POV: Dagen (Ice Bishop ♝)
Location: Ember Wastes
The ground hissed with every step.
Cracks split beneath Dagen's boots, steam rising from veins of slow-moving magma underfoot. Ember Wastes wasn't a place to stand still. It punished hesitation. The stone tiles here were jagged and unstable, each one a breath away from becoming molten. Even the air burned, dry and metallic—hot enough to flay the lungs if you breathed too deep.
Dagen didn't mind the heat.
He disliked it—loathed it, even—but he didn't mind it. He could function in discomfort. Ice didn't protest fire; it endured it. What unnerved him was the silence.
No drones. No monsters. No team chatter. Just the faint rumble beneath the tiles and the ever-present sense that the ground might open at any moment.
They were two days into this quadrant now. No visible Revitalize Point. No supply capsules. No signs of the White team. Only scarred terrain and ash gusts that tasted faintly of copper.
Dagen crouched and laid his palm flat against the scorched tile. His skin, enhanced by the serum, didn't blister—he'd numbed it long ago. The thermal pulse beneath was strong, too strong. The tile's temperature wasn't stable.
"Another surge incoming," he said aloud.
Behind him, Juno stepped into view, her short hair damp with sweat, knives already drawn. "We move, then?"
"North slope. Five minutes. This one's ready to crack."
Juno didn't argue. She just vanished back into the heat shimmer, likely to inform the others.
Dagen stood, spine straightening as the wind rose, carrying more ash. He squinted across the warped horizon. The Ember Wastes never looked the same twice. It shifted in subtle ways—angles changed, ridges sharpened, like a beast constantly shedding and remaking its skin.
And at the center of it stood Vera.
She was waiting just beyond the crest of the rise, motionless as stone, her figure blurred by the heatwaves. She never knelt. Never crouched. Never adjusted to the terrain like the rest of them. She moved when she chose to move—and the land accommodated.
Dagen approached her in silence.
"Tile's destabilizing," he said when he reached her side. "We shift north."
Vera didn't look at him. Her gaze was fixed on the horizon, where a collapsed field of obsidian had formed sharp ledges and broken platforms—almost like a battlefield left half-buried.
"This quadrant wasn't meant for survival," she said.
"No quadrant is."
"But this one pretends," she replied. "The capsules we've found? Scattered. Misdirection. The real supply line is hidden deeper—beneath a lava shelf or locked behind a tile sequence."
"Then we'll break it."
Vera turned to him slowly. Her eyes didn't blaze like fire—they froze, even here. Cold and unyielding, like frost etched into a blade.
"Will you?" she asked.
Dagen met her gaze without flinching. "I don't melt as easily as the rest."
She studied him for a moment longer, then nodded. "Good. I need cold minds in firestorms."
Footsteps crunched behind them—Iri, carrying her bow low, her face as unreadable as ever.
"Scanners show residual White-team signals," she said. "Maybe a day old. They passed through, but didn't linger."
"Retreating?" Juno asked, appearing beside her.
"No," Dagen said before Iri could reply. "They're probing. Testing if we're still divided."
"And we are," Juno muttered.
Vera didn't comment.
Dagen looked at her carefully. "What's the play, Your Majesty?"
Vera turned, cloak snapping behind her as the wind shifted direction.
"We make the Wastes our throne."
Then, without waiting, she walked straight into the rising ash.
They moved quickly.
Ash clung to their boots, and the terrain sloped harder with every step. What had once been a broken basin of shattered tiles gave way to a jagged incline—stone like black glass, cracked and serrated, rising toward a burned-out ridge known only as Tile E8.
The Board didn't name these places. The players did.
They called this one Scorchjaw.
Dagen had heard of it from older games—players who'd trained before him, whispered about a ruin buried in a throat-shaped gulley, a place where the lava didn't just flow—it spoke. Something about echoes. Something about hallucinations. Most of them never made it out.
Now they stood at its edge.
A split had opened in the ground, revealing a staircase of melted obsidian that spiraled downward, each step rimmed in heat shimmer. Cracked machinery jutted from the walls—ancient, half-buried, maybe once a testing hub or capsule vault, now warped into a tomb.
"Juno," Vera said.
The girl was already moving, blades drawn, shoulders tight.
"Iri. Cover."
Dagen felt the temperature shift before the lava surged—deep below, like a warning cough.
"Don't descend more than ten meters," he said, watching the edge with narrowed eyes. "If that flow destabilizes, we'll be trapped in a heat funnel."
Vera stepped past him.
She walked toward the stairs without flinching, without hesitation, without so much as a glance back.
And descended.
Dagen muttered under his breath, then followed.
The air inside the ruin was different.
Not hotter—strangely colder, in fact. But stale. Still. Like it had been sealed off for decades. Runes traced the walls, long dead. One glowed briefly as Vera passed, flickering green-blue before fading.
"What is this place?" Juno asked, voice hushed.
"A memory," Vera replied.
Dagen traced a finger across one of the metallic walls. The surface was etched in patterns he didn't recognize—pre-match infrastructure, maybe. Foundations from before the Strain Protocols. Before the game became spectacle.
"I don't like this," Iri said, arrow nocked. "Feels like it's watching."
"It is," Dagen replied. "This quadrant's alive in more ways than one."
They moved deeper. Faint lights glowed in alcoves. Some were broken screens. Others looked like capsules—but malformed, twisted, sealed with dark resin. Not Revitalize chambers. Not healing pods.
Holding cells.
Vera stopped before one.
Inside the glass, barely visible in the red glow, was a skeletal figure slumped forward, its arms fused to the chair by old restraints.
The figure's wrist still bore a glowing device.
Black.
A former King.
Dagen's breath caught. Juno froze beside him.
"They said the losing teams were buried," she whispered.
"They lied," Vera murmured.
Dagen stepped forward, kneeling beside the pod. The skeletal remains were fully fused into the seat—burned, melted, maybe even merged biologically with the pod's structure. The wristband glowed faintly. It had not been detonated. It had been deactivated.
Which meant the Board had overridden the death failsafe.
Which meant…
"They don't always kill the Kings," he said.
"No," Vera answered.
"Why not?"
She didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was quieter than he'd ever heard it.
"Because some are more useful broken."
A silence passed between them. Not hollow. Heavy.
Vera turned to the squad.
"We leave," she said.
"What about the ruin?" Iri asked.
"We've seen what we need to see."
Dagen stood slowly. "This isn't a ruin. It's a warning."
Vera looked at him then—not cold, not detached, but something else. Something unreadable.
And for the first time, Dagen wondered if the Queen was afraid.
Not of the Board.
But of what came after winning.
They moved quickly—because in the Ember Wastes, hesitation had a cost.
Each step pressed a boot into scorched glass and shifting stone. Beneath Dagen's soles, the tile hissed faintly, like breath caught under molten skin. Even his serum-hardened flesh could feel the warning—heat building in short pulses, the land breathing with volcanic rhythm.
Ash spiraled in the air, fine as dust, clinging to hair and lashes. It didn't fall like snow. It hovered, drifting sideways, suspended by thermal gusts rising from cracked ravines. When it settled on skin, it stung.
Their path wound along a half-collapsed ridge that had once been straight—rows of tactical tiles now warped by geological tantrums. The rock jutted upward in sharp ridges, like a great beast had clawed at the arena and left it wounded, bleeding heat.
Juno scouted ahead with her usual silence, feet skimming the ground like she wasn't part of it. Even covered in soot, she moved like a whisper. Behind her, Iri ranged wide, eyes narrowed, bow in one hand, fingers ready on the string. The glint of a notched arrow flickered in the light like a warning to the world.
Dagen walked center—silent, calculating.
He felt everything.
The pressure of heat against the underside of the rock. The hum of magma moving beneath. The shallow breath of dying tiles. All of it vibrated upward into the soles of his boots and whispered to his bones.
This quadrant was close to collapse.
The three of them stopped as they reached the edge of a steep basin—a gouged crater of fractured black tile layered over a yawning vent. The terrain dipped into a narrow canyon of obsidian and slag, where once there had been order. Now it was a mouth.
The path forward lay down there.
Juno called it Scorchjaw—a leftover term from a team that had entered during a previous game and never resurfaced. The stories had come back anyway. Broken. Twisted.
Scorchjaw devoured time. Devoured sound. Devoured teams.
Iri knelt beside the rim, brushing a thin crust of ash from the edge. Beneath it, heat glowed faintly—not red, but orange-white, the burn of something deeper than lava. Something alive.
"This is recent," she said. "A week, maybe less."
"No flow trails," Juno added. "Not natural."
Dagen exhaled slowly, fogging the air in spite of the heat.
Then Vera arrived.
She stepped through the haze like it parted for her. Her hair hung loose now, strands sticking faintly to her cheek with ash and sweat, but her expression was unchanged. Composed. Distant. Sovereign.
"You're sure?" she asked.
Dagen nodded. "There's a buried vault below. Could be capsule storage. Could be older infrastructure."
"Or a trap," Juno muttered.
Vera didn't flinch. "Then we spring it on our terms."
And without waiting, she descended.
The stairs were melted glass—spiraling downward like the throat of a dragon. Obsidian curved and warped from past lava surges, walls cracked open in vertical veins. Every few feet, metal jutted out from the walls—remnants of a buried station, ancient and forgotten.
They passed broken screens flickering weakly. Power cables severed and fused. Scorch marks etched in half-legible warnings:
DO NOT OPEN BELOW 1300°CCLEARANCE REQUIRED – A12 / F4
"Pre-Board tech," Dagen muttered. "Before they started livestreaming the deaths."
"Why bury it here?" Iri asked.
Juno gave a humorless shrug. "So no one finds it."
The deeper they went, the stranger the air became. It cooled, but not naturally. There was a stillness—a sealed, chemical silence that pressed against the eardrums. The walls no longer shimmered with heat. They absorbed it. Dagen could feel the temperature curve inward, like breath drawn before a scream.
At the bottom, a narrow corridor opened into a cavern chamber—smooth-sided, circular, too perfect to be natural. In the center stood a ring of pods, half-melted. Some had burst. Others were sealed tight with black resin that gleamed wet under the emergency lighting still barely alive in the ceiling.
Then Vera stopped before one.
Dagen felt it before he saw it—the soft hum of a live wrist device. A signal. Faint.
Inside the pod was a skeletal corpse, slumped forward, jaw slack. Arms fused to the restraints by hardened bio-metal. The flesh had long been eaten away by time and heat—but the wristband still blinked green.
A Black insignia.
Not a Pawn.
A King.
Juno stepped back instinctively.
"They said all the Kings were detonated," she whispered.
"They lied," Dagen said.
He crouched beside the glass, hand pressed flat. "This one wasn't killed by his team's loss. He was stored. Contained. The device still pulses. They severed the signal but left him alive long enough for the system to recognize his ID."
"So why keep him?" Iri asked. "Why go through the effort?"
Vera didn't speak for a long time.
Then, finally: "Because some pieces are more useful broken than gone."
Dagen stood slowly, the ice blooming faintly across his fingers. He didn't let it touch the glass. Didn't shatter the pod. He just looked at it—at what they could become.
"What did he know?" he asked softly.
Vera didn't answer. She turned, cloak swaying behind her, and strode back toward the corridor.
"We leave."
"No data extraction?" Juno pressed. "We came all this way."
"If the Board kept this here, it's not because they forgot it."
They followed.
Dagen hesitated once at the top of the stairs, hand resting against the warm obsidian.
He didn't fear death. He understood it.
What he feared now was winning.
Because if this was what victory looked like—a crown sealed in silence, fused to a pod, forgotten by design—then the real game hadn't even started yet.