Bit of a longer chapter here. Not much action either.
This is just a really, really awful place.
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Chapter 1-6: A Dark Passage
A few days after I got thrown in the pit, I begged Cizin to help teach me how to survive in the cage.
He just went “Eh, why the fuck not?” with his usual shrug. So after that he’s been training me in the dank corners of the mines during what little breaks we get from laboring.
Our sparing sessions have taught me just how much a monster he is. I can never even get close to hitting him at all. He’s clearly more skilled than me in every way; I can see how he managed to survive down here.
Even if I could overpower him in some way, he could just use that snaking tail of his to pounce at me from an unexpected angle and impale me.
Because I’m at bit of a disadvantage with only one arm, especially when not given a weapon, he’s instructed me how to use my whole body as a weapon. I specifically learned how to use my legs to fight and how to properly use my body weight to throw people off balance; also the important points to go for to inflict pain and the best places to make them bleed out.
Cutter often sends him up for fights, and even observing his fighting style I’m still no closer to touching him. Most of his fights he never uses his tail until the very end. He likes toying with them, parrying with either the dagger or sword and shallowly cutting them with the other.
He makes it nice and bloody while dragging out the fight. Eventually he’ll stab them with his tail after he tires them out, always either in the heart or throat. Then he’ll make a show of it while delivering the death blow.
Sometimes Cizin’s just a prick, but he’s willing to help me and that’s all that matters. And I do have him to thank for my life for dragging me into the deep mines that second day.
He’s also been the only one that hasn’t tried to kill me or rape me down here; I’ve got no choice but to rely on him more.
I’ve also been using him to learn what I can about this world and about the Wilders. He made it very clear to me that the Wilders down here, the slaves, are not my friends.
“The only different between the Wilders with the collars and the ones without, is that the former made the mistake of pissing off Hung” is what he said about the matter.
And honestly, I have yet to find any reason to disagree with him on that.
I’ve had to beat off a few slaves that tried to rape me during the little sleeping time we get. They all look at me with hungry, manic eyes like they’re looking at a juicy piece of meat.
Their faces, mannerisms, and minds are completely consumed by madness and rage. They seem to desire nothing but chaos, sexual depravity, and flesh to consume. Their morality is non-existent, seeming more like animals than sentient beings.
Most the Wilder slaves down here would just as soon do the exact same thing as Hung’s men if the situation were reversed. How did they become like that?
There’s no sanity left in this world.
* * *
I’ve been in the pit for about 6 months now, I think.
The deep mines below the blood pit seem to go on nearly endlessly, twisting and turning for many kilometers in every direction and going at least a kilometer deep. With the excavation methods they’re using this kind of complex must have taken hundreds of years to dig out.
Once while making the long trek down into the deep mines I tried asking Cizin how long a cycle was as I didn’t understand their units of measurement, but all he told me is that a full cycle is one revolution of the birth ring around the inner sea.
When I asked him what he meant by ‘birth ring’ he just gave me a look like he thought I was fucking with him and walked off.
I know he can tell time in this darkness better than I can so I eventually got Cizin to tell me I’ve been down here for a bit over a quarter cycle now. If I’m somehow managing to tell time correctly down here in this blackness, that means that a half cycle is about equal to one year on Terra.
Considering he says he’s been down here for 10 and a half cycles that means he’s somehow survived in this hellish pit for over 20 years now. I can’t comprehend living down here for that long without completely losing my mind.
I’ve only been down here for 1/40th that amount of time and I feel like I’m already starting to lose grip of my sanity.
Another thing is that either he’s shrinking or I’m growing taller these days, probably the latter. When I got thrown in here he was slightly taller than me, but now I have to look down at him when we talk.
Only the ones that piss off Hung and his men seem to get the express way in, but every few times we go up into the blood pit to fight another poor bastard gets thrown in here from the floor above. Sometimes Cutter or one of his men catches them… and sometimes they don’t.
The lucky ones die on impact and never have to live down in this hell. The unlucky ones get caught in time and live to die in the cage like animals.
And the especially unlucky ones don’t get caught in time, but live through the fall. They get to live down here as cripples like me, well, at least for a little while before they get slaughtered.
The Wilders in this abyss… they’re worse than animals.
I’ve already killed dozens of ‘men’ and ‘women’ since coming here, mostly inside the cage but also a few outside of it.
I’m definitely becoming numb to all the death and blood, and I’m not quite sure if I should be glad or troubled about that. I have a feeling I’d go insane down here if I didn’t, so probably glad.
The guards don’t really mind too much if we kill each other either. Cizin taught me that you just have to keep two things in mind when you do the deed: You have to make sure it’s in front of the guards and make it as gruesome as possible to entertain them, that’ll make them less likely to do anything to you over the loss.
They usually find it quite funny.
The other thing is that you have to be sure to leave the corpse in an accessible place and not take any of the body parts so they’ll still get all the meat.
All the ones I’ve killed so far have been Wilders, so I don’t feel particularly bad about it. One thing that scares me is that I’m not sure it would be any different if they weren’t Wilders; I’ve always just done what I had to do to survive.
The first one I killed outside the cage was for his tattered rags of clothing. I didn’t want to at first, but as the seasons changed the temperate began dropping slightly and they kept driving us deeper and deeper into those abyssal mines where it steadily got colder.
I did it one day when they gave us break time to sleep before the next bout in the blood pit. Before he got out of sight of the guards I snuck up behind him and used my body weight to shove him over and onto a sharp stalagmite. It pierced through his throat but he managed to struggle off of it and tried to attack me; he was losing blood rapidly as his neck sprayed blood all over the wall of the cavern. He tried to grab me but his hands were already slick with his own blood and he couldn’t get a firm grip on me.
After a brief grapple I got his head positioned over another stalagmite and forced him face-first onto it. It punctured through his eye and into his brain with a squelch.
I could hear the guards chuckling raucously behind me as I stripped him of all his clothing and left the corpse there.
The others I’ve killed have mostly been over the scraps of rotting ‘food’ they throw down here, feeding us like animals
This ‘food’, which they dump down from the upper level into the blood pit every few days when they gather us for gladiatorial fights, is mostly moldy, diseased scraps from a corn-like plant, a kind of mushy gruel made from old flour that’s been ground up with the maggots and insects still in it, and suspicious, rotting scraps of meat.
They just let whatever they’re dumping rain down onto us and then watch as we fight over the scraps. Most days they feed us, at least a couple of slaves are either trampled to death or murdered for their share of the moldy gunk they call food.
Amazingly the muck and moldy chunks of corn-stuff manage to be appealing when compared to the meat, although I sometimes manage to get it down and into my stomach when I have to.
My only consoling thought at these times is that it most likely isn’t Terran flesh; I doubt they would ever willingly give it to us instead of eating it themselves as they covet it so much.
We’re basically just cattle in a slaughterhouse down here with free labor and entertainment as a side bonus.
Considering the horrid conditions, I’ve been amazingly free of disease and infections… for the most part. At one point though I fell ill with a dysentery-like inflammation while in the deep mines.
I nearly shat myself to death in those godforsaken tunnels.
The guards wouldn’t let me rest or stop digging for more than a few moments so I had to dig while standing in my own excrement for days with a high fever, as well as occasional vomiting and my abdomen feeling like I was going to crap out my entire gastrointestinal tract.
I seriously want to kill them all.
* * *
Occasionally Cizin tells me about himself and his life before getting thrown in the pit. Rarely gets very specific though.
He lived in the central wastes of the continent for 12 cycles before he was caught by the Wilders and thrown into the blood pit here.
Apparently he was trying to steal food from Hung’s fields…. I asked him why the fuck he would even try doing that, but all he said was “I was hungry” with a shrug.
Still not sure if he’s smart, retarded, or insane; probably all three at the same time.
I gleaned some basic geography from his tales of the world beyond this pit. Apparently Hung’s keep is on the southern tip of the Aegea continent, which is entirely ruled over by various self-titled insane gods like Hung and his brother.
The only other ones he could name were Tityos the Violator whose realm is in the south-west and Dame Frejya the Alluring whose realm is in the far west.
Up on the surface as a sane one you have essentially two choices of where to live on Aegea.
You can try to survive in the hot, dry wasteland which dominates the center of the continent. The heat of the sun alone is enough to boil water during the long days and the vast, flat outer wasteland continues for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Very little lives out there, only a few water retaining desert plants and beasts that would eat you as soon as look at you.
If you travel inward far enough you reach the inner wastes, the few animals out there are flying scavengers and vicious, armored burrowing creatures that prey on any Wilders stupid enough to venture into those sandy dunes.
There are also ancient ruins under the sand of the wastes which occasionally collapse, swallowing huge swathes of the sandy wasteland and anything unlucky enough to be there at the time.
He doesn’t believe any significant populations live anywhere out there anymore, only making mention of some tales he’d heard of a single surviving settlement hidden in the inner wastes.
He seemed to think the story’s bullshit though, but if it is still there he said it would be the “last home for sane ones on the continent.”
All of the reasonable ones like Cizin are dead then, at least to his knowledge.
Your other choice is to go to the wilds of the outer regions and fight off the hordes of rabid man-eating beasts, poisonous ambulatory plants, and the droves of insane Wilders and their mad gods.
The wilds are huge and untamed, with impossibly ancient facilities littering it which were long ago looted and overrun by the forests.
You could try and make it across the necrotic seas to the north or west, but the sea is unfriendly to intruders. Anyone foolish enough to try and sail out on a makeshift boat or raft will never be seen again anywhere on the surface of Gali. Dragged under the waves by gigantic, unknown aquatic monsters.
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The entire coast to the east is hundred meter high sheer cliffs which go all the way down to where the waves crash against the rocks endlessly.
According to him, trying to sail off the northern coast is even worse; the Turbid Straits are guarded by some unknown sentience that commands the very waters themselves to swallow any man trying to cross them. The coastal water there is always clouded and murky with the blood of men and beasts as well as some strange foam.
He seemed more afraid of the Turbid Straits than anything else he talked about.
Cizin’s never been off of the Aegea continent for obvious reasons. The mad gods control all of the sea skimmers and airships and are therefore the only ones that can cross the seas. He knows that there are other continents, but he couldn’t tell me their locations or names.
It also seems we are indeed on a satellite called Gali and not a planet, but I do not know if this is a place I’ve heard of as their language is different. I have no idea how this translator converts proper nouns either. Their language is clearly extraordinarily different from the tongue of Unified Terra.
Gali must also either be a very large satellite or something strange is going on, as the gravity here is very similar to Terra.
I’m still considering the possibility that this is still inside UTE space somehow. I have no idea how something like these could happen under the reign of the God Emperor though.
I would sometimes tell Cizin about Terra and the colonies as well but… he’d just nod and say “That’s nice little fella. Got to distract yourself from this fucked up life somehow.”
He probably thinks I’m just making it up or delusional. Guess I can’t blame him considering the world he lives in; this place is awful beyond belief.
One thing that struck me as odd is that he said he survived alone out there but… I don’t think he was telling the truth. Sometimes his eyes would look off into the distance distractedly while he talked about his life outside of this pit.
Pretty sure he’s hiding a lot about his life up there from me. I suspect there are some things he simply doesn’t want to ever talk ever about.
I can imagine what kind of things they might be, and quite frankly I’m fine with him keeping it to himself.
He also tells me about things that have happened while he’s been in the pit.
Once he talked about a married couple of sane ones that were thrown down here 13 half cycles ago.
This is one of the stories I’d rather have not heard.
Apparently the woman was extremely pregnant at the time they were chucked in and she gave birth down in the murky corners of the deep mines mere days later.
The strange thing is that the guards could never find the child to collar it and drag it up to the fields. And while no one knows for sure what happened to it, I’d say it’s pretty certain that the child perished in the abyss. They should have just given the child to the guards if it was dead though, Cizin told me they nearly tortured the two of them to death for hiding meat from them.
Regardless, he said, after another 3 cycles they were made to fight each other in the cage. Neither of them would kill the other one so they were strung up on the walls of the cage. They didn’t butcher them alive like that boy I saw; instead they first cut the woman’s arms off and slit her throat to slowly bleed her out into a large bucket.
Then they force fed her fresh blood down the man’s throat, mixed with moldy gruel and urine to increase the volume. They just kept forcing it down while the light faded from her eyes. And they didn’t stop feeding him until “his stomach burst and he died as well.”
Yeah, most of the time he’s talking to me I wish he would just shut up.
Unfortunately he’s basically my only conversation partner in this pit… the Wilders aren’t much for rational dialogue. The few other sane ones besides Cizin and me have rarely lasted very long down here; most have died within a few weeks of being thrown in. A few were raped to death in the mines and the rest gutted in the cage.
There are a handful of others that have survived for a significant amount of time and aren’t Wilders but… quite frankly they have all left their sanity behind long ago. I wouldn’t trust them anymore than the rest of the Wilders.
* * *
And the cage… I’ve killed dozens in there alone. After my first kill Cutter seemed to take a sort of perverse liking to me and has thrown me in there a lot.
I’m just lucky like that.
Assuming they let me pick, or even give me a weapon, I’ve grown accustomed to using the rusty long-swords and thinner rapier style blades they have down here. They appear similar to ancient medieval and renaissance swords; most of them have cross shaped guards with blades between 80 and 115 cm.
The distal taper on these blades is almost always terribly unbalanced though, making them unwieldy and each one handles differently. The long-swords are made to be wielded with either one hand or two. Of course in my case it’s always one.
I’ve been favoring the thinner thrusting rapiers slightly because of the lighter, easier to handle weight with my single arm. Quick thrusts also leave me less open without a buckler or a second short-sword to parry with.
A swift jab into their unprotected throat to sever their internal or external jugular, armpit for the axillary artery, or thigh for the femoral artery has ended more than a few death fights in there. Once they’re bleeding, their speed and response time will drop, inevitably leading to their death.
I like this method even better because Cutter prefers the deaths to be flashier, as do the rest of the Wilders. I have no intentions of putting on a show for them.
Sometimes they also make us fight beasts of various kinds in the Cage. Their two favorites are ‘nagu’; man-sized, hairy monsters with eight legs that can rip a man apart in an instant, and ‘ladons’; gigantic 5 m long and 2 m tall reptilian beasts with huge three fingered forearms. Each of their fingers has long, tough claws that can cleave a man in two. Their faces have a single pyramidal horn that can easily crush a man to death when they charge as well.
The sight and sounds of these beasts crushing, slicing, and ripping men apart in the cage is even worse than many of the fights where they pit the slaves against each other.
Some of the nagu have been trained to… overpower and rape the slaves to death; both vaginally and anally. They either die from the trauma or severe internal bleeding as the nagu ravage them with their huge, barbed phalluses.
The Wilder guards seem to find this method of execution particularly amusing.
Pretty sure I saw one of them masturbating during a particular incident when a group of slaves infuriated Cutter. They threw all half dozen of them into the cage and unleashed a small herd of nagu on them.
It was probably the worst thing I’ve seen down here, and that’s saying a lot.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moist, tearing sound as one of the nagu penetrated clear through that Wilders intestines and out the front of his abdomen.
Cutter was laughing at them the entire time while making thrusting motions with his hips. Even if I can’t make it out of this pit I’ll at least kill that fat fuck someday.
As if Cutter and the other fetid Wilders down here with us weren’t bad enough, every once in a while I see those two fuckwits Den and Ben. They’ve never come down into the pit and only watch from the upper level around Hung’s dais.
Every time I see them my blood boils. The thought of slowly torturing those two while they beg for their lives is one of the few things keeping me going down here.
I still have no idea how I ended up in this foul place, and it didn’t sound like Hung had anything to do with it, but I can’t believe it was just an accident.
* * *
As for escaping this pit someday….
The guards have bands around their wrists that function very similarly to our slave collars. They track their positions and act as heartbeat monitors, so if any of them die in the deep mines Cutter will find out. They also have a video recording and displaying function and can inject some kind of opioid mixed with a stimulant into their bloodstream. Gives them a nice high and blunts the pain if they get hurt.
There are even miniature cameras set up around the cage in the blood pit, and these video feeds can be fed directly to those wrist bands. The guards mostly just use the cameras to watch us kill each other like animals when they aren’t in the stands, but they’ll also check them to make sure no one is trying to escape.
Over time I also found out there are several more uses for the slave collars beyond simply tracking us.
First is that they can be magnetized by those electrifying metal prods some of the guards have, forcefully pulling whichever slave they want towards them and dragging them by the neck.
Second is that Cutters slave masters, there seem to be a few dozen of them, all have some kind of control that can be used to remotely shrink the collars, constricting our trachea and choking us quite painfully.
Third is that these controls can also be used to remotely release some concoction of neurotoxins and hallucinogens. This mixture, which I’ve been told is Hung’s own personal design, causes severe hallucinations, extreme pain, psychosis, loss of precise motor control, and induces permanent insomnia.
The drug doesn’t kill too quickly though, that’s not enough fun for Lord Hung. He likes to watch as they slowly try to claw their own throat, groan, and eyeballs out. Then if they’re unlucky enough to not kill themselves before they lose enough control of their own body to do so, and if someone else doesn’t put the poor bastard out of their misery, they will slowly succumb to the mind rending pain and hallucinations until their brain shrivels to the size of a tangerine over as many as 14 sleepless, excruciating days.
I found out about this wonderful drug when some of the blood-slaves killed a guard down in the deep mines. Cutter and his men couldn’t find out who did it due to the signals being too densely packed, and because none of the other guards saw it.
So Hung just picked out several dozen slaves at random and had their collars inject the aforementioned drug. Then he ordered their hands and feet tightly bound and made his men haul them 8 meters up to the top of the cages metal bars and impale them on the sharp ends.
They writhed up there for weeks as the bars slowly pierced through their intestines and internal organs before coming out through their throats and mouths. To torment them further as they languished there flying rodent-like animals would come out from the deep mines and peck at their eyes and exposed skin; I think Cutter’s men might have done something to lure them to the poor bastards.
Feces, urine, flesh-eating maggots, and chunks of gangrenous tissue would drop down around the perimeter of the cage regularly until they finally rotted away to nothing but bones.
I can see why Cizin has never tried to escape this pit; there really does seem to be no way out of here. They are surprisingly thorough in making sure we’re beaten down and not evening thinking about trying to get out of here.
But… my mother, I can’t stop thinking about what they might be doing to her. Hung and the rest I saw when I was dragged here never come down into the pit, and the ones in this pit either don’t know or simply won’t tell me what happened to her. I have to get out of here someday, for her.
I won’t stop looking for some method of escape.
I just have to bide my time and observe, there must be some weak link in this cage of blood. I don’t believe these driveling lunatics have the capacity to make a perfect enclosure.
They’ll slip up someday and I’ll make them regret it.
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Fun Fact!: Did you know that the romans would train beasts to rape female prisoners and slaves to death in the colosseum? Because they did.