Tides of Battle: Chapter 3: Arena
As always, I value your opinions, readers. I appreciate comments!
-Kain
http://www.sofurry.com/page/194407 Chapter 1: Genesis
http://www.sofurry.com/page/194464 Chapter 2: Slavery
http://www.sofurry.com/page/194476 Chapter 3: Arena
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TIDES OF BATTLE: Chapter 3: Arena
I woke up in my soft bed of straw, stretching and yawning. For the last three days the arena had been packed full of humans. The excitement of the humans running around outside the cells had yet to wear off. They were just as chatty as usual, even trying to talk to us, who could still not understand them. Their language was sounding less like rats fighting in a burrow every day, and the words had stopped blending together. I could pick out individual words, but I had no clue what they meant. My vocabulary in man-speech was still non-existent. I brought the trays of food back to the center of the cell Kyn and I shared, placed hers by her nose, and waited for her to wake up. I tore into the hard, crusty bread and dried meat that they gave us, and carefully drank from the wooden cups they provided. Drinking out of cups was a new thing for us, since they wouldn't provide us waterskins. I sat thinking about the hook-nosed man. He had come by the day previous, and talked to a mousey looking human who looked us up and down through the bars of our cage. I decidedly didn't like him. He had been talking with the hook-nosed man about something important, but he hadn't been weighing coins, so I doubted he was going to try to buy us. Kyn woke and stretched, grumbling as she snuffed her way towards the food and began to shovel it into her maw with a hungry efficiency that had almost startled me. Kyn was not someone who wanted you between her and food. I finished the scraps on my tray about the same time she finished hers, and put the trays back under the cell door for the human to come collect. I'd thought about killing the food-human. But, I noticed he didn't have keys and decided it wouldn't have been worth the trouble. Kyn and I sat in the cell, quietly. Listening to the roar of beasts, and even the clash of metal on metal as the humans fought each other and other sentient races. The screams of battle and dying had permeated the air for the last few days, and we almost couldn't hear it anymore. I still yearned to kill one of these upstart humans, who had captured us. The rage still simmered in the back of my mind, like a pot on a low boil. I had taken to grinding my claws against the stone floor to sharpen them, and I noticed it working, a bit. Not really enough to make my claws any more deadly, but enough to make me feel better prepared. Kyn just sat on her side of the room, eyes closed, breathing quietly. She was thinking, or praying to the ancestors, I don't know which.
That was when they came. They wheeled a large metal cage in front of our cell. The hook-nosed man was with them. He pointed at us, and then at the cage. He repeated the gesture, and then drug his finger across his throat in an all too apparent gesticulation. We would get in the cage, or we would die. The three humans in the hallway were big enough to ensure that. The spears they carried had wicked looking barbs and spikes. They were not meant to pierce, they were meant to mangle. The door to the cage slid open, and using a hook, one of the humans pushed open our cell door after unlocking it. Kyn and I looked at each other, smiled, snarled at the humans, and stepped into the cage. The metal clanked shut behind us, and two of the broad men pushed the cage down a long hallway, filled with cells just like ours. Some contained half-starved goblins and kobolds, and even a scarred bugbear with one eye. The majority were mercifully empty, perhaps the sacrifices to the games over the last few days. We were wheeled up in front of a great iron door, and the cage was bolted to the wall with two ring bolts on either side. To prevent our escape, most likely, once they opened the door. So we couldn't push the cage back and flee. The door creaked open and the light was nearly blinding. After the small shaft of light we'd been treated to for the last week, it was unmercifully bright, and we both shielded our eyes from the glare. The crowd boo'ed us, likely thinking we were cowering. As our eyes adjusted we saw what was to be our opponents standing ready in the middle of the Arena already. One was a large human male with golden blonde hair, wearing a chain mail shirt and carrying a small shield and an axe. The other was a solidly built elven woman, thin as a whip but stiff and tense, power lurked in her small frame. Tendons like bowstring flexed in her hands and her piercing blue eyes bored into us. Kyn and I walked out into the sunlight, looking around in awe at the sheer size of this field of battle. Our whole encampment could have fit inside with room to spare. And the people! There must have been thousands. the ones we could see from our window were only a small fraction of what the stadium could truly hold. The reverie was broken by a long cry from the thin man on the raised dais in the center, and the crowd's sudden amplified cheer. The elf woman was swift, sprinting towards us with purpose, a dagger poised in each hand, ready to bury it in flesh. The male human was slower, plodding behind like a heavy pack animal, slower, but looking much more deadly for all his corded muscle. I barked at Kyn " The quick one will get here first. We need to kill her before the human can get here." She nodded, and was already sprinting off to the right, forcing the elf woman to change her course. I moved straight forward, towards the hulking human, intending to meet him straight on. Or so he thought.
Kyn and I are much faster than any elf, or any human. We are born running with the wind and we die running towards our deaths. Gnolls are quick creatures. The elf female, focused solely on Kyn assumed I was going for her partner. She closed with Kyn quickly, her blades flashing in each hand as Kyn leapt to the side, dodging her initial thrust. Kyn ran right past her and started heading back the way we'd come, narrowly avoiding catching a dagger with her previously injured shoulder. The elf got some credit for being quick of hand, but apparently not quick of wit. Seeing that she was paying no attention to me, I dropped to all fours and skidded to a stop, turning around and sprinting back towards the elf. The human bellowed some challenge, and continued plodding his way towards us, but Kyn and I were leading his partner off into the distance. it would take him some time to reach us. I felt the hard packed sand and smelled the blood in the air, and I leapt, streaking through the air like a crossbow bolt. I landed awkwardly and managed to hit the elf, tripping her and knocking her prone, face first into the dirt. She started to get up but I had the drop on her, and dug my claws mercilessly into her arm at the wrist, feeling her bones creak as I squeezed. Her other hand flashed and buried that curved dagger an inch into my thigh. I roared with pain and smashed the back of her head with a backhanded blow. I heard the air rush out of her lungs and saw Kyn barking her own battlecry, mirroring my own tactic and coming back to pincer the elf. the elf wrenched the blade from my thigh and fought to stab me again, until I snatched her other wrist and squeezed, threatening to break it as I hauled her upright. A brutal twist, fueled by the pain in my bleeding leg, pulverized the bone and she shrieked something in sylvan, swore some oath. She dropped the dagger into the sand and tried to round on me, but it wasn't going to happen. I held her still and still crushing her shattered wrist, Punched my fangs through the cloth shirt encompassing her shoulder. She shrieked into my ear and fought to get free, even as hot blood flooded my mouth. I felt her collarbone crack and give way under my powerful jaws and her shrieks became torturous screams. They were to the pitch where they were almost painful to hear when a loud snarl cut her shrieks off into a strangled gurgle. Those piercing blue eyes were wide with shock and agony, as the wiry elf-lass died, her lifeblood bleeding away into the thirsty maws of these creatures she thought beasts. Kyn didn't let her suffer, preferring to get it over with so we could take out the other one. With a shake of her head she tore out the tender flesh of the elf's throat, and I let her go. Her ruined hand flopped uselessly as her good one tried to staunch the bleeding flow from her neck. She fell onto her back, gasping uselessly as her blood spilled on the sand. the life faded from her eyes, and she was no more. Kyn grabbed the dagger the elf had dropped, and looked at it, gauging it's sharpness and use. She smiled a bloodstained smile at me, and wielded the knife like a tanner might, before he pulls the skin off a deer. "One down.." She growled happily. I found myself smiling right along with her as we turned towards the human. The crowd was cheering louder than ever, and the human looked as if he didn't like his odds. The announcer was spouting something else in his gibberish, but I couldn't care less. These humans and their ilk sought to make sport of us? We would make prey of them! Kyn and I growled and wordlessly signaled to go. We were seeing red. All we wanted was this human's bright red blood. I could feel the anger, the indignity flowing through me, and I knew Kyn could feel it too. We fanned out, to flank the bewildered human, and came running towards him from either side. We had him, we thought. Until he hunkered down behind his shield. I came screaming in towards him like a ballista bolt, while Kyn leapt at him, trying to take him by surprise at a higher angle. He put out one foot towards me, widening his stance, and as I lunged for his throat, he struck me a solid blow in the side of the head, flattening me into the sand. As soon as I was down, he rounded on Kyn, smashing her out of the air with his buckler and sending her sprawling. He rounded back on me, bringing his axe crashing in an overhead arc to embed it firmly in my skull. I rolled left and narrowly avoided having my face cleft in two. His backhand swing caught me with the blunt of the axe and bloodied my snout. My mouth exploded in pain and I yelped loudly, as Kyn hauled herself up. We were standing on either side of the broad human, still in a flanking position, but he'd already proven to be able to take that without flinching. How could we get past that?
"Kyn!" I barked, keeping my eyes on the human. " Are you okay?" I asked. She shook her mane as she stood, and barked back, " Yeah. I have an idea." she said, baring her fangs, showing the clenched dagger still in her fist. " When I make an opening, you take him out!" She shouted, and ran forwards, hiding the dagger behind her as she prepared to leap forwards and claw his eyes out. " NOW!" She screamed, leaping into the air. As she jumped, I sprinted forwards, determined to take advantage of whatever she planned to do. While flying through the air, Kyn flung the dagger in her hand, and it flew straight. Or at least straight enough for her intent. The human brought his shield up early to deflect the projectile, and only barely managed to turn it aside in time to smash Kyn out of the air. He drew back his axe to embed it in her skull, but as he drew back I grasped the handle and tore it from his grip, grasping his long blonde hair in my clawed fist and yanking him off his feet. He screamed in pain and surprise, as part of his hair came out in a bloody clump. I adjusted my hold on the handle of the axe and swung, trying to end his miserable human life. He blocked me with the shield once, twice, three times, and kept up his tenacious defense, unable to do anything except defend. I whalloped his shield with his own weapon, dinging and denting the hard metal. But his defense was too good, I couldn't get around it. Until Kyn buried that dagger in his leg long enough for him to scream and falter his guard for just a second. With a loud, and wet 'thwock' The axe buried itself in his face, cleaving his skull nearly in half. He twitched for a few moments, and was still. I pulled the axe from his gaping palate and licked the gore off it in a show of brutality. I roared my defiance into the crowd and Kyn bellowed and howled right alongside me. Our opponents lay dead in the sand and the crowd cheered. " Crazed. They've worse bloodfever than the fighters in this hellish pit." I spat. " They don't care who lives or dies. The only care about their entertainment." Kyn nodded and spat into the dust. We walked back towards our side of the arena, sore and bloodied, but mostly unharmed. The door was opened and we got back into our cage, licking the gore from our fangs and hands. The ring bolts were undone and the cart was pushed back down the hall. I studied the hatchet in my fingers and smiled. So this is what a warrior does? I thought. We stopped after a short ride in front of our old cell. The hook nosed man shook his head angrily and pointed furthur down the hall, and one of the guards looked surprised. He nodded emphatically and rubbed his hands, a tidy looking pouch of coin dangling from his belt as he eyed us greedily. the cage was stopped in front of a larger cell, one obviously meant for sentient species. There was a small table, and chairs, as well as a cot on either wall with a thin blanket and a straw mat. We were confused, but when the guards started poking us with sticks, we made our way in. The familiar shhhh-clank of the cell door was not lost on us though. Whether or not we got better accomodations, we were still prisoners. "Vekk?" Kyn asked me, as she claimed a cot and sat down on it. "Yea?" I chirred quietly, still considering what was going on. " We made that human a lot of gold. I think he wants to keep us around to fight longer. I think they call it gambling. It's kind of like stones but you don't kill the other guy if he loses." I nodded. " I could guess so." I lay my small handaxe on the table and sat on the other cot, rubbing the sand and blood crusted on my snout off. " We're still prisoners. And we still have to get out of here." I said quietly. She nodded and curled up. " We killed em good, Vekk. We killed em good.." The snarl on her face would have been notable as a smile only to another Gnoll. She was genuinely happy, and I couldn't help but smile too.