You’re nervous.
This is the first time you’ve been to one of these. The first time you’ve been invited to one of the most exclusive events on the planet. The kind of event that can only happen when the largest tech company on the planet breaks the code, splits open space and time, and reveals gods.
Gods. there, on the other side of the celestial veil, watching. Or, sometimes you think maybe they were waiting. Because they’re gods and of course they knew what humans were doing. What they’d accomplish.
Maybe they never guessed humans would figure out a way to put them in small square prisons, buy them on a digital public market, and take them to obscenely extravagant locations across the globe to put them in arenas to fight to the death.
Of course, gods can’t die. Not really. They pull no punches —like the fight between Zeus and Hades a year before, which became known for its brutality— but there’s no end for a god.
The driverless SUV comes to a stop in front of a mansion that, even from your vantage point near the entrance, you can’t really get a full grasp on. It’s the biggest building you’ve ever seen. Probably worth more money than you can even fathom.
Well, depending on how tonight goes.
You take in a deep breath, hold it until you open the door, then let it out as you step into the brisk night air. The sun’s down, so it’s night, but really it’s a little after one in the morning. These battles go on for hours, but your battle isn’t scheduled for another 40 minutes.
You have time.
The SUV behind you makes a quick, happy noise, and you jump forward as the door automatically swings closed. You watch as it moves up a few feet, the door opens again, and a drunk couple piles in, all laughs and slurry banter. You smile as you watch the SUV drive off with its new passengers. You remember what that’s like. It pulls on your heartstrings a little bit.
The memory of your last relationship is still fresh, but it doesn’t sting as much as it used to. Thankfully.
You turn back to the mansion, trying to take it all in. There are so many lights on it might as well be the middle of the day. They highlight the huge stark white columns that flank the bright red front door. You don’t know they’re called Doric columns — you simply relate the front of the building to The Parthenon, ancient architecture that you’ve only seen in books and travel shows.
Arenas like this one are scattered all across the globe, and private ownership that builds them chooses the theme. Here, in Boston, Massachusetts, the owner decided to go with an ancient Greece aesthetic. You’ve never been to any other arenas in person —this is the first time you’ve had the money to do anything worth of note— but you know that others look like ancient Egyptian tombs, others like Norse town halls, and others like Aztec ball courts.
Each of them massive in scale to hold the gods that fight within them, and the thousands of people that can afford to watch the battles in person.
It’s the one in San Francisco, though, the Shinto shrine, that you desperately want to visit.
“One day,” you whisper as you continue to take in the architectural glory that stands before you.
You blink and bring yourself back to the present. Back to the moment. You start forward and join the short line leading away from the red door. You check your phone but you don’t have any missed calls or messages. No one knows you’re here so no one knows to congratulate you, to wish you luck. You’ve kept this a secret from everyone you know. Your loved ones have no idea what you’ve done, what you’ve risked, to be here.
Of course you did. You spent all of your life savings to buy the trapped god in your backpack, and even a bit more you really didn’t have to get yourself to Boston. You put everything on the line for this one night, and there’s a real possibility you might lose everything.
Why would you broadcast that to your world? No, you’ll keep it close to the vest until there’s something worth sharing.
A minute or two later and you’re standing in front of a couple tall men wearing ceremonial Spartan armor, just without the helmets. They’re massive, as if they were chiseled out of stone, but they’re jovial and all smiles as they welcome you to the event. Your phone is your ticket, which they scan with their proprietary devices, and then you’re in, shooed through the door that opens in front of you.
“Good luck!” one of the guards yells back at you as the darkness swallows you whole, the red door closing behind you and shutting out the rest of the world.
The silence is deafening. For a second you find it’s hard to breathe and there’s a tightening in your chest as a childhood fear of the dark suddenly rears its ugly head after years of being dormant. Above you, embedded lights brighten to life, engulfing you in bright white light.
The entire room shifts around you, and you can hear something that sounds like a grinding gear. You’re moving — not up or down, but rather forward.
Your hand reaches out, desperately reaching for something, and, thankfully, your knuckles rap against a rail. As you grab it, as the interior light washes over you, your heart slows to a nominal rate. You take in another deep breath. The backpack on your shoulders feels a tad heavier, and you shift a little to adjust the weight.
Better.
The transport comes to a smooth stop. There’s a brief pause and you think, maybe, there’s something on the other side of the sliding doors in front of you. There’s a muffled sound coming from out there, you’re sure of it. You lean forward a little, listening, trying to figure out what it is.
The doors slide open with a pneumatic sound, and suddenly there are lights and cheers and boos and fireworks and other sounds you can’t identify. A cacophony of controlled chaos. You’re on the outside of the arena, walking under stacked, auditorium-style bleachers. Popcorn and cotton candy and other candies rain down from the heavens.
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You dodge the debris as you walk further inside. The transport is already gone, ready to shuttle other fans and competitors to the fighting grounds.
A tunnel leads you inward. There are posters of gods on both walls: Greek, Egyptian, Japanese, Chinese, Norse, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish. Gods you recognize and some you don’t, even with the names splashed across the posters in stylized fonts. You’ve tried to do your research, but ultimately your nights of learning have always led to battle tactics.
You’ve known which god will be your competitor tonight for weeks. That’s where your focus has been. Watching battle footage and learning everything you can about the way previous civilizations prayed and worshipped and, in some cases, sacrificed.
The hallway connects to a breezeway with shops and food. It’s loud here, but nothing compared to what pounds at your eardrums from above. As you pass by a cart hawking churros your stomach grumbles, but you ignore it.
Moving quickly, you find your way to one of the connecting passages that leads to the bleachers. You need to see it. You’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, your entire life it feels like, and now you’re here. You can’t waste any more time. You need to see it before you’re thrust into the madness of the battle.
You emerge and your breath is snatched from your lungs.
From this vantage point, you can see the entire fighting arena. It’s massive. Easily the size of 15 or 20 football fields, but the floor isn’t grass, but rather reinforced concrete. The typically white surface area is covered in incandescent celestial blood, the clear indications of a recent bout.
The crowd is a single living organism, wrapped around the arena on all sides, several hundred bleachers high. There are no empty spaces.
Four pillars similar to the ones out front stand at the corners of the arena, towering upwards towards the stars, several hundred feet high. You already know how this works, and you’ve seen plenty of video, but seeing it in real life still manages to make your knees a little weak.
Those pillars lead to an invisible barrier that only shimmers if you look at it the right way. Which you do now, shifting your head a little bit to the left like you’ve seen in the tutorials. Sure enough, the star-filled sky seems to come to life, like water being tapped by a gigantic finger. You can’t stare at it too long or you’ll risk getting nauseous.
Still, you smile. That field has a name that you can’t remember at the moment, but you do recall that it’s powerful enough to disintegrate a god. And it’s the same energy that’s present in long, flat boxes attached to the four Doric pillars. They work automatically, and will launch an invisible wall if one of the gods tries to escape.
Not that any do. There is a general belief, one you subscribe to, that the gods enjoy all of this. That, deep down, they are relieved to be able to work out their centuries-long aggressions. Some believe the fight between Hades and Zeus, what slowly devolved into a battle that could only truly be described as a bar brawl, proved this point.
Even as they pummeled one another, their laughter filled the arena in London.
Of course, no one can speak to the gods, and the gods do not speak to humans, so no one can know for sure.
It’s certainly possible that humans have, against the better judgment of life itself, managed to imprison gods and force them to fight against their will.
A centipede of discontent runs up your spine, but you ignore it. As far as you’re concerned, the bigger questions are not meant for you to answer. You are here to do one thing: battle. Nothing else matters.
You need to focus. You check your watch and see you only have thirty minutes before you’re scheduled to appear in the fighter’s room. You glance around, looking for signs that will tell you where to go, but you don’t see any. You remember your phone has a map, so you start to pull it out of your pocket, but the audience stops you.
You hadn’t noticed at first, but there was an arena-wide silence that had settled in just a few moments before. But now the volume is ramping up again, louder, and louder, and you realize it’s because there are two people standing in the arena.
You know you should be making your way to the fighter’s room, but you can’t help it. You can’t move. You’re captivated by the idea of what’s about to happen, because you’ve seen it so many times in videos, heard about it from firsthand retellings. But now you’re here, and it’s real, and this is everything you’ve ever wanted.
An announcer’s voice fills the arena, booming over the still-growing cheers: “LADIES and GENTLEMEN! You have already seen some rousing battles tonight! But! You haven’t seen anything YET! Are — you — ready?” A pause and the audience’s decibel levels intensify. “Now entering the arena, we have Hewitt Daccord of Seattle, Washington! And his combatant, Khalid Singh of Istanbul!”
The cheers somehow manage to reach a new level of deafening. You almost put your hands over your ears.
“Daccord!” the announcer commands.
The man standing on the far side of the arena from you waves to the audience, they scream in return, and then he throws a box down in front of him. It glows a brilliant red-gold, just as bright as the celestial blood that stains the floor.
“Khalid!”
The other man doesn’t wave. He’s all business as he tosses out his own glowing box. This one is blindingly purple and red, forcing you to look away from it. You’ve never heard of a box being that bright. You think this might mean something, but you’re not sure. You can’t quite put together the pieces.
The answer arrives a moment later.
Khalid’s box lifts off the concrete, spinning in place just a few feet off the ground. Faster, until there’s no discernible details left. Just light. Purple and red, two distinct colors that, a second later, combine into one — and then a shockwave erupts through the arena.
You’re almost knocked to the ground from the force of it, but you stay upright. You watch as the god within Khalid’s box emerges, a swirling mass of shaded purples and reds. Scales that seem to go on forever. A massive roar quiets the crowd for a handful of seconds as you watch, and they watch, the form of the Norse god Jörmungandr unravels itself within the arena, taking up half the space with its elongated frame.
The crowd’s appeals for action intensify. You stare with an agape jaw. You’ve never seen something so beautiful or terrifying or monstrous in your life. As far as you know, this is the first time Jörmungandr has been used at a battle.
The crowd’s reaction to the god’s presence only confirms this. They realize the same thing you do: this is history unfolding right in front of your eyes.
You can’t help but notice Daccord, standing like a statue in the arena, has realized the same thing as he stares up at the giant snake-god in front of him.
In response, Daccord’s box lifts off the ground, starts spinning, and there’s another flash of light and another shockwave, albeit not as bright and not as powerful as the first. A giant of a man appears in front of Jörmungandr, with dark skin, gold armor, and the head of a lion with a full mane of hair.
You can’t help but smile. Narasimha. Here, tonight.
Your watch makes a sound, forcing you to look away. You’re being summoned. You’re late.
Late for the rest of your life.
You start running, feeling the weight of your own box on your back, bundled away in the backpack you used in high school, which feels like a lifetime ago now.
Your god is next.
You’re next.