Sleepwalker

Mechanized

      The lights of the arena bathed everything in a blinding white light. At the announcement of a new challenger, everyone abandoned the dance floor and flooded the stands, screaming cheers for Amber, the reigning champion. Ace narrowed his eyes and adjusted his cap while scanning the simple layout of the arena from the challenger box.

The exterior of the warehouse had lied about its size, either that or someone had hacked the building design to extend the interior, because the concrete oval easily outstretched the SplytWyre's dimensions. A wall of red code cut the ring in half, blocking his view of his opponent.

"Rerek, manifest!" Amber shouted into a microphone, and the crowd went wild.

Rerek, one of the many names of the ancient Egyptian god of chaos in pre-Dreamwold times, his database supplied. Why Tom thought it was a good idea to give him that kind of useless knowledge, Ace didn't know as a small hieroglyph of a snake appeared in the lower corner of his vision.

Then the wall of code fell.

Oh. That's why.

"Rerek" hissed down at him, red optics gleamed, and arm-length metallic fangs fully extended. The top of its opened hood scraped against the roof of the warehouse, and Ace had to squint from the light reflecting off its silver "scales." The titanium coils of its body grated against themselves with each constriction, hiding the true length of the serpent under the mound of writhing bands. A barbed tail rattled from the top of the pile like a shaking pinnacle.

A clear force field of code rose along the black borders of the ring, protecting the crowd and locking the mech inside. A screen flickered to life from behind the snake, Amber's smirking face grinning at him through the camera. Ace glared at the fly-shaped camera projecting his face on a similar screen behind him.

"Come on, Ace," she jeered, "Let's see what you got."

Gray eyes scanned over the minimalistic keypad in front of him and landed on a glowing slit just large enough to insert an ID tag, which was presumably where he would load his mech card. A darkened screen displayed an empty stat sheet to show the details of his own mech. That would have been useful if he actually had a mech to brawl with.

Ace looked back up at the camera hovering above him so that he could easily see Amber's eyes. With all eyes on his screen, no one saw the tip of his finger flatten to the size of a paper's edge, and he jammed it into the glowing slider.

Name_ActivationCode, the computer asked, a monotone female voice echoing in his head.

Ace paused, mulling over how his opponent's name pulled from very ancient mythology. Rerek probably held something of a chaotic element as a callback to it. Names had meaning, but Ace didn't want to bother with the god titles.

He was an omen of Dreamworld's end. A messenger with a foreboding vision of what was to come. Ace knew exactly what he was, and that caused him to grin smugly.

"Raven, mechanized," he replied.

The force field around his box dropped, and he nimbly jumped over the low railing. Just for theatrics' sake, he rolled into a front flip and easily landed in a crouched position on the concrete floor of the arena. A wave of blue code washed across the ground in acceptance of his presence.

The crowd gasped, and the arena fell silent as he shouldered off his jacket, making a show of folding it neatly and setting it on the edge of the ring. Flipping off his hat, his stark white hair stood out against the black wall.

The rest of Amber's friends stormed her box and demanded what was going on, but all she could do was stare at the absolute lunatic shifting into a battle stance before her champion.