Six sets of footsteps reverberated through the tunnel as Shult and two of his men led the three fighters partway through before stopping.
Turning around to look at the slaves, he paused to inspect the two workers who were responsible for overseeing the activities in the slave chambers and ensuring everything went smoothly. Everything had just gone worse than wrong, so it was understandable that they seemed anxious about what might happen to them.
He personally couldn't blame them; no one had ever truly cared about maintaining order between the combatants, not even Fyke. If he had cared, he would have enforced it much more strictly. Yet, incidents happened all the time. The problem was that Fyke was quick to blame and punish if it meant saving his own hide... and this was that kind of situation for him.
"You guys go back and grab the girl," Shult instructed. "I'll take care of it. You guys will be fine." He added to ease their tension. They gave him looks of appreciation, seemingly holding him to a high enough regard to trust his word, before heading back in the direction they came from.
"Now," he started, addressing the three Gifted. "You guys will go up next. You have a specific task from higher up."
"Kill the girl that you're matched with," Shult spoke to them. "We don't know how strong she is, and we don't know how she fights, but for precaution's sake..." he paused to impress what he was about to say next on them. "Treat it as if you were fighting Gewalt."
That immediately stirred reactions from Dreer, Felkist, and especially Uno.
"You're saying this person's a monster like him?" Uno asked, clearly dismissing the notion as nonsensical exaggeration.
Shult opened his mouth, an annoyed expression on his face, but was promptly cut off from getting his words out.
"Forgive us for doubting you," Felkist started. "But we, of all people, know what it's like to fight a person who goes against reason like the Warbeast. You can't expect us to just accept what you say when you just admitted that you know nothing about her."
"Unless, of course, there is something you know that validates such an assessment," he added, eyes narrowed, trying to pick Shult apart for anything he could give away.
"...That's none of your business." Shult spat out with venom in his voice. "All you need to do is make sure she leaves that field as a corpse." He said, getting in each of their faces as if to drill the message in.
"We fixed you into this match specifically for that reason."
"And why exactly should we go along with this?" Uno questioned, her expression sour. "You guys don't own us."
"I told you," Shult responded. "These were arrangements from higher up"
The three slaves froze.
"Who knows? Maybe if you do a good enough job, they'll give you better conditions—maybe even freedom if you're lucky." The arena lord's lieutenant added.
"...And," Dreer spoke for the first time. "Which two of us are supposed to win in the end? Killing her is one thing, but what do you want from us afterwards?"
"It doesn't matter to us this time," Shult replied. "Deal among yourselves after you're done doing what you're supposed to."
The three looked at each other, silently deliberating before gesturing acceptance at each other.
"Fine... we'll do it," Dreer answered for all of them.
---
In the current moment, Uno had to avert her eyes from Astelle as her bright form threatened to blind her. She heard the walls creak and crumble, both from the power that was being exuded and the earlier ripple of damage sent across the ground.
Panic spread across the audience stands as the whole building seemed to creep closer towards collapse.
'Treat her as if she were Gewalt, huh,' Uno thought, sweat dripping from her brow. She was unsure if it was from the heat or from fear. 'She might actually be worse...'
"This would've been a good time to have learned how to use that," Felkist's voice appeared from beside her as he rose from his tunnel ability.
Uno didn't look at the man, keeping her gaze locked on Astelle, who was looking towards the audience blankly.
"She doesn't fight like someone who was taught," she pointed out, not even addressing what the man had said. "We saw plenty of guys like that back in our freelancer days."
The large man nodded in acknowledgement, resting his arms on his protruding stomach once more. "She moves on instinct. Her Gift power is doing a lot of the heavy lifting."
"Can you blame her?" Dreer said, walking up to them. "With an outrageous ability like that?"
"If you were both going to come over here, why not just tunnel over together with Felly's ability?" Uno asked, with a deadpan expression.
"I want him to focus on transporting one of us at a time to reduce the risk of him getting caught," The gaunt man explained, his expression dead serious and his usual tremor gone. "I have decent movement with my ice, so I could've managed something if she came at me, but you were a sitting target, and we had to avoid losing you."
"If we're being realistic, though, it doesn't matter. That thing is much faster than us," He said, remembering the punch that almost erased his head. "I think two of us should take a fall to one of our attacks and forcefully end the match."
Uno shook her head in refusal. The potential for freedom on her mind, despite how she knew it was probably a carrot they dangled at her to make her try harder.
"I'm fighting," she said.
Felkist beside her nodded, "Me too. We were lucky to survive a guy like Gewalt over and over. Might as well try our luck some more."
"I see," Dreer said, his expression grim. He sighed, the chill around him already forming in preparation for battle.
The three stood side-by-side, the two men flanking Uno's sides. Astelle finally began moving.
"Thank you for being graceful enough to let us get things together among ourselves," Uno said sarcastically, sweat still dripping from her face.
Astelle got into a running start position, appearing resolute.
"I don't sneak up on people," she replied simply.
Almost instantaneously, hundreds of bubbles blew out of Uno's lips. Much faster than earlier, unnatural for bubbles, they closed the distance and detonated immediately. Astelle appeared above the smoke cloud, completely unscathed, scanning the ground for her opponents before locking in on Dreer and angling her freefall much closer to where the man was.
Touching down on the ground, she felt the brief sensation of broken up stone on her bare soles before the ground gave way and she found herself in a dark space.
'The big one's tunnelling ability...'
The world got brighter again as she was disorientingly thrown out at a random point in the field, a bubble blast hitting her directly in the face. Ice formations came barrelling at her from the sky, crashing onto her as a couple of more explosions rang across the field, creating further cover smoke for her opponents.
Just as Astelle walked out of the ice, melting a path through it, she fell once more into a dark pit. The light encompassed girl clicked her tongue in frustration as she fell through the ability, questioning how long she was going to let this keep happening.
She surfaced once more, this time in a dark plume of smoke that didn't allow her to see anything other than her bright form. Sharp ice spears came flying, melting under the heat she gave off before they could touch her. Standing expectant of the following explosion attack, she was surprised when it never came, and instead, more fruitless barrages of ice followed.
She jumped in the air, intending to make another high vantage assessment of the field, when something in the stands caught her attention, and she smiled. Twisting her body to face headfirst towards the ground, she pushed off into a dive right back into the thinning smoke.
Just as she made landfall, she immediately burst forward, avoiding the hole that opened up afterwards. The smoke had cleared up enough that she could pick up the forms of two of the three. She released more power, generating a shock wave of air that pushed away the rest of the smoke.
Looking around, she still didn't see the larger man, deducing that he was staying out of her reach and view with his ability. Understandably, since he was the main utility Gifted of the three. They must have thought that losing him meant losing the battle, which was a decent assumption. But...
She immediately flashed in front of Dreer, who narrowly saved himself by rocketing upwards on a pillar of ice that immediately crumbled after taking the blunt force that was meant for him. Falling, he stayed alert for a follow-up assault that never came, as Astelle instead rushed towards Uno.
"Kist!" Dreer yelled towards the ground, and a pit formed under Uno as if in response, but that turned out to be a mistake.
Astelle sped up, exhibiting the same burst of movement from the earlier attack and kicked Uno away, falling into the ability instead. In the dark space of Felkist's tunnelling ability, Astelle's light roared fiercely with new fervour. She laid her sights on the man.
"There you are," she said, her tone filled with the most energy she'd exhibited in the whole match, rocketing a blazing hot fist strike into his gut, throwing them both out of the ability space.
Felkist collapsed into the wreckage of the field's stone ground, violently coughing out blood as he scrambled in agony from the burning sensation on his stomach.
Dreer rushed in immediately on a platform of ice, freezing the area the man had been hit again and again to quell the heat. When the bigger man finally calmed down, knocked out cold, Dreer's head hung low, his eyes imperceptible under the cover of his white hair. He looked at his friend, relieved that he would survive with some proper treatment.
Memories of when they were still free playing in his mind.
"It gets colder the more you use it?" Felkist asked, putting down his glass of juice. A look of concern quickly took its place on his face.
"Only when I use it to the extreme," Dreer corrected him, covered in layers of coats and blankets. "It's different from Uno's thing." He took a swig from the bottle of booze in front of him. "It's only like this because I did too much this time; it will get better after a week, maybe."
"...Hey," Felkist spoke, his tone and expression serious. "Don't ever do that again... depend on me if it ever feels like you're pushed to that point."
Dreer extended his arm in front of him, his palm facing the sky as light blue sparks flew from it. Mist billowed from his lips as he took heavy breaths, trembling much harder than he had been before.
"Absolute Frost..."
A thin film of ice spread across the entire arena as everyone in the crowd began to shiver.
"Flash Freeze."
Everything became encompassed in solid, thick white ice. A massive iceberg had manifested wide around the area Astelle had stood. The only thing that saved the people in the audience was the restrictions imposed on him by the slave mark, reducing his range. He stood in one of only two patches of space he had purposefully excluded. Here, next to Felkist, and where Uno had been standing.
"How's your throat?" he asked in between laboured breaths as Uno approached him.
She wiped the blood that trailed down her chin from her lip, stopping right in front of the collapsed Felkist.
"I'll be fine," she got out, her voice coarse and raw.
Dreer, hearing that confirmation of her general safety, collapsed onto the ground, trembling and shivering as if he was experiencing deadly levels of cold.
Uno crouched next to him, taking off her short coat, placing it over him and caressing his skin in an attempt to ease his suffering, however much she could.
She looked up to the audience. It seemed that at some point, they had started evacuating. The stands were nearly empty, except for the prestige booth, where it looked like a commotion had broken out.
That didn't matter to her, though. They made it through the ordeal, and if there was truly any fairness in this world, they had to have earned some chance at their freedom.
Just then, the massive ice structure sizzled, and steam rolled off from it as it melted.
"...There's just no way," Uno struggled to get out, an incredulous expression on her face as disbelief washed over her. "What are you?"
Astelle stepped out of the ice, the light having faded from around her. Her chest heaved high and low from exhaustion as she stumbled walking forward. She stopped, her vision getting blurry.
Uno stood up, pursing her lips to attack before breaking into a coughing fit. Astelle looked towards her, depending more on the sound the other woman made than her actual sight.
It was blatant to see that everyone was on their last legs.
Rubbing her eyes, the purple-haired girl walked towards Uno, taking measured, deep breaths. Uno clasped her fingers around her throat, forcing herself to blow a bubble.
It grew on her lips, bigger and bigger, larger than anything before it. Uno intended to take both of them out here. Astelle watched as blood spilt from the woman's lips as she blew, it was clearly straining her to the point that she looked like she would keel over at any moment. Releasing a final heavy breath, the light flared to life around her once more, much more faint than before.
"There's no need for me to let you do that," Astelle spoke laboriously. "I've done what needed to be done."
The bubble had grown big enough to fill the section of the field that hadn't been taken up by the iceberg from earlier.
The fight had already concluded. Uno and Astelle should've been announced the winners and ended all this, but with the audience gone and Fyke in the prestige booth doing damage control on the incident in the chambers earlier, no one was left to rein in the two slaves. Uno, who was moving purely on rage over her friends and desperation, and Astelle, who appeared to still have a purpose on her mind.
Reaching her limit, Uno fired the devastating explosive at her target. The bubble collided against Astelle's hands, outstretched in front of her, shouting as her light burned brightly once more, consuming the bubble and burning it away. She didn't stop there as her flare expanded to encompass the entire field, finally drawing the full attention of the few people still in the reserved booth.
"Shit!" Gavis said, his irritation giving way to panic. "Everybody get close to me!"
Boom.
A larger part of the colosseum, and more specifically where the prestige booth was located, collapsed.
---
A week following the catastrophe at the Lukan Arena, the high brass of the city had managed to contain the panic that had rocked the city.
The death toll was negligible. Only a few arena workers and some slaves had perished, mainly due to the extreme effects of the fight having been concentrated in the direction away from where the chambers were. Miraculously, the few that had still been in the Prestige Booth after everyone else evacuated had survived solely due to the efforts of Gavis Balroc.
Initially, the tournament was announced to be cancelled for obvious reasons, but a few days later, three figures pulled strings in the background, and it was instead postponed until further notice.
Beyond that, the clash in the prestige booth would snowball into a series of incidents, risking an outright confrontation between Baron Henry Fernand and his followers and the Merchantry faction.
As a preliminary measure to quell Fernand's rage over what had occurred in the slave chambers, it was agreed that he would receive whatever reparations he believed befitted the losses he had incurred.
Pendrick Dorn and Astelle were thus given over to him.