Chương 82: 3.7 Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd (9:08)

Z3ke (Original Poster) IT DOESN'T WORK. I NEED PDFS!! QUICK CrushDaddyXx What do you mean it doesn't work? Black Betty is the PERFECT song for a chase. It's got a fast rhythm and aggressive energy. It's crowd-friendly and it doesn't waste time on a long intro sequence. Just BAM, right into the song. The_Joss_Bat Hey, minor problem: Zeke can't access links outside the forum, so for him to read the tabs they need to be downloads instead of links to another website. BabyBloos Oooo. Good catch Joss.

That also means we're not locked into Black Betty anymore. GUYS!!! Emergency brainstorm session. What's the best possible chase song? RedMonty Oh Black Betty is excellent. I'm partial to Thunderstruck. Zeke can really play to the crowd with the lyrics. It's an excellent crowd song. Bonus points for not needing a good voice to sing it either. ShivSays Plus it's got that escalating energy where it feels like something terrible is about to happen every couple of seconds.

And you make a good point about not needing a lot of singing skills. That's perfect for Zeke because, as much as I love him, he's got the problem of all his plans turning to shit. Bilbo | Black Betty is the PERFECT song| I would've went with Immigrant Song. ShivSays Yes. Immigrant Song sounds like the start of an apocalypse. As soon as it starts everyone knows that things have become catastrophically bad. That's useful if Zeke is trying to escape things. Anonymous_S I think I have an idea where this is going.

He is in a chase and he found out particular kinds of songs help in particular situations, like chase song in a chase ig. Shukuen Ooh, that's right. The Rockstar class's gimmick was turning songs into environmental effects. I wonder how that actually looks IRL to Zeke if he needs something fast paced and aggressive. DashofSalt It's far too late, but: https: //gprotab. net/en/tabs/the-vines/get-free StoryLeech I'm more interested in hearing what all happened with the arena.

The last we heard from Zeke he was supposed to be "entertaining" the Black Teeth in the arena. Now he comes back and he's demanding chase music and yells about PDFs. That means something happened in the arena and it went horribly wrong so he's either currently being chased or he's planning a chase sequence. WTF mate? Zeke, we need to work on your communication skills.

ReCoil44 (Primary) One would assume that if Zeke has returned and suddenly started demanding high-tempo pursuit music, then events have progressed far beyond the preparation phase of the operation. This of course raises a rather important question for Zeke. Did the sonic attack work? More specifically, I have several questions about the attack. Did the glyph network successfully amplify his performance?

Did the sonic attack wipe out a large section of the Chapel Pit which would allow for Zeke and his allies to escape? If the answer to those questions is a yes, then congratulations are in order. Mainly to me for coming up with such a plan in a short amount of time, but also to Zeke for having successfully weaponized a musical performance in a gladiatorial slave arena. This was one of the more ambitious plans that this forum has ever assembled, and I will now take my round of applause. Shootingblnks Wait wait wait.

Did ReCoil's stupid music riot actually work? That feels cosmically unfair somehow. Z3ke (Original Poster) EVERYONE SHUT UP AND GIVE ME TABS. NOW!! CrushDaddyXx Here you go Zeke. Let's stick with my idea. <pdfcoffee. com/black-betty-guitar-tab. pdf> Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay. I'm safe… ish. We stopped the car and I handed out a bunch of rations and water from my storage space. We're resting and eating and I figured it would be a good time to tell you all what happened.

Before you all start hitting me with questions about what I've been doing over the past few days, I think I need to get something out of the way first.

If I jump onto this forum and start typing in all caps demanding help, that means something dangerous is happening and I need answers immediately. That doesn't mean that I've got time for a massive debate about which chase songs would best fit my current situation. I was in the middle of a goddamn chase sequence, and instead of helping me, half of y'all started debating about which song had the best apocalypse vibe. Look, I appreciate the enthusiasm and how much you all wanted to give me the perfect song but…

holy shit guys. ReCoil, no the sonic attack didn't happen. I still don't fully understand how I did what I did back in the Valley of Echoes. Maybe I need to rank up my class skills some more, or maybe it was something with how the Valley played with sound and how that interacted with my class. I don't know, and I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to replicate it.

I can kinda feel something there with my class skills, and maybe I'll be able to do a sonic attack in the future, but it didn't help me with the Cathedral. And if I had to wait for some kind of sonic nuke thing, I'd probably be dead right now. MushroomCleric So what happened? We've all been trying to be good and not jump in while you're actively dealing with stuff, but I for one am dying to know how you actually got out of the Cathedral.

You said you're parked right now and handing out rations, which means that you've somehow escaped the Cathedral. StoryLeech | instead of helping me, half of y'all started debating about which song had the best apocalypse vibe. | Like I said before, we need to work on our communication skills. We need a code phrase or something that means: stop arguing and just answer the question. Or something like that. Z3ke (Original Poster) The code phrase is: I'M WRITING IN ALL CAPS NOW!!!

And, yea, I said we're safe but I don't really mean safe safe. We're away from the Cathedral and we're not getting chased right now. At least, as far as I can tell. But that doesn't mean we're okay. But first, because I know you're all going to keep asking until I explain it, let me tell you what happened back at the Chapel Pit. The Black Teeth pulled me out of the holding pens early in the morning without any sort of warning.

The gate opened and a bunch of guards stepped inside and the whole mood of the pen shifted. Everyone tried to crawl away from the guards and one of the Black Teeth just pointed at me and I was roughly manhandled up and out of the pen. When I was grabbed, there was this palpable sense of relief that spread through the pen. Obviously the other slaves weren't happy for me or anything. It was more that they were happy that the guards weren't there to grab them.

That's the thing with the Chapel Pit that's a little difficult to explain until you've been there for a while. Everyone that is stuck in the pens just stops reacting to all the horrible shit that happens around them. It's like they've all just run out of emotional energy to care about anyone but themselves. The first time somebody gets beaten in front of you or dragged away by the Black Teeth, everyone watches.

But by the tenth or eleventh time, you stop watching and instead just keep your eyes on the floor because you've accepted that terrible shit happens here every day. Jackie caught my eye as I was manhandled out of the pen. She was seated near the far wall of the holding pen and Elnor was awake next to her. Mikey, kinda hovering nearby, looked excited when he saw me getting pulled out of the pen. The guards marched me through the Cathedral and I noticed we were taking the same route to the arena as a few days ago.

While they were shoving me down the corridors, I started running through the plan in my mind and how it had morphed over the past couple days. Jackie, Mikey, and Elnor had spent basically every free moment of their times working the holding pens and the mining pit. They were talking to survivors and passing on the message that we'd all worked out.

Most of the people trapped in the Cathedral were exhausted and terrified and broken, so Jackie and Elnor focused on those few survivors who were still somewhat clearheaded. Their entire goal was to convince them that, once the chaos started, they should run. They needed to push and scream and cause confusion and make for the exits. Jackie was surprisingly good at this part of the plan. She had this blunt and practical way of speaking that was able to cut through all the fear in the slaves.

While we were mining, I'd see her casually sidle up to another slave and start asking them these small questions to get them thinking.

"If the guards got distracted right now, where would you go first? If somebody opened the exits, would you actually run?" They were small questions that didn't really sound openly rebellious, but it was enough to plant the thought of escape in a few of the slaves. Once people started thinking about the logistics of escaping, instead of just wallowing in despair, there was this change that flowed over them. It's kinda hard to explain, but it was like Jackie was planting little sparks of life in people.

You could almost see some of them waking up to the horrors of the Cathedral. Mikey, meanwhile, was focusing on the volatiles. He was looking for the angry slaves and the ones who just wanted to fight everyone. He talked to them quietly and it seemed like he was building himself an army by telling them to wait for the chaos before they started anything. Elnor was the one who managed to tweak ReCoil's plan so that it would actually work.

You remember how Null kept pointing out holes in the plan and saying things like the glyph placement was a huge problem because none of us could wander the Cathedral and graffiti the walls? Well, Elnor solved all that. Instead of trying to carve the glyphs directly onto the walls and floors, he started grabbing small loose rocks from the mines. Then he and a few other slaves smuggled them back to the holding pens and carved Null's microphone glyphs into the stones.

After that, during the work details, people would casually toss the rocks into places they wouldn't have been able to reach before. They scattered them beneath the walkways and behind supply crates. A few tossed rocks near the garages. Elnor knew some of the slaves who were working with the kitchens, and they scattered the rocks all over the Cathedral. I saw it happen from time to time.

A slave just casually reached into their pants and grabbed a rock and then flicked it into an area while the guards weren't paying attention. Slowly, over the past few days, they'd spread the glyph network through the Cathedral. While all that was happening, I was doing my own preparations. Kinda. The Keystone Elixir I'd got from the Pale Regiment had been sitting in my storage space for the longest time, mostly because I had some hangups about using it.

Partly it was because Persona already freaked me out with how much it changed the way I thought and acted sometimes, and the idea of instantly boosting one of my skills up to Rank 7 felt dangerous. But the other reason was that apparently I'm one of those idiots who plays RPGs and saves every consumable "just in case." Whenever I've played one of those games, I always had this small voice in the back of my head warning me against using health or mana pots because, what if I need it more for a later fight?

On top of all that, I couldn't even decide which skill to use it on. You all have badgered me about the best skill to boost to 7. You've talked about glyph writing, saying that it's magic and would be the quickest way to safety and power. Part of me wanted to put the elixir into my melee skill because it would instantly make me more dangerous and more likely to fend off any Black Teeth coming my way. And as far as my class skills go, what would be the best option for me?

Persona might help keep me calm and it stops me from freaking out. Instrument Mastery would help with my guitar playing. But eventually I settled on Performance, with a small voice telling me that it would help me interact with people with my music and that was what the plan called for. So, that's what I boosted. I drank down the elixir and my Performance skill got boosted to Rank 7 and it felt like somebody had rewired my brain.

I hadn't been able to test it out and see what it did since I'd been stuck in the holding pen, but I was hoping that it would give me something to work with. We got closer to the arena and everything became so much louder. At first all I could hear was a distant roar that echoed through the Cathedral, but as they marched me towards the arena everything started to sharpen into individual sounds. I could hear the cheering and the screaming and the chanting and the people laughing.

The entire arena sounded violently drunk and my stomach started to twist and I cursed myself, wondering what I'd gotten myself into. The guards kept shoving me forward while more and more Black Teeth started appearing all around us. Most of them were carrying bottles or cups, and they were yelling over each other and stumbling about in drunken groups. A couple of them noticed me getting marched towards the arena and they all started laughing. Apparently word had spread that I was about to perform.

I didn't like the sound of their mocking laughter. The Black Teeth leader who'd beat the shit out of me a couple days ago was waiting near the entrance to the arena. As soon as he saw me he grinned and there was something predatory about it. He grabbed the back of my shirt and roughly hauled me forward and I scrunched my nose up at the smell of alcohol pouring off his breath.

"Come on then, entertainer," he sneered as she shoved me out into the arena. The noise from the arena floor almost bowled me over. The stands were packed with Black Teeth all screaming at the fight happening nearby. We'd walked out into the middle of the arena and I noticed two slaves had been fighting each other, getting the crowd riled up. Some of the Black Teeth were standing on benches and shouting down insults at the fighters while a few more were placing bets.

I stumbled a little when the Black Teeth leader shoved me forward. The crowd immediately noticed me and a wave of mocking laughter rolled across the arena. The leader spread his arms dramatically towards me like he was introducing some grand attraction.

"LISTEN UP EVERYONE!" he shouted. His voice cut through the crowd and drew attention. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"The other day, this little shit had the balls to walk up to me and tell me he was an entertainer!" More laughter exploded through the stands. I kinda understood where they were coming from. I was bruised and dirty and half-starved and covered in blue Veylstone dust from the mine. There was no way I looked like a rockstar at that moment. The leader jerked a thumb towards me.

"This idiot says that he can improve the fights! He says he can make the crowds louder!" That got an even bigger reaction as the Black Teeth started stomping and cheering and a few of them screamed to throw me into the pit immediately. The leader laughed and pointed towards where the two prisoners were still fighting.

"I thought to myself…" he said dramatically, "maybe he's right." The crowd quieted slightly at that.

"Maybe he can entertain all you murderous assholes." The crowd laughed at that and he turned to grin at me.

"Either he provides some entertainment between the fights… OR DURING THEM!" The arena went feral. Black Teeth stomped and screamed and chanted and banged bottles against the table. They chanted for my death while pointing towards the pit. For some reason, Persona wasn't kicking in like it normally did and I felt a shiver of fear race up my spine. I'd grown used to having Persona turn on when things got stressful.

As much as I might complain about it, it was useful to have my fear dull a little and my brain pushed into a more confident mindset. But this time I think it didn't really work because the fear was hitting me too fast and because my brain had suddenly realized that there was a gigantic flaw in ReCoil's plan that nobody had fully thought through. I couldn't just pull out my guitar and start playing for the Black Teeth.

The second I reached into my dimensional storage space and pulled out a guitar from nowhere, every Black Teeth member in the arena would notice. At best, they'd rush me and take my guitar from me. At worst, they'd cut me open and try to figure out how my dimensional storage space worked. The Black Teeth leader noticed my hesitation and must have thought it was because I was afraid of the crowd. That got another bark of laughter out of him.

Then he reached into one of the pouches dangling from his belt and he tossed something at me. I barely caught it. At first, I thought he was just giving me a random piece of metal and my brain started protesting, asking what the hell is this for? Then my fingers wrapped around it and Instrument Mastery activated and understanding flooded into me. It was a jaw harp. It was a tiny, cheap strip of metal that could be placed in your mouth and it vibrated against your teeth to create a sound.

The crowd saw the confused look on my face and started laughing even harder now. They were expecting me to try and play the obscure shitty little instrument, and then fail, and then get summarily executed. Thankfully, Instrument Mastery chose that exact moment to save me from the crowd of drunken assholes. Even though I'd literally never touched a jaw harp in my life before, the skill started feeding me information. It gave me everything I needed to know.

I knew how hard I needed to pluck and how to shape the vibrations and how to alter the pitch with my breathing. It all felt weirdly natural, like I'd been practicing with the thing for years and I didn't need conscious thought to get what I needed from it. The first note I played came out awkward and thin and a cacophony of laughs greeted me. Then I adjusted and played the second and third notes. The vibrations deepened and the rhythm picked up and suddenly… I sounded good.

I'm not going to pretend that I sounded amazing or anything. I mean, I was only at Rank 4 and I was playing a jaw harp which is not really the best instrument around. But it was good enough that the laughter started to die down a little. The jaw harp produced this strange rhythmic twang that bounced off the arena walls and it kinda sounded like some bizarre folk-techno mix. Instrument Mastery kept adjusting me in small ways; faster here and slower there and change your breathing during this part.

Little by little, the music started to come together. The Black Teeth didn't start cheering for me or anything, but I could definitely feel a bit of surprise making its way through the crowd. They'd expected a disaster and instead got something weirdly entertaining. I glanced up and saw the Black Teeth leader narrowing his eyes, then he shrugged and turned away.

He was satisfied enough with my performing to not kill me immediately, and instead he stepped back towards the edge of the arena where he could watch both me and the fights at the same time. The arena matches kept going after that. Someone would die and their opponent would get dragged away screaming and then there'd be a lull while the next fighters got shoved into the pit. During those gaps the Black Teeth would point at me and yell for me to play again.

I played while trying to shut out what was going on in the arena. It was difficult because… have you ever seen people beat each other to death? Have you smelled the fights and felt the heat that comes from that kind of killing? I know I talked about the arena before but seeing it from the floor was a whole different beast from when I was seated in the stands. The crowd was cheering the suffering and it was making me nauseous.

Whenever someone got hurt bad enough, or their faces were caved in, or when blood was spilled, the audience exploded. There was one fight where a guy slipped in blood and another prisoner managed to pick up a bottle that someone had thrown into the arena and he smashed it into his opponent's face. The crowd started chanting for him to do it again and again. It was about an hour into my playing when I noticed a group of slaves had been roughly manhandled to the arena.

I guess the Black Teeth had wanted more victims, and they wanted to terrorize the rest of the slaves. It was a way for them to say "look what happens when you step out of line." Jackie was in this group. She'd snuck in with them and, even from across the arena, I could tell she was tense as hell. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest and her eyes were darting around the arena to look at all the Black Teeth. We made eye contact and she gave me the smallest nod imaginable and I understood immediately.

The glyphs were in place and everything was ready. My stomach dropped because everything was becoming so much more real and I still hadn't figured out a solution to the glaring problem of not having a guitar. It was so much worse than I'd originally thought because last night I'd carved the anchor glyph to the guitar, and now that it was safely seated in my storage space I knew that it was completely useless to me. I needed another option and I needed it fast.

So, I slipped one hand into my pants pocket and quietly activated my dimensional storage space. Trying to do it all subtle-like while standing in the middle of the arena wasn't easy. I reached into my storage space and grabbed the first thing I could think of: my harmonica. I'd been practicing with it back in The MIZ and got the hang of it a little. It wasn't as good as my guitar, and I wouldn't be braining anyone with it if they got too close, but it was better than the jaw harp.

But before I pulled it out of my pocket I cursed at myself because it still didn't solve the problem of not having a connecting link to the glyphs that all the other slaves had been making for the past few days. The guitar had the glyph and the harmonica didn't, which meant that if I played it my music still wouldn't connect to the other glyphs. And without the glyphs then I had no chance to recreate the sonic attack from the Valley of Echoes. By this point another fight had already started in the arena.

Someone was screaming and people were cheering. I heard one of the slaves begging for mercy while the audience laughed at him and I tried to ignore everything. My brain was running through all the possibilities and I started scanning the arena floor all around me. It looked like I was just trying to keep my focus off the fact that a bunch of people were dying nearby, but what I was really doing was looking for… there.

It was a tiny jagged shard of metal that had broken off some armor from one of the Black Teeth who'd jumped into the arena to beat on the slaves. I palmed it quickly before anybody noticed and cut my finger open with the edge. It wasn't a deep enough cut to cause me any real damage, but it definitely drew some blood. Red spread across my hands and I quickly drew the harmonica out of my pocket and scratched a glyph onto it.

It looked horrible, all bloody and jagged and a complete mess that was smeared across a piece of cheap metal. But, hopefully, it would work. I finished the last line of the glyph as the fight behind me ended. One of the slaves collapsed and the crowd roared and then all the eyes in the arena were back on me. I stood up slowly and looked out over the crowd. I turned to where Jackie was standing and she had Mikey and Elnor with her.

Elnor was completely still and I could see him looking out at the exits and the crowd and the guards. Mikey was vibrating with excitement, knowing that the plan was about to start and he'd get his riot. Jackie was looking like she was about to throw up. I gave them the tiniest of nods and then I activated the glyph on my harmonic. A sudden weakness slammed into me and it was all I could do to remain standing I felt some of my power being drawn out of me to connect to the glyph.

Null, back when he was explaining magic and glyphs and everything to me had said that glyphs took mana and you had to be careful about trying to use all your mana or you'd be killed. A small voice in the back of my head started panicking, wondering if, by trying to connect to all the glyphs, I had fucked up. Was I about to drop to the ground from weakness? Was I about to be turned into a desiccated husk? Scattered throughout the Cathedral, the glyph network started waking up.

Before I could lose my nerve, I raised my harmonica to my mouth and started playing. Earlier, you all had given me the tabs to Free Bird, and that was what I'd been planning to play. But now I had a harmonica and not a guitar, and a cheap piece of metal can't really play everything for that song. But I tried. I rushed straight into the ending solo without any buildup. It was pure chaos. The first few notes from my harmonica blasted out across the arena. To say it surprised people is an understatement.

I'd been playing with that shitty little jaw harp earlier, but now I had a harmonica and they are two completely different sounds. The screeching hit the crowd, and I could tell that several of the rock glyphs had been scattered around the arena. I could see Black Teeth start looking around, wondering where the hell the sound of the music was coming from.

Before anyone could stop me, and before I could get too deep into the song, and before I could look at Jackie and Elnor and Mikey and start wondering if the plan was going to work… all my class skills slammed together. Persona Rank 4. Instrument Mastery Rank 4. Performance Rank 7. Back when you guys were talking about skills, you all mentioned the synergy that can happen with class skills. Someone gets acrobatics, parkour, and a melee skill and tries to work them together and they can be strong.

But if someone chose the ninja class and got all three of their class skills working together, they'd be unstoppable. You all said that class skills amplified each other and played off each other and combined into something larger than the sum of their parts. Playing in the middle of that arena, I suddenly understood what you all meant. Persona pushed emotion into song. Instrument Mastery handled the technical execution. Performance grabbed the attention of every single person in the arena and refused to let go.

I felt all my class skills activate and got a sudden rush of energy racing through my body. Persona took my anger and my fear and my thoughts about Free Bird and it pushed it outwards. Instrument Mastery helped bundle it all together, and they both fed into Performance. Then the glyph network took all of it and magnified it. Sound exploded outwards through the Chapel Pit and made everything so much… bigger and more. The Black Teeth started looking confused. The sound blaring from my harmonica was way too loud.

And where the hell had I gotten a harmonica? The sound rolled through the arena from all directions at once. I could feel all the glyphs that Elnor and the others had scattered through the Cathedral. They were catching my music and amplifying it and throwing it outwards. The harmonica in my hands started vibrating as the sound stacked and multiplied and fed back into itself and I started worrying that the little piece of metal wouldn't be able to handle it.

Only a few notes into the solo and my eyes instantly met those of the Black Teeth leader. I could see the surprise on his face as he scanned the arena with narrowed eyes while the music screamed through the pit. Then his gaze locked onto me and I swear that was the exact second he realized that something was wrong. It was probably my fault.

Persona helps me become a better actor but, well, while everyone else was looking around all confused I was standing in the middle of the arena playing like a lunatic and you can't really act your way out of that. The leader slowly pushed himself off the wall and started walking towards me. I, meanwhile, had lost myself to the music. You can all make fun of me if you want, imagine me just sitting there and vibing to Free Bird while chaos reigned around me, but I don't know a better way to really explain it.

The second all three of my class skills synced together, my brain just stopped working. It was like all thought had fled from me and I was left with nothing but the emotion of the music. Aggression and anger and frustration and violence.

I took the beating heart of emotion that Free Bird unleashed - memories of the first time I'd heard it play, memories of watching Kingsman when it was used as the backdrop for a violent set piece, and all the memories of having just watched people bash each other's heads in in the arena - and I let it all out. All the fear and stress and fury that I'd been bottling up inside me since arriving at the Chapel Pit started bleeding out of me through the song.

ReCoil had said that I needed the sonic attack to cause a bunch of chaos to buy myself a chance at escaping. But that's not what happened. The moment started with a bottle. One of the Black Teeth members in the crowd suddenly hurled a beer bottle at another guard's face. The bottle shattered across the guy's forehead and, a second later, they were both screaming. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a guard shove another Black Teeth member. Another swung a fist and it smashed into a face. A table flipped over.

Shouts cut through the crowd. A knife was drawn and flashed out and came back red. The arena fucking exploded! It happened so fast that I don't really think I caught the moment everything went from "drunken debauchery" to "psychopathic violence." All the aggression that I'd been letting out in the song spread through the crowd. Black Teeth started attacking each other. Bottles were smashed over heads and someone was kicked out of the stands and fell hard to the arena floor. Everything devolved into total chaos.

The Black Teeth leader had been storming towards me when I'd started playing, but I saw him stop dead in his tracks and whip around towards the crowd. He looked stunned at how fast the entire arena had gone insane. Then his head snapped towards me and it was like he knew I was the cause of it. Obviously he didn't know about the glyphs or my skills or anything like that, but he knew that I had just released all that violence on his people. He roared and charged at me through the chaos.

He lowered his shoulder and bulldozed through people. A flying beer bottle was tossed his way and he ducked it before shoving one of his own men to the side. The whole time I kept playing and my eyes were widening as I saw him racing towards me. And this bird you cannot chaaaaange. The sound echoed through the arena walls and screamed through the corridors. Every note I was playing sounded too loud and too sharp and somehow so much bigger than what a harmonica should've been able to produce.

The Black Teeth leader was almost on top of me when Mikey hit him. I don't even know where the hell he'd come from. One second the leader was charging and the next Mikey had launched himself through the air like a damn missile, laughter boiling out of him so hard that I could hear it over all the violence. Let me say that again. Mikey was laughing. It was a straight up lunatic laughter that you hear when someone has found the exact moment they've been waiting their entire life for.

He slammed into the Black Teeth leader and both of them crashed into the dirt while I was still struggling to contain the song - because how the hell do you play Free Bird on a harmonica? Mikey mounted the guy and started wildly hammering his fists into the leader's face and arms while the bigger man tried to throw him off. Mikey was grinning and blood was running down from his mouth where somebody must have clipped him, but he looked happier than I'd ever seen him.

And all the while, he was laughing hysterically like he'd completely lost his damn mind. My attention jumped across the arena towards Jackie and Elnor. Both of them looked shell-shocked and they were both sporting the same stupid look on their face that probably matched the one on mine. I mean, none of us really expected this plan to work. Even if it did, I think the best any of us was hoping for was confusion or panic, but instead the entire arena had fallen into violence.

But this wasn't the violence of slaves smashing into each other for the benefits of the Black Teeth, like what had filled the arena every time I'd been here. No. It was Black Teeth tearing themselves apart. Knives flashed and fists were thrown and feet stomped into faces. One guy got hit and went down and was consumed by the mob that just rolled over him like a wave. Jackie recovered quickly and I saw her grab Elnor by the arm and drag him towards the repair bays nearby while the crowd surged around them.

I couldn't do anything but play. It's not like I didn't want to try and escape or get my ass out of the middle of all the violence. It's that, at that point, I don't think I could have stopped playing. The music had become too big for me and the harmonica was screaming in my hands while the glyph network amplified everything and blasted it through the Cathedral. I could hear the riot spreading. There were screams and gunshots and people running. Metal crashed and fighting erupted.

A wave of slaves suddenly burst into the arena from one of the side entrances and smashed into the Black Teeth. Some of the slaves had grabbed weapons that had been discarded in the chaos and they started swinging them at the Black Teeth. Those were probably the ones that Mikey had recruited. But other slaves were just trying to escape. I realized what was happening. Once enough of the slaves had started running, everybody else had followed. It was exactly like ReCoil had predicted.

Panic has spread through the Cathedral and the stampede effect kicked in hard. The fights were spreading and the shouts were getting louder and somewhere deeper in the Cathedral something caught fire and smoke billowed up through the corridors and into the Chapel Pit proper. Standing there in the middle of the arena I was given a snapshot of hell. But instead of losing myself to the violence, or being terrified at being so close to all the death, I just kept playing.

The Free Bird solo echoed through the smoke and the screaming and the violence. It reverberated off the walls and bounced back to the crowd and fed on their emotions until it eventually stopped sounding like an old rock song and started sounding like the end of the world. The music wailed through the Cathedral as people killed each other. I was nearing the end of the solo and started panicking because… what the hell was I supposed to do after that?

That's when I heard tires screeching and my attention was drawn to the side of the arena. A massive black jeep, covered in all that shit the Black Teeth like to put all over their vehicles, came tearing out of one of the repair bays and nearly flipped over as it came to a stop. Black Teeth scattered out of the way to avoid getting run over. Jackie was behind the wheel and Elnor was in the passenger seat and somehow he'd gotten his hands on a shotgun.

Two Black Teeth scrambled up from the dirt and rushed the vehicle. Two blasts from the shotgun folded them both instantly and Jackie stood up from her seat, cupped her hands, and shouted at me.

"MOVE, ZEKE!!" I stopped playing and everything felt wrong immediately. I hadn't quite been at the end of the song but I just stopped playing and there was an ache in my chest at not finishing off the last few notes. But I knew I needed to run and I wasn't going to get a better shot at an escape, so that's what I did. I vaulted over two Black Teeth wrestling in the dirt and sprinted for the jeep.

Somebody clipped my shoulder and I nearly spun sideways before I managed to reach the jeep and jumped into the back seat. I heard Elnor and Jackie calling out for Mikey. I situated myself in my seat and turned back to the arena. Mikey was there, covered in blood and laughing and slamming punches into the Black Teeth leader while everything burned around them. I think all three of us realized in that moment that Mikey wasn't getting into the jeep.

He'd been completely consumed by the chaos that he'd wanted from the very beginning, and there was no reaching him. Jackie muttered something that got lost in the chaos, then she slammed the jeep into gear and floored it. We tore away from the arena while smoke rolled through the Cathedral behind us. Fire climbed up the walls and people ran screaming through the corridors. Black Teeth fought each other with knives and guns and bats and their fists.

Slaves raced from the pit and ran as fast as they could to try and get away. We raced towards the exit route that MapHack had pointed out in his PDF. Jackie was pushing the jeep as hard as it could go. That's when I heard engines roaring from behind us. I twisted around in my seat and saw two massive black trucks bursting through the smoke, chasing after us. Both trucks were covered in welded metal and spikes and chains and bones.

I screamed at Jackie to go faster and we finally hit the exit and exploded out of the Cathedral and into the open air of the Deadlands. Cold air hit my face and dust kicked up behind the jeep. I could feel the echoes of Free Bird racing through my body. It was a song about freedom and independence and in the open air of the Deadlands, after all the chaos of the Chapel Pit, the song felt… right. True. Then I looked behind us again and the two trucks were still there.

Judging by the smoke trails deeper in the Cathedral, and the sound of roaring engines, more were coming.