The technical section began where the jungle's mercy ended.
Forty-six kilometers. The ground transformed from jungle floor to something worse—industrial runoff mixed with rain had created a hellscape of mud that grabbed like quicksand and stank like decay. The course markers led through it without apology, testing whether enhancement could handle conditions no sane designer would create.
Jayson's first step into the mire sank ankle-deep. The second went deeper. By the third, he understood this wasn't about running anymore. This was about survival.
"What the fuck," an enhanced athlete ahead of him gasped, thigh-deep in particularly vicious section. His servos whined against the suction, million-dollar legs trapped by simple mud.
The path—if it could be called that—wound through what had once been a construction site, abandoned to weather and time. Rebar jutted from mud at random angles. Concrete chunks created false floors that collapsed under weight. Every step was a gamble between forward progress and catastrophic fall.
Jayson picked his route carefully, using debris as stepping stones where possible. His lighter weight was finally an advantage—he sank less deep than enhanced athletes carrying extra hardware. But it was still brutal, each step a full-body effort to break free from the mud's grip.
Forty-seven kilometers. The smell was overwhelming—industrial chemicals, decay, the particular stench of progress gone wrong. Enhanced athletes with atmospheric filters managed better. Jayson just breathed through his mouth and tried not to think about what he was inhaling.
"Help..."
The voice was weak, accented. Jayson found its source ten meters off the marked path—a young enhanced athlete face-down in the mud, one leg twisted at an angle that suggested serious mechanical failure.
"Help... please..."
Jayson should have kept going. The math was clear—every second spent helping was a place lost, energy spent, risk taken. The smart move was to alert medical and continue.
He veered off the path.
The athlete—Viktor, according to his bib—was in bad shape. His left leg's servo had failed catastrophically, driving him knee-deep into mud when it locked. In trying to free himself, he'd fallen forward, and now the mud held him like a trap.
"Can't... breathe..." Viktor's enhanced systems were keeping him alive, but barely. Mud caked his neural crown, interfering with processing.
"I've got you." Jayson grabbed Viktor's shoulders, tried to pull. Nothing—the mud's suction was too strong. "Can you unlock the servo?"
"Tried... won't respond... whole system crashed..."
Jayson looked around for help. Other athletes slogged past, focused on their own survival. Nobody stopped. Everyone had their own war with the mud.
"Okay. We do this different." Jayson began digging with his hands, scooping mud away from Viktor's trapped leg. The work was exhausting, his already depleted muscles screaming protest. But gradually, the suction lessened.
"Why?" Viktor gasped. "Why help... I'm competition..."
"You're drowning in mud. Competition comes second."
It took five minutes—five places lost, five hundred meters others gained. But finally Viktor's leg came free with a sucking pop. The servo was destroyed, bent at angles engineering never intended. When Jayson helped him stand, blood seeped from where metal had cut flesh.
"Medical," Jayson said. "You need—"
"No medical. I finish. Or DNF trying." Viktor tested his weight. The leg held, barely. "Help me to path?"
They struggled together through the mud, Viktor's arm over Jayson's shoulders. The weight was enormous—enhancement hardware plus a determination that matched his own. By the time they reached the marked route, Jayson's legs were shaking with more than exhaustion.
"Go," Viktor said, finding a concrete chunk to rest on. "I make it from here. Or not. But you go."
"You sure?"
"Sure I lose everything if I DNF. Sure my family spent life savings on these." He gestured at his ruined legs. "Sure you just gave away ten places to help enemy." Viktor managed a smile through mud and pain. "Go. Finish. Show them natural athlete has what enhancement can't buy."
Jayson went, carrying Viktor's blood on his shirt, his blessing in his ears. The mud section continued its brutal harvest, but now each step carried extra weight—the knowledge that someone believed he could finish.
Forty-eight kilometers. The mud section seemed infinite, each step a negotiation with filth that had developed its own malevolent personality. Jayson's shoes were carrying pounds of extra weight in caked mud, turning each stride into a strength exercise.
More bodies littered the path—not dead, but defeated. Enhanced athletes sat in the mire, systems clogged, hope gone. Some waited for medical. Others just stared at legs worth fortunes that couldn't handle something as simple as mud.
"Natural athlete's gaining." The voice carried bitter amusement. An enhanced runner from the Japanese team sat against debris, both legs seized. "Look at him. Covered in shit, bleeding, still moving. While we sit here with our perfect systems full of mud."
Jayson wanted to respond, but he'd learned to hoard energy like treasure. Every joule spent on words was a joule not driving him forward. He kept moving, one filthy step after another.
A scream ahead. Real pain, not frustration. He found the source—a female athlete, Korean by her kit, down in a particularly vicious section. Blood flowed freely from a gash in her calf where rebar had found flesh between servo joints.
"Medical!" she was screaming. "Medical!"
But medical was overwhelmed, scattered across fifty kilometers of course. She'd bleed for a while before help arrived.
Jayson's remaining gel packets could be bandages. His race nutrition could become her tourniquet. The math of helping was getting more expensive with each choice.
He knelt beside her, pulled off his shirt—already ruined with Viktor's blood—and tore it into strips. "This'll hurt."
"Everything hurts," she gasped in accented English.
He wrapped the wound tight, the fabric immediately soaking red. Not professional, but better than nothing. The Korean athlete gripped his arm with enhanced strength that left bruises.
"Why help? I'm ahead of you. Was ahead."
"Because that's a lot of blood."
"I have corporate sponsors. Team support. Everything." She laughed, edge of hysteria. "You have nothing. Still you stop."
"I have the ability to stop. That's something."
He helped her to a stable position against concrete debris, the wound wrapped but still seeping. She'd need real medical soon, but at least she wouldn't bleed out in the mud.
"Name?"
"Jayson."
"I know who you are. Natural athlete. Making us all look bad." She managed a smile through pain. "Making us look human."
Forty-nine kilometers. Shirtless now, mud caking on skin, blood under his fingernails from emergency first aid. The sun beat down on the industrial wasteland, turning the mud section into a steam bath of chemical stench and human suffering.
His position was certainly falling. Every stop cost places to those still moving. But something had shifted in his mind. This wasn't about placement anymore. It was about finishing with his humanity intact.
More athletes passed, some nodding recognition at the blood-covered natural runner who kept stopping to help. Word was spreading through the field—the last-place natural athlete was playing medic to million-dollar failures.
"Stupid," one muttered as he slogged past. "Throwing away your race for strangers."
Maybe. But Jayson thought about his father's fourth place, earned clean while others doped. Some things mattered more than placement. Some victories were measured in different units.
The mud section finally began to thin, industrial wasteland giving way to something that might charitably be called trail. His legs were screaming, energy reserves depleted by the extra efforts of helping Viktor, the Korean athlete, and the countless micro-assists—a hand up here, a path warning there.
"Position update?" he asked Maya for the first time in kilometers.
"You're... 95th. But Jayson, only 118 still running. The mud section has been catastrophic. Medical's calling it the worst casualty rate in ultra history."
95th. From 71st at the river to 95th after the mud. The math of being human was expensive. But Viktor was moving again, the Korean athlete wouldn't bleed out, and his father would understand the choices even if they cost him places.
Fifty kilometers. The psychological weight of the number hit as hard as the physical distance. Fifty K. In any normal ultra, he'd be done. In the Centennial, he was just transitioning to whatever fresh hell Singapore's designers had imagined next.
The mud gave way to packed dirt, then gravel, then something approximating actual trail. Jayson's body was a catalog of damage—muscles seized, energy depleted, covered in mud and blood and the accumulated evidence of fifty kilometers of poor life choices.
But he was still moving. Still upright. Still human in a race designed to showcase humanity's obsolescence.
His earpiece crackled. Sarah's voice: "The river section's next. Hydrate now if you have anything left. It's going to be rough."
The river. He'd seen it on the course map—a crossing designed to test waterproofing, system integrity, the ability to function when wet. One more way to break down the complex and reward the simple.
If he could make it that far. His shuffle had degraded to something that barely qualified as forward motion. Other athletes passed steadily, their enhanced systems finding second winds his body couldn't manufacture.
But he thought of Viktor, probably DNF'd by now but DNF'ing with dignity because someone had pulled him from the mud. Thought of the Korean athlete who'd know that enhancement didn't make you immune to human kindness. Thought of all the small assists that had cost him places but bought something harder to measure.
"Still moving," he said to no one, everyone, himself.
The river waited ahead with its own tests. But first, these final meters of mud section, each step a small victory against the voice that said helping meant losing.
Maybe it did. Maybe finishing 95th instead of 71st was the price of staying human. But as the mud section finally released its grip, as he stumbled onto cleaner ground carrying stories written in blood and mud, Jayson knew his father would understand.
Some races you run for time. Some for place. This one, apparently, he was running for the right to finish as the same person who'd started.
The river's roar grew louder, promising new challenges. Behind him, the mud section continued its harvest of broken athletes and broken dreams. But he was through, still moving, still asking with every step whether human was enough.
Even if the answer cost him everything.