The Immortals

Chapter Fourteen: The Winners

Chapter Fourteen

“We’re partners, I guess.” I look down at my feet feeling extremely awkward.

“Yeah,” He scratches the back of his head, sounding exactly like how I feel.

“Partners follow me,” Jason yells, waving towards the door. “You and your partner will be doing a series of challenges, starting in one of the smaller fields.”

All the other competitors start to file into a line after him, “Umm, shouldn’t we follow him?”

“Yeah, I guess we should.” Damon responds, not moving, looking like he was deep in thought.

Why are things so awkward between us? I get the Ian thing, but really it doesn’t seem like as big of a deal to me than what it is to him. It ripped our friendship apart but it seems like it’s bigger than that, like there’s more to it. Maybe his sudden outburst after he found out? But he denied everything as soon as he could, was he setting the record straight or was he lying to himself? If the latter is true, maybe it’s because I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t though it wouldn’t have been true, it would have been unrealistic. I care deeply for Damon I just don’t think I like him in that way. Even if I did I wasn’t going to be like, ‘Oh Damon, I love you too!’ Oh come on! That would be so fake he never would have believed me.

“Are we going to go?” I ask, walking towards the door.

“Yeah,” Breaking his fierce concentration, he glances up and walks towards the door, soon falling into step beside me.

“Now that everyone’s here,” Jason glances my way giving me an I-hope-you-worked-everything-out look. “You will be going through a fierce obstacle course.”

He looks around, it almost looks like he’s looking at each and every one of us to see if we are listening or not. “Harder than anything you’ve been through before.”

“First, you will do thirty laps of the big field. Second, you will lift all of the objects set out for your team. Then everyone but Damon and Dri will wrestle their opponents, because we all know what would happen if they fought, instead they will scale the wall of the Dining Hall, run across the roof, then climb down the tree in the other side.”

That would be fun; the roof isn’t the easiest thing to run full speed across.

“After that the fourth part of the course is you will run down to the lake and jump off the cliff, you will then swim to the other side. After climbing the cliff you will either have the choice to either swim back across the lake or run through the forest surrounding the lake.”

I’m swimming back; running around the lake is almost three times the distance. This course may be to test your intelligence as well.

"Finally you run back here," Jason finishes. "Remember this is a race between your partner and everyone else." He pauses. "How about this, whoever the members of the first four people who come in first overall get the rest of today and tomorrow off." Oh yeah, I was totally winning this. "Everyone line up on the field," Once everyone is in their places, "On your mark. Get set... Go!"

 I start to run, almost at my full speed. The laps fly by ten, twenty, thirty. I was in the lead but Damon was only a stride behind. I dash over to the weight field, picking up the first in the ten that are laid out for us. I lift it high over my head; once I have it as high as my arms will stretch I drop it into the ground. I do this for each and every one of them. Damon’s in the lead now, he’s always had a better technique than me. Every time we have to lift weights as quickly as possible he wins. It’s completely unfair!

Regardless, of Damon’s small lead, I push myself and run away from the wrestling couples, to scale the wall. I start to pull myself up, as quickly as I dared. There are almost no places for hands or feet to go, making it hard to keep yourself glued to wall. Meaning it’s easy to go sprawling onto the ground below and that won’t help me win.