Chapter 39: More Killings

Perched atop an eight-hundred-meter conical bluff in the Swabian Alps of Germany, Hohenzollern Castle had withstood centuries of siege warfare.

Its thick neo-Gothic limestone walls, fortified bastions, and narrow, winding ramparts had made it an ideal redoubt for six surviving European candidates when the floods began. For four months, they had hoarded dry cured meats, rainwater barrels, and crates of assault rifles looted from a Bundeswehr depot before the valleys turned into inland seas.

Now, those ramparts were slick with black slime and clotting gore.

Candidate #077, a former German tactical officer named Brandt who possessed the S-rank ability [Aegis Wall], slammed his shoulder against a barricade of overturned oak tables and sandbags blocking the castle’s outer portcullis.

"Reload! Reload the MG3!" Brandt screamed, his throat tearing on the raw air.

Beside him, Candidate #114, an elementalist named Sonya, dropped an empty drum magazine onto the stone flags with a frantic clatter. Her hands were blistered, her sleeves burned away, and her face smeared with black soot and rotting grease. She jammed a fresh belt into the feed tray of the machine gun, racked the bolt, and opened fire down the narrow spiral incline.

The heavy 7.62mm rounds chewed through the front ranks of the horde.

BRRRRRRT.

Muzzle flash strobed violently against the foggy midnight air. Down in the courtyard below, hundreds of infected bodies were shredded into spinning fragments of rotten meat, severed limbs, and fractured bone.

It made zero difference.

The Swabian basin had drowned over two million people during Phase 1. Now, those two million were climbing the mountain like an undulating, gray-black carpet of wet maggots. They didn’t care about the machine-gun fire. If a corpse had its legs blown off at the hip, it simply dug its blackened fingernails into the stone and dragged its torso forward with grotesque, frantic lunges, jaws snapping at empty air.

Worse, they were using each other as building blocks.

At the base of the twenty-foot curtain wall, thousands of drowned bodies were willingly throwing themselves into the dry moat. They packed tightly into the ditch, crushing against one another until the bodies piled ten, fifteen, twenty feet high—forming a squelching, shifting ramp of dead meat straight up to the battlements.

"They’re climbing the rampart!" Sonya shrieked, pointing a shaking finger toward the southern parapet.

A ghoul bounded over the stone crenelation on all fours.

Its body was horribly bloated, its abdomen swollen like an overfilled leather sack from four months of water submersion. It didn’t pause to bite.

Before Brandt could bring his rifle up, the creature’s ribcage split open with a sickening, wet rupture. A torrent of foul, pressurized bile sprayed across the stones like acid, hissing furiously as it ate through the heavy iron hinges of the gate in seconds.

"Get back!" Brandt roared, thrusting his arm forward.

A shimmering golden barrier of kinetic energy flared to life in front of him, deflecting the corrosive spray. But as the bile splashed against the shield, the magic sizzled and popped under the toxic payload, draining Brandt’s mana gauge like an open spigot.

Then came the heavy footfalls.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

The flagstones beneath their boots vibrated.

From the center of the surging swarm in the courtyard, a massive shape pushed through the sea of corpses, tossing lesser ghouls aside like rag dolls.

It was an infected candidate: Candidate #041, formerly known as [Grizzly].

Before drowning during the deluge in Bavaria, the man had wielded a beast-transformation talent. Now, the Phase 2 pathogen had mutated that dormant power into an eight-hundred-pound abomination.

The creature stood over nine feet tall, covered in matted, rotting fur and patches of calcified bone scales. Its snout was split vertically into three hinged jaws dripping with necrotic saliva, and its arms ended in eight-inch scythe-like claws of hardened keratin.

"Fire! Focus the big one!" Brandt screamed, emptying his G36 rifle straight into the monster’s chest.

The bullets punched small, black holes through Grizzly’s rotten hide, but the beast didn’t even flinch. It let out an ear-shattering, wet bellow that shattered every stained-glass window in the castle chapel behind them.

With terrifying speed, the mutated beast leaped.

It cleared thirty feet in a single bound, crashing directly into Brandt’s [Aegis Wall].

CRACK.

The golden energy barrier shattered into thousands of glowing shards like cheap glass. The sheer kinetic shockwave threw Brandt backward across the courtyard, his armor buckling inward as two ribs snapped like dry kindling. He hit the stone fountain hard, coughing up a mouthful of dark blood.

"Brandt!" Sonya cried out, raising both hands to summon a lance of blue lightning.

She never got the cast off.

Grizzly spun around with blinding agility, its heavy, clawed arm sweeping through the air. The scythe-like talons sheared cleanly through the machine-gun mount, the sandbags, and Sonya’s torso.

Her upper body was hurled fifteen feet against the chapel door, sliding down the oak wood in a smear of crimson.

The horde didn’t hesitate.

With the barricade smashed and the defenders broken, hundreds of swift ghouls poured over the breach like black water through a broken dam. They swarmed over the fallen, their teeth sinking into cloth, leather, and flesh, ripping with ravenous, mindless hunger.

Brandt struggled to pull a combat knife from his chest rig with trembling, bloodied fingers. He looked up just in time to see Grizzly’s three-part jaw open wide above his face, dripping black fluid onto his eyes.

"To hell... with this trial..." Brandt wheezed.

The jaws snapped shut.

Across the global interface, the cold chime rang out twice in rapid succession:

[Trial Alert: Candidate Elimination Confirmed.]

[Candidate #114 (Sonya) has been eliminated.]

[Candidate #077 (Brandt) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 84 / 500.]

Chapter 39: The Banquet Below

Four hundred meters beneath the churning gray surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, inside the private screening lounge of St. Jude’s Spire, the only sound was the delicate crunch of a roasted sea-salt almond.

Julius Vance sat with his legs crossed, wearing a pair of soft navy trousers and a lightweight cashmere sweater. A silk pillow rested comfortably behind his lower back. On the marble side table beside him, a bottle of chilled vintage champagne rested in an ice-filled silver bucket, condensation beading along the green glass.

The main wall display was split into three primary sections.

The left pane displayed a real-time thermal satellite feed of the European continent. Germany, France, and northern Italy were smeared with massive, glowing heat signatures—billions of fast-moving corpses sweeping down from the swollen river basins, scouring every elevation, ancient castle, and high-altitude retreat where survivors had tried to build redoubts.

The center pane showed the casualty ledger, which had dropped below ninety players for the first time since the Trial had begun.

The right pane, however, was playing a classic screwball comedy film from the 1930s, the crisp black-and-white images dancing across the forty-foot screen with zero lag.

"Colonel Mercer," Julius said smoothly, lifting his flute of champagne and taking a cool, effervescent sip.

"Sir?" Mercer’s voice crackled softly through the discreet ceiling intercom.

"How are our surface hydrophones looking after that seismic tremor off the Azores?"

"Completely nominal, Mr. Vance," Mercer replied, his tone devoid of stress. "The tremor was a localized tectonic adjustment at a depth of four thousand meters. No effect on our basalt foundations. The southern breakwater didn’t even register a three-millimeter deflection."

"And the infected drift?"

"The Atlantic current has carried the primary carcass slick toward the Iberian coast," Mercer reported. "Our automated radar detected roughly thirty thousand floating corpses caught in the southward drift. They passed eighty nautical miles east of our quadrant. They couldn’t smell us if they tried, sir. The offshore winds are blowing dead east toward the ruins of Lisbon."

"Excellent," Julius murmured. "Let Lisbon have them."

Julius set his champagne flute down and tapped his phone to check the [World Chat].

The channel was an absolute graveyard. The arrogance that had defined the candidates on Day 1—the boasts of ancient legacies, invincible magic, and divine destiny—had been burned away by cold, wet, mindless reality.

Only a handful of messages remained, spaced hours apart:

— [Vagabond]: Hohenzollern fell. Brandt and Sonya are dead. I watched Grizzly rip them apart from the forest canopy. I’m out of food. I’m out of arrows. There’s no high ground left.

— [GaleRunner]: My legs are black up to the knees. The infection spread from a scratch on my heel. Does anyone have an amputation skill?! PLEASE!

— [Monk]: Eighty-four left. Just eighty-four out of five hundred. If you are alive... find peace. There is no winning this.

Julius looked down at the words, entirely unmoved.

They still didn’t understand the rules of the game they were playing. They thought the Trial was an arena where the strongest warrior stood atop a mountain of skulls.

They never realized that an arena with five hundred fighters has only one rational strategy: build a vault, lock the door from the inside, and wait for the fighters to kill each other.

The door to the lounge slid open with a soft, pneumatic hiss.

Clara Chen walked in, carrying a covered porcelain dish and a small crystal bowl of freshly harvested white raspberries. She wore a clean linen shirt and dark trousers, looking relaxed and well-rested.

"Marcus told me you skipped the second course in the dining hall, Mr. Vance," Clara said with a warm, professional smile, setting the tray on the marble console. "He sent up pan-seared sea bass over saffron risotto with crisp wild leeks from the Level 4 hydroponic raceway."

"Marcus knows my weaknesses," Julius smiled, lifting the silver cloche.

The aroma of rich butter, fragrant saffron, and golden-crisp fish skin immediately filled the theater room, completely replacing the faint scent of ozone from the air scrubbers.

Julius picked up his fork and flaked off a tender piece of the sea bass. The fish was buttery, sweet, and seasoned to perfection, pairing beautifully with the creamy, aromatic risotto beneath.

"How are the crew morale metrics, Clara?" Julius asked, chewing slowly.

"Remarkable, sir," Clara replied, checking her tablet. "Eight-hour shifts, four meals a day, daily gym access, and the hydroponic yields are up another four percent. Everyone knows what’s happening on the surface. They see the satellite feeds. To be honest, Mr. Vance... the staff looks at you like you’re an emperor."

"I’m no emperor, Clara," Julius chuckled softly, taking a sip of the dry champagne. "I’m just a man who understands that in a storm, the safest place to be is four hundred meters under the rocks, eating fresh fish."

"A very wise man, then," she nodded with a respectful half-bow before turning toward the door. "Enjoy your film, sir."

The door hissed shut, sealing Julius once more inside his quiet, climate-controlled haven.

On the big screen, the comedy reached its climax with lively jazz music and rapid-fire dialogue. On the side monitor, another candidate’s name turned from bright green to dead gray on the global roster.

[Candidate #062 (Vagabond) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 83 / 500.]

Julius popped a sweet, chilled white raspberry into his mouth, leaned back into the velvet cushions, and smiled as the credits began to roll.