POV Seth

“We all aspired to win,” he said after a moment. Winning was the only unifying motive about any of the eighteen squads who took part in the games. Their approach varied, but as the games progressed toward the Championship game, winning by any means necessary became the unspoken rule. In the last game, winning condoned slaughtering the opposition.

Seth didn’t see the point of killing his future comrades-in-arms. But with the hindsight that many of the participants were not war-bound, it made even less sense that murdering the opposition was a reasonable solution to attain victory.

He had seen good people turn savage at the chance of laying claim to the title of Champion. The brutality of the last game made no sense. What did the elite gain by participating in the games at all? Obviously, some form of notoriety, but what else?

“You took part in the games. Won two championship games. What did that win you?” Seth asked.

The therapist cocked her head and cast her gaze to the ceiling. A cruel smile touched her lips and the flicker of humanity that barely existed to begin with blinked out. She had been among those who had slaughtered their opposition. Twice. And got away with it.

“We’re not here to talk about me. I understood my role.”

“Did the people you murder understand their role?”

The cruel smile didn’t so much as falter. “Their role was to serve as a sacrifice to our superiority. Had they been smarter, stronger, faster… I assure you, they would have done the same.”

“I didn’t kill my opposition,” Seth reaffirmed. “I somehow managed to not kill anyone in three years. Yet you could barely manage a single game without murdering anyone at all.” That’s right, she didn’t just satiate her bloodlust in the last game. She had taken lives in every game she had taken part in.

Her smile shifted, baring perfect white teeth. “There used to be four squads to a game, instead of two. The scenarios were harsher, longer, more frequent, and more demanding. The Council deemed the violence of the old games unnecessary. You’re demonizing me for responding to the standards of our society.”

“No. As an elite, you made a choice to join the games. Just like you made a choice to murder participants. If it’s as brutal as you claim, why join?”

“Why did you join?”

“I wanted to survive the Killing Fields. Direct combat situations would have given me the experience of unpredictable and thinking opposition.” Though not the whole truth, it was enough to signal the difference between his motives and hers. “You never served. You stole a position from a soldier who could have used the training, who could have used the experience.”

The cruel smile faded. She nodded to herself and tapped her tablet, adding additional notes to his case. “I stand corrected. You don’t just resent your squad, but all elites. Unless you deem them worthy, of course.”

“It doesn’t matter what their net worth is,” Seth countered, the uncomfortable truth gnawing at his conscience. “Anyone willing to murder to get what they want isn’t even human in my books. In your case, you murder people for something you didn’t need. You only wanted it because you couldn’t stand the idea that someone else could have it.”

“I wanted it because it proved I was the best,” the therapist replied, probably her first real statement in ages. “Same as you. The games don’t care if you were born top-side or in the Capital. They don’t care about my heritage, anymore than they cared that you’re here on a sponsorship. I was better than them. I survived through sheer grit.”

Seth frowned as he took in her unsettling words. “I don’t think it was about survival at all. It’s just like this room, and this stupid chair, and that ugly painting. For you, it was about dominance. Revealing your true nature. Promising pain and suffering, and death if you didn’t get your way. I know too many people just like you. And no, they aren’t all well-off. You are a monster born to wealthy parents. You didn’t even earn your wealth. It was handed to you, just like your slot in the game was given to you because you made a deal with the Captain through your family’s assets. How much did that cost you? Maybe not you specifically, but maybe your father, your mother… What did they have to trade to have you play an insecure warrior princess in pretend battle?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

She watched him, her dark gaze critical of every slight discomfort. “You’re lucky you have a chair. I’d have you on your knees behind a glass panel, and locked away for the nonsense you’ve uttered these past two sessions. But it’s my job to make you well, and I take pride in my work.”

The threat should have scared Seth, but he had struck a nerve. She had lost control of the dialogue. Her careful, perfect façade had slipped, revealing the monster that lay beneath.

He held her gaze for a moment. “I don’t resent my squad-mates,” Seth reiterated. “Make sure you write that down. Every one of them, regardless of how I feel about them personally, has been a tremendous asset to the way this team is run. They didn’t bribe me to get their position. They are skilled participants. I would not have won without them, not on my own. It doesn’t mean that I don’t question their ethics. The result is, on average, less than three percent of participants are war bound. Which means people who don’t have a vested interest in survival are deeply diminishing the odds of survival for those who need the training. I intend to revise my team in the coming year.” He stared directly at her, watching for any sign of dismissal.

True to whom he assumed her to be, she smirked and cast a hand to wave off such a silly notion. His stomach knotted when he thought she might arrange it so he couldn’t come back next year. It was an odd thought to have creeped into his consciousness, but there it lingered, and he didn’t know why.

Seth responded before she could weave the narrative. “You’re right. One year won’t make a difference. And your lot are likely to lie to get a position in the games to… what exactly? Follow in the tradition of slaughtering the competition as set by your forefathers? It won’t make a difference in the long term. But for that year, I will try to make a positive difference.”

When he recruited the few members he had, he hadn’t considered their motives for joining. He hadn’t considered cleaning out the old squad, even to avoid old rivalries and hurt egos from when he was appointed captain a year and a half into the games. Cleaning house would have been too risky for a new captain.

In the few hate-filled moments of silence that followed, his thoughts drifted to an odd pair of terms that his mind filtered through his dreams: ‘Spiritual Dissonance’ and ‘Spiritual Resonance’. It was an odd combination of words that didn’t quite make sense together. But at this moment, he thought that he might have understood at least one of them. Winning for the sake of winning wasn’t enough. He felt that concept right down to his marrow. But if he could unify his squad’s motives, if they all shared the same reason for winning, then perhaps they might end up with an immense advantage on the Killing Fields.

It was foolish. Everyone on the Killing Fields wanted to live, it was their unifying motive, and yet, the vast majority of them died. With that failed basic logic test, he buried the idea of Spiritual Dissonance.

He had missed her latest statement, but had noticed the way her eyes checked the time on her tablet. Good, he was getting under her skin, but he had to be careful about not pushing too hard, too fast. She had established herself as the vengeful type.

“These sessions are recorded?” He tried to mimic her style of asking a question as a statement, but failed. It didn’t matter if she knew he was making fun of her, cluing her into the very thing that had tipped him off to her manipulation.

“Our conversations are confidential. Anything you tell me is between you and me.”

“And the gaming commission, and the administration, and the council,” Seth added. “Actually, after this meeting, I am going to make all of our ‘private’ conversations publicly accessible. You seem to like to cherry pick a little much. I wouldn’t want to be labeled as unstable because you got sensitive over my inflection of ‘hello’.”

He caught the daggers in her dark eyes, just as she closed them to re-center herself. She muttered a few words that resembled a prayer before taking a deep breath. “You’re definitely challenging. I do come across students who refuse help, even when it’s blatantly clear that they need it.”

“Oh, I need help, no doubt about that,” Seth shared. “I’m terrified of my tour, something I’ve been open about since my initial recruitment. Hell, I’m pretty sure I even mentioned it on my essay application to attend the Academy and on my sponsor application, come to think of it. Since my service is mandatory, unlike yours, I would rather speak to someone with legitimate field experience. I need help in learning to cope with and manage that fear. You can’t help me with that because you’ve never been, never will be, and have no interest in serving. You don’t even have children for whom you have to buy exemptions for. The person I should talk to is not you. All you want to do is prove that I’m emotionally unstable. And then what… I don’t know. But I know our interests don’t align. You don’t like me, and I don’t trust you.”

He desperately wanted someone to talk to, someone who understood the buried fear that despite everything, none of it really mattered. He worried that his calculations were just a freak coincidence that he held onto, that there had been some other angle he hadn’t considered that had somehow given the soldiers hailing from the Council’s Academy a fighting chance. He had no one.

Seth’s teammate and best friend Wallace refused to talk about the war, preferring to live in the present. He thought himself as essentially dead and planned to live loud and large until the day the thought became reality. Gemma was a unique case entirely. He’d serve, but it was unlikely that he’d ever return. He knew it to be true, and Seth, after learning the reason for his belief, knew it to be true too.

Seth had no one.