"Alright, you lot, get out," said a familiar voice. It took a moment, but I realized it belonged to the person who had forced the water down my throat.

A heavy thud of metal resounded as a line of light split the far wall in two, eventually opening up to expose me and the others to the early morning sun. Not a wall. Doors.

The man wasn't actually a man after all. He was short and sported shimmering green scales all along his body. Yellow eyes fell on us as the doors opened and I immediately became more wary of the man. I couldn't be sure, but if the lizard-like creature was what I thought he was, he could burn us to ashes in seconds.

Those slaves who could move on their own gingerly stepped out into the sunlight, while the others, too feeble to jump down from the box, were roughly pulled to the ground by the male slaver. I hopped down by myself. If my slave tattoo hadn't been stained onto my forearm while I was unconscious, it would have been the perfect opportunity to escape.

I wasn't completely certain what the slave tattoos did in this world, but back in Ordite, a slave attempting to escape would trigger its tattoo to inject powerful poisons into the system. Not enough to kill the slave, but enough to temporarily put them into a coma, making retrieval easier.

Until now, faced with the threat of that poison and with the embedded skull wrapped in chains tattooed on my arm, I had never truly understood the cruelty of slavery. I don't think I'd even tried to consider it. Slavery was simply a result of war and disputes between Kingdoms. If you won, you gained free labor. If you lost, you became it. Like everything else in war, it was a gamble you took by putting your life on the line.

Or that's how it had always been portrayed to me. Did I ever take a moment to think about the slaves not created from war? I hadn't done that either.

Luckily, the energy usage in the world, other than the progenitor, proved itself incredibly weak. The energy from a properly formed core would shatter the tattoo's binding like a knife through warm butter. I just had to get there.

The box I exited was an odd contraption. It was almost like a carriage, but not exactly. Like a carriage, it was horse-drawn and had wheels. That was where the similarities ended. The entire body of it was a singular large wooden box with hundreds of wards carved on every inch. Other than the door on the far side of it and the hole on top, there weren't any openings. Just a space of about ten feet by ten feet. As I looked around, I counted at least twelve other similar contraptions arriving.

The area we'd been unboarded into was completely barren. No trees or grass in sight. No animals either. Other than the box-like wagons and the slaves, there was only sand. Piles, no, hills of sand.

"Okay, listen up," the lizard creature shouted after everyone had lined up, side by side. "Let's get this straight. I'm sure most of you have figured out by now that you're fucked. You've been tagged with slave tattoos and are bound to whoever I choose to sell your useless selves to. Some of you are here because you're criminals, some because you're poor, and others," he looked pointedly at me, "are just really fucking unlucky. Tough shit. No, I don't care about your problems. No, begging me won't work. If you cause me problems, I will kill you. Or I'll sell you to the most evil fucker I can find. I don't like doing that; they usually don't pay well, but I'm a petty motherfucker. Don't test me. My associate here," he motioned to a brusque-looking woman I guessed to be the voice giving the man orders earlier, "is going to speak briefly with each of you, and we're going to decide where to sell you. If you lie, you die. If you cry, you die. Remember, I don't care about you, so don't make me waste breath ending you." He nodded toward the human woman, and she walked to the first in line, the giant half-orc.

The first thing I noticed about her was that she was enormous. Taller than Marisar by a good amount. When she moved, she didn't walk. She stomped. I couldn't be certain of her species either, but the woman held a striking resemblance to a giant I once knew who had a watered-down bloodline. Her shoulders were as wide as she was stocky. Her jaw was hard-set, and her eyes were a muddy brown that reminded me of frozen dirt. Dark, brown hair fled down her large frame until it tapped against her waist.

"Name," the giant-like woman asked, towering over the half-orc.

"Gronch," he replied, looking like he wanted to pick his nose. He scratched it instead.

"Tell me, Gronch," she didn't so much say the name as she did spit it. "Are you good for anything other than bloodshed?"

"Nah."

She moved down the line, going one by one. Sometimes she conversed with the slave, and other times she simply asked a few questions. On rare occasions, she would ask a single confirming question before moving on, as she had done with Gronch.

There were a lot more human slaves. In fact, the odd races I'd been faced with in the box were actually rare. Other than the ones I'd been trapped with, I only saw maybe four or five of their kind. Weird.

I was in the middle of the line, stuck next to a fat dwarf who kept muttering words I didn't understand, but figured to be curse words by his tone, and an older human woman to my right who kept casting annoyingly furtive glances in my direction. The look in her eyes was... strange. Like she was looking straight through me. The fact her eyes were completely white didn't help the eerie feeling.

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When the giant woman finally reached me, I knew what my options were. There were four main places we were being "interviewed" about: the pleasure palace, the arenas, the mines, and the front lines. The pleasure palace was easily the most desired place among the slaves, which I understood. Of the four, it sounded like it would be the safest. Perhaps even good for those who didn't have an issue with what they'd be giving away.

She barely looked at me for a second before scribbling something in the little red book she'd been carrying around. "Hmmm... I think the palace will do for you. Don't think you'd fetch much coin anywhere else." She started toward the dwarf.

"No," I responded, not letting her move on. "You will send me to the arena."

"I don't think so. Now be quiet before I-"

"I will fight," I interrupted. Whatever threat she had been about to say died on her lips. "I can fight in the arena or I can fight in the pleasure palace. Either way, I'm going to fight." The words might have sounded silly coming from any other young girl, but even to my ears, it did not sound ridiculous. I was royalty in my blood and my soul. Others had always felt that back in Ordite even if I wasn't announced. I knew now wouldn't be any different.

"... If you insist." The giantess jotted something else down. I had a feeling it was not a comment about the nobility of my stance. "We'll see how you do. If you survive your first fight, I'll consider making it permanent. Be prepared. The slavers spent some good coin on that healing pill they saved you with. The only fights letting them break even will be definite death for you."

"We'll see," was all I said. The woman next to me was also being sent to the arenas. There was no sense to that decision, and I was fairly certain the woman was blind, despite how often I caught her staring at me.

The dwarf was sent to the mines and the fae-looking girl from earlier was being sent to the palace. She screamed and begged for anywhere but there. She whimpered something about elves being tortured and killed in the palace. Her tattoo mark knocked her out almost instantly. Her cries ended with a sad choking noise.

Those headed to the palace were placed back into the boxes and carried off first. The next to go were the miners. Then the front lines. The arena fighters were last. We didn't set off until the last of the new slave soldiers disappeared over the horizon. There were around a hundred of us left. We all stood there, unsure what to do until the giantess clapped her hands.

"Let's go fighters. I'll introduce you to your new homes."

She walked in the same direction as the slave soldiers, and we followed. For the first few minutes, the giantess simply led us further into the desert. Maybe she was leading us into the desert to die.

Then, with a pop, I was somehow at the entrance of a city gate. The grey stone walls of the city glowered down at me as I gawked in surprise. Just like the boxes, these walls had strange warding etched into their surfaces.

Circulating around the city boundaries appeared to be an endless ocean of sand. I realized at that moment we had stepped through some sort of energy barrier. I hadn't felt the pull of being teleported, but this giant city in front of me had not been there a second ago. Standing guard at a single, giant entrance gate were a group of armed men each strapped with a decorated sheathe embedded with a red hawk.

"Ah, welcome back, Chella," one of the men clad in full suit armor said, giving a nod to the giantess. "And Dralos, you too." The last one was said with disdain. The male slaver shot some insult at the guard with equal vehemence. "Good load?"

"Ay," Chella answered. "Lots of spirit among these new Meats. Got some I bet folks will be real excited to see die." She stuck a thumb at me. "This one even volunteered. Some real guts she's got."

"Meh," the armored guard mocked. "We'll see whether she can keep those guts inside her." The two of them laughed while Dralos snickered, despite his animosity toward the guard.

"Any of 'em gonna be thrown inta the evenin' fights?" the guard asked after his laughter died down.

Chella shrugged. "I doubt it. Unless the Boss already booked fights for some of them, I'd bet the spots are all taken." The guard grunted and let Chella through. I followed close behind, trying to catch a glimpse of the inner city.

Unfortunately, the barracks for arena fights were less than a full minute's walk from the city gate. I barely had time to see anything other than a few buildings that looked like inns or taverns. The outline of the arena loomed over everything else in the city except for the actual city walls, so I'd seen that fairly easily. There had been some distant noise of commerce, so I figured there was maybe a bazaar, but I had no way of knowing if that was true. All too soon the group of us were herded into a barren stone building and down a long flight of stairs. The walls of the stone building and all the way down the stairs, there was nothing. Not even a single torch. Little balls of white light dimly illuminated the stairway, but that was it. I figured the light was manipulated by wards somewhere in the building since I didn't spot Chella or Dralos supplying any of the heart energy running them.

We climbed down the stairs for what felt like hours. It took at least ten times as long as it had taken us to get from where we'd offboarded the wagon to the city gates before we finally reached the bottom. According to Chella, there was a tunnel connecting the barracks to the arena so we wouldn't have to climb back up, but that would only be accessible to us when accompanied by a slaver or arena official.

The bottom was also quite empty aside from some cubicles of space we were told were called personal areas. Each fighter was given a personal area containing a bed, a small sewer hole, and a single shelf. I sat on the bed, still utterly exhausted. Everyone's beds were placed against the stone wall, cupped on either side by bland and dirty grey curtains. With us at the bottom were more of the dim white balls of energy. Or maybe it was from that "magic" I'd heard about. I thought they seemed dimmer down here than they were on the stairs, which seemed wrong. Why would the lights be dimmer where there was less light? I was assigned one near the middle, which I assumed was supposed to match up with my spot in the slave line earlier. We had likely been numbered at some point. I sat down on the bed and almost laughed.

It was sturdier than the bed in Lilliana's bed chambers.

A fat man with an incredibly bulbous head suddenly came bumbling down the stairs well, wheezing hard like the very air was playing tag with him. He shouted, sounding panicked, "Madame Chella, the Boss needs at least three Meat sacrifices for tonight's arena bouts. Princess Aurora just now notified us of her appearance during this evening's Sun Setting Festival."

"What's the Sun Setting Festival?" I asked Marisar, moving to push aside the curtain of his personal area on my left so I could get a view of him. He was also sitting on a bed, glancing up at me when he heard the shambling of his thin privacy being shoved to the side.