The blade falls, inexorable as an avalanche.

  Well. If it can fall, so can I.

  Gravity Shift.

  I kick off the ground and let gravity take me. Stomach lurching towards my throat, I drop cleanly between the construct’s twisting legs and out the other side. I don’t cancel the power even when the purple sky is visible again, allowing the fall to give me some room to work. A bit of Weaken Gravity is hopefully enough that I won’t splatter unceremoniously against the far barrier, but it does feel like I’m already moving awfully fast…

  Something hits me in the side. My vision judders. I—we—slow, slow, and slide to a stop. A smile growing on my face, I meet Threenut’s eyes.

  “My hero.”

  “Not over yet, twig,” he says, setting me gently on my feet.

  Thirty seconds left. I turn to face the titan again, feeling an impossible, reckless confidence. My soul energy reads 37. This thing moves quickly, big as it is, but that also makes it a bit clunky. Once inertia takes over, it has difficulty turning, adjusting. It’s going to attack again, throwing itself towards us in a terrifying explosion of strength and speed. In a straight line.

  “Three… get your stick ready.”

  “What is your aim?”

  “Uhh… this translation shit has gotta be limited somehow, but I’m just going to say ‘baseball’ and see what that means to you.”

  Threenut hums low in his throat. The construct crouches, readying its sword.

  “Three…” I say, eyeing the angry suit of armor.

  “Speak plain, twig, for I—”

  “Just hit the shit out of it!” I shout, throwing up the Deity's Bauble and activating two powers at once.

  Threenut spins around in place, then spins again, faster. His unbreakable fetch stick hisses through the air and slams into the unbreakable ball with a devastating crack. Caught in a horizontal Gravity Shift pointed towards the Warbreaker, accelerated by Strengthen Gravity using every point of soul energy I have outside of my last, and absolutely clobbered by a tiny Babe Ruth, the ball simply disappears, leaving behind the sound of reality tearing. In the same instant, the construct springs forward with all its strength, level disparity allowing it to practically ignore the aberrant gravity.

  It closes the distance between us in a blink, its sword raised to strike. Threenut, desperate, lifts his stick over his head in a last futile attempt to save our lives.

  But the sword doesn’t descend. The runes glowing along its length flicker, flicker, and die. The twin eyes of liquid ice disappear. Metal shrieks on metal, and the armor collapses in on itself. In the silence that follows, the only thing that breaks the blanket of stillness is a number blinking in the corner of my vision: 0:08.

  Victory! You have completed a severe Challenge of the Tournament! Claim your prize, Competitor!

  I barely have time to register the words before crystal blue text fills my vision.

  Achievement! “Child’s play!”

  You completed a severe Challenge through its more difficult and uncommon parameter!

  Reward: Your reward for completing this Challenge has been upgraded to a higher rarity (extreme)!

  Achievement! “Devour the Deities!”

  You have defeated an enemy with a twenty-five level advantage over you!

  Reward: Your Skills affect allies and enemies normally up to the greatest level disparity you have so far defeated. Current: 29.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Achievement! “Cracks in the facade!”

  You defeated a conventionally invulnerable construct by striking its only weakness!

  Reward: Any active Perception Skills are better able to detect weaknesses in non-biological foes.

  Achievement! “Teamwork makes the dream work!”

  You and another Competitor combined your Skills to create a devastating attack!

  Reward: Increased efficiency on any Skills used to benefit your allies.

  Congratulations! You've absorbed soul energy! Spend it to evolve yourself!

  Energy courses into my veins, enriching my soul, firing my nerves. It is rich and luxurious, but somehow… lacking. Like part of it has been held back. My soul energy blossoms back over a hundred, and my exhaustion disappears.

  Addendum!

  I wait for words to appear, wait for the Seventh to spew whatever hate-filled vitriol is burning through his brain right now, wait for… anything. And yet the space after the word ‘addendum’ remains eerily, ominously empty.

  Threenut leans on his stick, his posture suddenly weary. His eyes flick across like he’s reading. And reading. And reading. Oh. Yeah. He probably didn’t have all the weird eating achievements I have, but he definitely has them now. In fact, if he was only eleven when that happened, he probably got the one after I did, for thirty levels or whatever. I wonder what it is. There can only be so many variations of eating strong stuff, right?

  “Crush me nuts,” he whispers eventually, almost a sigh. He glances up at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Methinks, twig, that the both of us made a wise choice in this pact.”

  “What even happened to that thing?” I say, nudging a massive pauldron with my toe. I step around the edge of the pile of armor until I can get a look at its chest plate. There is a hole there, sure, and a hole that would certainly hurt me, but it looks small and inconsequential next to the size of the construct. “I mean, it was just a ball.”

  “There must have been a seed, somewhere in there, what gave it strength,” Threenut says, gesturing vaguely with his stick. “By fate or fortune, it was found.”

  A pair of shining silver chests sit on the north side of the broad clearing, their surfaces shifting and morphing like mercury. I start that way, Threenut falling in at my side. Halfway there, we have to jump over a furrow the construct’s massive foot tore in the earth. I trip and fall over the lip of overturned soil, tumbling ass over teakettle onto the ground. Threenut gives me an incredulous look.

  “Were ye harmed?” His giant green eyes flick over my body, searching for some hidden wound. “Something in the spirit, perhaps?”

  “No, no,” I say quickly, feeling my cheeks heat. “No harm. Adrenaline fading, probably. Just, uh, misjudged the jump, or I guess step, but… reward chests!”

  I hurry towards the chest and kneel, ignoring Threenut’s mildly offensive chuckle. I am curious. I mean, the moderate chest gave me an indestructible ball, and another upgraded reward included my fancy new slippers. What the hell will an extreme chest offer?

  Clothes, please. A dress, pants, a skirt, something. I’m kind of afraid to see how little of my graduation dress still clings to my body.

  Identification: Challenge Artifact Chest (extreme)

  A rare reward for harrowing Challenges in the Tournament. The extreme version offers exotic, unorthodox, or unique artifacts solely befitting the Competitor.

  The chest doesn't flip open, but rather flows aside like water to reveal the perfect white light of the induction room. The light forms into a thin rod which shimmers faintly silver along its length. Definitely not clothing. But still… the little Pottermore nerd in me starts salivating in the back of my mind. A wand? A fucking wand? Am I going to be like—

  Identification: The Last Silk of the Laranya Progenitor (Unique Artifact, Crafting Material)

  The first Laranya, a broodmother matriarch from the time before names were needed, spun her web in lonely solitude, yearning for a companion with whom she could share her immeasurable tapestry. When the First gave her children, her joy overwhelmed her isolation, and she laid aside her sorrow and her art both. This silk is what remains of her last, unfinished, work.

  Imbuement: Variable. Find a Craftsman capable and worthy of working with this irreplaceable, priceless material.

  I sit back on my heels, not reaching for the thin stick wrapped in shimmering silver thread. Silk. Web? I don’t even know. A flash of confused rage explodes in my chest.

  Just wait a goddamn second. Find a craftsman? Are there crafting Classes? Did this stupid system just offer me a ‘priceless’ set of fishing line instead of a fucking shirt?

  “The Tournament is different every time, limited only by the creativity of the Twelve, which is limitless. Perhaps there are beings you can interact with who are not Competitors, this time around. Perhaps there will be incentives for Competitors to work together, though the path that would lead a Competitor to dedicate themselves to the creation of artifacts when they must certainly fight for their lives… such a path is cloudy indeed.”

  Groaning, I reluctantly grab the floating stick. It is light in my hand, light enough that I have to check twice that I’m actually holding anything. The silk seems to glow with a light of its own, beautiful and almost mesmerizing. This is some ancient spider’s silk… or something like it, a Laranya or whatever-the-fuck. Wary, I touch just the tip of my pinky to the thread and pull it away quickly. My chest eases slightly when my finger doesn’t stick fast. It would be just like Dickhead to give me something that would immediately fuse with my hand or poison me with incurable rabies or something.

  “That isn’t how these things work, Competitor.”

  Says you. Didn’t you also claim that the Tournament is different every time?

  “There are rules.”

  Which the Seventh doesn’t always follow.

  Threenut’s chest opens to reveal a helmet shaped like half an acorn, something that only a tiny little sucker like him could wear. I narrow my eyes to get a read on what it can do, but, before I can get Identification to trigger, the white barrier disappears from around the clearing. My eyes snap to the path leading farther onward. To the pair of figures squaring off against each other over a panorama of broken bodies.