Once the briefing was done, the teams were ushered into the arena. Said briefing was really short, apparently, as it only took five minutes to go over the rules for today's elimination round. Out of a hundred teams, twenty would remain. It was going to be an all-out fight between everyone. Nobody was friend or ally, except your teammates. There was a three-inch white line that circled the arena, and any member of a team who stepped on it or gets pushed across it is instantly disqualified to the next round. It seemed simple to hear, as though the kind of games you and your playmates would play during sunny afternoons. Save for the fact that this was for adults, and was way more deadly.
The arena was a jam-packed space of gruff and heavyset men, there were rarely any woman. And if there were, they rivaled the men around them in size. There were also young people, but not as young as us. We were the sole teenagers present. Oh goddesses.
