Last Man in the Death Game

Chapter 6: Left Behind

[Night phase: 3 hours, 20 minutes remaining.]

Kael took first watch with Mika. The others slept in a pile at the back of the barn, close together, like puppies. Even Oscar.

Mika sat with her back to the wall and her one good arrow across her knees. She had pried it out of the board an hour ago and hadn't put it down since.

Kael sat by the gap and turned the wolf's fang over in his fingers. He had picked it up after the fight, and nothing bad happened, which he counted as a win. [Cradle Alpha's Fang. Deprecated.] He had tried to salvage it four times. Four times the same answer: Access denied.

"What's wrong with it?" Mika asked.

"Nothing. It just doesn't want to come apart."

"Is that normal?"

"Not for me."

She didn't ask anything else. That was one of the good things about her.

After a while, Mika said, "My mom's probably calling my phone right now. Over and over. She never leaves voicemails, she just keeps calling."

"I've got a sister," Kael said. "Lena. She'll be sitting next to my body, telling it to get up."

Mika smiled, but only a little. "Then we'd better get home."

Thump.

The sound came from outside, low and uneven. Something was dragging itself along the ground.

Mika raised the arrow. Kael raised the hammer. It felt like bringing a spoon to a war.

"Please." The voice was a man's, thin and cracked. "Please, I can hear you."

Oscar was awake before Kael turned around. He crossed the barn in three steps, shield up, and peered through the gap.

A man lay on the ground outside. Silver armor, bent and dented. A crown stitched on his chest. One leg twisted at an angle no leg should go.

"Crownfall," Oscar said flatly. "No."

"Oscar—" Mika began.

"They wouldn't take Kael. Why should we take one of theirs?"

"Because he's bleeding," Kael said.

"Then let his friends fix it."

"His friends left him." Kael pointed at the leg. "Nobody crawls this far on a broken leg unless everyone else is already gone."

A long, cold howl rolled across the field. Then another. Close.

The two wolves. They were coming back.

"They're following him," Mika whispered.

Oscar swore. He stepped aside. "Fine. Get him in. Fast."

Kael and Oscar hauled the man through the gap by his arms. He screamed once and bit it off. Oscar dragged the shield across the gap just as something heavy slammed into it.

The wolves hit the shield twice more, snarled, and scratched at the boards. Then, one at a time, they backed off. Two wolves against a wall and a shield were not good odds, and even wolves could do that math.

Jun was up now, kneeling beside the stranger with two glowing fingers. "I've got two points of mana," he said. "I can give him seven HP. That's all."

[Minor Heal: HP 8 → 15.]

The man's eyes fluttered open. He was maybe thirty, with a thick, untidy beard. His name tag read Harlan Voss.

"Thank you," he croaked. "I thought I was done."

"What happened to you?" Kael asked.

Harlan gave a laugh with no laughing in it. "A boar. Big one. Hit the column from the side." He swallowed. "It rolled me. Broke the leg. I called for a healer and Sable came instead."

"She checked my Standing. Six thousand nine hundred. She said, 'Not worth carrying.'" He stared at the ceiling. "Vex took my sword. Guild property, he said. Then they walked on."

Nobody spoke. Oscar's jaw was tight.

"You walked with them," Oscar said. It wasn't a question.

"I did," Harlan said. "I told myself it wasn't so bad, because I was still walking."

"But that's not all of it, is it?" Kael said. He was thinking about the wolves. "Those two came straight to you."

Harlan looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked away. "Bait duty," he said.

"What's bait duty?" Dani asked. She was awake now, sitting up with her arms wrapped around her knees.

"Every night, they drop the slowest people on the road and leave them bleeding. The monsters go for the easy meal. And the guild walks on, untouched." His voice cracked. "Sable calls it thinning the herd. Vex calls it efficiency."

"Efficiency," Jun murmured. "Sure."

"That's—" Mika started, and couldn't finish.

"That's the plan," Harlan said. "They're heading to Ironmark. The Arena Trials open on Day 3. Win one and you jump a hundred places. Vex wants every Trial slot filled with Crownfall. And he wants the top hundred spots filled with Crownfall too."

Kael went very still. "The top hundred. The ones who reach the Core."

"He doesn't want to share. Every person who dies in a Purge is one less person between him and the exit."

Kael thought about the Purge line. He had spent all day trying to climb away from it. It had never occurred to him that someone might be pushing other people toward it.

"Hold still," he said. "This is going to hurt."

He had learned first aid at the warehouse, in a mandatory class nobody wanted to take. He tore strips from his bandage roll, laid two boards along Harlan's leg, and tied them tight. Harlan bit down on his own sleeve. [Status removed: Bleeding.]

"You can stay until morning," Kael said. "That's all I can promise."

"Kael," Oscar said quietly. "If Crownfall finds us with him—"

"They already know where he is." Kael kept his eyes on Harlan's leg. "They put him here."

Oscar opened his mouth. Then he closed it. He didn't like the answer either.

"We can't carry everyone," Kael said. "But we can carry one."

Harlan turned his face to the wall. His shoulders shook. Nobody looked at him. That felt like the kindest thing to do.

"So Crownfall is the real Purge," Dani whispered.

"Crownfall is part of it," Kael said. "The Warden built the Purge. Vex just figured out how to use it."

Vex had been honest about one thing. He knew how games worked. He just hadn't said which kind of game he thought this was.

Later, when the others had settled, Harlan spoke up in the dark. "If you're going to Ironmark, stay off the road. There's an old mill up the river. Past it, a footpath through the reeds. Slower, but Crownfall never uses it."

Then he said, more quietly, "There's something else. Sable checks the bait spots. She counts the dead. If a name is still alive when she comes back, she finishes the job. She's killed eleven people since the plaza. Not monsters. People."

"When does she come back?" Kael asked.

"Before dawn."

Nobody slept after that.

An hour crawled by. Kael's HP crept up to 58 out of 66. Nothing else came out of the dark.

[Night phase: 1 hour, 4 minutes remaining.]

Kael was watching the gap when he saw the light. Torches. Six of them, moving in a line across the field, all silver and orange.

They stopped in front of the barn. A woman stepped forward, a spear on her back. Behind her stood five others in silver, faces blank, spears held low.

"Harlan Voss," Sable called. Her voice was flat and unhurried. "Come out."

No one moved. In the dark, Harlan had stopped breathing.

"You were supposed to be dead by now," Sable said. "It's rude to make me walk this far."

Oscar's hand tightened on his shield. Mika's arrow shook. Kael put a hand on Oscar's arm. Then he leaned toward the gap.

"He's not coming out," he said.

Silence. Then, "You're the Scrapper."

"Kael."

"I told you not to follow us."

"We didn't follow you. You left him at our door."

Something like amusement crossed her face. It looked wrong there, like a crack in a wall. [Sable Kord. Lv 8. HP 410.] The five behind her were Level 6 and 7. Every one.

Kael was Level 3. Her HP was six times his.

"He's wearing guild armor," Sable said. "That belongs to us."

"Then take the armor," Kael said. "Leave the man."

"He's talked to you. He knows things. Hand him over, and nobody else has to die tonight."

Kael looked at the four faces behind him. Then at Harlan, pale as paper, trying not to shake. He thought about the sword Vex took, and the wolves that followed a bleeding man, and a woman who counted the dead.

Kael counted exits. There weren't any. He counted allies. Four exhausted people who had known him for a day, and one man who couldn't walk.

"No," he said.

Oscar stepped up beside him, shield raised. "He's with us," he said. His voice shook, but he said it.

Sable's spear slid off her back. She said it the way someone might say the time. "Then I'll come in."

The torches hissed. The tall grass whispered. And for the first time since the plaza, Kael had no door left to find.