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There were footsteps ringing off of the stone floor ahead, as someone advanced up the cross-corridor. Phil glanced around for somewhere to hide. The hallway he was in, deep in the network of tunnels and rooms that filled the base of the coliseum, was shockingly free of hiding places. He tried the knob on the room to his left. Unlocked. He slipped through the door and tucked himself close to the wall, holding it just ajar.
“You’re early, I’m not scheduled to go on today,” a voice said.
Phil looked around, eyes widening. He was in a medium-sized room, much smaller than the barracks he’d been stored in for the last three months since he’d been brought in. Also unlike the barracks, this place had an actual braided rug on the floor, a small bookcase by the head of the bed, and what looked like a quilt on the bed. There was a man sitting on the bed—a piglin hybrid by the looks of the height, the pink hair and the tusks—reading. He didn’t look up from the book.
“What now, you’re gonna tell me plans change?” He turned a page on the book, exaggeratedly slow.
There was a chain that connected his wrist to the wall. Phil cleared his throat. “Uh, no, no problems here, just checking in on shit, you alright there, mate?”
The man looked up, his eyebrows flying upwards. “Am I alright ?”
Shit. He shoulda gone with the abusive guard angle. Even in the uniform he’d pulled off the man he’d knocked out, maybe he wasn’t perfect at impersonating people. Committed now, though. He shrugged and made a wild guess. “I mean, we wouldn’t want any of our best fighters in anything less than top shape, right?”
The other man smiled faintly. Bingo, he’d guessed correctly. He was in the high-value area. The pink-haired man closed his book. “Mmmyep. Think I’d fight better if this chain was taken off. How about it?” He wiggled the shackle connecting him to the wall. There was a line in the carpet at just about the end of the chain, a long curve where someone had paced repeatedly.
“Sorry about that, mate,” Phil said. “If you could leave, you’d up and fuckin’ leave, and we can’t be havin’ that.”
The other man’s head tilted to the side slightly. “Yeah, that’d kinda defeat the whole purpose of the captive fighters, if they could leave before fights.” He stood up. God, the fucker was tall . Phil was abruptly reminded that avian height rarely got over six feet, and piglin average was closer to seven. The man took a step closer. “Haven’t seen you on rotation before, what’s your name?”
“Dave,” Phil told him. “It’s my first day on the job and I’m really fuckin’ nervous.” His mouth was still talking with minimal input from his brain, and the footsteps were advancing down the hallway towards him. He grabbed at the door, but there was no knob on this side. He pushed it as close to closed as he could get it, with his fingers stuck in the crack to keep it open. “Shhh,” he waved a hand at the other man, a little bit pleading.
Against all odds, the piglin hybrid followed the command of the “guard” in his cell. He folded his arms, but he didn’t say anything as the footsteps went by.
As soon as the echo died away, the piglin spoke up. “First day, is that so, Dave?” He was grinning slightly.
Phil glanced at him. “Yeah, really excited about it.” He brushed some hair out of his face. “Love being a guard at the coliseum, yeah.” Why had he thought he’d be able to lie his way out of this one? He sucked at lying.
The other man walked back and sat on the edge of the bed. “What would you say is the best part of being a guard, Dave?”
“Being in charge,” Phil told him. He took in the piglin’s way-too-knowing expression and gave up. He grinned sheepishly at the other man. “Love kicking people in the head when they’re down, too.”
“Oh, that’s everybody’s favourite part, I think,” the man said. “Barely worth showing up to work if you don’t get to kick a chained-up person while they’re down. You plannin’ to stay as a guard?”
“Oh yeah,” Phil nodded firmly. “For as long as it takes me to get out the fuckin’ gate.”
The man made a small pained expression. “Actually,” he said, but Phil waved a frantic hand at him. Footsteps were coming back down the corridor.
“Fuckin’ incompetents,” someone on the other side of the door said, grabbing the handle and pulling it closed. Phil barely got his fingers out of the way in time. The door latched shut with a click.
“Well, motherfucker,” Phil said, after a pause.
“Wouldn’ta worked anyways.” The man shrugged, tapping his fingers on his knee. “There’s a huge guard checkpoint before you get out, portcullis, and they check you for weapons. You’d need to be able to take ten guys without a weapon, and probably also turn invisible.” He grinned slightly. “I’m bein’ rude, maybe you coulda done that.”
Phil threw up his hands. “Thanks for lettin’ me down gently.” He sat down on the stone floor and sunk his head in his hands for a second. “Really thought I was gonna fuckin’ make it.”
“You got further than I did,” the man said. “You can sit on my carpet if you want.”
Phil scooted over to sit on the edge of the carpet. “Thanks, mate,” he said, taking a deep breath. Time to get himself under control. “How far did you get?” He tipped his head to the side in question. His voice was almost steady.
The man waved a hand. “Knocked a guard out during training, made it half of the way down the hallway, then they got me with weakness arrows.” He shrugged. “Not a lot of piglins in the guard, so I couldn’t try that angle.”
Phil fiddled with the edge of the carpet. “Yeah. You were on the wrong side of a battle? To end up here?”
“I think they called it an ambush,” the piglin said dryly. “Something about not expectin’ there to be resistance when they walked into a bastion with weapons and started stealin’ stuff. Very surprisin’ to meet somebody with an axe.”
“Oh yeah.” He nodded. “I just stole shit.”
The piglin raised his eyebrows. “Petty thieves are only supposed to do show fights, aren’t they?”
Phil grinned, with teeth. “Well, it wasn’t so petty, what I stole. Also.” His grin grew a little bit. “I keep pissing off the guards.”
“Oh bad plan to do that, they’re so touchy.” The other man started fiddling with his bookmark, absently. “You say you want them dead one time and everybody starts yellin’.”
“I may have implied that they all sucked at fighting.” He paused. “A lot. And that the whole enchanted staffs thing looked like they were compensatin’ for somethin’.”
“Yep, that’d do it.” He continued fiddling with the bookmark. “So what, you pissed off the guards a few too many times, they got tired of the lectures?”
“Oh, you got lectures?” Phil cocked his head to the side. “I just got beat up.”
“Well, they get touchy when you say things like ‘beatin’ up a chained up person with enchanted staffs so he can’t defend himself’.” He nodded soberly. “Goes over better if you call it a talkin’-to.”
“Ahhhh,” Phil said. “I’m no good at phrasing things, I just said ‘beat up’. And yeah.” He rolled his shoulders, wings flexing inside the chains. “Got told I’d been annoyin’ too many times, they were movin’ me to the kill fights, figured I’d see if I could see the sky before I got shot.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “Anyways.”
“Well, you know, there is a good side to all this,” the other man said. “Gettin’ locked in, I mean.”
“Oh?” Phil raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not like your day’s gettin’ worse. What are they gonna do in punishment, put you in a death game?”
“Oh yeah.” Phil nodded. “I hear you have to behave properly once you’re in the kill fights, or they put you in a death game.”
“Really modivatin’ at that level,” the other man said, nodding. “Either you behave properly and they put you in a death game, or you misbehave and they put you in a death game. I mean when it comes to the choices .”
“Really considerate amount of choices.” Phil folded his hands in his lap. “It’s the choices and the ways out that really makes this place special.”
The other man had pulled the bookmark out of his book. He opened it up and started paging through it. “I’ve thought about it a bunch, and I figure the only real way to get out of here is through the death gate.”
Phil raised his eyebrows. “Optimistic.”
“I mean, ideally you’re not dead when they drag you out, I mean.” He found his place and put the bookmark back in. “But it’s the only place that doesn’t have those big guard gates and portcullises, cause they sell the bodies.”
Phil leaned forward, distracted. “They sell the bodies?”
“Researchers, necromancers.” The other man waved a hand. “People who want skeletons, I figure. But they’ve gotta get the carts in, so. You could get out on or under one of those.”
“Huh.” Phil thought about that for a second. “Good to know I won’t be resting easy in my grave, either.”
“Cringe,” the other man intoned. “Who wants to lie around and rot? Active afterlife is what everybody wants.” He looked up as the sound of doors opening started in the corridor. “Well, sounds like they’re searchin’.”
“Thanks for being good company,” Phil said, grinning. “Who knows, maybe I’ll survive my fuckin’ fight and see you in trainin’ or some shit.” He paused. “I didn’t get your name though, mate.”
The other man smiled slightly. “I’m Technoblade. You’re not Dave, then?”
“I’m Phil,” Phil said, as the door opened behind him and a guard’s hands grabbed for him. “Nice to meet you.”
His ribs hurt. Probably would have a black eye, but he hadn’t lost any teeth. Phil poked at the side of his mouth with his tongue, hands manacled behind him. He could hear the roar of the crowd through the gate they were standing behind. Well, he was going to fight any second now. A real match, kill or be killed.
He’d never wanted to kill anybody, and the few times someone had not gone down and not gotten up in his crime career or here in the arena, he’d had trouble shaking the weird way it made him feel. Death at his hand felt too natural, and he didn’t trust it.
He had to kill someone today to have the privilege of worrying about his ribs any more. So there was that. More to the point, he was worrying about that to avoid worrying about the more pressing fact that he probably couldn’t kill somebody. All his roughly-a-decade of fighting experience was focused on evading pursuit and stopping someone coming after him.
His hands were shaking slightly inside the manacles.
“Afraid this one’s gonna go for your throat or something?” One of the guards talked over his head to the guard standing behind him. She had a smirk on her face as she nodded to the extra chains he was in.
“Tried to make a break for it,” his guard answered. “Makin’ sure he doesn’t miss the show.”
She laughed. “Well, maybe he’ll be fast enough to draw out the fight, the crowd’ll like that. He’s up next.”
“Move it,” the guard said, with a hand between his wings.
He pushed, and Phil stumbled forward to the portcullis. He had a moment of almost hysterical wondering if they were going to throw him into a fight still-chained, before there was a rattle of keys behind him. He got his hands back and rubbed at his wrists. There was another rattle, and Phil almost pitched forward as the weight of restraints dropped off his wings.
They really wanted a show, then. A sword and a shield was pressed into his hands, and Phil stumbled forward into the brighter sunlight of the arena, heart pounding in his ears.
Banks of seated faces rose above a circle of broken sandy terrain roofed in a magical barrier. Phil let himself glance for a second at the sky beyond the red haze and stepped briskly sideways, flipping his sword in his hand just to get a feel for the weight of it. There was a mock hill and a few large rocks breaking up the arena, he could get on top of one of them or use the stone to circle around behind. There was a constant hum of voices over top of everything, a couple thousand people talking to the person next to them, garbled to incomprehensibility by the magic barrier and the sheer volume of sound. The voices roared for a moment—that would be his opponent entering the ring. Or opponents.
Phil set about heading towards one of the taller boulders. If he got on top of that, he could launch himself in any direction, evade an attacker long enough for them to hopefully make a mistake. With the horrible condition his wings were in—not a lot of chance to exercise his muscles or preen his feathers while they were constantly bound up—he didn’t think he could stay in the air long, but he could get some extra manoeuvrability. He stepped carefully. Sometimes the game designers put traps in the sand, and he’d rather not die to a spike pit, given his options.
He made it to the boulder and climbed up, hand over hand on sun-warmed sandstone. From the top he could see the whole arena, including his opponent. Heading towards the same rock was a tall piglin hybrid, armed with a trident and a hook on a long rope. His face was familiar.
Phil felt the last hope that he was going to survive this die in his chest. Anyone who’d lasted long enough in the ring that the game designers were giving him rewards like books and rugs for his cell was not going to have any problem with an underfed avian thief. He saw Technoblade spot him. A complex emotion moved across his face for a moment, followed by blankness. He wound the rope around his off-hand. “Come down here and I can do this fast,” Technoblade offered, barely audible over the crowd.
Phil launched himself off the boulder in response, reaching as high as he could with mistreated wing muscles and battered wings. The barrier buzzed as he got closer to it, an aura of pins and needles and numbness hovering twenty feet in the air. His wings were wobbling, he couldn’t stay up long. Technoblade circled below him, and Phil dove to the side as the hook came whistling towards him.
He lost altitude and pitched towards the ground. Phil turned the dive into a roll as he hit, came up running, and tried to put the length of the arena between him and his opponent. He circled, shield up, trying to flex his wings and get everything back into place.
Technoblade had range on him, with the hook, but he could stay away from that trident if he moved fast. Maybe if he got above him and dove he could knock the other man flat?
Something clicked under Phil’s foot and he threw himself into a diving roll, coming up fifteen feet away. He’d forgotten to check for traps, like some kind of fool. Sand was shaking off a large cube, as it emerged from below the level of the arena. About the size of a mob cage. Phil kept his shield up, as the box broke apart to display—nothing?
There was the faintest blur of movement from within the box, and Phil pivoted madly in place as something launched towards him. He could feel the air movements across his skin, but still couldn’t see anything except out of the corner of his eye. Phil rotated, trying to keep an eye on everything and nothing. It was too loud for him to navigate via sound, but if they’d hit monsters with potions—what a fun trick—there was always a tell. There, the faintest glow of eight red eyes and the heat shimmer of invisibility. Phil kept staring straight ahead and stabbed out to a movement he felt more than saw.
He heard the death-screech of the spider even over the roar of the crowd, and rapidly pulled his sword free. Just in time, Technoblade had crossed the arena and was there, trident jabbing towards him. Phil danced back out of the way, looking around frantically. There was nothing for him to climb on here. The hook whistled towards him and he hit it away with his sword, backing up. He just needed to get some distance—his wings hit the wall.
This would be where he would plead for his life, wouldn’t it be, Phil realised, grinning at the man in front of him.
He put his little shield up. Really, dragging this out as long as possible probably wasn’t the smartest move, but he just didn’t want to go yet.
Phil showed his teeth to his opponent. “You can surrender now if you want,” he said, surprised at how steady his voice was. “Promise I’ll make it quick.”
There was a pause, before the other man laughed, and then the hook was coming in again, slamming into his wing and dragging him forwards. “Sorry we didn’t get to talk more,” Technoblade said, trident slamming into his shield and somehow batting it away. He was neatly tripped and down, tangled in the hook and his own shield and his own wings, and Phil only just managed to turn over and stare up at the man above him and the weapon darting down towards his chest.
He had just enough time to wonder if Technoblade was the sort to drag out a death before the trident stabbed into the space between his arm and his body, pinning him to the ground by the cheap fighter’s tunic they had forced him back into. “Play dead,” Technoblade told him, mouth barely moving, and stepped away from his prone body.
With a surge of hope so great it was almost painful, Phil remembered the earlier conversation about escape attempts, and he closed his eyes against the sunlight.
The arena cleaners, it turned out, were gentler with the ‘dead bodies’ than the guards were with misbehaving fighters. Someone grabbed his feet and dragged him through the dead gate and then tossed to the side, next to the other bodies. Phil lay face-down in a puddle of blood and other fluids, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible as one of the workers absently folded up his right wing to get it off the floor. They were chatting over his head, but Phil was not listening, he was focusing every fragment of his consciousness on not moving.
Something heavy hit his back, and a hand fell alongside his head, cupping the side of his face. A body had been thrown on top of him. The air caught in his throat as Phil forced down the impulse to scream or laugh. A trickle of blood trailed from his back to trickle down his neck. Phil laid under the cooling body and put himself in a cold, foggy place in his mind. He’d made offerings to the Lady of Death before of course, every thief had made their rounds to warn her off, but if he got out of this he was going to find a temple and both say thank you and say what the fuck to her. A silver cup for an offering, maybe, and a candle which he’d carved “But Why” into.
A breeze tugged at the feathers on his wing, and Phil realised that the voices had stopped talking. He couldn’t hear any footsteps, either. Heart in his throat, he rolled upright and glanced around. He was in a vaulted hall with a lot of other rooms leading off it, standing in a pile of bodies. To his right, there was rows and rows of mob cages, the rails down the centre of the room that they used to transport the monsters into the ring. To his left there was a cart with two bodies piled on it, and now that he didn’t have a dead man’s hand over his ear he could just hear voices around the corner, the particular pitch of back and forth that meant people had stopped for a chat. On the wall just inside the room of cages he could see a little spot where the monster-handling materials were stored. Whips, spears, long staffs, familiar-looking hooks on loops of rope, and a cabinet of potions, unlocked. He needed to get under the cart, and he needed to do it now, before the body-handlers came back.
His eye caught on that cabinet of potions. Phil thought again about the conversation he’d had about escape methods. He wiped blood off his cheek and slipped into the room full of mob-handling supplies. The ones he wanted would be an iridescent grey, and those little pliers would be perfect, and he’d take those spears.
“Already fought today,” Techno said, turning a page in his book. Judging by the look of him, you wouldn’t think that he’d just been in a death game. He’d even put his hair in a new braid. “And if you can’t manage your resources well enough to keep from bookin’ me twi—“ He looked up and cut himself off, seeing the room in front of him empty despite the door being open.
Phil dropped an invisibility potion into his hands. “Hey mate, you want to get out of here?”