Arena Road Chapter 3

The lanterns I had seen from afar were all hanging from various places on the city’s buildings. From this vantage point, I could see that the buildings looked like they were made from a huge array of mismatched wooden panels. It almost made each building look like some sort of jumbled patchwork quilt, and some patches reminded me of the shingles of the little beach cottage I rented back in Washington. Other patches looked like random two-by-fours of unpainted wood that were all a different shade of brown like they’d come from a hundred different types of tree. I even spotted a few buildings whose lower parts were made of red brick, terra cotta, and even stucco, but those were rare.

The buildings were closely spaced, and they were all of different heights, but they all seemed interconnected in one way or another. Some were joined by little wooden rope bridges that connected their balconies or terraces. Others were connected by a room or terrace that bridged them on one or several of the upper floors.

As I stared at the city, I almost got the impression that I could have crossed through its entirety without even touching the ground once I was inside.

The cobbled streets that ran between the buildings were almost like tunnels because of the buildings’ connectedness and their irregular shapes. The whole setup looked almost claustrophobic, especially with how many plants there were that seemed to choke out everything in sight. There were all kinds of moss and vines crawling up through the cobblestones and cloaking parts of the buildings, and flowering vines hung from their eaves along with the bright lanterns. There was a wider cobbled road that seemed to run in a circle around the whole city, and it was flanked by a wealth of even more lush green plants.

But once I got past the exotic beauty of the greenery that swathed the city, I realized that it didn’t look very prosperous at all. The mismatched buildings were rickety and ramshackle, almost like they might topple over at a slight breath of wind.

Despite how well lit the city was, there were absolutely no people, or any other visible life, in sight. But I could still hear the people. The crowd in the distance was alternating between cheers and roars. I figured maybe that was where everyone had gone.

That would make sense, but it would also be a little inconvenient. If I couldn’t get a glimpse of the city’s inhabitants first, climbing down the other side of the wall would be a bit more risky.

My heart leapt when the sound of a laugh rang out from down below. I eagerly scoured the area with my eyes and soon caught sight of a few people walking down the wide cobbled road that circled the outskirts of the city.

Then they passed under one of the hanging lanterns, and I saw that only two of them appeared to be a human like me.

The third person was a short, slender woman who had dragonfly-like wings. The lantern light played across her wings and shone through them slightly, like they were translucent, and they fluttered gently as she walked. When she made a vigorous hand gesture in her conversation, the wings moved clearly with the motion of her arms. They were real.

“Holy shit,” I whispered under my breath. “A fairy…”

Then I noticed a dark, barrel-sized shadow trundling along the cobbles just behind the fairy woman, as if it was her pet. It seemed too big and burly to be a dog, so I wondered what the hell it could be. A pig? That would be a little weird, but possible.

But then the lantern light glanced off its dark, iridescent back and its thin scuttling legs. I repressed a shiver at the memory of the many-legged creature out on the desert, but this was something different. This was unmistakably… a giant beetle.

I blinked in utter shock. Then I squinted at the group to try and work out just how weird this situation was.

One of the men in the group was tall and lanky with long, flowing blond hair like Rapunzel. He was dressed like a damn court jester, though, and he was carrying something that looked like a ukulele. I could hear him strumming a mournful little tune on the strings.

There was another laugh from someone in the group. It was a high, silvery sound, and I thought it came from the fairy. They were almost right under me now, and I could make out the words she spoke next.

“Is that a dirge for all the coins you lost tonight?” she asked with a teasing note in her voice.

“Of course.” The Rapunzel-haired man’s reply came in a slightly deeper voice, and it had a similar bantering tone to it. “I’m in mourning for my wealth.”

“You shouldn’t have risked your coin betting on Azria,” another low voice said. I thought this remark came from the other human guy, whose hair was made up of tight auburn ringlets. “Everyone knows she’s been inconsistent ever since she changed backers.”

“Can you blame her?” the fairy replied. “She looks half-starved. I could practically see every bone in her body. They’re obviously not even feeding her enough.”

The human guy shrugged, and his tone was careless when he responded. “That’s just the way of things, Tala. The strong push through and win anyway. You should know that by now.”

“I do know it.” The fairy’s voice was fainter as the group passed me and strolled further away, but I could hear the stubborn note in it. “I wasn’t born yesterday. I just don’t think it’s fair that—”

“Let’s go back to the arena,” the blond man interrupted. “I heard that Nerenya will enter the lists later tonight. Maybe I can win my coin back…”

Then they were out of earshot. I watched the silhouettes of the three people and their pet beetle get smaller as they headed down the cobbled road.

There were some things in their conversation that made absolutely no sense to me, but one thing was clear: There was some sort of event going on, just like I had thought. It definitely didn’t sound like it was anything along the lines of football, though. Judging by what I had just overheard, this was some type of one-on-one sport, and all the names they had mentioned seemed like women to me. Maybe women’s wrestling was a popular sport in this world I had stumbled upon.

Either way, I decided it was definitely worth going to check out. I could still hear the screams of the crowd in the distance, and I wanted to see exactly what this sport was. If it was exciting enough to draw the entire city in to watch, I figured it must be pretty damn cool.

And two of the three people I’d seen had been humans, just like me. Yes, the man with the ukulele-like instrument had been wearing some fancy-looking clothes that bordered on medieval style, but from what I’d been able to tell, the auburn-haired man was dressed similarly to me. He had worn plain-cut dark trousers and something that looked like a loose linen jacket, along with leather boots. True, the boots hadn’t looked sturdy enough to be steel-toed like mine, but I was sure our attire was similar enough that my own wouldn’t seem too outlandish.

I decided to slip down the other side of the wall before the three people were completely out of range. It would probably be easy enough to find the event purely by the sound of the crowd, but it would also be nice to know a direct route to where I had entered the city. If I went straight to the arena now, I could commit the direct route to memory and then take the time to wander elsewhere if I wanted to.

I scrambled down the plants on the inside of the wall a little more sloppily than the way I had climbed it, but I needed to make sure I didn’t lose sight of the three people.

“Oh, and don’t forget their giant pet beetle,” I muttered to myself.

A giant beetle seemed a bizarre thing to even exist, much less keep as a pet, but it was preferable to the monstrosity I had just slayed out in the desert.

After my boots thudded to the grassy ground, I straightened my jacket and took off at a brisk walk to get the people back in my sights. As soon as they were in better view, I slowed my pace a bit to roughly match theirs. Even though I now knew my appearance shouldn’t seem too suspicious, it still seemed a little risky to be overtly stalking people around the place, no matter how innocent my intentions were.

The little group was still walking on the wide cobbled road that stuck close to the city wall. That would come in handy for me if things got dicey here. I could either scramble over the plant-covered wall at first chance or have it against my back in a fight.

I hoped nothing would happen that led to that scenario, but if it did, I would be ready.

My sighting of a real-life fairy in this town made me feel a deep thrill, like I really had walked into a fantasy book. But the existence of my many-legged nemesis out in the desert had already proved that this world wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. For all I knew, there could be something– or someone– within these walls who was just as dangerous. I needed to be ready.

This thought made me reach under my bulky coat and feel for my gun, even though I had already triple-checked to make sure it was at the ready. In an unfamiliar city where I had no idea how things worked, it felt reassuring to have a weapon I would know how to use.

Judging by what I’d seen so far, a gun would also probably shock the hell out of the people around here since they didn’t seem to have much in terms of modern technology, at least not like the kind I had with me. That would make it as much a weapon of surprise as one of superior technology. A double-win.

I passed by more ramshackle, mismatched wooden buildings as I followed the now-straight cobbled road with the three figures just within sight. Sometimes, another faint silvery laugh from the fairy floated back to me, or another few notes strummed on the ukulele-like instrument, but for the most part they were out of earshot. We were getting closer to the source of the roaring crowd, too, and soon that drowned out any audible speech from the three people entirely as I followed them along.

I saw the occasional other shadowy figure striding between the cramped clusters of buildings, and I held my breath every time I passed one, but none of them even gave me a second glance.

Ahead of me, the three people had finally turned off the cobbled road that ran around the city. Another wide street had branched off sharply to the right, and as I increased my pace slightly to take the turn and keep the people in my sight, I saw that this street was just as wide as the one we’d been on.

It was a big contrast to all the other streets I’d seen criss-crossing through the city. Other than being more spacious, the cobbles seemed more even under my feet, and the lanterns that lined it were evenly spaced on tall wooden posts that even looked sturdier than some of the buildings I’d seen in the city. I got the impression that this was some sort of main pathway into the city.

Maybe it was a bit like back home, where the state would pay to pave the busy main highways to make them nice and smooth, but then turn their noses up at the less-trafficked roads and say they were the local city’s responsibility.

On this road, there were still more ramshackle buildings to the right of me, but on the left they thinned out and were replaced by grassy ground that was swarming with a huge variety of verdant green plants. Flowers hung from them like colorful jewels, and some of the blossoms even glowed faintly. When I saw a patch of radiant mushrooms that were all a good few feet taller than me, I couldn’t help but stop and stare for a moment. The mushrooms were weirdly beautiful with their pearly glow, but eerie as well.  They were just under the canopy of a forest that laid a short ways off the road. The trees were leafy and jungle-like, and their bark was hardly visible beneath the swarms of more flowering plants that climbed all over them.

That was when I saw the hazy, glowing orbs that seemed to float in the air just below the canopy of the forest. The orbs seemed to pulsate in a way that almost reminded me a little of the stars in the sky, but at the same time they had an ominous aura that reminded me of flickering fluorescent light bulbs in the start of a horror film. Or the deep-sea fish I’d seen in a documentary once that had luminous lanterns hanging in front of their toothy mouths to attract prey in the pitch-black water.

The creepy, ominous element of the lights’ beauty made me think better of my desire to go investigate the lights. I had a feeling I would become the equivalent of a little fish placing myself right within the grasp of some gaping, jagged-toothed jaws.

I was just about to tear my eyes away and walk onward when I spotted a shadowy little shape flying around in the air below the forest’s leafy canopy. From the way it bobbed and flitted around instead of flying smoothly, I guessed that it was a bat rather than some sort of bird or owl.

About a second after I came to this conclusion, something round and beach ball-sized descended from the canopy just above the bat. Against the silhouette of the glowing lights, I saw that it was hanging from a vine, and I wondered what the hell it could possibly be.

Then it split open in a way that made it look like a giant dangling Pac-Man, and the mouth-like gap was clearly bristling with a countless number of long, dagger-like teeth. They yawned open wide while the Pac-Man-looking thing descended on its vine. Then the whole mouth snapped shut on the unsuspecting bat. It disappeared without a sound inside the cavernous jaws, and the round thing reeled slowly back up into the canopy on its vine, like it was on a giant fishing line.

I stood there and blinked after it for a few seconds. The whole thing had happened so fast, yet at the same time it had played out with a gruesome sort of suspense that made me feel like it would be seared into my memory forever.

“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath again.

It was the second time I’d said that in the last ten minutes, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

This world, wherever the hell I was, just got darker and more intriguing.

Then I heard a rustle of motion in the canopy at the very edge of the forest, no more than six feet away from the edge of the cobblestone road.

I didn’t hesitate to hurry  forward. I now wanted to get away from the forest and its deadly, luring lights just as much as I wanted to see the reason for the screaming crowd, and I made sure to be doubly on my guard as I journeyed onward.

Luckily, I no longer had to worry about trying to catch up with the three people I’d been following, because I was now so close to the crowd that the screaming was almost deafening when it rang out periodically. As I walked on, something like a stone stadium opened up in the ground in front of me. The night was fully dark, but the flat stone arena way at the bottom was still flooded with light from more hanging lanterns than I had seen in the whole city combined. Some were hanging on wooden posts that surrounded the arena on all its sides, and even more hung from wooden archways above it. Just like the wide cobblestone road I had arrived here on, the stadium seemed like it was one of the nicest parts of the whole ramshackle city.

The rows of stone benches that sloped down to the arena were packed full of people, and there was some sort of commotion in the arena below. It looked like two people were being ushered out of a low stone gate that separated the flat arena from the bottom row of the stadium, but there was a thick cluster of people surrounding the two figures, so it was hard to even make out what was going on.

The crowd fell into another lull in their deafening shouts, and I scanned the top rows to see if I could find somewhere to sit. I could still see the arena fairly well from my position standing on the ground just above the top row, but I decided to join the people on the top stone bench and watch from there. Maybe I could overhear some conversation to get some context on the scene below, because I was already dying to know exactly what was going on.

And where the hell I was.

I made my way into the upper row and tried to act as casual as possible, like I did this every day. But I made sure to keep a wary eye out just in case anyone seemed put off by my presence.

The stadium’s benches weren’t as well-lit as the arena below, but from what I could see, it looked like there was a whole variety of beings in the crowd. I saw many who seemed to be human, just like the two men in the group I’d followed here, so I sat a respectful distance away from one of them toward the end of the stone bench.

He was an amiable-looking man who was dressed plainly, except for a mind-bogglingly large feathered hat that almost dwarfed the man himself. He didn’t turn toward me or question my presence, so this seemed like a fine enough place to sit for the time being.

Now there were two new people emerging down in the arena, and I could see that they were both women.

One of them looked human, at least from a distance. I couldn't make out her face too well, but I could see that she had smooth bronze skin. Her hair was tied up into a ponytail that fell in an inky black waterfall down to the small of her back. It rippled gently under the light from the hanging lanterns as she started to circle her opponent. She was wearing thin leather sandals with straps that wrapped around her legs, and every step she took in them looked graceful and deliberate. I was reminded of the sight of a panther stalking its prey.

In one hand, the black-haired woman was holding a leather whip with a dark metal spike at the end. In her other, she grasped a thin curved blade made of the same dark metal. Even from a distance, the blade looked shitty, like it was dull and dinted, and the woman’s clothes didn’t look much better. She was wearing only a skimpy silk tunic that must have been nice once, but now it was torn and ragged at the edges, and there were dried bloodstains on it. But despite all this, the woman still exuded an aura of fierceness and danger. She looked completely at home with the blade in one hand and the whip in another.

Her opponent was humanoid, but definitely not human. This woman’s skin was periwinkle blue, but its texture looked wrong somehow. It was wrinkled and pruned in a way that reminded me of someone who’s been in the bath for too long, and I grimaced at the almost-grotesque look of it. Her wispy hair was cropped into a pixie cut that was a faded shade of tea, and the way this woman carried herself was totally at odds with her black-haired opponent’s.

It was more like a gazelle caught in the cage of a lion. The steps of her frail and slender legs were slow in a way that seemed timid and hesitant rather than purposeful, like any misstep might mean death for her, and it seemed almost like she was unaccustomed to walking around on land.

I wondered if she was some sort of water being of the oasis, and if so, why she would choose to fight down in the hot and dry arena. And for that matter, why would she walk into the arena armed with only a simple wooden weapon?

Calling the stick in her hand a spear would be generous. It looked more like a short, sharpened wooden stake. Something I might hammer into some especially soft ground to pitch a tent, or maybe use for kindling in a campfire. It definitely didn’t look like it would hold up against the black-haired woman’s weapons, despite how shitty the metal may have seemed.

The crowd was still hushed compared to their earlier volume, and I wondered if it was a respectful silence because these two fighters were considered to be very formidable, or if it was the opposite, and the audience was just getting bored.

The quietness stretched on even when the fight began in earnest. It didn’t take long for the blue-skinned woman to brandish her wooden spear and rush at her opponent. The black-haired woman’s ponytail whipped through the air as she dodged nimbly to the side. She seemed almost bored despite the speed of her movement, like it was easy for her.

The blue-skinned woman whirled around and tried another rush, but her opponent dodged again.

When the blue-skinned woman was clearly about to try the same move for a third time, I could swear I saw the black-haired woman roll her eyes. This time the blue-skinned woman threw her whole body behind the thrust, so she was hurling herself at her opponent along with the weapon.

There was a collective intake of air from the crowd that wasn’t quite a gasp.

Then the black-haired woman dropped to a side-roll and snapped her whip at the blue-skinned woman’s ankles in passing. She easily could have slashed at her opponent’s wrinkly periwinkle flesh, but she didn’t even attempt to.

I was surprised, and I thought maybe the crowd was too, because there was an outbreak of muttering that ran in a wave around the packed arena. I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was shock, disapproval, or both.

But the blue-skinned woman’s risky headlong dive had put her in a vulnerable place. Her opponent was behind her now. The leather whip hadn’t quite sent her tumbling, but it had made her stumble enough that she was still scrambling to right herself when the black-haired woman completed her roll. By the time the blue-skinned woman had turned around, her opponent was on her.

There was no desperation in this leap. The graceful black-haired woman looked focused and deadly in motion.

The crowd erupted in screams of excitement again. I had a feeling these people loved the uncertainty, and probably would’ve been happy with any outcome as long as it wasn’t too boring.

Personally, I thought it was kind of an unfair fight. I found myself holding my breath as I waited to see what would happen.

In less than a heartbeat, the black-haired woman had her opponent pinned to the ground. Her dark curved blade stood out starkly against the fallen woman’s crinkly and pale-blue throat as it hovered there.

I could tell the fight was over, and the crowd seemed to think so, too. But they were still waiting on the edge of their seats, like they were looking forward to some sort of amazing finale.

Then the black-haired woman withdrew her blade.

The crowd’s excited racket immediately turned into a cacophony of outraged boos and hisses.

From the way the black-haired woman carried herself, the crowd might as well have been a cloud of buzzing flies. She shifted her whip to clutch it in her sword hand. Then she extended her free hand downward, palm open, in a gesture that was clearly recognizable to me, even as an outsider from another world.

She was offering her opponent a hand up.

I thought this seemed pretty fair, but the action clearly outraged the crowd even more. Still the black-haired woman disregarded them completely and waited patiently with her arm extended.

Her fallen opponent cast a look around that seemed skittish and fearful, but then her reaction bordered on friendly. She reached up and clasped the black-haired woman’s hand while she braced the elbow of her spear-arm against the ground to help her rise.

But at the last second, she brought up her short wooden spear and turned the rise into a lunge.

The wooden point drove into the black-haired woman’s upper arm, and she stumbled back. To my surprise, there was a pool of blood welling from the wound that was even visible from my position in the top row. The spear had actually wounded her.

It didn’t seem too serious, just bloody, but apparently something about it was significant, because several things happened all at once. First, two portly, green-haired women in turquoise robes rushed out into the arena. The black-haired woman tried to wave them away, but they grabbed her elbows and firmly frog-marched her to the edge of the arena.

I was distracted from this confusing scene by the sight of several gargantuan birds taking flight from different places around the arena.

Then I realized they weren’t birds.

They were gargoyles.

Or that was what they looked like. But they were made entirely of wood. I could even hear a faint creaking as they flapped their bat-shaped, woven-wood wings.

“Whoa,” I muttered in an undertone.

The feather-hatted man next to me turned at the sound of my voice.

“Shocking, isn’t it?” he lamented in a squawking voice that reminded me strongly of a talking parrot.

“Er… Yes,” I said vaguely without taking my eyes off the scene below. “Really shocking.”

The wooden gargoyles had all landed in the center of the arena and seemed to be having some sort of argument with each other. I counted nine of them, and I wondered if I could ask the man next to me what the hell they were without sounding suspicious.

I decided I would hint vaguely at it, but when I finally tore my eyes away from the arena to turn toward him slightly, the words died on my lips.

The man was just turning to face me too, and he was talking again, but the words didn’t even penetrate my brain. I was too busy trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with this guy.

The first thing that struck me over the head like a hammer was that the oversized feather hat wasn’t actually a hat. It was a live bird. A gigantic, tropical-looking bird with a beak like a toucan that looked about as long as my arm and four times as thick.

But the weirdest part was that the bird was the one talking. Its massive orange beak was clacking together with a force that reminded me eerily of the pincers of the many-legged beast out on the desert. Below it, the man’s eyes seemed glazed over and disinterested.

I finally realized I was gawking at this bizarre sight with my mouth open, and I hastily snapped it shut, but the bird didn’t even seem like it had noticed. It was still talking.

“… And oh, dearie me,” it went on with a mournful note in its squawking voice. “Flouting all the traditions like that… I expect they’ll have her hide.”

I nodded solemnly and then hurriedly turned my face back toward the arena below, partly to hide my look of confusion and partly so I could go back to watching what was going on. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the talking bird’s words, maybe because I had missed a good portion of them, so I would just have to watch and see for myself what was going to happen.

The two green-haired women were fussing over the black-haired woman’s wound in a way that seemed both meticulous and detached. They had just finished staunching the blood, and now they were applying some type of ointment. Even from a distance, I saw the black-haired fighter’s jaw clench, and the muscles in her slender neck stood out like she was tensing up from pain. But at the same time, her expression looked calm and far away, like this was just a typical day for her. The pain didn’t seem to bother her all too much.

That was probably a good thing, because despite the careful attention the green-haired women were paying to the fighter’s wound, they didn’t seem concerned with her obvious pain in the slightest.

My focus derailed when I saw one of them was now carefully tearing off a portion of green hair from her own head.

I watched with fascination as I wondered what the hell she was doing. And more interestingly, why the hell did her hair not look like hair at all?

Now that I was looking more closely, I realized that it looked like there were a bunch of green fruit roll-ups sprouting from her head like the long Fruit by the Foot ones.

She took the long chunk of hair, or whatever the hell it was, and wrapped it around the black-haired fighter’s wounded arm like a bandage.

“What the fuck?” I mouthed silently to myself.

The green-haired woman tucked the end of the weird, sticky-looking bandage neatly into itself and gave the black-haired fighter a light but callous shove to show she was finished with her.

The fighter looked like she was torn between gratefulness and embarrassment. Her expression reminded me of the time I fell off my bike as a kid and my mom rushed out onto the street to make a scene over my scraped knee.

Granted, this was no scraped knee, and the woman was definitely no kid, but I felt for her. I could only imagine how a proud, badass fighter would hate having people fussing over her in front of a crowd. But I still had to bite down on my lip to hold back a chuckle at seeing such a patently familiar expression here in this strange, magical world.

Things were still in a state of organized chaos down in the arena, and the crowd seemed content to sit and wait now, although I could hear people muttering. I could even see money changing hands already in some cases, although it seemed like a weird sort of money to me. It just looked like a bunch of dark, lumpy-looking coins that could only be recognized as metal because of the way they clinked together.

The wooden gargoyles still seemed to be arguing amongst themselves. Some were gesturing explosively with their arms while they talked. Others nodded or shook their heads in response. One of them raised its finger in what looked like a mixture of a threatening curse and a tut-tutting motion, and I even thought I saw another purse its wooden lips in an expression of disapproval.

Then I wondered what had happened to the blue-skinned woman. I had to rake the edge of the arena with my eyes to spot her, but I finally did.

She was standing stiffly in the middle of a cluster of people. Most of them looked human, and they were paying no attention to the blue-skinned fighter in their midst. Instead, their eyes were glued to the arguing gargoyles, and a few of them were wringing their hands anxiously.

Meanwhile, the two green-haired women were frog-marching the black-haired fighter over to stand by the stone gate. As soon as it was clear she was done being tended to, a knot of angry-looking people came boiling through the gate and surrounded her.

They  were screaming at her and all trying to get in her face at once, but I couldn’t quite make out their words. Two of them shoved her right on her injured arm without hesitation, and then she was shoved back the other way, only to get grabbed by the neck like a puppy.

My jaw locked together as I watched them man-handle the woman.

She didn’t seem afraid, but her body language clearly showed she would rather be anywhere but here.

One of the people in the group was a tall human guy with a hawk-like nose. He wore something that looked almost like a three-piece suit, and it seemed weirdly modern compared to the others’ clothes. He was clearly the angriest and most aggressive of the group, and he even grabbed the black-haired fighter by both wrists and twisted them until her knees buckled, which didn’t seem like an easy feat.

I winced for her before she even reacted for herself, and I felt anger rising steadily in my gut.

And yet the asshole still didn’t stop. I had a feeling he wanted to hear her scream or plead for mercy, and it made me clench my fists.

The black-haired fighter seemed determined not to give him the satisfaction. She didn’t even open her mouth to gasp or cry out. She just looked up at the man with something between loathing and resignation as he shoved her the rest of the way to the ground. It was like this had happened plenty of times before.

The rage inside me ramped up, but I pushed it back down for the time being. I wanted nothing more than to punch that smug fucker in the fancy suit, and I began to wonder why no one had intervened.

He seemed to be done hurting her, at least for now, but he was still looming over her with an aggressive stance that increased my urge to punch the self-assured look off his hook-nosed, aristocratic face. He glanced over at the gargoyles so frequently that he looked like a damn bobblehead from my place in the top row.

I couldn’t stand sitting there trying to figure out the significance of the gargoyles for any longer, so I finally leaned over a little to talk to the bird-headed man next to me again.

“They’re taking their sweet-ass time about this, aren’t they?” I asked in a leading tone.

“They certainly are,” the man— no, the bird— replied. His squawking voice was thick with disapproval. “Mark my words, whatever happens to the dark-haired wench next, it shan’t be easy to watch. Like I said, they’ll—”

He fell silent as the wooden gargoyles turned as a group to face the fighters and the people surrounding them.

But I was seeing red now.

It sounded like this bullshit abuse toward the dark-haired fighter was only getting started, and my body moved of its own accord.

Abruptly, I got to my feet and started squeezing past the people on the upper bench until I reached the stone stairs that led to the bottom of the arena. I wasn’t entirely decided about what I was going to do, but I was sure as hell going to do something. I wasn’t just going to stand there and watch that guy and his lackeys pulverize the black-haired woman.

Once I got to the stairs, I saw that they were almost as packed full of people as the benches. Some were sitting on the steps, while others were just loitering around on their feet.

I started pushing my way down and kept a constant stream of “sorries” and “excuse mes,” but I didn’t stop to see if they were well-received. I darted through every gap in the crowd, and when there wasn’t a gap, I made one.

Just before I got to the bottom, I saw one of the gargoyles had advanced forward more to talk directly to the fighters and the people surrounding them. The other gargoyles were waiting behind him. Up close, I could see their faces were even more expressive, and I definitely hadn’t imagined that disapproving expression before. Now, I could see it reflected on the faces of a few others among them, but some of the others were nodding sagely instead.

The one in the front seemed like their leader, and this was further confirmed when I saw a glowing red jewel pulsating in its head, although I had no idea exactly why it was so luminous.

I gave my head a shake and forced myself to focus. Curiosity could wait. Right now, I had a feeling the bejeweled gargoyle was in the middle of delivering some sort of verdict, and the beak-nosed man in the suit seemed like he was on the verge of throwing a full-on temper tantrum if it wasn’t something he liked.

I shoved my way past the people on the ground-floor bench and the others milling around in front of them trying to get a better view. People grumbled audibly as I passed, but I was gone before I could even hear their words.

Finally, I reached the front of the crowd, who were clustered right up against the low stone gate trying to listen in.

The bejeweled gargoyle was talking in the slow, ponderous, ringing voice of someone who likes to hear themselves talk. “… however, because the Induya did not truly wound the Phina, she was not victorious, according to the traditional rules.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the beak-nosed man’s face and saw his lip curl with rage.

But the bejeweled gargoyle wasn’t finished.

“But… because she clearly would have been the victor if she hadn’t chosen to be… merciful…” The gargoyle paused and shook his head with an expression like he was sick to his wooden stomach before he went on. “We have decided to treat this as a partial victory.”

It seemed like it took a few moments for the beak-nosed man to unlock his jaw before he was able to speak.

“A partial victory?” he snarled. “And what, pray tell, do I win in a partial victory?

“You may have half of the usual winnings,” the lead gargoyle said firmly. “Half of Lord Merze’s possessions. Of your choice, naturally.”

The beak-nosed man didn’t seem at all mollified by this. If anything, he seemed infuriated beyond all reason.

But something about the no-nonsense expression on the gargoyle’s face, or maybe the jewel on its forehead, seemed to deter him from venting his fury on the wooden creature.

So he turned to the black-haired woman and shoved her to the ground for a second time. This time he kicked her after. Then he kicked her again. And he didn’t seem inclined to stop any time soon.

Clearly, he considered her a safer target than the wooden gargoyle. And maybe she would have been on any other day.

But not today.

I shoved my way to the stone gate and barged through it like I owned the place.

I didn’t give a fuck.

“Hey, asshole.” I kept my voice calm but raised my volume slightly to be sure he knew I was talking to him.

He had yanked the woman back to her feet by the neck like a ragdoll, and he was holding her by the throat now while his other hand was raised in a fist. I could see the grip on her throat slacken ever so slightly at the sound of my words, and the woman sucked in a sharp gasp of air. Otherwise, the man didn’t move to react other than to turn his head and look at me as I shouldered my way through the little cluster of people.

He looked me up and down before he responded with a look on his face like I was a stray rat that had just wandered in from off the street.

“Are you lost, boy?” he asked in a tone of mock-sympathy.

He was maybe half an inch taller than me, but he managed to look down his hooked nose at me as he said it like he was on top of the fucking Empire State Building.

This guy was clearly a full on man-baby, and he wasn’t used to anyone standing up to him. He was used to being able to cow anyone in his path with a single look. And if that didn’t work, it’d be a fucking hissy fit.

So I ignored his taunts.

The woman was still in his vise-like grip and covered in red marks from the fucker’s kicking.

And even though I was itching to cave the guy’s face in, I kept my voice steady when I responded.

“Let her go.”