The Arena of Carnage
It was the copper in the air where the heavy blood smell oozed off the tongue bloating the stomach full of iron and death. The sun sank to ooze at the bottom of the battlefield, and white sand became black with gut. The mob that had once bellowed with bloodthirst hushed, an uneasy rustle. "The arena — which had previously been a domed coliseum of fighters, of courage, of calculated blows — was now something else."
A slaughterhouse.
Linked by the door, the too-dirty earth crackled under his feet through the soles of battered boots weighed down by the dust of the dead. His knuckles shone as if polished iron, the veins of his hands braided like steel cable. He had seen men torn to pieces. He had marched over fields of corpses. And yet — this — this was so much more than carnage.
This was something darker.
The Butchers of the Arena
They lay obnoxiously, multipedes galloping toward a murmurous silhouette in the horizon fucking the grade of bondage so stretched that their tendons and limbs were scarcely made of the alpha & omega logos, some creatures fried to ash by the never-ending conflict which had ushered them this distance, yet others with fear chargrilled into their haughtiness, their gilded bodies mirroring moments on a battlefield — shining carnality. It had been Gorr who had loosed, first, a wave of slaughter, a tower of meat and malice, the double-headed ax he swung — an engine of annihilation. Wherever he hit, flesh and bone opened cleanly, limbs severed from torsos, like a simple but overripe piece of fruit. He was not a fighter — he was a harbinger of ruin, a murderer stripped not only of desire, of even ambivalence, but of anything but resolve.
And then there was Lira: a specter of the field, twin swords shimmering with hakor venom, glistening like a viper's fangs.' She did not fight. She ended. With one look and a flick of her wrist men crumpled into the dirt, endowments undone, a death smiled at them before they could even know they were dead. No screams, no wails — just the gaped and uncomprehending eyes of humans who had been wiped from the planet without so much as a touch with the knife that had put them there.
Then there was The Butcher.
It's not so much a name as it is a title, a legacy of marrow and sinew. He dove into the fray, the rubbled crimson armor of a dead space warrior splattered with the gore of those they had taken down, the haft of a titan-spiked mace held aloft in gauntlet-encrusted hands. Where Gorr struck with deadly efficiency, The Butcher struck with glee. He laughed with a roar deeper than any of his victims's scream, a guttural, blood-curdling noise that bounced off bloody sand. When his mace hit the ground, it wasn't just one fighter who was defeated. They burst. Skulls crushed in like rotten fruit, torsos broken to bits, limbs pulled from sockets in grotesque violations of human anatomy.
And then came Seraph.
Not a man. Not a warrior. A force.
Where the other guys brought guns, he brought inevitability. And with the flick of those fingers the earth itself reared up before him, jagged and evil, arching out to speer the warriors mid-charge, their bodies left hung dead upon the ends as if the poor bastards hadn't even gotten the time to know they'd been gored. With every single action he took, an uncontrolled wave of decomposition started radiating away from him to a distance, eating through the armor, passing through his blood, and eating through the surrounding air. He did not revel. He did not acknowledge. He simply ended. A sun god wrapped in wreckage wearing human form marching across the battlefield like a storm.
And then—
She arrived.
The Girl.
She was nothing. A ghost. A nameless presence. No weapons, no armor, no blood on her hands.
But when she stepped into the line, the air itself fell to its knees.
And as the shooters simply surrendered, the cries of the onlookers who have been yelling for this all turned to silence, the growls caught in their throats.
She one hand raised, fingers waving open. It cracked open for a second — and then it shattered.
No explosion. No screams. No visible force.
Only silence.
And in that quiet, warriors 🥶
Some fell where they were, where they fell, knocked out before they knew what had happened. The others — the ones not targeted — were petrified, their limbs turned to stone, their last face petrified in horror. In place of warriors who had withstood shrapnel and flame and visible sorcery were now immortalized as august monuments to unknowable power.
Hangfang's breath was a ragged pant, heart pounding a jackhammer. Not from exertion. Not from fear.
From something worse.
*What kind of power is this? *
The arena was no longer a battlefield." No longer a test of strength.
It was a graveyard. A monument to madness.
The Next Match Begins
The moment shattered. The final match snapped, penetrating the stillness.
Hangfang advanced. Fifty warriors remained. None of them charged forward. They did not want to battle anymore. They had seen what happened. They had seen the impossible.
Hangfang, settled in his place, his body taut, his mind whirring. A familiar voice — muffled, with the leaden weight of caution that had settled in his shoulders — slithered into his head.
*"Listen closely. You cannot implement the tricks that I taught you. Do not expose them here." *
Why?
He wanted to demand answers. Why was he shackled by the chains he couldn't even see? But no time to ask questions.
The battle had begun.
Hangfang moved. In the next, his figure blotted out, devices of war do, it was a knifed pyre in the field. Wait a minute, what does that even mean? Four times his base speed hot-hot-hot knife through silk. But the rest — the ones that were still standing — weren't just any old fodder. Instead they shrieked in vicious counter proclaiming: his blows found purchase with rough weaponry, the wash of incoming blows ringing deep in the bowels of the arena's foundations.
Steel clashed. Spears punctured flesh. Axes split skulls. The ground became a nightmarish patchwork of broken bodies, twisted arms.
And then—
Danger.
It stalked after him swift and merciless.
The swordsman bent to the last moment, his blade intercepting a mortal blow meant for his spine. Flesh screamed as steel raked against steel, erupting into a wild spiller of sparks.
"Is that all you've got?" * my vie," he growled, rifting the active.
But, before he could say that, something even worse crawled from the carnage.
A figure that glides, swaddled in billowing black rags, coursing across battle's blood-caked dirt like flesh-and-blood death. Hair the color of the abyss. His eyes—empty, void.
And in his hands—
A sword of stone. Massive. Heavy. * Too heavy for a man to use. *
And the air filled with those nameless around him, in his periphery, warped, engorged. It was everywhere, omnipresent, suffocating, relentless, living.
The figure moved.
No words. No ceremony. Only death.
As the stone sword fell freely, cutting through the very air. As the urge to raise his blade and absorb the blow surged up within him, Hangfang's arms burned as if afire. But the force—
It knocked him skidding backward, gushing with trenches over the dirt beneath his feet. His sword cracked. The blow resonated bone on bone.
The black-robed warrior tilted his head, his voice as chill as a corpse's.
*"Your weapons are useless. Everyone else is gone. "Yield unto them"… lest too Late." *
Knuckles turning white around the hilt of Hangfang. His base, his forum, was wreckage at his feet, dead eyes fixed on the heavens, and sooner or later the sky.
His sword was breaking. His strength was failing.
But he did not surrender.
In fatigue, in the face of the lead hand of fate, he raised his reserve of steel one last time.
It wasn't fear that beat in his heart, it was defiance.
This was not the end.
Not yet.