Dark crimson sprayed across the muddy ground in wide arcs, painting the roots of nearby trees. The metallic scent hit him a moment later, sharp and unsettling. His stomach churned, but he forced himself to look, to analyze, to understand what was happening.
Four figures occupied a small clearing ahead.
Two stood in a loose formation, weapons raised, their bodies relaxed with the confidence of predators who had cornered wounded prey.
Their clothes were torn and mud-stained, their faces hard with violence. One, a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head, held a bloodied axe. The second was a woman with sharp features and pale blonde hair, gripping a pair of twin daggers.
They looked nothing like the timid prisoners from the armory. These two moved like they'd already accepted what they had to become, killers whose sole purpose was to kill.
On the ground between them lay a body. A young man, barely older than Damon, face-down in the mud. Blood pooled beneath him, dark and spreading. His hand still clutched a broken sword, fingers frozen in death's grip.
The fourth figure—their target—limped backward, trying desperately to create space. A girl, maybe sixteen, her face pale from terror and blood loss. Her left arm hung useless at her side, dark red seeping through her torn sleeve. She held a knife in her right hand, but it trembled so badly it was clear she couldn't use it.
"Haha! Look at this trash!" the bald man with the axe shouted, his voice carrying through the forest with disturbing cheerfulness. "There's nowhere left to run!"
The girl's back hit a tree. Cornered.
"P-please," she gasped, her voice breaking. "Please, I—I won't—"
"Won't what?" the woman with the daggers asked, stepping closer. "Won't try to kill us? Won't compete?" She laughed, cold and sharp. "Too late for that, sweetheart. You chose your partner. Your fate is sealed."
The girl's legs gave out. She slid down the tree trunk, leaving a red smear on the bark, and collapsed into a sitting position. Her knife fell from nerveless fingers.
"Should've picked someone stronger," the man said, almost conversationally. He gestured toward the dead body with his axe. "This pathetic filth went down in three hits!"
Damon's grip tightened on his sword hilt. His mind cataloged everything—the attackers' positions, their weapons, the ease with which they'd defeated the other pair.
'This is what it takes to survive,' he thought, his mouth dry.
A gentle tug on his sleeve pulled his attention away.
Elise.
She'd moved up beside him, so quietly he hadn't heard her approach. Her magenta eyes were fixed on the scene, but her expression was unreadable. She turned to him, her lips moving without sound.
"Should we intervene?"
The silent question hung in the air between them.
Damon's first instinct was to observe. The two attackers clearly had combat experience, while he and Elise were untested. Any intervention would turn those weapons on them, and he had a feeling it's not something they should be facing, not right now.
But beyond tactics, there was something simpler, even colder.
He had no reason to intervene.
That girl wasn't his ally. She wasn't his friend. She was a competitor, one of many pairs standing between him and survival. Her death reduced the number of people trying to kill him. It was mathematically beneficial.
More than beneficial.
It was necessary.
He met Elise's gaze and slowly shook his head.
"No."
Something flickered across her face, not disappointment or judgment, but what looked like mild surprise. She nodded once and turned her attention back to the clearing.
The bald man raised his axe, its edge still dripping with blood from his previous kill.
"Any last words?" he asked mockingly.
The girl opened her mouth, but only a sob came out just as the axe fell.
Damon forced himself to watch, to not look away, to remember every detail. The impact. The sudden stillness. The way the two attackers immediately began looting the bodies, searching for anything useful with the efficiency of scavengers.
'This is what it takes to survive.'
He tried to justify it to himself, then he realized the pair would soon finish looting their prey. His gaze shifted toward Elise, and with a simple nod, he gestured for them to retreat.
They took a single step backward.
CRACK!
The sound of a branch snapping echoed through the forest like a gunshot.
"What the hell was that?" the man with the axe shouted, his head whipping toward their position.
Damon's eyes snapped down. A large branch lay broken beneath Elise's foot.
'How—?' He didn't have time to finish the thought.
"Get ready!" he shouted, raising his blade just as the bald man came crashing through the underbrush.
The axe came down with a devastating force.
Damon met it with his sword, the impact sending vibrations up his arms and nearly driving him to his knees. The weight behind the blow was tremendous.
The man's face split into a grin. "What do we have here? Two more prey?"
Damon gritted his teeth, pushing back against the pressure. The axe lifted, and he barely had time to reposition before the next strike came.
To his left, he caught a flash of movement, Elise was sprinting away as the blonde woman pursued her with deadly intent, daggers flashing.
"Where are you running, sweetheart?" the woman called, her voice dripping with cruel amusement. "Don't you want to play?"
But Damon couldn't focus on Elise's fight, as the axe wielder demanded his full attention.
The man attacked again, bringing his weapon down in a powerful overhead swing. Damon sidestepped, the movement coming almost instinctively, surprising himself with how natural it felt, and countered with a quick thrust.
His blade found its mark on the man's left arm, drawing a line of crimson.
"Bit slow, aren't we?" Damon asked, purposefully trying to anger him.
And it worked.
"You damn brat! I'll kill you!" the man hissed, his next swing wild and reckless.
'Perfect,' Damon thought, analyzing the pattern. 'He's strong and he has a long reach... but no speed. He's... predictable!'
He dodged the clumsy assault and struck again, this time catching the man's exposed side. Then again, opening a shallow cut across his thigh.
The axe wielder's movements grew more desperate and more aggressive with every moment. Blood seeped from multiple wounds, but he seemed to have endless stamina, swinging that massive weapon as if it weighed nothing.
'He's weakening,' Damon noted, circling around his opponent. 'But one solid hit from that axe and I'm—'
A piercing scream cut through the forest.
It was unmistakably Elise's voice.
Damon's head snapped to the side.
Through the trees, he saw blood spray from the girl's right eye as the blonde woman withdrew a dagger from her face. Elise collapsed to her knees, one hand clutching at the wound, blood streaming between her fingers.
The woman stood proudly above her, grinning as she enjoyed watching her twist in pain.
'No!'
The thought hit him with unexpected force.
Surviving with a weak partner would be difficult, but surviving alone in a battle royale with nearly a hundred other pairs? Impossible.
He couldn't let her die. Not this early. Not when the whole thing barely started.
Damon had no choice but to take a calculated risk.
As the axe wielder raised his weapon for another overhead strike, Damon didn't retreat, he lunged forward, inside the arc of the swing.
His sword cut deep across the man's abdomen.
The axe wielder's eyes went wide. He stumbled backward, the weapon falling from his grip as he clutched at the wound. Blood spilled between his fingers as he fell to his knees, gasping for air.
Damon didn't stop to finish him. He simply ran, sprinting toward Elise as the blonde woman raised her daggers for the killing blow.
"No you don't!" Damon swung wide at the woman.
She twisted with serpentine grace, her daggers catching his blade with an impossible speed. The impact jarred his arm, and in that moment he realised that he had made a mistake.
'It wasn't the axe wielder who killed that pair. It was her.'
The woman's eyes gleamed with predatory satisfaction. She pressed her advantage immediately, her daggers moving in a blur of steel. Each strike came from an unexpected angle, high, low, left, right, forcing Damon into a purely defensive stance.
His sword barely managed to meet her attacks.
She deflected his blade with minimal effort, leaving openings that her second dagger exploited ruthlessly.
Pain blossomed across his shoulder. Then his ribs. Followed by his forearm.
Warmth bloomed from his wounds as blood soaked through his clothes. His breathing became ragged, his movements growing slower by the second.
'She's toying with me,' he realized. 'She could have ended this already!'
It was a cruel realisation, one that sent shivers down his spine.
The woman simple smiled, confirming his suspicion as if she could read his mind. "You're better than the previous two... But still..." She stepped forward, daggers spinning. "...just another corpse waiting to happen."
Damon tried to retreat, but his foot caught on uneven ground. The mud gave way beneath him, and his leg sank ankle-deep into a hidden hollow.
He was trapped.
He raised his sword desperately as the woman's right dagger struck, pushing his weapon to the side with almost insulting ease. Too far to recover, and too far to block the follow-up.
The second dagger came at his throat, aimed with lethal precision.
His eyes widened.
'This is it!'
Suddenly, right before it could reach him, the woman's arm jerked violently to the side.
It wasn't a flinch or a miss, it was as if her entire arm was pulled, as if yanked by an invisible string. The dagger that should have met his throat met nothing but air, missing its mark by almost a meter.
Shock flashed across the woman's face.
"What?!"
Her arm jerked again, pulling further away, her whole body twisting as she fought against something unseen.
Damon didn't waste the opening.
He ripped his foot free from the mud and drove his sword forward with everything he had left. The blade tore through cloth and flesh, sunk deep into her chest.
The woman's eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She stared down at the sword protruding from her body, confusion and disbelief etched across her features.
Then her knees buckled and her body collapsed into the mud with a wet thud.
Damon stood there, gasping for air as he tried to process what just happened.
**
His sword was still embedded in the woman's chest, his hands shook from adrenaline and every part of his body hurt as if he got hit by a truck.
But at that moment, he remembered
"Elise!"
He turned, pulling his blade free, and saw her kneeling a few meters away in a small clearing between the trees. One hand pressed against her ruined right eye, blood streaming down her face and dripping from her chin.
But it was her other eye, the left one, that caught his breath.
It glowed.
It wasn't the magenta colour he had seen, it looked brighter, more intense than before. A luminescent shade that seemed to pulse with inner light, as if lit from within by something that wasn't quite natural.
And around her other hand, the one not covering her wounded eye, he could only now see very faint threads of silver light.
They were impossibly thin, nearly invisible. The more he looked, the more they seemed to cover, it was as if they were linked to everything around them, including himself.
But before he could take a longer look, all at once they dissolved into nothing just as Elise's hand dropped to the muddy ground.
The glow in her eye had also dimmed but didn't fully disappear, leaving a faint luminescence that made her magenta iris look otherworldly.
She looked up at him, her face pale with blood loss and shock.
Damon took a step toward her before pausing as he remembered he had some unfinished business.
Behind him, he heard the wet drag of something moving through mud. He turned to see the axe wielder crawling away, leaving a dark trail of blood in his wake. The man's movements were desperate, pathetic in comparison to his earlier confidence.
Damon almost scoffed at the sight but caught himself.
He approached without hurry. The man tried to move faster, dragging himself toward the trees as if they could offer sanctuary, but it was pointless. Damon's shadow fell over him before he'd made it another three feet.
The axe wielder stopped crawling. His breathing came in ragged gasps.
Damon stood above him, sword still dripping with the blonde woman's blood.
"Any last words?" he asked, his voice flat.
The man's head lifted. The same eyes that had gleamed with sadistic pleasure while killing the other pair now looked up at Damon with raw terror. The hunter became the prey.
"P-please," the man gasped, blood bubbling at his lips. "I have family!"
Damon, however, was done talking.
His sword fell and with it, the man's misery was gone.