the minotaur
“Carson?!” Alex cries out. “Where did you go?! Where are you?!”
Alex races through the labyrinthian stone halls, desperately twisting and turning and searching for Commander Carson Cole, the famed Defender of Dallas, as the time ticks down:
1:00
“Carson?!” Alex shouts again as he hurries through the candlelit corridors of the cobblestone maze. But the voice channel is dead. No signal from Carson anywhere in this strange, dark dungeon. The fateful clock looms over his blue visor:
0:55
“Aeschylus!” Alex shouts as he turns another corner, only to find a dead end. “Where’s Carson?!”
“Unknown,” Aeschylus responds. “Your objective is to rendezvous with Commander Cole in the center of this maze.”
“Where’s that?!” Alex yells. His white armor is tarnished and clogged with dust and grime from the dank, dripping subterranean walls, but he keeps running, dashing, sprinting to reunite with Carson.
“Unknown,” Aeschylus drones. “Your objective is to—”
“I know my damn objective!” Alex turns another corner, dashes down another hall, the skulls and bones and shattered armor of ancient warriors sprinkled all across his path. He hits another dead end, a dim little alcove filled with only some loose bones and rusted swords.
“For fuck’s sake!” He curses the maze, turns back the way he came.
0:50
“Alli?!” Carson suddenly scratches into the grainy voice channel, his deep twang rich with static. “Alli, where—where are—at?”
“Carr!” Alex turns another corner to find a long, narrow hall lined with skeletons and broken weapons. “Carr, where are you?! I see a long candlelit hall!”
“I don’t—where—you?” Carson’s glitched, distant voice struggles to take form as Alex hurries down the hall, the skeletons suddenly leaping up from the dead, clutching their broken swords and shields tight.
“RESPOND!” Aeschylus commands as the skeletal knights charge toward Alex. No man living or dead is any match for the legendary Commander Alex Altair, Champion of Hudson. His instincts activate, he stabs through their dull bronze shields, slices their arms and ribs and spines to shreds with his speedy white blade, blazing down the hall in a flash of white steel.
0:45
“Carr!” Alex calls out into the maze. “We don’t have much time! We need to get to the center of this maze!”
“I don’t—you?” Carson barely crackles through the voice channel.
Alex races around another candlelit corner, cuts and chops through more shambling skeletons, spots a bright light at the far end of the hall.
“Carr, I see something!” Alex shouts. “Maybe the center of the maze!”
0:40
He sprints toward the light as the dungeon’s walls open and slope up into a tall, majestic marble dome. Sunlight pours in from the roof high above, where the kaleidoscopic stained glass visage of a furious bull oversees the dome.
A notice from Aeschylus pops into view:
REMAIN IN PLACE
AWAIT CMDR COLE
Sunlight and rainbows of stained glass drench the white stone walls in beautiful tints and glowing hues. Motes of bygone dust hover in the sunbeams, floating across the old dome’s airy heights. But Alex doesn’t have time to sit around and absorb the sights for long.
“Aeschylus!” Alex echoes out into the empty dome. “Where’s Carson?!”
“Unknown,” Aeschylus replies.
0:35
“Ugh, FUCK! I’ll find him myself!” Alex races out from the immaculate dome, back into the dingy corridors and dusty dungeons of the maze surrounding it. But the dim, cobblestone halls of the maze are all empty. The voice channel is dead. Alex runs and runs and runs through the wet, sprawling halls and turns and dead ends like a frantic sewer rat.
“Carson?!” Alex calls out as another pack of skeleton knights lunge out at him from around a corner, but his instincts quickly kick in: the skeletons instantly break into dust and bones at the edge of Alex’s mighty white blade. “CARSON?!”
0:30
“Warning,” Aeschylus chimes in. “If you do not reunite with Commander Cole in 30 seconds, you will fail this mission.”
“WHERE IS HE?!” Alex shrieks.
“Unknown,” Aeschylus drones.
0:25
“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?!” Alex screams all around at Aeschylus. “You said we were supposed to fight the Minotaur together! What the fuck’s going on?!”
“Unknown,” Aeschylus drones.
0:20
“This is all wrong!” Alex shakes his head, plunging into a panic as he bounds around another corner, sprints past the same pile of skulls and bones he just saw moments ago. “None of this was in the mission briefing! What’s going on?! Is this a hardware fault?! Bad simulation?!”
“Unknown,” Aeschylus drones.
0:15
“What the hell is this maze supposed to represent?!” Alex howls and throws his sword to the ground in a rage as he hits another dead end. “What the fuck are all these skeletons?! Cars?! Planes?! Droids?! People?!”
“Unknown,” Aeschylus drones.
“Please don’t tell me they’re real people?!”
0:10
“Alli?!” Carson’s voice hisses through the static of the broken voice channel once again. “I’m—center—maze—where—you?”
“Carr?!” Alex’s eyes pop, a fresh new sword leaps into his grasp as he turns and speeds back through the twisting and winding halls, racing back toward the dome. “Where are you?! Center of the maze?! Big dome?!”
“Ya!” Carson crackles. “Tall—lots—sunlight.”
0:05
Alex leaps from the ground, bolts into the air, flies and twists through the grim halls in a streak of white-hot flame, spots the dome from down the long hall once again, speeds toward it like a mad bullet.
0:03
Alex soars down the long hall, the light at the end glowing brighter and brighter, the clock clicking down:
0:02
The sunlight glistens and flares from the distant stained glass of the sunroof as Alex draws closer and closer to the dome.
0:01
Just as the dark hall begins to slope up into the tall, marbled walls of the holy dome, Alex freezes and stiffens, crashes down from the air, smashes into the dust and ancient moss of the cold cobblestone floor. The dreaded notice pops into view:
MISSION FAILED
But Alex doesn’t give up. Her strength quickly draining from her body, she crawls with all her might, one slow, pained hand at a time toward the scorching sunlight of the white marble dome mere feet away.
“Hmph. A little girl?”
A booming voice shakes the walls and quakes the floors. Alex raises her tired head up to see a gargantuan figure looming above her, its arms massive, its legs towering high up toward the ceiling of the warm white dome, casting a monstrous shadow over Alex.
“I didn’t hijack every supercomputer in Asia just so I could fight a little girl.”
Alex scrapes at the cobblestones ahead of her, failing to reach the white dome, failing to stand, failing to speak, barely able to lift her head just a tiny bit higher to squint at the head of shadowy beast. Two tall, mammoth horns spike out from the sides of its head, curved like deadly longswords up toward the stained glass bull glittering atop the dome’s sunroof.
“You’re not supposed to be here yet,” the colossal Minotaur grunts high above her.
“You wouldn’t even be a challenge for me.”
Alex tries her best to let loose a war cry at the indomitable monster, but her mouth has gone numb. Her head has gone limp. Her vision has gone blurry. The Minotaur’s brute chuckle echoes and trembles throughout the maze.
“Come back when you’re older, little girl.”
As the light of the Minotaur’s maze fades away around her, Alex tries one last time to claw her way back up to her feet.