Cut hated fights, and yet fights were drawn ever to her. It was a barbaric thing, to put one’s strength against another, to slam fists into skull, skull into nose, and then finally, when one fool was moving and the other was not, call the more brutal of them a victor. She didn’t hate the blood, the pain, even the death, no… She hated that it proved nothing and yet people pretended it did, like a woman was somehow more than whoever she was able to kill.

That was why she loathed it, but then again… who actually liked their job?“You ready Cutter?” Toothpick asked, back against the changing room’s far wall, eyes drifting lazily across its interior. He was an ugly bastard, as were most who’d spent as much of their youth being punched in the head as him, but the lines of grey along what few of his hairs remained, and the roundness of his belly, told loud and clear that his fighting days were over. These days Tooth only helped others become as ugly as him.

“Always am,” Cut said. Sitting on the bench, she had to tilt her head up to meet his gaze. “You always ask that you know?” She added. “Like you’re leading some bloody bug into the Sieve.”

Mention of the Net’s more illustrious sister left her wondering how different its changing rooms were. They probably smelled less of piss and blood, Cut reasoned.

Toothpick shrugged in the way men did when they wanted to seem sagely, but had nothing sagely between their ears to be shared.

Seeing that she’d get no more out of the old man she reached into her bag and drew out her knuckles.

They were old things, made from iron that an alphoe might have smelted, dull grey facings abraded by hard use, tainted by the creeping presence of rust that spread like festering sores no matter how she tried to scrape it back. There were areas where the metal thickened, or thinned. The scars from points where she’d broken it against a particularly tough oponent. It was a shit weapon, and still she understood just how dangerous it was, even before she’d done it herself Toothpick had been careful to hammer home just how easily a solid hit could split skulls open like firewood.Cut was already on her feet when the cunts entered, five of them at a quick count. She was sure they were distinct, somehow. They could tell each other apart after all. For the life of her, she had no idea how. Every one seemed a damned copy of the others, pressed out by those steam-powered printers that were spreading like wildfire.

It was their leader who spoke first. “Cutter, how’s our champion feeling?” Danny Eksha asked, wearing the smile of a man who knew they had the most punchable face in the world, and that the person before them could not enjoy the luxury of punching it.

“Like she’s having her way blocked,” She said, careful to keep her features stiff and her hands far from his throat.

She’d known of the Eksha family since she was a kid, as had most in her corner of the city. The stories of blood and bodies spread well.

A family of ruthless killers, and Cut would be making a great effort to ensuring she didn’t soil herself at their very presence. Had the presence belonged to any of them at all, except Danny fucking Eksha.

He’d not inherited any of the Eksha ‘charm’, not his father’s towering physique and certainly not his mother’s brains, in fact Cut doubted the good miss Eksha were even present for his birth. Ekshas oozed with a silent promise of violence and dangerm in Cut’s experience, even at an age as young as his twenty. But this one just oozed. “Relax, I just want to have a chat,” Daniel said, trying, Cut thought, to keep her as far from relaxed as he could with the worry of what it was he really planned. Hilarious. It was hard to believe he was five years her senior, he behaved like some fucking toddler who’d wished for an Immortal to make them big.“We’re here for a chat’s all,” One of his idiots parroted, Cut didn’t look behind the man to see who it was, she only heard the laughter that came after from the group. She spared a glance at Toothpick, it might as well have been only him and Cut in the room with how little his demeanour had changed.

“What about?” She asked, locking eyes with the heckling sycophant and feeling some level of satisfaction as she watched his gaze skitter away. There would be no fight, not with them.“Your fight withTwo-Fists today,” The Eksha brat cut in, and Cut could practically see the image of him rehearsing his next words in a mirror, “My mother says-”

“She didn’t say shit Daniel-”

Like a speeding carriage suddenly bereft its wheels, his momentum crashed to a halt, and it took the boy a fair bit of time to gather his wits, when he did it had rage to fill in the cracks in its seams. “My mother said!” He continued, poor sod couldn’t dare veer off-script, couldn’t risk it. “The fight’s got to go Two-Fists’ way.

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“And she sent you to tell me to throw the fight?”

“Y-”

“The family reject, the screw-up, the fucking waste of space with all the resilience of a slashed-open piss bag?” Cut felt the wave of anger swelling, she rode it. “Scuse’ me if that doesn’t sound like something a smart person would do. No, no it sounds exactly like something a fucking simpleton would do, don’t it Toothpick?”

The old man shrugged in a sagely way.

Daniel’s fist curled, arm vibrating with a pitiable, juvenile anger. The group behind him seemed suspended in time, waiting to see how he reacted so they could mimic it, the way all paid-for friends did.

Cut would guess they’d seen him be humiliated time and time again, the only thing that changed was whether or not he could do something about it.

“I’m gonna give you a chance to reconsider that, Cutter,” voice low.

“And I’m going to give you a chance to get out of my way before I do the impossible and make your jaw even weaker,” She said, saw the hesitance in his eyes as his gaze flickered to her knuckles, and knew his mind was racing to the idea of using his advantage in numbers, she couldn’t let that idea take root.

“Everyone saw you walk in here, touch me and you’ll have a lot of people to answer to when their champion enters the arena looking like they already came in from a fight.” Daniel opened his lips but Cut was already continuing. “Your mum will save you, yes… Worst you’ll get is maybe a scolding but your friends over here won’t be as protected, doubt she’ll bother paying their way to safety,” She pressed, nodding over to the wall of cunts behind him before settling her eyes back on their leader. “So it’s either you let me go now, or you and I have a little bit of a scrap right here. I’ll see if I can’t take more than half of you down before the crowd gets you.”

Cut made the decision for him, moving forwards and watching him nearly trip over himself to get out of her way. The group melted back from her right alongside their boss, and Cut was soon in the hallway. “You’re fucking abomination you know that right?” Daniel shouted after her. “Things like you are made when siblings fuck.”

She considered turning around then and there, giving him a new hole to piss out of, but Cut had more important things to focus on. Besides, she’d heard it all before. Sometimes more wittily, sometimes less.

“That was a mistake,” Toothpick said at last as he congealed into the space by her elbow, heavy steps ringing against the floor behind her.

“I know, but I really don’t have time to be killing him.”

“I’m serious Cut,” Toothpick snapped, “The boy’s an Eksha.”

“I noticed, it’s why he isn’t busy picking up his teeth,” Cut interrupted whatever Toothpick was about to say next. “Best I focus on the match ahead.”“Aye,” Toothpick grunted begrudgingly, stroking a grey scruffy beard. “Sieve season’s a tough one.” If by a tough one Toothpick meant as painful as a thorn shoved up her cunt then yes, Sieve season was a tough one.

The Sieve was a competition that brought about the greatest young mystics in the continent to fight one another in the middle of Udrebam. It was the peak of every year, a national tradition, a true display of magic, and not the competition Cut was in. And she was thankful for it, the mystics that made it as far as its third stage could eat her alive.

She was a spark, her kind only had access to a trickle of magic, but it was still enough to be entertaining, and that was where the Net came in. The Sieve’s buzz always brought people of all sorts to the city, and in-between matches they needed something to quell their lust for violence. A poor mans’ Sieve did the trick and the Net was but one of many. Normally, Cut only had to fight the regulars, and the occasional drifter who slipped through the city. But when Sieve season came around, things got a little dynamic, it had become an unofficial tradition for fighters from all of Unix to gather their shit and test their metal in Udrebam, it meant Cut had to deal with opponents she knew nothing about with all sorts of tricky fucking sparks. She hated it, hated the lot of them and hated that her opponent was one such sort…

Two-Fists, what the fuck was she supposed to get from that? That he was not a cripple, Cut guessed, a shame. She’d have an easier time against a cripple.The guessing wouldn’t last long however, each step drew her closer to the arena, the crowd’s noise grew ever closer, a steady rumble. Like a wave crashing into itself, like a wolf’s growl, the tendrils of fear sunk into Cut’s veins in their usual venom, pervading through her body, making her gus squirm and blood her blood chill, it was not a poison she was immune to but it was one she was used to. ‘It will pass,’ she told herself, ‘It will fucking pass,’ and it did.

Cut took one more step forward, and plunged into the Net..