Chương 43: [B2] Chapter 1: The Second Leg

The black floor was different this time in one respect only: there was less of it occupied. Zero counted before he understood why he was counting. 1, 024 team boundaries had once spread across this reflective surface, gold-bordered and stretching toward a horizon no orientation chamber should have possessed. Now, the count stood at 512. The floor had not shrunk, instead, the distance between occupied spaces had grown. Zero looked at what remained rather than what was missing.

He had learned, over the past months, that this was called 'optimism'. His team's boundary held its usual members: Viria sat cross-legged with her chin propped on one fist, watching distant silhouettes with the attention she gave anything that might become a joke later. Yukito stood near the boundary's edge, weight even, hands visible. Miho knelt with her sword laid flat across her knees, checking the edge with two fingers in the same unhurried motion she used before and after everything that mattered to her.

Her tails moved while she worked. Both of them. Zero had catalogued the second tail on three separate occasions since it appeared, and had not yet brought it up. It had arrived the night the sponsorships landed, sometime between Ninefold's visit and morning, and Miho had said nothing about it, which he understood to mean the subject was hers to open. The tails moved together, unhurried, without the tight, deliberate control she had once applied to every motion she made in front of him. He filed the difference.

He did not know precisely when her tail had stopped needing to perform calm. But not knowing didn't bother him as much as it once would have. A window opened above the boundary, snapping Zero out of contemplation. World 1 — Concluded Teams Entered: 1, 024. Teams Advancing: 512. Team Slot 008 (Team Zero): Advanced — 1st in final point standings. World 2: The Untamed Wilds — Deployment Pending.

"First place," Viria said, reading it upside down over his shoulder.

"Still enjoying that. I want it known that I intend to enjoy it for a considerable amount of time."

"You have enjoyed it for almost three weeks."

"I intend to enjoy it for considerably longer than three weeks, Zero." Miho did not look up from her blade.

"You have mentioned the ranking eleven times since we arrived in the plaza."

"Slander."

Zero opened his own status while the chamber filled, the way he opened it most mornings now, less to check the numbers than to confirm they were still his to check. STATUS MENU: Name: Zero Race: Chimerian (Modified being) Class: None — (Unranked) Level: 32 HP: 1450/1450 Strength: 46 Agility: 54 Endurance: 62 Intelligence: 43 Willpower: 50 Talent: 25 Unique Stat: Anima — 2500/2500 Free points: 20 Skills: Adaptive Shift Lv. 5; Biological Mimicry Lv. 4; Identify Lv. 4; System Intuition Lv.

3; Spiritual Shapeshifting Lv. 3; Silent Mantis Dual Strike Lv. 2; Rabbit's Step Lv. 1 Titles: Fast Learner (#501), The Specimen System Trait: Race Evolution Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Sponsor: The Archivist of First Errors He still had 20 free points from the rewards. He had been holding on to them, waiting for information that would tell him where they mattered. He did not have that information.

But he allocated them anyway, all 20 into Endurance, and watched the number resolve from 62 to 82. The reasoning was simple enough to state in one line: in every fight that had nearly killed him, the deciding factor had been whether his body could remain intact long enough for him to think of something. Strength had never been the constraint. Duration had.

"That's a lot of Endurance," Viria said, reading over his shoulder without pretending she wasn't.

"I intend to survive things."

"That's the most Zero sentence you've produced this week."

"Thank you."

Enigma arrived the way they always arrived, which was by occupying space that had been empty an instant earlier. Murmurs across the boundaries dropped to nothing before the main mouth opened.

"Congratulations," it said,"to those of you who did not die, disqualify yourselves, or bore me into revoking your invitations. Savor it briefly, as I have somewhere to be." A smaller mouth near its collar started to object,"Actually–" A tentacle slapped the mouth shut. Enigma's main mouth continued, ignoring the attempted interjection.

"World 2 will not be gentler than World 1. The Untamed Wilds is a realm of considerable size, no population of intelligent races, and an ecosystem that has certain opinions about underprepared visitors." Translucent panels distributed themselves across every boundary faster than any team could track the motion.

"Each team deploys into its own territory, alone. Your objective is singular: Locate and defeat your Assigned Apex Predator." The panel resolved above their boundary. World 2: The Untamed Wilds Objective: Locate and defeat your assigned territory's Apex Predator. Assigned Territory: Sector 8 Assigned Predator: Midnight Jaguar Items provided: 4x water canteens 4x backpacks 20x daily ration servings (View full list) Warning: Apex-tier designations reflect confirmed dominance within a bounded ecosystem.

Confirmed dominance is not static.

"You're just… giving us stuff?" Viria asked with incredulity.

"Believe me, I don't want to either," said the clone of Enigma that had appeared in their boundary.

"But if I didn't, far fewer than 256 of you would survive. And that would complicate the logistics."

"What does the last line mean?" Yukito asked, changing the subject.

"It means exactly what it says," Enigma said, delighted.

"I find it very informative, personally." Viria groaned.

"I hate you." Enigma's smile grew wider. Miho sheathed her sword.

"How large is a territory?"

"Large enough that you will not see another team once you land, and not for at least several days after that. Small enough that hiding from the problem is not, ultimately, a viable strategy." The countdown resolved above the boundary, silent and unhurried, and then the floor dissolved into green.

Heat struck first. Not the dry heat of the Shattered Peaks' lower passes, but something thick and standing, dense enough that Zero's first breath registered as more of an effort rather than a reflex. Humidity followed, high enough that his skin read it the way it had once read laboratory climate gauges: saturated, organic, and loaded with matter no sealed room had ever produced. The canopy overhead was not a ceiling.

It was practically a second world stacked over the understory, green folding into deeper green until the sky survived only as scattered fragments too distant to warm anything below. The ground gave under his weight and sprang back, moss over root systems thick enough to walk along. Water moved somewhere close and somewhere far at the same time. Then, there were the sounds. Insects buzzed, birds called from heights he could not see.

Somewhere distant, a body moving through undergrowth with the confidence of something that had never needed to move quietly. Zero turned in a slow circle and ran the inventory he ran in any new environment. There were no paths. There were game trails worn by generations of animals, which he had expected, but nothing at all resembling a route intended for feet.

"Enigma was correct," he said, mostly to himself. Miho looked at him with an expression that Zero had learnt meant continue when it came from her.

"Humans have never lived in this world." Miho considered the implications of that.

"Then nothing here has learned to be afraid of people," she said, and drew her sword. Yukito had already crouched at the base of a root system large enough to form its own hill, one palm flat against wet bark, testing the shadow it threw against light that barely reached this far down.

"Shadows are thin," he said.

"Everything's diffuse. I can work with it, but I'll have less to grab than I'd like." The distant weight moved again, farther off this time, unhurried, entirely unconcerned with four new arrivals in its territory. Sector 8 Objective: Locate and defeat the Midnight Jaguar. Status: Predator not yet located.

Zero read it, then looked at the canopy stretching unbroken in every direction, at ground that held no path because no path had ever been needed, at his teammates already arranging themselves into the loose formation they used when a search was about to begin.

"We move before the light changes," said Miho, already walking.

"We are not going to be helpless before night falls."" Especially with an apex predator called a 'Midnight Jaguar'," said Viria, in an attempt to lighten the mood. Zero ignored her and fell into step beside Miho, cataloguing terrain as he went, and found that for the first time since landing, nothing he counted told him anything useful at all.