They had taken the body of the guard without a word and left Azeric in a heap on the floor, bruised, bloodied, and half-conscious. A baton had left a welt across his back. Another strike had caught his temple.
Now, alone, he forced himself upright with a grunt, one hand pressing against the wall for balance. His ribs ached. His limbs felt heavier than they should have.
There was no light except the slit above the door, and no sound except the settling of stone and his own breath.
Azeric sat with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms resting loose.
He kept thinking about the letters.
Floating.
Revealing themselves in front of his face, untouched by the chaos. A system, it said. Combat protocols. Synchronization.
He didn't even know if it had been real.
There was nothing now. No light. No flicker. No voice in his head. Just the echo of what had been there and the cold whisper of possibility that maybe it hadn't.
Maybe he'd lost it.
Maybe it had never been there at all.
He let out a dry, low chuckle—short and humorless. "You've finally snapped," he muttered to no one. His voice sounded foreign in the empty space, like it belonged to someone else. Madness felt too clean a word for it. Hallucinating floating text? Hearing systems? Maybe they'd hit him harder than he thought.
A loud bang jolted the silence—a fist slammed against the iron door, followed by the scrape of the hatch sliding open. Azeric didn't move at first, but he heard the shift of armor, the smug breath behind the words.
"Warden's orders," the guard sneered, voice thick with contempt. "Your little stunt bought you a front-row seat back in the pit. Beasts this time. Should feel right at home, gutterspawn."
The door unlocked with a clank, hinges whining as it opened. The guard stood smirking, flanked by two more who looked less amused and more wary. Azeric gave a faint, bruised chuckle as he pushed himself upright.
"You should thank me. He earned it." Azeric pushed himself up, slow, breath hissing through his teeth. The bruises ached. His head pulsed.
But he stood.
He always did.
The guard's smirk twisted, hate blooming in his eyes. "I'd beat the rest of your teeth out right now, but what's the point? The pit'll finish the job soon enough."
Azeric let out a slow breath and smiled—this time not bitter, not broken, but pleased. "He squealed. Bet you never thought he would. I did you a favor, really." he said, voice hoarse but steady.
The guard didn't smile this time. His fist snapped forward, smashing into Azeric's mouth. The impact split his lip and knocked his head back against the wall.
Azeric winced, blood streaking down his chin—but the smirk didn't vanish. He said nothing more. He didn't need to.
They shackled and dragged him through a corridor rank with blood and bile. Azeric didn't resist. He kept his head down, not from fear, but because the pounding in his skull hadn't stopped.
He had never been thrown to a beast before. They always paired him against weaker men—small, injured, sedated—just enough to guarantee a show without a real threat. This was different. This was punishment.
But he wasn't afraid of teeth and claws. He'd seen what real monsters looked like and they wore uniforms.
He would survive this—bloodied, bruised, even crawling if it came to that—because the only thing more satisfying than killing the beast would be seeing the disbelief on their faces when it dropped before he did.
Let them think they were feeding him to monsters.
He'd show them which one belonged in a cage.
The pit doors opened, and the roar of the crowd broke like a wave across his skin—loud, hungry, and full of the kind of hysteria that made his stomach tighten with contempt. It wasn't awe or fear they wanted. It was blood. Screams.
A man reduced to meat. He didn't flinch, but something in him curled back from it, disgusted by how eagerly they waited to watch someone die.
The beast waited.
It looked like a thing dragged out of the wild and broken in the process—its spine too long, back legs crooked as if they bent the wrong way. The jaws were oversized, stretched too far with rows of uneven teeth that jutted like bone shards. Tufts of wiry fur clung to bare muscle, and its eyes—dark and sunken—gave no sense of awareness, only hunger.
Caged until the moment Azeric stepped onto the arena floor.
From the platform above, a voice boomed across the pit—sharp, theatrical, meant to cut through the chaos. "This one comes from the far south—untamed, starved, and bred to tear through bone!"
The crowd roared again.
"And facing it today," the announcer sneered, drawing out the silence between syllables, "is Azeric, sentenced to live... or die."
The crowd screamed louder than before, thrilled at the odds. Azeric didn't glance up.
He had no interest in their games. Instead, he lowered his stance, one foot sliding back into position, his body turning side-on. No blade, no shield—but the motion was deliberate. Balanced. Ready.
If he was going to die, he'd meet it standing like a fighter, not some caged thing thrown in to amuse them.
It lunged before the gate had fully lifted. Bone armor clattered over stretched muscle, its roar jagged and wrong. A creature bred for carnage, dumped into the sand to entertain the masses.
The beast charged. The crowd screamed.
In the corner of his eye, something caught the light—metal, dulled by blood and sand but unmistakably a blade. A short sword, likely from a previous match, lay equidistant between him and the oncoming beast. Reaching it first would mean surviving. Failing would mean death.
Azeric didn't hesitate. He bolted.
The crowd gasped, some rising from their seats. He hit the sand hard, slid, grabbed the hilt, and rose in a single motion. The beast was almost on him.
He swung with everything he had.
The blade met flesh with a crack like stone breaking. The creature's head snapped back, then off entirely, severed mid-charge. Blood sprayed across the pit wall as its body tumbled and skidded, lifeless.
For a heartbeat, there was silence.
Then the arena erupted.
The crowd howled with disbelief and savage delight. The monster hadn't just fallen. It had been executed.
Above him, texts flickered.
[SYSTEM UPDATE]
**Target: Class-I entity terminated **
**Vital signs: Stable **
Synchronization increased: 7%
He stared at the text, brow tight. It was the same sterile format as before—sharp, floating, unreal. Slowly, almost without thinking, he reached toward it. His fingers passed through the air, and the letters rippled slightly, bending around his touch like light through water. He froze. It wasn't a hallucination. Or if it was, it knew how to react.
And just as he finished reading it, the letters flickered once and vanished—clean, silent, as if they had never been there at all.
He looked up. The crowd roared above him, louder than any system, louder than reason—yet not one of them could see what he did. The text hovered only for him, untouched by their frenzy.
He just turned toward the gate as it opened again, his bare feet leaving no prints in the blood-wet sand.