Chapter 150: S38T6: The Inter-Team Duel
The four champions stood in their line, four points of tension in the vast dark. The crowd’s roar was a physical pressure against their skin. Arkan Veyl waited for it to crest and begin to fall. In that moment of collective inhalation, he raised his hand.
The air above the arena floor ripped open.
It wasn’t a projection that faded in. It was a violent superimposition of another reality. Towering trees of bruised violet and deep jade erupted from the empty space, their trunks thicker than buildings, their canopies a tangled nightmare against a false sky the colour of a fading bruise. Between them, shattered remnants of canopy bridges—ropes and splintered wood—swung over bottomless ravines that seemed to breathe, widening and narrowing. Thick, serpentine vines, covered in glistening thorns, lashed slowly through the humid air as if tasting it. A distant river glowed with a sickly phosphorus green, its fumes visibly distorting the air above it.
The hologram was so massive, so enveloping, it felt like the audience was leaning over a terrarium of cultivated madness.
“Your Inter-Team Duel,” Arkan’s voice cut through the stunned silence, “is called The Abusive Jungle Leap.”
The hologram zoomed in, focusing on a narrow branch high in the canopy. A generic figure of light scrambled across it. The platform behind them—a fungal-looking growth—dissolved into powder without a sound. Simultaneously, two thorned vines whipped in from off-screen, crossing the space where the figure had been a half-second before. The figure leapt, a desperate arc, to another branch that visibly sagged under the weight.
“Irena, Anjala, Silvia, and Modou will be teleported into a special dimension where the jungle itself will attack, pressure, shove, and punish every hesitation,” Arkan continued, his tone that of a lecturer describing a fascinating experiment. “It is engineered to be antagonistic. The terrain is not a setting. It is your primary opponent.”
The view panned upwards, through layers of hostile foliage, to a peak where a small structure of smooth, white stone sat. A green flame burned at its centre. The Apex Rescue Shrine.
“Each champion will carry a Team Immunity Totem.” As he spoke, four pedestals of light solidified on the arena floor before the champions. On each rested a palm-sized disc, pulsing with a soft light corresponding to their team’s colour. “Reach the Apex Rescue Shrine first, activate your totem, and your team wins immunity. Your nominee…” He glanced toward the four beams of light. “…is saved from the Elimination Trial.”
The finality of it landed like a hammer.
In the East’s beam, Taitusi let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh. He looked toward Irena, his grin strained at the edges. “No pressure, then,” he called out, his voice echoing in the arena’s acoustics. “Just, you know, my entire future. Casual.”
Irena didn’t turn. She kept her eyes on the swirling, violent hologram, her small hands clenched. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
From the South’s beam, Otar barked a laugh. It was meant to sound easy, confident, but it came out thin and reedy. “Hey, Anjala! You see that? It’s just a big, angry park! You love ignoring people! Now just ignore… angry trees!” He was bouncing again, a nervous tic feeding on false energy. “Easy for you!”
Anjala didn’t even look at him. She was rolling her shoulders, her neck, her dark eyes tracking the patterns of the lashing vines, measuring the rhythm. Her focus was so complete it seemed to swallow Otar’s voice whole.
Skellir, in the West’s light, wasn’t speaking. He was just watching Silvia. His usual chaotic warmth was gone, replaced by a stark, clinical fixation. He watched the sway of her hair, the set of her spine. Her victory over him had landed him here. Now, her movement through that monstrous jungle was his only shield. The dependency was absolute, and it hollowed him out.
Rajab said nothing. He stood rigid in the North’s beam, but his stare at Modou’s back was a laser of pure, banked fury. His elimination had been a clinical decision by the team. Now his salvation was a task for the same man. The injustice of it was a hot, silent scream in his throat. His silence was louder than any plea.
“Observe,” Arkan commanded.
The hologram shifted violently. A massive tree, its roots entwined around a cliff edge, suddenly pulled away, retreating into the mist as if on gears, leaving a gaping void. A ravine beneath a rope bridge widened by twenty feet in a second. A seemingly solid branch a contestant was about to jump toward simply retracted into a larger bough, like a closing fist. In the depths, where a failed jump would land, the ground didn’t just disappear—it opened into phosphorescent pits filled with churning, gaseous mist.
“Your reality will change throughout the duel,” Arkan explained, a hint of genuine fascination in his voice. “The paths are not fixed. The jungle will not wait for courage. It will force the jump before you feel ready. Hesitation is a penalty measured in distance, and distance here is often fatal.”
He lowered his hand, and the four glowing totems floated from their pedestals, attaching themselves to the champions’ wrists with bands of light. Irena’s glowed crimson, Anjala’s amber, Silvia’s silver-blue, Modou’s cold white.
“The duel is not a race of speed alone,” Arkan concluded. “It is a test of adaptive will. Can you negotiate with a landscape that hates you? Can you commit to a leap when the destination itself is untrustworthy? The jungle will abuse your instincts. Your task is to survive the abuse.”
Irena swallowed, a hard click in her throat. She looked small before the colossal, shifting hologram. But she stepped forward, one precise step onto a marked circle on the floor that began to glow. Her fragility was present, but so was a newfound sharpness in her gaze. She was mapping it, turning fear into data.
Anjala cracked her neck. A small, dark smile touched her lips. This was a language she understood: a world designed to hurt, where trust was for fools. She stepped onto her circle, her posture loose and ready. For her, the hostility was almost a relief—finally, a fight that wasn’t hiding its nature.
Silvia’s smile widened. It wasn’t the soft, inviting smile from the party or the cool one she’d given Skellir. This was different. It was a smile of recognition, as if violence had finally shed its pleasant disguise and become honest. She stepped onto her circle with a dancer’s grace, already swaying slightly as if to the rhythm of the lashing vines.
Modou remained silent. He had studied the moving canopy, the shifting ravines, with the weary eyes of a general surveying a costly battlefield. He stepped onto his circle slowly, heavily. The totem on his wrist looked like a manacle. He did not look back at Rajab. The burden was accepted, but it bowed him.
The crowd’s roar reached a fever pitch, a wordless demand for the chaos to begin. Above them, the Apex Rescue Shrine burned its relentless green beacon, a promise of salvation impossibly far above the simulated slaughter.
“Champions,” Arkan said, his voice the final calm before the storm. “Prepare for teleportation. The Abusive Jungle awaits your first mistake.”
The circles at their feet ignited with a searing, white light. The colossal hologram seemed to lean down, the hungry jungle opening its maw. The last thing the arena saw was the four faces: Irena’s determined flinch, Anjala’s cold readiness, Silvia’s thrilled acceptance, and Modou’s profound resignation.
Then the light consumed them, and they were gone.
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The Abusive Jungle Leap Trial Dimension, Elarion Trial Space — the lower canopy layer of the hostile jungle, where giant roots rise like walls, unstable branches shift above toxic ravines, predatory vines strike from the trees, and the first ascent path leads toward the middle canopy. Stage 1 of 3 of the Trial 6 Inter-Team Duel.
Stage 1 of 3 of the Trial 6 Inter-Team Duel.
The world reassembled itself from blinding white into a crushing, humid cacophony. Irena’s feet hit spongy, violet moss that gave way like rotten fruit. The air was thick with the scent of decaying blossoms and something metallic, like blood on hot stone. A chorus of shrieks and chitters echoed from the bruised canopy high above, a soundtrack of unseen hostility.
“Lovely,” Silvia muttered, already in motion.
She didn’t survey. She attacked the landscape. Before the others could even orient themselves, she was sprinting toward a massive, gnarled root that formed a natural bridge over a ravine oozing green mist. The root itself was shifting, groaning as it began to retract into the muddy bank.
“Try not to fall behind,” she shouted over her shoulder, not looking back.
She launched herself, a streak of silver-blue light from her totem cutting through the gloom. Her landing on the far side was a controlled roll that brought her upright, already scanning the next obstacle—a series of unstable-looking handholds on a vertical rock face slick with algae.
Modou took a single, deep breath that expanded his broad chest. He watched the root Silvia had used finish its retraction with a wet, final suck into the mud, closing the path. His eyes, heavy with calculation, found another: a lower, thicker root angling across a narrower part of the same ravine. It wasn’t a shortcut. It was solid.
He moved toward it, his pace a determined, ground-eating march. He tested the root with a heavy step before committing his full weight. It held. “The fast path closes first,” he said, his voice a low rumble lost to the jungle’s noise, meant for no one but himself.
Anjala was already gone from the starting ledge. She had dropped down, vanishing into the thick undergrowth beneath Silvia’s and Modou’s high routes. A thorned vine, thick as her arm, lashed out from a shadowy crevice. She ducked, feeling the air part above her hair, and came up sprinting along a game trail that skirted the ravine’s edge.
“Speed is not the same as control,” she called up toward Silvia’s general direction, her voice cool and carrying.
Irena stood frozen for two full seconds. The world was too much—the smells, the sounds, the sheer malicious life of it. A branch she’d mentally marked as her first step trembled and then snapped back into the tree trunk with a sound like a cracking bone. The jungle was punishing her pause.
Taitusi. The name was a spark in the fog of her panic. He’s standing in that light. Because of me.
The thought had the clarity of shattered glass. She didn’t choose a better path. She simply ran at the gap where the branch had been and jumped, a wordless cry tearing from her throat. She fell short, her chest slamming into the far ledge, her fingers scrambling for purchase on slick moss.
A vine, tipped with a barbed stinger, slammed into the space where she’d been standing half a second before.
She hauled herself up, gasping, heart hammering against her ribs. She was last. She could see Silvia already ascending the rock face with terrifying grace, Modou a steady, dark shape moving methodically along his root bridge, and Anjala a flicker of movement in the dappled shadows below.
“Keep moving or it moves for you,” Modou’s voice boomed suddenly, not a shout but a command that cut through the din. He was halfway across his root, his eyes on a cluster of hanging vines ahead that were twitching with unnatural interest.
Silvia, finding a narrow fissure in the rock, chimneyed up it with ruthless efficiency. She emerged on a broad, fungal platform just as a section of it crumbled into dust. She leaped sideways onto a swinging liana. “It’s more fun when it fights back!” she laughed, the sound bright and dangerous.
“Fun is a distraction,” Anjala shot back from below. She had emerged onto a network of giant, plate-sized leaves that formed a precarious, bobbing path over a pool of the glowing green water. She moved across them with quick, light steps, each leaf dipping but not sinking under her weight. “It wants you to play.”
“Everything wants something,” Silvia retorted, kicking off from the liana to grab a protruding knot on a towering tree. “The trick is enjoying it anyway.”
Irena forced her legs to move. She followed Modou’s lower root path, her breath coming in sharp gasps. The ravine’s green mist curled up, stinging her eyes and leaving a coppery taste in her mouth. She focused on the pulse of the crimson totem on her wrist, a visual heartbeat. For Taitusi. For East. Don’t think, just go.
Ahead, Silvia reached the top of the rock face and faced a choice: a wide, inviting branch leading right, or a narrower, twisting path of fungus-covered stones leading left and upward. She chose the branch.
The moment her weight settled on it, the entire limb recoiled like a startled serpent, throwing her backwards. She twisted in mid-air, catching a handful of creepers that ripped at her palms. She swung, colliding with the trunk, the breath knocked from her.
Modou, reaching the same point, didn’t hesitate. He took the stone path. “The obvious gift is a trap,” he grunted, more observation than lesson, as he began to climb.
Anjala, emerging from her leaf-path onto the same ledge, saw Silvia recovering and Modou climbing. She took a third route: a diagonal crack in the rock face Silvia had just scaled. It was a harder climb, but direct. “The obvious choice is for people who like to lose,” she said, digging her fingers into the stone.
Irena reached the base of the rock face. She was panting, her muscles burning. She looked up at the three diverging paths taken by the others. The wide branch was still twitching. The stone path Modou took looked secure but slow. The crack Anjala was climbing was sheer.
Her eyes caught a different movement—a curtain of thick, rubbery vines draped to the right of the crack. They swayed, not from wind, but as if beckoning. It was a risk. Everything was.
She jumped, grabbing the vines. They held. She began to climb, hand over hand, the world swinging dizzily below her. The vines were slick with moisture, but strong. For a moment, she gained ground.
Silvia, back on her feet, saw Irena’s progress. A competitive smirk touched her lips. She launched herself at the stone path Modou was on, not to climb it, but to use a protruding rock as a launch point to jump across the gap onto Irena’s curtain of vines.
The added weight and sudden force made the entire curtain groan and pivot violently. Irena screamed, her grip slipping.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Silvia said, not sounding sorry at all, as she used the swinging momentum to propel herself up and over the top of the rock face, disappearing onto the next level. “It’s a race.”
Irena clung on, her feet scrambling against the rock. Below, the green mist of the ravine seemed to pulse hungrily. She closed her eyes, found a deeper grip, and kept climbing.
Modou hauled himself over the ledge at the top of the stone path. He was second, behind Silvia, but he had expended far less energy. He watched Silvia, already twenty feet ahead, darting through a tunnel of interwoven thorns. He didn’t sprint. He began a steady, relentless jog, his breathing measured. The jungle ahead was a puzzle of shifting shadows and false floors. Endurance, he knew, would outlast frenzy.
Anjala pulled herself up the crack, her fingers bleeding, and emerged just after Modou. She saw his strategy and matched it, falling into a quick, efficient pace a few yards behind him. She was a shadow, saving her strength, letting the two in front test the traps.
Irena finally dragged herself over the ledge, collapsing onto the soft, strange moss of the next level. She was drenched in sweat and terror, her hands raw. She was last. The distance between her and Anjala seemed vast. A low, grinding sound echoed through the jungle, and the path they had just ascended—the root, the rock face, the vines—began to fold in on itself, swallowed by the hungry flora. The first ascent was locked behind them.
She pushed herself to her feet, a new determination hardening in her gut. The jungle had tested her survival. Now it would test her will.
Ahead, Silvia was first, a flash of arrogant color against the deep green and violet. Modou was second, a dark, steady engine of motion. Anjala was third, a silent, observant ghost. Irena was fourth, alone, and with the image of Taitusi’s desperate face in the beam of light burning behind her eyes.
The duel was far from over. The abusive jungle had only finished its introductions.
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The Abusive Jungle Leap Trial Dimension, Elarion Trial Space — the middle canopy layer of the hostile jungle, where suspended tree bridges, swinging bone-vines, collapsing leaf platforms, vertical ravines, and aggressive living branches force the champions to jump upward while the jungle attacks from every direction. Stage 2 of 3 of the Trial 6 Inter-Team Duel.
Stage 2 of 3 of the Trial 6 Inter-Team Duel.
The ground beneath them dissolved into a lattice of interwoven branches, a treacherous new floor that groaned with every step. The air grew thicker, hotter, pressing down like a damp hand. This was the middle canopy, and the jungle’s patience was gone.
Silvia entered first, a silver-blue blur. She didn’t climb; she assaulted the vertical space. Cutting through a nest of swinging vines with brutal, dismissive swipes, she leapt onto a broad leaf platform that immediately began to crumple at its edges like burning paper.
“Still behind?” she called back, her voice dripping with casual challenge, already springing to the next unstable foothold.
Anjala landed on a higher branch a moment later, her arrival quiet and precise. She didn’t move.She watched. The trees ahead weren’t static; they swayed in a slow, predatory rhythm, their branches extending and retracting like probing fingers.
“Still thinking,” Anjala answered, her eyes never leaving the pattern. “You should try it before the jungle hits you again.”
Silvia snorted and launched herself toward another platform. As her feet touched down, a massive, moss-covered branch—one that had been still—suddenly slammed into her side with the force of a truck.
The impact was a dull, wet thud against her ribs. It threw her sideways, off-balance, toward a gap in the foliage where a phosphorescent pit churned below.
She twisted, grabbed a thin vine, and swung wildly. The platform she’d aimed for crumbled entirely. She hung for a second, gasping, the green mist from the pit stinging her eyes.
It slowed her just enough.
Anjala moved. She jumped, not to where Silvia had been going, but to a thinner branch that had just finished its retraction cycle. She landed lightly, then used the momentum of the tree’s next sway to propel herself upward, passing Silvia in a controlled arc of amber light.
“It wants impatience,” Modou’s voice came from below, heavy and sure.
He was advancing along a more solid route, a suspended bridge of woven fibers and bone-like wood. He tested each step with a methodical tap of his foot before committing his weight. The bridge held until he was at its midpoint.
Then, without sound or warning, the entire structure unspooled beneath him.
The fibers snapped. The bones shattered. Modou dropped, not into a pit, but onto a lower, tangled net of vines ten feet down. The fall jarred him, a grunt escaping his lips as he landed in a crouch. The route he’d chosen was gone, replaced by a more convoluted, slower path upward.
He looked up at the wreckage, his face a mask of weary analysis. “It breaks certainty,” he amended, more to himself than anyone.
Irena, breathing hard but with a new, sharp focus in her eyes, reached the edge of the shattered bridge. She saw Modou below, regrouping. She saw Anjala climbing ahead with cold efficiency. She saw Silvia recovering, scrambling back onto a secure branch.
A thick, rope-like vine, tipped with a glistening sticky substance, uncurled from the shadows to snatch at her ankle.
She didn’t freeze. She didn’t try to dodge it.
“Then stop giving it certainty,” she said, her voice thin but clear.
She jumped. Not away from the vine, but directly into its path, using its grabbing motion as a slingshot. It wrapped around her calf and pulled, but she was already launching with her own force. The combined momentum threw her forward, up, past the expected trajectory.
For a moment, a breathtaking moment, she flew past Silvia’s position, closing the gap. The East’s crimson light streaked through the gloom.
Silvia’s eyes widened, not with fear, but with furious delight. “Nice trick!” she yelled, then recovered violently.
She tore through a net of thinner vines that sought to entangle her, ignoring the scratches they left on her arms. She pushed forward, muscles burning, refusing to let the gap widen again. She stayed close behind Anjala’s ascending form, a predator locked onto a new target.
Anjala kept climbing. Her movements were controlled, precise, each jump timed to the jungle’s malignant rhythm. She didn’t look back at Silvia. She didn’t look down at Irena. She listened to the creaking of the wood, the whisper of the leaves, and moved as if she were part of the soundtrack, not an intruder.
Modou remained dangerous. His new, lower route forced him to navigate a vertical maze of thorn-covered creepers and unstable, fungal outgrowths. He moved with unshakeable calm, but the lost route cost him time. The distance between him and the three women above grew steadily, etched in the exhausting geometry of the climb.
The middle canopy began to seal itself behind them.Bridges retracted. Vines knitted together into solid walls. Gaps filled with sudden, thorny growth.
The order locked as the last pathway closed.
Anjala was first, perched on a sturdy limb near the top of the canopy layer, her chest rising and falling in steady, measured breaths. Silvia was second, a few yards below and to the left, her body coiled and ready, her eyes fixed on Anjala’s back. Irena was third, having landed solidly on a branch just below Silvia, her face flushed with effort and a strange, new confidence. Modou was fourth, still wrestling with the dense undergrowth of the lower middle canopy, a persistent shadow but visibly behind.
Above them, through a final filter of twisted branches, the Apex Rescue Shrine burned its green flame. It was closer now, so close the light painted patterns on the sweaty skin of Anjala’s neck.
The final stage was still waiting, a silent, patient apex above the abuse.