Diving and rolling for what cover he could, Jack let his finger off the trigger as his back hit the cracked stonework of the fallen pillar..  His arms shook, though it was nothing compared to when he was a Tank, and he’d logged so many hours there that he only noticed the recoil on the that heavy machine gun when he needed to compensate.

        Still, not so bad as the Special Ops, where he at times somehow managed to forget he was even holding a weapon.  Compared to that, the Commando’s Rifle was downright gratifying.  Though the smoke that filled the room still pissed him off.

        Squatting as low as he could, he switched his grip on the rifle as he turned and inched to his right down the collapsed framework of the arena.  He could hear the snarls of the beast coming closer.  It would have been foolish to assume he was safe.

        Reaching behind his back he slipped his hand into his inventory, and grabbed his last flash-ban.  Pulling the pin with his thump and immediately throwing it over the rock, he dared not raise his head to check the toss.

        One second.

        Two—

        He never even had the chance to make it to three.

        Instead there was a roar that echoed in Jack’s bones, and then he felt the oversized beast land five feet to his left.  Reflexively Jack turned his head to look, straight into the snarling jaws of Fenrir as the beast shifted and advanced to pin him against the very thing he’d been trying to hide behind.

        The beast’s arms closed in on either side, moving in to strike him with his jaws.  Heart in his throat, Jack twisted his rifle and squeezed the trigger for the secondary barrel as fast as he could, which in turn caused the very unpleasant experience of the recoil jerking his hands back so hard the handle struck the floor and the barrel flung up almost slamming into his chest.

        But it didn’t matter, his point-blank shot was accurate enough, the shot-gun round exploding in a puff of red smoke as the beast reared back and screamed a high-pitch wail that rang through the shattered remains of the stonework of the Upper Vault.  But Jack only knew that from past experience, right then, in that moment, it felt like his ears were bleeding.

        Not even hearing himself scream, Jack rolled and crawled beneath the beast Fenrir as it began lashing out, flinging blood all around him in it’s temporarily blind state.  Diving on instinct, he rolled left, right, right and dove head-first, sneaking beneath the clawed left arm as it slammed down, the stone slate exploding upward as Jack found his feet and turned, already squeezing the trigger, the rifle cutting loose with a mighty ripping sound as he backed away and began circling the beast.

        When Fenrir began to settle a moment later and stopped wiping the blood from his face, Jack finally, actually began to feel good about himself; he felt perfectly secure as he directed his shots with more care and watched the right hind thigh-bone crunch and collapse.

        Thinking the fallen pillar was too close for comfort, Jack continued moving back, toward the ones still mostly together.  He saw it, but as Fenrir turned to face him all his thoughts were on shooting the furry, toothy, blood-riddled face to keep it back.

        Jack expected better of himself, he should never have put himself in that situation in the first place.

        He knew he needed to be better.

        But instead, the grenade just to his right went off, and though the noise made little difference in his already near-deafened ears, the blinding flash turned his vision completely white.

        Ears still ringing, squeezing his eyes shut to dull the pain in his head, Jack could only curse himself for his stupidity, he knew he was already dead.

        It would only last moments, he knew, but hoping for that was a fool’s errand at the best of times.  Throwing one arm up and shooting with his best guess in the creature’s general direction he started running directly opposite immediately.  Arm raised, he fully expected to find a standing stone pillar, but never did.  Instead his legs slammed into wood that crunched on the force of his weight and sent him tumbling, going shoulder over shoulder until somehow, someway, the sides of his left ribs slammed into a thick stonework that he knew from experience was one of the stone pillars he had been searching blindly for.

        He couldn’t help but move slowly, everything felt like it hurt, and as he rolled over he discovered he’d lost his main weapon also.  Dimly he swore at himself, knowing a side-arm was absolutely useless.  They usually were against the bosses.

        Though blurry, the furry, bloodied muzzle of Fenrir was unmistakable as it entered his vision, coming down on him from above, completing it’s pouncing manoeuvre with it’s one good clawed foot slamming into his belly, knocking the wind out of him even as it raised it’s fore-claws.

        There was nothing Jack could do but lay there and take the brutally punishing strikes Fenrir delivered to end it, the beast ripping him apart and throwing blood in long streaks across the walls and floor of the arena.

        It hurt like hell sometimes, but it was nothing even a teenager wasn’t unaccustomed to.  And he was nearing his graduation.  He should be used to it by now.

        Still, the fading screen took too long to reach black.

        As did the world sprinkling into existence that was the respawn.

        When the pixels finally settled into position, he was standing over a small tree no higher than his knee, glowing a sharp blue and seeming to have grown out of the stone floor of the circular balcony.  At the edge of the circle was simply a ledge, below which ran the staircase, winding downward against the wall as it led to the main hall below.

        Had he wanted, Jack could have turned around and climbed the staircase embedded in the wall behind him, a tight cylinder that wound upward to the halls and walkways above until he came to the collapsed ceiling.  But that was how he entered in the first place, he needed to go down, not into the main hall, but following the lower staircase further down until it ended and he was led into a long hallway.

        Following the torches on the walls he took a left, then the second right, ignoring the darkness in the far corners having become second nature long ago.  But Jack couldn’t help groaning when this path led him to a dark dead end.  It happened often enough, the floor layouts changing slightly.  He should have been expecting it, but that didn’t stop his bubbling frustration as he did an about-turn and headed back the way he had come.

        He took a left back around the corner only for a blast to slam into his chest, ringing in his ears as he was knocked back off his feat.

        Holding in a cough, chest in agony, Jack rolled twice over and brought up his rifle just in time to squeeze the trigger and blow the small, glowing, four-clawed Wispdemon to sparkling pieces just as it moved to pounce on him.

        Unable to hold back a groan, twisting his hips Jack languidly rolled himself over before pushing himself up.  His chest and left shoulder were numb – that meant not good most of the time.

        Spluttering through a coughing fit, Jack struggled to keep his eyes on his surroundings, slowly pushing himself up, his back sliding against the wall as the last remains of the Wispdemon faded from existence.  Right hand on the wall beside him, he took only a moment more before pushing himself off, the long shadow cast by the flaming torch overhead stretching out ahead of him before weakening and disappearing beneath the light of the next.

        The rough wall a little too smooth beneath his fingers, after all these years Jack couldn’t help but be a little disconcerted by it, unable to help himself as he pulled his hand back from the stone.  Taking a breath and ignoring the lack of feeling in his chest, he hefted the rifle and took the next left, the hallway circling downward and ending with a rickety, rusted cage elevator.

        The ride down took a few shaky seconds, but when the cage stopped and opened it’s door Jack was facing a wide domed room with pillars holding the up thin walkways and the roof higher above.  In the middle of the room crouched Fenrir, the feral pet werewolf of Surt, banished to the bowels of the city before the fall of Thor’s brother.

        All fur covering a hunched back and clawed legs beneath shredded cloth pants, the beast just seemed to have too many teeth.  Though at almost the length of the rest of it’s body, it’s beefy arms were the real danger.  With biceps almost as large as it’s head, the creature looked hard and hit harder, yet it was only one of the middling bosses.

        The creature turned it’s head and dropped it’s jaw all the way to it’s chest, letting out a roar that even at this distance echoed in Jack’s skull.

        Jack didn’t wait, he held the rifle in one arm, throwing his aim off and barely grazing the creature with a couple of shots, freeing his off-hand to pull a flashbang from his inventory as he began circling, trying to keep his distance and find some cover behind a nearby pillar.

        Turned out, Jack wasn’t really thinking that well.

        Keeping a careful eye on his prey, while shooting the rifle and trying to time a grenade throw, he discovered for not the first time, could only be considered awkward at best.

        Having already pulled the pin on the grenade, he was still a few feet from cover when he reached back, ready to throw.  Only, he saw the beast rear back on it’s legs and stretch it’s left arm out.  Cursing himself, he dropped the grenade where he stood and quickly dove to his left, avoiding the creature’s wide lunge, but as Fenrir followed through on his lunge the knees came up and collected Jack’s knees and legs, sending him sprawling and rolling to the side.

        Legs aching, struggling to breath through a numb chest, Jack counted himself lucky to still be alive, he rolled over just in time to see a foreclaw whooshing down into his face.

        He tried to move, but more out of reflex than any real hope.

        The world faded around him as the creature continued it’s pounding assault on his corpse.  Best of all?  The moment before complete darkness, there was a sharp flash of light, illuminating Fenrir.

        Well, it wasn’t the first time that had happened, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

        When the pixels settled into place once more and Jack was standing over the small tree, the area around him illuminated by the blue glow, there was also the double-ping of a pair of messages.  The first had been more than a few minutes ago now, so clearly someone wanted something of him.

        But he ignored it.

        This thing between Fenrir and the Commando, now it was personal.

        Racing down the staircase and into the lower halls, he refused to stop running as he held the rifle low in both hands, even though that forced him to turn around and circle back twice, ducking and weaving through a pair of Wispdemons and a few tiny Wolfpups before he finally found the rickety elevator.

        When he touched down and exited the elevator he was instantly on edge.  Fenrir was nowhere to be seen.

        He heard it, dimly, so he decided to keep back from the open floor as much as possible.  Slowly Jack spiralled around the room, circling from pillar to pillar, skirting the edge of the room before moving inward.  Finally, after far too long, as he stood beside a pillar near the middle of the room and looked up, only to see the beast let go of the pillar almost directly above him.

        Jack dove far too late.

        Fenrir landed with a might thud, it’s huge foreclaws catching and piercing through his right leg.  Even after so many years, Jack couldn’t help but to scream at the pain.

        He tried to lift his rifle to fire as Fenrir lifted him up above his furry head, but his shots completely missed as the beast slammed him back down into the stone floor, over, and over, and over again.

        In the total darkness of non-existence, Jack couldn’t help but feel frustrated, but that only amounted to an insistence of redoubling his efforts.  Even though it was obvious that the game wasn’t really intended for single-player, now he had to do it again.

        This time when he spawned in there were three pings.  But he couldn’t answer them yet, because this time it was personal.

        Taking off at a run he rolled down onto the staircase rather than actually take it as the designer had intended, and landing on his feet he took them two and three at a time, refusing to slow down as he entered the torch-lit hallways.

        It was probably inevitable he would have turned a corner to run straight into a pair of Wispdemons who blew him into a wall.  Some might even call it justice that the moment his back slid down and he’d settled on his arse a small pack of Wolfpups pinned him in place and finished him off.

        Yet, in spite of his technical non-existence, Jack still felt the sensation of slouching as he heard himself scream, “Fuuuuck ooofff!”

        Desperately feeling as though he needed a moment, the first thing Jack did when he respawned was to flick his left wrist.  Forgetting those other damnable troubles for the moment he instead focused on the see-through menu as it appeared by his hand.  Sitting down by the tree, the menu followed him, and he selected the messages line just as another pinged at him.

        That was the seventh.

        They were all from either Sebastian or Hayley, his classmates and among those he liked to consider his friends.  With another, different flick he saw they were both active, in the same game.  The last was from ’Bastian, so he just opened that one.  All he heard was, “Hurry up!  We need a Tank!”

        Tickled a little, he started flicking through them until he got to Hayley’s, whose crisp high voice came through with a stretched, “Get over here biiiiitch!”

        Smiling to himself, he cycled back through the menus, tapped out of the supposedly, “Single-Player Campaign” (wilfully forgetting that he had actually completed it alone), and waited as the beautiful rendering of the world around him disappeared so he was sitting alone beside the glowing-blue tree, surrounded by an unending void of pure white.

        Cycling back to his messages, he tapped ’Bastian’s message and selected to accept the invite.

        Before anything else happened, the class choices appeared in front of him and he walked through the larger-than-the-others Tank class—his personal favourite.

        Only then did the pixels start to fall down from above, collapsing around him to form the world of the arena he was being parachuted into mid-battle.