Furia Vedrix was on patrol. It was a regular component of being a gladiator in Onyxfell: there were the fights in The Arena, the training to go with it, the occasional glory of guarding the gates, the drudgery of other miscellaneous tasks, and then the patrolling of an assigned city district to maintain order and enforce law. She was wearing her guardian's pendant, engraved with the hasta and parma emblem of The Empire, and today's patrol seemed to be one in which she would find Victory for D-four.
Already she'd thwarted a rare thieving man who thought to seek Victory in the possessions of others, namely the marks they carried in their pockets. It was a trivial matter for a gladiator of even her relatively low amount of stats to catch the man, but she brought Victory to herself and all the man's victims with his capture and beheading.
Those who sought to steal the Victory of others received the harshest penalty in The Empire.
On that day, however, Furia Vedrix wished she could find Victory of another sort. That morning, while training with her long-time friends, Arquillia Tullas and Plautia Cornuta, she had encountered the mysterious coffee-seeker as well as the great Laberia Salonina, a person she'd been wishing she could meet for years. Discutrix Gladiorum, nicknamed for her consistent ability to shatter the gladius of anyone foolish enough to raise one towards her, was a hero of the twenty year-old gladiator.
Furia Vedrix had barely withheld her girlish shriek at the chance meeting with one of her idols, odd though the circumstances were. The thirty five year-old woman had been a gladiator for nearly two decades, and though she did lose on occasion—as nearly every gladiator did—it was the grace and poise which she maintained even in defeat that made her a favorite of so many. Even in the face of the shit-talking of Scorpio Fulminis during their last battle, Discutrix Gladiorum had remained calm and detached, furious though her admirers had been when she accepted her platform-out defeat and strode back to her place in the closest level of the seating to watch Scorpio's final bout of the ten-match endurance trial that day.
But the renowned, veteran gladiator had no time to spend answering the multitude of questions from Furia Vedrix that morning. No, she'd been deeply interested in the coffee-seeker, marveling at the odd cadence of the huge, stumbling man's steps as he staggered across the city. What had been only a source of irritation to the young woman and her friends had then become a font of wisdom and questions.
Who was this man that possessed such unbelievable technique of movement, subtle in ways that betrayed even the experienced gaze of Laberia Saloinina and caused her to be unable to find advantage against him? Yes, the gladiators could have leapt over the bearded foreigner or taken a circuitous route around him, but there was something deeply vexing about being unable to simply walk past the man. It had taken the practiced eyes of Discutrix Gladiorum to transform this irritation into curiosity, however, as the almost equally-large woman had begun attempting to mimic the strange motions, describing with each step how it could be used to evade or counter a blow.
This was surely no System-granted skill. No, this was raw technique, a kind forged over decades of combat. They'd apologized profusely for their rudeness, but the man seemed to be in a trance, only occasionally uttering the word "coffee". None of the four had dared to interrupt what was obviously a dedicated session of training by actually delivering coffee to the man. For a master such as he, the gesture would only be taken as a further insult.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
A moment of carelessness and inattention had caused them to lose sight of him, and they'd spent considerable time scouring that district and those adjacent for any traces. Laberia Salonina had been the least upset, continuing to practice the movement technique after bidding her farewell when she turned to strike out for The Arena. Furia Vedrix and her companions had reluctantly given up the search as well, needing to seek out the patrol houses in their assigned districts to commence their guard work for the day.
Time had passed, and then it had happened once again: Furia Vedrix caught sight of the coffee-seeker.
"Hey, you! Stop!" she shouted when she noticed his giant form trundling past her in a sleek, green car which seemed likely to belong to a contender at one of the racing tracks.
The man had glanced at her, then turned to his driver, a comely blonde girl who seemed to be about her age.
"Coffee-seeker!" Furia Vedrix called, commencing her pursuit. She would catch the odd man this time and formally request that he teach his technique to her. "Coffee-seeker, stop! I must learn your skill!"
The car had begun to speed up at her calls, and it seemed to her that the coffee-seeker was testing her dedication as the vehicle dodged around other cars and people in its path.
"COFFEE-SEEKER, WHY DO YOU FLEE?" Furia Vedrix bellowed, thinking to test the man's temperament with some light shit-talking in case it enraged him enough to stop.
The car only sped up further at her taunt, proving that it was certainly not one of the many cars delivered to the city each month by the Char hero.
"COFFEE-SEEKER!" Furia Vedrix yelled, now bounding over cars herself in her continued attempts to catch up. She was closing the distance, and it would not be long before—
The green car suddenly swerved to the right, narrowly avoiding another car traveling in the opposite direction which had inexplicably veered towards it. The oncoming car struck Furia Vedrix just as she landed, bowling her over backwards under its weight as it trampled her.
The young gladiator groaned. She was injured, yes, but it was only to the degree of having minor scrapes and cuts. She'd gained several points in a number of odd stats from The System, and one of them seemed to grant her a hardier constitution that made her more resistant to injury. By the time she had untangled the situation with the apologetic driver, Caerellia Festa, an experienced, if unremarkable competitor in the lower track who had swerved to avoid a giant hole in the road, the coffee-seeker's car had vanished.
Furia Vedrix struggled to retain her calm as Laberia Salonina surely would, but her temperament ran more closely to her namesake. She grumbled her displeasure to herself as she returned to her patrol. She was due to meet her lover, Arquillia, later that day, and she was certain that the dark-eyed, compassionate woman would listen intently to her complaints over dinner or, perhaps, during a foray to one of the bathhouses.
She may not have found Victory in her pursuit of the strange, bearded man, but there were many forms of Victory available to those who truly sought it out.