NEXUS TRIAL: The Rise of Liam Parker

Survival at Any Cost

Liam’s entire world had narrowed down to the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other and ignoring the screaming agony radiating from his torn calf muscle. Sweat poured down his face and stung his eyes but he couldn’t spare the energy to wipe it away, and his breathing had become ragged gasps that tore at his throat with each inhalation. The archway that marked the end of the bridge seemed to be getting closer but not fast enough, and behind him the relentless advance of the collapse continued to eat away at the structure beneath his feet.

People around him were in similar states of desperation, their faces twisted with pain and fear as they pushed their bodies beyond what should have been possible. An older woman in her fifties was running just ahead of Liam and she kept looking back at the collapse with wild eyes, and he could see that she was starting to slow down as her enhanced stamina reached its limits. A younger man tried to push past her and in doing so knocked her slightly off balance, and Liam watched in horror as she stumbled and went down hard on her knees.

The woman tried to get back up but her legs were shaking too badly to support her weight, and she looked around at the other runners with pleading eyes that begged someone to help her. Liam felt something twist in his chest as he approached her position because stopping to help meant risking his own life, but leaving her to die meant accepting that he was the kind of person who could make that choice. His father had always taught him that character was defined by the choices people made when nobody was watching, and that lesson echoed in his mind even as his survival instincts screamed at him to keep running.

He made his decision in a split second and reached down to grab the woman’s arm as he passed, using his momentum to haul her back to her feet. She gasped in surprise and pain but managed to start moving again with his support, and together they stumbled forward while the collapse closed in behind them. The extra weight of supporting another person sent fresh spikes of agony through Liam’s injured leg and he could feel something warm running down his calf that was probably blood, but he gritted his teeth and refused to let go of the woman’s arm.

“Thank you,” the woman gasped between ragged breaths, and tears were streaming down her weathered face. “Thank you so much young man.”

Liam didn’t waste breath on responding because he needed every bit of oxygen he could get for running, and speaking would only slow them both down. The archway was perhaps two hundred meters away now and the collapse was maybe thirty meters behind them, which meant they had less than a minute to cover the remaining distance. His wristband was pulsing frantically against his skin as if urging him to move faster, and through his blurring vision he could see numbers counting down in the corner of his display showing exactly how many seconds he had left before the void claimed him.

Other runners streamed past them on both sides, most of them too focused on their own survival to spare any attention for the struggling pair. A few people shot them looks that might have been sympathy or might have been contempt for being too weak to save themselves, but nobody else stopped to help. The girl who had run beside Liam earlier had already made it through the archway and disappeared, having pulled far enough ahead that he had lost sight of her several minutes ago.

Liam’s injured leg finally gave out completely when they were about seventy meters from the archway, and he went down hard enough to skin both his palms on the metallic surface of the bridge. The woman he had been helping cried out and tried to stop but he shoved her forward with the last of his strength, knowing that at least one of them needed to make it through. She hesitated for just a moment before continuing on alone, and Liam rolled onto his back to see the collapse bearing down on him like an approaching wave of nothingness.

Time seemed to slow down as Liam lay there watching his death approach, and his mind flashed through memories of his mother and father and all the things he would never get to do or say. He thought about Derek’s mocking face and Collins’ satisfied smirk and Principal Matthew’s disapproving expression, and rage flooded through him at the unfairness of dying here without ever getting the chance to prove them all wrong. The wristband on his arm sent one final pulse of energy through his body like a desperate last attempt to keep him moving, and something inside Liam snapped.

He rolled onto his stomach and started crawling forward with his arms alone, dragging his useless legs behind him and leaving a trail of blood on the bridge surface. Every movement was torture and his vision kept threatening to go black, but he refused to give up and let this be the end of his story. Other people were still running past him and some of them were close enough to the collapse that they were screaming in terror, and that sound drove Liam forward with renewed desperation.

The archway was still forty meters away and the collapse was less than ten meters behind him now, close enough that he could feel the air pressure changing as reality itself dissolved. His arms were screaming in protest and his hands were slick with blood and sweat making it hard to grip the smooth surface, but he kept pulling himself forward one agonizing meter at a time. A man running nearby tripped over Liam’s trailing legs and went sprawling, and his scream cut off abruptly as the collapse caught up to him and erased him from existence.

Liam forced himself not to think about what he had just witnessed and focused everything he had left on reaching that glowing archway. Twenty meters, fifteen meters, ten meters, and behind him the collapse was so close now that he could no longer hear the screams of other runners because they had all either made it through or fallen into the void. His arms were completely numb and operating on nothing but muscle memory and stubborn refusal to die, and through his fading vision he could see the archway looming above him just a few meters away.

The collapse reached his feet and Liam felt a strange sensation of nothingness starting to spread up from his toes, as if parts of his body were simply ceasing to exist. He let out a roar of defiance and threw himself forward with one final desperate lunge, stretching his arms out as far as they would reach toward the glowing blue light of the archway. His fingers brushed against something that felt like electricity and then suddenly he was tumbling through space, and behind him the bridge completed its collapse with a sound like reality tearing apart.

Liam hit solid ground on the other side of the archway and lay there gasping like a fish out of water, unable to move or think or do anything except breathe. Relief came first. Then guilt. He was alive and his mother had no idea. She would be worrying, searching, blaming herself, while he stood in a world she didn’t even know existed. The thought made his chest ache. For the first time since entering the Nexus, he wondered if surviving was enough to justify what he’d done.

Every part of his body hurt in ways he hadn’t known were possible, and his injured leg felt like it was on fire despite the strange numbness that had crept up it during those final moments. Slowly his vision started to clear and he realized he was lying on smooth stone in what appeared to be an enormous plaza filled with thousands of other survivors who were in various states of exhaustion and distress.

The woman he had helped was kneeling nearby with her hands pressed to her face as she sobbed with relief, and when she saw that Liam had made it through she crawled over to him and grabbed his hand. “You saved my life,” she said through her tears. “You could have left me behind but you didn’t and you saved my life.”

Liam managed a weak nod but couldn’t find the energy to speak, and he let his head fall back against the stone while he waited for his heart rate to return to something approaching normal. Around them other survivors were checking themselves for injuries or helping friends and family members who had made it through, and the plaza echoed with the sounds of crying and relieved laughter and people calling out names to find their loved ones.

The silver figure materialized above the plaza just as it had appeared above the bridge, and its presence immediately silenced the crowd as everyone turned their attention upward. Liam forced himself to sit up despite the protests from his abused muscles, and he saw that his wristband was displaying new information now including something called a trial completion notification.

“The first trial is complete,” the figure announced in that same emotionless voice. “Of the nine thousand seven hundred and forty two participants who began, two thousand five hundred and seventy eight have survived to advance. Those who fell have died permanently in accordance with the rules established at the beginning. Survivors have earned one hundred experience points and will now be given time to recover before trial two begins.”

The casual mention of over seven thousand deaths sent a ripple of shock and grief through the survivors, and Liam felt sick as he realized the true scale of what had just happened. Seven thousand people had died in the space of maybe twenty minutes, erased from existence because they hadn’t been fast enough or strong enough or lucky enough to survive a collapsing bridge. The weight of all those lost lives pressed down on him and made it hard to breathe, and he wondered how many of them had families waiting at home who would never know what happened to them.

His wristband chimed softly and new information appeared in his vision showing that he had gained enough experience to reach level two, and apparently this came with something called attribute points that he could distribute to improve his base statistics.