Kegen- no, Markus led me down the stairs to the white rings. They shone weakly here. But they were still strong enough to withstand strong impacts. A frail man was slammed onto them by another one relentlessly and they did not bend. The sounds were muted too, I could barely hear anything inside them, and each time the frail one hit the wall it sounded hard, but not metallic.

More often than not, it seemed the fights were quite heavily one sided. I saw no people evenly matched. Just beatdowns, pummelings and lethal wounds. The only place I saw something resembling people trading blows was where two people who looked famished and on their last legs tried to kill each other, but both were too feeble to finish what they’d started.

Eventually one fell, and the other started to cry while looking relieved and exhausted, kicking the one down. As always I had many questions, but Markus didn’t give me time to ask, as he grabbed me by the neck and threw me in another cage. I landed on my back in the red sand and it stuck to my sweat. I got back up and dusted the cultist’s robe I had tied around my waist.

A weary man in dirty clothes approached the circle with a woman and a child. They looked malnourished. His wife was holding back tears and the child seemed to understand something wasn't right. He kept his eyes worryingly on his parents as his mother held him.

The thin man kissed his wife and his son's head softly. They held each other for a long time, until he took a deep breath, sighed and entered my arena. At that moment the ring of white light around us flared and dimmed. I approached as he held his clenched fists slightly in front of him, in a stance I'd seen other people here use. We stared at each other for a while and I held up my dagger between us, keeping the stick in the other hand.

Where I was perfectly unmoving he was trembling, growing jumpier and more anxious by the second. He tentatively took a step forward, and I mimicked him. Except I didn't stop. I ran the short distance that separated us swinging my club to his left side. He tried grabbed it, but I didn't let go, bringing me closer to him though I was destabilized. I lashed out with the dagger, and he let go of my stick, backing off as fast as he could.

Unfortunately for him, there was a wall there. I dashed to keep up with him, stabbing wildly. I dodged a kick and caught him on the thigh as I covered the last meter separating us, getting a startled scream of pain in answer. His eyes were wide with panic and tears began appearing in their corners.

" No ! No plea- " the end of his sentence disappeared in a scream when I stabbed him in the lungs, though it quickly ended in a pathetic wheeze and gasp for air as I pulled back my knife. I stabbed and clubbed until he didn't move anymore. And then I kept going just to make sure.

The deep red pool that was forming around his body was quickly absorbed by the sand of the same color. The circle of light blinked again and I knew the match was over.

I thought about what defined me.

Race [ Base Hecatoncheires ]

Affinity [ None ]

Feats [ None ]

Kills [ 1 ]

… Was killing another being that important ? It felt so easy. Did being a killer define me as much as my species did? As much as other things I’d done and who I was ? As far as doing things went, killing wasn’t the hardest. I pondered that for some time and decided killing just wasn’t that important, because harder things must have had more value.

I was so lost in my thoughts I didn’t notice the body disappear. Nor the woman that ran away as her child cried.

As I stepped out of the ring, Markus pressed a heavy hand on my shoulder "Ruthless. I like your style, boy. That was very well done for a first fight. Keep at it and you'll shift in no time."

I nodded unsure of what to say. I could tell his expressions were still fake. I appreciated that he tried to keep me motivated, but I didn't need it.

"Ready for another one ?"

I nodded and turned towards the circles, only to be grabbed by my neck and thrown again. That vermin. One day, he was going to pay for this.

A young man with fine white and clean clothes, blond hair and a rapier was waiting in the ring. “You look like a savage. Heh, not as if there’s much else beside this worthless filth here.” He chuckled as if he’d just said the funniest thing in the world. Markus had mentioned that there were only the desperate and the foolish here. This one seemed to belong to the second group.

“Rejoice scrub, your life is about to gain meaning.” I cocked an eyebrow, mimicking what I’d seen the others do when they wanted someone to explain. As I stood up from my … accelerated arrival, I took a fistful of sand in my dagger-hand.

“You are after all, my first step towards the greatness I deserve.”

He darted forward and I just stepped to the side, dodging his thin sword easily. He was slow. Weak.

I dashed towards him, throwing the sand towards his eyes. He just turned his head and stepped back, but most of it got on his clothes. He looked baffled “You shitstain ! These are worth more than you !”

He tried to stab me again in the head, but I knocked his sword aside with the dagger and clubbed him. He fell and held up a hand to his cheek where I’d hit him. He started blabbering as I approached with measured steps.

“Do you know who my parents are ? They’re the Magna family ! Yes cower, I’ll give you one last chance : kill yourself and maybe your family will be spare-” I clubbed him again and kicked him until he balled up on the ground, each impact making him whimper as he threatened me. But he had no power here. He was weak.

I hit him in the shin multiple times with the club. Hard. As soon as his hands left his neck to protect his legs, I squatted beside him and planted my dagger in his throat in a swift motion. I dragged it out in a half slicing, half sawing motion while his scream died out in a gurgle and a splutter of warm blood.

I hesitated about taking his rapier. I hefted it up, trying to get a feel for it. It was light. It required precision and training. But more importantly, it was too light and seemed a simply worst version of a glaive. I let it drop, keeping my trusty and wooden partner in crime. It was swallowed by the crimson sand just as the body. I might have wanted those robes, but death waited for no one it seemed.

As I got back Markus’ eyes gleamed and his smile stretched a bit wider “Well done boy ! That was efficient and well thought out. The execution was somewhat lacking, but don’t worry, you’ll get there. Try being closer for the sand trick to work.”

He patted my head and I felt a familiar pressure on my neck as I cartwheeled to another ring.

I glared and his smug smile made it all the worst. One day he was going to pay for this.

One day.

///

Most of my fights after this were against desperate and often famished peasants, but they did not go as well as the first two. I'd won a few cuts on the legs and arms, a black eye and a whole lot of bruises for my trouble. As I finished my ninth fight, Markus didn’t wait for me to get out of the ring before he threw me towards another where a muscled and tanned woman with an axe awaited. Well, awaited till I hit the ground. As soon as my backside slick with sweat touched the ground, she was already on me hefting her axe up in an arc of which I was the ending point. I rolled to the side, grabbing once again a fistful of sand as she redirected the strike. It fell right beside my head, and I could see some fresh red stains on it.

In a split second decision, I grabbed onto the shaft, which prompted her to let go completely and start beating me bare handed. As the blows rained, I dropped my stick and the sand but held onto the dagger. When she tried to grab the hand holding it, I pushed her off of me to get some distance between us, throwing her to the ground.

We were now a few meters apart, and I was on my feet which was definitely an improvement. As she scrambled to get up, I ran to get between her and the axe, a limp I'd gained from a previous fight slowing me down. Her wavy hair bobbed and she launched in a guttural scream as she propelled herself towards me, shifting her center of gravity towards the ground.

I didn’t wait for her to take me down and launched into a tackle of my own, except I had a dagger pointing at her face. She sidestepped me at the last moment… and kept going for her axe. She was more skilled than I was and had more endurance than me. I couldn’t let this drag on. I would not give up on all the things I had not discovered yet.

As soon as the barbarian girl grabbed her axe, she made a spinning motion to hit behind her. I ducked under it, and she converted the momentum into a step backwards.

I decided to once more give my new best friend a chance, and took a fistful of sand in my sweaty hand. The barbarian started to approach slowly, trying to take advantage of her longer reach. Being small really had a whole lot of disadvantages when fighting.

I threw the sand and she moved one of her hands in front of her eyes to block it, taking a blind swing. The sand wasn’t ever going to get in their eyes anytime soon huh ? Didn’t matter, it had done its job. I grabbed her axe again and pulled, angling my blade so it would reach her eyes.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She tried to grab my wrist, but the blade was already too close. She didn’t have the time. It penetrated her head with a wet sound and scraped something hard behind, but disappointingly didn’t go all the way. She screamed, in a much higher pitched voice this time, letting go of her axe to reach for her head. I held on tight to the dagger and fell back to the side where she now had a blind spot.

Snot began running down her nose as she shot me a tearful look of pure fury. The blood from her eye flowed slowly down her face and throat, some dripping on the ground. She started hyperventilating, each ragged breath she took being closer to her last one. She reached for the weapon she’d dropped, but I rammed into her and started hacking away at her. She lashed out desperately in an attempt to get me off of her, hitting me with a foot or a punch then and there, sometimes beating a place where I'd been hit, but I pushed through and kept at it.

Her every move eventually got weaker and slower, and she eventually just balled up just as every other one of my opponents. It was a shell I now knew how to crack easily. I stabbed her in the back multiple times, sometimes clanging against her ribs. Spurts of blood Left her each time I jerked the knife out.

I fell on my back once I was sure that even if she lived she’d be too beat up to put up a fight.

I put my hand that was slick with blood on her axe, hoping it would be enough to keep the Pit from claiming it.

[ Sufficient kills. Rest to shift. ]

The fruits of my labor, it seemed. When I got up, the girl’s corpse had indeed disappeared, and the axe was still in my hand.

Markus, which I hadn't even seen arrive, hefted me up to my feet. He had the closest thing to a genuine smile I'd seen from him, eyes shining with glee. " You did a bloody good job, boy. I'm proud of you." I could tell he truly meant it for the first time.

I felt nice. Validated. As if this senseless killing had some meaning. Did it ? Did it matter if it had a sense or not, if this felt nice ?

Questions without answers. For now.

"With this, you've earned a place in the Pit. The food isn't good, and the beds are worse but it beats sleeping on the sand and starving to death."

... I could definitely go for food and a night's rest right about now. As we walked towards one of the wall's many openings, I saw one of either Ben or Jim hit the giant gong at the Pit's highest point, the sound reverberating deafeningly as always.

We passed through a doorless arch, revealing a simple but wide, tall and long corridor and a pair of stairs to upper and lower levels. The walls were the same crimson red the Pit was made of, and simple cavities in the wall held flames that wavered but didn't die and lit up the passage well enough. The flames had no apparent source, and they did not emit heat. I tentatively passed my hand through one of them behind Markus' back, but the old man chuckled when I did anyway. "They're not real, just illusions." I marveled at them as we descended the stairs, a bustling noise of clinks, chatter and hearty voices coming from down below. Many smells were mixed together, that of fresh beer, warm stew and spices.

We stepped into the gigantic mess hall, and the noise and smells hit me hard. The ceiling was a few meters higher than needed in a normal room, but some of the occupants were truly gigantic. A cyclops' head almost grazed the ceiling, and he was hunched over talking to a positively tiny faerie that floated in front of his door-sized eye. People, creatures from myths and far realms bustled between tables, some engaging in discussions and card games with others, some nursing their tankards alone. There was a long queue of waiting people towards a place where they gave out bowls of varying size filled with various foods, but it didn't seem you could choose. The staff threw food in the bowls quickly, picking at random in what they had.

Markus kept walking, and so I followed. We weaved through and sometimes under the people of different size from the crowd and the tables. We eventually reached two familiar black and muscled warriors. We sat down besides Ben and Jim and they handed us some bowls. I had some yellow soup with mushrooms and various vegetables thrown inside, while Markus had some meat that looked like and was probably as hard as a boot's sole.

"It's good to see you're still kicking. Wouldn't be proper if you'd just died on us" said Jim.

His mustached counterpart shook his head "Still, kind of sad to see a boy your age have to kill."

I just realised they'd all took me for a child... Which, I debatably might have been. Though if I'd just been freed from a stasis, I might have been older than any of them.

"What age do you think I am ?"

"Well, not much more than 15 that's for sure. You're not that tall and you lack the musculardefinition that comes with age. Am I right ?"

"I don't know."

They looked vaguely perplexed by this, but they just shrugged at the same time and moved on. They didn't pry, about my life, which I was somewhat thankful for since I could only have told them that I didn't know a lot more than they did. Still, what was a normal life like ? Markus looked somewhat amused at the misunderstanding.

We ate in companionable silence, the old man giving me his plate saying I needed it more than him. I pondered my situation and realised all of them were hardened killers of tens, hundreds or thousands that could probably make a red smudge on the wall out of me. And not just Markus, Ben and Jim, but every single living being in the mess hall. I didn't feel fear nor stress. Just an understanding that I wasn't exactly safe with them.

A bored Lyn came towards our table, though her expression lightened up when we locked eyes. She sat at our table "The reports you asked for are on your desk". Markus nodded, his expression not changing in the slightest. "So, how was your fight ?"

"They went well. Got hurt, but I'm still alive." I was happy to be alive, in case it wasn't obvious.

She looked towards the old one with a questionning gaze "They ?"

He nodded and smiled, saying nothing. The twins looked like a bulb had gone off in their heads and looked at me with renewed interest.

A flash of anger passed through Lyn's face before it disappeared into a controlled blankness, then she looked at me worryingly. "Are you okay ? You look-"

Markus cut in "He's waiting on the first shift."

She and the twins looked stunned, and it didn't seem to ease her worries. "This is not what we had discussed."

He just kept his face perfectly still, in that signature casual and unsettling fake smile "Do I look like I care ?"

She once again schooled her features to perfect neutrality. Marius nodded "Good."

An awkward though heavy silence I didn't understand went on for quite some time, and I finished my plate until the twins cut in. "Well congrats little man! Sure didn't expect you to be such a killer, but you did good". It felt nice to be complimented by them. Less than when Markus had, but still. Would Lyn compliment me too ?

"Lyn, take him to his room." We left the giant mess hall, and she led me up multiple flights of stairs. There were no windows, probably to keep the inside from getting too warm because of the lack of night. She looked lost in thought and glanced at me every few moments, the worry and concern bubbling back up to the surface.

"You didn't get hurt too bad ?"

I had a few bruises, a few scratches and I'd probably wake up all achy tomorrow, but it could've been much worse. "No."

"Are you okay ? You know, I care for you. If it's too hard you can just tell me."

I shrugged, the fact I wasn't affected all that much probably was very apparent on my bruised face "Yes".

Apparently, this didn't make her less worried or anxious. She led me to a room with the number 379, a few chilly alleys farther. "That's your room. Don't hesitate to leave stuff there, other people can't enter. Well, most of them at least."

I nodded, waiting for her to leave. But she didn't. She observed me carefully and asked the question that had been weighing on her mind "Did you enjoy killing those people ?"

I thought about it long and hard. "Not really. The fights are fun. I like winning them. It gives me a rush and compliments. So I guess killing makes me feel good ?" She sighed. Had I disappointed her ? I ... I wanted her to approve of what I did.

She spoke to me as if I was a child, which she probably thought I was. One very deranged and on a killing spree, but a child nonetheless "Look, it's bad to kill."

"Why ?"

"You take their choice away. Yes, you could say that crippling them or forbidding them from doing something is bad too, but that's not what I mean. When you kill someone, that's the only time where you do something that can't be taken back. You close that door, and it's the only one that can't open again."

"But why is that bad ?"

"Would you like your choices to be taken away ?"

"No."

"Well then don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you." This made me think a bit. It was a sound argument...

"But... They're not me."

She thought for a moment, opening the door to my room and leading me inside. It was a plain box of sandstone with a bed inside, cracks running along the surface of the floor. I couldn't tell if they were decorative or signs that the coliseum would collapse any day now. A simple flame akin to the ones in the alley sparked into existence a few seconds after we entered. We sat on the bed and I dropped my knife and my new axe on the wall, the door closing by itself.

"What do you want in life ?" a deceptively easy question. Then again, I'd only been living and awake for a few days at most, maybe my answer would change with time.

"I want to learn and discover. I yearn for novelty, for understanding of the world, its mecanisms and its people."

"Well then, why do you enjoy killing ?"

"Killing in itself isn't what brings me joy. It's fighting to the death, seeing my opponent's capacities in their fullest. I enjoy when they're going all out, with nothing to hide and everything to win and lose. When I can see everything they can do, all they are."

She chuckled humorlessly, on her face a dispirited and sour smile "You're a child that breaks his toys to see what's inside." She gazed at me with her eyes the color of wheat in the setting sun, still trying to get me to understand her. "They could have been so much more. Made and created so many things. What you see when you fight them isn't everything there is to their person. It's just how good they can fight on one day. They could have learned too. Shown you things. Built and sculpted amazing places, created wonders. Every single thing you see has been made by nature or another person."

It hit me harder than any of the punches I'd taken today. They had lives of their own, and so they were constantly evolving. Fighting might have been discovering, but killing certainly wasn't. And fighting certainly wasn't all there was to their lives.

"Do you understand ?"

"Yes. Sorry."

She smiled in a way that was both sad and happy. "Good. You did good today by the way. I'm not angry at you, I know you didn't have much of a choice. Their isn't much I can do about the old monster though."

I felt even better than when the others had approved of me. Why ? Why was I more attached to her than them ? Because she cared about me ?

"See you. Don't die." She hugged me and left.

I didn't even feel my eyes close and my breath slow down, and before I knew I was asleep.

[ Shift initiated ]