Troy stood surrounded by opening portals linked to spawn wave after wave of monsters, and an abundance of former students turned slaves. She knew that one of two circumstances would occur. Either she was about to be overwhelmed and crushed by the odds, or she would be forced to fight alongside her fellow slaves, only to be betrayed in the end.
Either way, I’m going to go down swinging.
Troy began to summon HardLight clones of herself, each clone wielding different colored spiked maces. The faces of those around her spanned from brave to panicked, as all eleven portals started to spawn various creatures.
To Troy’s surprise, the many slaves around her formed a perimeter around her protectively. Those she’d assumed would immediately attack her instead guarded her, many nodding in her direction, while others even looked to her for direction.
“What should we do?”
Troy looked over toward the young man and thought for a moment before she created a spiked mace, extending the black weapon handle first toward him.
“Find anyone who needs a weapon and send them to me.”
The young man hefted the heavy weapon with a smile and nodded before rushing off. Before Troy knew what was happening she was creating various weapons made of HardLight to any and all who would take one.
The weapons were all various colors, and all had different effects. Troy didn’t have time to explain the capabilities of each weapon, but quickly found out that her fellow slaves had paid far more attention to her fights than she would have ever expected.
Harpies, trolls, chimeras, and much more crept from the portals. The creatures didn’t play kindly with each other in their own habitats, but with the less dominant Cultivators being presented as prey to them all, the monstrous races gave little to no attention to one another.
“Time to die, Time to die, Time to die!”
Troy continued to summon clones, that she then trickled not only through the crowd, but lined outside the slaves perimeter. The announcer continued to rile up the chanting audience, and Troy prepared herself for the worst as the first mana blooded rhino exited a portal and charged without any hesitation.
“Get ready,” Troy yelled. A burst of lightning arced over one side of the pack of slaves and surged into the head of the rhino, stopping the creature dead in its tracks. The nearby monsters took the opportunity to engage with the downed rhino, ripping into the beast as it struggled to overcome the lightning.
Troy looked over to where the lightning had come from to see a smiling young man who winked back at her. She ignored the bravado and gave the Cultivator a nod of approval before continuing to sweep her gaze across the incoming enemies.
The young man’s preemptive strike caused many others to attempt the same, and before Troy knew what was happening, collective barrages of elemental attacks flew haphazardly in every direction. Friendly fire was as much a potential to decrease their numbers as the incoming enemies and Troy was forced to reign in those who shot more out of panic and fear than skillful confidence.
“Don’t fire unless you know you will hit our enemies and not those on our side, you’ll weaken our chances of victory if you take out our own members and further more you’ll waste mana that we don’t have!”
“Yes ma’am!”
Troy frowned at the echoed yells of the slaves, feeling as if she’d done nothing to deserve the allegiance being shown. She’d not garnered faith in any way, shape or form thus far. She'd never worked with any of them before. She assumed the worse, unaware of just how iconic her battles had become to her fellow slaves.
Then the harpies targeted their first victim. A young man at the edge of the pack of slaves gave far too much of his attention to the goings-on of the fights around himself, not realizing that a small group of harpies had clustered just above him, waiting for the perfect chance. A chance that came as quickly as a blink.
The scream was heard and Troy jerked around to see the young man being pulled into the air. She moved on instinct, rushing through the crowd and climbing over her fellow slaves before she jumped off the shoulders of a particularly tall young woman, dropping both of the maces she held to wrap her hands around the ankles of the young man being pulled away.
“Oh no you don’t!”
Troy clambered wildly up the young man’s body, and began her counter attack. She thanked the maiden that the young man’s belt was strapped around his waist tightly as she clamped her grip around his buckle with one hand, and summoned a HardLight spiked mace in her free hand.
The three harpies that held the young man in their talons flew incredibly high in what only felt like a couple breaths to Troy who looked down and felt her head spinning at the height they’d reached.
By the Maiden’s blessings, what could have made me believe this was a good idea!
Troy pushed her growing fear to the back of her mind, pulled back into the moment by the screams of the young man she held onto. Her grip tightened and Troy roared all her frustrations as she began to lash out.
The red mace she swung collided with the winged arm of the nearest harpy; the creature screeched as an explosion of heat and flame consumed it. The other two that tried to claim the young man screeched violently as their continued attempt to capture their prey grew more frantic.
“Come on!”
Troy summoned another blue mace and smashed the weapon into the chest of another harpy, which caused another spiked mace to be summoned above the harpy’s head, the secondary projection attracted by the energy of the first mace that poured into the harpy once the conjured weapon collided with its body. The secondary mace plummeted with the back of the harpy’s head, crushing its skull and killing it instantly.
The secondary mace exploded with force, knocking into the final harpy that struggled to stay airborne with its prey in hand. The chain of energy poured into the final harpy, but didn’t carry as much energy as the first hammer. Another projection was conjured above its head as well, but instead of crushing the head of the final harpy it merely collided with the side of the creatures temple knocking the flying creature unconscious.
The harpy let the young man go, dropping him from its taloned feet, and Troy and the young man began to fall.
Troy pulled the Cultivator into her arms and prepared for a crash landing, putting herself completely underneath the body of the young man as they sank through the air like a stalled aircraft.
How is this for going out swinging, Arson…
The breeze ruffled through Troy’s hair and she waited for the worst, surprised when she felt herself ease into the embrace of a pack of interlocked arms. She opened her eyes to see her clones and many of the slaves all around her and the young man she’d saved, all slowly putting the pair down. She looked around, smiling and nodding at those who helped her, before she looked at the trembling young man beside her.
“Watch your six, and don’t forget to look up, you idiot. Next time your bird food.”
“O-Okay,” stuttered the young man, and Troy jumped up to her feet. She looked around and a outburst of cheers rained in from the audience unlike any she’d ever heard from the school before.
“Ha, you would think that they don’t make credits when we die,” said a slave near to Troy. Troy nodded, and laughed in return.
“Doesn’t matter to me I’ll take it over that bloody death chant any day!”
…
Lane sat within the ManaWell and prepared for the next match to begin. She and Seven had many matches to watch that day, but she yawned in boredom.
None of the contenders were worth her time, but she cared little for the mundane job she subjected herself to during the day, while instead her continual moonlighting had begun to leave her far more tired than usual during the day, and had began to affect her proficiency.
“Sleeping on the job again, what’s going on with you,” Seven asked as he entered the room.
Lane jumped and tried to wipe the sleep from her eyes, but Seven placed a hand on her shoulder and laugh.
“Calm down, I’m only kidding. These matches are more boring than watching dirt turn to dust, just don’t let my dad catch you and you’re good.”
Lane smirked and gave a solitary nod.
“Thanks, just been up late and I wish you were wrong about these fights, but seriously the competition in this area of the bronze is lackluster for sure.”
Lane and Seven both had a considerable eye for talent, and while under the effects of the system’s changes, neither knew that it was BlackHole Conglomerate’s creation that had stirred up the competition in the bronze sector of Maelstrom, leaving them to believe the area to be completely without talent.
“Yeah, I thought a lot differently about those from my neck of the woods before I was adopted, now seeing this though, I wonder what it was I thought i saw back then,” Seven responded contemplatively.
“I didn’t know you were adopted?”
“Yeah, I used to live not far from here, and trust me when I say this, things weren’t always like this. It's like something is missing, almost like the life was sucked from this place and a passionless desert was left behind.”
Lane noticed how quickly the young man moved beyond his adoption, so she moved on with the conversation as he had chosen to, not wanting to annoy the young man.
“What do you think happened?”
Seven looked away from the fight below the viewing box they sat in and back toward Lane.
“I think that any hope of this place having a future was adopted from the Orphan Mother and taken to places already drowning in success.”
Lane froze at her boss's words, and looked back toward the fight that had put her to sleep after a moment of contemplation.
She too believed that her time in the bronze sector of maelstrom came with truly odd and enlightening circumstances. The most prominent being what she’d learned during her night job.
“Well this place can’t be all that bad, wasn’t the winner of the Tournament of Scions from around here?”
Lane analyze Seven’s every facial feature as she waited for an answer, hoping that she would finally receive a valid response. However Lane found herself once again disappointed.
“Yeah, I think so, can’t remember the person’s name though…”
Yet again Lane found herself on the receiving end of a response that made little to no sense. The winner of the Tournament of Scions was always proclaimed to be a future leader. The strongest of the strongest of the future generation of Cultivator’s, but here was a young man who knew every fighter in nearly every division of professional fighting, who couldn’t even name the winner.
There’s literally no way…
“Don’t you think that is odd, I mean that is one of the biggest tournaments in the entire realm layer and beyond and neither one of us can name the winner, especially with them being from such a small backwater as the bronze sector of Maelstrom?”
Seven’s face scrunched temporarily but he finally laughed, brushing her comment aside as if it were nothing.
“Do you know how many fights I watch in a day, let alone a season cycle, not to mention how many of the previous Tournaments of Scions I’ve watched on the holo-web? I know more fighter names than I do actual people. Give me a break, I’m not a computer.”
Lane frowned, nodding as she looked away and back toward the fight below. Not quite able to drop her point.
“Who won the Tournament of Scions a century ago?”
“Oh that’s easy, Esmerelda StarWater,” Seven said without a blink to think of an answer.
“What about a decade ago?”
“Craig BlackStone,” answered again without a breath between her question and his answer.
“So who won this season cycle…?”
Silence filled the room, and Lane turned back to see the strain on Seven’s face. A ripple of power thrummed through the young man’s body, and Lane felt the air in the entire room vibrate. She looked around and noticed that the fight below had begun to move in slow motion and not a blink later reality seemed to snap back into normality.
“I don’t know, but I guess that is why I’m better off being a promoter than an information broker,” Seven said frowning as he rose to his feet.
“But hey, that’s all in the past now, and to be honest I’m suddenly not feeling well my bloody self... think I’m going to go lay down.”
Lane nodded, doing her best not to panic after what she’d just seen, wishing Seven a quick recovery. Deciding to leave early before the fights below even finished, Lane didn’t think she would be getting any sleep that night.
She made her way home, pushing her way into her messy apartment. It didn’t take her long to find something to eat as she waited for the suns to set, feeling the need for the dark embrace of night to submerge the bronze sector in unending shadow.
She changed into the all black stealth suit she worked endlessly to save for, dawning her hood and the demon mask she wore, turning to the wall screen that housed her virtual evidence board and began to click through information.
News clips indicating the kidnapping, violent interrogation and torture of certain mortal political figures by a vigilante named, Bad Actor, framed the board. While the interior was filled with conspiracy theories all pulled from the holo-web in regards to runic systems being designed to erase the memories of entire realms to control the mortal and Cultivator populous.
She’d been pulling together as much information as she could to support what she believed to be the biggest cover-up by the realm’s oligarchs in the history of the realm. She didn’t know why those in power would want to wipe away the history of a prominent figure, but knew that the changes the individual must have brought to the impoverished areas had to have been grand for the wealthy leaders of her home to take such considerable action.
Her family was the wealthiest family in all the known realms from what she knew, and the extent they used to destroy their competition was thought to be unrivaled in her mind, until now. She knew how those in power operated, and how inconsequential they felt their enemies' actions to be, unless their bottom lines were affected.
If it doesn’t make credits, kill them off before you have to pay the medics… Lane thought to herself. One of her families many odd sayings running through her mind as she looked through all the articles. She knew a disruption of wealth had to be the root of her investigation for events like a realm wide memory wipe to occur, she just didn’t know why her soul wouldn’t let her rest until she knew the exact details down to the letter. Almost as if she knew her own life had been affected directly.
Lane’s eyes then focused on an article on the faceless winner of the Tournament of Scions and she sighed to herself as she turned away and walked toward her open window.
“Head up Lane, it is time for another fun night on the town…!”