by Deck Davis
“Ah, crap. Got a stitch. Feels like my nan’s stuck me with one of her knitting needles,” said Rynk.
“Suck it up, big boy,” said Glora. “You never did have stamina.”
In the midst of the torrent of blinding snow that fell like ash around us, I heard a noise. It was sound of two sets of feet thumping on the ground. I instinctively thought that we’d crossed into the path of another team, but my gut told me that wasn’t right. The sound had been too deep, too powerful. Then, to my right, I heard more sounds, big, loud crunches on the ice, softened only slightly by the newly-fallen snow.
It was polar bears. Two of them. I slipped on the ice, almost losing my balance completely. I managed to right myself enough to keep going without face-planting in the snow. My lungs begged me for a rest. They ached with a kind of burning cold, like the snatch of air you get when you open a freezer and the chill spreads along your throat. ‘Stop,’ my body begged. ‘Give me a break.’ But I couldn’t.
“Did you guys hear that?” said Eddie, gasping for breath.
“Hear it? My Hexer Senses are going nuts,” said Glora. Out of all of us, it seemed like she was the least out of breath.
I slowed down. The blizzard in front of us, and the blindness that came with it, seemed never-ending. Somewhere, to both our left and right, stalked a couple of polar bears, each following us with the sole intention of competing over our tender flesh.
“I can’t…” I said, sucking in air, “…go on. I can’t run.” My legs burned. A fire spread up my claves while my lungs seemed to splutter like an old car. Just push through it. My body refused to obey me. My legs rebelled, and I crashed onto the snow. I only just managed to put my hands out to protect my nose.
Rynk collapsed to the ground. He didn’t seem to have any concern about my fall. “Thank God for a rest. I thought I was gonna die.”
“For a rest? Get up, you morons!” said Glora.
I tried, but I couldn’t. Even my biceps ached, and I had barely used them.
Ice cracked into our sides. I peered into the ultra-white color of the blizzard, and I could make out a murky shape. It was hard to tell how far away they were; it was like staring into mist and seeing some sinister figure walking my way.
“We’re still in the wave zone. We gotta go,” said Eddie.
“Ninety-one teams left!” called Glora.
“Just five minutes, ma,” said Rynk.
No. This wasn’t right. We couldn’t just sit here, no matter how much we ached, no matter how exhausted we were. I remembered hearing something once, about people who went into the Antarctic. Was that happening to me? Was my brain going haywire and telling my body to shut down?
“Guys…the wave,” said Eddie.
I summoned every ounce of energy I had and got to my feet. “If we sit here, the wave isn’t what we need to worry about,” I said. “We can’t take on two bears. No chance. Even without the Bronze Sun, they’d smash us to pieces. Bears are there for level-eight fighters. And I’m only level five.”
“Then we better do something,” said Eddie.
I quickly checked my mana. After building my ice tunnel, I had only thirty-five out of three-hundred mana points left. We either needed to find more potions, or I needed to level up.
Focusing on the emerging shape of a polar bear to my right, I cast Terrain Drain and created a wall in front of it. However, as soon as the ice rose from the ground, a message told me that my mana was at zero. The polar bear hit the wall of ice and then roared. It was a horrible sound, almost like a wail but full of anger instead of pain.
“That’s gonna hold it for all of ten seconds,” I said. “And we’ve still got the other to contend with.”
“I could set traps,” said Glora.
“They won’t hold them for long enough. And again, our friend the wave is gonna hit.”
“Then what?” said Eddie.
“We need to move.”
I brought up my map. We’d headed south, trying to get away from the wave, but we’d need to head east soon. The problem was that my map showed a large expanse of water in that direction. It must have been a lake. The original plan had been to run south long enough to get around it, but I didn’t think I had it in me to sprint such a distance. My stamina was creaking along at forty out of two-hundred-and-one, and it wouldn’t regenerate quickly enough. Even if it did, the polar bears would catch up to us since they were much faster. There was nothing else for it.
“We’re gonna have to swim through the lake,” I said.
“You do know polar bears can swim, right?” said Eddie. “The documentary said—”
“We don’t have a choice. We can’t stay in the tundra. We have to get into the shadow quadrant, no matter what the overseers do to us, and the quickest way is across the water. Check your maps.”
While they did that, I heard more booming feet on the ice. The bears were being cautious right now, but the closer they got, the more chance there was that they’d be aggroed. At that point, nothing would stop them from attacking.
“Let’s do it,” said Eddie. “Like captain says, no choice.”
So, we headed east. We covered two-hundred meters without the bears attacking. I half-hoped that they’d given up their pursuit and had found easier prey, or maybe that they’d just started attacking each other instead. But no. When I listened, I could still hear them. I was amazed at how quiet they were when they wanted to be. It was as if they could switch into hunt mode and then slope stealthily across the ice, despite their bulk. I wondered if they only boomed on the tundra ground when they wanted to intimidate us.
I quickly checked my map, running across the tundra with the holo-light in front of me. According to my map, the water should have been just fifty yards ahead. It was such a giant expanse of it that I should have been able to see it already. Yet, all I saw was more white, icy ground. Where is the damn lake?
Then, I realized where it was. The air left my lungs completely. Panic took hold of my body. I stopped with such a suddenness that I lost my balance and fell to the ground. Steadying myself and wiping the snow from my eyes and cheeks, I realized that it wasn’t more white ice in front of me. Instead, it was just air. It was the pure, white tundra sky.
The others stopped beside me. Eddie helped me to my feet. Rynk walked on a few paces, then whistled in shock. “Hoo, boy.”
The reason I couldn’t see the water, even though my map showed that it was fifty yards in front of us, was because it wasn’t straight in front of us. Instead, it seemed that we’d run to the edge of a snowy cliff. Below us was a sharp drop of fifty feet. And there, and the bottom, was the pool of water. My map showed it as being just in front because, in a sense, it was just in front. Only, it took leaping down fifty feet to get to it.
When I looked down, I strained to see through the falling snowflakes. There, glistening in the Arctic sunlight, was the lake. Small parts of it were frozen over, but the rest was a pool of dark blue.
“We’re trapped,” said Eddie, with no effort to hide the fear in his voice.
We had bears to our left, a stomach-churning plunge into icy water to our right. The question now was, which gave option gave us half a chance? Or, even worse, which way of dying would hurt less?
I guessed that at least we had a fighting chance with the bears—a tiny scrap of opportunity, maybe, but it was there all the same. Then again, the wave was coming. Even if, by some miracle, we killed the bears, we’d still have to walk back through the wave and then take a diversion if we wanted to avoid the fall into the ice water. Doing that with the minuscule hitpoints a double polar bear fight was going to leave us wouldn’t be easy.
“We’ve gotta jump,” I said. Even as the words left my lips I couldn’t believe it was me saying them. It was like I’d floated out of my body and let someone else take the reins for a while, someone who didn’t feel sick when they saw a fall of any kind.
“You sure you can do this?” said Glora. She put her arm around my shoulders.
“I’m not letting you guys get ripped apart by bears just because of my fear,” I said.
“What makes you think we’d stay up here just ‘cos you’re scared of a little drop?” asked Rynk. “If you stay up here, you’re on your own, buddy.” When I looked at him, I could see plainly that he didn’t mean what he’d said.
“You could have left Glora back at the quarry, and you didn’t. Don’t act like you’re some lone wolf, Ryan. I think you want to win for the team, not just yourself.”
Rynk grunted. “Let’s jump. ‘Cos our furry friends are done being cautious.”
As he said it, I saw the bears emerge from the white-mist of the blizzard that was starting to quieten. They were just as tall as the bear we’d seen earlier. One had a scar across its chest, stopping the fur from growing through. The other, when it opened its mouth, revealed rows of jagged teeth, that were perfectly sharp, save one at the front that was chipped.
“So, we jump,” I said. “It’s gonna hurt on impact, and the longer we stay in the water, the more its gonna freeze us. I mean, we won’t get hypothermia like in real life, but it won’t be a nice swim.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t stay and practice our breaststrokes,” said Rynk. “Got it.”
“Head to the banks straight away. Then cross into the shadow quadrant. Don’t wait around for anyone else. Just run. We can meet up later, once we’re safe.” I said the words with a confidence that I didn’t feel. The wind felt worryingly strong, as though someone had dialed it up to become a force that could give me a push over the ledge before I was ready. But then, I realized that I never really would be ready, would I? Maybe it was doing something when you felt scared, when you’re weren’t ready, that made it worthwhile. When you did something despite fear rather than because of it, you got stronger.
Just as I had that thought, another one hit me. It had tugged on my brain earlier, but I’d ignored it. The lake fifty feet below us had a name, did it? It was listed on the VBR map. I brought it up and read the words. Each syllable was a punch in my stomach.
Bluejaw Lake
Bluejaw. The same as the quarry back near my ranch, the one where I’d watched, paralyzed, while Lucas struggled in the quarry water. Like Rynk, I didn’t believe in coincidences. There was a reason this lake was called Bluejaw, and that reason was Lucas. The guy had an unrelenting obsession with me; first, in Bernli when he’d destroyed my team, and then here in the Eden VBR, with the double ambushes. It seemed like everything he did was a side note in his orchestra of revenge against me. Had I really hurt him that badly? Had I really done something so horrible that he could hate me so much?
I looked down at the lake. I felt my resolve firm up inside me. I wouldn’t freeze this time, I decided. I had frozen at the quarry all those years ago, but I wouldn’t let the height get the better of me this time.
With that, I had another thought, that my parents…everything that happened to them, and Bill…had contributed to this. It wasn’t just Lucas’s fall that had instilled this fear in me. If I was ever going to face it completely, I needed to address everything.
“You jumpin’ or what?” said Eddie.
The team. They’d asked about my parents earlier back in Perlshaw, and again in the temple in the jungle quadrant. Each time, I had shrunk back. If I was going to deal with my fear of heights, then I had to face something that terrorized me even more: talking about what happened to my family.
It was time for me to stop freezing. The next time we can talk, I’ll tell them. With that, I felt lighter. My stomach hadn’t turned to water, the hairs weren’t standing up on my neck. The drop still scared me, but I had some other, stronger feeling inside of me, one that made me think I could deal with it. I took one step forward, focused on the lake below us, and then I jumped. I plummeted through the air. The wind rushed at me, screeching in my ears. Even as fear of the fast-approaching ground made my heart freeze, I couldn’t help feeling a little free.
Chapter Thirteen
68 Teams Remaining
An icy shower sprayed up when I plunged into the water, coating my chest and face. It took just thirty seconds for me to lose feeling in everything from my toes upwards. I felt like I’d plummeted into the heart of an iceberg, where I’d become encased in a prison so cold that it had frozen the blood in my veins. Three loud splashes shattered the silence soon after, and I knew the others were in the lake with me.
As the cold spread in my body, I felt the seeds of panic begin to take hold. You’re going to die. Ice is going to spread along your arms and legs and then your chest and finally it’ll crusty around your throat until…
I needed to get a grip. That was panic setting in due to the sudden change in temperature. There was no way I could really have lost mobility in my legs so quickly; it was just a split-second reaction conjured by my worrying brain. I remembered the newscast that I’d seen showing in Sootstein when I was there not long ago; the one aimed at the visiting VBR spectators. It had been about what do to if you fell through the ice and into water.
Think, I told myself. What did it say? First, you had to brace yourself for the shock response. You had to stop yourself hyperventilating so that your heartrate didn’t spiral out of control. The shock response would pass, as long as I didn’t give in to it. Okay. Deep breaths. Got it.
Next, I had to keep calm. That was the most important part, the broadcast had said. Don’t give in to the shock, because that would make you think irrationally and do stupid things. The middle of a frozen lake was the worst place to panic.
I sucked in air and I looked around me, trying to ignore the shock response that hammered inside me. To my right, Rynk was swimming backward through the lake, navigating himself calmly to the bank. Glora was near him. Her face was pure white, as though the color had been drained from her, and then there was Eddie, struggling to grip onto a sheet of ice to his right so that he could pull himself up. Near him, was a fin.
What? A fin!?
A deeper sense of cold tremored through me. I thought I was seeing things at first. I blinked, trying to somehow alter the reality of what I had seen. Two blinks later, and it was the same. Near Eddie, gliding through the frozen waters of the lake, was a two-foot high fin. It was deep blue and had a fleshy look to it, and the long edge of it was jagged. “Shark!” I shouted.
Eddie lost his grip on the ice and took a face full of ice water.
“What?” shouted Glora.
I switched to team speak. “There are sharks in here.”
“Impossible. It’s too cold for sharks.”
“Use your Hexer Senses and see for yourself,” I said. “There’s something in here with us.”
A few second slater, she said, “I’m getting hammered with alerts. Shit, we need to get out of here!”
After that, it was almost as if someone had pulled a blindfold from my eyes to reveal to me the true horror of the lake. I saw another fin way over to my left, gliding back and forth through the waters. There was another to my right, headed toward Rynk. The worst part was how silent they were. In their sinister predatory way, the sharks could move without a sound. Their fins cut through the surface of the water. The sharks emerged here and there, but mostly stayed hidden. That was the thing that sent a shudder through me; that when you saw a fin, you didn’t know how big the creature underneath it was.
“What the hell is going on?” said Eddie.
“Ice sharks!” Said Glora. “They’ve got cold-resistance.”
“Never seen anything like it before in my life,” said Rynk.
I realized that this was Lucas again. Not only had he named the lake Bluejaw, but he’d filled it with the sharks that Bill used to pretend were in the quarry. I could imagine him stood in the overseers’ control room now, watching me flail around in the waters, just as I had watched him do all those years ago.
I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me panic. That was what he wanted. So instead, I sucked it up. “Get to shore,” I sai
d over teamspeak. “Just get onto the ice however you can. Don’t try and fight the sharks.”
A fin swam horizontally thirty feet in front of me. Then, it straightened so that it faced me. The fin silently began to cut through the waters, heading my way. The sight sent a chill through me.
I looked around for the closest piece of ice or lake bank. The bank behind me was too far away. Instead, I moved so that I faced to my left, and I started swimming. I was all too aware of the thrashing and splashing my arms made as they smashed in and out of the water. I knew that sort of thing attracted sharks, but when one was already coming for me, it didn’t seem to matter.
My lungs and arms ached by the time I hit ice. Without looking behind me, I tried to haul myself up. Something told me the shark was close now. I felt the danger emanating from it, sending a shiver through me. I gripped the ice but my fingers slipped, and I fell into the water and felt it drench my shoulders. For a second, my brain threatened to slip into shock mode again.
