The arena was different to last time. Rather than an empty city, Nicolai appeared in an exceedingly mountainous patch of jungle.

He was on a grassy bank before a large pool, in an area made secluded by the cliffs rising all around. A waterfall poured down the cliff ahead, churning the pool. The ground rose to his right, forming a ledge that led up the side of the cliff, arcing around the pool until it found an exit just to the side of the waterfall. Up above, he didn't see the coliseum surrounding them nor the large screens that'd been there before. Instead there was a presumably false sky, generated via some magic of the duel arena.

Nicolai took in all of this in a flash. Most of his focus was on activating his Burst Skin Shield and priming his standard Skin Shield, while readying the Sheltering Glove. Simultaneously he seized his assault rifle and took aim.

There was someone standing less than two metres away from him.

It was the very same guy who'd come to speak with him, invited him to the group. Pal.

The merc had raised his own assault rifle, and they gazed at one another through ironsights. Like Nicolai, Pal had activated a Burst Skin Shield. The man peeled two fingers off his rifle's forward grip, raised them carefully in a sign of peace.

They lowered their weapons.

'Glad to see a, uh, friendly face,' said the merc carefully. He was clearly on edge, which was understandable.

Nicolai was silent. He was wrestling with disappointment. He'd been eager to get straight to fighting. But in this case, smarter to wait. If he removed Pal right now, the man's companion would start gunning for him, and he might be cut out of the "alliance" the Earthers had formed.

He anticipated this because there was already one stark difference between this Free For All and the last. Back then the Local had immediately been rendered unusable by the vast amount of interference released by every Earther. Now, quite the opposite. It buzzed with activity as all those who'd accepted the invitation started speaking up. Other than that, things weren't too different. He already heard the crackle of guns fired in anger, felt the ripples of Symbiotes used with killing intent.

Pal had immediately established communications with his companion, Jex, who it transpired was somewhere on the other side of the arena. Cyberwarfare wasn't confident in its ability to block or play tricks with Pal's link to Jex. Not yet, at any rate. But it did monitor what was being said and passed the communications to Nicolai, who listened with half an ear.

'I'm spawned,' Pal was saying. 'And guess who's standing right in front of me?' He sent her a picture of Nicolai.

Nicolai was in the process of dismissing that picture when something stood out to him. Zooming mentally, he saw something strange on his helmet.

The H-gram was active, and displaying a nightmarish face. It looked like a red overlay burned into his helmet, a living face formed of angry red light. Eyes that burned and a huge jagged grin.

What is that? He asked the Modules, frowning.

Your War Face, replied Psychology promptly. The psychological benefits of inspiring fear in the enemy have been long proven. It is entirely worthwhile.

The Mask started protesting that a friendly face also had benefits, but Nicolai merely nodded. In this case, a "war face" was more suitable.

He considered the map Simulations was generating, based on all those connections with all the other members of the group. He and Pal were in a relatively quiet area, isolated from the rest. Most were concentrated about half a mile away. The other side of the arena.

A question suddenly occurred to him: If most of the Earthers were way over there, then where were all the Cultivators?

Threat Analysis, working hard to sift through all the ripples washing over him, had just determined the answer to that question.

Nicolai and the Modules considered the various factors and guessed at the future. That guess brought his attention to Pal. Pal was distracted, looking up at the top of the waterfall and speaking to his comrade. They were only steps away from one another. Nicolai made a decision.

He lunged in a fluid blur across the intervening space. The merc immediately twisted to fight back but he was surprised, off-guard—convinced Nicolai wouldn't attack him because he knew of no logical reason to do so at this time. Nicolai threw a perfectly executed Soul Strike with his bionic arm into the merc's Burst Shield, popped it, and got a solid grip on him before he could activate another shield. As he'd seized the guy with his Level 3 bionic arm, and held a pistol to his chin with the other, that was that.

'Do nothing,' hissed Nicolai. 'Use nothing. Recall your drones within the next five seconds. If I feel you activate a Symbiote, you will die.' He reflected that the threat rather lacked the proper weight, considering he couldn't actually kill the guy. Still, it sounded properly punchy and attention grabbing.

'What the fuck are you doing?' Pal snarled back, voice strained by the gun metal poking his throat. However, he did recall his drones, which came and hooked onto his combat suit. 'Are you out of your—'

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'In approximately one minute almost a third of the Cultivators involved in this Tournament are going to appear at the top of that ledge,' Nicolai informed the man in a low voice. 'I am merely ensuring you don't do anything that might cause them to notice us, because if you do, we are finished.' The merc's square-pupilled eyes widened. Nice human-like detailing on those, noted Threat Analysis.

'Do you have Symbiotes that allow you to hide your Soul Sense?' Nicolai asked. He already knew the answer. The man nodded, eyes flicking worriedly back and forth between Nicolai and the ridge. 'Good. I'm going to release you, and we are going to go into the water.'

'I get it,' snapped Pal.

Nicolai released him. He watched the merc very carefully as he did so, and as they both began to move toward the water, he remained close enough to grab him. Covering the distance was half of the reason he'd lunged in the first place. Pal, perhaps aware of what would happen if he tried to escape from Nicolai's grasp, stayed close.

Pal could not be allowed to gain distance from him, for a simple reason. The man hadn't been wrong when he said the Cultivators would prioritise Nicolai above all else in this section of the Tournament.

If he and Pal weren't right next to one another, the merc could simply do something to draw their attention to Nicolai, then flee. Nicolai would flee too, of course, but it wouldn't matter. The Cultivators would likely either ignore Pal or just send a few after him, while the majority if not all of them focused on Nicolai. Of course, Pal might decide it was better to ensure Nicolai wasn't overwhelmed at the start, so he could try and engineer that fight between him and the Nara Cultivator. But Nicolai wouldn't leave a decision like that up to someone else.

Thus, Pal had to be kept close. So long as he remained in Nicolai's grasp, he wouldn't spoil their hide. Not unless he felt he could play it off as a clumsy mistake, and that Nicolai thusly wouldn't attack him.

'Should you, through incompetence, cause the Cultivators to spot us, I will be quite upset,' he informed the man in a pleasant tone of voice via Local, as they sank slowly, silently, and in near-perfect sync into the water. 'If I were to become so upset, I would have no choice but to do my utmost to kill you before they collapse on us.'

'What the fuck is your problem?' hissed Pal, glaring back at him. 'You think I'm a rookie? It's yourself you ought to be worried about. No one's going to see me.' He smiled, tugged a mask up over his mouth and nose then pulled his hood over his head, and his form shimmered. Nicolai's brows rose as the man all-but faded from view. The combat suit had active camouflage. Similar to a shimmer poncho, except better in every way. Very nice. At the same time all sense of the merc's Soul faded into the background.

Nicolai didn't bother with his poncho, focusing on Shelling his Soul and activating the Lurker Symbiote. The poncho worked best when still, and the faint movement of the water might cause it to shift and shimmer. His skinsuit was already dark-grey camouflage and would blend in well with the dark mud at the bottom of the pond.

He and Pal descended to the very bottom, and there they waited. With his bionic eyes and skinsuit's numerous sensors, Nicolai wasn't worried of losing track of the merc. Active camouflage gave off some tells, if you knew what to look for, and he and the Modules did.

'Deactivate your Local, too,' he told Pal. 'It's possible some have augments and know how to detect radio waves.' Pal didn't argue, stopping his ongoing conversation (which was impressively calm, considering) with his comrade.

They waited. The water settled. Nicolai watched Pal and the ledge far above through his cameras. After a short time, he saw faces appear up there. Cultivators, peering down. Likely they had sensed the ripples he and Pal initially released, but those ripples would have faded, been absorbed into the Cultivators own numerous ripples. It was very unlikely any would be able to tell that there had been two people, unaccounted for, in this area with the pond.

Unless one of them possessed capabilities like Threat Analysis was developing, of course.

But the faces above disappeared. For now, they were undiscovered.

Minutes later Nicolai and Pal emerged, heads slipping free from the water side by side. Distant gunfire echoed off the cliffs. They re-enabled Local, but found it barely usable.

'A jammer?' muttered Pal, confused. 'What the fuck? Who would put that up?' For whatever reason he cast a suspicious look at Nicolai.

'Why are you looking at me? Perhaps the Shenrans have simply gotten smart. If one of them asked at the Information Guild for some easy ways to cause trouble for those from Earth, I imagine that purchasing an external jamming array would be a suggestion.'

'Yeah but who'd sell 'em one…' Pal trailed off. He scoffed. 'Actually, what am I saying. Shit, if they were willing to pay enough I'd sell 'em whatever they wanted.' He frowned as though at a sudden thought. 'There's another explanation, now I think on it. Not everyone joined the group. Some of those me and Jex talked to were pretty stubborn. Said they were going alone, that they didn't trust us.'

'I wonder why,' said Nicolai. Pal gave him a narrow-eyed look but Nicolai's voice hadn't held even a trace of sarcasm.

They made their way up the slope, to the ledge from where the Cultivators had peered down. Nicolai pulled free his anti-materiel rifle as they went. He wanted more firepower. He and Pal did have a general idea of the arena, at least. In the first moments, before the jammer had been setup, the Local had surged with activity and every Earther had sent their drones up, sharing the feeds. Thus they'd gained dozens of top-down views of the arena, and knew its general layout. At least, Nicolai did. Simulations had already made a detailed 3D map based on that data.

The arena was large and circular, and the vertical jungle set up continued throughout it. Abrupt rises and cliffs acted like walls, sectioning it into small valleys, overgrown patches of jungle, flat-topped mesas, and secluded rises. The centre held a number of natural bridges, reaching across to other cliff faces. Thus there were many possible routes—high, low, and in the middle.

The bare portions of stone cliffs, bridges, and ledges revealed them to be formed of a sandstone of some kind, dull orange in colour. The jungle growth oozed over this in climbing vines and pockets of spiny plant life, and wherever there was a flat and earthy area it was full of the typical dark-barked and vibrant-leafed trees common to the jungle.

Reaching the top, Nicolai and Pal gazed out upon one such area, an abrupt explosion of jungle that filled the small valley before them. It was dark and humid under the leaves, and the air was full of the cries and rustling of jungle creatures. It seemed that there was life here, within this arena, though he didn't hear anything truly dangerous. Nicolai wondered whether it was somehow created by Heaven, or transported from the jungle to this arena.

After making their scans and checks, they pressed out together and into the undergrowth.

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