The raindrops fell around Susi as she dropped to one knee amidst the groaning men who clambered to get away from her. She had not killed any one of her targets, but everywhere she looked there was evidence of murder and bloodshed.

A young woman was sprawled in the sand with her face disintegrating and mixing with the grit of this place where she did not belong. Men’s faces were trapped in the horror of their circumstance as they remained suspended in their agonizing death throws.

Her eyes darted back and forth as dozens of guards entered the arena to lift the survivors' heads and cut their throats. Susi stood up as the guards dispersed to her defeated opponents. As easily as if they were preparing cattle for a large dinner, the soldiers slaughtered every downed competitor that still moved.

Susi wore a disgusted face as she glanced at the chancellor who glared down at her with his snide, malevolent stare.

Two guards dragged a seventeen-year-old woman out from the brush and were in the process of getting a good handle on their knives. Susi knocked one guard’s knife out of his hand before thrusting her staff into the chest of the other to knock him down.

She stood in front of the girl as the two soldiers gathered themselves. The rest of the men saw what was happening and advanced upon the two girls. Susi readied her staff.

“Hold!” Ralvese called to the men with his hand raised. He and the chancellor were in communication via some form of crude sign language.

At least twenty soldiers had Susi and the girl surrounded with their weapons raised.

The girl suddenly gasped and grappled Susi’s backside. Susi could sense her pain in the tight hold she had upon Susi’s koromo. All she could do was lower the girl to the ground as the color drained from her face. Susi saw a throwing knife stuck in her side around a blooming red circle that stained her tunic.

Susi looked up from the girl as she clutched her hand. The guards parted for a young man wearing full black and gray quilted chainmail with bladed edges, and a bladed helmet. He wielded a long, pointed lance.

It was one of the champions known as Rhenos. He had been sent to put down the random nuisance that had interrupted the games with their unbelievable skill. Susi released the girl's hand and got to her feet. She glared at the man with her teeth gritted.

“Salve.” He called. The soldiers moved away to give the fighters space.

“You didn’t have to kill her.” Susi said.

“She was dead the moment she entered this field.” Rhenos said. “We all are.” He waved to the crowd that Susi realized was going insane over the coming battle.

“You should be ashamed, killing someone without looking them in the eye.” Susi fought back the tears she wanted to cry over the girl. For whatever reason, as close as she came, she could not let the tears fall. “You’re all so sick it’s not even measurable.”

Rhenos shrugged. “If you were hoping to appeal to my better nature, I’m afraid that abandoned me a long, long time ago. Prepare yourself!”

Susi readied her staff as Rhenos approached. The two circled one another as Susi moved away from the fallen girl. Susi lifted her staff in time to deflect a direct strike from Rhenos. Their weapons crossed and the sound of his lance upon her staff rang throughout the stadium.

He executed a series of maneuvers that Susi blocked. Upon the final strike, the two separated, Rhenos chuckling. “Is that a Talea staff? You think you can win this with the defensive martial art of a pacifist, weak, and dying religion?”

Susi didn’t take things personally often, but Rhenos needed to be educated. The Talea Macto was not a pacifist religion—it was the ultimate religion.

To take responsibility for yourself and the others around you, to understand that there is no leader except we are all leaders, and that redemption is at the end of your own efforts; these are not weak ideals. They are the rules of a warrior.

The speed at which the two began to lash, jab, and defend was uncanny. Susi ducked as Rhenos’s lance swept through the stone behind her, slicing through the sediment like butter.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Susi whirled and slammed her staff into his raised spear. She tried to kick his feet out from under him, but he was too quick. Rhenos hopped her strike and the two broke into another sparring match that ended in yet another stalemate.

His intention was to crush her at all costs. A person’s battle technique was akin to their perspective in life. Rhenos was made to win. Forged in battle, taught to understand weaponry and their many uses, he practiced on the souls that stood opposite to him in every arena. To Susi, this couldn’t hold.

Rhenos was not wrong that the Talea Macto was mostly a pacifist religion. They didn’t take part in the political wars that were waged upon the planet’s surface and remained impartial to the rulers of the day who were always vying to replace one another.

However, that was only the part of the Talea Macto that everyone was familiar with. The pacifist side was the defensive side. This is the fighting technique for keeping yourself and your opponent alive. But if Rhenos was here to kill, Susi would never be able to win without switching to the offensive version of the art.

She thought of the execution strike, Kunha. She was never to use it under any circumstance. The monks only taught it as a reference for what not to do. Dozens of non-lethal moves passed through her mind as her staff connected and clacked off Rhenos’s lance. They could not work because they could not land. A passive outlook could not defeat an intentionally aggressive oppressor.

It was in that moment that Susi realized one must know when to take up arms to defend oneself. It had nothing to do with survival of the fittest, but it was to be a gatekeeper, the one who bars the exit from the killer, the one who turns wrong to right, the one who says 'no, you cannot have your way'. One must stand when it is time to stand.

Susi saw the end ahead, and it was going to cost her everything.

The Three Move Cross—one-by-one-by-one—unfolded, and then it happened. It happened like a dream. She was going to kill him: she knew this as she had a seeming eternity to swing her staff on the final blow across his skull that would have enough force behind it to end a life.

The staff went out—and then shattered across his face.

Everything happened slowly. The gray bladed mask tore on his right side as a spray of splinters exploded from the strike. Rhenos went spiraling to the ground as Susi gaped at the broken staff she held in her outstretched hand.

The other piece of her staff dropped from the sky several yards away. It was an apprentice’s staff, which is why it was made to break under such massive force. How odd that it had happened under her first legitimate kunha execution strike.

It was as though the volume was suddenly turned up as the hordes of people in the stands roared in unison, except they didn’t seem happy. They sounded enraged.

Susi looked around to see if Rhenos was really down. Only someone who had seriously trained for extensive periods of time like a Talea monk would be able to keep up with her. He moved like the monks did—outside of time, without worry of space or distance.

She went to retrieve the other half of her quarterstaff. As she did, the crowd roared their disapproval. Instead of cheering for her, a furious booing took over the patrons in the stands, which infected the rest of the audience.

Several guards entered the field and stopped about ten yards short of her, not wanting to get too close. They beckoned for her to follow.

Susi looked up to the thousands of now infuriated Aallandrons—all of them drunk, all of them indulging in some way or form, all of them fools for their errand in life whatever it may be. They jeered and threw whatever food they could get their hands on toward the field, but Susi followed the guards through the middle of the arena and descended the stairs from which she and the rest of her now murdered faction members had entered.

Susi was reunited with Grobeche in the vorago undercroft. The guards had to bring him inside and bar the doors because the crowd of the arena had transformed into a violent mob.

While Susi had defeated each of her opponents, she chose not to kill any one of them. Everyone she overcame lay writhing in the dirt behind her, neutralized, and as helpless as a newborn baby. Impressive, spiritually beautiful, but it wasn’t what the hordes of blood-thirsty Aallandrons paid good money to see.

Rhenos was supposed to walk away with her head on the end of his lance. The Tornetum was about champions, violence, and bloodshed, so a champion that chose the high road, who chose life instead of death: that person defied the rules of the game, and that person should be punished.

For three long hours, Susi and Grobeche waited in the undercroft before they were summoned to Narcuss Castle via the royal underground passageway. The whole time they walked down the ancient, musty corridor that every city had, Susi couldn’t look at her teacher.

While Grobeche was almost always reserved and patient, Susi knew when he was mad and she had never felt him as mad as he was right now. He was like a searing hot iron, glowing in the dimness of the corridor.

A haughty frustration kindled within Susi in response. What was she supposed to do, let herself be killed? And the way that last guy fought, she didn’t think Grobeche would have been able to survive his ferocity if he had been cast into the ring instead.

As irritated as his silence toward her was, a pang of guilty sorrow filled her chest at the thought of his insides being mangled upon Rhenos’s spear. Hoping his anger with her would fade, Susi followed him quietly as he followed the two guards to the castle.

Her first day of the Tornetum was complete.