's left leg. Gen finished unclipping the second of three on his right leg.

"Na endlich," Kane said, flexing his leg after having it bent at the knee for so long.

"Don't!" Liam yelled a moment too late. The shift in pressure loosened something under the chair, and the Bowie knife clattered to the floor. The tension bar fired like a piston. There was a wet crunch. Kane let out a high, sustained howl. Gen scrambled back, also screaming, her hands stained with thick, dark green ichor. On the footrest, a long, horn-shaped claw lay in a pool of green blood, the serrated clip still clamped to it. Kane was hyperventilating. His ruined toe was mangled.

The clip had peeled the nail out of his toe, leaving behind a pulsing crater of exposed raw tissue, pumping a thick stream of dark green blood across the concrete.

"That went as well as can be expected," Isabel deadpanned.