Old Chapter 1 - v1.0

-1- v2.0

Cyclopean walls, slits in-between the stones become streams of Contestant blood. At a mismatched base, oval droplets fall over a fresh corpse. Its broken skull, reveals a golden-layered organ that blinks out of reality.

With its brain missing, the skull suddenly becomes open to the extreme temperature of the planet. Without force from this instant movement, outwards goes from the hollow escape blackness and steam.

On Ohros, there is only gradient, from void to hellish glow and back again to blackness. Seas of magma cover the small planet, they expand around the arena and the fortress at its center. Light pollution of molten rock chokes all starlight. The celestial lights of spectators too, the few pairs of eyes from beyond that are focused on this game become invisible in this overhead blackness.

As such, the final moment of quiet for this match begins. And anew goes Jorj to the familiar process of a resurrection pod.

Jolts of nerves return between his fingerprints and so breaks the pain of a new body being woven onto him, extreme, intense and shocking. Another iteration of a plex that makes him. Marrow to skin, neurons branch themselves out amidst metal needles and silicone binding seals. Bones become real through pressure sockets spewing calcium and noble minerals. Sinews are grafted to the expanding flesh, magnetized, drawn to where they should be.

Every respawn, Jorj does the usual stretching open of his left hand and a tight fist on his right. Last, after all his organs become bound and pumped with blood, his sight and hearing returns to him. He cannot witness anything other than the light of the pod and out he is pushed with a new plate of gladiator armor, forged directly on-top of his skin. It covers barely anything. Two breastplates, a light tight second skin, two thigh-plates, gloves and grafted devices on his eardrum and nasal cavity.

As willpower binds signals to new flesh, so does a whisper to the objects around Jorj. The Claimant that hovers besides him in fantasy, he is running in his ear, tightening logic in this light Gymnete armor, making the currents, circuitry and hydraulics obedient to their combined will.

The first breath is always hell. Jorj's flesh sweats instantly as if the previous death was mere lapse wherein no time had passed and the accumulated fatigue and dehydration, they too have been grafted into his body. Heat, uneven gravity, industrial grade oxygen-nitrogen breathing mix, the atmosphere itself makes the matches that much more demanding. Death is neither escape, nor chance to swat exhaustion away. The man breathes this prison and chemical burning, scorch and gasp become plastered in every cell of his lungs.

No relief can come from the Claimants either. The other person who is there, in-between the ears and besides all matter of stimuli, he can not bring coolness, or some other decrease of what burden the Contestant has to carry. The flesh alone has to make due without support. The abstractive magic of a Claimant that pushes chemistry and physics within machines, is simply not there in the Gymnete armor. There are only hints masquerading as help, wherever the Contestant's body demands coolness.

So is known to Jorj and so knows his Claimant Maras.

To that lapse of initiative, Jorj moves faster than the whisper in his ear.

Dashing on the dry gravel around the wall's outer perimeter, a shock Lanza awaits idle. It remains there unpowered in dull cyan and standing on its metal stock, almost at the same colour as the corpse he left behind. The weapon itself is seeking hand to wield it and as Jorj answers with a swift grab, it returns to its bright azure, a radiance of malice and drowning pull. From its core, the long cylinder glows cobalt that becomes plastered in the enveloping metal, the handle, the scope, the Lanza's bolt and the Contestant's body. On its tip, the weapon has a muzzle brake shaped to an arrowhead. Mere minute ago that it was fired, the tip of the Lanza streaks white smoke that breaks and dissipates.

There is no sound but a soft sizzling. To where ear might beget movement, there is only stillness. Jorj remains calm.

Maras' advice parts this in a whisper. A distraction among the moments, Jorj digs into his ear and pulls out the small earpiece that was grafted to his eardrum. Where there was that hush of sound, therein now rests more, deeper, introspective joy of the moment and the streak of blood that runs down his side of the neck, it evaporates and stiffens. Jorj smiles. Clots become a cracked row moving anew as it mixes with evaporating sweat.

Somewhere in this smile, Jorj refuses thought. In that absence, he is well aware, that teeth, thoughts and urges find themselves grounded to nothing over the centuries of life experienced. Initiative is as such, animation without impulse.

And that movement, tiny a gap. Tiny a passing place. Manic, infinitesimal chance crowns the Contestant. On the ecstatic nudge beyond pain, with his jaws pressed to breaking clench, one strong push of the wall sends him sprinting away.

From above, a flak round the size of a human head, arches over and explodes behind Jorj. Shrapnel follows along the fleeting of his foot. Between the shrill of a torn eardrum, a torrent of gravel and hot metal resounds. A cacophony that nears and consumes a rubber-booted shin. Flickers and lodestone, superheated bullets pass, eat and bore along as he shifts mid-momentum.

Beyond prayers, beyond the tight woven plex of experiences and other abilities that define prowess, through pathways of blood working in habit and though chance itself, a certain aim happens that is once again empty of thinking. The manic thundering collapses in a hole within the gray. Then and thus, Jorj pulls the trigger of the shock Lanza.

Fired from the hip, with the long cobalt rod staring upward, the streak of blue light powers instantly through the air and there is nothing left but a swirling void that vacuums within it, sizzling particles of air. Jorj feels the recoil pull his shoulder off as every hypertrophic, tightened part of his core and arm musculature pushes against the handheld horror of physics.

In the distance above, the other body opens up. Lit in deep blue the shape is unmade from that of a five edged humanoid, to that of a gaping nothing. An absence of a silhouette where there should be one, a shade unmade to expanding rings of rubbery flesh.

The score is five to four as Jorj collapses on his side. All the tightening unwinds, the body relaxes and he remains there.

When he tries to enjoying that empty moment of aim again, detached pain breaks that effort. He turns on his back, chin to breastplate. He thinks it might take a while for the cleaners and other services to take him away. Much more so now that Maras and his twenty bronze neck-rings rattle in anger.

From one of his pockets he pulls a strip of cloth. Rarely revealed and many times re-manufactured per match, Jorj straightens the ageless black rag and then creates a makeshift tourniquet on his thigh.

The pain is there, but muted, from the many and more, exalted moments that had been way worse. And to his mind, this is all manageable pain, an otherwise normal shock to his body, by way of much experience alone. Before passing out Jorj recalls it all one last time. Bleeding eardrum, missing leg, strained shoulder and perhaps a few other broken things within him, they are all cloaked in a membrane. A thin, see-through plastic, a dampening coating, that makes pain horrible and overall, not that important.

The limbs stop itching. Within him now is no death, but worry. Worry on whether he might not make it the cheap way out and he might be pulled into another resurrection pod. Worry of debt for the extortionate rate of these machines. How much more so now, with an angered sponsor evicted from his eardrum.

But that fades as worry too, is coated by that membrane. Interlocking particles, extreme systems, beliefs and things that have gone past humanity and all his worry becomes muted noise, before he passes out.