The Contract Through the Screen

The dragon round turned every choice into a trap. Ash broke the first chain, and the dragon answered with claw and fire. Nick resisted the logic of the game, arguing that freeing the dragon might be exactly what Exaba Prime wanted. He tried to hurt the dragon instead of playing cleanly, but fire against the creature did little. Then the studio made its cost clear. Dhaz tried another option on his screen. For us was gone. He chose for you, and the game forced him to pick an ally to suffer. Nick accepted the hit, and psychic force dragged his mind into a maze of fear, searching and searching for the people he could not protect. The help from the studio was not help. It was leverage with a price tag. Jonah kept praying. The static on his screen widened. Jebus pushed closer, voice breaking through in fragments until a contract appeared beside Jonah's hand. Jebus told him to trust, read, and sign. The words were not written in a normal language. They were written for Jonah: symbols, images, a hand, a dwarf like him, a message shaped so that faith could understand what ordinary translation could not. The contract said Jebus wanted to help, but the divine rules were tangled. Trixie's deal had the party caught, and Jebus needed a signature to pull them out of it. Dhaz received a contract too, but his was unreadable to him, and caution held him back. Jonah looked at the strange symbolic page and understood enough. Creator, I am always yours. He signed with a cardinal. On the field below, Maine saw Nick brutalized by the game and answered with the thing he still had left: force. His empowered Eldritch Blast struck the dragon, and one beam hit so hard it tore through more than flesh. It ripped through the dragon, the field, the trees, and the false shape of the arena itself. The void opened. Something else could get through now.