Wraith rips her way out of the Void right next to Hopeflame, dusts herself off and stows her kunai in a fold of her scarf. "Don't take the Kraber if you're going to be a shit shot with it."

Well at least she's alive. 

"Will you please just fucking help me?" 

It's not clear, at this point, if picking Lyta up counts as helping her. But she could use the extra gun, and the extra bullet sponge. Wraith kneels down next to her and rummages through her pack to extract the nano-syringe. "It's gonna hurt the usual amount." 

"I figured." 

And then she's shuddering and trying not to scream as the nanobots ram their way through her system, replacing everything unfixable with plastic and carbon fiber. Parts of her guts can't be saved, so the bots snip them off and let them slither to the floor - she can't eat sausages or spaghetti anymore after smelling that one too many times - and then wall everything off, seal the blood inside, and start rigging up artificial neurons so she can control - 

And Wraith's face contorts and then fragments as a bullet exits her cheek, taking a few teeth with it. 

She slumps slowly to the floor, her hands going up to her face and her eyes flashing blue, and then the second shot explodes her chest. Blood, far too much blood to clean away with a rag, soaks the wall and the lootbox and the door and Lyta. 

The blue fades from her eyes. 

God damn it. Where's Vantage? Lyta's still here, so she must be alive somewhere - 

Revenant drops smoothly off the huge bone arch, straight into the dusty courtyard at the centre of Skull Town. A cloud of dust kicks up around him, so that at first the only thing visible is his glowing yellow eyes, and then the fluttering end of his red scarf, and then the cold steel of his limbs and the unmistakable profile of his carbine. 

He enjoys how his mechanical knees barely notice the hit; the springs absorb all the shock and then pneumatics kick into action, taking all that energy and propelling him smoothly into a perfect leap forwards. He lands with a predator's grace, right in front of Lyta, with his face close enough that he knows it messes with her head. He's precisely close enough that she wouldn't connect if she swung at his nose.

Revenant cocks his head and grins. He's so fucking creepy, and he loves it. 

"Aww, skinbag. You thought someone was coming to save you?"

"Get lost, asshole." 

She wants her pistol, but the nanobots didn't finish their job and now everything's all disjoint and she can't figure out how to move most of her limbs. She gives it a go anyway, but her elbow bends backwards and a painful spasm wracks her whole body, and now her face is in the sand and she's coughing that awful coarse sharpness out of her lungs. 

"The sheer terror that comes with dying. I remember feeling that. All saved in HD." 

His chuckle is low and robotic. He's perfectly capable, technologically, of getting a voice that sounds more authentically human. He just likes the synthetic shudder in this voice, and the way it makes the flesh-suits flinch. 

She wants her pistol very fucking badly but her arm won't fucking cooperate and her head's feeling fuzzy. The only real hope she has is to distract him long enough that Vantage shows up and does.... something. Hopefully something very accurate with a very powerful sniper rifle. 

"Do you say this shit for the ca-" and her bravado is ruined by a sudden fit of coughing as the sand and blood mixing in her lungs starts cooking up some fascinating new kinds of pain. Breathe. "Do you say this shit for the cameras? Or do they pay-"

He cuts her off by stepping on her knee. It crunches in such a satisfying way underneath the pistons in his ankles.

"Do you know how many millions of times I've done this?" he asks, though he's not sure she can really hear him over how loudly she's screaming. "They made me a killing machine. Can't argue with my programming. What am I supposed to do except choose to enjoy it?" 

It is so much work to shape a scream. Her brain is only half-working and every part of her throat and tongue just wants to howl incoherently but she has to make them make words, she has to unblur her mind and focus her will enough for: "Vantage! Vantage! Van-"

"Oh she's the one still alive? Alright. I'll look forward to making her acquaintance." Revenant smiles nice and big. His mouth is full of perfectly ordinary human teeth he's taken off corpses, because he thought it'd freak people out more to see human bones in his android mouth. They fit with his skull mask. It's a good look, as far as he's concerned. "Any last words? You know, it's more fun for both of us if you beg for your life."

She doesn't have enough capability left to tell him to go directly to hell. "Vantage!"

He sighs melodramatically. "I'd make this nice and slow, but ring's moving. Hope you enjoy your unmarked grave." 

Revenant shoots her in the head and moves on. 

The E-District

Lyta's knelt by a window, rapidly fitting a 3x HCOG Bruiser scope onto the G7 Scout rifle she's been lugging around for an hour in hope of finding some decent optics for it. She's practised this so many times, and yet she never quite gets her movements to look smooth and delicate the way Vantage's do; she just shoves metal pieces into metal sockets like a child with some very deadly LEGO. 

"One squad on my five o'clock," she reports as she peers out of the window. The movement isn't immediately answered with a hail of bullets, so she sets up her gun on the windowsill and starts thinking about her breathing and her posture and the reliable system created by her finger on the trigger and the stock pressed lightly into her shoulder, everything the same way she's done it a thousand times before. "I think another ground floor of one of the Lotus towers." 

She's learned some things about adrenaline over the past century or so. The hormones running through her aren't electrifying, though they do make her feel so fantastically viciously colourfully alive; they're calming. Every moment, every breath, feels like it could take a thousand years. She's perfectly focused on the doorway she's watching, and when that flicker of movement appears, she fires.

And with that gunshot, the storm breaks out. There's voices yelling in her ears and bullets flying everywhere and footsteps above her and smashing sounds below her and she's in the zone. "Cracked shields on one!"

"Fuck yes that's got a kick!" 

Octane's got a submachine gun and he's kind of just spraying and praying. It's inelegant but it works fine and he's high as fuck. He sprints towards the target Hopeflame's marked and holds down the trigger until he runs out of bullets and it's such a rush. 

"Draw them out! I don't have sightlines!"

"What?"

Octane's sprinting up the stairs as he reloads, spilling bullets carelessly out of his pockets. They make a delightful tinkle as they bounce down the stairs, but he shoves enough into the gun that it'll work. "I got two targets in here!" 

"Just let him do his thing," Wattson suggests calmly. 

She's focused on the puzzle in her hands. Connect two wires, plug a component into another component, wiggle it around a bit and - yes, yes! An electric fence crackles to life across the doorway, so nobody can bother her and Hopeflame - at least via the elevator shaft - while they work. 

"He's, uh, crazy. But we're safe up here." 

"WOOOHOOO!" Octane exclaims over the radio. "Downed one! Got 'em right as they tried to jump out the window!"

"He's crazy but he works. I think I got eyes on the other-" 

Lyta cuts herself off, because she does have eyes on the other squad. And she's never liked Revenant. She closes one eye and squeezes and watches delightedly as his supposedly-superior robotic chest disintegrates into screeching copper. 

On the radio: "Watch out, Octane, I think they'll rotate into you." 

She takes a different window with her Triple Take, and finds another angle. "Cracked shields on another, I think it's Loba but didn't get a good look."

Wattson likes this gun; it's a high-powered energy weapon, so easy to use that she can pretend it's a shotgun or pretend it's a sniper rifle depending on what sort of scope she shoves on it. It'll never outdamage an R99 on paper, but it's very easy to use, and that leaves her more time for constructing complicated electronics. 

She might debate the wisdom of trying to fight both squads at once, but she's too busy winning. Her eye is keen and her fingers are deft and her nerves are quick and steady. "Loba for sure, just don't want to let her rez anyone." 

She puts another ten bullets into Revenant's body just to make sure. His banner appears, a little hologram over his corpse, and now she's immensely satisfied with her work. 

Syndicate Tower, Demeter

"I want to buy my image back." 

The lawyer crosses her arms on her desk and fixes a very pleasant smile on her face. "It's not for sale." 

"Bullshit. You paid me ten million bucks to emulate me and put my emulation in the Games. I give you ten million dollars, you take her out of the Games." 

"Except she was your emulation.... what was it, now, two centuries ago? She's a different person, now. Legally she can consent to being in the Games if she wants to be in the Games." 

"If she's not me anymore, it's because the Games made her worse. She's died about a thousand times, she's - look, you know I signed up right after the war? For her the war never ended. I want her to get the chance to heal, the way I-" 

"And that is a lovely thing for you to want. My mother also wants me to stop playing violent video games, thinks they're psychologically disturbing me. But you have as much right to force your wishes on Hopeflame as my mother does to confiscate my console." 

"Do you actually want this headline? War hero Lyta Hopeflame suing the Apex Games over ownership of her own mind?" 

"Except that won't be the headline, because no court will actually let you sue us for ownership of another person. Whether you like it or not, she's not your slave. If she agrees to remaining employed here-"

"Why would she do that?" 

"Do you want to ask her?" 

Lyta blinks slowly. 

"I... can do that? I thought you only actually downloaded them into real bodies when it was Games time. Their bodies pretty much get destroyed every Games, right?" 

"We've been working pretty hard on the technology, so we can actually put them into new bodies pretty much immediately after the previous Games. It's only a year until next Games, and usually the wear-and-tear is pretty small, but some of them choose not to download until the Games are actually starting so that they can have a fresh-"

"Download her. I want to talk to her." 

The lawyer uses the very polite smile that she practises in the mirror every morning. "I will pass along your request. If she chooses to instantiate and wants to talk to you, then she'll message you. I assume she'll remember all your contact details?" 

"She'll - yeah, I haven't changed them."

"Great. Is that everything I can help you with today?" 

Lyta sits back, bubbling with fury but unsure exactly where to channel it, and suddenly bursting with hope that she might be able to talk to herself, and full of deep despair about being dismissed like this, and... confused. And tired. She's always tired. 

"Would you do it?" she blurts out, though that wasn't what she'd planned to say at all. "Would you sell a duplicate of yourself to the Syndicate for this? To fight in the Games? Would the prize cut be worth it to you?" 

"Well, no, Miss Kalonym, I can't say I would. But I suppose that's why you're a decorated war hero and I'm not. Now, do you need help finding your way back to reception?" 

"I remember the route. Thanks."

Lyta waits several days before she calls a lawyer, because she's got a headache and she's full of despair and the last time she looked at her phone she had seven thousand eight hundred and twenty five missed calls.

She plays some violent video games. They don't make her feel better. 

She breaks out of her depression one evening to sit in her garden and look at the little pond that she never got around to getting any koi fish for. The water's a grimy khaki colour, but it still reflects the moon. She sings a song she remembers from her childhood, and buys a water filter, and resolves to turn her life around. The next morning she really means to keep doing that, but she's distracted by the news about the new arena - apparently the bombed-out ruins of their fourth moon are now non-radioactive enough that Legends can shoot each other inside its abandoned mines and factories, and the Games is willing to pay more for the ruins than anyone wants to pay to redevelop it - and she ends up doomscrolling until she suddenly, with a painful jolt, realises it's 17:00 already. 

Her therapist calls her. She doesn't see what good therapy is supposed to do her. She's already been told she has PTSD and there doesn't seem to be much more to say on the topic. Lyta Kalonym is a war hero.

She knows she has to dig herself out of the hole, so she goes to the theatre to see a musical. Mostly she dully stares at the actors and dutifully notes which ones are skilful, which plots are unexpected, which lines spark ideas that she could totally use if she ever finishes her own novel. 

There's a bit right towards the end where an song seems like it's going to be the classic I Want song, but the character has a villain turn right in the middle, and even though the actress is pretending to be evil it's impossible not to see how much fun she's having being the heel. She looks like a child who's found a hidden stash of candy and is plotting how to use these resources for world domination.

She doesn't actually feel anything until it's over, and the person sitting next to her - who surely doesn't recognise her, thankfully - turns to her and exclaims, "Wow! What a show! Do you want any popcorn? Our group has way too much left over." 

That gets a genuine smile. 

The popcorn tastes better than hers did. She savours it on the shuttle home, tiny little bites of sugary joy that get her dopamine without hurting anyone.