hunger games weapons genius

The Arena changed after the Feast.

Not the terrain. Not the traps.

The mood.

The air itself shifted. Tighter. Meaner. Like the Gamemakers were holding their breath, waiting to regain control of something that had slipped between their fingers.

Goo could feel it.

He could see it in the sudden drop in sponsor gifts. In the stillness between cannon shots. In how the hovercams drifted now—not with curiosity, but with urgency.

He wasn't playing the Game the Capitol designed.

He was rewriting it.

"Why didn't you kill her?" Rue asked.

They were sitting beside a stream that bubbled quietly under the roots of a split tree, half-hidden from the sky. She was wrapping her hands with cloth, fixing what the Games had frayed.

"She'll come back," Rue said. "You know that."

"I want her to."

She stared at him. "You want her to kill you?"

"No," Goo said, his voice calm. "I want her to try."

He didn't say it to brag. It was just… strategy. Pure and sharp. Everything he did was meant to cut something down the line.

He was teaching Rue now—subtly. Slowly. Not just survival, but presence.

"Don't step wide," he said once, adjusting the angle of her foot during a snare trap. "You give yourself away with noise. Always."

Later: "Don't look up when you hear the anthem. Everyone looks up. So don't."

Even later, after she hesitated over a sleeping tribute in the brush: "If you don't move, they die. If you move wrong, you die. Pick one."

She hated him for that moment.

And then, an hour later, she didn't.

Cassia found them on the fifth night.

Alone.

No sword.

She was limping, bleeding from the shoulder.

Goo stepped in front of Rue, expression unreadable.

"You followed us," he said.

"No," Cassia rasped. "I lost everything else."

Rue reached for her knife. Goo held up a hand.

Cassia met his eyes.

"Kill me, if you want. I just want to know why you didn't before."

Goo crouched beside her. Looked at her like she was a puzzle, or maybe a mirror.

"Because you're not a villain," he said.

"Neither are you?" she asked, bitter.

He smiled, just barely.

"No. I'm the auditor."

Then he stood and walked away, leaving her with that word like a dagger lodged somewhere beneath her ribs.

She didn't follow them again.

Didn't show up in the sky that night either.

But she would.

When she did, Goo would be ready.

Not for revenge.

But for proof.

Rue sat with him the next morning, eating berries she'd triple-checked for toxins.

"They're changing the Arena again."

Goo nodded. "They'll funnel us."

"To where?"

"Each other."

"Then what?"

He looked up at the sky.

"They'll try to end it fast."

She didn't ask why.

She was learning.

That night, the sky lit with two more faces.

One was the boy from District 8.

The other was Seeder.

Rue gasped, covering her mouth.

Goo didn't react. He simply stood.

His mentor. Dead.

Not in the Arena.

Taken out outside the rules.

A warning.

The Capitol had decided: he wasn't just a player anymore.

He was a problem.