Pezo Games: The Strong Will Be The Only One Standing!
Prologue — The Calm Before the Crow
Copper 9. Year 3071.
The surface was dead, and it had been for a long, long time.
Snow fell in endless sheets across a planet whose sky had gone black with dust decades ago, when the core collapsed and took every living thing on the surface with it. The only flicker of civilization left on this exoplanet was buried under thirty meters of permafrost — the Worker Drone bunker, a cramped warren of corrugated steel and flickering fluorescents where the last descendants of JC Jenson's servant-class robots had carved out something resembling a society.
And today, for reasons only the bunker's chronically underpaid educators could truly explain, a class of Worker Drone teenagers had been bundled into an armored surface transport and sent up to the freezing dark.
Educational excursion. Three days. One abandoned JC Jenson weather monitoring outpost. Two Disassembly Drone "supervisors." No murder allowed.
Apparently the Copper 9 Worker Drone School Board had decided the kids needed "fresh air." Nobody had the heart to tell them the air outside would liquefy their exposed chassis components within four minutes.
The transport rumbled across a frozen plain, treads grinding through compacted snow, headlights carving twin yellow tunnels through the perpetual twilight. Inside, the cabin was cramped, warm, and full of teenage drones in varying states of boredom and annoyance.
Uzi Doorman sat alone near the back window, forehead pressed against the cold reinforced glass, her violet visor ( > _ < ) narrowed at nothing in particular. Her railgun was technically not allowed on the trip. It was in her bag anyway. Obviously.
"Stupid trip," she muttered to her reflection.
A few seats ahead, Doll and Lizzy were having a hushed conversation that was very clearly about her, complete with the occasional flick of the eyes and barely-concealed smirk. Uzi didn't care. Uzi had decided, approximately thirty seconds after boarding, that she did not care about anything that happened for the next seventy-two hours.
"Ughhh — how much farther is it?!" Rebecca's voice cut through the low hum of the transport engine, climbing an entire octave on the last word. "I'm already tired of sitting still for five hours!"
"...It's been one hour," Emily said quietly, not looking up from the paperback she was pretending to read.
"Shut up, nerd."
The teacher — a middle-aged Worker Drone with a coolant stain on his tie and the dead-eyed visor ( - _ - ) of a man who had once had dreams — did not raise his eyes from his clipboard.
"No insults," he mumbled, with roughly the enthusiasm of a man declaring a funeral officially begun.
In the very back row, as far from the students as physically possible, the two Disassembly Drones sat.
N's visor was practically vibrating with excitement, the yellow Xs of his eyes ( ★ v ★ ) stretched into something that should've been anatomically impossible for a murder-machine. He was swinging his legs. In the seat. Like a kid.
"Oh, I'm so excited! We're gonna be like real supervisors, V! This is gonna be great!"
V's response was immediate and without inflection.
"N. Shut up. Before I rip your head off."
( ^ _ ^ ) "Sure!"
V ( ✖ _ ✖ ) pressed her claw-tipped fingers against her temples and seriously, seriously considered ripping her own head off instead.
The rest of the class was plugged into phones, data-slates, or deep in sleep-mode, their visors dimmed to idle blue. Nobody talked to the Disassembly Drones. Nobody wanted to talk to the Disassembly Drones. The entire reason N and V were chaperoning this trip was that the school had, through a process involving a city council meeting and several very tense compromises, decided that two retired-from-murdering ex-killing-machines made for excellent crowd control.
Which was, all things considered, probably true.
The transport shuddered to a halt.
"Here we are, folks," the teacher said, already standing, already walking toward the door, already clearly planning to be back on the transport and heading home within the hour. "I want you all on your best behavior for the next three days. Stay at the outpost. Don't wander into the waste. Don't touch anything that sparks."
He paused at the airlock, one hand on the lever.
"N and V are in charge of your class while I'm — handling logistics." He said 'logistics' the way other people said 'a long nap.' "Any questions, any problems, you go to them. That's why they're here."
N bounced to his feet. ( ★ o ★ ) "Yeah! Me and V'll look after you all, no problem!"
V ( - _ - ) stood up beside him. "Don't wander off. Don't mess with anything. Don't die. I don't want the paperwork."
They said the last part almost in unison. One of them meant it warmly.
The airlock hissed open, and the cold rolled in — the kind of Copper 9 cold that reminded every drone in the cabin that they were, at the end of the day, made of metal.
The outpost was worse than creepy. It was forgotten.
A cluster of prefab buildings huddled around a central courtyard, their paint peeled down to rust, their windows fogged with frost from the inside. A single JC Jenson logo still clung stubbornly to the side of the largest structure, half-scoured by decades of wind. Beyond the outpost's chain-link perimeter stretched the tree line — a petrified forest of blackened pine, their needles long since fallen, their branches reaching up like the hands of buried corpses.
And beyond that, the frozen lake. Black ice, a kilometer wide, reflecting nothing.
N took a deep, theatrical breath of air he didn't need.
( ★ ω ★ ) "Isn't this awesome?! We've got the whole place to ourselves!"
V ( > _ < ) "You're getting weirdly into this, N."
"Oh come on, V! You gotta be at least a little excited! Look around — look at those trees, look at the sky!"
"The sky is black, N."
"Exactly! It's got atmosphere!"
V was about to explain to him, in great and patient detail, exactly how much she did not share his enthusiasm for atmosphere — when her visor snapped toward the tree line.
Something had moved.
A flicker. Just at the edge of her sensor range, just past the first line of dead pines. Something had been standing there, watching them, and the instant her optics had swung toward it —
It was gone.
Not ran away gone. Not ducked behind a tree gone.
Gone gone.
V's visor narrowed to slits ( ⚠ _ ⚠ ). She zoomed in, cycled through her thermal, her magnetic, her motion-capture. Nothing. The snow between the trees was undisturbed. No footprints. No heat signature. No residual EM.
"What're you staring at?" N had followed her gaze, head tilted. ( ? _ ? ) "Do you see someone?"
"...I don't know."
She stood there for another long second, claws flexing at her sides, every combat protocol she'd been built with screaming quietly in the back of her processor. Something had been there. Something big. Something that knew how to vanish before a Disassembly Drone's targeting array could lock on.
That shouldn't have been possible.
N put a hand on her shoulder, gentle in that way that still sometimes made her want to hit him.
"You're just seeing things, V. I don't see anyone out there."
"I could've sworn —"
"Probably just a wild solver-construct or something. You know they still wander out here sometimes. Nothing to worry about!"
V looked once more. The woods were empty. The snow was still. The only sound was the wind threading through dead branches, making a noise like breath through a bone flute.
She forced her visor back to neutral ( o _ o ).
"...Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right. Solver-rat, maybe."
She didn't believe it.
Timeskip — Night
The campfire crackled in the courtyard of the outpost, throwing orange light up against the flaking walls. The class sat in a loose ring on scavenged crates and old power cells, visors flickering with the reflected flame. Someone had produced marshmallows, which was strange, because none of them could eat. They were toasting them anyway. Tradition.
N stood in the middle of the ring, arms spread wide, yellow X-eyes wide with theatrical menace ( > ▽ < ).
"— and the Absolute Solver said," he intoned, his voice dropping into a spooky whisper, "'I. AM. UNDER YOUR BED.'"
"Oh my god, N," Lizzy groaned. ( ¬ _ ¬ )
"That's not even a real story, that's just something my mom yelled at me once," Thad said. ( - _ - )
"The delivery was good though," N protested. ( u _ u )
V, perched on a log on the outer edge of the firelight, wasn't listening. V hadn't been listening for about twenty minutes.
She'd been listening past the fire. Past the chatter. Out into the forest.
And somewhere, far out in that forest —
A tree cracked.
Not a twig. Not a branch. An entire tree, splitting, with a sound like a rifle-shot across the snow. Her audio array pinpointed the distance: one-point-three kilometers, east-northeast. And whatever had done it was too heavy for any solver-construct, too big for any Disassembly Drone.
V's head snapped toward the dark.
Her visor cycled to maximum magnification, auto-focusing past the trees, past the second tree line, deep into the blackness beyond —
And she saw it stand up.
Just for a second. Just long enough for her targeting system to try to assign it dimensions and fail, because the dimensions it was reporting couldn't be real. A silhouette against the black sky, vast and angular and wrong, the size of a JC Jenson skyscraper, the size of something that should not have been able to approach their position without shaking the ground to pieces.
And then — the way the figure in the daylight had gone — it simply wasn't there.
No retreat. No sound. It had stood. It had looked at her. And then it had decided not to exist in her visual field anymore.
V's coolant system spiked audibly.
"V?" N's voice, close now. "V, what're you looking at?"
She couldn't answer. Her voice module was working through several error states.
"...V?"
"I just —" She gripped the log under her. Her claws sank into the wood. "I'm. Um."
( O _ O )
"What? What'd you see?"
"I think I saw — I don't know if I saw —"
She looked back.
The forest was empty. The tree line was still. Nothing moved but the snow.
Her targeting system had no log of the contact. No recorded frame. No sensor echo. As though her own optics had been edited in the half-second after the sighting.
"I don't see anything, V," N said carefully. ( . _ . )
"I know," V whispered. "That's the part that's bothering me."
That was when the first one touched the transport.
Nobody saw it happen.
The figure — smaller, leaner than the thing in the woods, a silhouette so precisely humanoid it looked painted on — walked out of the tree line, crossed the courtyard behind the rim of firelight, laid one gloved hand flat against the hull of the armored transport, and walked back into the dark.
He did not make a sound. He did not leave a footprint. None of the twenty-three drones sitting around the campfire, including two Disassembly Drones with threat-detection arrays rated for a kilometer radius, registered him at all.
He did leave something behind, though.
The transport, for a moment, glittered.
Just a shimmer. Just a faint rippling cascade of refraction running from the spot where his hand had been, spreading out across the armor plating, down the treads, through the viewport glass, into the engine block, into the fuel cells, into every last atom of what had, ten seconds ago, been a seven-ton vehicle.
And then gravity remembered what to do with crystal.
N was mid-sentence.
"— and that was when the Absolute Solver said —"
The transport shattered.
Not exploded. Not collapsed. Shattered. The way a champagne flute shatters when dropped on marble. One moment it was a vehicle, and the next moment it was a noise — a high, ringing, impossibly musical crash — and a glittering, chest-high pile of diamond rubble sparkling in the firelight.
The courtyard fell dead silent.
Twenty-three visors rotated, in eerie unison, toward the pile.
"...What," Emily said flatly, "the hell."
N's voice module cycled three times before it found the right setting.
"WHAT THE — ?!"
"W-what the hell did that?!" Lizzy's visor was wide as dinner plates ( O O ).
"I don't know, but what kind of sick prank is this?!" Thad stepped forward, picked up a shard of what had been the windshield. It was flawless. It was cut. It was worth, he estimated dizzily, roughly the entire annual budget of his father's drone-repair shop.
Uzi was already on her feet, railgun pulled from the bag that had definitely not been approved for the trip, eyes scanning the tree line ( ￣ヘ￣).
"Some prank," she spat. "Turning a whole transport into pure diamond."
The class erupted. Everyone talking over everyone else. Doll was the only one not speaking — she was staring at the diamond pile with a visor that had gone strangely, quietly still, like she was recognizing something. A solver-construct. She knew solver-work when she saw it. And this —
This was not solver-work.
N had his hands up, trying to calm the crowd. "Everybody — everybody calm down!"
"How the hell is that even possible?!" Uzi demanded.
"Dunno," Thad muttered. "But this is giving me the creeps."
"What if whoever did that decides to do it again?" Lizzy said, voice climbing.
"We're all gonna die —"
"Shut up, Darren."
"Okay, okay — " N held his hands higher, voice firmer. ( ! _ ! ) "Let's not start panicking, alright?! We don't know what happened yet!"
"He's right," V said. She hadn't moved from the log. Her visor was still fixed on the tree line. "Panicking won't help. We need to figure out what the hell is going on here. Calmly."
N shot her a grateful glance. ( u _ u )
The class did not calm down, exactly. But they did stop screaming.
Meanwhile, in the teacher's tent —
The teacher had decided that this was, officially, above his pay grade.
He was fumbling with the long-range comm, thumbing the emergency frequency, trying to raise the bunker. Hello. Yes. Field trip. Transport is now a rock. Please collect us. End transmission.
The comm gave him exactly one thing.
A headache.
A massive, splitting, impossible headache — the kind of electrical feedback that shouldn't have been possible in a drone chassis, because drones didn't get headaches, they got error codes. But the second his transmitter warmed up and reached for the sky, something reached back — something enormous and invisible and electrically alive — and slammed his voice module against the inside of his skull.
"Agh — !"
He dropped the comm. It hit the floor of the tent and immediately went dark. Dead battery. Full-charge to zero in under a second.
His phone was dead too.
His data-slate. Dead.
The emergency flare gun's ignition coil. Dead.
Every piece of electronic equipment he had brought with him had, in the last thirty seconds, given up.
He sat down on his cot, slowly, and put his head in his hands.
"...I am going to retire," he informed the empty tent. "I am going to retire so hard."
He did not know — none of them knew — that roughly one kilometer out from the outpost in every direction, an invisible dome of perfectly tuned electromagnetic nullification had just snapped into place around them. A perfect sphere. Half in the ground, half in the air. No signal in. No signal out. No drone-scale power source capable of punching through.
And none of them would know until morning, when they tried to leave.
Meanwhile.
In a chamber that existed nowhere in particular, at the center of a structure that did not appear on any map of any reality that had ever been surveyed, seven figures sat in shadow around a circular table.
Seven. Plus the three near the front.
Plus the one on the throne.
The chamber had no walls, exactly. The ceiling was simply absent, replaced with a slow-churning void of black and deeper black, stitched through with veins of cold violet light. The floor was polished to such a mirror shine that the figures sitting on it appeared to stand on their own inversions, heads touching heads, infinite in both directions.
At the far end, on a throne that seemed less made than extruded from the dark, sat a figure in a long black coat. His visor was a single gleaming streak of red that caught the violet light and swallowed it. A halo of crow feathers drifted in the air around his shoulders, orbiting him like satellites, never falling.
Pezo.
"It's happening," he breathed. His voice was almost soft. Almost reverent. "Ahaha — haha — it's finally happening."
To his right, kneeling, was a tall slender figure in a white mask, hands folded neatly before him. Crystalline light ran under his skin where skin should have been.
"Yes, my master," Dimno said. His voice chimed when he spoke, like a fingernail on a wineglass. "Their transport is neutralized. They have no vehicle. No shelter capable of withstanding the surface for more than forty-eight hours."
On Pezo's left stood a thinner figure, sparks walking up and down the lines of his chassis in slow, purposeful patterns. He did not kneel. He did not have to.
"They are trapped by my field, sir," Ligho said. Every word he spoke made the overhead lights flicker. "No signal escapes. No signal enters. Should any of them attempt to draw significant power — a railgun discharge, a long-range scan, any form of amplified transmission — my field will return that energy to them. They will learn, very quickly, not to call out."
And before the throne — standing rather than kneeling — was the third.
Motenlar.
His form was, today, almost modest. A bare two meters tall. His bulk was folded down into something resembling a humanoid silhouette, his plates neatly overlapped, his optics dim.
V, V had seen him earlier. V had seen him the way he normally was.
Two hundred meters and climbing. A silhouette against the night sky that no Disassembly Drone targeting system could properly process.
He had been stretching.
"My lord," Motenlar rumbled, and his voice, even compressed into this tiny chassis, made the dust on the floor hop. "I have surveyed the candidates. All twenty-three students, the two Disassembly Drone chaperones, and the supervising instructor are present and accounted for. None are aware. None are prepared."
He paused.
"They are ready for your game, sir."
Behind them, silent, the seven shadowed figures sat at the table. Their faces were not visible. Their visors, if they had visors, were turned toward Pezo. One of them drummed its fingers on the table. The sound was the only thing the seven of them had made in the entire scene.
Pezo rose.
The feathers around him scattered in a slow halo, and the chamber seemed, for a moment, to inhale.
"Good," he said. And smiled.
It was not a kind smile.
"Then let this universe fight the others. Let the original Copper 9 fight the parallel. Let the AUs bleed into each other. Let every Uzi, every N, every V, every Cyn — " he said the name with a flicker of something almost like affection " — meet their counterparts in my arena, and let them understand what they are made of."
He raised one hand.
The violet veins in the void above him pulsed once, and the chamber agreed.
"Let the games begin."
Back at the outpost, nobody heard him. Nobody could have heard him.
But Uzi, halfway to her tent, railgun still half-drawn, paused mid-step.
Her purple visor ( . _ . ) went still.
Something — someone — had just spoken. Not aloud. Not to her. Somewhere far away, in a language her processor didn't have a name for, someone had just said begin, and every synthetic nerve in her body had felt the weight of it land.
She looked up at the sky.
The sky was black.
The sky had been black for thirty years.
But tonight, for one strange second, she could've sworn she saw a crow.
"...Uzi?" N's voice behind her. Soft. Worried. ( . _ . ) "You okay?"
She didn't turn around.
"...N. Something is really wrong."
"Yeah. Yeah, I know."
"I mean really wrong. Like — " she gestured vaguely at the sky, at the diamond pile, at the tree line, at the whole cursed night. "Like worse-than-the-Solver wrong."
N was quiet for a long time.
Then — quieter than she'd ever heard him — he said:
"...me too."
Inside the largest of the prefab buildings, the class huddled around battery lanterns. The teacher had emerged, pale and shaking, from his tent, and had very calmly announced that he was "taking a short walk" and that N and V were "in charge, good luck, goodnight." He had then walked into a supply closet and closed the door.
Nobody had seen him since.
V stood by the window, visor fixed on the tree line, claws very slowly flexing and un-flexing at her sides. N sat on the floor beside Uzi, who was disassembling and reassembling her railgun for the fourth time in a row, which was her version of coping. Lizzy was holding Doll's hand, and Doll was staring at nothing, her pink solver-eye occasionally flickering in a way that suggested her passenger was also, at long last, nervous.
Thad was taking inventory of every weapon in the room.
Rebecca was crying.
Emily was reading.
Darren was making peace with his maker.
"We make it to morning," V said, without turning around. "Then we figure out what's on the other side of those trees. Together. Nobody splits off. Nobody does anything stupid."
"V," N said carefully. "What did you see in the forest?"
V was quiet.
Then she said:
"...Something big, N. Something really big. Something that looked at me, and decided I wasn't worth the effort."
The room went very still.
Outside, somewhere far out in the dead pines, a second tree cracked.
And a third.
And a fourth.
Something — or many somethings — were walking a slow, deliberate circle around the outpost. Not closing in. Just circling. Patient. Curious. Waiting.
The games had begun.
The players just hadn't been told the rules yet.
To be continued —