“Fuck,” Ace muttered.

  Something watched them from the shadows beyond the arena, in the deep void beyond the newly opened tunnel in the wall. Only the beasts’ eyes could be seen, floating in the darkness, and he really didn’t want to know what they were up against.

  These things would charge at any moment, and facing them was probably going to hurt.

  A lot.

  The sergeant’s boots sank into the blood-soaked sand with each step, the grains clinging to his soles. Decades of death had stained the stone walls black, and moisture wept from the rock like tears in the torchlight. Two hundred feet of open arena floor stretched between him and the iron gates, and sparse columns of pitch-black rock offered the only cover in the ring.

  The crowd’s excited chatter bounced off the arena walls, a hundred whispered bets becoming a deafening buzz that set his teeth on edge. His fangs ached, and this time, he didn’t fight them as they extended. His enhanced vision scanned the onlookers, and he caught sight of what he suspected were the wealthy ones. Those assholes watched from their private boxes carved high in the stone, sipping from crystal glasses while they waited for the slaughter to begin.

  A deep tremor shook small ripples through the red sand under his feet. Beside him, Tara’s sharp intake of breath cut through the noise. Her fingers stretched and coiled, again and again, as the all waited to see what would charge them. The predator within him caught the acrid scent of her fear.

  “A weapon would be nice,” Ace snapped into the air, knowing damn well that the floating girl was listening.

  “Oh it would, wouldn’t it?” The girl’s voice echoed through his skull, as though she had burrowed into his head, and he winced the moment he heard her speak.

  “Nope,” he said with a low growl. “Get out of my head.”

  “...what?” Tara asked, her eyes scanning him warily.

  “How about this?” the System continued. “I’ll give you a weapon if you survive.”

  “You want us to take these things on with no weapons at all?” he asked incredulously, much to the confusion of everyone around him, who apparently couldn’t hear what the little girl was saying. “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Yep!” she said cheerfully.

  “Wonderful,” he muttered to himself.

  “You alright?” Tara asked him cautiously.

  He simply nodded.

  The darkness beyond the gate was absolute, save for those glowing eyes bobbing in the void, and something massive shifted in the shadows. His newly awakened instincts screamed at him to run, to climb, to escape—but the walls had been designed for guaranteed bloodshed, rising thirty feet before tapering inward.

  There would be no escape. Only survival.

  Just another day in paradise.

  With a deep breath, he relaxed his shoulders. All that mattered was what he could do right here, right now. The System herself had called this a test, and it was one he would pass. This was about tenacity and the raw will to persevere, even if these bastards in the stands saw it as little more than entertainment.

  “Get ready,” he warned the others.

  “For what?!” Rachel snapped. “What the hell are we supposed to—”

  “Shut up, damn it,” Victor interrupted.

  In Ace’s periphery, Rachel bristled. “Don’t you speak to me like—”

  “He’s right,” Tara interjected. “You’re not helping.”

  “Focus,” Ace chided. “We have to team up. Tara, you—”

  Before he could finish his thought, the beasts growled. The snarls began in the earth itself, a resonant frequency that vibrated through the sand and straight into Ace’s marrow. His enhanced senses picked up layers in that sound—ancient, hungry harmonics that spoke to something primitive in his brain, something that instinctively remembered a time when humans weren’t the apex predator.

  Those eyes floated in the darkness like holes punched in reality—not just glowing, but somehow absorbing the shadows around them. The eyes drifted closer to the threshold, toward the line between darkness and firelight, and Ace’s vampiric vision caught fractured glimpses of what lurked in the void.

  Crystalline structures that shouldn't be alive.

  Geometric patterns that twisted in ways that made his eyes hurt.

  The creature’s hide rippled with unnatural angles, orange-tinted spikes of living crystal jutting from its shoulders and spine like frozen flames.

  “What the ever-loving fuck is that?!” Tara asked breathlessly.

  The sergeant didn’t know, but hot damn, did he want his rifle right now.

  When the first beast crossed into the light, Ace's enhanced senses struggled to process the nightmare before him. Its body was a fusion of crystalline angles and organic curves—a wolf built from broken mirrors and frozen magma. Its obsidian teeth leaked something that moved like liquid shadow.

  More monsters emerged behind it. Each was a variation on the same impossible theme, all wrong in ways that set every predatory instinct screaming.

  These weren’t natural predators.

  These were weapons, forged in some mad god’s crucible where the laws of physics went to die.

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  The closest beast fixed those glowing eyes on him. His new vampiric instincts were throwing up red flags, while every ounce of his training demanded an immediate tactical retreat. And somewhere deep in his psyche, in a place that remembered being prey, a voice was whispering a single, urgent command:

  Run.

  Run.

  For the love of God, fucking run.

  Ace widened his stance as the wolves spread out in a loose semicircle around their group. Their growls intensified. Each movement sent prismatic reflections dancing across the blood-stained sand in a mesmerizing display that was both beautiful and lethal.

  “God fucking damn it,” Victor muttered from somewhere behind Ace. “That brat could’ve at least given one of us a weapon.”

  For once, they agreed on something.

  “Yeah,” Tara added breathlessly, her fingers clenched into tight fists. “Usually games like this will make you choose a starter weapon. They’re always shit, but at least it’s something.”

  “Fight in many bloodsoaked arenas, do you?” Victor asked dryly.

  Tara huffed. “She keeps calling this a game, idiot, and you saw those stats screens. Hell, she calls herself the System. Are you really trying to tell me you don’t play anything online between your bouts of what I can only assume is mass-murder?”

  “Focus, damn it,” Ace chided yet again. “Bicker later. For now, we’ve got to work together to get out of this. Tara’s right. We need to find a weapon.”

  “I—I think she already gave us some,” Marcus commented darkly, his eyes trained on his hands. “I feel strong. Stronger than I’ve ever felt before.”

  The man had a point.

  As they spoke, the pack of mutated wolves spread out with predatory precision, their crystalline forms catching and fracturing the torchlight into kaleidoscopic patterns across the sand. Ace tracked their movements with the cold calculation of both a Marine and a vampire, noting how they moved with such grace, that each step was precise, deliberate, and hungry.

  “Alright, fair,” Ace said. “We aren’t human anymore. We have natural defenses our old bodies didn’t. Let’s use them.”

  The largest wolf, easily the size of a horse, kept drifting into his peripheral vision no matter which way he turned.

  Classic flanking maneuver. These things would attack at any moment, and they would all attack at once.

  These monsters might have looked like abstract art gone wrong, but they hunted with military efficiency. Two smaller ones worked in tandem, mirroring each other’s movements as they cut off potential escape routes to the rear. Another hung back, watching, waiting—probably the cleanup crew if anyone somehow slipped past the first wave.

  Through the blood-tinged floor and prismatic reflections, Ace’s enhanced senses picked up the subtle shifts in their muscles, the way their bodies seemed to fold through space in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. One wrong move, one misstep in this lethal dance, and they would have him surrounded faster than he could blink.

  Ace counted ten—no, eleven of them as they spread out in a practiced formation.

  They stalked closer, orange diamonds dragging jagged lines in the sand as they did. The lead wolf’s head snapped toward him, and those eyes locked onto his with terrifying focus. Its muzzle peeled back to reveal teeth like serrated daggers, each one looking sharp enough to rip through steel.

  The beast lunged.

  More out of instinct than conscious thought, the sergeant dodged it easily. His body responded faster than it ever had before. He felt like he was on the best caffeine high of his life after a good night’s sleep. Every muscle was aligned and ready to move.

  He grinned. It was a feral expression, but he didn’t care. The leader’s gaze locked onto him yet again.

  A growl rumbled in the beast’s throat, low and menacing, and the very ground trembled with a vibration strong enough to shake his bones. It was the low rumble of a building howl. The other wolves snarled and took tentative snaps at his teammates, testing their defenses.

  Here he was, facing off with killer glitter wolves that wanted to eat him.

  Fun.

  “Get away!” Rachel shouted with her arms clutched to her chest, jumping back as a wolf snapped at her heels.

  Before the sergeant could say anything, the other wolves took up the leader’s fierce howl. Their harmonizing voices built to a chilling scream that sent a shiver of dread down his spine. Pain throbbed inside his skull from the deafening cry, but he forced his eyes to stay open. He would not let something as simple as a flinch be the reason he died today.

  Ace had dealt with plenty of enemy soldiers who had wanted to kill him in his Marine days, but these things—these were something else entirely. Something that had no business existing outside of a nightmare.

  “She’s not starting us off easy, is she?” Ace muttered under his breath.

  “This can’t be real,” Marcus said, his voice shaking as his fingers nervously clenched and unclenched, over and over. “This is a dream. This is just a dream. I want to wake up now.”

  Without a word, Victor punched the man in the bicep.

  Marcus let out a string of curses as he cradled his arm. “What the hell was that for?!”

  “Not a dream,” Victor said flatly.

  Ace cursed under his breath, but let the in-fighting slide. The wolves were spreading out, trying to encircle them. Classic pack tactics. He needed to break their formation and disrupt the pattern.

  Simple, then. The best way to deal with a pack, after all, was to form another pack.

  “Here’s the plan,” Ace said, careful to keep his voice steady and low so as not to panic any of the inexperienced fighters. “We’re going to—”

  “Are those crystals?” Rachel squinted at the approaching pack, her brow furrowed. “Growing out of them?”

  “God damn it, Rachel,” Ace snapped. “Focus! We need to—”

  “Less gawking, more fighting!” Victor shouted as he kicked at an overeager wolf that had lunged while Ace was distracted with Rachel. Victor’s form blurred with superhuman speed. His heel smashed into its jaw with enough force to shoot hairline cracks along its face.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Ace muttered under his breath. “Now I’m lumped in with this idiot.”

  Fine. Fuck Victor. The others still needed guidance in this insane circus, and Ace was apparently the ringmaster.

  “Marcus, Rachel, watch the rear!” he barked. “Tara, with me. We take the center. Victor, try not to—”

  But Victor was already gone, and in a matter of seconds, the scene dissolved into brutal chaos.

  Victor vanished into a blur as the first wolf lunged. His fist connected with its crystalline jaw, sending cracks spider-webbing through its face. Two more wolves launched themselves at him, their obsidian claws extended. He caught one mid-leap and cratered it into the blood-soaked sand. The second raked his back open, but Victor's snarl of pain became a roar of fury. He spun with inhuman speed and punched through its chest, its crystalline ribs shattering like frozen branches as dark blood painted the air.

  But the wolves were relentless.

  Even as Victor threw one attacker into the arena wall hard enough to shatter the stone, two more rushed in from opposite sides. Their glowing eyes tracked his every movement, coordinating their attacks with cruel intelligence. Each collision of vampire and crystalline beast sent shockwaves thundering through the arena.

  Ace watched the brutal exchange with perfect clarity, his enhanced vision capturing every devastating blow and tracking every wolf.

  Eleven total.

  Victor had taken on four.

  The other seven closed in on Ace and the survivors, their faceted bodies refracting torchlight as they moved like extensions of a single predator. The air crackled with the raw violence of it all—the sound of breaking crystal mixing with bestial snarls and Victor’s rage-filled battlecry.

  There, at the front of the semi-circle, stood the largest of them all.

  The alpha.

  Had to be.

  And its eyes were locked squarely on Ace.

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