Hallek
“I think it's him,” a voice said. “The guy who did for Dryss.”
Well that can't be a good sign.
“Who cares?” another voice. “He'll be just as dead as the rest of us, once they open the doors.”
The voices seemed to be coming from somewhere at the top of the well he was down. No, he wasn't down a well he was just...confused, and tired, and he ached all over. He thought his eyes were closed. He opened them. The immediate view was of a pair of enormous hairy nostrils looming over him. Not a promising start.
“He's awake,” said the owner of the nostrils.
“Who cares?” Somebody else said.
“I do,” Hallek said, sitting up and taking in the room. One wall was made of wood, with studs along the bottom. It looked familiar somehow. The other walls were stone, the one across from the wood with a door set in it. There were benches all around, and a weapon rack at the far wall. The room was full of mean, ugly looking people who also looked a little bit on the starved and hungry side, all wearing rags. “Where am I?”
“The butcher's chopping block,” someone laughed.
“You're in the arena,” Nostrils told him, although now that they were all sitting up it would be more accurate to call him Enormous Beard. “You're about to go into the spectacle.”
That's where he'd seen that wall before. It wasn't a wall, it was a gate. It lifted up to let the prisoners or the smaller animals into the arena. To die, which was obviously what they intended for him. He reached around, but he didn't have his sword.
“How did you do it?” Someone asked. “How did you blow up the prison?”
“I don't know,” Hallek said. “I stabbed Drys and everything went white.” Of course they'd both been doing things they shouldn't with soul essence in the middle of an ancient and complicated infusion they didn't understand, which probably had something to do with it.
“At least they're giving us real weapons,” a prisoner gestured to the weapons rack. “I heard sometimes they sent people to the spectacles with wooden ones.”
“We'll be up against something that doesn't care much about swords,” Enormous Beard said. Hallek couldn't argue, but it would be nice to have a weapon. He reached for a sword about the same size and shape as his sword but it wiggled away from him on the rack, sliding off and clattering to the floor below.
“Clumsy idiot!” Someone snapped. “This twerp is the one who killed Drys?”
Hallek reached for a spear, only have it shudder in its rack. Another three attempts produced the same result. When he finally got what was going on he threw his head back and laughed.
“That's it the lad's gone daffy.”
“I know I have,” Hallek said. “The whole damn world has. That's what's so funny. Don't you get it? Watch.”
He whirled on the weapon's rack and shouted. Every weapon began to quiver and shake in its bindings, sending the whole thing rattling like a sack full of dice.
Real weapons but weak infusions. Timid things that won't help us out in battle, beyond strengthening and sharpening the blade. Too timid for a real fight with anything probably, let alone meeting up with me...
“I'm a Fang, everyone!” Hallek laughed. “Even the weapons here are scared of me. What do I have to be scared of out there?”
The prisoners just gave each other dark looks. Hallek chuckled. He knew he shouldn't, he knew he was about to face unknown but lethal dangers weaponless and sore all over with no idea where his friends were or what the situation was, but he couldn't help it. He was just so screwed, his situation was so terrible, that it had become ridiculous. He was still chuckling when the gate rose and he found himself faced with the roar of the crowd.
He'd been a part of it but he'd never thought about it before, but standing there in the arena he understood. The crowd roared because it was a beast. A huge, fickle monster demanding to be fed. It could feed on glory, could watch a hero rise against the odds and roar in triumph. Or it could watch something helpless wander into its jaws, and roar before the kill.
I may, in fact, be going daffy. While he'd been going on his little internal monologue about the crowd, the other prisoners had huddled up.
“Way I see it,” one of them said, “only chance we've got is to work together. Against whatever it is.”
“Why won't it come out already?” another muttered.
“They always wait a bit to build up suspense,” the first prisoner said. “I say we move when it kills the daffy kid. It'll be distracted then.”
Hallek felt absurdly hurt, but it passed. Desperate people made desperate plans and besides, Lekarik's corruption aside most of the people in the spectacle would still be rapists and child murderers. He had not fallen in with the very best of crowds. Hallek focused on the battlefield. Sand on the ground, so the blood would soak in but no one would slip on it. Gates like the one he'd come out of ringed the circular space, with one enormous one at each compass point.
The huge gate across from him opened and the crowd erupted into fresh cheers. Rumbling footsteps heralded the arrival of an enormous allosaurus being ridden by a man in a leather loincloth and not much else. On either side of the man's saddle was a quiver of javelins. The rider mugged to the crowd, grinning and waving for them to cheer louder, and then he saw Hallek.
Akko the Abomination, Hallek thought. So some people made it out alive.
The prisoners scattered, all thought of strategy abandoned in the face of the world's most famous gladiator on the back of a ferocious dinosaur. One of them ran a little too close to the allosaurus and its head shot out like a striking snake, catching the man by the arm and lifting him in the air. It tossed its head back and swallowed him still screaming.
Akko laughed, and the crowd roared. Akko pulled a javelin from one of the quivers and used it to skewer one of the prisoners running the other way. It would be easiest to say the crowd cheered again, but the noise from the crowd never really stopped. It had become an eternal rumble, and self contained thunderclap slithering around the arena. When the man fell twitching in the dirt Akko grabbed another javelin and threw it to pierce Hallek's heart.
Slap.
It was the tiniest sound but it exploded over the arena, leaving silence in itswake. The crowd had lost the energy to cheer or boo or roar because it had just seen something impossible. So impossible half the crowd felt like it was dreaming, hallucinating from drink, until the vision on the arena floor refused to disappear and they were forced to accept that yes, somehow, this nameless young man sent out to die in the spectacle had caught the javelin.
Hallek held it just behind the point, making eye contact with Akko the whole while. When the allosaurus had first stomped out into the arena he'd been terrified of it, the primal fear of coming face to knee with a relative of the Fangs and one of the worlds most dangerous predators. But then it had started killing and reminded him of the Fang in his memories, of the destruction of Tivek. And as vicious and powerful as the allosaurus could be next to the Giganotosaurus it was almost...cute.
Akko snarled and cracked the allosaurus's reigns, riding it to forward to bit or crush Hallek. But Hallek wasn't having it anymore.
“Who the hells do you think you are?” Hallek screamed at the charging dinosaur. The power of the Fang filled his voice and it carried all over the arena. “I've been carved up and kidnapped and cursed! I've been bitten and slashed and beaten and almost swallowed! I fought ape men and soldiers and I faced down a gods-damned Fang and won! I'm down here in this pit without a weapon because Lekarik is afraid of me! And compared to all that you ain't nothing, Akko!”
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That last defiant shout saved Akko's life. The allosaurus was already confused. Every sense told it the creature it hunted was another one of the crunchy two legged things, barely prey really but good enough to eat. But every instinct warned that the creature it hunted was death and rage and power. That was the half of its brain that won when it heard Hallek's final roar, full of rage and bloodlust. It stumbled backwards, away from the terrifying and inexplicable monster.
Which is why the javelin Hallek threw back didn't pierce Akko through the neck. Instead it caught the allosaurus in the eye. Yellowish green ichor flowed with the blood down its scales as it screamed in pain and lost its balance, slamming to the arena floor with a sound like thunder. Hallek had a moment to hope the fall had crushed Akko, but it was only a moment before the gladiator clambered away from his fallen mount, drawing the sword in his belt.
“Good job!” A prisoner said, clapping him on the shoulder. “That's cut him down to size! Like you said, without that allosaurus to ride he ain't nothing!”
“No he's still Akko the Abomination,” Hallek said wearily. “World's greatest gladiator and psychotic cannibal murderer. That's very much something.”
But the sight of one of their own—in the fluid way the desperate, dishonest, and not especially bright calculate things like that—slaying the allosaurus seemed to have filled them all with truly implausible confidence. For almost the first time in the history of the arena, the prisoners charged.
They died. Akko barely moved, a few flicks of his arm and they were down. The gladiator's eyes never left Hallek. Some of them were still twitching, but with all that blood around Hallek didn't think any of them would live for very long.
He hoped they really were all rapists and murderers, and not just people Lekarik didn't like.
“You are going to die for this,” Akko snarled. “And for what you did to me at the prison.”
“Oh I get it,” Hallek said. “That's why you hate me so much. I hit you were it hurts didn't I Akko? In the audience.”
“Shut up,” Akko said. “Just shut up!”
But he winced again when the crowd cheered. They didn't know Hallek's name, prisoners in the spectacles were never given names, so they were just chanting “prisoner, prisoner!” But what they were chanting wasn't really important, except that what they were chanting wasn't Akko. For all his fury Akko approached cautiously. He'd gotten too many surprises out of Hallek to strike him without thinking, even unarmed. So for a few moments the fighters just circled each other, waiting for the other one to make a move.
“It didn't matter you were a murderer,” Hallek said. “It didn't matter that you were insane. It didn't matter you spent day after day locked up in Balrok prison, where even the walls drain your will to live. Because here, you were a king. I've got it, haven't I? That's why you're not sounding so cocky now. Because somewhere in that shriveled peanut you call a brain, it finally occurred to you you might lose.”
“You're trying to get me angry enough to make a mistake,” Akko snarled through clenched teeth. “It won't work. I never make mistakes when it comes to killing, boy.”
“And when you lose, who will you be then? Just the man who couldn't kill eight barely armed prisoners when he had full arms and armor on top of a gods-damned allosaurus!”
The allosaurus saved Akko's life again. Maybe it was chance, or the gods, or maybe it just knew the word allosaurus and thought someone was calling it. But in the instant before Akko's rage goaded him into the mistake that would have given Hallek the sword instead, the shadow falling over them as blood dripped from its ruined eye. Akko and Hallek's decision to move together was pure primal instinct. We can decide who's alpha male later. Right now, there's a predator here. They spaced out away from each other, waiting to see who it would go for first, so the other could hamstring it.
It never occurred to them the answer might be “both.” Its head lunged for Akko, the most familiar scent. But its tail whipped out and caught Hallek in the chest, sending him flying into the wall on the far side of the arena. The stone crumbled and fell on top of him, and he heard a disappointed sigh from the crowd.
They think I'm dead, Hallek realized, trying to get his bearings.
He was upside down and folded over, a humiliating enough position at the best of times. Between his own legs he could see Akko backing away from the allosaurus, slashing its snout with his sword to keep it from lunging in for the kill.
Sword. I wish I had my sword.
He trembled in his wooden case.
Wait what?
My sword is in a wooden case on a table in the arena's armory. The tried to touch it, but I clawed the one who's fingers gripped my handle to pieces. Of course I did, because I'm the sword. I'm stronger holding it because it has a piece of the giganotosaurus soul inside. And the Fang's soul is my soul now. So the sword is a part of me. I can probably always find it, I was just never far away from it like this before.
He was proud for having reasoned it through so far.
Too bad it can't get up and come to me.
He felt the sword shifting in itscase. He heard wood break.
Who says?
The impressions stopped making sense after that. Fury and roaring, distracting him from his body in the moment. He put them aside to focus on the immediate danger. But they called up one of the strangest and yet most comforting thoughts he'd ever had: My sword is coming. He scrambled out of the rubble and found himself in a pile of discarded javelins.
Akko had slashed and punched the allosaurus's snout until it had given him a chance to grab the harness. He wasn't stronger than the dinosaur, but the harness was designed to punch and pull and bend it to a human's will. With a few tugs the animal calmed, giving Akko the chance to climb up onto its back and take the seat again. It shuffled restlessly, but with a firm grip on the reigns Akko stilled the massive beast.
“VICTORY!” Akko roared, raising his sword above his head. The crowd cheered wildly right up until the moment the javelin struck him in the arm. The wound pierced deep into his flesh, skipping off the bone and flying away from Akko in a spray of blood. The insane gladiator roared in shock and confusion, his sword tumbling to the dirt as he cradled his arm and tried to process what happened. When he saw Hallek standing he bellowed something. An insult, a challenge, Hallek couldn't tell because the crowd had gone mad, cheering and screaming inarticulately and between the noise and the distance he could never have heard whatever it was Akko wanted to say. He responded with a brief salute.
Akko jerked the reigns to bring the dinosaur around. Hallek calmly picked up another javelin and tossed it towards the allosaurus's good eye. Like any creature would it flinched away, trying to protect the only sight it had left. When it jerked back Hallek threw three more javelins. They struck it in the side where it was protected by thick, leathery scales. Like a small splinter in a thick callous they wouldn't do much damage, but Hallek didn't need them to. He just needed them to stick in place.
When Akko finally convinced his mount to lunge again Hallek rolled under the snapping jaws and came up at a run. He leaped first onto the creature's shin, than up to catch the first of the javelins he'd stuck in the dinosaur's hide. He used them like a ladder, climbing up well out of Akko's sword reach. It was too far away for him to get Akko either of course, but he wasn't going for the gladiator anyway.
“You coward!” Akko roared. “Just die already, and give me my victory!”
“I thought you liked a good fight?” Hallek laughed, eyes focused on his work.
“Then stop jumping around like a drunken flea and fight me!”
Hallek didn't bother to respond, because he'd finished unbuckling the saddle straps anyway. He let go and landed on the ground with a roll. Akko was less lucky. His eyes widened as be felt the saddle slip, until he finally fell in a tangle with the saddle leathers on the other side of the dinosaur.
Free of its harness, the allosaurus went mad. It stamped the ground and roared, lunging for the one human it could see still standing. Hallek turned and ran. The crowd began to laugh, but he didn't care. He wasn't running away. He was running to the place his sword was going to meet him.
An arched wooden door high up on one of the arena balconies cracked and exploded in orange light and the crowd screamed as a giganotosaurus stepped into their midst. It was insubstantial, a ghostly thing of wispy orange light that stumbled out onto the stepped seats sending people scrambling for cover. Someone who knew what they were looking for could see the sword floating inside its transparent skull. It roared at the sky and then burst like a soap bubble, sending the sword flying through the air.
The allosaurus was almost on him, but Hallek didn't look around. In one fluid motion he caught the sword, turned to face the dinosaur, and left a deep bleeding gash across its snout. And then another and another, cut after cut into the rampaging dinosaur's flesh.
“STAY DOWN!” Hallek roared. Orange light flared around his body, flickering like flames with the suggestion of snout and fangs.
The allosaurus used to being ridden, and cut once or twice in a fight. Today it had been slashed, stabbed, impaled, one of its eyes was gone and now it was facing this strange little thing which looked so small and delicious but was obviously a superior predator. It bent its legs and laid its head and tail flat on the ground in surrender. It whimpered as it looked at Hallek, waiting for the Axe to fall.
“It's okay,” Hallek sighed, relief flooding through him. He felt invincible when he was holding the sword, but he'd learned the hard way that he wasn't. An incompetent and feeble human with a sword could kill him with a lucky strike. A rampaging allosaurus would have to get a lot less lucky. “It's alright, buddy. I got you.”
With the sword in hand his senses were heightened, so he felt it happening behind him even as the wild cheers of the crowd covered the noise. He sighed and turned around to look Akko in the eye. The gladiator had found his sword and held it in his off hand, his usual sword arm useless at his side. Some of those cheers had probably been warnings, but the Hallek couldn't make out words.
It occurred to him later he could have pushed Akko aside. In a one on one fight, with the Fang sword in his hand, Akko wasn't a match for him. Bruised and bleeding and broken Akko would have been like a kitten. But he didn't think of it and later, when he did, he thought he might have made the same decision. The human and the dinosaur within him were in perfect agreement. A persistent and hateful enemy is an enemy that needs to be destroyed.
When he saw he couldn't stab Hallek in the back anymore Akko roared in fury, lunging forward with his blade. Hallek raised his own and cut the man in half, from left shoulder to right hip.The sword passed through bone almost as easily as flesh and Akko fell to the ground in two parts, spilling blood and gore out onto the sand.
There's something I'm supposed to do now, he thought, staring at the body. Something, something...oh yeah.
“VICTORY!” he shouted, raising the Fang sword over his head. Akko's blood dripped from the blade onto his forehead, and the beast that was the crowd exploded in deafening cheers.
It had just been fed a better meal than any it could remember.