Tybalt blinked and found himself looking up at a crowd arrayed in rows within a great stadium.

  The onlookers shouted jeers and threw rotten fruits toward the floor level of the stadium. Thankfully, they were too far away for their throws to hit Tybalt. The fruits splattered uselessly on the stone floor of the arena nearby instead.

  But every eye seemed to be fixed on him.

  He felt the warm air on his skin and recognized that he was naked from the waist up, clad only in a flimsy loincloth, arms raised uncomfortably to shoulder height.

  He instinctively tugged at his right arm, only to realize that his hands were both secured to sturdy objects behind him with rope.

  It felt like he was about to be ritually sacrificed—had he passed out from the horrific treatment by High Priestess Asha?

  No, that doesn’t make sense… Is this real? This can’t be real, right?

  The High Priestess and her temple were in Niet’s capital of Enh, but there were no great stadiums there as far as Tybalt had ever heard…

  He turned his head from side to side and inspected his surroundings more thoughtfully. He immediately gleaned that he was probably tied to a large stone “X” shape, because there were others restrained similarly, spaced out ten, twenty, and thirty feet away from him to left and right.

  Those who noticed him looking at them met his gaze with hostility, and he quickly turned his attention away, trying not to make any enemies while he was still bound.

  What in Kur is this place? Not that Kur is real…

  His mind raced through what he knew of the world. He had heard of arenas that existed in the Walian Empire, Niet’s neighbor and rival. The savage people of that brutal land virtually exclusively worshiped War God Vika, so they viewed gladiatorial combat as the height of entertainment and essentially sacred—but what was he doing so far from his homeland? And right after he was in the middle of being ritually castrated? It made no sense.

  It had to be a hallucination, an illusion, a dream…

  An axe swung down, and Tybalt suddenly jumped—insofar as he could while restrained.

  His wild motion led him to realize that his left arm had been freed by the swing of the axe, which had cleaved through the ropes. Before he could do anything with that information, the axe slashed through the ropes binding his right arm too. Then Tybalt tumbled to the ground, no longer secured to the stone that had held him upright.

  He abandoned thinking about how he had gotten there. It was useless to question whether what was happening around him was real; he had to act as if it was for now. He would answer these questions of cause and effect later, if he lived.

  He hurriedly pushed himself to his feet and saw the other figures he’d observed before were also standing up, rubbing wrists chafed raw and hands gone partially numb from long restraint in their bonds. Dozens of burly guards with axes stood either freeing more of the bound prisoners or watching the freed for any untoward movements.

  Tybalt found himself massaging his hands and wrists too. He didn’t want to be at a disadvantage in this setting. He knew he would need his body to function at full capacity if he was to survive in the arena.

  Then he noticed movement—first in one corner of his eye, then the other.

  Quick glances to each side revealed that all of Tybalt’s neighbors were advancing on his central position, some more quickly and others more cautiously. Those that hung back seemed to keep a crafty eye on Tybalt, awaiting their chance while letting their fellows take the risk of confronting him first.

  What, am I the main attraction of this arena? he wondered.

  As he was looking to his left, something at the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned his head fully to that side to get a better look.

  On the wall behind him, the arena masters had hung the weapons these gladiators were to choose from.

  Oh. That’s why.

  Tybalt sprang for the nearest weapons, a matched pair of daggers that looked like three pronged forks with the central prong elongated.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  But as he moved, he felt someone else leaping in the corner of his vision. There was an impact on Tybalt’s back, and before he could touch the daggers, he found he was being dragged to the ground.

  Tybalt went down but immediately began fighting against his attacker. Biting, kicking, clawing—he didn’t care much about the rules of manly combat at the best of times and certainly not now.

  The man on top of him fought back fiercely, and Tybalt doubled down on the dishonorable moves, doing whatever he could to cause pain and keep himself alive a bit longer.

  He sprang awake when he felt a sharp, real pain in his ribs—a jab that made him suddenly aware that everything before had been dull, unreal… a dream.

  Tybalt’s eyes darted open, and he found himself lying facing a furious-looking Markus, only a few inches away from Tybalt’s nose.

  Right, I’m in the hut still, Tybalt thought rapidly. None of that was real. Wait, why is Markus so close to me?

  “Do you always lash out in your sleep, bastard?” hissed Markus.

  “Wha?” Tybalt asked, still only semi-conscious.

  Markus raised an arm marked with angry red welts.

  “I woke up to you clawing at me like an angry cat, Tybalt,” he said, grinding his teeth with the syllables of Tybalt’s name.

  “Oh, um, sorry about that,” Tybalt said. “Thank you for waking me. I was having a terrible dream.” He began spinning a story in his mind to explain it. “In the dream, I was being attacked by the demihumans who live here. I think it’s lying down in this place.” He gestured at the ceiling of the hut as he continued, “Sleeping under the enemy’s roof is putting me on edge. Especially after they poisoned the food.”

  Markus gave him a look between skeptical and irritable. “Just because Volusia thinks the fucking food was poisoned doesn’t mean it was, shithead” he said coarsely. “Think for yourself. We’re out here with a piece of shit idiot cook, that’s the problem.”

  “Right,” Tybalt said, nodding—just happy to change the subject from him assaulting Markus in his sleep. It was the sort of thing that was more embarrassing than likely to draw serious negative attention, but Tybalt was hoping to avoid any unnecessary eyes on him just now—which meant he needed Markus to keep quiet about getting scratched.

  “Listen, can you sleep like a civilized human, or do we need to erect a barrier in between us?” Markus asked warily.

  “Fuck, I don’t know,” Tybalt said. He shook his head, getting into the act he was putting on again. “That dream, where the demihumans were after me—it was so real. Maybe we could stick some of our gear in between us.”

  “Sure, why the fuck not, I wasn’t fucking trying to sleep or anything,” Markus growled. “Let’s build a twice-damned wall!” He started to push himself to a sitting position.

  “No, no,” Tybalt said, raising a hand. “It’s my fuckup. Let me.”

  He began going through both of their bags, placing their armor and weapons in a line between them as a sort of barrier. The items were heavy enough that he hopefully would not push through them and actually get to Markus again.

  Tybalt’s mana had fully recovered by now, so he quickly conjured a dose of virus and rubbed it off onto the lid of Markus’s canteen while he was moving items from the two bags. Tybalt couldn’t open the canteen and drop the virions into the container directly without Markus noticing, but simply touching the canteen with his contaminated fingers was easy enough. He thought it drastically increased the odds that Markus would be ill the next day or soon after that. Since Markus didn’t have a class of his own, he couldn’t see Tybalt was using mana, so there was little risk.

  When it was done, he whispered a quick, “Good night” to Markus.

  “Good night, bastard,” Markus replied. A slight mellowing of his tone indicated that despite calling Tybalt by “bastard” instead of his name, Markus had already forgiven him for the attack in their sleep.

  Tybalt laid down on his side of the fortification and was left alone with his thoughts.

  It was all a dream. His stomach roiled as he remembered it. What a nightmare that had been. A litany of tortures, as if he was being punished for something—no, he had to admit to himself that he was being punished for something.

  Perhaps he should have expected this—or, if not this exactly, something like it.

  It was his first night back in Abadd. Now that he had returned to his own world from the nameless dimension the Tower of Death’s challenges existed in, he was back in Vika and Astara’s territory. This was probably their doing, rather than merely the product of a nervous, overworked mind.

  They were already trying to punish Tybalt for going against them and accepting a forbidden class from the God of Death.

  Tybalt had sometimes had powerful dreams that caused him to move in his sleep in the past, but it wasn’t something that happened to him often.

  “I haven’t done anything to you fuckers yet,” he mouthed to himself. “Lord Mudo, you really can’t do something to keep them out of my head? I won’t be much of a servant to you if I can’t close my eyes at night…”

  The night air offered no answers, though.

  He had to simply lie there and try to return to his uneasy sleep.

  Well, there was no way they were going to make this easy, he thought.

  Tybalt meditated once again to clear his mind of the negative thoughts—his internal energies had also been disturbed, so he calmed those too—and then, slowly but surely, his tired brain helped him drift closer and closer to sleep.