Chapter Text
He hears the tell-tale sound of 1x ripping its eye out, and makes out approaching footsteps. He steels himself, before he hears the firing of his sentry and metal bending as 1x brings its sword down on the steel. He bolts down the stairs of the ballpit, trying to make as much distance as possible with the tiny head start he's been afforded. He feels instinctively the destruction of the sentry, like it was part of him.
He makes it all the way to the white tiled room before a sword pierces through him, and he can't move.
The thing laughs as it charges up Mass Infection, and he still can't move.
There's a gunshot behind him, and he can finally move again.
He turns the corner, avoids the pale, zombified hands and arrives at what was once probably the gift shop of this place, given the knocked down shelves. Thankfully, he'd kept a dispenser here, so he leans on the wall next to it as he tries to catch his breath.
There's a generator in the room, half finished, and so he finds nothing better to do than to fix the damn thing.
Time passes that way, joining wires over and over again, moving out the way whenever he hears the noise of 1x charging Mass Infection and finding his work on the current panel reset. Finally, the generator sputters to life, and he finds himself with nothing to do again. He doesn't have enough metal to build another sentry, so he waits. He doesn't wait for long.
A Mass Infection rips through his dispenser. He backs out of the way, and realises it probably wasn't aimed for him. He has enough scrap to make the sentry though, so he decides to place it by the zombie hands. He kneels by the hands and starts building.
The hands latch onto him immediately, clinging to his legs with an iron tight grip. They're slimy, and thin, and the hands that can't reach him still extend their rotted fingers towards him, like they're inviting him to join their ranks. He thinks of all this while constructing the sentry, which he can do without thinking at this point. Finally, the thing gets going, and he gets up and backs away from his sentry. The hands don't let go of him until he shakes them off, and even when he goes back to where his dispenser used to be, by the fallen shelf, they're still reaching for him. Sometimes, he thinks they grab onto him more than they do anyone else. The hands hang onto him like they want to freeze him forever, and swallow him whole in rotting flesh.
He hears 1x rip out its eye again, and he's on the alert. Sure enough, he hears the noise of the sentry firing, and back to the ballpit he goes. He makes it halfway there, before a Mass Infection slices through him, sending a wave of panic and pain and a sheer sense of wrongness through him. He stumbles.
1x capitalizes on this and sends a sword flying through the wall to freeze him in place. Through his blurry vision, he spots one of the wretched thing's minions making its lumbering way towards him from the ballpit stairs. He struggles, trying to move, to do anything through the static in his limbs.
It gets a hit on him before he can move again. He runs, hoping to get somewhere, anywhere, away.
He finds himself at the other entrance to the outdoors area, and he can't hear 1x's footsteps. He can't build a dispenser yet, not while the little scrap he used to build the sentry with is a fading, smoking pile of rubbish. He leans against the wall. The adrenalin that kept him running through the pain is fading. He exhales slightly.
“Guess I'll search fer a medkit.” He mutters this to no one in particular, but he hears footsteps, too light to be that of 1x, and too fast to be one of his minions.
“Woah, what's happened to you there, Buildsy?” Chance walks over from a generator in the neon pink hotel room, his suit still somehow clean.
“Got caught off guard. Think you could spare a medkit?” He says through grit teeth. Sometimes he can't stand Chance and their lackadaisicality. Chance, to his credit, does pick up the message, and ducks back into the room he came from to take a medkit they stashed there. They pass it over to him, who wraps the bandage around his arm. They'd all figured out that no matter where they wrapped the thing, it'd heal them all the same, the fabric painlessly becoming one with their flesh. It helped avoid awkward situations, which was one of the few things the Specter seemed to not want to happen. It was a small blessing, but a blessing nonetheless.
“Thanks for the medkit. And, thanks for gettin’ 1x off my back.” He says. Chance obviously interrupts.
“Ey, don't worry about it, Buildsy.” They say. He's still not sure why they chose that as a nickname for him, instead of just plain ‘Builder’. Probably something for pizzazz or something equally ridiculous. He takes his mind off of Chance's flair for the dramatic, discarding the medkit and watching it slowly fade.
“D'you know who's still alive right now?” He asks Chance. He starts flipping a coin in one hand, and raises the other to count on their fingers.
“As far as I can tell, five of us went in this round. Noob, Shed, Duse, you, and me.” They raise all five fingers.
“1x was gunning for Shedletsky at the very beginning, and my gun jammed, so I couldn't help him.” A finger lowered. “Shed was getting protected by Duse, so they died after that,” another finger lowered, “and I haven't seen Noob since all the generators were finished. Left me the last set of wires.” Three fingers raised. Three survivors left alive.
They hear the clock on their wrists tick up, and Chance glumly lowers a finger. Two survivors: just them.
“Only one more minute,” He mutters, looking at the watch the thing orchestrating this whole game was kind enough to give them. One more minute to stay alive, and they could get back to the cabins and not have to worry about dying there.
He checks how much scrap he has with him. It's a sizable amount, enough to make a sentry, and if he waits long enough, a dispenser. But he doesn't have time to waste, so he constructs a sentry in the corner just in time for 1x to throw a sword where he was kneeling. The missed sword almost grazes Chance, who leaps back like it burned him.
“Will you keel over if you get hit?” An idle question, really. He just wants to make sure. That Chance is not in a position to take any hits, much less fire his gun when it has a chance to misfire and leave him as the last man standing.
“Y-Yeah.” His voice is shaky, still staring at the air where the sword almost grazed his side. He's stopped flipping the coin now, instead clutching it in a death grip. He loosens, and hides the coin in a pocket somewhere. Maybe it's like the scrap in his satchel in that it vanishes when it's not needed and reappears when he wants to take a look at it or use it to build something. The train of thought is brought to an abrupt halt when he hears 1x stab itself, and green chains rattle as somewhere in this place, another one of those braindead minions rises from the grave.
1x enters the red carpeted room through the red killer only door, phasing through it with its sword perched on its shoulder. He runs first, dragging a startled Chance behind him. Chance recovers though, and both of them sprint for the white tiled room to get to the ballpit. They hear the sound of metal hitting metal again, and the sentry stops firing. It's not destroyed though, and he realises that the damn thing has figured out how to disable the sentry with a single hit. They reach the room with the ballpit in it, when he is pulled back by a sword thrown through him.
His muscles feel like they've locked up. He can't move an inch, and 1x's footsteps get closer and closer. He can only brace himself for the inevitable hit—
When Chances rights the hat on their head, flips a coin, readies the gun–
And the light from the barrel lights up their face for a split second–
And the bullet buries itself in 1x's translucent green body, and Chance bounds over to him, takes him by the hand and drags him forward to the ballpit.
He stumbles after them, almost light-headed, but before long he's climbing the stairs and Chance grins.
“You're welcome for that, Buildsy.” He's put on a winning smile, flipping that coin again. The flip lands on heads, and he smiles wider.
“Didn't even say thanks,” He grumbles, and cranes his head to see where 1x is. Strangely enough, they don't seem to have recovered from the stun.
Then 1x starts screaming.
Sometimes it does that, especially when it hasn't killed Shedletsky yet and it's getting trounced by the survivors, say if Noob was leading it around in circles around a wall, or if Two Time stabbed them any more than the requisite needed to get their second life. Or if Two Time stabbed them at all, actually. It starts screaming about vengeance and unfairness to the thing that watches, and this inevitably results in the survivors getting their abilities weakened in some way. This is the.. fourth time 1x in particular has done that without Shedletsky alive in the round.
He just sighs, and takes a look at his timer. There's only around 15 seconds left, so they were pretty much free to do anything, since 1x's.. breakdowns, for lack of a better word, tended to last until the round ended.
Chance twists their face in displeasure listening to 1x. “My mother isn't even four dimensional, man.”
“Don't listen to ‘em. There's no point in hearing out whatever it's gotta say. Whole lotta nonsense.” Builderman tells him.
“Aww, thanks for the comfort, Buildsy.” Chance grins, and flips their coin.
Obviously, since he's the luckiest man alive, apparently, it lands on heads.