Death Show Colossus
20 Climbers. 20 Watchers. 5 Hunters. 1 Colossus.
After both their parents die during the live broadcast of the Tournament of the Colossus, Quinne promises to always keep Benn safe. Even from the deadly Hunters who scour the slums for those who can wield magic. But when Benn’s rare ability manifests during a public confrontation, the Hunters see them for what they truly are: riveting contestants.
Quinne will be a Climber, where she’ll be chased by Hunters and mechanized monstrosities through a trapped forest before attempting to climb a thousand-foot-tall destructive god. And Benn will be her Watcher, as his consciousness will be transferred into nothing more than a glorified camera in the form of a metal bird.
The odds of survival are low, the likelihood of death and blood great. Tune in today, for this Tournament will be a ratings juggernaut!
Editorial Reviews for Death Show Colossus:
“A little Hunger Games, a little Dungeon Crawler Carl, a little Shadow of the Colossus, and one hell of a good time.” – David Walters, FanFiAddict
“This is big chaos with a big heart, and somehow that messy combination of ferocity and tenderness just works. Don’t miss out on this one if you like your SFF adventures dark, sharp, fun, emotionally loaded, and full of all the best ‘wtf did I just read’ vibes.” – Esmay Rosalyne, Grimdark Magazine
“Death Show Colossus is a bloody affair. An action-packed, wild romp that gutted me from head to toe – and even in the book!! Yes, I had the most awesome death scene!” – Graham Blades, The Wulver’s Library
“Kickass imagery perfectly paired with non-stop action and amazing characters. Straight out of a movie! This book will punch you in the face. And you will like it!” – Andres Early Reads
The opening:
Cue music, flashing light breaking the starkness of a blank screen.
Bass thumping, a tapping of drumsticks on the head. Camera panning away to reveal dancers. Male and female, tight outfits, showing skin, and sparkling sequins. Rhythmic movements, specific and well-rehearsed.
“Genties and gentettes,” a woman’s voice, clear and soprano from behind the dancers. Angelic and lovely. “My Cauldron boys and girls, those in the Spire, in the Dross. Welcome!”
Applause roars from a crowd offscreen. “ELYSIA! ELYSIA! ELYSIA!”
The woman appears now in a blaze of lighted glory, walking long-legged gleaming down a stair, trailing dress of moody blue. Hair coiffed, blonde, and big. Her smile lights the stage as she waves to the crowd, a golden bangle wrapping her wrist, attaching to auric rings on each finger. Red, blue, green, yellow gemstones within, an eye-shaped diamond in her palm. Make-up rimming sultry brown eyes, pink stain on her lips.
“ELYSIA! ELYSIA! ELYSIA!” The roar of the crowd so great, it drowns out the thumping bass.
“Now, now, my lovelies,” the woman coos. A dancer spins into camera view and hands her a thin microphone. Graceful hands take it, the perfect smile returning. “You flatter me oh so much. I love you all!”
“ELYSIA! ELYSIA! ELYSIA!”
“You spark so much joy in my heart. Every one of you. And don’t you dare to ever forget how much you mean to me.”
She whips about the stage, dress tail fluttering in elegant swirls, gesturing extravagantly as the background changes from blackness to that of a magnificent set of mountain tiers rising above a grey cityscape illuminated with crys-wrought lights. The shot expands to the larger valley nestled into the crook of mountainous peak to a dense forested rise toward a natural gated formation of rock. Weaving through a series of jagged fissures that opens to a green peninsula, stopping only as a giant figure stomps across the screen.
The music dies. “And you know what else gives me joy?”
“THE TOURNAMENT OF THE COLOSSUS!”
“The Colossus, created by our God!” the woman says, arms splayed out in holy prayer, her smile brighter than any glowing crys shards. “Our Zenith! On behalf of myself, of the Honours, I am beyond pleased to tell you that the wait is over, my lovelies. ‘Tis the season our God has returned like He always does. Today marks the opening of the lottery!”
“COLOSSUS! COLOSSUS! COLOSSUS!”
“What a load of slag,” Quinne Vox muttered at the commercial broadcasting on a holoscreen across the street as she jumped off the side of a building’s roof.
Eight stories up, the holo was practically half the length of the building itself; the emblazoned visage of Honour Elysia Vera was frighteningly huge. That, and disturbing.
Who in their right mind would think scaling a thousand-foot golem a good idea? To exchange life in the Dross for that of the Spire? Void no. Nothing quite said delusional like being hunted by vicious killers through a neon-lit forest and jagged fissures outside the Cauldron just to ascend a destructive god. All in the name of a bloody game show.
It was insanity.
Not quite unlike freediving off a building with naught but a rope…
Quinne flew, the air whipping at her golden locks trying desperately to free themselves from her braid as the breeze tickled the shaved portion behind her right ear. Down she went, three stories blurring by. The rope pulled taut as she barreled through the open window of her destination. She rolled to her feet and unhitched the tether, legs a bit wobbly under her.
Yeah, that was dumb for her to chance such a thing, but desperation and all. It bred lunacy.
She scanned the darkened room, fighting the urge to down a vial of her flux in a goodly effort to quell her nerves. Not to mention to keep the meager contents of her stomach within, well, her stomach. Just a vial’s worth of flux would give her strength, give her a bit of an edge. But she tamped down said urge, for flux was too damned expensive to waste on frayed nerves. Besides, she was better than a weakened strumpet, she was Drossbred.
A few heartbeats without anything coming up were grounds for a declaration of victory.
It was a small room she’d landed in, perhaps it had been a bedroom before it had been blasted out into the streets of the Dross below. Empty, save for a pile of skulls. Blackened skulls. A sick, terrible trophy left behind. She shivered at the sight.
Only they would keep such a trophy. Hunters.
She raised her wristlet and began tapping away at the small screen. In seconds, an orange light pinged, showing her the schematics of the building in three dimensions an inch above her arm. Within the lattice of orange lines, pale blue dots blinked, dozens of them. The sole reason she was there.
Crys shards.
A wry grin spread beneath the scarf covering her face.
Easing through the doorway opposite—the door long since pulled from its hinges—Quinne found a much larger room, one that ran at least one hundred feet in each direction. There might have been interior walls once, but only a handful of melted studs shot upright here and there, electrical cords hanging limply. The floor was pocked with yawning abysses, jagged holes that could spell her death if she fell, splatting into gore stories below. The shadows of large piles of broken tech lay across those openings. Holos and radios. The potential for crys shards was disgustingly tantalizing.
A breeze rattled the shattered glass of the nearby window. Quinne dove behind the remains of an overturned desk, charred and broken. A light pierced the gloom of the hollowed-out building, brightness pushing back the murk as it flew through the room. Wings flapping, a metallic impersonation of feathers. Searching. Seeking. Watching. The light passed overhead once, twice, thrice. Then it was gone, a slight whoosh and churn of a whirring engine underpinning the flap of false wings.
A dronehawk from the Spire. A grotesque melding of metal and flesh in the shape of a bird of prey, housing a camera and comms device.
The building had once been a refuge for the rebellion, a hideout purged the week prior. It had been showcased upon the holos throughout the Dross. The Diamond Dogs descending upon the apartment complex in their soldiering force, bombing the third and fourth floors. Then the Hunters were sent in, the masked fluxblessed freaks wreaking death.
The Honours claimed at least a dozen rebels were slain. Another twenty were arrested. A victory for the Spire, for the Cauldron itself. For a cleansing of the hateful few would protect the hallowed many who called the Cauldron home.
It was all a crock of shit, a lie Quinne could never believe. Those in the Spire knew fuck-all what hardship was. What it took to survive the harsh streets of the Dross when times were tough and the coke dust from the mines and furnaces thick.
They might be one people within the Cauldron, but they couldn’t be any more different.
With the dronehawk long gone, Quinne rose. It was the black of night, only the incandescence from the holos giving any sort of light inside the burnt-out rebel cairn. It was fine, she worked better in the dark. One of the perks of being fluxblessed.
Despite the destruction being a week old, the place still stunk of death and blood. She tiptoe-danced across an exposed girder, not daring to look down the gaping hole.
Once past the death abyss, Quinne made for the nearest stacked pile of tech haphazardly tossed about. There were holoscreens with long cracks, radio comms devices smashed to pulp. There were handheld radios and desk-sized tech. Screens, keyboards. Everything a rebel needed to hack into the Honours’ network. Had she known how to use said tech, she might see what she could salvage from their corpses.
Didn’t matter, she wasn’t here for tech.
Tapping her wristlet, the pile blinked blue on her orange layout. There were definitely crys shards within. Quinne dug into the pile, tossing holoscreens about like she were a dog digging into the dirt. She didn’t want the screens themselves; she needed the boxes they were attached to. But each box was bent or broken in half, its wiry guts pouring out like disemboweled intestines. Each one she opened, the lattice of fractured crys shards bled dust. Slamming her fists onto the last box of the pile, she cursed. Nothing.
She moved onto the next pile, again coming up empty. The next pile, the same. And the next.
There had to be something. She hadn’t come all this way for nothing. She needed some luck to come her way.
In the farthest reaches of the room, far from the window and bedroom, close to the room’s outer exit, she crouched next to a small stack of holoscreens. After tossing half a dozen holos to the side, she excavated a long, cylindrical metal box. It was unbroken. Thankfully.
“Come on, you stupid piece of slag,” she whispered to the unmarred box, “be whole, be whole.”
Pulling a screwdriver from her belt, she started on the screws of the box’s lid. Short work later, she flipped the lid of the cylinder and stuck her hand inside, reaching toward the bottom. A coldness tingled her fingers as she found the board within, coldness of the void. A few light tugs and she pulled the board free.
The meager light within the room reflected upon the brilliant bioluminescence within the center of the board. Upon the light blue faceted surface of a crys shard the size of her thumbnail. A sapphire.
She scanned her wristlet over the shard, the orange light pulsing up and down. The small screen blinked blue. A success. A flawless shard.
“Praise fuckin’ Zenith.”
A crys shard of this size would earn her enough bits to last her a few months. This shard alone would be enough to create two dozen vials of flux.
Flux, the wonder tonic. The sole currency in the Dross that meant anything.
Only regular dregs who weren’t fluxblessed cared about bits and diamonds, of ore and metal. Flux made the ordinary extraordinary. Made those blessed more than human. But it also made them the target for the Honours and their stupid Tournament of the Colossus.
She glanced toward the holoscreen outside the window. Pictures flickered, rotating between the massive godlike golem loping through the destroyed lands past the valley of the Cauldron to the previous winners hugging Elysia Vera atop the Spire.
Anger flared at the thought of the Tournament, for that was where her parents had met their demise more than a decade ago. On live holoscreen, their deaths shown in all their horror. All for a chance to leave the slums of the Dross for the splendor of the Spire. A chance at a life not spent worrying about survival.
Quinne quelled the memory. There was nothing she could do, other than keep as far out of the Honours’ sight as possible. She wouldn’t be like her parents, ever. She wasn’t that desperate to cast her life aside. Besides, she had Benn to look after. And to do that, it meant taking drastic action.
But her insane plan had paid off. All it took was pilfering from the rebellion and stealing it from right under the Diamond Dogs’ noses. A daring plan. Benn would be over the moon when she showed him her find.
Her luck was finally turning.
“Holy shit, that’s a big one.”
The sudden voice scared the ever-loving void out of her. So much so, she actually jumped, her heart nearly popping completely free of her ribcage. She dropped the crys shard, hand reaching toward the flux vials on her belt, ready to down the contents and burn her flux to pummel the voice into oblivion.
“Easy, Quinne, it’s just me,” the newcomer said calmly.
The ‘just me’ was Benn.
“What the…” she started before pivoting into semi-parental chiding, “How the void did you get in here? And stop swearing.”
Benn emerged from the shadows off to her left; his crop of dusky hair covered in coke dust. The boy came near, lowering his scarf. He towered over her even though he was only fourteen, eight years younger than she. His blue eyes shone in the holoscreen’s light, a smarmy grin parting the measly wisps of hair he called his ‘manly beard’. He was a reedy thing despite his height, as most Drossbred were.
“You think I’d just wait for you at Grandpa’s?” he asked. “I wanted to help. You never bring me with you.” He gave her a grin. “I’m old enough to swear, Mother.”
She drew up, which only brought her up to his wispy-haired chin. “Goddamn right I did, you blubberin’ cur. That was the plan. You aren’t fluxblessed. I am. I do the jobs; you reap the benefits.” Or suffer the fails, she almost added. “And I’m not old enough to be your mother. Wipe that smile off your face right now before I…”
“You what?” he teased, cutting her off. “’Sides, there’s nothin’ to worry about,” he added with a bravado that only teens just sprouting their first hairs on their bollocks possessed. “I made sure to check for Dogs.”
“The hounds are the least of our worries, you ratfink brat. Hunters came here week last.” She pointed toward the room where the skulls were. “This ain’t some back-alley smelter.” Quinne grabbed his arm and flicked away the coke residue. “’Sides, how’d you get in here?”
“There are stairs, you know?”
“You took the fuckin’ stairs?” She shook her head. Zenith, the brat needed an ear boxin’. No, he needed an ass whoopin’. “You could hav—” she nearly bit off her tongue as she heard the sound of boots, soft and sure from the floors below.
Benn made to speak, but she put up her finger, glaring.
Crouching, Quinne fingered a vial from her belt. She lowered the scarf that covered her face and brought the flux to her lips. A black hue, her lips and the tonic. Her fluxblessing, staining them so.
Leech.
Of the five strains of flux—Smart Money, Slab Head, Dovetail, Eyeball, and Leech—Quinne was the rarest of fluxblessed, a Leech. She could use any of the other four strains, drawing upon each gift like a bloodsucker.
The flux burned her lips like slag being poured from the smelt. She inhaled sharply as the tonic danced like flames down her throat. Quinne wiped her arm across her mouth, but it was useless, she knew her lips were stained black by the flux, the veins around her mouth and chin also blackened under her pale skin. It pooled within her belly, the flux, ready for her to call upon the magic within.
She released it.
A still beat of her heart and the dam holding the flux back shattered. A flare in her mind, fiery and alive with the silvery tang of Eyeball, as if the molten crys shard had replaced all the blood in her veins.
Yeah, it fuckin’ hurt, too.
The air within the room shimmered in light sterling as her senses exploded, the surrounding world expanding in clarity, sight, touch, and feel. Benn’s rushed breathing palpitated in her ears, his heartbeat a drumming that could make her ears bleed. He was quizzical, not yet frightened. Good. But there was something else just below the surface, something she hadn’t ever felt from him before.
No, please don’t be…
The sounds outside the building were deafening, breaking her focus on the odd feeling coming from Benn. The dronehawks aflight, streaking through the buildings of the Dross with their mechanical wings, their humanly connection to Eyeballs or Smart Moneys up in the Spire. Oh sure, a dronehawk was really a fluxblessed person behind the camera birds. The people, the commerce of the surrounding cityscape. Quinne heard and felt it all. The holoscreens lining the skyline.
Elysia Vera’s lottery ad became clear as if she was standing right before it, she could even see the Honour’s graceful smile as she spoke. “Which of you genties and gentettes think you have what it takes to tame the Colossus?” The music of the ad rose, screens showing people in the audience eagerly thrusting up hands. “All of you, my lovelies, could easily win should you choose to participate. Twenty spots up for grabs. Who would be a Watcher and who would be a Climber? Who would come live with me in the Spire?”
But Quinne also sensed the presence of a handful of people in the building, moving through the destruction of the floor below with ease and precision. Cautious but hurried. Not yet climbing to the fourth floor where she and Benn stood like a couple of numpties.
They had to move.
Quinne scooped up the fallen crys shard and yanked Benn toward the exposed girder bridge. She darted across as the bootfalls below were measured, almost as if they, too, were sneaking into the former rebel hideout. She turned back to Benn, beckoning him to cross, but the boy shook his head, squeamish. His earlier bravado had evaporated. Again, just like a teenager sprouting those first curlies. In the throes of Eyeball, she sensed his fear. And that odd feeling emanating from within him.
Damnit, she cursed silently. Quinne gave him a dramatic arm motion, trying to stir his feet to get a movin’. But her survival sibling stood his ground.
Dashing forward, she grabbed Benn by the arm and pulled him across the girder. One of them stirred some latent coke dust and it snowed down on those below.
Voices called a halt.
“What’s that?” one asked, husky and male.
Quinne shoved Benn behind a pile of broken tech, guarding the boy with her body, hands hovering over the vials of flux at her belt.
“Ravet,” said a feminine voice, a commanding voice. “What do you sense?”
There was silence for a moment, and Quinne bit the inside of her cheek, hoping this Ravet wasn’t an Eyeball.
Those hopes were quickly dashed as the very air within the building crackled with energy. Flux being released. “Two souls, floor up.”
Shit.
More silence, making Quinne jittery. Her nerves balanced upon the edge of a blade, one cut to either side would send her spiraling.
More flux unleashed. Then the female voice spoke, “Not Diamonds. Not worth our attention.” A pause. “Not yet at least.”
That meant the woman was also an Eyeball at the very least. Two fluxblessed. That was a problem.
“You sure, boss?” asked another, this one a younger-sounding male.
“Sure as the Honours shit in our porridge and call it hope,” said a second woman.
“Kiss my ass.”
Quinne put a finger to her ebony-stained lips, telling Benn with her gaze to stay the void down. Satisfied he would comply; she crept toward the gaping hole in the floor and peeked over the edge.
She released the last vestiges of the flux, her Eyeball flaring again that silvery clarity. Her vision magnified in the murky room that was no longer murky. The shadows were pushed back, almost as if she was standing in the daylight of Zenith’s blazing sun with binoculars. She saw the quad clearly. Two women and two men.
One of the women was instantly recognizable. Ardenn Roark, the leader of the rebels. This problem became a nightmare.
As the Eyeball faded, the holoscreen directly behind her shifted in her senses.
“This just in, my lovelies. I believe we have some takers. Some very bad hitters.” The camera panned away from the crowd, focused now on the Honour, great big smile of straight, white teeth. Her hand pressed to her coiffed hair, to the ear below. As if listening. “Very able bodied. All capable of winning. Some we thought lost in last week’s purge. Our brave Hunters are on their way now to apprehend them.”
“Oh slag,” she hissed.
Quinne grabbed another vial of flux, downing it in one gulp, not caring a lick about the burning sensation singeing her insides. Standing, she dragged Benn to his feet and made to flee toward the small bedroom.
That’s when the outer wall of the third floor exploded inward, showering the quad of rebels in dust and plaster. Surrounded by raining motes, in walked a fluxblessed who needed no introduction.
Clothed in bloodred linen wrappings from neck to foot, the Hunter looked like a wounded patient leaking blood. The vaguely human shape was that of a female, but she was bent and contorted in painful angles, muscled arms and legs bulging, bare of feet. In the center of her chest was a blazing black shard of obsidian, blood weeping from around it. Both hands were gloved in diamond-tipped, clawed gauntlets. Black hair cascaded down to the Hunter’s middle back, matted as if she’d bathed in blood. Upon her face was a white mask, plain and simple, only eye holes and a thin slit for a mouth. Across the mask was a sanguine handprint.
Blood Lettie, she was called. A Hunter for the Honours. A creature twisted and destroyed by the crys shard tonic.