by R W Foster
The world slowed in an abrupt fashion. The two demons spread out to flank me. Both thrust their blades at me in a simultaneous fashion. I twisted to my left as I ducked. The one which had been behind me drove its blade into the other one and I picked up the fallen blade. The world reverted to its normal pace just as quick.
The demons fanned out as I had foreseen and thrust their blades at me, also as I had foreseen. I ducked and twisted my body to my left so that I spun away from the L’Arcs. The remaining demon bent and picked up her dead partner’s sword. ‘Hey. That wasn’t supposed to happen!’ The last one began to stalk me as I backed to the wall behind me.
“Something wrong, Carter Blake?” Belial called.
“Everything’s just ducky!” I shouted back without taking my eyes from my opponent.
I began to edge around the arena wall as the L’Arc started moving her swords in intricate patterns. I feinted towards the demon, then lunged backwards. The demon moved for where she thought I would be, swinging the sword in her left hand at my neck and swinging the other at my stomach. She growled at me in frustration, and then began to twirl the blades in a figure eight pattern. Do you have any idea of how hard it was trying to fight a demon that looked like a stunning, beautiful, and nude woman with a tail that she moved like an annoyed cat? Add to that, the demon had a pair of sharp swords she wanted to use to make cutlets out of you. The degree of difficulty was immense, even more since my hormone filled body didn’t want to keep my eyes on the fucking swords! And then things got even harder. No pun intended.
I saw her multiply, swords moving in different patterns all the time. I didn’t know which image of the L’Arc to focus on. I found her movements started making sense. Which was odd enough, but I also was even able to begin anticipating which way the swords would move next. I continued to retreat, my eyes now more interested in following the patterns of the blades, rather than the demon’s… um… assets.
I found myself stopping my retreat. ‘Move you dummy!’ It was like someone else had control over my body. I found myself feinted a kick at the demon’s knee. She crossed the swords in a downward pointing scissors position. My leg pulled back from the feint and whipped forward into the L’Arc’s face. Bone crunched as the heel of my foot broke the demon’s nose. Silvery blood gushed from her nostrils. The demon dropped both her blades as to protect her face.
I dove forward in a somersault and scooped up the swords. From my position on my back, I whistled at the demon. She tilted her head down at me, causing some of her blood to fall on me. I thrust both swords up. The one in my left hand went into the demon’s throat while the one in my right punctured her left eye. The strikes killed the demon where she stood. She began to slump down on me, but I used the swords to push her off to my left. I rose to my feet; the area was silent as the grave. Something had me cross the longswords at their hilts so that each point was near my opposite shoulder. I bowed to every section of the arena. The crowd waited until I was finished, then exploded in wild cheers.
Electricity shot through my body, causing me to drop the swords and hit the ground twitching. I heard the crowd screaming in protest, and then everything went black.
2
I regained consciousness after dark, my body still shaking, trembling and spasming. My neck burned in a circle that traced its path under my shock collar. ‘I guess Belial wasn’t too fond of our performance.’
‘Well, we did taunt him and tell him to shut up,’ I answered myself.
I grinned at the memory of the half-demon’s furious face. ‘Yeah, that was awesome, wasn’t it?’
‘Indeed, but it didn’t help us.’
‘True.’ I sighed. ‘What kind of Walker of Worlds allows himself to be captured by a demon?’
‘One that doesn’t allow innocents to suffer. What is a Walker of Worlds?’
I still didn’t know. I had no idea as to what had allowed me to defeat those L’Arcs, but was glad of it anyway.
‘I hope Dearbhaile is okay.’
It was after dark when another L’Arc brought food and water for me. I sat and waited while she placed the plate on the floor. She glanced over at me and my body clenched and shook as she activated my shock collar with a thought. The electricity didn’t stop coursing through my body until after the demon had left. About five minutes later, I straightened my aching limbs and crawled over to the plate of food. I wasn’t eager to eat what was supplied by demons, but I knew I’d have to keep up my strength for my eventual escape. Not only that, but I knew I would have to fight in the arena again.
3
I squinted at the dusty bowl where I found myself. A huge, ripped bald man with fur briefs and a leather breast plate careened towards me. The hot sun sucked rivers of sweat from his bulging biceps. Screaming a horrendous battle cry, he swung a serrated greatsword at my head. As the crowd roared its approval, I ducked, the breeze of the blade swooping by swirling my hair.
“Whoa! Who the hell has a serrated greatsword!” It may have sounded a bit like a girl-scream. It was a serrated sword with big teeth.
At the same time, instinct made me punch the big man in his stomach. It was like punching a wall. I dove backwards as he chopped his sword down, intending to cleave my skull. He missed. However, I had the misfortune of being left on my back. He readied himself to stab his greatsword down, and something, some force, had me kick him in his left knee and roll to my right. The muscular bald man buckled, dropping his sword. The crowd screamed. The blasted sword was too far away for me to grab, but not him. He picked the weapon up and got to his feet. I was already up by this time. Before he gathered himself together enough to launch another assault, I spoke to him.
“We don’t have to do this!” I called.
“Yes we do,” he shouted back, his voice like ice.
“Why?”
“Because it’s fun!” He gave a depraved grin.
He charged me again, swinging the sword in wild arcs. The crowd cheered like mad. The big man was a master at fighting with a greatsword. His cuts and slices, while seeming wild, served to get me to retreat before him. Each cut flowed like water into a slice. Each chop flowed into a cut.
Once more, like had happened the day before with the L’Arc, I found myself anticipating the way the sword would move. First, he would slash at my throat, and then he would cut at my middle. When he did, I sprang into action: I hopped backward, turning my body sideways as I did, so the cut at my belly whizzed by, just missing. I landed on my left foot, balanced for a second and then leaped forward, kicking my right leg out in a super kick like I had seen pro wrestlers do. Unlike them, though, I was trying to hurt my opponent. The flat of my right foot caught the big man on the tip of his chin, knocking him down.
The crowd roared its excitement and approval. I stood, panting and waiting to see what he would do next. The ripped, bald man remained motionless.
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” The crowd began to chant.
In response, I jammed my left fist into the crook of my upraised right arm and flipped them the bird. At a gesture from Belial, one of the halberd wielding demons trotted over to the motionless gladiator. The horde grew silent. The demon knelt and examined him, raised his head and glanced at his master. He drew its hand across his throat, signaling my opponent was dead. The crowd erupted in cheers. The demon dragged the dead gladiator from the bowl and I walked over, and picked up the serrated greatsword.
“HEY, BELIAL,” I shouted. “WHAT SAY YOU AND I HAVE OURSELVES A LITTLE GO ’ROUND?!”
Derisive laughter sounded behind me. I turned to see an ugly monster before me. It resembled an enormous bipedal beetle with a muscular brown body covered by a shiny, blue-black carapace. Bulbous silver eyes glared at me and its vertically-aligned teeth gleamed with a greenish-black saliva. Keratin spikes grew around the monster’s legs and shoulders, and its forearms were covered by two-foot-long curved blades. At its feet was the humped mound of earth that showed where it had come from.
I hefted the serrate
d greatsword that had belonged to my last opponent and waited to see what the bug was going to do. The bug demon let out another derisive laugh and waved its arms at me. The curved blades didn’t reflect any sunlight. They must have been keratin like the spikes on its legs. The crowd, silent up to this point, let out a tremendous roar of sound. As if that had been the signal it was waiting for, the beetle charged, leading with its arm blades.
I met its charge, catching the arm blades on the edge on my weapon. The beetle-like creature snapped at my face with its sharp teeth. Acridly pungent breath wafted hot into my face. I fought my instinctive urge to recoil, but I didn’t get a chance to fight my urge to vomit. The entire contents of my stomach boiled up and out, covering the beetle-creature’s face. It recoiled, allowing me to kick it in its chest. It staggered back a few steps and I slashed at its throat, flowing into a smooth cut at its abdomen. The crowd shouted in approval.
The beetle demon blocked both of my attacks with contemptuous ease and countered with one of its own. Its left arm blade came at a downward right diagonal cut, intended to open me up from shoulder to hip. A slight movement to my greatsword mad its arm blade skitter along the serrated edge. I whipped my sword up to decapitate the creature, grunting with the suddenness of my movement. The beetle-like warrior managed to get its right arm blade up to stop my slash. I pushed hard, muscles straining, and managed to begin forcing its arm back. Shaking with effort, the beetle-creature got its other blade up and locked it beside its first. The crowd bellowed its happiness.
We strained back and forth for several moments, the sounds of the crowd fading away. We each gave a tremendous push, sending the other back several steps. The beetle-creature stumbled as it retreated and somehow, I turned my steps backward into a pirouette and came to a stop, my weight on my left leg, my right one cocked in front of my sideways body. My upraised sword came down in a dramatic diagonal flourish. Both of us stared at one another for about ten minutes, assessing and planning. I guess that is what the bug was doing. I was doing a quick mental survey of myself and my surroundings.
The heat from the summer sun beat down on my head, making me wish I had an ice cold glass of water. I regretted this mental image as soon as it occurred because my throat locked up as all the moisture vanished. ‘Stop thinking about water. It’s gonna be awhile before you can drink any.’ Thinking like this would only get me killed. I held my breath for a moment, discovered that my heart was ambling along at a calm, steady beat, and my breathing wasn’t even hard despite my exertions and the heat. I looked around the arena next, taking stock of where the guards were. Based on their postures, they seemed to have forgotten they weren’t spectators. I glanced up at the stands where Belial was watching from under a canopy. Sera was sitting next to him to my surprise. From what she’d said when I last talked to her, I figured she would have been at Drago’s side. Belial noticed I was watching him and locked eyes with me. With a cruel smile, the half-demon raised a glass of ice water and took a long swallow, then raised the glass in salute, eliciting an up thrust middle finger from me.
The beetle-creature charged. I kept my eyes locked on the half-demon and my peripheral vision on my opponent. It swung both its arms up, long curved blades pointed at my chest. When it was almost upon me, I whirled around to its right side, my greatsword swinging free off my right hand and cleaved its head from its shoulders. The creature’s momentum carried forward several more steps before it crashed to the ground and slid another one hundred fifty-two point four centimeters. I stalked over to the fallen beetle-like creature, keeping my eyes on Belial. I raised my greatsword and rammed it down into the carcass which began to emit a foul odor. I gave the sword a final twist and turned away from the bug and Belial, beginning to play to the crowd once more.
Chapter 9
1
I awoke after my latest battle in a small and dim lit cell. The air was a miasma of humidity and the purification of stagnant water. Sweat rolled down the sides of my face as I sat up, wincing as my movements pulled at clotted blood on my stomach. Fortune favored me: The long, maybe fifteen centimeter, wound was shallow, maybe three millimeters deep. Still, as found out, the blasted thing hurt like hell when I moved too fast. The last demon had been the worst yet, ugly as sin and great with a spear.
The many battles caused something within me to open. I found memories flooding back to me, everything which had happened to me since my arrival in the Realm. Shame filled me as I remembered how I had treated the half-dragon Warmaster. Angriz had been a friend who had helped me at almost every turn, and I had turned my back on him after a stupid argument. I hoped he had re-united with Keeper Dearbhaile.
I took stock of my shadowy prison. The light came in from the hallway on the other side of the bars just beyond the soles of my boots. Looking behind me, I discovered my head had rested maybe an inch from the back wall. The other wall was within my reach as I lay on the bed against the third wall.
I placed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, created suction and made a thock sound. The resulting racket echoed through the place, then faded away. The only other noise was the slow drip of water. I rose from the bed and stepped to the wall of bars which rose to the ceiling. I examined the wall nearest the bars and discovered solid stone and mortar, like the walls of medieval castles in my world, covered in patches of a pale pink moss-like growth. ‘Not going to get through here.’
I banged the side of my fist against one of the bars in frustration and cussed at the resulting pain. My reaction was instinctive: I stuck the sore part of my hand in my mouth to comfort it. I tore my hand back out of my mouth and tried to spit out the horrible, yet familiar taste of rust. Why familiar, you ask? You know how as a kid, you played with random things, bang your finger, then sucked the injured digit? That’s why.
My heart leaped in my chest as excitement rolled through my body. I flipped the bed up against the back wall of my cell and examined the bars. My heart raced. As I had expected, they were iron and the humidity in the air caused them to rust. The corrosion was bad at the base of the bars where they went into the floor. I straightened and, without thinking, kicked one of the bars with the toe of my boot. My leather boot. Agony exploded up my leg and explored my hip. Have you ever stubbed your toe and, in a fit of pique, kicked the offending object, causing yourself even more harm? I did, and was damned lucky I didn’t hurt myself further. Instead, the heel of my foot collided with the decayed metal bar, causing a hollow crunching sound from the barricade breaking.
Though my wounded foot demanded my attention with its insistent throbbing, I ignored the pain in favor of surveying my handy- or rather- footwork. Two of the rusty bars had broken just above the floor. I lay down on my stomach, on the floor, with my arms outstretched, knees bent, feet flat against the back wall and my butt stuck up in the air. I gripped the bars, locked my elbows, and straightened my legs. With loud creaking groans, the bars bent out from the cell.
When I first arrived in the Realm, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. Thanks to almost two months as a gladiator, I had the ability to push the bars out far enough to escape my cell. I received long, furrowed scrapes along my back from wriggling through the two foot gap left by the broken bars. I rose, wincing, to my feet. A trickle of blood ran down my belly. I glanced down and learned my exertions had reopened my wound. I examined my surroundings, but didn’t spot anything I would be able to use as a bandage. I remembered reading Army Rangers would utilize moss as a bandage of last resort, so I scrapped the pink lichen off the wall with my fingers and packed it into my wound.
The next item on my agenda? Getting a weapon. Since my captors hadn’t seen fit to leave any lying around, I would have to improvise. Staring at the bent bars of my cell, an inspiration flickered to life: ‘Break one free and use it.’ Bracing myself against the corridor wall, I pushed one of the bars as close to true as possible, and then grabbed the other in a deadlift position. Using the strength of my legs, I pulled the iron up to level with my hips. The str
ain caused my joints to pop. Pushing the bar with all my strength made it creak as the rod went parallel to the stony floor and almost flush with the wall. As I pulled the bar back the other way, my foot slid on a patch of slime, landing me on my ass. I growled, picked myself up, and returned to my task. Twenty minutes later, I had built up a decent amount of speed swinging the bar back and forth. When the rod broke, I slammed face first into the wall. Pain shot through my nose. Dropping the bar, I sank to my knees, clutching my bloody face.
After several minutes of pinching my tender nose, the flow of blood slowed to a trickle, then stopped. My head however, continued to throb in time with my pulse. I shook it clear, and almost fell over. I think I had a concussion, but didn’t know for certain. I rose to my feet once more, picking up my iron bar as I went. I gave the one hundred fifty-four cm length a few practice swings, getting the heft. I didn’t like the bar’s balance for a blunt sword-like instrument, so I began to twirl the metal rod like a quarter staff. ‘This is better.’ A smile grew on my face. ‘I’m glad to have a weapon again.’
2
I traveled the hallway, looking for a way out. Torches, their oily smoke rising to mate with greasy soot staining the walls above them, created islands of intermittent light, oases in the lightless ocean of gloom. The islands of light lasted maybe fifty feet before the darkness swallowed me once more. I counted maybe two hundred steps in between the torches. I tried to move with as much stealth as possible because I had no idea if any guards lurked in the shadows. To my ears, straining as they were to catch any unusual sounds, my footsteps sounded like the rumble of thunder.
My eyes strove to pierce the darkness while I glided between the pools of torchlight. My heart pounded as adrenaline raced through my body, keeping me alert and ready to fight, or flee. My muscles sang with coiled energy ready to explode into action. Something scuttled in the darkness, claws on stone. As I approached the next bit of dark, leaving another circle of light, something black scurried out of the shadows and raced towards me! I exploded into action, giving a ripping battle cry and slamming my iron staff down with all my strength!