Micheal found himself once again in the lotus position as he prayed. He no longer had to light a candle to avoid drawing the ire of Nero-Un, but the habit had been hard to break, and so the candle at the end of his bed atop his lonely wooden desk burned with a faint amber in the early morning darkness. The elder Gods had no requirements for prayer, but they required little of anything at all. That was simply their nature.

Micheal could feel his body grow stronger as he felt the taint of the shadow of the elder Gods fall on him. He had grown stronger in his body, if only barely, but the greater increase was in his apostle. Prayer mainly provided strength to the body, which was the main point of power for the bone and earth ranks, but it also gave power to a chosen's apostle. An apostle was the shadow of a God given form; their blessing upon their chosen mortal. It was no wonder Micheal's apostle had grown stronger given this was the case.

The effect had been noticeable only recently as the crystal of his apostle had been sturdier, sharper, and more powerful. Again, the changes were small, but they remained consistent. With Micheal devoting as much time out of his day as possible for prayer he had grown more powerful in the short amount of time he had had his apostle than he would have ever imagined when looking at one of the other chosen of the first hall.

Another thing was determination. Others might pray to the Gods for power or strength, but few prayed with the same unyielding determination that Micheal had. Admittedly, this determination was seldom pointed toward his awe of the Gods, but its direction was an irrelevancy. All that mattered was conviction, and none had a stronger conviction than Micheal. Whether it be killing the Gods or gaining Sam an apostle, Micheal would do it. No matter the price.

Finishing his prayer for first bell, one of the three mandatory bouts of prayer that all would have to do, Micheal went to meet up with Samantha. There were only a few official training halls in all of Dasgad, and only one of any note in dockside. That hadn't mattered to them, of course, because they had no use for what was and wasn't official in any case.

He left his room in the first hall and headed out to the seedy part of town as fast as possible. The smog seemed to be thicker as he went further into the back alleys, and the foot traffic grew sparse. He began to see fewer and fewer lost as he made his way deeper and deeper into the dark side of Dasgad. People, chosen and lost alike, had come to Dasgad in droves as its factories opened with the promise of stable employment, but few had enjoyed their benefits. With chosen of the lesser and true fire Gods there was no need for the army of lost that had made their way into the city to gain employment at one of the many steel factories.

The makings of empire were the marching of progress, and as was always the case, the lost were left behind. Many had joined the army or the guard, but it was obvious that even the army only needed so many meat shields for the infantry, and the remaining spots were too dire a prospect for any but the enslaved. Not even Micheal had thought to sign up for runner positions, despite the honor's it would supposedly bring. There were limits to madness, even for him.

That meant that the eyes of the pedestrians around him slowly shifted to the abyssal black of the lost, each one a different shade and depth of darkness. Few could match the absolute midnight black of Micheal's eyes, and it had become something of a point of pride for him. He was a lost among lost, and now he was found. The world was an ironic like that.

Eventually he came to the meeting place that Samantha had set. It was a shack no different from the dozens surrounding it, but there were things that could tip off the knowing few that might come across it. They were subtle differences, enough that only those that had spent enough time on the streets in the wrong kind of company would know about it.

Of course, Micheal was the wrong kind of company.

It was the way there seemed to be a bubble of absence around the wooden shack that had caught his attention. Around each stable building were the regular hangers on; those that were reluctant to give up their spot around the only thing that could be called their home.

The general well kept nature of the wood was another. A few boards had been artificially broken to simulate the effect, but it was altogether too stable to mistake for a building around this kind of area.

The final and most telling thing was the feel of the place. There was something about the place that Micheal's life as one of the lost had told him was special, and that wasn't something to ignore. If Micheal's gut told him it was special, then it was.

He walked to the door and with two hard knocks, a voice returned.

“What do you want, short stack?” the gruff male voice demanded.

“The same thing you want, you nert shit. To see some action,” he replied. A heavy hand was the only way to come out of this with his head on his shoulders. He needed to let everyone know that he was too much trouble to mess with. If people started getting the idea that he was someone they could take advantage of, he wouldn't be leaving this place in one piece. Or at all, for that matter.

“Is that so?” the man asked snidely. “Well come on in then. We always have a use for runts that think they can take a hit,” He laughed to himself. A cruel laugh. One of those laughs that the boys in the lower hall would make when they would tear and rip at the skin or teeth of one of the younger boys. Feeling the scar above his collar bone Micheal shivered. He knew well that kind of laugh.

The door swung open to reveal the exact kind of man Micheal had expected. Physical strength among the chosen had little to do with physical size in most cases, but there was always a trend. The larger chosen almost always found their Gods within the realm of strength and power, because that was where the greatest association lay for them. It was also the path of a bully.

The large and powerful would often gravitate toward physical torment, simply because it was their want to do so. So when Micheal saw the towering door guard he barely took the time to confirm his suspicion of the man's size.

He looked more a Garuth than a man. Wide like a wall and with enough fat to kill three smaller man, he was a monster of a man. He lacked the black eyes that marked the lost or found, and Micheal suspected he was the chosen of some animal based lesser God. The hair of his head and beard were shaggy and untamed, and spoke more of an animal than a man. Given the wild thing he probably was, Micheal believed him to be closer to the former than the latter. This was a man who was completely and utterly bereft of humanity. Micheal walked past him without looking back even once.

He was simply the first of many of his kind in this place. Morals were a hindrance in a fight, and this run-down and dirty shack was a place where fighting was second only to greed. Money spoke loudly in this building, and brutality was simply the whisper left in the calm of its wake.

Micheal left the smiling animal at his back as he went into what was once the living room of the wooden building. The inside was completely unlit, lacking all creature comforts that might have held the residual warmth of the home it had once been. In their place was only an abandoned emptiness, with the strewn rubble of construction marking the floors and walls in equal measure. He found the basement stairs he knew would be there in short enough order. There was no way an operation such as this would take place in the living room, open to prying eyes through old windows and cracks in the walls. There would be a basement, and Micheal could already hear the noise of a true fighting pit.

Muffled shouts and laughter echoed from the depths of the stairs. The sounds of a bar left open beyond the night came in abundance. Joyous depravity in waves and the bloodlust that only a group left to its own devices could carry. To Micheal it was familiar, which was a sad thing to know about oneself. Not that it mattered. Feeling sorry for himself wouldn't help him achieve his goals. It was something to be acknowledged and then forgotten just as quickly.

Walking down what he assumed to be three levels worth of stairs, Micheal arrived at the true opening of the fighting Pit. A ring sat in the middle of a large open room, surrounded by a congealing ocean of bodies, each one trying to see into the fight at its centre. It measured no more than thirty span in each direction, and was surrounded by ropes of artisan make to keep them in. The once faint sounds he heard on the stairs were at a roar inside the room, like a concerto of primal desire shouting for its turn at slaughter.

He walked into the belly of the beast to better see the location that Samantha had picked out for them. The bar off to the side would serve the purpose of an oddsmaker as well, and Micheal knew there would be enough vices sold there to attract the attention of enough of the black Gods to create a pantheon all their own. That meant it would be the place to go later on, once Micheal knew the lay of the land enough to start some proper betting.

His first move was to find Samantha. She had told him she would be waiting for him by the time he got here, and he knew without a doubt where she would be. She had a bloodlust to her that only Micheal could match, and even then only when things were in a bad state. Separated from her Micheal doubted he could reach that state, but he knew her well enough to know that she would be near the ring.

Pushing past the undulating mass of the crowd, no easy task with his five span height, he finally saw the brutal melee of the ring. He had been close in his assessment of Samantha's bloodlust. Looking into the ring he knew he had underestimated her.

Standing toe-to-toe with someone twice her size, Samantha looked on, undaunted at her adversary. She had a bruise already forming on one eye and a smile too full of teeth. Her raven-black hair was matted and messy, covering one eye and wet with sweat and exertion. He smiled at the sight, because he knew her opponent wouldn't last long enough to do much more.

The man, a match in size and ferocity for any lost, was barely standing. His left arm had been broken by something Samantha had done earlier on, and his teeth had been sprinkled onto the arena around them. He would be lucky to be able to see anything through the blood that had leaked from the various cuts and splits on his face and forehead, and he had a truly formidable amount of scarlet all over him. He practically swayed in place as Samantha looked on, panting a small amount in exhaustion.

It was moments like these that made Micheal wonder how he had ever bested his best friend not once, but twice as a lost. As Samantha finally got her bearings enough to charge the man, that thought was only deepened. She drove a kick into the man's knee, and the Garuth of a lost was too weary to stop it. A crack resounded through the shouts of slaughter, loud enough to send tingles down to Micheal's own knee, and the gargantuan man fell like a rock, screaming in agony as he clutched his shattered knee.

It was a favorite move for Samantha, and Micheal felt slightly bad for the weeping mass on the floor of the arena. Only slightly. He might not have deserved to be up against someone like Samantha, but at the end of the day, he knew what he had been signing up for.

Samantha raised her hands in victory as she looked at her fallen opponent, spitting on him as she took in the shouts of the crowd. She would no doubt have been the underdog in this fight, so Micheal doubted those shouts were the sounds of joyful winnings being collected. In fact, Micheal had already prepared to fight his way out in the wake of all the angry losers that Samantha had just created.

Despite his best guess, Samantha left the ring with little in the way of opposition. He figured he'd be pretty unwilling to pick a fight with the girl who had just shattered the knee of a full grown man in a fight in an underground fighting pit, but he had figured such logic was beyond the surface-deep pride of the type of people that attended this kind of place.

Micheal signaled over to Samantha as she waded her way through the crowd, but he cursed his height once more as he was unable to get her attention. He figured she would be heading to the bar to collect on the winnings of her bet, the winnings she no doubt would have have earned by placing a bet on herself. Pushing his way once again through a crowd of people twice his size, Micheal began to resent his short stature even more. It was becoming damn inconvenient.

Samantha sat at the bar with a wide smile on her face as the oddsmaker handed her a mug of ale and large purse full of coins. They would only be copper, but it was more than he could say for himself. He didn't have two coppers to rub together, and he assumed Samantha had just made almost half a silver in a single bet. That was the kind of money a lost wouldn't see in a decade.

“Well, I guess we know who gets to buy me a drink,” he said arrogantly to his friend. Samantha looked back, clearly shocked at his sudden appearnce, before breaking out into a genuine smile.

“Briny chance of that,” she laughed. “You should be the once buying me a drink after that. Did you see the size of that briny bastard? I thought he'd eat me,”

Micheal laughed in turn, and fetched the single copper in his coin purse, enough for one mug of ale. It was something of a tradition for the one of them to buy the other a drink after a hard-fought battle, and Micheal would not be the one to break it.

“Still, you got started earlier than I thought,” he said, sliding the copper onto the counter. “I thought we would be watching for tonight,” he said with mock exasperation.

Samantha turned an evil smile to him and all he could do was sigh. “We can watch first hand from inside of the arena!” she shouted the words Micheal knew were coming, and he once more he gave into the tide that was Samantha Cald. There was as little Micheal could do to fight Samantha's wishes as there was to stop the wind blowing. He doubted that would change no matter how far down the path of a chosen he progressed. There were some things that were simply not meant to change.

“Don't worry too much, dumbass. I only fought other lost. I haven't moved onto chosen just yet,” She said solemnly. That had been the Micheal's one and only condition for training here. He would join her in fighting some of the competitors at the fighting pit if she agreed that they would only fight at their own level until they agreed otherwise.

He and Samantha had both sparred and trained together for years, including the extra training of the last few days. Micheal knew better than anyone her limits and style, and she his. They had even fought together in the city sanctioned training hall a few times against teams with a similar make-up. Frankly, there was no team that could hope to have better teamwork than them. The problem, then, was Samantha being lost.

“I know,” he replied. “But that might have to change tonight. The tournament only has another two months before the preliminaries, and you still haven't fought a chosen,” he said with some regret.

Samantha looked taken aback for a moment before a wry smile crept on her face. “I never thought it would be you that would trying to get me to fight a chosen, Mike,” She said jokingly. Micheal sighed in response. He hated pushing for her to fight harder opponents, even if he himself had done the same as a lost.

Micheal had fought and struggled as a lost enough to know that chosen were just inherently too powerful for a single lost to take out. It was for that reason that Micheal knew Samantha would be chosen if she was able to win the tournament with him. that meant their strategy would have to be different.

Samantha's job was to distract her opponent long enough for Micheal to beat both of them together, and they had tested it against other lost/chosen teams. Such teams had been exceedingly rare, though, and they had finally run out of available sparring opponents, which was why they had come to the underground sparring arenas in the first place.

Even still, it was time for them to push past what was safe, and that meant risks. “Well, I'll be doing the same thing tonight,” he said with a grin, causing Samantha to punch him in the shoulder.

“Yes, but at least you have an apostle, you idiot,” she joked, causing Micheal to poke his tongue out at his friend. That only resulted in a second, slightly more painful punch to his shoulder.

“okay, okay. I get it,” he chuckled. “But still, it's about time we move things up a little,” he said. “We need to fight some chosen,”

“Did you say you were interested in fighting some chosen,” A voice said from their side. Micheal and Samantha looked in shock to their right.