The figure lurched into the arena, a gaunt, skeletal frame stooped in a permanent, wretched hunch.
Its matted white hair cascaded like a shroud, veiling half its face and dragging across the stone floor, swaying erratically with every forced, limping stride.
But when the creature jerked its head up through the tangled white strands, the arena fell into a sudden, suffocating silence.
It was not the face of a human, nor that of any living thing, that greeted them.
It was a death-mask of a demon made manifest.
Its mouth hung agape in a permanent, agonizing yawn, revealing elongated fangs that curved upward from the lower jaw, jutting past its snout.
Gray skin was stretched tight over razor-sharp cheekbones, shrinking over the skull like parched, centuries-old leather.
From that unclosing maw, a coarse, blackened tongue flickered out, lolling past its chest.
It quivered with a primal hunger, tasting the aroma of fear in the air, seeking the iron tang of blood it had been denied during its long exile.
Everyone saw it.
A pair of wide, lidless eyes that glowed with a crimson hue, not a natural reflection, but like dying embers trapped within the hollow darkness of its sockets.
"Rangda..." someone in the stands whispered, a shudder racking their frame.
It was the voice of one who still harbored the ancestral memory of terror.
A name that should have been scoured from the histories of the Balinese kingdoms.
The whisper caught fire.
One voice became two.
Two became dozens.
Soon, the entire arena was hissing with a dread that could no longer be contained.
The creature continued to drag its wretched form toward the center.
Up close, the horror became even more nonsensical.
Fingers of impossible length clawed at the air, tipped with black nails that resembled curved talons.
Its movements were stiff and mechanical, like a shattered marionette being jerked by invisible, spectral strings after centuries of burial.
Its four arms hung with a grotesque lack of balance.
Two were where they should be, but the other two erupted from its back in a mangled, inverted position, as if extra limbs had been forced through a carcass already claimed by time.
Torn skin revealed blackened muscle and bones bent at impossible angles, yet somehow, they bore the creature's weight.
Every step was an anomaly, a defiance of natural law.
One didn't need medical knowledge to see the truth: this thing should be dead.
This body should not be standing, let alone walking.
With a sudden, sickening snap of its neck, Rangda looked skyward and howled.
It wasn't a mere scream; it was a shriek of high-frequency agony, a wretched harmony between a babe's wail and a madman's laugh.
The sound didn't just travel through the air; it erupted as a phantom shockwave that seeped into the very marrow of every soul who heard it.
The echo slammed against the stone walls, causing the torch-fires to recoil as if in fear, before they flared back up in a sickly, unnatural shade of green.
The impact of that howl was like a tide of ice-water, drowning the arena in a primordial chill.
In the stands, the spectators recoiled as one, doubling over and clutching their ears in agony.
The air around the arena suddenly turned thick and stifling, as if a great hand had reached down and choked the oxygen from the sky.
The vibrations of the howl pierced through skin, vibrating deep within the marrow of their bones, forcing their teeth to chatter uncontrollably.
To those of fragile spirit, that sound was pure venom.
In the holding cells beneath the stone walls, candidates who had not yet been summoned heard the shriek penetrate the solid rock.
They collapsed to their knees, some vomiting, others losing control of their bladders.
They were paralyzed by a raw, primal dread injected directly into their nervous systems, forced to bow before the face of fear itself.
Bandung, standing at the epicenter of the blast, took the blow the hardest.
His vision flickered into a blur.
His heart hammered in a jagged, desperate rhythm.
He stumbled back several steps before his legs refused further orders, feeling as heavy as leaden pillars.
His survival instincts screamed a single, frantic command: Run, Bandung. Run.
All his pride, his iron will, his dreams of becoming a Patih, it all crumbled in a heartbeat.
In the stands, Anindya recoiled, her hands clamped over her mouth to keep her heart from leaping out of her throat.
Tears welled up unbidden; her body had detected a predator far beyond her imagination.
Jaka ground his teeth so hard his jaw throbbed with a dull ache.
As someone accustomed to dissecting monsters in virtual worlds, seeing this entity in the flesh made his brain short-circuit.
Logic shrieked that this creature was a glitch in reality, it simply should not exist.
Danu, meanwhile, was frozen in a deathly stillness.
He gripped his knees until his knuckles turned bone-white, his eyes wide and unblinking, terrified that if he lost focus for even a second, Death would claim them all.
But the most chilling reaction came from Ranti.
Usually the image of serene detachment, she now sat rigidly upright.
Her breath hitched.
Her usually calm eyes were wide, reflecting the crimson malice from the arena.
"Impossible..." she rasped, her hands trembling violently beneath her silk wrap.
She had expected the Keraton side to play dirty, perhaps a drugged beast or a high-level assassin to "entertain" the crowd.
But Rangda?
To unleash a forbidden legend in the heart of the city was a madness she had never dared to fathom.
"They have truly lost their minds," Ranti murmured, her face turning the color of ash.
"That is no mere opponent... that is a walking curse."
The silence of the terror lasted only a heartbeat before it escalated.
Without any sign or a single warning, Rangda lunged.
The body that had seemed limping and frail was suddenly airborne, gliding as if jerked by an invisible wire.
Its four arms splayed wide, claws raking through empty space with a sharp, whistling hiss.
Bandung's feral instincts that honed in the depths of the Southern Forests for years, took command before his conscious mind could process the threat.
He hurled himself sideways, rolling violently through the grit and dust of the arena floor.
SRAAAKKK!
Only a fraction of a second had passed.
Rangda's black talons slammed into the stone exactly where Bandung had stood, leaving deep, jagged gouges that sent splinters of rock flying.
Had he been a moment late, his skull would have been split like a melon under a sledgehammer.
The arena erupted.
A cacophony of horrific screams collided with the cheers of a few bloodthirsty spectators, a sickening symphony echoing under a leaden sky.
Bandung scrambled to his feet, his knees quaking, his face and arms caked in dust.
He realized then that he wasn't fighting a man, or even a beast.
Rangda gave him no time to breathe.
It charged again, not leaping this time, but scuttling on all four limbs like a colossal spider, moving with a speed that defied human anticipation.
Bandung instinctively raised his round shield, bracing for the onslaught of those black talons.
KRAAAANGG!
The collision was so violent that the screech of metal against claw rang painfully in his ears.
Bandung's left arm went numb instantly, the vibration surging up to his shoulder as if his bones had been struck by a massive sledgehammer.
His iron-reinforced wooden shield groaned, fine cracks spiderwebbing across its surface.
Shitt... it's too fast! Bandung thought frantically, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
If I just keep blocking, this shield will shatter in minutes. And I'll die with it.
Rangda refused to give him space.
The creature leaped again, soaring higher this time, all four arms plunging down like lances. Bandung hoisted his shield.
His entire body shivered under the hail of claws; every impact felt like a mallet striking his bones from the inside out.
The crowd's cheers grew more brutal, more feral.
Find a pattern. Find a gap.
Bandung commanded his brain to function under the suffocating grip of adrenaline.
He couldn't afford to see this monster merely as a source of terror; he had to see it as an obstacle with a flaw.
Rangda lunged again.
Bandung ducked suddenly, feeling a sharp whistle of wind graze the top of his head.
He spun to the side, nearly losing his balance.
BRAKK!
One of Rangda's claws slammed into the ground, gouging the hard stone arena as if it were soft clay, sinking nearly a foot deep.
Bandung didn't wait.
He leaped back, rolling through the dust, and sprang to his feet with his dagger drawn.
Rangda growled, a coarse, guttural rasp of irritation.
The creature seemed surprised that its small prey could still move after being struck by its aura of dread.
A storm of attacks followed.
Rangda pressed forward with four arms moving in a chaotic yet lethal rhythm.
Bandung was forced to push past his physical limits.
Dodging, parrying with the fading strength in his left arm, and in one moment of sheer madness, leaping onto the back of Rangda's hand while it was stuck in the ground to vault himself through the air.
His chest burned.
His breath was shallow and scorching.
He knew this was no honorable duel between soldiers.
It was a flight forced into a fight, a dance of death where the smallest mistake was paid for in blood.
In the stands, Jaka didn't blink.
His eyes, accustomed to dissecting video game mechanics, tracked every shift in Bandung's feet and every swing of Rangda's arms.
"He's... he's reading the pattern," Jaka whispered to himself.
Danu overheard and turned with a panicked face, cold sweat dripping from his temple.
"Reading what?! Jaka, look at him! He's just running for his life! He'll drop dead before he even lands a hit!"
Jaka shook his head slowly, his jaw set tight.
"No. He's not just running." He pointed toward the arena with a tense chin.
"Bandung is baiting the same movement over and over. He's not playing it safe... he's waiting for a single window."
That moment arrived in one sharp intake of breath.
Rangda leaped with a bizarre coordination: her two upper arms crossed to protect her chest, while her two lower arms thrust straight forward like twin spears.
However, that aggressive surge created a fatal opening, a sliver of a blind spot on her left side that only stayed open for a few heartbeats.
Bandung saw it.
Not with his eyes, but with an instinct forged in the dust of the arena.
He didn't retreat.
This time, he charged.
Bandung dropped into a low crouch until his knee nearly brushed the floor, letting his shield take the impact of Rangda's lower hand with a thunderous boom.
At that same moment, with his entire body weight behind the strike, he snapped his right hand forward.
CRAAAASH!
The dagger didn't just graze; it sank deep, biting into the muscle at the base of one of Rangda's arms.
The arena went silent.
The cheers died in the spectators' throats.
For the first time, the monster didn't howl to spread fear, it howled because it felt pain.
Black blood erupted from the wound.
The color was so dark it seemed to suck the light out of its surroundings.
The liquid splashed onto the stone floor, a disgusting, viscous black sludge that looked like rotting swamp mud.
Instantly, gray smoke began to billow from the dark stains.
A sharp hissing sound filled the air as the fluid began to corrode and melt the hard stone.
An unbearable stench exploded into the air.
It wasn't just the smell of iron; it was a foul cocktail of stinging sulfur, rusted metal, and the pungent rot of a corpse kept too long in a damp grave.
"Oh God..." Anindya whispered, her face turning ashen.
She didn't see the black blood as a sign of victory.
To her, that foul sludge was another warning from a freshly opened hell.
Rangda let out a colossal shriek, a scream capable of tearing through fear itself.
Her body thrashed wildly, slamming against the floor until arena dust clouded everyone's vision.
In the midst of the haze, Bandung stood trembling, gasping for air.
Blood trickled from his temple, contrasting sharply with the black stains hissing and evaporating on the tip of his blade.
For a heartbeat, a flicker of hope touched his chest.
It's not a god. I can wound it. I can kill it.
But hope died an instant death.
As the dust settled, Bandung saw that the wound hadn't weakened Rangda.
Instead, it had triggered a denser, darker vibration of rage.
The air around the creature grew cold, and a dark pressure began to crush Bandung's lungs.
In that second, Bandung realized how far he was from 'safe.'
This was no longer a fight.
This was merely the opening of a slaughter ritual, and he had just forced the butcher to reveal its darkest secret.