What was the point of this?
This battle.
This spectacle.
This opera of blood and silence, of smoke and screams.
What was the point of raising the stakes so high, only for the match to collapse like a gutted beast?
Veyne—killer of the Eastern Wastes, the unbeaten pit-born, the man who forged his name in agony—had been dismantled like an afterthought. As if he were nothing more than a decaying scarecrow tossed into the maw of a hurricane.
His legend snuffed out in minutes.
No. Seconds.
Even now, as the coliseum echoed with the shrieks of triumph and horror, as nobles toasted and gamblers cackled and commoners roared for the blood they'd been promised—
The question lingered. Unspoken. Heavy in the air like smoke after a funeral pyre.
What was the point?
Why fanfare a storm, only to unleash a butcher's knife?
Why build tension like a playwright, only to have the curtain fall in a single, brutal act?
Some claimed it was overkill.
