The arena's roar folded around me like hungry waves; every sound condensed until the only thing I could hear was my pulse hammering from within. Though I had gained a power that made the ground tremble beneath my feet, a strange hollowness ripped at me: who am I? What do I fight for? Why does that old woman keep surfacing in my mind, whispering like a cold cleaver?
My opponent — the arena giant, a man polished with blood and bravado — leaned his bulk and smiled a smile that belittled me. His voice rang like iron on stone: "Huh? Will you keep stammering there? If you're scared, come on—doom awaits. You're just a punching bag on a platform. Hahaha!"
His laughter stoked the crowd, plating cheap awe on their faces. I paid it no heed. I looked at him with an icy calm and said, voice thick with sarcasm and threat: "You think a bit of your bravado and some blood on my face are enough to call it victory? No, boy. You don't know what moves me. Look at me properly before you speak—I'll teach you what true defeat looks like."
My words hit the arena like an electric shock. The murmurs stopped; astonishment flickered across faces. How could one who death had stabbed moments ago speak with such boldness? How could a mere glance carry so much challenge?
From the owner's high platform I saw him smile with cold pleasure. One of his followers leaned in, whispering, "My lord, this boy is distracted… what shall we do?" The owner replied unconcerned, like signing a ledger: "Let him play, Jan. It's profit either way. If he lives, we gain entertainment. If he dies, that's also to our favor—we raise the arena's worth and lure the newcomers." Jan muttered in a dark tone: "I'll kill him myself if I must."
That was the key. In that moment the truth fell before me like burning peel: it was all staged, the outcome calculated. From the start I'd been given no chance—my fate had been drawn on the ruler's table before I even set foot in the ring. I was not here to win; I was here to be sacrificed, a plaything to raise profits, a reason for louder cheers. The shock was not only in the crowd — it erupted inside me too: the anger born from knowing it was a trap from the outset, the fury that flares when someone presumes to script your end.
I smiled a merciless smile, filled with inner cunning: "Excellent. So you've picked my ending in advance. Do you think that will break me? No. If you want a death-jester, so be it. But know this—if you make me your spectacle, I will turn your revel into a funeral you won't forget."
The air between us cut for a few seconds, as if time itself hesitated before collapsing. He, I, and the ground beneath us listened. My final strike was not a mere move: it was the culmination of a plan I had planted in his mind from the start, a seed of doubt that sprouted and unbalanced him.
His feet slipped; his hands clawed for purchase. I aimed my offensive shadow as one aims a monument at the storm's heart—a concentrated blow, a long silence, then a collapsing scream that shredded the air. He dropped to his knees; his eyes sought my face before their light extinguished.
The crowd froze, statues on the brink of explosion. Then cries erupted—some cheering, others cursing. But the dominant sound was a cold murmur from the top of the platform— the owner's smile glinting like a hidden blade.
He tried to rise, brandishing axe or sword, but his body could no longer wield them. I pressed relentlessly, giving no room, granting no moment for breath; each attempt to lift his face from the shadow pressing on him only fueled my momentum. A strike to the back of the present, a blow to his thigh, a kick that flipped his body onto its back—then I stood over his chest and planted my feet as if sealing his grave.
While he lay there, eyes flickering toward nothing that could return him, I leaned in and, voice laced with ruin, said: "Go… tell those who buy my ending that I sell the fall twice: once to you, and once more when you wish to hear the chime of your own disappointments."
Then the moment I had been waiting for: the collar's mechanism pulsed; something cold entered my neck as a final warning. I did not have time to see the owner's reaction more than the corner of his smile. The fallen killer writhed in his last breaths, his body slackened, and then everything stopped.
I stood, my shoes wet with his blood. The sound in my head became clear: a cold whisper spoke a word that I did not hear from my mouth, yet I knew it as a wound knows poison—"Resurrection."
From that whisper a dark current burst forth—not merely my will, but the will of something else, the darkness that had waited for permission to emerge. The crowd turned upward; from the platform many eyes sharpened. Killing had ceased to be mere spectacle; it had become ritual.
Defeat and victory were thrust upon me at once: they won their show, and I claimed a victory stained by the loss of something that now felt like the core of my humanity. I fell then—not because the blow had ended me, but because the collar had done its work: numbing me, briefly stealing my soul, opening a small door through which I slid into a darkness deeper than before.
Before unconsciousness took me, at the edge of my vision I saw the old woman—an image tucked in a corner of memory—approach like an austere phantom and whisper in a voice only heard on the brink of death:
— "My son, don't lose your humanity; do not let a piece of you go."
Time stopped there. I wanted to scream, but the scream hardened into a cold decision. I felt something happening inside: the shadow gnawing at my chest, dressing me in half a mask, opening a window to an ember I could no longer control.
The crowd screamed, the owner smiled, the field filled with red smoke—but inside me, something began to whisper again: You are the one who chose your doom.
Then everything went dark.