Chapter 1-4: Into the Pit
I can barely manage a muffled, pained croak of a scream as I go half-flying, half-falling into that dark, fetid, stinking pit.
Just before my face is about to smash against the rocky ground of the black pit I’m caught by a pair of powerful, foul arms. Hung seems to be ordering him around but my head is becoming fuzzy again.
Must be all the bleeding and dismemberment and almost dying.
Hung laughs boisterously. “Good catch Cutter. The last one ended up with two shattered arms and had to bite the other slaves to death.” Then he mumbles to himself, “Which was actually exceptionally amusing now that I think about it.”
“Thank ya Milord Hung.” Cutter responds respectfully.
“I want a good show tomorrow. Make sure the boy is in it.”
“Yes Milord. Cizin again?”
“He always makes for a good spectacle, very well. Just don’t put the boy up against him, if I wanted him dead immediately I would have done it myself. I wish to have a bit of sport out of him yet.” He grins then continues, “If the boy starts dying on you, try and keep him alive and in pain as long as possible. Then contact me as I would loathe to miss it.”
“Gotcha, make it bloody, painful, an’ long. Anythin’ else Milord?”
“Oh, yes. When he dies I want you to personally serve him up for me. You know what cuts I like.”
“Tongue, eyes, testicles, an’ intestines if I recall correctly Milord.”
Lord Hung smile widens even more. “You know my tastes well. I’ll be back in the morning to spectate then.” He turns around and retreats out of sight.
* * *
“Wake up slave!” Cutter rouses me out of my daze with a slap. Then he pulls the dagger out of my left shoulder. “Milord’s favorite dagger. Must’ave done something hefty to piss em off enough to throw you down here with it. I would say you were lucky he didn’t gut’cha himself, but you weren’t.”
Cutter then puts me down and as my feet hit the floor I slip and fall onto my back.
I’m horrified to find that the ground is squishy and completely covered in dried and drying blood. There is so much that the floor itself seems to be made of blood. The amount required to do this must have come from hundreds, if not thousands, of men and beasts.
The rancid stink down here alone is enough to make me gag and I can literally taste the metallic odor of blood hanging in the air. My eyes water from the noxious stench of rotting flesh.
However the immensely foul odor coming from the grotesque fellow that grabbed me is somehow strong enough to overpower these other pungent smells assaulting me.
His enormously fat body is covered in abscesses and boils oozing some kind of viscous green pus. Instead of hair on his head he has evil-looking, twisting spikes between 2 and 3 cm long and just below this ‘hair’ in the center of his forehead is a large, third eye.
“This is ma butcher pit lad. I’m Boss Cutter, but you will call me ‘Master’ down‘ere.” He introduces himself with a voice that’s part wheeze and part growl. “Once you’re in this pit I’m yer one an’ only lord an’ savior. This is MY holy sanctuary an’ sacred slaughterhouse.”
He stops talking while he nearly coughs a lung out. Kind of wish he wouldn’t continue, he keeps pitting on my face. But contrary to my wishes he starts back up again.
“No one may enter or leave without my, Milord God Hung’s, or His Divine Lord Brother’s express permission.”
After pausing to breathe deeply he looks away from me and bellows hoarsely. “CIZIN!!! I know yer skulking around ‘ere somewhere!” He pauses for a moment and then continues when a shadow starts walking out of a dark corner. “Stem this lad’s bleedin’ so he ain’t dead ‘fore Milord’s show tomorrow. Then take em into the mines!”
When the figure he called Cizin comes fully into what little light is coming down from the large hole in the ceiling I can see that he’s fairly short, maybe 160 cm, but rippling with muscle. A large amount of his body is covered in hard, blood-red scales and the skin that is visible is pale like it’s never been exposed to the sun before. Right at his tail bone a slim serpentine tail extends at least as far outward as he is tall and his eyes are fiery orange with + shaped pupils.
His gaunt face with thin lips completes his rather sinister appearance, but he also has a somewhat sarcastic look to him. I can see he’s wearing a white slave collar just like mine, marking him as another slave.
As soon as he walks up to me he flips me over onto my front as I lay on the ground. It feels like he’s rubbing something moist into my shoulder with the knife wound, and then he pops my right arm back into its socket.
Ow. Couldn’t you be a little more gentle dude?
“Come on, let’s get out of the cage.” When he opens his mouth to talk I see that he has a long quadruple forked tongue and canine teeth that are longer than any human should have.
I struggle up with my one arm and manage to limp after him. In the center of the room where I fell is a huge arena surrounded by large vertical steel bars that are covered in blood, rust, and filth. The bars form a circular cage the same diameter as the hole 15 meters above it and they go about halfway up to the ceiling. In the dead center of the cage is an ominous looking rectangular stone altar. There are four open steel gates evenly spaced around the perimeter of the cage, one of which I exit through behind him.
Outside of the cage is an expansive room with rock seats roughly carved into the walls like steps, they go up the wall almost the entire way to the ceiling. The room outside the cage isn’t much cleaner than inside it as everything is covered in filth, debris, and pus.
Looks like you could seat thousands of people in here. Not the kind of people I ever want to meet though.
When we get to the outer edge of the room he finally greets me, “Welcome to the blood pit, kid. You’re a handsome one, well at least compared to the rest of the Wilders down here. You don’t appear to be one of them. Rare that any of us are thrown in here anymore, most are used for breeding or house-slaves.”
“I’m Zed. He called you Cizin right?” I introduce myself. At least he doesn’t sound like a drooling lunatic and doesn’t want in my pants… yet.
“Yup, I’m Cizin. Chief blood-letter of the pit, so to speak.” He responds in a joking manner.
“You called them Wilders a moment ago, what is that?” I ask.
“What are the Wilders? Maybe you are one of them after all.” He snorts. “All of them are the Wilders.” As he motions towards everyone else in the pit around us. “Revolting, incestuous, genetically degenerate cannibals that run amok all over the surface of the Great Satellites.”
Then he points towards one of the stone seats that line the walls. “Sit down. Let me stitch up that wound on your shoulder.” As I do he gets out a rusty needle and some thread from one of the pockets on his tattered clothing and starts threading the needle.
“You and I are nearly the only ones down here in this cesspool that aren’t Wilders at the moment. The sane ones like us usually die off quickly. Killed by the Wilders, succumbing to disease, or overworked to death.” He explains as he starts stitching my wound shut.
Huh, he looks scary but he doesn’t seem to be the same as the other ones I’ve met so far since coming here. He doesn’t seem to want to rape or kill me immediately.
...Maybe he’s just better at hiding it?
Well whatever, I should try and actually get some information about where the hell I am, what it is they want, and what these people are from him.
“Where are we, anyway?” I ask, trying to get him talking.
“We’re in Lord Hung’s blood pit on the continent of Aegea, kid. Under the surface Gali, the greatest satellite among the Great Satellites eternally circling the Father.” He explains with a tone of voice like I’m an idiot.
The Father must be the planet that we’re in orbit around. I think I saw it while they were dragging me here; it looked enormous in the sky. I have no idea how I ended up here aboard the Vulcan’s Hammer. If we were caught in the warp tunnel closing then it should have torn us asunder and scattered our particles across light years.
“What do these bastards want with us anyway? Is there no way out?”
He looks at me with eyes that question my intelligence; apparently this is common knowledge here.
“What do they want? The Wilders? Are you fucking kidding me?” He says incredulously, “The only things they want are your blood, flesh, and suffering. You’ll entertain them either in life with your ass, hard labor, or gladiatorial combat; or you’ll entertain them in death with your flesh piled high on their plates. Did you hit your head when Hung threw you down here? Knock some of your mind outta you?”
“My heads fine. I don’t understand though, how did it become like this? They make us fight each other to the death? It’s insane, this world makes no sense.”
“It’s been like this for long, long before I was born,” Cizin looks off into the distance like he’s thinking, “and I should be turning 22 and a half cycles old soon. And to answer your other questions, where do you think all this blood came from? Hundreds upon thousands of men have been slain in this pit for the entertainment of Hung and his thugs. I’ve killed more than I can count both in the cage and out of it. And I’ve only ever heard of a few people crawling out of this pit, and none at all since I’ve been here. Even when they do get out it’s only one of two ways: be an unlucky enough of a fucker to be born down here, in which case they take you up to be raised among the field or house-slaves for hard labor, or when they prove their martial skill to Hung or Magnus. Far as I know no one has ever escaped, not that they haven’t tried.” He ends with a knowing grin.
This place is horrible in every way imaginable.
“That asshole Hung called me ‘un-modified’. What did he mean by that?” I ask Cizin.
“Now that you mention it….” He looks me up and down with his fiery eyes. “You ARE un-modified, at least externally. Unless you’ve got 3 dicks and 6 balls under that loincloth.” He chuckles to himself then continues. “Basically none of the Wilders are un-modified anymore. They bred the weaknesses out long ago. You really don’t know what an un-modified is either? Where in the sea of satellites are you from?”
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“I’m from Terra.” I respond. “Now please tell me exactly what they are.”
“Terra? I don’t recall a place called that among any of the satellites. Well I have been stuck down here for a very long time. To answer your question it means you have no additional traits from those of an original man.”
Man? Is the translator not working correctly or are these people somehow human?
I ask him again, hoping he’ll tell me directly. “You mean you’re all Terran then?”
“I don’t understand that word. There is no name for what we are. There are the Wilders and the sane ones like you and me. We’re all the same species if that’s what you mean. And so are you unless you aren’t what you appear to be. You must really be from a very strange place if you don’t know this.”
There were many cybernetically enhanced trans-humans on Terra as well as the inner and outer colonies, the holy God Emperor himself is more machine than man, but these people are different. If they are somehow human it looks like they’ve been genetically spliced or had foreign tissue grafted directly onto their bodies. Neither of these should be possible in the United Terran Empire. The technology just doesn’t exist, not to mention the empire would not allow such experiments to take place.
After a brief silence passes between us. “Okay, shouldn’t bleed out on us by tomorrow at least. Because of you I have to go work in the mines today, thanks for that. Couldn’t you have pissed off Hung another day? Well whatever. This way.” He pulls me up by my arm and motions towards a dark tunnel.
“Wait, what mines?” I don’t like the sound of this either.
“You didn’t think we’d have it so easy as just having to kill each other and be butchered and eaten by the Wilders like pigs, did you?”
“Yes?” I kind of did.
“Well you’re wrong. They only have gladiatorial bouts every few days, or when Cutter or Hung get bored. The rest of the time everyone gets herded into the deep mines to scratch out ore and gemstones for days without rest. It looks empty now because all the other slaves are down deep in the mines being worked like dogs. You’re more likely to be worked to death than killed in a fight. They’ll still butcher you up and eat your flesh though.” He states all of this very matter-of-factly like it barely even matters to him.
Somehow this place manages to get worse and worse every moment, which is kind of impressive considering I’m practically in hell already.
“None of these thugs are going to go with us to make sure we go down there?” I question while looking around the room at the few Wilder guards here that are lounging about, mostly playing some kind of card game and eating meat that I unfortunately suspect is human flesh.
“There’s no need, these collars all have position trackers. If we walk off down a tunnel that’s the wrong way or stop they’ll know almost instantly. Then they’ll hunt us down and make us wish we were never born. Cutter knows I have the tunnels they’re currently mining in memorized.” He urges me to start walking with his eyes. “Come on already before I have to drag your ass the whole way. Got a long way to walk.”
* * *
I’ve been stumbling along behind Cizin and deeper into the blackness of the pit for what seems like hours but was probably only 30 or 40 minutes. It’s surprisingly hard to tell time in this blackness. I would try talking to him to pass the time but I can barely keep up with his pace with my head still being fuzzy from blood loss and my body aching like it wants to give up and fall over after every step.
We pass numerous side paths that snake about in every direction in a mazelike manner, but he really does seem to know exactly where he’s going. He strides forward with an even, confident gait.
I wonder how long he’s been down here for. I can’t imagine anyone surviving in this abyss for any length of time but it seems he has. I don’t even want to think about what he’s seen in his days down here.
He seems friendly enough, but I’m starting to think my initial sinister impression of him was the correct one. He’s far too comfortable and nonchalant down in this fetid pit to be normal, or completely sane.
When he slows down a bit I try striking up a bit of conversation to fill the silent void of these endless tunnels. “Why weren’t you down in the mines with the rest of the slaves? I can see your slave collar and you clearly still have your mind.”
Well… at least more than the Wilders, but I leave that comment out.
“I’ve been Lord Master Hung’s personal favorite for a while now so I’m afforded certain pleasures and comforts. Probably would have been released to serve among his riders cycles ago now but he enjoys my matches too much.” He gets a self-amused smile on his face then continues. “And I’m not so sure about me still having my mind. If you’re the only sane one among insane monsters well, maybe it’s you that’s the crazy one.” He shrugs and picks up his pace again.
* * *
Eventually, after another indeterminable amount of time we start seeing more people in the darkness. We’re passing hundreds upon hundreds of slaves dredging away at the walls and floors of the ever widening tunnels.
They’re using all manner of pickaxes, shovels, and strangely shaped automatic drills of various shapes and sizes. I can’t tell what they’re using to power them. Now I know why the arena room is so large; there really are thousands upon thousands of slaves down here.
For every few dozen slaves there is a guard stationed. Wearing armor that makes them looks like something between an ancient roman soldier and medieval knight. They all have a small metal bucklers or larger round metal shield on their backs and a single long-sword on their hips.
A few of them also have odd looking firearms that are reminiscent of ancient guns that used chemical propellants to fire off soft lead rounds. Those were used for hundreds of years before the unification, but have all but completely disappeared since the God Emperor banned all civilian ownership of weapons of war. There’s no need for them in the military either, as handheld electromagnetic railguns are superior in every way.
It’s strange that they would have all these ancient weapons.
Every once in a while I see one of the guards shock a slave with the long, metal prods that some of them carry. Just the agonizing screams alone are enough to make me cringe. We also passed two guards dragging a Wilder by his feet, and I’m pretty sure he was a corpse. His body was charred almost entirely black and was literally shouldering. Did one of those prods do that to him? They must be extremely powerful to be able to do that to a man.
Strangely, many of the guards that I saw in the cage chamber and the ones we pass down here in the mines seem to be drooling lunatics that make Ben look smart in comparison. That reminds me; when I get out of here he and Den are the first to die.
After we reach a gigantic cavernous room with hundreds of slaves laboring in it Cizin departs into a pitch black side tunnel with a “Don’t die on me kid. See ya tomorrow” after taking a pickaxe. Then two guards come grab me, dragging me towards the other side of the cavern where several other slaves are digging away at it.
When we reach the far side, one of them gives me my own special pickaxe and points me to the wall along with a kick. Looks like I’ll have to start digging or they’ll beat me, or probably much worse. I get to work trying to swing the heavy pick with one arm while attempting, and failing miserably, to ignore my agonizingly sore body.
Looking around at the other slaves most are hideous, deformed, or both. There are men, woman, and children and many of them look practically devoid of life. The ones that don’t look like they’re on death’s door have a deranged, vicious look in their eyes, not much different from the Wilders that guard us.
While attempting to dig I start wondering why I’m so strangely calm and collected about all of this horror around me. The only thing I can think of is that it must be due to the conditioning I underwent as a junior imperial star cadet earlier this year.
When they turn 12 the most promising cadets, like myself, are granted the honor of being given the lowest level of imperial mental conditioning to further the glory of his holiness, the God Emperor. This kind of conditioning is normally only given to commissioned Imperial Naval and Marine Officers.
I can’t remember much of the conditioning process itself, but according to the officers I spoke to it should remove feelings of fear and terror, make you unfazed by death and blood, and keep your mind sharp and focused even during times of extreme pain and stress. I was under the impression it was only a low-level conditioning however, not the deep, fully subconscious conditioning given to full cadets in training so the effects would be lighter.
Regardless, the young cadets before me who were afforded these boons have always grown up to assume positions of great prestige and bring tremendous honor to the God Emperor.
I have no idea if I’m even among the realms ruled by the God Emperor anymore or if I’m truly in some unknown, alien land. It’s entirely possible I may never make it back to my home or anywhere in the empire.
It strikes me how completely powerless I am. The only thing I can do for now is dig, and wait for the right time to escape this fucked up hellhole. I absolutely refuse to die in this pit. I will get out regardless of what I have to do or become.
My mother’s probably suffering even more than I am right now, if she’s even woken up yet. I almost hope she never does. I’m starting to think the one’s that died when the Hammer fell were the lucky ones, being able to pass on peacefully.
Regardless, if I’m going to get out of here I must be stronger, be unflinching, be fearless; for both her sake and my own. I can’t give up and die down here in this festering pit of degenerates.
This will NOT be my tomb.