The sky was dull.
Not grey. Not black.
Just… dull. Like someone had scraped all the color out of it and forgotten to put anything back.
A sky where no sun or moon, no star would ever shine. Where such a sky was normal. Common sense.
A teenager lay on his back, arms and legs spread wide, staring at that empty stretch of nothing. His chest rose unevenly.
Each breath felt like a mistake his body had not realized yet.
His wavy, shoulder-length black hair was wet with mud, eyes open ajar, light brown stained by the lead-colored sky.
On his neck a mark was etched, like a burnt spot, looking like a chain forming a perfect circle... A mark that had stripped him of everything since his memories ever began to form.
Blood soaked the ground beneath his exposed light olive-colored skin that had lost its sheen. Most of it was his. Some of it was not. He could not tell anymore, and honestly, he did not care enough to try.
A few meters away, another lay in the same position. Same stupid spread.
Same sky.
Though his features were different, his hair was straighter and his skin was paler... He looked older as well, but he was also malnourished and bony...
They looked utterly broken.
"Fifth Bro," his friend muttered, his voice dry and cracked. "I think we are dying."
Fifth Bro blinked slowly.
"Yeah," he said. "I can tell." Bitterness dripped from his voice.
They had fought long and hard, for nothing…
There was a pause. Wind passed over the battlefield, carrying the smell of rot, iron, and burned flesh. The fight was long over. The survivors had already moved on.
No one checked on them... and even if they did... they wouldn't survive.
They knew what condition they were in... maybe this was the freedom they earned after an endless cycle of fighting for others.
Warslaves were not worth the effort of saving; they were not even worth the mercy of a quick death.
The mark on their necks, the seal of slaves.
The mark that stripped them of any human ambition.
No name to be called. No memories of family or relatives.
"Did you see any of our brothers survive?" Fifth Bro asked.
"None, they all died early… only the two of us survived that long," he said in a light and prideful tone unbefitting the situation.
He paused for a moment before adding, "Still, we're on our way as well."
Right… It was all for nothing.
"Yeah, Ninth Bro... you can finally surpass me by dying earlier," Fifth Bro added playfully, unfazed by the fact that he was dying.
"Just… let us die peacefully," he spoke again, deciding this would be his last.
His friend let out a weak laugh that turned into a cough. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
They stayed still for a moment.
Then Ninth Bro spoke.
"Well," he said weakly, "whoever dies first is gay," refuting the Fifth's suggestion.
Fifth Bro turned his head just enough to look at him.
"You son of a bitch," he spoke angrily, but a weak laugh escaped his lips.
They laughed. Or tried to. It came out wrong. Broken sounds that scraped their throats raw.
"Ha," Ninth Bro wheezed.
"Ha," Fifth Bro replied.
"Ha…"
They had numbers.
Warslaves of the same batch and close in age, they were given numbers.
Slave Number 135 and Slave Number 139.
That was what they were known as while alive.
The laughter stopped halfway through.
"You know," Ninth Bro said quietly, "I had a sister a long time ago. I do not know if she is still alive… ha…"
Fifth Bro gathered his strength.
"I…" He squeezed the words out one by one. "I do not remember being anything but a slave…"
Fifth Bro waited. He counted breaths that did not come.
The sky stayed dull. Unimpressed.
"Do you remember your name before becoming a slave?" he asked.
"Ha… not sure. Does not matter anymore."
"…Figures," Fifth Bro muttered.
His vision blurred. Not dramatically. Just enough that the edges of the world softened, like reality was losing interest in him.
This was it.
No last words. No regrets worth mentioning. No sudden realization that life had meaning all along.
Just exhaustion. And the quiet certainty that he was done.
Maybe if he had a chance to live again, it would still be meaningless.
He would rather not experience living once again.
It was bitter and tiring.
Too tiring.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment.
Or a very long time.
He thought he would never open them again.
But he did, and when he did... everything felt different.
His body was freezing cold. His neck was stiff. He could not turn to look where his friend was.
"Bro…" he called.
He waited.
No answer came.
His body shook slightly.
There were no tears to shed. A dry, silent sob echoed from his chest.
And the wind went silent.
What remained of his consciousness questioned things, but before long, the world blurred. His eyes went dull.
Death, cold and silent, started to take over his body.
He could no longer struggle; there wasn't anything more to fight.
And his eyes finally closed.
In absolute darkness, he stood alone... experiencing newfound comfort he had yearned for for so long.
Like a dream where there was no sight, he started hearing things. Or feeling them. Like something pressing against his body, holding him gently.
He tried to turn his head, but inside the void of death, he had no control.
But this void suddenly cracked, random intersecting lights slashing through darkness... but it was just for a moment before darkness took over again.
Though the noise persisted, and every once in a while, he started making sense of scattered words.
"Dead."
"…Pretty sure I am."
The voice chuckled.
"Live."
Slave 135 tried to comprehend it, but the words slipped away.
"Yeah…"
BOOOOM.
Something rang like an explosion.
"Kid."
"Stable."
"Energy."
Something groaned, creaking.
Boooooom.
More followed.
Slave 135 kept focusing more, trying to understand... But the dark space he was locked in started to shake.
Or so it felt... but...
"Stable now."
The talkative stranger kept ranting...
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
"Good luck."
"Ah, right… Moon."
'Huh?'
He managed to catch a few words, but he understood nothing... there was no meaning behind it. Though, the booming sounds had grown too loud... more rhythmic and consistent... and the voice was now completely gone.
He felt a slight familiarity in the words, but...
Another explosion echoed.
And the sense of familiarity vanished.
Slave 135 wanted to open his eyes. He wanted to see where the noise and voices came from.
He was starting to comprehend the words at last.
He started to feel his eyes again, realizing they were shut closed.
But his eyes were shut, refusing to open.
Still, he did not give up.
For some reason, he wanted to look. He wanted to see what death was. What came after it.
Would he finally find this freedom he desired; would he find a name... become a person at last?
He used all his strength, trying to force them open.
His efforts didn't go to waste, and suddenly, his eyes opened.
A new scene unfolded.
Darkness... it was the only thing he could see.
He felt his back resting on something, and a weird creaking sound was echoing from it.
And he saw it.
Behind him, where there should have been nothing but ruined ground and corpses, something existed.
'A wall?' He was not sure what it was...
He supported his body on the ground, crawling back to take a better look at what lay before his eyes.
But after crawling for a long distance, he could make sense of a slight angle.
He realized it was a gate, a towering gate beyond any city gate he had ever seen, but fragments creaked. Jagged edges. Fractured surfaces. Cracks running across it like scars that never healed.
It was whole, but fractured.
Like a living being, it was gradually healing itself visibly... but considering the size of the rifts running through it, it was a very slow process.
Where was he?
Where did the battlefield go?
Where did the gate come from?
He was frozen in place, unable to take his eyes off the gate for a moment...
But for just a moment, he turned his head to explore what existed in this place.
He searched in the opposite direction to the gate, but all he saw was darkness.
Not the absence of light.
Deeper.
A space that did not feel empty so much as unfinished; something was accommodating the space, this darkness was...
He felt his body twitch before gravity shifted.
His body started falling toward the darkness.
The pain of his killing wound traumatized him at this unnatural moment. He checked his rags and touched his stomach... but the wound was not there... only a large scar he could feel with his hand.
Heaving a sigh of relief, he tried to stop his fall.
His fingers scraped uselessly against a surface too smooth to be natural, but his legs refused to move. His body obeyed the new gravity as the new law.
The gate started getting further and further away, and now he could see... it was like it was hit by a hammer multiple times from afar.
But the darkness he was falling inside was more pressing. He looked inside the abyss...
And the abyss stared back into his eyes.
His eyes, wide open, could no longer break the eye contact.
And the closer he got, the more he could see.
It wasn't a face, but an eye... one eye covered his entire field of vision.
An eye that felt like the darkness itself was looking down at him.
Unwelcoming.
The stare brought with it fear... fear he couldn't understand.
He, who never felt that anything could give him fear, who hated his status as a slave for being under those he could fight and defeat...
He believed that on the battlefield was where everyone was finally equal.
He was afraid, but the fall didn't cease.
THUD.
He crashed beneath the eye.
Gasp.
He gasped violently, his lungs dragging air like they had been deprived for far too long. His body convulsed as pain flooded back, ripping a scream from his throat.
He rolled onto his side, coughing, choking, retching blood onto the smooth black platform that definitely had not existed a moment ago.
His eyes were shut in pain.
"Hmmm."
A sound of irritation echoed; he forced his eyes open.
He lay within a vast, empty circular structure. The floor was solid, dark, and unmarked. The air felt heavy. Compressed. Like the atmosphere itself was watching him.
He looked at the eye again.
"You stink of death," it said flatly. "You were not invited."
Slave 135 swallowed a mouthful of blood; he wasn't sure what the thing was saying, or what it even was.
The being's structure was impossible to imagine.
If he had not already died, there would have been no way for him to accept what he was seeing.
He used the cuffs of his rags to wipe his mouth. "I could not even die peacefully," he muttered. "Haha." A burdened laugh escaped his lips.
The gaze sharpened.
"You did not open the gate," the eye said, drawing closer.
"Was I supposed to?"
"You were not," it snapped. "That is the problem."
Silence stretched. He wasn't sure how to respond to this situation... 'Does it want me to open the gate or not?... And why am I wounded again after death?' The troubled teenager questioned death itself.
"My deepest apologies, how do I leave this place?" he asked, before a sudden question came, "Are you the guardian of the underworld?"
The eye kept looking without an answer.
'Why was death so underwhelming?' He had imagined peaceful rest.
Instead, a giant eye looked down on him in the dark, rupturing his ribs...
"Where is this place?" Slave 135 asked.
The eye stared as if he had asked something profoundly stupid.
"The Trial Zone," it said. "And you should not be here."
"What is a Trial Zone?" he asked.
"The Tower's Trial Zone."
"What tower?"
"You stupid thing," the eye growled. "You lived inside the tower your whole life and did not even know."
Darkness coalesced into an arm.
A hand rose.
"No explanations," it said coldly. "No accommodations. No mercy."
The ground beneath him shuddered.
Space tore open ahead.
Through the rift, Slave 135 saw movement.
Green skin. Yellow eyes. Snapping jaws.
Too many.
Before he could speak, understand what was actually happening.
[Trial initiated,] a cold, mechanical voice spoke inside his head.
[Last man standing.]