Swords slash, spears stab, arrows fly, magic magics, and I take it all. One spear goes into my stomach, an arrow stabs into my shoulder, a sword slashes my forearm, and a bit of magic bounces off me harmlessly. To the people around me, it must have seemed like I willingly took it, which I did. However, I made sure to move just enough to ensure no weapon hit any critical areas.

Like this, I will be more disturbing to look at.

My apathetic reaction to it all is enough for the person who stabbed me with a spear to freeze in place, the realization that he stabbed a human crashing down onto his conscience like a cinder block on a mouse. “A—ah…!”

Not giving him time to mourn himself, my flared claws shoot out to gauge a slash across his neck and upper chest. He grabs at his neck, eyes wide in surprise, trying to talk but unable to. Killing him straight away would be a waste, though, so I pick him up, hold him above my head and thrust my hand into his belly, tearing out a spool of glistening intestine. I toss his dying body back to the floor, ignore an arrow striking me in the back, slice off the ends of the intestine and throw it into the air like a handful of confetti, splashing the nearby fighters with blood and intestine and various other bodily fluids.

The horrified screams erupting around me tell me that my spook-them-stiff strategy has worked. Now, I just have to get to work.

Tearing out the arrows is more trouble than it's worth, so I ignore them, even as more thump into my back. I don’t think much. I don’t have to. My fingers slice, my teeth bite, and people die. It’s effortless. A few people see the purposeful mess I’ve made and let out screams like schoolchildren finding a dead squirrel, which only adds to the psychological damage of the whole thing. Yes, all things considered, this method is the best for fighting large groups of people. If people are scared, they will be more reluctant to fight the thing that scared them, and if they do, they will fight in a state of terror, making more mistakes than otherwise. In the best of cases, this can actually make people run, crushing others underfoot. Effective.

“RunAndKick and YourNameHere are locked in a battle! Who will win: the sword, or the spear? And on the other side of the arena, my lovely friend PrissyKittyPrincess is living up to his namesake, playing with people like a cat plays with mice!” The God of Pain comments.

I don’t actually care about what he’s saying, but I still pay half an ear to it while I tear the head, spine and attached nervous system out of a woman I feel like I might have seen before. Hm. Looking at the bit of exposed, RED flesh, I decide that if I’m going to do the spook-them-stiff strategy, I might as well commit fully. I take a bite of the flesh, tearing out her still-twitching cheek and chewing it fully. Hmm. Compared to the flesh of goblins, it’s… more. More meat, more fat, more skin. I like eating the skin together with the rest of the meat, since the salty sweat is basically the only seasoning I can get.

Yeah, not too bad! It isn’t gobling meat or anything, but I would never say no to it if the chance arose.

I make eye contact with someone. Oh, hey, that’s Reef, isn’t it? I wave to him, but he doesn’t wave back. I take another bite of the head in my hand. He goes totally pale. As in, ashen. He’s got less color than a BLACK-and-WHITE silent film but that’s all dispelled in an instant as his face goes RED with rage and he flies across the arena, spear raised. “Ho—how could you—!?” I easily dodge the strike with a simple side-step. “She—she’s our teammate! Our healer! Why would you—”

Stepping around him easily, I stab my hand clear through his chest, tearing out a twitching and trembling heart.

“Well, well, well! Looks like the Wu-Li party is about to be defeated from the inside out. Who would have thought that their own teammate would do a full wipe-out?”

Reef staggers, one hand at his chest, the other waving his spear like it’s a magic wand. “I… I can still fight…! Damn it, just because Mole told me to, I accepted, but I didn’t…” He falls to his knees. I take a bite out of his heart like it’s an apple. His face wrinkles up in despair. “He… tricked me…!”

I pause mid-bite. Okay, now he went too far. Stepping forward, I kick him in the chest, forcing him fully on his back, and I stand on top of his chest, foot grinding into the hole that used to hold his heart, feeling the flesh twitch beneath my sole. “Now, listen here,” I say. Even though battle is raging all around us, no one will approach us, and in the silence between us, I know he can hear my voice, as soft as it is. “Moleman didn’t trick you. What would he even gain from that?” Bending my knees, I crouch down atop him, my eyes locking onto his. They’re dim. Dying. He can barely even look at me, so I grab his face and angle it towards me. “I didn’t fool you, either. I’m keeping my promise. This battle will be won by your team.” The final flickers of life begin to fade from his eyes. “Just not by you.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

And like that, he dies. But the instant he does, or maybe the millisecond before he truly dies, he disappears, turning to ash. I’m holding ash in my hands. What the—

“Remember, folks, those killed won’t actually die! With the help of the divine shard, they will be able to survive death and return, unscathed in all but mind!”

Aww, that’s a shame. But it does also raise a few questions. To answer these, I continue my little massacre. People begin fleeing me, some even jumping out-of-bounds into the pool of super-powered healing potion to alleviate the pain, even at the cost of losing. Weird. But I still get my answers.

Only the part connected to the heart turns to ash, the rest stays fleshy and yummy. The heart itself can be removed, but once the brain dies, the heart turns to ash. Not yummy.

The upsetting thing about the whole ash thing is that by the end of the skirmish, I was almost completely covered in it, ash sticking to blood like feathers to tar. It felt horrible, but it did scare people enough to surrender rather than die. Of course, people who surrendered were just extra easy to kill, so… yeah.

In the end, I stand alone, pulling my sole remaining hand from the chest of the final challenger, in an arena covered with dissected and half-eaten body parts and puddles of blood filled with ash. Spook-them-stiff: very effective.

“And it seems we have a winner! Everyone give a hand to PrissyKittyPrincess of team Wu-Li!” Silence. But only for a few seconds. Then the booing begins. In every single corner of the colosseum comes the sound of booing, every single person in attendance finding my display worthy of jeer. No, not every single person. Up there in the bleachers, there’s one person who doesn’t boo. He isn’t cheering either, but at the very least, he isn’t booing.

Moleman sits alone, watching me.

In the wall of booing, I meet his eyes, and he meets mine. I almost raise my hand to wave at him when he shakes his head. My hand stalls halfway up. Ah. I… see. It falls to my side again, throwing a few drops of blood to the floor.

“Congratulations to the winner! Now, if all remaining contestants… Oh, sorry, there’s only one! Kitty, will you please leave the stage to make space for the next skirmish?”

Numbly, I head towards the drawbridge. As I walk, I pull arrows out of my back and swords out of my abdomen and spears out of my chest, tossing the lot into the ever-blue waters below. On the other side of the bridge stands Cathy, who looks neither angry nor disappointed. I suppose you can’t exactly be disappointed if you never expected anything.

I’m just about to stalk past her when she steps in front of me, plunges her hand into my chest and plucks the shard of divinity straight out of my heart, which actually hurts more than it did going in. I don’t show it. I clutch my hands, give her a glare, and continue. I leave out of a hallway and into the vomitorium receptionist area. People turn to look at me, and then they look away. They aren’t on the bleachers anymore, so they can’t boo me from the safety of their seats. I’m right in front of them, and even if their levels are higher than mine, that doesn’t matter to me.

Scowling, I move past them, and the crowd opens up before me.

I leave the vomitorium. I can tell that the breeze is soft and nice, but I can’t actually feel it. Silently, I walk across the spring square, bringing myself back to the bench I shared with Moleman earlier. Sitting on it alone feels weird. It’s empty. I should talk, but I don’t want to talk to the air. That’s even worse. I don’t want that.

My back hunches, my neck falls, and I let my eyes fall to look at my dirty feet.

A handkerchief appears in my vision. I look up to find Moleman, nudging it towards me. I take it. He sits down next to me. I wipe my hands with the plain handkerchief, staining it with BLACK and RED.

We sit in silence. I look at the blooming trees, petals of pink and yellow and blue dancing down to gather in little cuddle-puddles on the ground, leaned up against the stones and buildings like multicolored snow. “Did you…” I change my mind. “I didn’t—” No, that isn’t right either. My gaze falls to the handkerchief, snuggled closely between my fingers. At one point, my claws accidentally tore a little hole. I run my fingers over the hole, unwittingly making it a little bigger, snapping a few more seams. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath and turn to Moleman. “I’m sorry.”

Moleman reaches over and plucks the handkerchief from my hands, cleaning it with a single brief spell. Then, he opens a little satchel on his belt and pulls out thread and needle. I watch closely as he bites off a length of thread, threads it through the needle’s eye, pulls it double, makes a double-knot and begins sewing the hole shut. It only took a few minutes, but it felt like seconds. It wasn’t effortless or fast and it didn’t turn out pretty. He pricked himself on the needle, got the thread all wound up, and he made several tiny mistakes. But in the end, the handkerchief was fixed. It was obvious it had once been hurt, and that scar would never go away. But it didn’t need to.

He holds out the patched-up handkerchief to me. “I think you’d better keep it,” he says mildly. Not answering, I accept it, putting it safe and secure in my inventory. Standing up, he holds out his hand to me. I take it, and he pulls me up as well. He looks me up and down. “Say, what kind of house did you get? Does it have a shower?”

…House?

Correctly assuming my ignorance, he gives a brief explanation. “Everyone spawned inside their house, where they would be able to stay and rest over the coming days. Did you… not get one?”

Does he mean…? “I got, um… a hole.”

“A hole?”

“A hole in the ground.”

“Ah! I see. A hole in the ground.” He nods as if that’s normal. “I’ll assume you don’t own a shower, then?”

“I don’t,” I answer with a mix of confusion and bitterness. I can’t believe I don’t own a shower.

He scratches his neck. “In that case, would you care to use mine?” After a second or so he adds on, “The one in my house.”

My jaw falls open. “Y—yes,” I say. “Of course I do.”

We go.