All the other twEfE flew up at him, shrieking their war cries. At the same time, the knife fragments in us started to crackle like cackling goblins. Gritting my beak, I squeezed my fingers on the burning metal and managed to pull it out and toss it to the spike pits right as it and the rest of the white-hot shards exploded in gnarly electric bolts that cooked their targets alive. Bodies fell through their own wisps of smoke, sewing the stench of burning leather and feathers through the arena.

About a third of the twEfE hit the spikes and died on the spot, while the rest crashed onto a passing tile where they lay, stunned and helpless, unable to stop the ninja from buzzed down to them and passed over them like death itself, dealing coup de grâces that their frazzled nerves and busted armor was powerless to defend against.

He slit their necks with blades of pure force.

"I can't believe it," the announcer yelled, "it's Number Three for the win!"

And the crowd went wild. The hummingbirds leapt and sang and cheered.

Meanwhile, I flopped onto my back and scuttled up against the wall, free of any pretenses of dignity as Number Three flew over to me.

His force blades glowed with a soft, swirling light as he pointed them at me. He hovered over me, just out of arm's reach.

Behind us, the floating tiles descended toward the ground and settled in place above the rusty spikes.

I raised my hands and pleaded for mercy. "Please don't kill me!" I repeated the words like a broken record as I cowered in his shadow. "Please don't kill me! Please, please, please, don't kill me! Don't kill me don't kill me don't—"

—Number Three threw one of his force knives at me. I closed my eyes, bracing myself for pain and death, but, surprisingly, neither of them came.

Daring to look, I saw Number Three hovering in front of me, holding with his force blade's blood-dripping edge just millimeters away from my throat.

"Are you real?" he barked. The blade trembled and pulsed. "Answer me!"

"Yes! Yes!" I said, keeping my hands raised. "I'm real! I'm as real as real can be!"

Number Three's wings were a blur at his back, generating air currents that ruffed my feathers.

"Who are you?" he demanded. "Why are you here?!"

"I-I'm looking for the Imprisoned Ones," I said. "The Keret! The d'zd told me this was supposed to be their prison. I had the key, and everything—"

The warrior tapped his beak open and shut. "—The Imprisoned Ones?" he said.

He pushed his force blade into me ever so slightly. I winced as the tip of his magic cut into my neck.

"I… there's a lot of things I'm trying to do, okay?" I said.

His eyes narrowed behind his helmets' slits. "No! I'm not falling for it! No more tricks, you hateful bitch! Not again!"

All of a sudden, a distant voice came screaming toward us. "Stop, EUe! Stop stop stop stop stop!"

The twEfE looked up and back. I followed his gaze to—

—Holy crud, was that a Vyx?

It certainly looked like one. It had the telltale, rough-hewn metallocrystalline geometry and floated preternaturally and everything. The only odd thing about it was its size. As it zipped over to us, I realized it had to be no bigger than my head.

"EUe, don't!" The little Vyx spoke in a chipper, excited voice, slightly glowing with every word.

Wait a minute.

Did he just say…?

I stared at the twEfE and stammered in shock. "E-EUe?"

The twEfE glanced angrily at me and then turned to his Vyx companion.

"Why should I stop?" EUe asked.

"Because of what he is!" the Vyx said.

Oh fudge. Did that thing somehow know I was a wyrm?

"Which would be?" EUe asked.

"I haven't the slightest idea," the machine replied, "which is all the more reason to keep him alive."

EUe looked at me. "Is he Vyxit?"

I shook my head vigorously. "I'm not Vyxit!" I waved my hands side to side. "I swear, I'm not!"

EUe glanced at his companion. "Is there any chance he's telling the truth?"

The floating drone scanned me with a wide, scintillating green ray. "I detect no traces of Vyx software. I can confirm he is using Vyx code to interface with our prison, but underlying algorithmic substrata… I simply don't know what to make of it."

EUe's grip on the spear went slack. The blade pulled away from my vulnerable, birdy body. "How's that possible?"

"Again, no idea," the drone said, "though I've got a dozen hypotheses." It turned to me. "To think, after all this time… something new has finally happened."

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"V, are you telling me… he's real?"

"Yes, EUe," the Vyx replied. "I can hardly believe it, myself."

EUe immediately dropped to his knees. His armor clinked against the arena's stone floor.

"Last time I checked, I was very much real!" I said. I patted my scale-backed hands on my chest, thumping the meaty flight muscles below. "See, one-hundred-percent real."

Up above, the crowd chanted, drunk with death.

"Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!"

But EUe stayed his hand.

"Number Three stays his hand!" the announcer said. "Number Seven lives!"

An alarm blared.

"Time's up!" the announcer said. "Ela-tU's golden feathers, I never thought this day would come! We have two survivors! Can you believe it, folks? Two! Are they both kwekek?"

EUe's beak twitched. His eyes twinkled among his ruffled, bejeweled feathers. Then he lifted his head and let out a mournful cry, throat quivering with sound and feeling. EUe's call was a melody of clicks and whistles, and warbles and chips. The crowd stopped jeering as the airy swan-song echoed through the arena.

The haunting call ended as abruptly as it began, only for a buzz to thrum behind EUe as he flung himself onto me and hugged me in a tight, winged embrace. I could feel his heart blitzing like mad within his fragile form. He shivered as if feverish.

At first, I didn't know how to react. I held my wings out to either side, and kept my arms slack, resting my hands on the ground. But then I caught sight of V's accusative glare, and—after a moment of thought—I returned EUe's embrace, putting one of my hands on his shoulder. He shook more in my touch, letting out a low, almost electroacoustic coo. I tightened my grip on his shoulder, as if to hold him steady. We stayed like that until he stopped shaking.

Then, without warning, he ripped free of my touch with a flutter of wings. For an instant, I saw him hovering over the ground, one foot a hair's breadth above the stone, before he set down and folded his wings.

The crowd was not the least bit amused with this turn of events. They belted out chirps and sneers and hissing boos.

EUe looked at me askance, wary and ashamed. "Brace yourself," he said, turning away from me.

"Brace myself? For what?"

"I don't know what will become of you in what happens next, other than that you'll probably be hungry."

Before I could even open my beak, the arena and everyone in it started to twitch and shimmer. Light flickered in and out of existence in fibrous lines, gathering thicker and thicker they drowned both my senses and the surrounding space in a spreading torrent of luminous cross-hatching, which made the sudden end as everything turned to black almost comfortingly familiar.

Then I got punched in the face.

— — —

WHAM!

The blow sent me reeling. I staggered backward, dizzy and disoriented, vision flashing. The world turned on its axis and knocked me onto my tail feathers.

The whole room seemed to throb. Or was that just me?

I groaned in misery.

I was in a large, curved underground chamber. Archways in the front wall let in daylight. Clanging metal and other sounds of combat echoed between the stone walls, along with the never-ending buzz of twEfE wings.

There was movement all around me. twEfE—some armored, some not—darted here and there. Some sparred with one another, while others tested their mettle against minimalist dummies and oddly patterned targets. As I blinked my eyes, in between the ringing in my ears, I watched my assailant go toe-to-toe with EUe—at least, I was pretty sure it was EUe, considering the way his Vyx companion was hovering over the scene.

The twEfE that had punched me was almost comically muscular, so much so that his wings seemed almost puny as they stuck out from his back. I watched in dazed awe as EUe hovered about, swishing side to side, effortlessly dodging the big twEfE's blows.

They were the moves of a master.

EUe zipped around and behind his opponent, pulled out a knife, and held it against the twEfE's throat, all in the blink of an eye. The beefy fellow raised his arms, wings, and tail feathers, and froze stiff.

"I yield," he said. "I yield."

EUe pulled away from him.

"Excellent work." The big twEfE clacked his beak in approval, showing off the serrated tips. Then he glanced at me and chittered. "As for you… well, it's been nice knowing ya."

He fluttered his wings, cackling as he walked off.

EUe looked down at me. "Are you okay?"

I moaned in the affirmative.

"You should drink some nectar." He looked off into the distance.

I followed his gaze, passing my eyes over floor cushions, wall-extruding platforms, and tight-rope spans of slender wooden rods until I saw a fountain burbling off in the distance. I recognized the sweet scent coming off it. It was not unlike the one from the fountains and current troughs up in the arena, though it smelled significantly less "pure".

If I had to guess, it had been adulterated with water and alcohol.

The nostrils—technically, nares—atop my beak quivered at the acrid, alcoholic scent. For a split second, I was repelled, but then everything changed.

It was like my body had a switch, and someone had just flicked it on. Every one of my muscles seemed to go tense. My heartbeat was a miniature chainsaw screaming in my ears like a. My long, slender tongue lolled out from my beak as every cell in my body screamed at me in unison: NECTAR!

I burned with hunger, and just hunger, but fear, as well. The feeling made wyrm-transformation hunger seem like just a bad case of the munchies.

The liquid in the fountain? I would make it mine. I'd make the fountain mine, too, for added measure, because if I didn't, my gut told me that EUe would, and that simply couldn't stand.

It was MY NECTAR! MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE, and NOBODY ELSE'S!

I was barely aware I'd even moved. I ran up to the fountain on biological autopilot and lowered my beak and lapped up the liquid with my tongue, and if anyone so much as got in my way, I would gut them.

Lick. Slurp. Lick. Slurp. Lick. Slurp. Lick.

I wondered if there'd be nectar in the guts…

A muscle at the back of my head hammered against my skull.

My heart rate slowed with every slurp. After a few seconds, I could just barely discern gaps in between the individual beats.

I'd been gripping the edge of the fountain's bowl so tightly, my fingers ached.

The fluid was kind of like the Polovian schnapps my grandmother used to drink, only terrible. My current drink was watery and bitter. I could barely taste any sweetness at all.

Still, if you tried to take it away from me, I would cut you.

Staggering back, I fell onto my bottom, wincing as I crumpled some of my tail feathers, though a quick twitch of muscle made them lift up and stick out.

EUe barely paid any attention to me as he slurped up the fluid. Meanwhile, all I could do was stare, marveling at the extraordinarily violent thoughts that were passing through my mind. I very much disliked having them, but I was powerless to stop them. About a quarter of them involved me killing EUe in various ways in order to better assure my control of the nectar fountain. The middle two quartiles were much more reasonable. Yes, they said, EUe is a threat to your food security, but, he's a fellow Ruby—you can smell it—so, what's good for him is good for you, though because he isn't a blood relative, you probably shouldn't let him go without giving him a minor beating, at least, just so that he doesn't get any ideas of taking what is obviously YOUR nectar.

On the one hand, that was still a terrifying thought, on the other hand, I had to admit it had a point. Nobody messes with Genneth Howle's nectar.

Meanwhile, the lowermost quartile of my mind—where most of me currently was—was of the opinion that all this time I was wasting on thinking could be much better spent drinking more nectar.

I managed to convince myself to go with that last idea.

Lick. Slurp. Lick. Slurp. Lick. Slurp. Lick. Slurp.

I burped gently.

And just like that, the murderous rage was gone. Mostly; it did take a bit of conscious effort for me to look away from the fountain.

EUe turned to me, cocking his head in concern.

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