Luke had broken every record the wiki tracked and created some of his own, inadvertently for some, intentionally unintentional for others. He hadn't survived for over four months - he wasn't sure how long, exactly, with this world not having a day/night cycle - just to break a record, but he had planned to survive as long as possible. With that came the most kills and longest time between kills, as well. He was also setting new records the wiki curators never imagined someone could set in the arena.

Furthest distance traveled, most times successfully sleeping without dying, most potions crafted, most clothes fully destroyed, longest time spent naked. The list of records that they decided to track that started with Luke was long, if mostly useless stats no one cared about or would ever even attempt to break in the future; but, when there's no real developments going on in the arena for weeks at a time, you have to have your own fun in some way, and tracking weird stats about Luke's time in the arena was how they decided to spend theirs.

Luke woke up in his most recent hidey hole. Fraxions had largely stopped suiciding to bring him back to the arena, choosing to die of starvation, instead, while trying to find him. Try to see if there can maybe be new information learned about how to track this elusive human. A few times, Luke got a little complacent and his nightly fortress had been torn open early, but that hadn't happened in a while.

While he couldn't craft rest potions, he could craft exercise potions of the quality of those sold by Dixon. While not ridding him of the need for sleep and significantly less effective than he was used to, they were useful for keeping himself in shape, something he hadn't considered would be a need here in the arena. With the majority of fighting being magical in nature, his physicality had suffered a bit. He was still active, even more so now that he's noticed the issue, but not even close to the degree he used to be.

He was certain it was lowing his magic capacity, but he wasn't sure by how much.

He tore open the metal sphere he slept in and dug his way out of the timber wall surrounding the arena. He'd chosen to sleep relatively close to the origin today. Be unpredictable, as much as he could. Always running really far away would mean the fraxions would learn to ignore the arena when they go searching for him. Mixing up where in and how far from the arena he slept kept him safe, most of the time, having expanded the fraxion's minimum search area significantly.

He quickly checked the arena was clear before heading back to the central clearing. He'd been attempting to make his own oil by putting wood under extreme pressure and heat. He'd never been left alone long enough to succeed, but this fraxion seemed to believe he'd escaped out into the wasteland that surrounded the around 18 mile diameter arena. He wasn't exactly sure how big it was, but he knew how fast he walked, how long it took to reach the timber wall after a path had been cleared out, and the math to find the overall distance out from that.

Today would be the fifth day of avoiding this fraxion. After a few initial run-ins outside the arena, he escaped back to the arena underground. Yesterday, he set up a large steel pillar and near-air-tight sheath for it to crush wood and used magic to heat up said wood, attempting to somewhat recreate the conditions deep in the earth that created the oil on earth. He wasn't a geologist or biologist or whatever profession knew exactly how oil formed, so he wasn't sure his attempts would ever yield anything, but he had to try. Having a good source of oil would let him forgo the need for sleep.

While heating up the potential oil, he conjured a blade and began shaving his facial hair while he cooked a chunk of his leg. Every so often, he would carve an anti-Dixon message into the earth around where he was, and he decided to do so today, talking about the real potioneering he'd experienced that had gotten him to the strength he was. He couldn't get any responses, since the arena's cameras were invisible, had no microphones, and had no speakers, but he could at least preach his accomplice's teachings through text.

Anything to keep sane in a world with no human contact.

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Around a year in, Luke had begun needing to bury the bodies of his fallen opponents. They were simply taking up too much space. While there seemed to be no decomposers or infectious bacteria or viruses among the corpses, they still began to take up too much space. He considered simply throwing them outside the wall, where it would be decades before the bodies could pile up enough that it would matter, he decided against that.

While the fraxions were his opponents, that was because of the gods, not because of any malice they held toward humanity. At least not originally. The amount of death caused on both sides would obviously cause enmity toward each other to some degree, but ultimately, it was the gods that created this horrible conflict in the first place that Luke placed the blame on.

So, whenever he had some free time, he would clean up the arena and bury any fraxion corpses therein. Those that died outside the arena were too exposed for him to safely bury. The risk of being seen by a fraxion flying high from multiple miles out was too great and the corpses out there were too far apart. It took him a month, between all the combats and raw count of dead bodies, to fully clean up the arena.

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It didn't help that he was losing sleep from the nightmares.

With the only thing he's experienced in over a year being this arena, almost every dream he had was set in here. Fantastical dreams were the outliers, with the vast majority of his nights spent fighting imagined foes or not rationing his magic properly and dying. His only source of food being himself or the fraxions he refused to eat also gave way to many nightmares of eating himself to death or being unable to heal himself and bleeding out.

The fraxions had also varied their tactics significantly. There was still the occasional fraxion that attempted to strap him down at the start, but those were rare, these days. Instantly attacking, going invisible and stalking him for days before actually springing an attack, using their all on a suicide attack like the fraxion that had managed to reduce him to a head and arm, and simply being too incompetent to pose any threat to Luke were far more common. Often, his escapes would see him needing to patch up significant wounds, as even the "low threat" fraxions he chose to escape from had begun increasing in potential deadlines.

Being alone, he had no one to talk to. He would occasionally write in the dirt, still, but he figured his messages about potioneering had either gotten through or been called crazy and ignored by now, so he'd just been venting into the void. About the nightmares, about the loneliness, about the fear of not waking up. Being isolated for so long, the only company being armored beings that wished for your death, was torture.

But it was a torture he was willing to endure for the future of humanity.

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Around five years in, a major shift happened.

Luke appeared in the neutral spot after taking out an aggressive fraxion when he was suddenly hit by lightning. He flopped to the ground as the newest magic the fraxions had figured out nearly knocked him out, quickly followed by another bolt of electricity coursing through his body, stiffening his muscles against his will. In the gap between the second and third attack, he summoned a spike of metal beside him, which took the next couple of blasts.

As the lightning bolts hit the lightning rod he conjured, Luke shot a glob of acid toward the fraxion opposite him, which was blocked by a shield, but distracted the fraxion from a compressed jet of acid directed at his opponent's spine. It failed to sever the fraxion's nervous system as it reacted to the pain of having its skin corroded fast enough to put up a second shield. The jet impacting the shield splashed some drops onto its armor platings, but ultimately failed to produce the results Luke wished for.

It did allow Luke a few fractions of a second to begin making space between him and his opponent, but a lightning bolt hit him. It ignored his lightning rod as the fraxion casting it produced a proper leader all the way to Luke's body, rather than just the minimum to make it target Luke over it and the ground. The electricity coursing through his body before finding its way out and to the ground was enough to disrupt his concentration over his flight, sending him tumbling and almost breaking his neck. He had no time to right himself as another bolt hit him in the middle of his tumbling.

In the second between casts of this new lightning spell, Luke created a sphere of acid around his opponent and trapped them in the deadly liquid with a sphere of glass. The fraxion could escape if they thought to simply flee or break the glass, but this was the first time Luke had actually implemented this attack, saving it for a foe like this, with a very deadly magic he was unfamiliar with.

Experiencing Luke's desperation attack for the first time ever, the fraxion believed it was simply an acid conjuration around their body, as Luke had done many times in the past, and attempted to implement the standard counter of dousing themself with water and blowing the acid away with wind, which would still leave them with some burns, but the acid did not move. The panicking fraxion died before it could realize its actual situation and figure out a way to escape.

In the couple seconds Luke had before the fraxion died, he began healing the damage the electricity had done. Many nerves were completely fried, muscles and tendons were torn from exerting his full strength, and the points of impact had burn marks. He hadn't finished repairing all his nerves by the time he returned to the neutral starting position.

And was immediately blasted by yet more electricity.

He hadn't even fully processed that he'd been hit yet when the next bolt came in, followed by a third on his way to the ground, and a fourth before he could erect a lightning rod. The next few bolts of lightning impacted the rod before this fraxion, too, countered that by creating a leader for the bolt of electricity into Luke, directly. Luke had already begun to sink into the ground, moving dirt out of his body's way, when the bolt hit him. The shorter distance through his body to the nearest ground helped lower the impact enough that he was able to fully encase himself in dirt before the lightning could overwhelm him once more.

Luckily for him, neither of these electricity wielding fraxions had enough control to send the bolt into his head.

Luke started parting the earth to effectively fly through the ground when a metal spike pierced through his lower torso from above, preventing him from moving. Another threatened to take his head as he spun, pivoting off the spike in his torso, and flew straight up, back into the air. Before the fraxion could launch another bolt of lightning to take him out of the sky, he encased this opponent in a sphere of acid and glass, as well.

The same trick did not work twice in a row as his opponent broke out of the glass sphere, steam rising from their body as the acid ate away at its flesh in the few fractions of a second before it could wash it off. Luke was over half way to the woods by that point, but it was not enough.

Another bolt of lightning quickly took him out of the sky.