I’m already gone.
The arena shifts around me—grids of rusted wire, warped scaffolds, spikes where the old walls caved in. My boots don’t slip. My hands don’t falter. The maze knows me now.
Above, the crowd pounds their feet in unison.
Epsilon!Epsilon!Epsilon!
The rhythm echoes down through the cage stacks, like blood in a throat.
Not cheering. Not chanting.
Calling.
My blood vibrates with the sound. My limbs sync to the rhythm.
Epsilon!Epsilon!Epsilon!
Each stomp is a pulse. Each pulse is a command.
I obey.
My breath is steady. My vision floods with targeting overlays, proximity heatmaps, exit vectors. But I ignore them. I’m not calculating. I’m ascending.
My hands tear through the last grid. I stand on the top of the cage maze—above the arena, above the pit, above the screams.
The crowd roars. The drums of their boots shake the world.
Epsilon!Epsilon!Epsilon!
I open my arms. Let them see me. Let them think I belong to him.
The first one reaches me and…
I’m somewhere else. Peace. Quiet. Dark.
The space between worlds.
The silence so loudit roars like a memory.
I want to stay. I want to grab Clara from that lab, bring her here, and let this peace be our ‘good world’.
But I can’t get to her. Not from here. Not empty.
I need to be able to fill her back up.
So I sift. Ignoring the peace. I sift. Scanning the frequencies, dippin’ in, backin’ out when I don’t find what I’m lookin’ for.
Because I can’t use a cave filled with monks now. I need more than the diggers under the ground buildin’ tunnels.
I sift. Again. Again. Through broken timelines and threadbare cities.
I need fodder.
The kind of sacrifice one only finds in war.
I find it.
Not a battlefield. A slaughterhouse.
