ALL NOVEL Chapter 23: The Endless Colosseum
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The rasp of the metal cuts through the screams of the crowd as two bodies press past each other, sparks flying through the air and igniting into bursts of flame as damp rags, greased with the cut fat of bodies, fall like snowflakes in a winter blizzard. All around the arena, explosions and blast waves erupt out across the fighting chamber, laid down below the crowd that sits on the seating all around the underground space. Two fighters turn around, facing each other once again, as on one side of the arena, the ground begins to crumble and fall into an abyss — the collapse triggered by someone on the blue team stepping on a trap. In the same instant, the red side of the arena is fully engulfed in flames as the crawling fire consumes and gorges itself on more flesh and clay than even the gods of battle of many creeds could hold in their hands.
Half of a metal visor falls down to the ground. The cold face visible beneath there, where the obscuring mask is now broken apart, looks no different than the cold, lifeless material that is covering it. Like steel, there is nothing in it to signify life — organic. It’s firm and motionless. A cold blue eye stares outward and onward past the slanted blade of a sword held in both hands toward the opponent, silhouetted by the gathering flames that crawl up behind his back like the specters of a thousand dead soldiers on a battlefield, clambering and climbing up the legs of the last man standing atop the bloodied mud.
The arena quakes, the roar being indistinguishable from that of the screaming crowd who sit on the bleachers and howl like hungry animals toward a blood moon.
The two fighters ready themselves, neither having anywhere left to go but forward, toward the other, toward the fangs of the wolf that stand opposite to them. Behind them is fire, behind them is collapse, and behind them is nothing but anarchy and violence from a battle in which the two of them are uniquely separate. Two teams are competing here in this arena today, two teams fighting each other for possession of an orb in what is a fairly simple game.
But both of them, while competing, have become distracted from the goal of the game and instead become infatuated with the goal of the burning heat in their cores.
The man’s broken piece of helmet finally strikes the sand at his boots after falling for the longest second either of them had ever known. Like the chiming of a church bell, the slight clang it releases as it makes contact with the ground echoes out to both of their ears. In a flash of a second, the two of them meet again in the middle of what remains of the usable arena. One strikes, the other counters, and metal flashes against metal with the same intensity of two sets of eyes that stare into each other, locked in an emotion that lovers and those who know hatred both cannot understand. One body ducks, the other slashes. One body weaves, grappling the other as they undergo a complicated dance on uneven terrain; the other body releases — barely avoiding the sting of a piercing strike — before pushing back into the conjoined himself. One man and another fight, their weapons and fists moving in precise, disjointed cohesion. Two bodies, each fighting to be separate from the other, ironically unify themselves in their movements in the attempt — the serpent doesn’t eat its own tail, as the metaphor would go, rather, in this display of combat, it is eating the tail of another serpent, which is eating that of the first. Two endlessly hungering bodies press with killing intent — not for the sake of the hunt but for the sport of it.
There is no rivalry here, no centuries-old declaration of war — rather, this fight is based on nothing but the honor and merit of the fight itself, fully irrelevant to the game being played in the background of their scene. Two dozen others run around this way and that way, locked in their own games and schemes, but as these two men fight, they know nothing but the other.
One kicks a sweeping leg, the blue fighter losing his footing and beginning to fall, catching himself only because of a lucky opportunity afforded by the fact that his very opponent — the man trying to cut his neck — grabs him by the collar and flings him the other way. Just the same, the blue fighter, as the red combatant is nearly engulfed in the flames of the arena, changes footing and pushes toward a tactically disadvantageous position for himself to allow the opponent to leave the trap he’s put himself into.
Because both of them know that for this to count and for this to matter, the final strike has to be made with intent and purpose. It can’t be an accident. It can’t just happen.
Once more, they prepared themselves for a new lunge, both of them panting. Their armor is scarred and cut, the same as their bleeding bodies, which cannot hold either of their weapons steady anymore.
It has to be done right, or it won’t matter at all.
Energy crackles in the air as thousands of eyes — including those of the dungeon-core, Munera — watch them and only them as they all sense something different in the fight being fought here than in that of the rest of the game.
They lunge.
She’ll show them.
Vilalae, the elven archer, stands in front of a table covered in odd marks and scratches that look like the work of a bored drunkard, gazing down toward it with eyes that are obsessed and frantic. They dart from side to side, glancing over the table’s etchings as she goes through her growing scheme in her mind.
She’s going to get out of this dungeon — not by playing by its rules and earning its stupid champion-points to buy her way out. No. She’s going to get out of here the way she decides. She never wanted to be resurrected to begin with. What right does this dungeon have to tell her that she has to be here or die? Of course she wants to die, but she is not going to accept being told to by someone else.
She chooses. Her. Not some unseen magical force vaguely floating through the walls of this damn place.
Her plan is almost ready. She has just about everything she needs.
Even if Marjus, the spearman, is a two-faced rat and Niji-ji, the priestess, has already left now — having had as much loyalty to their cause as a kobold taking tours of a gold mine — she doesn’t need them.
Vilalae’s eye twitches as she reaches up to her hair with a hand, digging through it. After a second, she pulls something out of it. The elf looks at the crawling beetle on her palm for a moment before tossing it over her shoulder and into the air.
The world shakes, rumbling, as, outside in the arena, the crowd goes crazy. Even through meters of thick stonework and cavern rocks, she can hear them screaming and cheering.
“Hey,” says a sharp voice from the side. The elf, her hair frizzy and her eyes just the same, turns with an unblinking gaze to look at the fairy hovering there a few steps away from her. “You look stressed,” she says. “You should go to the confessional,” says the small person, pointing over her shoulder toward a pair of booths in the wall. “Talking really helps take the load off the old shoulders, you know?”
The elf opens her mouth, her gaze dry and coldly blank.
A beetle crawls out of her throat, crawling over the side of her lips, down her cheek before flying off into the air.
“…Oh… uh… okay,” remarks the fairy, lifting her hands and backing away a little further into the air. “Forget I said anything.”
The small person flies away, and Vilalae turns her head back down toward the carved ramblings all over the wood as the dungeon shakes again from another explosion.
Soon.
This has been going great!
Munera, the colosseum core, watches in pleasure as the crowds flood through the dungeon — a nightmare for any other dungeon-core in this world — as these crowds would likely be adventurers, plunderers, and soldiers, all of whom would love nothing more than to kill the dungeon-core and take all of its riches and power for themselves. However, in this scenario, this really is the ideal state.
Thousands of people walk through its corridors and passages every day. Thousands of people of all levels of power and ability, ranging from mundane to absurd, and the loose, ambient magic that radiates out of their bodies like passive heat saturates its tunnel linings. Like dripping moisture down along a ridged wall, magic is flooding the tissue of the dungeon, letting it feed and grow fat — in a metaphorical sense. Members of the church pray in their cathedral, people drink and celebrate in the inns and taverns built inside of the underground, and adrenaline and burning emotions of any manner of passion flood the tunnels — hidden from the world’s eyes — in rampages of debauchery and violence, the raw emotional energy causing Munera to grow at unprecedented speed for a dungeon-core. Like a spiritual parasite, it feeds on their emotions, their magic, and their intents.
The arena and all of its many accompanying facilities are developing to a quality and status akin to the finest of any nation, and all of this is attracting even more people from the distant regions of the world. It’s a self-feeding cycle of growth. Now that a lot of the core construction has been done, Munera has begun expanding itself further, not just in amenities for the humans but in many for itself. Reservoirs of magical power where it can bank magical energy for rainy days, tunnels and entire chambers full of nothing but legions of monsters that are lying in wait to be used for a day that might never come, rooms full of traps and mazes in order to deter those visitors who begin to wander down the wrong tunnels in their idle curiosity. Even a great graveyard is made in the darkness below the world, a collection of thousands of corpses that it finds in its tunneling or corpses that are brought to it by travelers in order to resurrect for its games. Were this to be any other dungeon in the world, the great nations would have culled it in alarm and fear long ago. However, because of the bread and circus it offers them, the humans have turned a blind eye to the potential danger Munera could pose, should it go rogue. With the blessings of the Holy-Church and that of the many kings — none of which want to be the odd man out in regards to this matter — Munera feeds, grows, and swells past the point of normal power and toward that of what one might call a catastrophe.
But in a way, it itself doesn’t even realize the breadth of its own swelling.
Its thousand eyes are too busy obsessively watching the fighting, and its thoughts are too busy yearning for the next battle to come as it watches and grows, and it slowly realizes as it watches a hundred fights more that it itself might never know this level of intense personal weight itself.
After all, after all of this growing, all of this change, after subjugating even a great hero and demon of history, what possible opponent could what might be the world’s most powerful dungeon-core have?
It is the burden of the powerful to know that there will never be a worthy opponent.