I will also be posting this story on RoyalRoadl. They require me to post this here to show that I am not plagiarizing myself. Please read onwards...
***
Raucous cries broke the sky as we circled one another, weapons held at the ready. Above us, two blazing suns shone down on the sands of the Pit — my own personal hell for however long I managed to survive. I took a deep breath, my muscular chest rising and falling slowly. Tens of thousands of people screaming for blood. My blood, if they could get it. Or anyone else's. Luckily, the crowd wasn't too picky.
What a way to start my day.
I locked eyes with my opponent and my mind went into overdrive, trying to predict the purple-skinned Dextari's next move. Sweat dripped down his long, drooping ears as they swung left and right on either side of his face. In each hand he clutched a slim grey katana, each blade made of military-grade ultracarbon. A long cut across one side of my bare chest attested to his skill.
My fingers clenched on the handle of my short black gladius. I was probably fucked.
The shouts and sounds of the xeno crowd behind me began to coagulate to form a single word, chanted by thousands upon thousands of throats. "Car-nage! Car-nage! Car-nage!"
That's who I was to them. To the crowd, to my guards, and even to my opponents.
Carnage.
The name was wrong. But then, so was everything else.
The Dextari moved like lightning, his hands a blur as the blades moved in perfect sync. Somehow, though, my body knew what to do. My gladius intercepted one of his blows and my hand gripped his other wrist, halting the second blade mere inches from my skin. The sweat dripping from his pores made my grip slippery, and the xeno fighter snarled as he struggled to free himself, but I was already moving, ducking and stepping inside his reach and ramming my shoulder into his gut.
Air blasted from the slim humanoid's lungs as I stood upright with a powerful yell, flipping his slightly built body up into the air over my shoulder. I spun like a dancer as he tumbled, my short blade ripping through flesh with a spray of blood. When he hit the ground, my enemy was already bleeding out, a gaping wound opened in his side.
I should be sorry
, I thought, but my foot stamped down on his scrabbling wrist as he reached for one of his katanas and my blade cut a neat red line across his throat.
For a split second, as I stared down into the glazed-over eyes of my kill, I was somewhere else. I was standing over someone else, another corpse, the sand coarse and gritty between my toes. The sword in my hand felt heavy, and I couldn't quite grasp the gravity of what I'd done.
My first day in the Pit.
My first kill.
A wave of cheers crashed over me as the crowd realized I'd slain my opponent, and arena brought me back to my senses. Like it always did.
I shook my head angrily.
Get it together.
Lapses like this were dangerous. They could get me killed. Still, the question haunted me. Had my first kill thirty days before
really
been my first? No matter how hard I cast back, I didn't remember anything before the moment I woke up in my cell in the catacombs beneath the Pit. Prior to that...
Nothing.
But I had a sinking sensation that that hadn't been the first time I'd dealt out death to an enemy. My body was fast. Too fast. And it was skilled. Trained in the art of killing.
No time for distractions,
I ordered. It would all be over soon, one way or another. This was to be my last time in the arena.
My eyes flicked across the harshly lit space. Six of us had entered the large, sandy-floored hexagon under the bright suns. Now, two were lying dead in widening pools of blood — my Dextari and the hulking ape creature with the power axe that had been facing...
Fuck. Where'd he go?
Even as I asked I heard the clinking of metal behind me and dove forward, feeling the wind of the spiked chain as it flailed by, right where my neck had been a split second before. Thirty days of killing had given me quick reflexes. I spun, facing the four-armed alien warrior who held two long, barbed chains, one on each side. The chains were dripping with the dark blood of the apeman. I'd never seen a xeno like this before, and I wondered whether he was an entrant from the Deeper Reaches. His skin was a sickly green, but his rippling muscles told me he was in perfect health. An extra pair of arms sprouted halfway down his rib cage, and I scowled deeply as I wondered how I'd get inside his reach to let my gladius do its own bloody work.
Then, in a flash of motion, the chains were whirring towards me. I let my body go into autopilot, deeply-embedded muscle memory somehow keeping me away from the spinning lines of bloody death. As I ducked and wove, I saw in the corner of my eye the other pair of duelists. They were barely a dozen feet away — a Terrus cyborg with a lightning spear and the slim, unarmed being whose race I'd also been unable to identify but looked like an inky figure of solid shadow. Inexplicably, my mind seemed to break in two, one half avoiding the twirling chains of my newest opponent and the other half watching as the shadowman slithered past the cyborg's stabbing weapon and thrust his unarmed hand directly into the man's chest. Sidestepping as one of the chains slashed down vertically and sent up a spurt of sand where I'd just been standing, I saw the shadowman rip his hand out in a spray of blood, clutching the cyborg's heart. The Terrus' face was frozen in shocked agony as he fell to his knees, but he was already dead.
My fingers shifted their grip on my own heavy sword.
What am I going to fucking do now?
I had no idea. So I did all I could do — I let myself drop into the flow of combat, and suddenly, in a few brief seconds, everything snapped into place. I stepped back and circled, eyes locked on the four-armed xeno across from me as I turned him so that his back was to the freshly-fallen cyborg.
First, eliminate the immediate threat.
As the alien gladiator turned to face me, there was a flurry of movement behind him. The shadowman took the opportunity I'd given him and dashed silently across the sand. I felt a wall against my back and froze, realizing I had nowhere left to retreat. Then, even as the chains rose up to lash down on my unprotected body, a silky black hand punched through the xeno's chest from behind, erupting in a fountain of purple blood.
The green warrior's scream bubbled in his throat as his lungs filled with blood. He fell to his knees, his chains falling from slack fingers. In his place stood the shadowman, a freshly ripped heart in his fist and a face with no expression. The roaring of the crowd hushed momentarily at the grisly sight.
Next, eliminate ancillary targets.
I charged forward, my feet churning up the sand. I felt an indomitable rage rising in my body, clouding my vision and making my arms shake with energy.
It's time to end this,
a voice inside of me seemed to say, though the voice wasn't my own. My opponent dropped into a fighting crouch, but at the last second I hurled myself forward with an extra burst of speed that caught him by surprise. The shadowman was faster than I'd expected, the edge of his hand slicing across my bicep like a blade itself as I drove forward. I grunted as blood sprayed up into my face, but my anger blunted the pain and by then my assault had already been launched on its way. I slashed the xeno across the chest, then severed one dark hand from his body as it darted toward my sternum.
My hand thrust forward, gripping the slightly-built humanoid by its throat and lifting it into the air with mad strength. The shadowman tried to knee me in the neck, but my gladius flashed in the light of two suns as it plunged forward. Once. Twice. The dark, shadow-forged form was already limp as I stabbed it a third time in the chest and flung it away so that its body crashed to the bleached sands. Black blood began to seep out onto the arena floor.
As I took a final, shuddering breath, I realized that the rumbling thunder I heard wasn't my heartbeat pounding in my ears. It was an entire amphitheater; tens of thousands of xenos chanting with one voice. "Car-nage! Car-nage! Car-nage!"
I shook my head to clear my vision as I walked to the nearest wall and slid down into an exhausted crouch next to the still-warm body of the Dextari duelist. I wasn't quite sure what to expect next. This had been the thirtieth round of games, and one of the few things that I
did
know was that after thirty days the whole thing ended.
So,
I asked the purple-skinned gladiator as I stared down at his body and he gazed into nothingness.
What's the meaning of all this?
Life and death and killing...?
Most people probably left this question for themselves, but I didn't think it wise to ask about the meaning of life from a man with thirty days of memory.
I prefer to ask dead people.
***
"Move," came the growling voice of Snout, my handler, behind me. I felt a metal pole pressed against my back and then the swift jolt of the shockrod as it sent a pulse of energy through my body.
I locked my jaw and gritted my teeth to stop the gasp of pain from escaping.
Kind of you,
I thought as I stumbled forward down the corridor of the massive palace, black spots swimming before my eyes.
You're not using the highest setting.
The shockrod was meant as a tool for control, not torture, but to many handlers the uses were indistinguishable.
Now that the adrenaline was no longer pumping through my body, my chest stung from where the Dextari's katana had slashed across it. My hands were tied before me, but blood dripped down one wrist from the cut across my bicep. It made my palms slippery and red, but no one else seemed to notice my wounds. I looked over my broad shoulder, my eyes staring into Snout's face. The handler's ridged trunk of a nose — what I'd used to give him his nickname — drooped down past his chin, wobbling as he scowled a gap-toothed frown at me. He gripped the shockrod a little tighter with his three thick fingers.
Irritation?
I wondered.
Or maybe fear...
I had a reputation, of course. I was as dangerous as they came. "Move, Carnage," Snout repeated, hefting the rod.
The name was wrong. I flicked my pointed ears in irritation, but said nothing.
Save your energy,
I ordered myself.
You'll need it to figure out what you're doing here.
As I failed to move immediately, however, the bulky handler grunted, baring his teeth in another scowl. Then, without warning, he thrust the metal staff towards me once again.
I moved without thinking, jinking past the tip of the rod like it was moving through honey and powering forward. Anger surged through me, a rising wrath that overwhelmed my every sensibility. I bunched my shoulders and my forehead cracked into the xeno's nose, spraying blood across my face and his. Snout fell back with a cry, the shockrod clattering from his hands to the floor.
In an instant, my feet scooped the shaft from the tiled ground and flicked it up into the air. I caught it in my tied hands and struck the heavyset alien across the face as he struggled to dash blood from his eyes and rise up. He fell to the floor like he'd been poleaxed and I swung again, a ripping, surging force powering through me. The tip of the shockrod tore across his face with a crackling jolt of energy and the xeno bellowed with pain. I rose up, preparing to jam the end of the staff down into Snout's throat, ending him for good, when something stopped me.
What the hell are you doing...?
I froze.
