Chapter 6
GYON
The world comes back in pulses of blue pain. Each beat sears through my muscles, crawls under my skin, and leaves a bitter metallic taste in my mouth. The electricity crackles in my bones like trapped lightning. I’m lying in a pool of my own steam, breathing smoke.
It takes me a moment to remember where I am.
Then I smell her.
Faint. Sweet. Humans. Liora.
My jalshagar.
The word burns through me again like a fever. I don’t understand why she affects me this way, why her scent cuts through ozone and death like light slicing darkness. I only know it’s true. Every instinct screams mine.
And she’s gone.
Husker took her.
The maze hums, smug and alive. I press my palm to the floor, feel the vibration of hidden machinery purring underneath, mocking me. The static still dances along my arms, residual current crackling at my fingertips. My claws twitch involuntarily, eager to carve something that bleeds.
I get to my feet, unsteady but functional. Pain’s a comfort; it means I’m still dangerous. I can work with danger.
“Enjoying the show?” Husker’s voice oozes from the vents—bright, glib, smiling. “Our audience can’t get enough of you, Reaper. Ratings through the roof! You’re the crowd favorite!”
I bare my teeth at the ceiling. “You’ll die slowly.”
“Oooh, promises! My favorite foreplay.”
The wall next to me flickers to life with his grinning cartoon avatar. Same wide eyes, same perfect teeth. “Chin up, champ! You’re not supposed to get the girl yet. That's act two material! We need the tension!”
I drive my claws through the wall. The projection bursts into static, the sound of tearing metal mixing with my snarl. When I pull back, my hand is slick with molten circuitry. The maze shifts in response, walls grinding, rearranging, cutting me off from the direction I was heading.
He’s moving me. Herding me.
Keeping me away from her.
“Fine,” I growl under my breath. “Let’s see what else you feed me.”
The corridor tightens into a throat of steel and shadow. I move low, silent. My senses adjust to the dark—infrared vision painting the world in heat and pulse. The air here is different. Stale. Stinking of rot and failure.
Civilians.
I smell them before I see them—unwashed bodies, stress hormones, blood. Not fresh blood, though. Days old. The stench of fear clings to every molecule like oil.
I find them in a chamber three levels down. The room’s ceiling is cracked open like a wound, cables hanging in tangled webs. Four survivors crouch around a dead light panel, eyes wide and hollow. One’s muttering to himself. Another’s gnawing on her sleeve like it’s food.
Pitiful.
The maze doesn’t even have to kill them anymore. It just waits.
One of them—the muttering one—gets up and stumbles toward a sealed door at the far end. His hands shake so bad he can barely grab the handle. “There’s gotta be food in there,” he rasps. “Or a way out.”
The others don’t stop him. They just stare.
The door clicks. The hiss of released pressure fills the air.
Then comes the gas.
It pours out in pale tendrils, shimmering in the low light, beautiful in the way poison sometimes is. The first breath hits them like a hammer. Their eyes go bloodshot. Their screams overlap until it’s just noise—wet, gurgling, animal.
One collapses. Then another.
The last one—small, young, maybe twenty—tries to crawl away. Her fingernails drag uselessly against the slick floor. The gas wraps around her like a lover’s arm and finishes the job.
Silence.
I stay above them, crouched in the vent shaft, fists clenched so tight my claws cut my palms. The smell of burning nerves floods up to me. I breathe it in. Let it scrape through my throat like razors.
This isn’t war.
War is honest. Brutal, yes, but clean in its way. You look your enemy in the eye when you kill them.
This? This is rot.
Husker’s rot.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The Maze Master’s voice purrs from the walls. “Tragic. Poetic. Oh, don’t make that face, big guy! You’re lucky! You get to be part of something legendary. A game that never ends!”
I close my eyes and imagine the sound his spine will make when I crush it.
He keeps talking, like he can’t help himself. “You’re my favorite, you know. You’ve got… presence. The camera loves you. The way you move. The way you kill. There’s an artistry to it.”
My claws dig into the wall until sparks shower down like blood. “You mistake survival for art.”
“No, no, no. You mistake art for survival.”
The laughter that follows is static and sugar, drilling into my skull.
I move before I can think. Drop from the vent. Land among the corpses.
The floor’s slick with what’s left of them—acid-eaten flesh, melted metal from their jumpsuit clasps. My boots squelch. The sound is obscene. I want to burn the room just to erase it.
Instead, I crouch and drag one finger through the grime. The floor beneath is smooth, programmable alloy. The maze reads inputs like skin feels touch. So I give it a message.
I carve deep, each stroke deliberate.
The glyph is Reaper script—ancient, primal. It glows faintly when I finish, pulsing like a heartbeat.
It means Gyon. It also means Stop watching.
But there’s more beneath it. Another shape—simpler, rawer.
A warning.
The glyph of mine.
If she sees it, she’ll know. Or maybe she won’t understand the language but will feel it. That’s enough.
I press my hand to the fresh carving, blood mixing with circuitry. The maze hums in irritation, like a beast flicking its tail. I smile, sharp and humorless.
“Your move, Dirk.”
The walls shift again, faster now, less graceful. He’s angry. Good.
I move with them, letting the maze’s rhythm carry me through new corridors. The architecture changes as I go—metal gives way to glass, glass to some kind of living resin that pulses faintly when I touch it. The hum under my feet grows deeper, almost like a heartbeat.
I realize then—the maze is feeding.
Every death, every scream—it’s power. He’s building energy through suffering.
He’s not just broadcasting for fun. He’s harvesting.
It makes sense. It’s what monsters like him do. The Maze isn’t a game.
It’s a farm.
And we’re all cattle.
A vent bursts open ahead of me, spewing out thick black smoke.
I crouch, instinct sharp, scanning for motion.
My hearing picks up the faintest sound—footsteps.
Not human. Lighter. Faster. A maintenance drone.
I catch its shape as it darts from one wall panel to the next, welding something. Reinforcing the maze.
I grab it mid-leap.
It squeals in binary. I crush it until its light dies.
A fragment of its memory core falls free, still glowing. I pocket it. Information might be the only weapon sharper than claws.
Then I keep moving.
For hours—maybe minutes, maybe days—the maze guides me downward. The concept of time doesn’t survive here. It blurs, melts, loops.
But something’s changing.
The lights grow dimmer. The air heavier. I can taste humidity now, mixed with oil and blood. The walls glisten like flesh, warm under my palms. I don’t like it. Not because it’s alive—because it’s listening.
It knows me now.
And it’s afraid.
I find another door, marked with symbols that look suspiciously like my own script. Not quite right, though. Mimicked. Stolen. Husker’s signature is all over it—like a parasite trying to imitate its host.
The lock clicks open for me automatically.
Inside is a narrow corridor lined with mirrors.
They reflect everything but me.
“Cute trick,” I mutter.
The mirrors ripple. Husker’s voice echoes, bouncing from every surface. “Ever wonder what you look like to them, Reaper? To the humans? The civilians? The little game designer?”
Each mirror flickers—images of me slaughtering. Me roaring. Me drenched in blood. Memories twisted out of sequence. A monster.
“Do you think she’ll love that?” Dirk whispers. “Do you think your mate will still look at you the same once she sees what you really are?”
I smash the nearest mirror. The sound is deafening. Shards fly. Some cut deep into my arm. I don’t care.
“Better she fears me,” I snarl, “than dies like the rest.”
The maze pulses once—displeased. The mirrors flicker out. Silence again.
When I finally stop, I’m in a narrow access tunnel. The lights flicker weakly, and the floor slopes downward into dark.
For the first time since waking here, I sit. Just for a moment.
The hum of machinery fades into the background, replaced by something quieter—something in my own chest. That strange pull again, tethering me to her.
I close my eyes and picture her face—the flash of her eyes, the fury, the defiance. The way she didn’t beg. Didn’t break.
Every Reaper’s born knowing their song. It’s the pulse that binds them to their fate, to their kills, to their pack. Mine always sounded like silence.
Until now.
Now, I can hear her voice in it.
I stand again. No rest. Not until I find her.
The maze can shift, lie, snarl all it wants. It won’t keep her from me. And if I have to carve my way through a thousand dead civilians and Husker’s synthetic nightmares to reach her, then so be it.
Because she’s the only real thing in this machine-built hell.
And if the maze eats its young, then I’ll be the one who bites back.