Forsaken

The courtyard floor was glassy with old slag, and every step Alex took made the surface sing under his boots - thin, metallic, wrong. Heat rolled up from the lava-choked ruin like breath from a furnace, drying the sweat on his lip before it could cool. Somewhere behind the half-collapsed archways, 1X1X1’s laughter kept arriving a heartbeat late, as if the hellscape itself couldn’t decide which corridor it lived in.

Alex tightened his grip on the scrap he’d been chewing into shape while they ran - wire, plates, bent bolts torn from whatever had survived the fall of this place - and forced his eyes ahead. The angel statue pedestal sat in the center of the courtyard like a lie carved in stone: a single base, scorched and cracked, with nothing but an empty socket where the angelic power should go. One pedestal. One shot.

“Stay close,” Alex said, even though the words came out rough. His throat tasted like hot pennies from the air and the grit that always found its way in anyway.

Strawberry’s sword was already out, the blade catching the orange light whenever she shifted. Thirteen years of training showed in how she didn’t hesitate, only recalculated angles with every twitch of her shoulders. Kyle moved half a step behind her, palms hovering as if he could pluck mercy out of the smoke. Steve, clutching his backpack like it was a second spine, kept glancing at the shadows between pillars.

1X1X1 arrived in the open with the kind of ease that made “closing in” feel like a courtesy. He didn’t sprint so much as fold space between corridors, stepping into view where they weren’t looking. Strange and satanic powers clung to him like static - dark motes skating over his skin, a faint hiss rising from the places his shadow touched the lava.

“You’re almost there,” 1X1X1 said, and the voice sounded amused, warped, like it had been dragged through a broken bell. “Almost.”

Alex’s stomach dropped. The pedestal wasn’t far - distance was measured in steps - but the courtyard was a trap of open sightlines. No cover. No flanking. Just lava seams and cracked stone that would turn their feet into anchors.

He wanted the statue. He wanted it now, before 1X1X1 decided the courtyard belonged to him instead of them.

“Angel statue pedestal,” Kyle murmured, eyes fixed on the empty socket. “We get the crystal, we activate it.”

Strawberry’s gaze flicked to Alex. “Turret?”

Alex swallowed the urge to answer with something clever. The heat made everything feel louder: the hiss of lava, the scrape of ash, the ticking crackle of 1X1X1’s power. “I can build a turret and a healing dispenser out of just about anything,” he said, and he hated how confident it sounded because it didn’t match the panic crawling under his ribs. “But first we live long enough to reach the pedestal.”

Steve unzipped his backpack. The sound was too small for the hellscape, yet it cut through the roar. “I’ve got - ” he started, then stopped as 1X1X1’s laughter spiked into a sharper note, and the air changed.

The ground rippled.

Not water. Not heat. Something else - like the courtyard had decided to rearrange itself without bothering to ask permission. A corridor of broken stone opened where there hadn’t been one, its edges still smoking, its mouth angled straight toward the group. Lava surged at the new opening, then pulled back as if it had been tugged by an invisible hand.

1X1X1 raised his palms. The dark motes around him tightened into lines, drawing geometry in the air - half sigil, half trap. The new corridor wasn’t a shortcut. It was an invitation to get cut down while they crossed the open.

“Alex!” Kyle’s voice sharpened. “Move!”

Alex moved, because there wasn’t time to argue with the way danger had already decided. He shoved his scrap into place with the kind of practiced speed you only got from too many emergencies. A turret didn’t need a blueprint when you had stubborn hands and a junk pile of dead things. He crouched, snapped bent metal into a frame, and used wire like sinew. A barrel of scavenged plating angled toward the pedestal, and he dragged a line of scrap-mesh into position so the turret could spit out whatever it had been built to spit - whatever the hellscape allowed.

The healing dispenser came next - an ugly contraption with a chamber that would have been laughable anywhere else. Here, under burning sky and broken stone, it was a promise made of parts.

“Fire at him,” Alex ordered, then realized he was talking to a thing that didn’t understand orders. The turret didn’t care. It just shuddered and clicked, as if waking up.

1X1X1 didn’t approach the turret like it was a threat. He approached like it was proof of their desperation.

He snapped his fingers.

The air screamed.

A wave of force slammed into the turret’s frame, bending metal with a sound like bones in a vice. The turret held for half a breath, then its scrap-mesh sagged. Heat hissed off it, and Alex’s hands stung as if the device had bitten him.

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