Sands of Fate: The Wrong Side of History

Chapter 56: Like A Coiled Snake In The Dark

The morning of the third bout dawned with the sound of the crowd.

Alex woke slowly. That was the first thing wrong.

He never woke slowly. He woke to the pings of the system, and aching limbs from his daily tasks routine.

But this morning, he opened his eyes to the grey light filtering through the high window, and his body felt heavy. Rested. He had slept through the night.

He pushed himself up on the straw bed, his back protesting, his muscles stiff. The holding area was quiet. The champions who remained in the cells around him were still asleep or sitting in silence, waiting for the guards to come. Above, the crowd was already building—a low, steady roar that seeped through the stone like water.

He looked at the corner of his vision.

The system UI was there. Everything looked normal.

Except there was no daily task notification.

No ping. No 30 push-ups. No 30 sit-ups. No countdown timer ticking away in the corner of the display. He blinked, waiting for it to appear. He had done his tasks every day since he arrived in this world, in fact. The system had always been there demanding, being relentlessly petty. Even when it punished him, even when it froze his skills, it had never been silent.

Now it was silent.

He pulled up the full display.

[Sands of Fate System Level3

Host: Human

Name: Alex Norman

Skills: Temporal Dilatation Lv3, Blade Work Lv1

Points: 520/600

Status: optimal]

Scrolled through the menus. Nothing. No notification of punishment for missing the tasks, no warning. Just the steady, indifferent pulse of the system, watching him, waiting.

And then he saw it.

A ripple. Just for a heartbeat. The text flickered—his stats distorting, the numbers blurring, the entire UI shuddering like a reflection in disturbed water.

Then it settled.

Everything was normal again.

Alex stared at it. His heart was beating faster now. The quick, tight rhythm of fear.

"No, no, no, no, no. Don’t do this to me." He blurted like a man who’s mind was failing him.

Suddenly, the iron doors at the end of the corridor slammed open, and guards filed in.

Their boots echoed on the stone, their armor clanking, their faces hard with the particular efficiency of men who were doing something they had done many times before. They moved down the row of cells, unlocking gates, pulling men to their feet.

A guard stopped outside his cell, and Alex’s stomach dropped.

The bolt slid back with a sound that cut through the noise like a blade. The gate swung open.

"Up," the guard said. "You’re in the third bout."

Alex didn’t move. For a moment, he stared at the guard, at the open gate, at the line of champions forming in the corridor beyond. The system was still silent. The glitch was still there, hiding beneath the pristine surface of the UI. He could feel it waiting.

"Move." The guard grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet.

Alex stumbled into the corridor. Other champions were already lining up.

They were all looking toward the iron doors at the end of the corridor, the ones that led up to the platform.

The Gaul was not among them. He was still in his cell, watching. As Alex passed, the Gaul pressed his face against the bars and grinned. The promise of violence.

Alex didn’t look at him. He was watching the corner of his vision, where the system UI sat in perfect, terrifying silence.

The guards led them forward. The iron doors groaned open. The roar of the crowd spilled down the corridor like a wave, and Alex walked toward it, his palms sweaty, his heart pounding, his mind fixed on a single, desperate thought.

Please. Not now. Don’t fucking let me down.

---

The corridor sloped upward, and with every step the roar of the crowd grew louder. Alex felt it before he heard it—a vibration in the stone, a pressure against his skin, the accumulated voice of a hundred thousand people pressing down through the arena’s weight.

Then he stepped into the light, and the sound hit him like a wall.

The arena stretched around him in every direction, a vast bowl of stone and flesh and noise. The stands rose tier after tier, packed with bodies, faces blurring into a sea of color and motion. He had stood in the Colosseum before fifty thousand. He had thought he understood what a crowd could be. This was different. This was a hundred thousand voices raised in a single, shapeless roar, and at the center of it, suspended above the darkness below, was the platform.

He stepped onto it. The wood was rough beneath his sandals, stained dark in places where blood had dried and been painted over with fresh blood. The other champions were filing out around him—forty-nine men, armed and armored, their faces grim. They spread across the platform in a loose formation, but Alex noticed the glances. The same glances he’d seen in the registration hall.

The announcer’s voice boomed across the arena, amplified by stone and silence as the crowd hushed to hear him.

"Citizens of Rome! Visitors from across the empire! Welcome to the third bout of the Battle of Champions!"

The crowd roared. The announcer let it crest, let it fall.

"As I explained on the previous days, fifty men enter the platform, one man leaves. The rest will be claimed by the waters below—and by the Beasts of the Nile that dwell within them!"

Alex’s eyes dropped to the water. He’d seen it from the corner of his vision when he stepped onto the platform—a dark, still expanse stretching across the open half of the arena floor. But now he really looked. He saw the shapes moving beneath the surface. Massive, scaled bodies gliding through the shadows. Eyes catching the light. Jaws hanging slightly open, revealing rows of teeth.

Nile crocodiles.

Their tails stirred slow ripples across the dark water as they circled, patient and hungry, waiting.

His eyes widened. His stomach turned to ice. Ignatius had warned him about the poison, the triple threat, the rigged format. He hadn’t mentioned this. He hadn’t mentioned that the platform was a raft above a pit full of monsters.

The announcer raised his hand. "Let the third bout begin!" His hand dropped, and the crowd erupted.

Nobody moved. For a single, suspended heartbeat, fifty men stood frozen on the blood-stained wood.

Then the glances started. Quick and subtle. Exchanged between the champions like a silent conversation in a language Alex couldn’t hear but understood perfectly.

The first man moved. A Gaul with a notched gladius, his face twisted into something between fear and determination. He turned toward Alex. Then another turned. Then another. They were all turning, all moving, all coming for him at once.

Forty-nine men, one target. The Ghost of Rome.

"Oh, I see how it is." Alex’s hand tightened on his gladius.

It’s you and me, now. He gave a quick glance at the system. I was still silent in the corner of his vision. He could feel the subtle glitch like a coiled snake in the dark. "Don’t fucking let me down."

The first man lunged, and the platform erupted into chaos.