The man pulls the laces tight, the boot hissing as it pulls shut around his leg.

Leather, fabric, skin, and metal rub against one another as contestants around him move in a frenzy, getting ready for today’s game.

“Where’s my staff? Amelia! My staff!” yells a wizard, flipping over a mattress and frantically searching for something. The sleeping priestess, who had been lying on it, scratching her stomach, tumbles out of the bunk onto the floor on either side. Her groggy head poking up and looking at him in annoyance as he searches for the staff that he has strapped to his own back and seems to have forgotten.

“I bought three chain-lightning scrolls for today,” explains an elf, walking by and flicking her hair to her side. “So try to stay behind me.”

“Huh?!” ask the other two people walking next to her. “But your points!”

“It’s an investment,” she explains, the three of them walking down the corridors toward the arena entrance. Screams and hollering can already be heard coming from the distance, the stone walls of the resting quarters shaking with a dull vibration for the constant hum of their exhilaration.

Paika gets up, checking the straps of his leather armor. Last time his spaulders fell off, and he had to spend two points buying new ones. Can’t have that happen again. He rolls his shoulders, making sure his things are stowed away under his bunk before walking through the crowds to the entrance.

“Did you hear? Kirken got out,” says a man in metal knight’s armor, leaning against the wall. He’s wearing the regalia of a foreign kingdom. He must have traveled very far to come here and compete. There’s a few of these guys now — knights sent by their kings and masters to the colosseum in order to win favor and reputation for the kingdoms they represent. All of them are wearing tabards and ornamental armor with eye-catching designs, meant to get the crowd to notice them and their feats. “Traded his points into enough obols to buy himself a wizard tower and a title back in the east.” He shrugs. “Guess he’s a lord now.”

“Lucky bastard, just because he won that special event,” sighs the archer standing next to him, wearing the same tabard as the knight. “Typical that he’d pick the one chest out of the hundred that wasn’t a damn mimic.”

“…Mine was full of pudding. How does that even make sense?” says the third man there, shaking his head with crossed arms. “I can still hear it squelching.”

“You’d think the core would’ve used an actual chest for that one and not a mimic,” adds the archer.

Paika gets in line, a swarm of people waiting out front by the still-closed portcullis into the arena. Today’s event is an open event, so anyone can choose to join or pass at their own leisure.

“Blessings! Enchantments!” calls a priestess, standing up on a wooden stall next to the wall. “Get an edge on the competition! Come get your blessings and enchantments!” she calls. “One point each!” She points at a man. “You there! You look like you need a little nudge in the right direction! Only five points for a week’s worth of enchantments for your next seven games!” The man shakes his head, waving her off. The priestess sighs, looking at the empty line and then down at her sisters of the cloth.

“I- I don’t think this is working, Poppy,” says a timid-looking priestess with brown braids behind the counter. “Maybe… maybe we should… you know, the plan?” she suggests, poking her fingers together.

Poppy, the priestess, standing on the counter, looks at her with narrowed eyes. It’s a serious suggestion. But they’re desperate. At this rate, they’ll never get enough points together for the big stuffed toy bear before someone else does. It costs a hundred, exactly the same amount it costs to leave the dungeon or to receive a literal fortune in money to take outside. It’s an entirely pointless, frivolous thing that makes no fiscal sense to buy.

But there’s only one in stock, and they decided that they really want it. They’re going to give it to the hero as a gift.

Poppy points at a woman behind the counter, leaning back against the stone wall and examining her nails with a smug look on her face. “Okay. Do it,” she instructs. “Warlock.”

“Well… I might,” says the warlock, standing in between the priestess. She lifts her eyes to them, the ghostly, vividly white eyes looking their way in contrast with the deep black liner and mascara around them. “But I get to be the one to hold the bear when we give it to him.”

“No way!” yells Poppy.

“Poppy…” mutters the other priestess quietly. “We have to.”

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Poppy grits her teeth and crosses her arms, looking over to the crowd in exasperation and then back to the warlock. “FINE!” she relents.

The warlock smiles smugly and then lifts a finger, a glow shining on the floor next to the little stall as an arcane sigil carved into the floor begins to illuminate. Green and purple lights flash and condense, shooting out of the ground in the pattern of an ancient mark of evil, and then begin to condense together into the shape of a body.

A demonic woman with the wings of a bat and the frame and build of something that seems to shift and contort into a different shape for everyone who looks at her stands within the circle — a succubus.

Poppy calls back out to the crowd, pointing down to the literal demon with both arms. “A KISS WITH EVERY SALE!” calls Poppy, several heads turning at once. “Yes, that’s right!” she markets, gesturing to the crowd, the succubus blowing a kiss out into the crowd.

It hits a man, who clutches his throat and falls over, spasming. His face is turning blue.

— It was actually a real spell, not just a cute gesture. Succubi are extremely dangerous monsters, capable of performing horrific mental magics in their pursuit of stealing souls from the bodies of their victims.

Paiki stands back against the wall, watching as the crowd shifts, the stall surrounded all of a sudden. He moves in toward the front of the arena entrance as an opening comes to sight. He doesn’t need enchantments or a kiss. But a lot of people seem to, all of a sudden.

“Potions! Get your potions!” calls a man, walking through the crowd and shaking a bottle above his head. A crate of clinking bottles is strapped around his chest over his shoulders. “Healing, magic — anything you need to restore, then you can get here a little more — in a bottle!” he calls out in a marketing jingle of sorts, shaking a healing potion, several people buying from him to stock up before the fight.

“So there I was,” starts a woman, whose conversation he hears in on. “Just minding my own business, and then this huge knight in the scariest damn black armor you’ve ever seen just pops up out of nowhere — built like a damn brick house -”

“- Is this another one of your old stories, Granny?” sighs the red-haired man next to her, the sorceress shooting him a cold look. She doesn’t look old enough for the nickname, because she isn’t. But she also is.

She’s been resurrected from the bones of an old ancestral grave their family had brought to the arena. Her old life sounds to most as if it had been thousands of years ago at least. Nobody is really sure of the exact details.

“Those were way more interesting days than the world you have to live in, runt,” she says to him.

He rolls his eyes. “Sure, sure. Next you’re going to tell us about the time you saw the demon-king.”

“That was thousands of years after her, dummy,” says another member of her group. “Learn your history.”

A different man over to the row to the right raises his hand, calling over to the group. “I saw the demon-king!” he calls over to them. “I was there in the raid on his castle. Real shit-show.”

The group looks over to him. “You saw the demon-king?” asks the red-haired man, raising an eyebrow.

The other man nods. “Sure did. He killed me himself; he did,” affirms the soldier, from a kingdom that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a very long time ago. He’s also one of the resurrected. “— Wrote a poem about it too. Odd fella.”

The three of them stare at him and then look back at each other. “Anyway -” starts the sorceress, all of them ignoring what they just heard.

Paika leans against the wall, having pulled out a cloth and polishing his knife, looking at another group speaking a foreign language amongst themselves. It seems the core is able to understand just about any person. They’re vildt, from another continent. Vildt are half-animal, half-people and are viewed as either more or less of one or the other depending on who you ask. In the western continents, they’ve seen fairly unfavorably because of historical reasons.

— But the colosseum really seems to be drawing in everyone from everywhere.

The crowd starts to murmur, moving apart as people excitedly talk amongst themselves. Clanking metal like the jingle of a church bell fills the air as the hero makes his way down the passage to the front of the gate, where people let him through, almost like they were a school of fish swimming apart to let a bigger one through.

Following next to him is a chittering, hissing creature that snaps at the crowd. Following each of them is a procession of either holy people in robes of the church or ominous dark-robed cultists.

“I’ll suck the gristle from your bones while you’re still alive, wretch,” hisses the insectoid demon-queen, looking down at the hero who she towers over.

The hero looks at her, smiling. “Let’s have a good, fun day today, Sally,” he says. “Do your best!” encourages the hero, holding out a fist for her to bump.

She hisses at him, her chitin chittering as someone behind them in the crowd snickers. “…Her name is Sally?” asks a man, trying not to laugh.

His face turns straight and solid the moment she spins around, drooling mandibles clicking closed inches from his eyes. “…You’re first,” she hisses. He gulps, leaning back.

Outside, a barrage of trumpets starts blowing, the roar of the crowd getting even louder than before as it turns from a passive buzz into a deafening cry that feels like it really is shaking the world.

There is a heavy lurching, the portcullis starting to rise up to the gap in the ceiling as an announcer outside in the arena calls in today’s contestants and begins to explain the rules of the game.

The contestants move. Paika puts his knife away, stashing it back into his boot, having only had time to polish the one and not the other one in his second boot, or the one in his belt, or the one behind his belt, or the two inside of his tunic, or the one below his armguard.

It promises to be a normal day in the arena like any other.