Uneasy Alliance 

The Admin was right. Elemental had indeed somehow, by pure bad luck and coincidence, been chosen as a Prey. Except we weren't sure if it was Elemental's bad luck or the Hunters' bad luck having to hunt down someone like him. And sure enough, an instructor came and took him away to the armoury. 

POV Elemental 

Blindfolded, Elemental gets pushed by the instructor who called for him to the armoury.  

I'll have to ask Ronin to remind me to kill this asshole after we get out of here. He has a good memory. 

He feels himself get shoved forwards, and almost trips on a slightly elevated part of the ground, and then the blindfold is stripped from his eyes. 

"Arm yourself," the instructor tells him curtly, and then slams a metal door behind his back. 

Elemental spits a curse under his breath after him, but his anger instantly dissipates when he turns around and sees the gigantic hangar of a room he's standing in. Racks and racks of weapons are everywhere in the massive, whitewashed room, with blinding chrona lights he hadn’t seen for a year and a half, there were chrona katanas, machetes, knives, daggers, axes, swords, shields, lances - you name it, it was there. There were hundreds of stands of chrona-powered battle armour, vials of strengthening elixir - and guns. Lots and lots of guns, all of them on full power and fully charged with chronoplasma. Gatlings. Pistols. Rocket launchers. Rifles. Snipers. 

"This is my world," Elemental mutters. "Sniper here I come." 

He put his eye to the scope, but he couldn’t see a thing. 

"Oh, shit, I don’t have a left eye," he remembers, and scratches at the eyepatch that Artee had hand crafted for him.  

A little forlornly, he placed the sniper back on its stand and kept wandering through the mazes of weapons of mass destruction. There was enough to arm a whole army in there. Then, he turned a corner, and almost jumped out of his skin as he collided with someone. 

"Woah, what the fuck!" 

"I should be the one saying that, shut up!" 

Elemental got back to his feet, and realized who he was looking at. 

"You’re Airo's…" 
"Airo's what?" JJQ asked.  

She was a tall woman, and unlike Nyx she looked like the type to gut anyone who got in her way. He auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail, and right now her brown eyes were narrowed at him. He glanced down at the electric knife at his throat.  

"Aren’t we allied?" 

"You're the one who ambushed me." 
"Ambushed?" he demanded incredulously. "I ambushed you? I didn’t even know you were here." 

She sighed and lowered the knife.  

"You’re Prey too?" 

"What do you think?" 

"…fair. Do you have a plan, 002?" 

"Course I do, courtesy of 005," Elemental replies, turning around and examining a katana on a stand, the edge glowing and pulsing with bright blue chrona.  

"Sword?" 

"Yes," he confirms, slipping the katana into its sheath and hanging it from his belt. "And if it works, the Hunters will become the hunted." 

"I was told by the Administrator that you guys will have to choose weapons. And apparently there's no limit to how many you can take, and there's no limit to who you can give it to either." 

"So we're going to rinse this place," JJQ asks incredulously. "And give them to everyone else?" 

"Yup," Elemental replied. "Find like a rope or something. We're going to tie a bunch of swords together." 
"There's a problem." 
"Which is?" 

She took a deep breath. 

"When Airo found out I was a Prey," she said, "He told the others that he'll support me with you guys, Pod 50. But…" 
Elemental realized what she was getting at. 

"So you and Airo are alone now?" 

"No, most of the G2s and the others in the bulk of our group betrayed us, but Avoma and Relic, who are the most loyal to Airo, are still with him. They've probably gone to Pod 50." 

Elemental shrugs. But then it dawns on him, and he whirls around. 

"It's just Pod 50, Krim and you four!?" 

She looked away, and Elemental sat back heavily.  

"…change of plans," Elemental said, squeezing the bridge of his nose. "We're going to bring all the firepower we can get. And weapons. We're going to arm ourselves to the teeth." 
"Isn’t that the same plan?” 
"Shut up." 
Just then, there was a clatter from the other end of the giant room. The sound of someone dropping a weapon.  

"…I forgot there's three Preys."  

"Shall we see who it is?" 

Elemental stared at Vedix. Vedix stared at Elemental. 

"No," Elemental says. 

"No," Vedix agrees.  

"I'm going to go this way." 

"Alright, bye." 
They turned away from each other, and Elemental went straight back to JJQ. 

"We have a dead weight," he announced. 

"HEY!" Vedix shouts from somewhere in the blade section. 

"SHUT UP, MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE!!" 

"This isn’t going to work, is it," JJQ commented.  

"You fought in the skirmish too." 
"Yeah, I beat the crap out of Auvrion." 

"Oh, that was you?" 

"Yup." 

A few minutes passed, as they picked out weapons for themselves. Elemental had settled with a pair of pistols, the katana, a pair of gloves that could administer electric shocks, and two knives. JJQ had simply loaded herself with as many blades as she could carry. Then, she had found a bunch of chrona whips, which covered themselves in chrona when activated, and she and Elemental began to tie together bundles of guns and swords. 

"Loflo said he was a sniper when he was in the army, at least for some time," Elemental told her, so they made a mental note to bring one when they left. 

If was only after twenty minutes that Vedix got up the courage to come back. 

"On a serious note," he said. "Please hear me out." 

"I was being serious," Elemental scoffed. 

"We're all Prey, going to be hunted down by eight hundred others, who are probably planning and making preparations right now." 

"What about you and Woodsy's big hunk of cronies?" 
"Most of them betrayed us," Vedix said. "Except for Auvrion, Woodsy, El Casio and Zak, all of them have betrayed us. Even Stroma." 
"Understandable," JJQ muttered.  

Elemental sighed. He hated Vedix, and wanted to jump the asshole immediately, but he knew he was right and he hated it. And Vedix knew that he knew and that he hated the fact that he knew. They were going to need all the help they could get. 

"I doubt you guys will be able to go back to your respective armies after this," he exhaled. 

"No," JJQ and Vedix agreed at the same time. 

"I never thought this would happen, but it looks like we're going to have a Sword-Airo-Woodsy alliance." 

POV Sword 

There's a knock on the Pod door. Airo, Avoma and Relic are here with us, discussing plans for tomorrow, and Ronin opens it. JJQ, Elemental and… are standing outside. 

"Hey," Vedix says. 

We do the obvious. I punch him in the head and he gets laid like a dead donkey. Then we jump the motherfucker. 

"No," I say. 

"No," Ronin agrees. 

"I would rather die," El Casio mutters. 

"No," Artee says. 

"No," Avoma says. 

"Fuck no, I would rather kill Elemental," Chris spits. 

"That's too far." 

"It’s not cuz I wouldn’t be able to kill him  anyway." 

"EVERYONE SHUT UP!!" 

Elemental has managed to calm us all down (without ANY violence AT ALL, and DEFINITELY no beating EVERYONE up), and as of now we're all gathered outside our Pod.  

"We need to do this for the sake of our survival," he tells us. 

“No shit. We’re unhappy we’re teaming up with the people we literally just beat the crap out of,” Chris snorts. 

“Arguable,” Zak snaps. “I absolutely clobbered Sword.” 

“You say something?” Elemental demands. 

“No.” 

“That’s what I thought.” 

“Elemental, with that you just threw your argument down the toilet and flushed it down with the shit.” 

“Shut up, I can argue what I want. I’m him." 

After a great deal of arguing and pointing fingers and jabbing each other in the shoulder, we settle on a temporary alliance for this mission, and we set about preparing our weapons. It was then that Relic, Airo's left hand man, returned from his scouting mission, with news. 

"They’ve pretty much gathered together everyone," Relic tells us. "They're all uniting under this guy called Exqua." 

We're silent for a bit, and then Krim says, 

"Who?" 

"Exqua," Relic repeats. "I haven’t heard of him either, but… he's dangerous. He's more of the plotter, trickster, planning type of guy." 
"I heard of him," Loflo joins in. "He's ranked #2 in the Strategist department." 

"So, he's a nerd," Chris finished. 

"No, I wouldn’t say that either," Relic shakes his head. "He's also skilled in fighting with a polearm. Airo might've seen him somewhere." 

"Yes, a few times," Airo agrees. "He is indeed not bad." 

"And the biggest problem of all is," Relic keeps going. "He's trying to recruit Clown." 

"That crazy psychopathic murderer?" I ask.  

Artee shudders.  

"He's killed more people in a few months than Elemental has in a year." 

"Apparently he's convinced that whichever side gets him wins." 
"They're treating him like an object." 
"Yeah, he's not even worth being called an object." 
"Well, I honestly couldn't care less," Kake shrugs. "He's just someone who goes around killing weaker people. If he shows up we can just shoot him full of holes." 
He clicks his chrona rifle to prove his point. But I've been thinking this whole time, about the Administrator's words to me during the meeting. Before I had left, I'd asked him: "So, are you on our side?" He had smiled and replies with, "No, I am nobody's side. The Facility is simply the survival of the fittest." 

"It's strange," I say. 

"What is?" Chris asks. 

"The missions he gave so far always focused on singling out the strong through their own skills. It's… unlike the Administrator to favour us specifically. I think there's something more to this than meets this eye." 

"Sword," Elemental says. "You were talked to by the Administrator… what if others were as well? What if they were told things he didn’t tell us?" 
"… just prepare for the worst," I tell them all. "Focus on surviving the next week first, then we can worry about other things." 

"Week?" 

"That's apparently how long we have to do this." 

I look around at the grim, determined faces of my friends, allies and former enemies. There's Woodsy's group, with Zak, Vedix, El Casio and Auvrion, as well Airo's group of four, with JJQ, Relic and Avoma. And Krim's duo, with his only roommate, Framed. And then us, the core of this mission, Pod 50. We have all top 10 ranked in the whole Facility, several in the top 20 - everyone here is highly skilled, and armed to the teeth. I finger the hilt of the chrona-powered longsword Elemental has given to me, and we wait out the night in Pods 50 and 47.