It had all happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that Ace didn’t even have time to move before the dragon shifter collapsed in Rachel’s arms, choking on her own blood. The sound of tearing flesh echoed off the stone walls, and Rachel slurped greedily at the dragon’s twitching body. The rusty tang of fresh blood hit him like a physical blow, making his own fangs extend involuntarily.

  When the last of the blood drained from the dragon shifter’s corpse, Rachel stood. Purple-blue liquid cascaded down her chin. Her eyes blazed with a mixture of horror and ecstasy. The shifter’s body slumped to the ground, twitching once before going still.

  A delicate chime echoed through the tunnel.

  “Oh, magnificent!” The System materialized, clapping her tiny hands as Rachel’s form began to glow with sickly red light. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Come now, everyone. Look how she preyed on the weak like such a desperate coward! Welcome to the hunt, sweetie.”

  The male dragon shifter backed away until he hit the wall, horror etched into his draconic features like stone. Victor’s smirk widened, but he shifted ever so slightly into a subtle combat stance, one that would give him the advantage if Rachel got any more ideas. Olivia stared at the corpse in horror, while Tara stepped closer to Ace, her medical training apparently warring with her survival instinct.

  Rachel’s hands trembled in front of her, and dark blue droplets fell like toxic rain from her fingertips. Electricity arced between her fingers—not the normal yellow-white of a taser or power line, but a deep, unnatural blue.

  Something was happening to her. The horror that had been on her face moments ago was twisting into something else. Something darker. Her tongue darted out, catching a stray drop of blood from her lip, and her eyes fluttered closed. He recognized that expression—it was the same one he’d seen on the faces of some men after they’d gotten their first taste of killing. That moment when revulsion gave way to power.

  She was in ecstasy. It was obvious from the way her shoulders relaxed, how her breathing steadied. The trembling in her hands wasn't from fear anymore—it was from pleasure. The quiet analyst who’d spend her days poring over data was gone. In her place stood something new. Something hungry.

  And by the sultry curve of her lips, he suspected she was already addicted to the feeling.

  “You… you fucking killed her!” the lone surviving dragon shifter screamed. He dove for Rachel, but Victor held him back with a quick tug on the shifter’s arm.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Victor told the lone surviving dragon shifter. “She’s dead. You can’t change that. Get your head on straight or you’ll lose it.”

  They had all just learned another lesson about their new world: hunger turned friends into food.

  The first to break earned the power to break others.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Rachel whispered, but the words rang hollow. “She just... God, she smelled like summer wine and warm honey. I told myself one taste would be enough.” A small, broken laugh escaped her throat as another surge of electricity illuminated her blood-slicked hands in strobing azure light. The last traces of guilt were apparently drowning in waves of euphoria. “But once I got started…”

  Her voice trailed off into silence, but her eyes told the rest of the story—the dawning realization that the monster inside her felt better than any shred of humanity she had left.

  “First blood goes to the coward!” The System twirled. “Who’s going to join our little killer in what it takes to survive in my world? She’s got four brand new skills to help with the coming fight while the rest of you have, hmm.” She pointed at each of them, pantomiming a tally. “Oh, that’s right. Zero. Better hurry and catch up, or Rachel might leave you all in the dust like that poor shifter.”

  Ace watched Rachel carefully. A strange burst of light snapped through the air, and with a sudden rush of wind, something appeared in the empty space before her. A floating status screen, blazing red this time, appeared before her. It bobbed in an unfelt breeze in front of Rachel, and blurred data that Ace couldn’t read buzzed across its surface.

  His eyes narrowed at the woman. The power rolling off her now was palpable. She had four skills, apparently, though he had no idea what that meant save for the fact that it was bad for him. The rest of them had nothing.

  “Let’s see,” the System continued. “What class will you choose, little coward?”

  With the ecstasy of her kill evidently fading, Rachel flashed an annoyed glare at the little girl. She opened her mouth to speak, most likely to tell the System off, but she wisely closed her mouth before she could say something stupid.

  The former CEO scanned the blue screen that had popped up before her and, with a final deep breath, returned her attention to the floating girl.

  “I choose Blood Analyst,” Rachel said flatly.

  Ace frowned in concern, hoping the System would get cocky and explain what the hell that even meant.

  “Oh, you precious thing!” The System clapped her hands together, as though this were all deeply entertaining. “Trying to turn vampirism into a corporate strategy? How adorably delusional! I simply must see how long you last treating blood quotas like quarterly earnings. Do you have a PowerPoint for your hunting strategy too? Please tell me you do!”

  Rachel gritted her teeth, but again she kept silent.

  The roars from farther down the tunnel grew louder. Now Ace had to watch for both external threats and dangers within his own team.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  A new sound cut through the chorus of voices—the unmistakable growl of something beyond what they could see. Thousands of voices cried for blood, blending with the snarls reverberating through the corridor.

  “Line up,” Ace ordered. He pushed past Rachel, who was still flexing her fingers, colorful energy crackling between them in flashes of blue, then red.

  His enhanced hearing picked up fragments of her muttering: “It’s all so easy now... It’s like I can finally see.”

  She met Ace’s eyes. There was no humanity in them anymore.

  “Better hurry up, Sergeant,” the System whispered in his ear. “You don’t want to be pinned down in a tunnel, now, do you?”

  Nope.

  He gestured for the others to follow, casting a sidelong glare at Rachel before he repositioned himself so that he could keep her in his peripheral vision. They headed off together, their backs tense as they glanced anxiously around the darkness.

  The tunnel curved sharply, then opened into a cavern so vast that even his vampiric vision couldn’t find the ceiling in the fog of darkness high above. Crackling sconces, each as tall as he was, lined the walls far above. Beneath the firelight, ancient stone seats rose in tiers, and every seat had something in it. The silhouettes filling the stadium were shapes that might once have been human, but they now blurred together in a rush of cloth and scales.

  Creatures with too many limbs, too many eyes, way too many teeth. All of them screaming for violence. Most of them resembled vampires like himself, but there were plenty of dragon shifters, too. To his shock, he caught sight of a few humans milling about serving drinks and food, but all of them wore large metallic collars.

  A rumble through the ground drew his attention back to the arena. Rust-colored sand filled the ring, stained black with centuries’ worth of dried blood.

  “Good luck.” The System’s whisper brushed his ear like a cold knife.

  He suppressed the impulse to shudder. Hopefully, she wouldn’t keep up the whispers. Given his luck lately, however, he doubted he would be so fortunate.

  “Finally.” Victor’s low chuckle carried even over the crowd’s roar. “A proper combat zone. Want to set a little wager, Sergeant? See who can get the first kill?”

  “She might think this is a game,” Ace said in a gravelly tone. “But we don’t have that luxury.”

  “Sure we do. We have to make the most of a dire situation, don’t we?” The merc sneered.

  Ace didn’t reply.

  “Suit yourself,” Victor said with a shrug. “Either way, I get to see what you’re made of.”

  The sergeant glared over his shoulder, only to find the former special ops agent watching him with an unwavering expression.

  Marcus wouldn’t leave the mouth of the tunnel, even as the others stepped from the darkness into the torchlight. “She was just limp. We left her there. We left her. We just fucking left her.” He shuddered. “Oh, God.”

  “BEHOLD!” A man’s voice boomed across the arena, silencing even the monsters in the arena’s seats. “This year’s crop of heroes, along with the dragon shifter who survived the System’s trials! Let’s see which of them has the strongest bloodlust!”

  As the thunder of voices and feet stomping on the stone filled the air, Ace did another threat assessment. Six survivors, including him, and one was a proven hostile.

  No weapons.

  No armor.

  No plan.

  Tara walked up beside him, her voice barely a whisper. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Before Ace could answer, the announcer’s voice rumbled again through the sky. “Place your bets! Will the freshly fed vampire continue her killing spree? Will the other doe-eyed heroes get their shit together in time? Or will our sole remaining dragon shifter avenge his kin and slaughter them all with those claws of his?”

  Oh, just fantastic.

  This bastard was giving Ace’s team ideas.

  Ace peered over one shoulder as a shadow crossed the shifter’s face, and the humanoid reflexively peered down at his scaled hands. Sure enough, claws sprang from his fingertips, each one wickedly serrated.

  “Ace!” Tara hissed under her breath. “We need a plan! I’m just a medic. I don’t know how to fight.”

  “I’m working on it,” he snapped.

  “Well work faster.”

  Instead of answering, he scanned the arena. So far, nothing was here to threaten them except for his own teammates, but he had a feeling that would change at any moment.

  “Let the games begin!” the System said cheerfully, though she was nowhere to be found.

  The ground beneath his feet rumbled with the thunder of distant boots. It shook the crimson sand beneath him, and he braced himself as the roar of the crowd grew to a deafening clamor. Flecks of rust-colored sand caught the firelight, dancing like bloody stars with each tremor. His shoulders tightened as his body readied for a fight, his fighter’s instinct dialed to eleven as he scanned the pillar-riddled arena for their foes.

  His newly-sharpened fangs ached in his jaw, responding to the bloodlust that saturated the air. The vampire in him wanted to embrace it, to give the crowd the savagery they craved. The Marine in him wanted to maintain discipline, to survive with some shred of humanity intact. Both instincts warred as another tremor shook the arena floor.

  Something was coming.

  Something big.

  The crowd’s roar pitched higher, and Ace dropped into a fighter’s crouch, his boots shifting in sand that had drunk the blood of countless “heroes” before him. The System had called this a trial, but he knew better.

  This was a slaughterhouse.

  “Come on then,” he muttered, the words lost in the cacophony above. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The tremors grew stronger, and now he could feel a rhythm to the gait. Paws. The kind that belonged to something that had no business being that large. The sand began to shift in waves, tiny avalanches of crimson cascading down the dunes that dotted the arena floor.

  The crowd went suddenly, terribly silent. He had the feeling that they knew what was about to barge out of the cave at the far end of the arena.

  He didn’t.

  And in that silence, Ace finally heard something useful: the echo of ancient chains groaning against metal, of massive doors beginning to rise. Across from them, several iron gates lifted into the air, strange blue light emanating from glowing runes across their cold interlocking pattern. This girl had talked a lot about magic, and if he had to guess, it was some sort of magical barrier reinforcing the iron and keeping whatever was behind it from getting out prematurely.

  A gate opened in the rocky outcropping on the far edge of the arena. The squeal of ancient hinges scratched at the air, deafening and shrill. He winced at the sound, but he never once took his attention off the shadows within.

  In the darkness, a pair of eyes stared back at him.

  Big ones.

  And, to his dismay, even more filled the void around whatever monster they were about to face. Light glinted off the first beast’s fangs, which were easily the length of Ace’s forearm.

  “Oh my God,” Tara muttered, stunned into horrified awe. “We’re all going to die.”

  Again.

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