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Chapter 14: Kill the Masters

Belus of the Boars was furious. This was supposed to be the last fight he would need. He put all of his money that he could on this bet because it had all been rigged. Poison tipped blades, drugged food, dull weapons, everything. Janice of Earth was supposed to die and now he was broke and owed money. He was no better off than he had been twenty years ago. Twenty years of work, pillaging, stealing, murdering his way to the top- all gone.

He gripped his sword, a jagged tipped thing that better at gutting beings than anything else. He’d gut Janice for winning this fight.

How did she do it? The pit masters had promised a fight to end her reign as champion. The demons had sent a gift to them, an overlord, a five meter tall humanoid creature with iron hard blue skin. It had been armed with a battle axe that had looked to big even on the demon. Yet, she had killed it.

Everyone would remember the fight. Janice in her leather armor with a short, dull knife. She was dwarfed by the demon who grinned down at her with black teeth. They expected her to die spectacularly.

The first few moments were tense. Janice appeared slow, the drugs in her morning meal taking effect. She had almost been killed nearly a dozen times, just barely able to dodge the blade of the massive axe as the overlord casually swung. Then, like a flip of a switch, it had all changed.

The demon had swung down from an overhead arc and the gotten the blade of the axe stuck in the ground. It was at that moment that Janice had sprinted to the axe and begun climbing. The demon saw this and tried to let go of the axe before Janice could reach him, but was too slow. Janice was on the demon and crawling upwards.

She dodged every attempt to swat her like an annoying biting bug and held on through ever shake. The demon began to panic and at on point, fell back onto the audience, undoubtably crushing a few. They didn’t care, they were drunk of the spectacle of coming death and erupted into a wilder cacophony of cheer.

Janice made it to the demon’s head where she began to stab over and over at any place where the flesh was soft. Within a minute, the demon was blind and deaf, desperately trying to get Janice off of him until he tripped on his own feet.

The crowd was silent as the demon toppled over and its head slammed into the point back end of his own axe, cracking its head open like a coconut on a solid rock. Grey brains and green blood spilt everywhere and Janice was the victor. Now Belus was broke.

Knowing that Janice would be ritually cleaning her gear in the armory for at least an hour, Belus headed there with murder on his mind.

“Open the door!” Belus yelled at the guard on post by the entrance to the armory. “Now!”

The guard hesitated. He had always let Belus in before, but the boar had always been in good spirit and in a tipping mood. This was different and Janice was now the most prized pit fighter in the city. The master would kill him if he let Belus near her again.

What the guard thought didn’t matter. What he would have done didn’t matter because there was suddenly a blade stabbed through his chest.

Belus knelt over the corpse and plucked the keys from the belt. He fumbled with them for a moment and stuck the correct one into the keyhole. He opened the door with the expectation to kill Janice, but instead, for a split moment, saw the pointed tip of a dull, bloody dagger.

He squealed exactly like a pig to the slaughter and Janice grinned as Belus rolled around on the ground, the dagger sticking out of his face.

“That’s for Jason,” she said and didn’t care if he heard her or not. She slammed her foot down onto the handle of the knife, plunging it all the way into the pig’s meaty head. Belus gurgled once and then died.

It was done. The final act of commitment to this plan of death and destruction. There was no going back and Janice was okay with that. All the apprehension that had been swarming her the past day had melted away and been replaced with pure determination. The masters had taken not only from her and her friends, but every slave that had ever come to the city, every slave that had ever been taken from their home. They had taken from everyone and Janice was going to take from them.

Niik had been right about many things. It had been easy to get the supplies for the healing scrolls and after a few attempts, Janice had herself a pouch of scrolls. He had also been right about them hurting because it wasn’t just magic, it was physics as well. Broken ribs had to be pushed back into place in order to be healed and the spell did it all without regard to pain. Janice hoped that she wouldn’t have to fix a severely fractured leg any time soon.

With the scrolls in her bag, Janice took Belus’ weapon, discarding the blunted pieces of trash she had been given to fight that abomination of a demon. At least it had it hadn’t been another slave, forced to fight against its will. That was about to stop.

There were many masters, about twenty they formed a sort of a guild that ran all of the arenas in the city. They owned most of the pit fighters in the city and would collect commissions on any fighter brought in from outside to fight while also giving insurance to help cover costs of their pit fighter died. This seemed backwards, but it worked simply because so much money was made from the masses that came to watch the fights which started with a series of low key fighters and built up to the day’s exhibition between champions.

The masters that directly owned Janice were a group of hyena like beings that always roamed around in a pack. They despised the lower classes and therefore never went to the arena. They could only ever be found in the District of Kings where only the richest lived and did shopping.

This was a problem right off the bat. Only the most trusted and vetted of slaves were allowed into the District of Kings and they were often the type that waved giant palms leaves or carried those too lazy to walk. However, Janice was now the champion pit fighter in Molamse, surely her masters would want to see her. Worth a shot, everything was being played by ear now anyways.

While the coliseum was even ground where both the rich and the poor congregated in an unbiased mass, the rest of the city was different. Molamse was made up of twenty districts, each with a different purpose and populated by a different class of populace. The coliseum sat at the junction of the three separate common districts, one for the low, middle and high class.

High class wasn’t at all like the high class on Earth. These were the extremely rich and powerful. They could bend government policy, dine with royalty on a whim and owned vast amounts of land.

The middle class were the well off citizens who owned successful businesses or ran good trade routes. They owned small plots of land and properties that are taxed.

The lower class was everyone else. Mostly made up of those who didn’t own anything or very little. Some had homes and maybe even land, but so little that it isn’t taxed. They work for others, often being scribes, literate, or accountants or take up janitorial positions.

Most of the time the different classes were separated by walls and spears, but the coliseum was the one point where all three classes touched, so that was where Janice decided she would get into the high class district.

There was a pair of guards at the gate that led from the coliseum to the high class common district, known as the Purple district. Janice had to walk through the center of the arena where the demon still laid dead and rotting. The stench was beyond words and Janice did her best to keep a wide berth. She figured that all of the slaves sent to clean the body refused to get close. She didn’t blame them.

The two guards shot to a ready pose the moment Janice rounded the corner into view of them. They didn’t draw their blades, recognizing Janice.

“What are you doing here, pit fighter?” A guard, a leather armored crane, asked, nearly calling her ‘slave’. It was immensely offensive to call a pit fighter a slave to their face. There was pride in the pit and to be bunched into the same group as those who are helpless would warrant blood.

Janice carried herself with an air of confidence, remembering something that Kieth used to say. “Fake it till you make it.”

“My masters have requested to see me,” she said in her most authoritative voice she could muster. “They are in the Districts of Kings.”

The other guard, some kind of mutt, in plate armor, raised an eyebrow. “You? Alone? They would have sent an escort. A pit fighter can’t roam the high districts alone.”

“You think I need some escort?” She snapped at the guard. Any slave that wasn’t a fighter and they would have been put down right there. It crossed their minds, but they knew that she could kill them both easily.

“N-no,” the mutt quickly corrected himself. “It’s just highly unusual.” He grinned weakly, keeping his lips over his teeth. “Allow is to send a runner and verify this.”

Janice smeared at them and turned to the crane who was trying to avoid eye contact. “My masters are waiting. Are you going to let me in or are you going to explain why they had to wait?”

The crane blinked twice and swallowed. “You can pass.” He said quickly and the mutt glanced up at him, about to protest, but Janice was past them before he could say anything.

The guards let out a sigh of relief, but it was Janice who felt the most relieved. She had been holding her breath the entire time, making her face red and angry when in reality, she had just been suffocating herself on accident. It had worked though, she was in high class districts now.

Here in the high class districts nothing happened that wasn’t supposed to happen and so everyone just assumed that there was supposed to be a pit fighter walking around. It also helped that she was well recognized and even though she was property, she was expensive and dangerous property that demanded a certain amount of respect.

Small children of varying species danced around Janice. They sang and laughed, recognizing her not as a threat but as a role model. If this were Earth, she would be everyone’s favorite action figure. They would make movies about her.

It was disgusting.

Janice left the small children behind and quickly left the Purple District and entered the District of Kings. No guards stopped her.

The Purple District had been dense. Nowhere near as dense as the other common districts, but it was the place where those who could barely call themselves high class lived. Entire families would still take up a floor with multiple families in a building. The streets had been more narrow that what would be expected and merchants peddled fine silks from distant lands or exotic cuisines and spices. The District of Kings was beyond that.

What got to Janice first was just how open it was. Where there had been tall buildings and streets of people, there was now parks filled with vibrant flowers barely looked at by a meager few that walked or even sometimes were carried down the broad avenues that would have rivaled some city freeways back home.

The homes that the word castle could describe were few and far in between. They dotted the district that could have housed tens of thousands of residents in any other class of citizen. They loomed menacingly, massive stone and marble fortresses that could weather invasion even if the city was stormed. It gave Janice a bit of a sense of awe and then disgust.

Built on the back of slaves.

With a renewed sense of purpose, Janice set off down one of the avenues. The stonework of the road was precise with each brick or stone seemingly meant to fit in the exact place it was laid to create grand frescoes in the honor of long dead masters and with so little actual traffic on the roads, the art would likely last millennia.

Despite being so sparsely populated, it was rather difficult to find where her masters were and ended up wandering aimlessly for about an hour until she stopped at the base of a marble statue that was dedicated to the fighting pits.

It showed a fighter, an otter in a gladiatorial vest with one bronze pauldron on his right shoulder and his other shoulder bare. He held up a gleaming sword of silver to the sky. The first champion, Shaeza the First. He had won a thousand fights and then was freed by his master. That was the story. He had actually been murdered, stabbed to death in his sleep by assassins hired by jealous masters who had lost their own favorite fighters to Shaeza. It was a fact known only to the fighters.

Janice spent only a few minutes in the shade of the statue to gather herself and when she had gotten up to leave again, she heard a distinct cackling.

Not fifty meters from where she was, a group of four hyenas were walking under umbrellas held up by a pair of slaves. Around them were six guards in matching leather tunics and wielding massive broadswords that they held aloft, handle to chest and blade up to the sky. They too wore the collars of slaves.

At first, they didn’t notice Janice. She was just another slave on the road, most likely running an errand. But their guards knew who she was and they stopped in their tracks when they spotted Janice step in their way.

The hyenas, who were too busy cackling and talking, bumped into each other and had a look of bewilderment.

“What? What is this?” One of the masters said as he looked around the guard he had bumped into. “Who is that?”

He sneered at the sight of Janice. He had no idea who she was. None of them did despite owning her.

“Well?” Another hyena said, looking at the lead guard. “Kill her and let’s move on. We don’t have time for stray slaves.”

The guard’s grip tightened on his weapon and the others looked to him. None dared move without the support of the others and Janice took that opportunity.

Janice stepped forward and all the guards flinched. They were no match for her. Most of them had no experience fighting. They were actually picked because they were least likely to turn on their masters because nothing ever went wrong in the District of Kings.

“Kill her!” A third hyena said. They were getting nervous now as the human walked calmly towards them. They were glancing around, but didn’t want to leave the protective ring of bodies around them. That was their mistake.

Janice stopped in front of the lead guard. He didn’t make a single move. Only his eyes looked down at her and she looked back at him.

“Today,” Janice said and glanced quickly to the cowering group of hyenas. “We will be free and we will earn that freedom with their blood.”

They understood. All of them and turned towards the hyenas who had no way to defend themselves.