Their assigned pod sat along the inner ring of the arena, angled toward a central pit where projections of previous matches played in faded loops. The shell was a gently curving cradle of matte black and gold, with Dreamspawn conduits running beneath translucent panels like veins of light.
A tech in a muted jumpsuit checked their IDs - only the credentials, never the faces - and nodded them through with professional indifference.
Tessa moved first, familiar with the hardware. She checked the harness dangling from the pod's upper arc, tugged at the straps, tightened a buckle, adjusted the neural interface bands so they sat at the right height.
"Shoes off," she said to Rhett. "You do not want to wake up with your feet numb."
He toed off his boots and stepped up to the pod. The cushioning molded under his weight. He settled back, feeling the gentle give as the cradle took him in. The harness came down over his chest. Tessa leaned in close to fasten it, her hands moving with easy efficiency.
Her hair brushed his shoulder as she reached past him to clip the last connector. He was close enough to smell whatever soap she had used before they got here, mixed with metal and something that was just uniquely her.
"You've done this a lot, haven't you?" he said, to distract himself.
"I've done this enough," she said. "Getting good at the Dive is really more about quality than quantity."
Her fingers skimmed the curve of his collar, checking the alignment of a sensor pad. It appeared logical, but it felt like something more than technical.
He let his head rest back fully, looking up at her from the angle of the cradle. "Any last-minute advice?"
She considered him for a second. The usual sharpness in her expression eased by a fraction.
"Stay aware of me, ok?" she said. "The real me, the idea of me even. Not the me you see. Dream physics will lie to you. Your own head will lie to you. I will not."
"That's a lot of pressure for one person," he said.
"Good thing we're not just any persons," she replied.
Her mouth tipped into a quick grin, the kind that showed she was as eager for this as he was. This was their element - risk, skill, improvisation - with the volume turned all the way up.
She moved around to the other side of the pod and dropped into the twin cradle beside his, her own harness descending. The tech checked their readings on a wrist console.
"Team Crescent registered," he said. "Neural sync stable. Royale session in three minutes. Once the Dreamspawn engages, you ride it out. If you panic, remember that your body is here, not there. If you die in the dream, you wake up. Eventually. Probably with a headache."
"Comforting," Niko muttered from the edge of the platform. He looked small against the glow of the arena, shoulders hunched around his satchel strap. "I'll just be over here, watching your very alive bodies and trying not to vomit."
Rhett turned his head toward him as far as the harness allowed. "If I start screaming stock tickers, you have permission to yank the plug."
"That's not how this works," the tech said reflexively.
Niko ignored him. "You come back," he said. "Both of you."
Tessa gave him a lazy salute from her cradle. "We always do."
Rhett wished he believed that as easily as she sounded.
The pod's canopy lowered in segments, panels sliding into place above them. The world narrowed to the soft glow of interior lights and the delicate hum of systems spooling up. A faint vibration trembled through the cradle as the Dreamspawn lattice linked to the pods, invisible threads connecting their minds to the waiting arena.
Rhett felt the first brush of it at the base of his skull - a warmth that was not physical, a tug that was not directional. It was like the moment just before sleep when the world tilted and perspective started to loosen… except this time, something else had its hand on the tilt.
He rolled his head left. Through the small gap between their canopies, he could see Tessa's profile. Her eyes were closed, but the corners of her mouth were curved, as if she could not quite suppress her anticipation.
Her right hand lifted blindly, fingers splayed, searching. His left hand did the same without thinking. Their fingertips met at the edge of the pod's frame, just a touch, just enough pressure to say I am here without saying anything at all.
"Ready?" she asked, voice low.
"Always," he said.
The Dreamspawn hum rose, a chord felt more than heard.
The arena lights dimmed.
Rhett's body stayed in the pod, strapped and safe in a room under a moving city, but his mind tipped forward as if someone had taken the floor and turned it into a slope.
The last thing he saw before the world dissolved was the glint of Tessa's chrome through the gap, and her hand still pressed against his.
Then the Crescent Well took him, and the real fight began.
Rhett hit the new world like a falling skyscraper. But there was no falling, not really. There was a blink of nothing and then his boots slammed into cracked sand, knees buckling as gravity pulled on him all at once. Hot wind slapped his face. The sky burned in colors that did not belong together, bands of emerald and violet and molten gold folding over each other like an aurora somebody had run through a glitch filter. He had enough time to register three things:
He was standing on a floating island - rather, a pocket of sand. There was a scope glint high and far to his left. The shot came a heartbeat later.
The air rang out, a projectile screamed past his ear. The sound punched through his skull, a layered shriek of metal and thunder. Sand exploded where his head had been just moments before, a fountain of red-gold grains spraying into the nothing beyond the pocket's edge.
Rhett dropped, hit the ground hard, and rolled behind the only cover available - a half-buried slab of concrete that might once have been part of a building wall before somebody's subconscious shattered it and left the piece here, floating in a dream desert.
His lungs dragged in air that tasted like heat and static.
"Welcome to the Royale," he muttered to himself.
The pocket stretched maybe 40 feet across. Desert sand, sun-bleached rock, one leaning framework of metal that suggested a ruined scaffolding. Beyond the edge, there was no horizon. There was only the nebula: dense, shifting bands of color and depth that went down forever.
Tessa's voice came from somewhere to his right, distant but clear.
"Snipers! Upper left cluster. Move, Thorne!"
He twisted, heart hammering, and saw her.
She stood two pockets away, on a separate island of desert, slightly higher than his. Her outline glowed faintly in his awareness, a Dreamspawn-generated team marker. She was already in motion, sprinting across her pocket toward the narrow gap between hers and his.
Rhett risked a glance over his makeshift wall.
The sniper nests were distant smudges on the far pockets. Two figures, prone along the edges of their own platforms, rifles sunk into their shoulders, bodies angled apart to cover different lanes. Their visors reflected nebula light, emotionless.
Another crack. A spray of sand erupted a meter to the left of his cover.
They weren't missing their shots, they were feeling him out.
He flattened again and forced his thoughts into order. There were twelve pockets in view, unevenly scattered at different altitudes. Some drifted a little, sliding in lazy arcs around each other. Each carried a piece of architecture on its back like a shell: a collapsed tower, a rusted shipping container, the skeletal remains of a comms mast.
The rules in his HUD pulsed at the edge of his perception, written in cool, uncaring glyphs.
LUCID ROYALE. TEAM COUNT: 8. ELIMINATIONS: 0.
He needed a weapon.
He popped his head up in a different place, a quick side glance around the other edge of his slab. One of the collapsed towers on his pocket had an access hatch that gaped half open. Something glowed faintly inside, some kind of workbench or table. The snipers did not like that. A third shot came, closer this time, chewing a chunk out of the hatch's rim, sending fragments spinning.
"Rhett!" Tessa sounded nearer. "You need to jump!"
"I would, but I'm kind of busy being a target!" he shouted back.
He picked his angle and tried to double his courage. The broken tower was 20 feet away, no cover on the approach. If he stayed here, the snipers would eventually angle him off the slab. If he moved, he was sure they would try to catch him mid-run.
He waited, listening past his own pulse for the smallest of patterns: the brief silence after the last shot, the rhythm of reload, recalibration, the slow exhale snipers always had whether they were awake or asleep.
There.
He exploded from behind the wall in a sprint, boots digging furrows into the sand. The world narrowed to the point between him and the hatch. Air burned in his chest. Another shot cracked; the impact threw sand into his peripheral vision, but it was behind him, just behind him, they were correcting too late -
He hit the tower, slammed shoulder-first into the open hatch, and rolled inside.
The space was cooler by two degrees and smelled like dust and old wiring. It also held exactly what he needed: a rack, half phasing in and out of existence, with three energy rifles hanging in the ghostlight.
He grabbed one. The weapon solidified the moment his hands wrapped around it, gaining weight and texture. Its surface was matte, with seams of blue-white running along the barrel, pulsing in time with his own heartbeat. Dreamspawn design: it felt like a memory of guns more than any specific model.
His HUD flickered.
H.E.C. RIFLE. RECOIL: HIGH.
He grinned despite himself. "Hello, bad decisions."
"Rhett!" Tessa again, closer. "Now!"
He reached the mouth of the hatch and looked toward her.
She was poised at the very edge of her pocket, body tilted forward like a diver about to lean off a rooftop. The gap between their platforms was a good thirty feet, maybe forty, with nothing but nebula below. His instinct said: if she jumped, she would descend in some kind of an arc and maybe, maybe, catch the far side if she was lucky. His instincts were wrong. She pushed off - and the moment her boots left the sand, the rules changed altogether.
The local gravity seemed to release her, shedding its claim, and something else grabbed hold instead. The pocket he stood on tugged at her like a magnet. Her body snapped forward in midair, pulled toward his platform with a vicious, invisible yank. Her stomach must have dropped straight through her spine. She rode it like she had done this a hundred times, limbs tight, momentum clean.
She landed in a skid of sand at his feet, knees bending to absorb the pull. The ground shuddered under the impact.
Rhett stared for half a second longer than he should have.
"You call that a jump?" he said. "I've definitely seen safer deaths."
"Are you kidding? That was a low pull," she said, slightly breathless, eyes already scanning the upper pockets for sniper flash. "Come on, your turn."
"Pass," he said. "I enjoy having my internal organs in approximately the usual locations."
A new shot cracked close. The round slammed into the metal frame beside his head, showering them both in sparks.
"Rhett. These snipers push and play the long game. We have to move."
He sighed. "Fine."
He backed up a few steps, rifle slung awkwardly in one hand, and eyed the edge. The nebula churned below in slow, hungry waves. The pocket opposite him - another desert island with a cracked foundation slab and the suggestion of an old billboard - sat at a slight angle, like a plate on a tilted table.
"I can tell you're overthinking it," Tessa said.
"Correct," he said. "That's how my brain works."
"Run," she said. "Don't look down. The pull catches you halfway. If you fight it, you'll spin. Do not fight it."
"You say that like you've seen someone spin."
"I've seen many people spin," she said. "Most of them did not appreciate the experience."
He lined himself up anyway. There were worse ways to die than trying to keep up with her.
The first of his strides felt normal - sand underfoot, muscles firing, air burning his throat. As he approached the precipice, he pushed away with everything he had, and his feet left the ground as gravity fluttered out from beneath him.
For a terrifying fraction of a second, he hung between worlds, body weightless, stomach lurching. The nebula yawned beneath him, a depthless storm of color and light. The sense of exposure was complete. The snipers could have painted his spine with a smile. Then the pull hit.
It grabbed him from the front, not the back, a sudden, violent drag at his sternum like an invisible hook had slid into his ribs and yanked him forward. His momentum snapped into a new vector. His limbs wrenched backward. His spine complained under the assault as his stomach tried to climb into his throat. But for what its worth, he didn't spin.
He slammed onto the next pocket in a rough roll, shoulder-first, sand scraping his cheek, his rifle trying to leap out of his hand. His bones vibrated. His heart did something complicated.
He lay there for half a second, face full of desert, and laughed once, sharp and a little hysterical.
"That," he rasped, "was terrible. Horrible. And yet I kind of want to do it again."
Tessa hopped across after him with insulting grace, landing in a smooth skid. "Told you."
Another shot chewed up the lip of the pocket behind them. They moved without needing to talk about it, dropping into a lower crouch behind the fractured billboard base.
The Snipers had not shifted nests yet. Rhett could see their silhouettes in his peripheral HUD: two bright blips on opposite high pockets, adjusting angles.
"Are we dealing with the Snipers first or last? Are there others?" he asked.
"Last," Tessa said. "Team Oracle likes to farm the chaos, but we can use it to our advantage. We don't want to be the last ones to go up against them if we can help it."
The arena seemed to agree. A new presence slammed into the pocket to their right, landing with enough force to send a ripple through the sand. Rhett turned, rifle up. The first thing he saw was a streak of red.
The girl who landed there was small, all wiry limbs and too-big energy. Her hair was braided back into a messy tail, and a strip of crimson cloth was wrapped around her throat like a flag. She wore modular armor plates that looked half-grown and half-welded. A pair of compact pistols spun in her hands as she straightened.
She grinned at them, eyes bright.
"Hi!" she called. "Which one of you wants to die first? Tick-tock you two, I'm on a schedule!"
Behind her, something heavier hit the adjacent pocket, the sand shuddered in response. A man pulled himself up from a partial kneel, massive shoulders rolling under plated augments. Husk. His arms were thick with reinforcement, his chest a slab of polymer and metal, his jaw squared off by some reinforcement mod that made him look more statue than human.
Team Crimson.
Rhett kept his rifle leveled. "We're a little busy getting shot at, if you could come back with a number we'll get right to you!"
Viper laughed. It was too big a sound for her size, delighted and vicious. "That would be boring! And you're Thorne, right?" She pointed one spinning pistol at him. "Husk, I want that one."
Tessa's voice was flat. "Get in line."
Rhett ducked behind a fractured support beam, sand sliding off its edge as another sniper round cut the air above him. Tessa scanned the upper pockets, gauging the angles, calculating ricochets.
That was when Viper made her move.
A metallic chirrup rose behind Rhett, too light to be a rifle, too sharp to ignore. He twisted just in time to see something round and insectile crest the lip of the pocket - a little sphere with eight flexing stabilizers and a pulsing red aperture.
"Aw, come onnnn," Rhett muttered.
The drone clicked once, like it was agreeing with him, before blasting him nearly point blank in the chest.
A concentrated graviton beam slammed into his ribs - silent but forceful enough to pick him up like a rag doll. Rhett felt the world rotate around him, pockets tilting, horizon spinning. Sand tore away under his boots as the beam hurled him backward, straight over a jagged split in the platform.
"Rhett!" Tessa shouted, but the distortion of the beam drowned her voice out in a low, humming pressure.
Rhett hit a half-collapsed pillar, rolling across its slanted surface until friction finally caught him. His lungs burned. His vision stuttered with static.
The drone reoriented, aperture widening, preparing to fire again - this time to blast him clean off the pocket. But not before Tessa moved into position.Her chrome arm snapped up. Fingers extended. Thumb cocked.
A finger-gun.
Viper laughed somewhere in the chaos. "What are you gonna do with that?"
Tessa whispered the word like a verdict.
"Bang."
Light erupted. in the form of a cutting beam that existed for no more than half a second - the purest line Rhett had ever seen, slicing through the air with no visible build up or warning. The pressure was so intense, it practically sucked out all the sound, like it brought its own vacuum. It hit the drone dead center.
The little machine didn't explode so much as it simply ceased altogether, collapsing into a ribbon of dissolving pixels that fell like ash into the nebula wind.
Silence followed, broken only by the snipers repositioning in the upper pockets.
Rhett lay still for a moment, chest heaving, staring up at Tessa as the last motes of the drone drifted away.
"What," he said, breathless, "the fuck was that!?"
Tessa wiggled the chrome fingers that had just fired the beam. The metal gleamed with faint residual heat.
"I have lots of tricks, Thorne," she said. "you'll see."
Her grin was feral. Proud. Beautiful.
Rhett swallowed hard. "Remind me never to get on your bad side."
"You're already there," she said, and offered her hand. "But I don't hold grudges against people I like."
He took it.
Her grip hauled him upright like he weighed nothing. Viper's scream of frustration echoed across the pockets. "Oh my god, you cheaters!" she yelled. "Who brings a death laser to a Royale?"
Tessa didn't look away from Rhett. "People who play to win, girlie. You're next."
The snipers continued to oblige the chaos. Another shot hammered into the sand a meter from Viper's feet, spraying grains across her boots. She hopped backward with an exaggerated squeak.
"Hey! Third parties are rude!" she shouted at the sky.
She snapped her attention back to Rhett, guns already coming up. She moved like someone had turned her reflexes up a notch too high and never dialed them back down.
Tessa moved at the same time. She slid sideways, chrome arm angled to catch the first burst. Energy rounds slammed into her forearm, the impact blooming in bright halos before dissipating. The Dreamspawn compensated, translating near-lethal shots into force inside the arena's pain-safe parameters.
Rhett shifted left, sighting down the rifle at Husk instead. The big man's job was obvious: soak fire, be a wall, scare anyone who got too close. He advanced across his pocket with slow confidence, each step sending small avalanches of sand toward the nebula's edge.
A sniper round cracked again, close enough that Rhett felt the shockwave in his teeth.
Team Oracle was patient. They were waiting for someone to make a mistake. But Rhett refused to be that someone. He drew a bead on Husk's center mass and squeezed the trigger. The HEC rifle bucked hard against his shoulder. The blast was a white-blue lance that crossed the gap between pockets in an instant. It hit Husk square in the chest, the dream-forged impact equivalent of a small missile.
The shockwave staggered the big man. His torso snapped back with a grunt, feet sliding, sand pluming around his boots. The plating across his chest glowed bright, then dimmed. The arena did not take him. Not yet.
"Rude," Husk said, voice a dull grind.
Rhett blew out a long, shaky breath. "You're welcome."
Tessa and Viper collided in a whirl of motion. Viper dashed in, pistol fire barking in alternating patterns. Tessa used the edges of the pockets like springboards, slingshotting from one to the next in tight arcs, momentum snapping her across gaps. She met Vipers attacks with efficient brutality, chrome arm deflecting shots, human hand striking in quick, precise blows.
Viper laughed through it all.
"You're fun!" she crowed, ducking under a swing and sliding past Tessa in a shower of sand. "We should do this again when we are not being farmed from the sky!"
A sniper shot punched a neat hole through the ruined billboard between Rhett and Tessa, close enough that the shockwave snapped Tessa's hair against her cheek.
"They're not going to let us schedule a rematch," Tessa said.
Viper glanced up at the sniper nests, just for a second.
That was a mistake. One of the Oracle rifles spoke as they made eye contact. The round took her in the side of the cheek. Her body jerked once, eyes going wide, as the the Dreamspawn translated lethal physics into clean elimination. Her outline tore into a lattice of light, fragmenting upward in a silent scream while her body dissolved into a spray of mist that the nebula drank like dust.
Husk bellowed. "Viper!"
He surged forward, rage finally putting speed into his movement. Rhett would not give him a clear path. He stepped back toward the perimiter of his pocket, boots feeling for the line where sand turned from stable to treacherous. The Dreamspawn pulsed at the edge of his awareness, acknowledging his intent. This place was not real rock and desert. It was consensus, shaped into something that pretended to be solid. It would listen if you pushed it.
Husk barreled straight at him, head down, arms wide to grab and crush.
Rhett fired again.
The shot hit a shoulder plate this time, spinning the big man half a step. It slowed him, turned his charge into something that could be redirected.
"Come on," Rhett muttered under his breath. "A little closer."
Husk planted one heavy foot onto the narrow band of compromised sand near the edge.
The pocket responded.
The ground slumped under the weight, grains pouring away in a sudden, hungry spill. Husk's foot dropped. His balance went with it. His arms pinwheeled as his center of gravity pitched toward the nebula's yawning glow.
He caught the part of the pocket with one hand, massive fingers digging into the crumbling crust. Rhett lifted the rifle for the finishing shot - but Tessa beat him to it.
She launched across the gap between their two pockets in a brutal arc, the slingshot pull grabbing her and hurling her faster than any human jump should allow. She hit the sand running and did not slow. Her chrome fist drove into Husk's chest with the same terrible efficiency she had used by the maintenance spires hours ago.
For a moment, Rhett saw the exact shape of the impact: the way her knuckles sank into the plated armor, the air blasting from Husk's lungs in a sound like a cracked bell, the microfractures spiderwebbing through the dream-metal. Light from the impact tore through him as heat from the attack bellowed outward.
The punch knocked him clean off the edge, fingers losing their grip in an instant. His body cascaded backward into the nebula, limbs flailing once before the colors took him. He dissolved into light before he ever started to scream.
The arena marked it with a simple, cold update.
TEAM CRIMSON: ELIMINATED.
Tessa turned, breathing hard, hair sticking to the side of her face. She shook sand from her hand as if she had just punched a heavy bag instead of a man built like a walking wall.
"You stole my dramatic end line," Rhett said.
"You're welcome," she replied.
Another shot slapped into the sand at their feet, interrupting any further commentary.
They moved together without needing to speak, dropping behind a low blasted ridge as more rounds chewed into the pocket around them. The snipers had lost their distraction. Now they had all the time in the world to kill the last visible pair. The air felt thicker as Rhett wiped sweat from his forehead - and saw something that did not belong.
A coaster sat in the sand beside his hand.
It was cheap plastic, translucent amber, with the EXECUTIVE LOUNGE logo printed in neat corporate font. It was half-buried, like it had been there for years. A ring of dried condensation stained its surface. His breath stopped. He blinked and it was gone - in its place, there was only sand.
Tessa noticed the pause. Her eyes flicked to his hand, then back to his face. "What?"
"Nothing," he said, too fast.
A flicker at the edge of the next pocket caught his attention. A service vest- the exact cheap cut he had worn last week, greasy around the collar - hung from a twisted metal rod for half a heartbeat before phasing out, leaving only the memory.
The Dreamspawn was not just generating desert and ruins. It was listening.
Fear spiked through him, sharp as any bullet. The idea of the arena vomiting his old life into the open made his skin crawl. The nebula pulsed as another sniper round landed close enough to rattle bones. He pulled himself together by force. The snipers did not care about his existential crisis. They cared about angles, cover, and the rhythm of his breathing. He risked a look.
Team Oracle had repositioned. One sniper now lay prone along a higher pocket directly ahead, barrel pointed down at their cover. The other had shifted to the far right, creating a vicious crossfire.
The snipers too easily moved in eerie sync. One fired. The other adjusted. One reloaded. The other shifted to cover the gap. No gestures. No shouts. No tells. Just mirrored purpose.
"Options?" Rhett said.
Tessa's gaze moved over the pockets in quick, calculating sweeps. "We can't stay here. They'll collapse this platform if they have to. We can move forward and to the right, take the lower pockets, force them to adjust."
"Love that for us," he said. "Minor concern: the part where moving involves getting slingshotted through their kill zone."
Tessa thought for a moment. "They're not the only ones allowed to adjust."
A new shape glitched into existence at the far edge of their pocket: a tray of drinks, perfectly balanced, glasses gleaming with condensation. The smell of citrus and cheap gin hit his nose, incongruous and sharp. He stared at it. Tessa followed his gaze, saw it too this time, and frowned. "That yours?"
"Unfortunately," he said.
The tray dissolved into a scatter of dice, bouncing once in the sand before vanishing.
She looked at him, something serious in her expression now. "You need to lock it down."
"I'm trying," he said through gritted teeth. "The problem is, my head doesn't seem to be taking feedback very well right now."
"Then give it something else to fixate on," she said. "Like not dying. On three. We jump right. Low pocket. Keep moving once you land. Do not stop for anything."
He tightened his grip on the rifle. "Do you count in normal integers or is this like your definition of safe odds?"
She ignored that. "One."
They both took a breath.
"Two."
The snipers shifted.
"Three."
They ran.
The edge came up fast. The nebula opened beneath them again, colors swirling with hungry patience. Rhett felt the world drop away and the now-familiar terror of weightlessness clench around his spine.
The pull hit a moment later, vicious and insistent, dragging him sideways and down toward the lower pocket Tessa had marked. A shot tore through the space between them as they flew, close enough that he felt the heat of it across his cheek. The force vector twisted, trying to spin him. He fought the instinct to flail and forced his limbs into alignment.
He hit the next pocket hard enough that his teeth clicked as he rolled and slammed up against a half-buried laptop that had no business existing in a desert. The screen glowed for a second, showing a login prompt with his name, RHE… flashing, then it blinked out and became just another slab of rock.
He pushed himself up, lungs burning, hands shaking, and laughed again, because the alternative was screaming.
This arena was trying to kill him. It had to be. His own head was trying to expose him. The snipers were zeroing in, but he felt more alive than he ever had.
Tessa landed beside him in a controlled slide, sand kicking up around her. Above them, the pockets shifted in their slow, grinding dance, and the nebula watched with patient, endless color.
The Dream Dive had stopped being a game. It felt like a question now, whispered under everything: What happens when the wrong man steps into the right war?
Rhett rose into a crouch, rifle snug against his shoulder, and looked up at the sniper nests. The snipers wanted a show, and he was done dancing exactly where they wanted his feet. The next pocket shuddered under Rhett's boots, a stuttering vibration that crawled up his legs like a warning. He braced against a fractured beam and watched the sand at the far edges start to fall - not down, not up, but sideways, drifting off in thin streams like the world had sprung a leak.
Tessa noticed too.
Her eyes cut to him once, sharp and assessing, then to the pockets trembling across the cluster. "Rhett," she said quietly, "you're tilting the whole damn map."
"I'm not trying to," he said.
"Oh, I know," she replied. "That's the problem."
A sniper round tore through the beam above him, spitting splinters that dissolved before they hit the sand. Oracle was tightening the box. The two of them were one exposed moment from getting clipped clean off the platform.
Rhett wiped sweat from his brow and caught another flicker - this one a tray of cocktail glasses resting neatly on the sand beside him. Cold condensation ran down their sides. He blinked. When he opened his eyes, the tray was gone.
Tessa followed his stare, saw nothing, and made a low sound in her throat - a mix between concern and calculation. "We're running out of time."
"That's fine, that's usually when I shine," he said.
A high pocket across the arena fractured along its underside, dream-sand pouring in glittering ribbons into the nebula. One of the snipers lay prone on it, rifle steady, visor reflecting the collision of aurora colors like a mirror turned toward madness. Tessa noticed the fracture, as a smile began to creep across her face. HER body shifted in response, subtle, predatory, electric.
"Oh no," Rhett whispered. "Don't you -" But she was already running. "TESSA -"
She launched herself from the platform with more velocity than he had seen before. The slingshot force grabbed her mid-air and hurled her forward like a human projectile. Her chrome arm cocked back mid-flight, body twisting into the momentum. She wasn't aiming for the pocket's surface.
She was aiming for the weak point beneath it. Her fist hit before she did. The sound was less a punch and more a detonation - metal and sandstone erupting outward in a violent blossom. The entire topside of the pocket blew open, support structures shattering into light. The sniper atop it jerked upward, rifle tumbling, body flung skyward like a kicked doll.
Tessa was still airborne, thrown off-course by the blast. She had nothing to slingshot from, no pocket in range, only open space and void below. At this rate, both squad members would fall into the void - a dual elimination.
Rhett didn't think. He raised his rifle, trying to track the position of the remaining sniper.
Breathe. Steady. Fire. You can do this.
But Tessa had no intention of falling into elimination.
She flung her hand upward with practiced ease, as a bead of light formed in the center of her palm - white, then blue, then searing. The air vibrated around it as her free hand gripped her wrist to stabilize what was about to happen next.
The detonation was phenomenal.
The plasma beam erupted downward, a blazing pillar of energy that blasted her backward in a high, arcing trajectory. The light lit the whole cluster, casting their shadows across pockets and nebula alike.
She rocketed toward a stable island of sand, unable to maneuver until she touched solid ground again. The second sniper saw it, and immediately realized her vulnerability. Rifle steady. Breath slow. Visor narrowing its aperture. From their vantage, she was a perfect shot - airborne, exposed, unable to change direction.
Rhett practically saw the muzzle flash forming. But time did something strange again. The world quieted, as if waiting to see whether he deserved this moment. He didn't aim at the sniper, but rather at the pocket beneath them The HEC roared as it came to life. The blast tore through the sniper's nest, ripping open beams and supports. The pocket crumbled under the sniper's body, collapsing into the nebula like a dying star as the world dropped out beneath them, falling into silence, swallowed by the shifting color.
The arena pulsed the verdict:
TEAM ORACLE: ELIMINATED.
Tessa slammed into a new pocket in a hard skid, plasma steam curling from her palm and chrome arm. She rose, shook sand out of her hair, and looked across the cluster toward Rhett.
He stood on a cracked pocket, rifle still raised, chest heaving from adrenaline and disbelief as the nebula light painted him in shifting bands of blue and gold.
Their eyes locked across the drifting islands.
A slow smirk pulled across her mouth.
"You're not supposed to be this good, Thorne."
Rhett lowered the rifle, heartbeat still pounding in his throat.
"Tell that to the snipers."
She laughed, short and warm, before the ground beneath Rhett vibrated again.
The arena wasn't about to give either of them time to celebrate, as another chime echoed across the dream-desert.
TEAM COUNT: 6 REMAINING.
The sky above twisted, pockets shifting position like they were being rearranged by an unseen hand.
Rhett swallowed, rebalanced his rifle on his shoulder, as a smile creeped across his face.
"Round Two?"
Tessa rotated her wrist, crackling energy dancing across her knuckles.
"Round Two," she agreed. "Don't die ok?"
"No promises," he said, stepping toward the next pocket's edge.
"Don't die," she repeated, softer. "I need someone to shoot the idiots I miss."
Rhett stepped into the slingshot's pull, feeling the world gather him into its invisible grip as the battle royale continued.