“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

  function annotate209(){ codex.updateEntry(“Pattern Recognition | Some rhythms can only be learned through death.”); }

  // If at first you don’t succeed. Some bullshit like that.

  As if to punctuate his statement, the room itself purred. A metallic vibration, as if gears were moving. A hiss surrounded Remi as air shot from behind him. The training room stretched, then unfolded into a tunnel, as the far wall tipped forward, like a domino being toppled by a child. It dropped with a crash that was felt rather than heard.

  For an instant, Remi could once again see the emptiness of unrendered Crucible space. But the emptiness was quickly replaced as the new floor unfolded, like a card, creating a right wall. It unfolded again to form the left, which unfolded to make a roof. It proceeded like this until he found himself in a long tunnel made up of interconnected rooms that stretched far into the distance.

  The cascade of wall-minos stopped, and the movement paused for a breath. All impressive stretches need that moment of inhalation, and then, once it had gloried in its length, the room began to contract—one wall at a time. The first one slammed upwards, far in the distance, and as it settled into place Remi could barely make out the door gap at its center. Then another wall slammed up, shortening the corridor further.

  For just one last moment, the entire tunnel was visible through the open doorways, two rooms beyond the one he stood in. He could just make out that something was happening in each of the rooms as they too morphed into something. Into what he didn’t even want to think about, and he never had time to find out. Just as the room closest to him shifted, the system cut him off, and a metal door materialized with a thunk, followed by a clang as a knob appeared.

  If there was something more concerning than watching the metamorphosis of the spaces before him, it was suddenly not being privy to any of it.

  “Well, that was something,” he said, turning to face Nel’s window. “That was some impressive work you did there.”

  “Wasn’t me,” she said in response. “This is all Crucible coded. I’m at a loss as much as you are. Neither of us has line of sight, and my diagnostics have yet to tell me anything of use. So?”

  “I can help with that,” came the soft voice of Amihan. “Sadly, our fun and games time is over. The Crucible has given us no flexibility in this module. I’m told I have limited freedom in the final one, but as for this one. They are in control.”

  [SYSTEM MESSAGE]

  [TRAINING MODULE 3 — GAUNTLET LOADED]

  The protagonist will proceed through three locked rooms in a fixed order. Each room contains a distinct combat or adaptation scenario. Upon failure or incapacitation—or with any luck, decapitation—player will be restored to baseline condition in the starting chamber. “IT’S ALIVE!!!!”

  Proceed when ready. Proceed with caution.

  Remi considered for a moment before talking, which was unusual for him. “So, it sounds like I get respawns?”

  “Sounds that way,” said Nel.

  “Okay, but what about my anchor point? Won’t I just start the module again and move to the next one if I die? ”

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t actually understand how that has been working, really.”

  “That is obvious,” she said, but there was kindness in her voice. “Here is the Remi’d-down version. I had you anchor in the portal, so the anchor exists in between two spaces. This let me bypass the one use per scene rule. Normally, you anchor to a fixed scene-state, but we had you anchor to the space between them. The anchor can’t decide where to put you, so it just spits you out based on where you were going. We have been exploiting this and the Crucible’s module advancement, which we discussed earlier. It’s a pretty obvious loophole, but their oversight is your sped-up training schedule.”

  “That makes sense,” he said.

  “Sadly, they are going to patch that shit as soon as we are out of here.”

  “That is obvious.” Remi smirked.

  “So, the reason you don’t end up back at your anchor is that respawns are hard-coded into this module. You are not really dying; that is by system design. Your anchor point prevents actual death, so what is going on here is ironically closer to a video game than what was happening before.”

  “I think I get it,” he said.

  She continued. “Now if you stabbed yourself, you might—.”

  “It’s good, Nel, I got it.” He cut in.

  “Oh sure. Would you consider stabbing yourself for scientific purposes?”

  “No.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’d be fine.”

  “No.”

  “Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if that would even bypass the spawning protocol, are you sure you would give me a little stabby, stabby, just so we could both know the truth, and sleep better at night. “

  He shook his head in exasperation. “Now, I know you’re fucking with me. Could we just focus on what’s in front of me?”

  “Sure thing, Boss, whatever you say,” she said with a grin.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Remi shook his head as he walked towards the door. He looked at Amihan and held up his meter stick. “Will I need this?”

  “Probably not in the way you think. But I would suggest keeping it out so you can work on running with it. Practice some with one stick, and others with both.”

  That made sense to Remi, so he shrugged and approached the door.

  “Also, I do not want you to use your spells. This is combat training, so I want you to succeed as much as possible without it. Agreed?”

  “Sure,” he said, “no spells. It’s not like I have Fireball, anyway.”

  “Not that it would help you much,” Nel chimed in.

  Remi was about to laugh, but then he thought about the fire maze and how close he had gotten to losing her. His heart dropped. He really needed to stop telling that joke.

  “You’re right,” he said as he grabbed the knob. “It probably wouldn’t.”

  He opened and tugged the door towards him. What he saw horrified him. So he closed the door.

  “Come to think of it, maybe we should wait on those diagnostics.” He was half serious, but knew there wasn’t much help likely to come. His intuition was correct. Nel still couldn’t pull anything useful from diagnostics. But opening the door had triggered something — the Crucible pushed a new label onto his HUD.

  [ROOM 1: PULSE CHAMBER]

  Fun fact—submarines aren’t the only things that implode under sudden pressure. People just pop better.

  Well, that was fucking horrifying. It also didn’t make him want to open that door again. Remi looked at Amihan for reassurance. He found none.

  “Forward,” she said. Gesturing towards the door with a nod of her head.

  “Fine,” he said. Remi grabbed the knob and opened the door fully. Just like last time, the walls were breathing. Wide, slow expansions followed by sudden, violent contractions, like a giant metal lung trying to exhale him out of existence. A wave of hot air, moist and fetid, struck him this time. It was like rolling over first thing in the morning to be met with morning breath. Gross!

  The floor even looked a bit like a tongue, off-pink and slimy. But other than the breathing, it was empty. Seems pretty straightforward, he thought as he stepped confidently into the room.

  A few things happened all at once. His foot slid as the floor, as something that looked solid, gave under his weight. Why is it spongy? The stumble carried him over the threshold just as the door slammed shut behind him.

  The chamber emitted a faint thunk. He paused, expecting a delay before something happened. Again, he’d miscalculated. The pulse hit him immediately.

  The walls snapped inward with the force of a sledgehammer, compressing the air and his ribs inward at the same time. He had a half-second to register a sound like a creak, and then a ping as his spine protested. It sounded exactly like the Titan submersible test clip, the one where the hull started to fail. He’d heard it in a documentary. That was bad, but what came next was substantially worse. Just as the tooltip had predicted, Remi, in the fraction of time just before he was submerged into darkness, heard himself pop.

  

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 2

  Remi returned, unsurprisingly winded and disoriented. His eyes flicked downwards, confirming he was in fact whole and that he didn’t have shards of ribs jutting from a mulched chest. He sighed with relief. But as his mind reached back to the moment just before he died, he found it was mostly gone. Maybe that was a fortunate thing. A lifetime memory of Remi’s exploding like a water balloon dropped on a sidewalk is probably best forgotten.

  It took him a few more moments to reassemble the world around him. He looked towards Nel. “Did you see that?”

  “Unfortunately,” she said.

  “Thanks for the nightmare fuel, Page. We get the pleasure of watching it all in high definition.” She pointed behind him. Remi turned, and sure enough, a massive flat-screen had materialized against the back wall. It was dark for the moment, except for a single line blinking in the center:

  [REPLAY QUEUED]

  “It appears I can control the replays from here.” She looked down at her laptop, and he could hear her fingers dance on the keys. “Do you want to see what we did?”

  Remi looked at Amihan for confirmation. She shook her head no. Maybe it was the artificial light in the room, but she looked green.

  “No, I think I can live without it.”

  “Actually, you lived despite it,” she said in a deadpan monotone. But she looked up, likely hoping for a reaction. He gave her a chuckle. Getting the reaction she had hoped for, she went on, “Can you try not to do that again?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Amihan had apparently had enough of the chitchat; she pointed to the door. Remi shrugged and opened the door again.

  It was the same as before, which was good to know. The walls still expanded and contracted in that horrible rhythm, like the room continued to breathe, and it still very much needed a Tic Tac.

  He hovered in the doorway. He wanted to move, and he even tensed his muscles, prepared to spring into the space, but he couldn’t. Every instinct screamed don’t step in. He did a gut check and leaned forward, hoping to see something that might give him a clue when the shockwave would come.

  That hesitation cost him.

  The chamber emitted another faint thunk, but the timing differed from before. The wave came earlier; the Crucible having shifted its rhythm.

  “Oh, come—” Remi started. But Amihan moved; she grabbed the back of his shirt and shoved him forward just as the pulse detonated outward again.

  The pressure wave slammed into her outstretched arm instead of his chest. As he moved, the wave seemed to pass through him, like particles on the same wavelength that move in tandem. Amihan’s arm, however, was not so lucky.

  There was a sickening, wet crack. Amihan’s arm bent in the wrong direction. Remi stumbled into the room as she was thrown backward, hitting the far wall with a grunt.

  “Amihan!” he yelled.

  She didn’t scream. She just got up, her one ruined arm cradled in the other, and said through clenched teeth, “Don’t… hesitate.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “Okay, I won’t,” he said. But his decision to turn back towards Amihan was a costly one. The shockwave hit him mid-turn. It struck him and continued the turn, except it spun him like a top.

  Remi careened around and slammed into the wall with enough force to snap his neck. He was not sure what was more sickening, the sound as he died, or the look of disappointment on Amihan’s face as she spun into and out of his view.

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 3

  He started counting. “One-Mississippi—.” THUNK!

  The pulse hit early.

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 4

  He tried again. The Pulse shifted. THUNK!

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 5

  He counted more slowly this time. “One…two…three—“

  A quick pulse snapped on the “two-and.”

  He folded like bad origami.

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 6

  Before he went back in, Amihan offered some advice. “You cannot solve this. Only survive it.”

  He did not.

  [RESET]

  [RESET]

  [RESET]

  So many fucking resets.

  [RESET]

  Attempt: 22

  Remi stepped in, matching the chamber’s rhythm before it even began. The first contraction hit, but he was already sliding past it. The second pulse rippled across the room, but he dipped, letting it fly over his head harmlessly. A third pulse tried to cross-cut him mid-stride; he spun with it, allowing it to move him, but not destroy him.

  Every movement flowed into the next. There was no counting. There was no thinking. There was just motion. He crossed the room after the fifth breath.

  His HUD chimed before he even reached the far door.

  [SYSTEM MESSAGE]

  [PULSE CHAMBER: CLEARED]

  

  [NEXT ROOM 2: CONSTRICTION HALL]

  “Of course it is,” he muttered. His personal trauma and a murder tunnel. Figures. There was no way back, only the door in front of him. Remi shook out his hands, forcing the tremor out of them before wrapping his fingers around the next knob.

  At least he’d glow a cool purple in this room.