243: Punishment Until the End
“Oh my!” the announcer gasped theatrically as she and the others watched Uma’s bald eagle rip chunks of flesh out of Aldrich, her former teammate, and clansman, in all the gory detail on the big screen. “Adding to what I said about not being able to eat a summoned creature: you best be careful when you find yourself on the wrong side of a summoned beast, lest you find yourself to be the one on the dinner plate!”
“Yeah, no mercy for traitors!” some cheered in the crowds.
“Traitors!?” someone asked in surprise. “This is a death game! Everyone for themselves!”
“How is he still alive though?”
“He’s still trying to fight back, too!”
Aldrich indeed desperately tried to defend himself from the eagle, rolling on the ground, flailing his limbs, screaming, and kicking. Not that it helped. Between both his hands, Aldrich already lost four fingers. The eagle simply bit the fingers off one at a time. It did not so much toy with its prey as it seemed to methodically torture the man, never landing a lethal strike that would kill or incapacitate him.
But even as the crowds cheered the brutality of Aldrich’s undoing, while the fighting went on across the arena, as minutes passed, each time the big screen returned to show Aldrich, still alive and still mutilated, piece by piece, several spectators looked at each other with signs of unease.
“And we already have our first winner of this round!” Thelicia announced.
A pale-skinned girl in a fancy dark blue outfit, with dark shoulder-length hair and crimson eyes, popped a pink bubble at her lips and looked up when she heard the announcer. Number Forty stood in a puddle of blood, looking over a pile of guts, meat, and limbs that were all smeared across the rocks.
“Number Forty! Please sit down and take a rest by the fire!” Thelicia said. And as soon as she said that, a line of fire spread from the nearest masked man to Number Forty and made a circle around the girl, rapidly growing in height. The ring of fire was about twenty feet in diameter and the wall of fire surrounding the girl was high enough to completely obscure the girl from other competitors.
However, despite the proximity to the fire that completely surrounded her, it did not look like Number Forty was in any major discomfort, once again confirming the magic nature of the flames in the Forge of Champions.
As time went on, while others in the arena fought for their lives, Aldrich’s screaming and crying attempts at self-defense grew more pathetic, driven purely by his body’s automatic response of self-preservation and desperation to do anything to alleviate the pain.
“Bwahah! Look! He literally pissed himself!”
“Isn’t that just more blood?”
“No! Are you blind!? Look closer!”
“I... I rather not.”
Before long, Aldrich’s resistance devolved to feeble attempts to crawl away from the eagle toward the nearest edge of the arena. But the blood-thirsty torture eagle would have none of it. It sunk its claws into Aldrich’s legs and kept him pinned down, dishing out more damage as he broke his remaining fingernails against the rocks, trying to pull away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Uma asked, taking unsteady steps toward the traitor while her legs continued to bleed. But the girl ignored the pain. No, she blocked it off. And not just her own pain. She wanted to be close to Aldrich, she needed to see and hear his punishment. “Do not think that you can escape this that easily!”
The eagle let go of Aldrich’s leg, an opportunity that Aldrich latched onto as he tried to get up and run, without even the ability to think or realize how impossible it was that he would be allowed to go anywhere. He just wanted to escape the pain. But the false hope was dashed, he was pinned down again and the eagle used its beak to pluck one of Aldrich’s eyes out right out of the socket and swallow it whole.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAARGGHHH! Pleaseeeeee! Stop!” Aldrich wept as his tears mixed with blood. “I’m sorry! I was wrong! I’ll do anything!!”
The cheers slowly turned to nervous chuckles amongst those in the crowd that followed this scene.
“Take a look at the time above our heads while you still can,” Uma said without the slightest hint of unease or compassion. The fire numbers showed that a little more than twenty-two minutes remained until the end. “Until that time runs out, you will not be granted the mercy of death.”
Uma’s voice was colder than ice, her eyes looked lifeless, despite the fires around the arena reflecting in them. She did not get off on the torture, neither was she sickened by it. She simply was determined to inflict as much pain on the back-stabbing, cowardly traitor as was possible.