Fan opened up the camera on his phone as he strolled over to the crowd forming in the center of BFB's contesting grounds. Mostly everyone from teams 1 and 2 were there, as well as Ruby. He slid his way through the others and sidled up to the gem, asking, "Has it started yet?"

"You're just in time!" Ruby pointed ahead, where Flower and Knife could be seen standing in front of a roughly outlined path in the lava-scorched field. Various obstacles sat ahead of them, including a parkour area, a rock climbing wall, something that appeared to be a smoothie-making station, and more.

Gelatin stepped out of the crowd and stood next to the two contestants. Clearing his throat, he loudly said, "Welcome, everyone! So glad we could have you all here today to witness this awesome mini-contest. You probably already know what's going to happen, but I'm going to quickly summarize the course anyway, for the sake of our two contestants."

He gestured forwards. "Knife and Flower, you'll be competing against each other in a series of obstacles set up by the crowd watching you today. The prize: bragging rights!"

"First up is a simple rock-climbing wall, at the top of which is a not-so-simple rope bridge that leads to another rock wall, where you'll have to climb back down. Next is a swing set, donated to us very generously by Four; get five full swings to continue. Then there's a station where you have to make a smoothie the quickest. After that is a small parkour course. Finally, the last section is just a race to the finish. First one there wins!" He paused. "Any questions?"

Knife and Flower both raised their hands.

"Too bad. On your marks... get set.."

Flower took a stance and glanced over at Knife. "See you at the end, Slicey Boi," she mocked. He just rolled his eyes.

"...GO!!"

--------------------

As Match absently traced abstract shapes over her desk with her finger, she wished that she was anywhere else in the world than the EXIT. It had gotten especially dull when Pencil rejoined; Match was happy for her, but that also meant that she likely wouldn't be able to talk to her again for a long time. At least Book wanted to talk to her again. Match had never really disliked her, but the weird, increasingly dicey relationship between all the alliance members had made chatting difficult for a while.

Speaking of weird...

The woodsicle lazily glanced to her right, looking over a few heads of other Exitors and directing her eyes towards David. Possibly the weirdest contestant there. She had never understood him, but to be fair, nobody had. His entire vocabulary consisted of approximately five words, two of which were repeated on a daily basis. He'd always acted oddly and barely ever listened to anyone else.

But what was particularly strange was the fact that he currently appeared comatose. Ever since Four recovered him yesterday after he was accidentally killed during a fight, he hadn't spoken a word or moved a muscle, and didn't respond to any sort of stimulation. Match could only wonder why he hadn't opened his eyes yet.

He suddenly opened his eyes.

Startled, Match fell backwards out of her chair. In trying to stop this from happening by grabbing her desk, she accidentally pulled that to the floor too, causing everyone in the room to stop working on their algebra problems and stare at her.

Book quickly got out of her seat and rushed over to help. "Are you alright?" she asked worryingly. "What happened?"

"I'm, like, fine, thanks." Match accepted Book's hand and stood up. "I was just, like, really startled cause I saw David's eyes open."

The others shifted their eyes from Match over to David. "I dunno, he still looks unconscious to me," Cake commented.

"What?" Match looked over again and saw that his eyes were still closed. But she could have sworn they'd opened, as they had looked different than normal from her brief glance. Had she imagined it?

David suddenly began to move, startling the others in the same way he had startled Match a moment ago. "Oh hey, he is moving again," remarked Robot Flower.

The grey-skinned stick figure stood up completely. For some reason, he still had his eyes closed. He began to slowly step forwards, carefully groping around to feel any obstacles in his path. "...what in batteries' name is he doing?" Remote wondered aloud. "He could move around so much more easily if he opened his eyes."

Nobody had an answer. They simply watched as he tripped on a desk leg, emitting an Aw, seriously? before finally locating the door to the EXIT. "Waid, iz he tryink to go oudzide? Four will surely bunish him vor that!" Cloudy exclaimed.

Even though Four wasn't in the classroom at the moment, Loser stood up to stop David before he could get in any more trouble, but David thrust the door open and sprinted through it. Surprised, everyone except Roboty and Spongy got out of their seats and rushed outside to follow him.

"DAVID, STOP!" Bracelety shouted. "REMEMBER LAST TIME WE TRIED TO ESCAPE FOUR? IT'S NOT WORTH IT, NOT EVEN FOR ICE CUBE... OK, MAYBE IT'S WORTH IT FOR HER. BUT STILL!"

But David wouldn't listen. Everyone else stopped and could only watch as he sped over into the Fourest, nimbly leapt onto one of the trees, climbed all the way to the top, and forced his way out of Four's mouth.

--------------------

"WOOOO!! Go, Flower!!" Ruby and several others cheered as Flower and Knife both finished the swing set obstacle at the same time. It was mostly the BFB contestants rooting for her, but some were on Knife's side instead, while the objects off II2 were almost evenly split.

Knife groaned inwardly when he reached his smoothie-making set. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Trophy smirking, but the joke was on him - thanks to Trophy, he knew he could pull ahead of Flower, at least temporarily.

Fries strolled up to Bell, who was watching with excitement. "Sorry I'm late. Who's winning?" he questioned.

"They're tied right now!" Bell answered giddily, turning slightly to look at him. "I'm rooting for Knife. Who will you ro-"

She paused as something strange happened. Off in the distance, Four was twitching oddly, and it was made clear why when a grey stick arm suddenly poked out of his mouth. She watched in horror and bewilderment as David forced Four's mouth open.

"Bell?" Fries asked, confused. He followed her gaze and his mouth dropped open. "What the... David?"

The mock human himself finally squirmed his way out into the open, immediately sprinting away from Four as fast as he could. The host shook his head and angrily yelled, "GET BACK HERE!!" He extended his arm and tried to grab David, but the Exitor dodged it with ease. By this point, a couple other contestants had noticed the commotion happening behind them. Fries and Bell looked ahead to try and follow David's path and found that it led to Black Hole, which only raised more questions in their minds.

A few more seconds of dodging Four's capture attempts, and David reached Black Hole. To the surprise of those watching, he impossibly grabbed the cosmic entity and held him above his head. "What in the world?" Black Hole exclaimed, completely thrown off balance, both literally and mentally.

This attracted the attention of several other objects just in time for them to witness David shoving Black Hole close to Box, causing the cardboard container to get sucked up and killed. "Hey! I did NOT consent to this!" BH cried. For the first time in his life, he felt truly frantic and completely out of control. "Guys! Run!!"

Hearing Black Hole panic, of all objects, caused everyone else to start screaming and running in the opposite direction. Flower and Knife, halfway through the parkour section, finally looked behind them to see only chaos. After realizing what was going on, they, too, began to flee from the area. Poor Eggy and Ice Cube were too slow, being the next ones to get sucked up, then Pen right after.

Fan quickly hung up on Blocky before dashing away with the others, but he had waited too long. A tug on his back prevented him from moving very fast, and the closer David got with Black Hole, the stronger the force was. He closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

But the inevitable never came. The force on his back unexpectedly lessened immensely, causing him to trip and get a face full of grass. He spat out a clump of dirt and turned to see Four with David in his grasp. Black Hole, freed, had shot upwards and was now floating several dozen feet above the ground.

"Gotcha!" Four cried with glee. His hands began to grow and grow until they completely enveloped David. When they returned to normal size, David was gone.

Fan breathed a sigh of relief. "What did you do to him?"

"Killed him. And I'm keeping him dead for a week as punishment."

He began to recover the four dead contestants. As the other objects slowly regrouped, Black Hole lowered himself to them slightly and started apologizing profusely, despite the situation not being his fault. Fan pulled out his phone and redialed Blocky's number. "Dude!" Blocky exclaimed after immediately answering. "What happened??"

Fan quickly summarized how David had somehow escaped the EXIT and what he did afterwards. Blocky was silent for several seconds.

"So... something's not adding up," Fan started, after Blocky continued to not say anything. "First, Test Tube's portal starts killing anyone who walks through it, and can't be turned off. The objects killed by the portal are completely comatose when recovered, and..." He glanced over to Four to confirm a theory. "Yup. The objects David/Black Hole killed aren't responding to anything, either. Then the objects the portal killed went missing, as well as almost an entire team, and MePhone4 to boot. Today, we learn that some weird heat source possibly coming from the laboratory isn't letting anyone get close to it. And now, for some reason, a random Exitor decides to just... kill a few objects."

"I also just remembered something else," Blocky interrupted. "Nobody over here has seen anyone from Team 5 since yesterday, after the portal started acting up. Or Clock."

Fan silently combined the numbers in his head. "That's... 27 total objects missing, four comatose, and one acting weirdly."

If they could see each other's faces at that moment, they would have traded expressions. "Something's going on. But what?"

Neither of them had an answer.

After another few minutes of confused and meaningless conversation, they both hung up. Fan looked over at everyone else, where they were half-heartedly trying to restart Knife and Flower's competition. His eyes strayed over to Ruby, the one member of Team 3 who hadn't mysteriously vanished the day before. Her various shades of red, bright and dark, made her stand out from the crowd.

Red...

Something jarred in Fan's mind. A detail he had noticed during the fiasco from a few minutes ago, but never processed until now because it was meaningless, yet odd nonetheless. For some unknown reason, David's eyes had been glowing red. ~ End of day two ~

and that wraps up day two! a shame it only got three chapters lmao

Fun fact, if anyone cares: I recently managed to finalize the number of chapters this book is gonna be, and it's 45, which means that this chapter makes us 1/3 through the book (15/45 chapters). That also means that we're exactly 3/4 of the way through the CO series as a whole (90/120 chapters total from four books). What a milestone!

Also, I mentioned at the very end of COSS that CO was 15 chapters, IDFBC was 35 chapters, COSS was 25 chapters, and now Overtaken will be 45 chapters... I'm happy I managed to continue the pattern :)