abel [https://imgur.com/gfZpXk6.png]

As soon as Abel realized that he had been sent back to the square room and the overly animated voice called out for the contests to begin anew, he leaned on the nearest wall, panting hard, glad to be away from both Bernard and Zeal.

The handful of people remaining in the room ran to his side. One of the women screeched, pointing to the blood running down his leg. Two men helped him down to a seated position against the wall. One began to finger at the cloth surrounding the wound, but Abel swatted him away.

Across his vision, his panel appeared. The HUD showed the same list of weapons as it had the first time. “Sabre,” He whispered. The weapon materialized before him in the air. Those around him glanced at the curved steel in disbelief.

“Abel, what happened? You’re bleeding bad. Did someone try something?”

Above them, the crowds were roaring to life. He had forgotten to ask Lyssa what was happening between rounds to get them all so riled up.

“I fell,” he said, then, unsure why he was hiding the information, started anew. “I got pushed down one of the ramps.”

When he had received the wound, the pain had been bearable, once the initial shock and bleeding had stopped. He’d been a bit light-headed walking around the halls above, adrenaline pounding through his veins still, but he had been recovering.

Then he had been pushed, landing on the bad leg, feeling it twist and rip beneath him. Now he was wondering if he would ever walk again. If he would survive in the stands, even if he quit.

“Pushed?” the woman snapped. “Who pushed you?”

“Bernard.”

“Bernard?” a man asked, a rise in his voice, “Who is Bernard? Why would he do that? Stop hitting my hand away, I need to look at how bad this thing is.”

Abel winced, closing his eyes as the man untied the cloth wrapped around his leg, the air of the room feeling cold, stinging the exposed flesh.

“Who is Bernard?” someone repeated their question. He was losing his sense of direction as the man inspected the area surrounding his wound with practiced fingers.

“I met him on the train,” Abel said in quick, low words, failing to keep the pain out of them. “The trains, I came here on one of the trains, he was on the same car. We stayed in the apartment building, Daryl brought up, he’s a level three Kara user. Sarah and Lyssa were there too. But Lyssa couldn’t stay with us because-”

“Calm down, Abel,” the man said, looking up from his work. “I’m going to tie you back up. It’s no worse than it was, but you just ripped it back open. You fell onto your left side, didn’t you?”

He nodded, breathing sharp through his nose as the man squeezed the cloth back around his leg.

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“You’ll be fine. I’m actually shocked it bled as much as it did, I was scared you had punctured an artery. Just relax, you’re okay.”

The words melted the panic and tension inside of him. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, like I said before, it’s deep but nothing important got severed. You’ve still got all the parts you need intact. I’m not saying it will heal anytime soon, but you won’t need surgery.”

“So I can fight,” Abel said.

“I’m not going to say no,” the man said, standing up. The sabre was still hanging in the air before Abel, motionless. They both looked at it. “But I strongly advise against it. There can’t be too many competitors left now, if our room is anything to go by. We’ve got...five, six people left. What I’m trying to say is: the cream rises to the top, and you’ll only be fighting the best the city has to offer.”

“Or maybe I’ll just get put against a tiger again,” he said as a joke, but imagining that happening, realizing it was a distinct possibility, made his small smile fade instantly.

“You’ll quit if that happens,” the man said, firm.

“Yes, I will,” Abel agreed.

“Well at least you’ve still got some sense in you.” The man put his hand on his shoulder, then got to his feet. “You’re just lucky you’ve got a nurse in your room or you might not have made it to that intermission.”

They shared a laugh. Abel reached out and grabbed the hilt on the sabre, which gained weight in the blink of an eye, losing whatever mystical property had allowed it to float before him. The others in the room chose their weapons, the same as before.

Then their panels appeared, showing them two fighters in pits. The crowds quieted slightly. Bernard was one of the fighters. Across from him...

Abel turned his gaze to quickly scan the room around him. There were no longer six, there were five. The woman who had been at his side moment’s before was now in the pit, only several paces from Bernard’s glaive.

“Oh, not you,” she whispered. The crowds didn’t laugh at the words: they were likely thinking the same.

Bernard started towards her. She lifted her short sword up over her shoulder. That’s not how I taught you, Abel began to think, disgruntled at how quickly she had forgotten. Then he realized she wasn’t holding the weapon to swing it, she was preparing to throw it. Bernard made the realization late as well.

The blade circled through the air like a boomerang, catching Bernard in his non-dominant arm as it passed him. If she’d waited another few moments, it may have caught him in the chest, Abel realized with some fright.

Bernard cussed, inspecting the blood flowing from the wound, then turning back to woman. “You-”

“Surrender,” she raised her hands in the air.

They both vanished from the pit.

“That,” Abel said into the quiet around him, “was Bernard.”

The others in the room looked at one another. “That guy pushed you down the ramp?”

“Yeah, he’s the one.”

“How do you know him again? You said something about a train earlier, but it was hard to understand you.”

“We were on the same train coming into the city. There were five of us.” There were four of them now. If he wasn’t careful, there would only be three.

“Why is he doing this to you, then?”

Abel shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure. I don’t think he’s the person we thought he was. I’m not sure we ever thought he was that person to begin with, actually, he’s always been a little shady.”

“Well now he’s a murderer,” someone said. “So I don’t think there is much question. Still, isn’t it a weird coincidence? That you-”

They vanished. The brief intermission between rounds had passed.

He thought he knew what the man was going to say. That you know the person who killed Brian. But that wasn’t the most notable coincidence that he was thinking of. Isn’t it weird that Bernard has gone against the most poor fighters the arena has to offer? That he has rarely needed to fight, compared to others? That he had been set to fight against Brian, the person Abel had grown closest to during these competitions, and that Bernard had, seemingly by accident, been forced to kill him?

Abel wondered if they were truly coincidences. But he was terrified to think of the alternative: that it was being done on purpose. By the plentiful super computers buried beneath the city. By the eye in the heavens. By the voice in their ears: Sky Sight.

But why me?

“Okay,” the man who had nursed his leg said suddenly, “I have a plan.”