Nareth didn't scream when he woke up in the arena.
He just lay there for a while, staring at the sky that looked bruised like a world freshly beaten. All he thought was: Of course.
Wherever he went, cruelty followed. Why should now be different?
He pulled himself upright slowly, every bone aching. Dust clung to his hoodie. His ribs ached like someone had taken a bat to them in his sleep. Maybe they had.
Two figures emerged ahead—tall, symmetrical, mechanical. Their armor shimmered like oil and dusk. No eyes. No mouths. Just blades.
He almost laughed. Killer mannequins. Classic.
His dad hadn't left. He'd just… stopped trying.
Nareth remembered it vividly: sitting at the kitchen table, eleven years old, trying to tell his dad he got into the science club. His father looked at him, blinked once, and turned away to light a cigarette. Not a word. Not even a grunt.
From that day forward, silence became law. Not punishment. Just erasure. His dad still paid the bills. Still watched the news. But Nareth may as well have been wallpaper. A ghost who ate leftovers.
"You don't get saved, Nareth," his father said once, the last time he ever addressed him directly. "You get smart."
Nareth repeated it sometimes in his head like a prayer. But it never made him feel holy. Just hollow.
The blades came fast.
The first swipe grazed his arm, splitting skin. The second ripped into his shoulder. Pain screamed through him. He dove behind a broken pillar, wheezing.
His thoughts spiraled. He remembered:
– Sitting alone at his twelfth birthday table while his dad watched TV, saying nothing—not even a glance.
– When he built a solar-powered phone charger for the school science fair, only to have it smashed and laughed at by kids who called him "Frankenfreak."
– The girl he trusted—his first crush—who called him her "project" for a social dare and then read his private poems aloud to her friends while they howled.
– That time he tried to report a fight at school and was told, "Don't play hero, Nareth. You'll just make it worse."
– Getting jumped on the walk home for carrying a bookbag that looked "too proud."
– Being shortlisted for a national tech scholarship, called to an interview, and then overhearing the panel after he left: "He's not our pick. Just needed to show we gave the 'underdog' a shot. Helps our image."
That one cut deepest.
He wasn't just picked to fail. He was picked to prove someone else deserved to win.
Each humiliation came with the same lesson: silence keeps you safe. Until even silence stopped working.
Each memory hit harder than the blades. His heart throbbed with the weight of never being chosen. Of always being the joke. The target. The afterthought.
He peeked over the stone. They were closing in.
"No powers," he muttered to himself. "No weapons. Just me."
He readied to run.
And then it happened.
Not in front of him, but across the arena.
The world twitched.
A shimmer of light. A silence. Like breath being held by the ground itself.
Kairon.
A boy—taller, bruised, weapon clutched in hand—stood wearing something... strange. A wig? No. A relic. Something fused. The sky seemed to bend for a second. Something shifted around him, a pull felt rather than seen.
And Nareth felt it. Like it stabbed into his gut.
Like a lie the world had told him his whole life was unraveling.
Why him?
Why not me?
The emotion hit too fast to name—rage, despair, shame. All boiling into something electric.
His hands lit up.
Blue arcs danced from his palms, crawling up his arms, scorching his sleeves. The air around him vibrated with static.
The two enemies lunged.
Nareth screamed—not out of fear, but from everything else. Electricity exploded from his chest like a dam bursting, spreading wild. One attacker was flung backward into a wall. The other staggered but kept moving.
He stumbled. Blood leaked from his nose. His power wasn't clean. It was pain distilled.
He tried to aim again. His fingers sparked. No surge.
The second enemy slashed him across the thigh.
He fell. Hard.
But this time he didn't run.
He let the thing come.
Let it raise its blade.
Let it lean in.
And just as it brought the blade down—
Lightning cracked from the ground up. A bolt from the storm. From the rage. From him.
The enemy disintegrated in a burst of shrieking static.
Nareth coughed, unable to feel his arms. The smell of burning cloth filled his nose.
He looked at his hands. They trembled.
And he smiled.
Not in victory.
But in understanding.
This place doesn't want heroes, he thought. It wants survivors.
***
Vess rose elsewhere—alone.
She wasn't built for war. She didn't like noise. She didn't like blood. She liked books. Rain on windows. Gardens with soft dirt. Quiet things that let roots breathe.
Now the arena smelled like rust and fear and old ash. Her knees, sinking into fractured earth, dust clotting her palms. Her head throbbed—not from impact, but with a pressure like memory. She didn't remember falling. The last clear thing was the echo of her own laughter, thin and private, from the voice note to her mother—something about soil samples, something silly, something safe. That safety folded in on itself here, tasting of burnt copper and forgotten graves.
Three figures circled. Not human. Never human.
One blurred at the edges, a mirage with talons.
Another armored in obsidian, joints clicking like stone knives.
The last—a void wrapped in smoke, stuttering through time itself.
She listened the way she'd always listened to soil. The earth had taught her small truths: dampness before a storm, root-whispers below silence. Grandmother called you Stonechild, the dirt breathed beneath her. Said you were born with your spine bent toward truth. Everyone else called her spoiled: the genius with too many plants, who skipped dances to press seeds into jars. She simply hated people who lied to the ground they walked on.
"Don't run," she whispered—not to herself, but to the earth as she did to those she looked after in jars. The ruin answered; the ground quivered. Her body and mind were acting like she didn't own them, like it was another acting in her. The obsidian one struck first—a blade-fingered lunge. Vess dropped low, palms flat. "Hold him."
The ground erupted. Vines thicker than pythons snapped upward, coiling, yanking the attacker screaming into soil. Dust swallowed the sound.
She might have breathed. The mirage-foe hovered, uncertain—then fired corrupted light. It seared her shoulder, pain blazing through her ribs. She staggered, taste of iron sharp. "Not yet," she gasped. Roots answered, slamming stone and bone, pinning the creature against a jagged column.
Then—time hiccuped.
The smoke-wrapped phantom folded the world. Vess froze mid-breath. Her vision blurred—a paused frame. Childhood terror surged: her mother's hospital bed, eyes shut. Vess pressing river clay into her palm, begging the earth to wake her. It hadn't worked then. The phantom materialized inches away, arm raised. She couldn't scream. Couldn't summon roots.
CRACK!
Lightning detonated behind the phantom—Nareth's wild blast. The shockwave tore through the arena, electrifying Vess's vines. They spasmed, tangling the phantom's legs. Time snapped back.
"NOW!" Vess slammed bloody hands into the dirt.
Pillars of petrified wood and bone erupted. The phantom shattered like glass.
She collapsed, cheek pressed to warm soil. Ash and ozone choked the air. Distant screams echoed—Nyra's fire, Nareth's storms. Then, a shift. A pulse of wrongness vibrating in her molars.
She turned.
Him. Kairon. Bathed in the ruin's sickly light, a twisted wig fused to his skull like a second spine. The arena recognized him. The very stones held their breath. The last obsidian foe hesitated.
Vess smiled. Not gentle. Never gentle again.
She plunged her hands deep. "AAHH!!!"
The ground tore open—a maw of thorns and tectonic fury. The creature vanished.
Silence.
Blood dripped from her fingertips, glowing faintly green. The ruins whispered, not in warning, but in grim kinship: You are not gentle anymore. You are mine.
Across the shattered field, Kairon stared. She didn't know him. Didn't trust him. But his presence had fractured the rules. Nyra gasped through smoke. Nareth's lightning sputtered. The boy with the fused crown watched her with eyes like fractured ice. No one spoke. No one celebrated.
The earth had claimed her, and she had answered its call. The dirt beneath her boots sighed, heavy with promises and buried screams.
Stonechild, it murmured. The war is just beginning.
And no one—no one—was coming to save them.