“That… doesn’t sound like a bad idea, actually,” the mage says.
“Yes,” Wilhelm says. “And if we travel as a group, we’ll increase our chances of survival.”
“Then let’s get going,” Bruce says. “And remember to keep a look out for the manticores in the sky. There’s no telling when they’ll take a dive for us.”
We all start moving towards the desert marauders in short sprints, stopping behind a monster carcass every time, in order to make sure that the tramplers don’t begin charging towards us. As soon as we reach our targets, we position ourselves in a way that blocks us from the tramplers’ line of sight, and we begin our attack.
Bruce is the first one to engage the marauders, shouting loudly and swinging his large two handed sword towards them, in an attempt to intimidate them. Leila makes a rush at the marauder that’s closer to Bruce, trying to get to its head, but the creature blocks her path with its claws, and it tries to attack her with its tail. She dashes out of the way, and she tries to attack it again, from the side.
One of the marauders charges towards the ex-noble thug, and it tries to impale him with its tail. The thug screams in shock, and he jumps back, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to get away in time. All of a sudden, Bruce jumps out of nowhere, and he deflects the marauder’s tail with his sword, making the creature back up a bit, in order to measure up its new opponent carefully.
“The arena is no place for cowards!” Bruce shouts at the thug. “This is a place for real men! If you’re planning to fight like a woman, then get out of my way!”
Bruce then quickly realizes the poor wording of his phrase, and he turns towards Leila, who is now frowning at him.
“Or you can… also fight like a woman if you want…” Bruce says. “Just don’t be a coward. You get what I mean.”
Bruce and Leila then resume their fight with the other marauder, while Wilhelm is providing support for them.
“Hey, you,” I say. “Ex-noble thug!”
“What did you just call me?” the thug says, in a menacing tone.
“Never mind that!” I tell him. “Can you and your thug friend stand over here, and make some loud noises? I need someone to distract that marauder, so I can get behind it. The creature seems to have already taken a liking to you, so you’d make the perfect distraction!”
“Screw you and your distractions!” the thug says. “Do you take me for a fool?”
“If it’s just a distraction, then I can handle it,” the mage says. “Where do you want me to stand?”
“Over there would be perfect,” I tell him, as I point him in the right direction.
The two thugs don’t seem to want to be any part of my plan, so they’re moving away from us, and joining the others. The mage gets into position, and he starts throwing rocks at the marauder, in order to make it come after him. As soon as he gets the desert marauder’s attention, I walk behind the creature and quickly climb on its back.
Now let’s see… If my notes are correct, then giant scorpion-like creatures should have a weak spot right around… here!
I stab the marauder between two of the scales on its back, and the creature starts to scream loudly, while rocking its body back and forth for a few seconds. As it drops to the ground, I seize the opportunity, and I move towards its head, delivering the finishing blow with one quick strike of my knife. I then get down from the marauder’s back, and I get ready to join my teammates in dealing with the rest of the creatures.
No, wait… this isn’t over, yet. From what I’ve seen in the past two battles, the manticores in the sky have always tried to dive for the gladiators right after they killed a marauder, in order to take advantage of their distraction. This means that if I look up right now—
Before I get to finish my train of thought, I suddenly see a premonition of a manticore diving straight for me and grabbing me in its claws. I look up, to confirm my suspicions, then I immediately jump backwards, and I slash at the manticore’s wing with my knife, in order to cut off the feathers that it needs to fly properly. The creature tries flying away, but it no longer manages to gain altitude, and it crashes to the ground. I give the beast no time to recover, and I jump at it with my dagger, slitting its throat in one move.
Perfect! Two creatures are already down. But there’s now a new problem that I need to deal with. Ever since we entered the arena, I’ve been keeping a close eye on Wilhelm, because my premonition did not tell me exactly when he would try to kill me. I tried to not let it show, but I’ve seen him getting closer to me ever since I jumped on that marauder. The fact that I can’t see him now can only mean one thing.
I quickly turn around, and I see Wilhelm standing right there, holding his orange hilted dagger with both hands, looking as if he’d been only seconds away from delivering a lethal blow. However, in this very moment, the man seems almost frozen. He keeps holding onto his dagger with both hands as if he were still about to attack me, but now that I’m facing him directly, all of his assassin instincts must be telling him to retreat, instead.
“Wilhelm?” I say.
Wilhelm says nothing. He keeps staring at me, quietly, as a trickle of sweat runs down his forehead.
“Wilhelm, are you alright, my friend?” I tell him, with a concerned tone, as I put my left hand on his shoulder. “You look rather tense!”
Immediately after I stop talking, I use my right hand to hit him very hard in his left temple with the hilt of my dagger, in order to make sure that I knock him out without killing him. He loses his consciousness almost instantly, and then he falls to the ground, with his dagger beside him.
“Idiot,” I say to him, and then I begin heading towards the others.
“So, uh…” I hear the mage’s voice coming from behind me, as he catches up to me. “Do you have any idea why mister smiley over there would want you dead?”
I completely forgot about this guy. I thought he already went to help the others, like the two thugs.
“No idea,” I lie to him. “I’ll figure it out later. Right now, we need to focus on killing the creatures.”
By the time we reach the rest of our team, the two marauders they were fighting are already dead. It doesn’t look like the second manticore had the guts to attack any of them while they were in such a large group, especially after what happened to its friend, earlier. Leaving the manticore aside, we’ve still got two tramplers and two cobras left to deal with. We should start making plans right away, before the creatures take the initiative.
“Hey, Leila,” I say. “Could you go and kill those tramplers over there? With your level of strength, I’m sure that you’ll be able to cut through their tough hides without much trouble.”
“By herself?” Bruce asks, in a loud voice. “Are you insane? Why would we not attack them in a group, like we did with these scorpions?”
“Because I want her to bait that manticore in the sky, while she’s at it,” I say. “If she’s alone, then the manticore will almost certainly try to attack her right after she kills one of the tramplers, but if we’re in a group, the creature will be too scared to attack us. I would do this myself, but Leila is the only one of us who has enough strength to pass through the tramplers’ tough hides.”
“I’ll do it,” Leila writes. “You deal with the cobras in the meantime.”
“Okay,” I say. “You remember what the tramplers’ weakness is, right?” I ask her.
“Yes, I remember,” Leila writes, and then she turns away, heading for the tramplers.
“We can’t just let her fight them alone like this!” Bruce says, as Leila gets further away from us. “What if she needs our help?”
“I guess we could wait here for a while, to see if she needs backup,” I say. “She’s probably going to be pissed about it, though. She told us to go deal with the giant cobras in the meantime, not to stand here and do nothing.”
“We’ll get going as soon as she kills all of the creatures,” Bruce says. “We’ll have plenty of time to
deal with the cobras before she gets back.”
We stand there and watch Leila run towards the tramplers for the next few seconds. Seeing her out in the open, the tramplers have also decided to target her, and they are now charging towards her. Neither of them are giving signs that they’ll be stopping anytime soon.
Now, if what I’ve read in all my notes is correct, the tramplers are much easier to intimidate than one would suspect. Tramplers are not used to being challenged on their own turf, so if you keep running towards them at full speed while they are charging at you, they will eventually stop charging, and back down. Leila knows of this weakness, and that’s the reason why she’s not stopping. Hopefully, everything will turn out okay.
After a few more seconds of running at each other, the two tramplers finally stop, about a dozen feet away from her, and they begin to swing their spiked mace tails towards her, in an attempt to intimidate her.
Perfect! This is the best scenario that Leila could be hoping for. A trampler’s strength lies in its charges. A few tail swipes are only good to scare off dumb beasts. They’re not going to inconvenience her.
Leila jumps over one of the beasts and lands on its back, stabbing it in the back of its neck. Before the trampler even has time to fall to the ground, Leila already jumps off its back, in order to attack its companion. The second trampler barely has any time to react, before Leila gets below its head, running one of her knives straight through its lower jaw and all the way to its brain.
As soon as she gets away from the dying creature, the last remaining manticore makes a very fast dive towards her, in an attempt to surprise her. Leila feigns ignorance until the very last moment, and then she makes a powerful slash at the creature’s chest, exactly when it reaches her. The manticore drops to the ground, and Leila finishes it off with one swift strike of her dagger.
“See?” I say to Bruce. “I told you we didn’t have anything to worry about. Now let’s hurry up and kill those cobras before she gets here!”
“Uh, actually,” the ex-noble thug says. “I think I’d rather wait for the silver haired princess to get back until we go fight the cobras. The more the merrier!”
“Yeah, me too!” the other thug says.
“For once, I agree with these two,” the mage says. “Why would we go fight the cobras by ourselves, when we could all go together? We’d just be taking risks for no reason.”
Interesting. I’ve noticed this since we were fighting the marauder, but it looks like the mage is trying his hardest to avoid doing any actual fighting in this round. I don’t think he’s used his homemade stat device at all in this fight. He must be trying to save the little energy it has for a real emergency.
“Nobody was counting on any of you to begin with,” Bruce says. “Come on, stillwater. There are two cobras, so there’s one for each of us.”
“Sure, whatever,” I say, and then we both go on our way.
As we get closer to the giant cobras, the two creatures stop in their tracks, and they prepare to attack us.
“Make sure you never stop moving sideways,” I tell Bruce, as we approach the snakes. “The cobras can only shoot their acid in a straight line, and it takes them a few seconds to take aim, so as long as you don’t give them the time they need, they won’t be able to hit you.”
“Understood,” Bruce says.
“You take the one on the left,” I tell him, and I make a rush towards the cobra on the right.
I bait the cobra by standing in one place for two seconds, and then I jump out of the way, making the creature miss its shot, and waste its acid. While the snake is busy gathering up more acid in its glands, I make a dash towards it, and I stab it in the head, killing it in one strike.
I take a look to see if Bruce needs any help, but he seems to have handled himself just fine on his own. The other snake is already dead, with its severed head lying on the ground beside its body, and Bruce is now coming back towards me, holding his double handed sword by his side as he walks, while Leila seems to be heading our way as well.
This is it. It’s over. The round is finally over. The crowds are going wild. They obviously weren’t expecting us to make it. If I were Hadrik, I’d probably be making some sort of speech right now, but to be perfectly honest, all I want at this point is to go back to my division area, and get a little bit of rest, before the next round begins.
After a while, the announcer finally asks us to clear the fighting area, and we prepare to go back to our division room.
“Wait, where’s Wilhelm?” Bruce asks me, all of a sudden. “Wasn’t he with you?
“Oh, he’s over there,” I say, as I point towards Wilhelm’s unconscious body. “He said he was a little sleepy, and he decided to take a nap.”
“Hold on, are you the one who knocked him out?” Bruce asks. “Did he try to attack you or something?”
“How did you guess?” I say.
“He was an assassin!” Bruce says. “I don’t trust assassins. I’ve been watching my back for him ever since we entered the arena. Anyway, taking naps is all well and good, but the next division is waiting for us to leave the area. I’ll go wake him up.”
Bruce goes over to Wilhelm and he begins to slap his face, while he shouts at him.
“Wilhelm!” Bruce says. “Wilhelm, you no-good assassin, get up! Our first round is over. We need to clear the area.”
After a few more slaps to the face, Wilhelm opens his eyes, grabs Bruce’s hand, and then grips it hard, while looking at him as if he’d want to murder him here and now.
“I’m awake,” Wilhelm says, forcing a calm tone in his voice. “Let’s get out of here.”
It takes us about a minute, but we eventually get back to our division area, and once we re-enter our room, the iron gate closes itself behind us.
“I need to go get something from my backpack,” Wilhelm tells us, shortly after we enter the room. “I’ll be right back.”
“I hope you won’t try to assassinate anyone else on your way to the locker room, Wilbert,” Bruce says. “If you get knocked out again, I’m not coming to wake you up.”
Wilhelm gives Bruce a scornful look before he opens the door, but he leaves the room without saying another word.
“Uh…” the announcer says, all of a sudden. “It appears that we need to take a small break, in order to do a little inventory of our remaining creatures. Please remain patient! This shouldn’t take long!”
“Hah!” Bruce says. “They’re already running out of creatures. I bet they weren’t expecting so many of them to be taken out in the first few fights!”
“I don’t think they’re done,” I say. “I haven’t even seen any griffins, yet.”
“Yeah, but griffins can’t compare to manticores, in terms of deadliness,” Bruce says. “They were probably saving them as their last reserve, in case they ran out of everything else.”
As we wait for the announcer to resume the event, I start hearing some voices coming from further down the hallway outside. Yet again, it seems that I am the only one in the room who is able to hear the conversation. The two people talking appear to be Wilhelm and the ambassador of Ollendor.
“I paid you to get the job done, not to hear your excuses!” the ambassador shouts.
“You didn’t pay me anything,” Wilhelm says. “You just promised me that you’d get me out of this place, and that you’d make sure I don’t get executed for killing a teammate, as long as I kept my end of the bargain. Well, I’m here to tell you that the deal’s off. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s too risky. I already tried to assassinate him once, and I failed. He’ll be expecting it now. There’s no point in trying to assassinate a target that’s already onto you.”
“If you can’t backstab him anymore, then just attack him directly, you moron!” the ambassador says. “I don’t care how you get the job done. I just want him dead!”
“I’m not doing any job anymore,” Wilhelm says. “Stop bothering me. I’ve already said what I had to say.”
“Sorry for the delay, everyone,” the announcer says. “After checking to see which creatures we have left, it would appear that we are down to our last reserves after that last fight. If this division will manage to kill all the creatures as well, then we will be forced to go back to our regular stock of creatures for the divisions that follow. Now, with all this said and done, I would like to introduce to you the fifth division!”
When the next iron gate gets raised, Kate is the first one to step out into the fighting area. As she proceeds to the middle of the arena, the other members of her division also start to follow in her footsteps. Once I get a good look at all of Kate’s teammates, I get the sudden realization that Kate is likely the most capable fighter in her division, even without her magic. Most of the others look severely out of shape, and some of them don’t even have weapons. These clearly aren’t the types of gladiators that came here willingly.
As the unarmed fighters go to get their weapons of choice from the walls of the arena, the new creatures are slowly beginning to walk out of their den. I recognize the creatures immediately as being the ones that I encountered two days ago in the underground caverns. Or some of them at least. The giant rats are missing. I guess they may have only been there as food for the griffins. Either way, this is looking pretty bad. I don’t see Kate dealing with those monsters all by herself, and her teammates likely won’t be much help. Will she be forced to use her magic? Things could get really ugly if she does. I don’t even want to think about what would happen in that scenario. Maybe she can make it somehow. There’s always hope…
The harpies and the gargoyles are the first ones to make their way out of their den, and they immediately take to the air, studying their targets carefully.
Harpies are hideous creatures that have the appearance of women with scales, wings and claws. They might look almost human, but in reality, they couldn’t be more different. They are just about as intelligent as the lowliest of reptiles, and they’re twice as vicious. The gargoyles, on the other hand, could accurately be described as thinner ogres, with wings and horns, and with strength that is comparable to that of the ogres as well.
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