Chapter 66: Glory
It wasn’t the pain that woke me.
It was the shouting.
"Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!"
It arrived before I’d even opened my eyes, thousands of voices together, on a beat, with feet stamping the stone between every word. And right behind it the pain from the day before came back and took its place again, all of it, having lost nothing overnight.
I opened my eyes and the sun burned them shut.
There was no black night anymore, no braziers, no empty sky. There was a white light coming straight down onto the colosseum that made the sand below almost painful to look at. I blinked. My vision wouldn’t settle. I coughed, and what I brought up landed on the iron in front of my mouth, and I blinked again, and slowly the shapes came back together.
The stands were full.
All those empty rows from the night before, all those seats I’d looked at wondering who could possibly come and sit in them, they were taken, from the sand right up to the top, and it was moving, and it was screaming, and it was stamping.
"Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood!"
A shadow crossed my cage.
It was him. The same one. He opened the door without a word, came in, took me by the back of the neck, and pulled me out of there the way you take something out of a bag. I saw the drop, I saw the sand coming up, and I landed.
I rolled. My whole body screamed, my ribs, my back, my dead leg going off in a direction I hadn’t chosen, and I ended up on my side in the middle of the arena with sand in my mouth and in my eyes.
I wanted to shout at him. I really did want to, I turned my head toward the walkway, I opened my mouth, and my voice didn’t come. All that came out was a strangled sound with no words in it, an animal noise.
You son of a bitch.
You absolute sons of bitches. What is wrong with you, all of you, seriously, what the hell is wrong with—
I didn’t get any further.
Across from me, at the other end of the arena, a great stone door started rising, and the noise rose with it, and something came out onto the sand.
A wolf.
As tall as a man standing, black coat, short fur, jaw too long for a wolf. And behind it, instead of a tail, there were three, lifting and weaving through the air, each one ending in a head, each one with scales and eyes and an open mouth, and the sound they made carried across the whole colosseum.
Pssssss.
Snakes. Actual snakes.
A wolf with snakes for tails.
I got up, and it took me far too long. One hand on my ribs, the other on the ground, the left leg dragged up last. I looked around, everywhere, for anything at all.
And I saw it, on the right-hand side of the arena, against the wall.
A wooden stand. With weapons on it. Swords, spears, shields, laid out there like a stall at a market.
Of course. The toy has to fight, otherwise it isn’t fun.
I stayed facing the wolf, backing toward the stand, never taking my eyes off it. It didn’t charge straight away. It circled, head low, sizing me up, and the three snakes swayed above its back without ever stopping.
I sized it up while it sized me up.
It isn’t that strong. It’s nothing next to what I ran into in that forest, nothing next to what came out of the mist. With Worldflow I’d already see how it moves, with my mana I’d already be behind it, with the Arsenal I’d have opened it up by now, and even in the state I’m in this wouldn’t last.
But here, right now.
The wolf reached the same conclusion I had.
It stopped circling and it charged.
I ran for the stand, as fast as my leg allowed, which didn’t mean much. It caught me first. Pain went across my whole back, from the shoulder down to the base of my spine, and the sand came up into my face, and I rolled across the arena while the entire colosseum got to its feet.
"Kiiiiill! Blood! Blood! Blood!"
I got up. My back was worse than everything else now, and I could feel it running.
The wolf hadn’t followed. It had stopped, one front paw raised, and it was looking at its own claws, red down to the base. It brought them to its mouth and licked them, one at a time, in no hurry, watching me.
Then it threw its head back.
"Ahouuuuuuuuuuuuuu."
The sound crossed the sand and climbed into the stands and the demons took it up screaming.
And it charged again.
I’d fallen next to the stand. My hand found a shield, a wooden round banded with iron, and I didn’t have time to get all the way up. I planted it in front of me at an angle, braced against the ground and against my shoulder.
The wolf went into it.
The impact travelled up into my jaw and I thought my arm was coming off, but the angle did its work. It slid. Its whole charge went off to the side, past me, and it carried on and hit the arena wall and crashed into it hard enough to quiet part of the stands.
I didn’t waste a second.
My left hand grabbed a spear off the stand, and I was on it before it turned around, and I drove the point into its throat with everything I had.
The blood went everywhere. Over my arms, over my chest, over the sand, and the cry that came out of that thing had nothing left of a wolf in it.
One of the tails reared up and came down at me, mouth open.
My hand was already on a sword. I threw myself backward, the snake’s head snapped shut on nothing exactly where my stomach had been, and I rolled onto my back and came straight up out of it.
The wolf had already collected itself.
It was watching me with the spear still buried in its neck, and while I was getting my breath back one of its tails curved forward, closed its mouth around the shaft and pulled the spear out in one movement. It dropped onto the sand. Blood ran out of the wound steadily, and it did absolutely nothing to keep the thing from standing.
"Ahouuuuuuuuu."
This time the air shook around it, and I felt it in my chest.
Then it leapt.
And for whatever reason, at that exact moment, I saw that goblin in the forest again. The one that had ended up facing the wolf.
My body followed on its own.
I dropped forward and slid under it through the sand with the sword held up, and I let it pass over me and do all the work for me. The blade went in at the chest and only came out at the end, and its belly opened along its whole length while it was still moving forward.
I came out the other side soaked in blood from head to foot.
Behind me, it went down. The sound was enormous, and a cloud of dust went up over both of us, and the sand drank the rest.
The stands went off.
They all stood up, every row, and they took it up again, stamping.
"Blood! Blood! Blood!"
Pleased. They were pleased. I was covered in the blood of an animal I’d never seen before, in a place whose name I didn’t know, sent here by the only person in the world I had left, and these things were applauding the show.
And my own blood started to boil.
I raised the sword toward the stands.
"You!"
I moved it.
"YOU!"
Again.
"And you!"
A different demon every time, every time somebody I was picking out personally at the end of that blade, and the colosseum that had been screaming a moment earlier went quiet.
Completely.
"YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?"
My voice went out into the silence and came back off the walls.
"IS IT FUNNY, PEOPLE DYING? IS IT FUNNY, SUFFERING? IS IT FUNNY, BLOOD?"
I felt something at my back.
Not a sound. A shadow, air being pushed aside, something behind me that had no business being there.
I turned on instinct.
The three tails were up above the corpse, raised high over me, and they were already coming down. The body was dead and they weren’t.
I went past the first one and the sword took its head on the way.
The second went into my chest.
I felt it drive in and clamp shut and stay there, and I screamed, and my free hand caught the third one in midair. I squeezed. It fought between my fingers, and I brought it up to my mouth and bit into it and tore, and I spat what I had onto the ground.
Then I brought the sword down on the head still biting into my chest.
It came off. The fangs stayed in me.
"YOU THINK THIS IS ENTERTAINING?"
I turned on the spot with the sword out, sweeping the whole arena, every tier, every level, every one of those faces turned toward me.
"YOU THINK YOU’RE ABOVE US? YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER BECAUSE YOU GET OFF ON OUR LIVES? YOU’RE ANIMALS! MONSTERS! FILTHY ANIMALS, AND I’LL COME AND KILL YOU ONE BY ONE THE DAY I GET OUT OF HERE!"
I had no control left at all and I wasn’t even trying.
"DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU, YOU, YOU, ALL OF YOU, I’LL KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU, I SWEAR IT ON MY NAME!"
And the colosseum, which had stayed silent through all of it, went off.
No anger. No threats. They all rose at once, tens of thousands of them, and what came out of their throats was one word, taken up everywhere, on the same beat as the blood before, with the same hunger in it.
"GLORY! GLORY! GLORY! GLORY!"
I stood there in the middle of the sand with the sword hanging off the end of my arm, watching them cheer me.
What is wrong with them.
What is wrong with these godforsaken demons.
I’ll kill all of you. I swear it.
And on that thought, the adrenaline dropped.
It all came back at once. The open back, the ribs, the leg, the exhaustion, and something else on top of it that was climbing up from the fangs buried in my chest and that was neither pain nor blood.
My legs didn’t ask my opinion.
The sand came up, the noise went away, and my mind went into the black.