“IT SEEMS WE HAVE A CHALLENGER,” said the announcer. I had no idea how his voice could be so loud and yet I had heard nothing just one floor down. He continued, saying “WELCOME TO THE OCTAGON, FIGHTER.”
The light was blinding. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I was trying to shield my eyes when I felt my arms grabbed on either side. I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t feel threatened, either. I went with the flow. The firm grip on my arms told me whoever it was had to be tough, inhumanly strong. Well, inhumanly strong for a pre-system person, at least. I had no idea what level these guys could be.
“Now,” continued the announcer. He was no longer full-on shouting into the mic, which meant his words only vibrated my chest, instead of threatening to crush my organs. “Let me remind all of you what the rules are.”
The crowd roared. I had never heard anybody excited to hear rules, let alone an entire crowd.
“One!”
The crowd roared along with him, like some sort of call-and-return routine for a comedian. I blinked and finally could see. It was like I had been flash banged, but the blindness went away all at once. I was absolutely surrounded. What was strange was that while I could hear the people, even smell them… they weren’t there. It was holograms. Half the reason I had been blinded was the thousands of little projectors creating images in the seats. And there was a riot of color, shape, form, even light level and smell. As we walked past a row, I heard and saw a small mist jet out from the projector. The smell of body odor immediately grew worse, nearly choking me with its ferocity.
“Oh, man, someone tell that guy to take a shower!” I waved my left hand in front of my face to fan the smell away.
“That’s rude.”
I looked up at the guy dragging me along. Well, I looked up, at least. Then down. Then back up. Then all around me.
“What the hell?”
There was no guy dragging me. Nobody pulling me along. Well, no body. It was just a pair of arms, neatly dressed in sleeves that enclosed where the shoulder would be. Floating. That’s it. Just a pair of floating arms, dragging me down an aisle to what was very clearly an octagon fighting ring.
“What the hell is going on?”
I looked for the announcer in the ring. I saw him. Her. It? The… being… had proportions not unlike those of Douma. However, it had to be almost twice as tall. That made me reconsider the size of the octagon. Either something was messing with my perception, a conclusion I did not rule out, or the ring was enormous. While it was hard to get a good pin on the size, I guessed it was at least twice as wide as a normal fighting ring.
“Hey, don’t you alien egg-heads know the smaller ring promotes more action and faster fights with more frequent finishes?”
I suddenly had a headache. I pulled back against the arms hauling me down the aisle and paused to rub at my temples with my eyes squeezed shut. I don’t know how, but it seemed like the arms were surprised. Maybe they weren’t expecting me to stop during the entry walk. Either way, they waited a moment, then started to yank on my arms again. My headache subsided as quickly as it had appeared, and I opened my eyes to find the ring was further away than I had thought. No, it wasn’t farther away, it had shrunk. Reduced to just twenty-five feet across. I blinked a few more times, but it didn’t change again.
“As I was saying, rule number one: you get in the ring, you don’t come out until someone goes down.”
“TWO!” Roared the holographic crowd.
“Two:” the announcer said while extending a second extraordinarily long finger. “No powers, abilities, skills, chants, auras, channeling, chi, mana usage, or biting. This is a strictly stats-based fight.”
I shook my head. Everything there made sense, except the biting. I could think of a few different creatures or animals that would handicap to an unfair degree. Not that I was going to argue against the ruling, I did not want to get bitten in a fighting ring. By this time, I was at the stairs to the ring. I looked around, but the fighter that had been talked up was nowhere to be seen.
“THREE!”
“Three:” he said. His words grew quieter, more sinister. I could see him now, and he was definitely male, like Douma. Masculine features, a deep voice, and hard muscles despite the extremely lanky frame. “This is a fight to the death.”
The announcer flickered, then disappeared. The door to the cage opened toward me and I was shoved up the stairs and into the ring.
“Our challenger: Alabaster Blackwood, a half-dead human zombie hybrid. Standing six-one, one-hundred-ninety pounds, this is not his first fight. The heart of a lion, the brain of a strategist, the body of a hard-core partier. Can he last against our reigning champion?”
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The lights swiveled down on me, and I… stood. I had no idea what to do. The crowd half-heartedly cheered. I waved generally, feeling confused. I hadn’t volunteered for this.
“And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Fresh from the regen chamber, the brutal artist, the blood-spattered ballet star, the creature from the abyss; standing at two meters tall, weighing in at ninety-five kilos, a genius in cultivation, the ten-year-tenth-level monster, let’s hear it for…. CRRRRRRRAIIIIIIIG!”
“Craig? That’s this guy’s name? Craig?” I shook my head and laughed. “That sounds like the name of the guy my step-mom would date if my dad kicked the bucket and left her everything. He probably wears cyclist shorts everywhere, because he brings his folding bike with him, just in case he gets a chance to ‘lay some rubber’ or something equally lame.”
My words were drowned out by the roar of the crowd as Craig entered the ring. He was… well, he looked mostly human. Tall, broad shouldered, he looked like a bodybuilder mixed with a martial artist and carved out of granite. Right down to his skin tone, a very rock-like gray. What was weird, well, weirder than his skin apparently being made of stone, was the long mane of hair that shot up from his head like an anime character. The hair was well defined, but appeared to be made from lava. It glowed like smoldering coals, with lights moving along the length like a flowing river of magma. He raised his fists in the air and let out a battle-cry that I would never forget.
“For the Swan!”
I burst out laughing. “This? This is your undefeated champion? He sounds like a squeaky toy!”
The crowd fell silent as Craig pointed a meaty… uh, stony hand at me. “You don’t know who you’re picking a fight with.”
“You’re damn right. I walked out of that elevator and got shoved in here fifteen seconds later. I don’t know you from Adam. Or, more appropriately, Adam’s dog’s chewtoy. Say, do your species suffer from cauliflower ear, or are yours just that ugly naturally?”
Craig let out an undignified squeaky roar and charged me. I side-stepped him, watching him swing like he had sent a postcard a day before.
“You’re a once-in-a-generation genius? What the hell is wrong with this system, if you take ten years to reach the same level I did in three weeks?”
“Shut up! I have been sent to the greatest curated farming worlds, where monsters are allowed to breed and roam free. I have been given opportunities most would weep to hear about!”
“Okay,” I said as I dodged another slow haymaker. “But, like, this planet has been covered in monsters.”
“What?” Craig tripped over his own feet, crashing to the floor. I heard murmuring in the stands.
“Yeah, I’ve been fighting like non-stop. The system arrived, I fought zombies. Well, actually, I was a zombie. But, yeah. Killed a bunch of zombies. Even had to put down a chick I was talking to before the system arrived. That sucked. But she had an arm missing, half her face had been chewed off. I’m not really all that certain it had been her.”
Craig got up, watching me warily. I had hardly moved from my starting spot.
“You said there were monsters.”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I trailed off. “I mean, I think… actually.”
“What monsters?”
I shook my head. “I guess… I guess there haven’t actually been any. But I fought monsters in the slot machines. Got some XP for that. And I played a game with soldiers, that gave me a little bit. Not enough to make up for the trauma, but I got a title, so that’s cool.”
If it was possible for rocks to explode from sheer surprise, Craig would have done it.
“You have a title?”
“One? No.”
“Ha,” Craig said, turning in circles to rile the crowd. “Listen to this guy lie!”
“I don’t have one title,” I continued. “I have twelve.”
Craig stopped mid movement. He peered over his shoulder at me, then immediately fled to teh far side of the arena where he had entered from.
“GET ME OUT OF THIS CAGE!”
“Craig, Craig! What’s the issue, buddy?”
The announcer boomed from above. “Rule one, Craig. You enter, and you don’t leave until one of you can’t.”
“Well that’s just poor wording,” I said. “Neither of us can leave, according to your stupid rules.”
Craig looked at the sky, then shook his fists and screamed in high-pitched rage. He turned, then thundered back across the ring at me. Three steps away, he launched himself at a full run into a superman punch aimed at my face. I stepped to the side and dropped a hammer fist on his back.
“Ow!” I jumped away from the rock-man as he crashed to the mat and looked at my hand. It had burned from that brief contact. “What temperature do you run at? And what the hell is the cage made of to prevent it from burning?”
Craig rolled to his side and leaped to his feet, surprisingly agile for a man made from burning stone. He pointed at me and said “You talk too much!”
I shrugged, then ran at him. Technically, he was a level higher than me. I had no idea what his race or job gave him in stats, in fact, I had no idea what level his job was. He probably had higher constitution and strength, owing to his nature as a living rock. Even so, I felt like my stats were probably better. Basil had mentioned titles were important.
Craig ran in, throwing remarkably quick punches and kicks. A right jab, followed by a one-two combo, then a kick at my side. He developed a flow and put the pressure on. I found it interesting. He used a style not unlike a mix of karate and boxing. I had studied both for a while, then dropped those for capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fighting style, because there had been a wildly attractive woman in the class. She ended up being in a committed relationship with her long-time girlfriend, a fact I mourned but respected. After that, I settled on a wholly different style that spoke to me in its utilitarian approach to fighting. Krav Maga, a constructed style from Israel that taught fighting as the last resort. If a fight had to happen, the idea was to end it as quickly as possible.
On his next flurry of attacks, I saw an opening. Craig tried to trick me with a right hook, which he pulled back and switched to a southpaw left jab. I stepped in, ignoring the heat pouring off him, and grabbed his arm, turning into a throw. I held onto his arm, bring it down on my knee as he flipped and slammed into the ground, using the momentum to shatter his elbow. As it turned out, despite being made of rock, he was built very like a human, and screamed so loudly, I thought he went into the infrasonic. It was a surprise, hearing his voice drop like that so rapidly. I could feel the scream in my guts.
“Please, don’t let that be the brown note.”