The voice continued on repeat for another few minutes until Sam got up with a groan and dressed himself. Walking down the hall, he was met with an army of piercing stares from some of the other fighters.
Cursing Berrigious for the hundredth time, Sam ignored them and made his way to his destination. The area was noticeably emptier than before, yet another reminder of the lives lost in the previous event. Everything that Sam looked at were yet more reasons for Berrigious to die, and he knew this without the influence of his Dao of the Arbiter. It was just a fact, simple as that. As the last few stragglers trickled in, Berrigious appeared, with his signature flouncing movement.
“Greetings, my beloved fighters. I apologize for any injuries that might have been caused by the monster hunt, emotional or otherwise. You must understand, it was not my idea.” The man surreptitiously looked at Sam with the last sentence, making it abundantly clear to everyone who was to blame. Sam gritted his teeth in rage and tried to control himself. The man was trying to get under his skin, and so far, it was working. By apologizing for what had happened, he was making it seem as if Sam was not willing to take responsibility for what had happened, and of course, nobody believed him over the arena host, except for Eduardo, Profound Visionary and strangely enough, the Overlord. In any case, if somebody tried to make a big deal out of it, Sam was confident in his ability to defend himself. Eduardo flashed him a quick look of solidarity, and Sam gave him a weak smile back. Then he looked back up towards the front of the room and waited for Berrigious to continue.
“Now that we are down to you all, it's time to restart the tournament. I have rearranged the matches based on the losses that we incurred during the hunt and you will all be matched up against a new fighter. Our first match for today is, the Arbiter versus Reaper!” Berrigous smirked at Sam as he walked up alongside Reaper, the other man barely containing his rage towards Sam.
Outwardly Berrigious was smiling, but on the inside he was seething. He had been this close to getting Sam to break his other Dao during the hunt, but it had suddenly stopped. Nothing had been visible to him that could have caused such a change, and it was completely inexplicable. The System imprint had assured him that it had not detected anything out of the ordinary, so Berrigious was left to project an aura of calm to the world when he was really furious at Sam. His only hope now was to make the man enraged again, but there was something different about him this time.
In the time since Berrigious had last seen him, it was almost as if his Dao had vanished. Berrigious could no longer feel its presence, and there was no way that Sam had already figured out how to mask his Dao. He was a prodigy, yes, but not to that level. Berrigious had made sure that Sam was matched up against those who were the most antipathetic to him and Reaper was the first of a long list of fighters that were baying for Sam’s blood.
With a smile, he ushered them into the arena where they were greeted by the bleating cheers of the crowd. Sam snarled up at them, disgusted by how little they valued human life. It was like how the Romans enjoyed watching their bloodsports, only in an era where people were supposedly beyond that. The System had brought many benefits, but also had brought society back thousands of years socially speaking. Sam wondered if it was like this in the more civilized universes, or if they were like Earth had been before the System came. All that Sam could do now was endure.
Reaper faced off against him, the man’s face a mask of pain and rage.
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“Did you even know the names of the people that you killed?’ He whispered to Sam. Sam growled and tried to stop himself from launching himself at the man. It was not Reaper’s fault. He had been duped by Berrigious, a man with what was probably hundreds of years of experience with manipulation, or perhaps even longer. With a blast of noise, the battle commenced and Sam raised his hands to placate the other man. Sam was sure that he could easily dismantle Reaper in a real fight, but he wanted him to know the truth first.
“Reaper, I did not plan that hunt. Berrigious is messing with all of us, and I don’t know why.”
The other man’s face creased in confusion.
“Why on Earth would he do that? You’re probably just lying to me.”
Sam gaped at the man in amazement. Just how hard headed could he be?
“Why the hell do you trust an alien from some other universe over another human? He's goddamn pink for crying out loud!” For the first time, Sam noticed something off about the other man. His face was slightly slack, at odds to his appearance earlier. Now that Sam thought about it, there was a slight delay between his words and his mouth moving, almost as if he was being controlled by something else. With a gasp, Sam understood. Berrigious was mind controlling all of the other humans to believe that he had wished for the deaths of the others. This was all some sort of sick game to the man, probably to hype up his show rating or whatever the multiversal equivalent was. It was a lot easier to run a tournament when the fighters hated each other. With a sigh, Sam resolved himself to the fight, and if he was being honest, he felt a bit angry at the people for being duped. It was clearly a matter of willpower, as three of the fighters were unaffected by Berrigious’ control. It was somewhat Reaper’s fault in any case.
Sam waited until the man had begun to charge, and then he sank back into a weapon stance. For this battle, he was going to go with a more elegant and rapid fighting style as opposed to the other ones that he had available. His movements became as the water itself as he twisted around, mimicking the motions of a whirlpool. As Reaper came in, his face twisted in anger, Sam sucked his free arm into his spinning embrace and caught it with his mace. As soon as his skin touched the ectoplasm, it began to burn, until Sam remembered something. He pressed the button on his brooch and winced as the spike drove itself into his body. The burning started to ebb as the brown pattern spread over his body and it soon became manageable. He grinned at Reaper and then continued the motion.
Twisting his arm to face the sky, he thrust it up and threw Reaper into the air. With the crack of a hurricane discharging bolts of lighting, Sam drove his elbow into Reaper’s face as he fell down. It slowed as it approached, as he entered the field of ectoplasm, but he powered through and struck the man’s face.
He spiraled backwards into the arena wall, indenting himself into it. The man was relatively unharmed however, and he quickly got to his feet, extricating himself from the wall. With a bellow of anger, he raised both of his hands and transformed them into two spinning drills of energy. Pointing them at Sam, they both split off from the arms and shot towards him at hundreds of miles per hour. Sam’s eyes widened and he summoned his shields just in time. The drills spun against them like a pair of angry bees, and a humming noise came off the weapons as they began to drill through the barrier. Sam tried to increase the size of the barrier, but his mana bar was rapidly dropping.
Reaching for his Dao, but finding nothing there, he instead unwittingly drew upon his nascent Meridian. The yellow energy that he had seen during the vision started to trickle out of him in a tiny stream of energy that rushed into the holes caused by the drills. With a cracking noise, they began to heal over and the drills were pushed out, the rotational energy spent. Sam reached for more, but he could not find any. It seemed that his foray into the elements was already paying dividends, but it was still orders of magnitude weaker than anything anyone else had in the arena. Sam imagined that he had felt a tiny part of that energy come up from the sand beneath him, but it could have been his imagination. With a smile, he stretched his hand out and curled it towards himself, beckoning for Reaper to come at him.