As the thoughts of the thousands gathered reached out like starving hands toward their "Light," Abid spoke. His voice was not the roar of a lion, but the steady, rhythmic tolling of a funeral bell.
"We will fight. We will die," he declared, his eyes scanning the sea of broken faces.
"But we will leave this place. We will find solitude for everyone. To get there, you will walk on the dead bodies of your comrades... but you will live."
The humans stood paralyzed. They listened to their Light as if his words were the only air left in the room.
"If you want to live, you have to be strong," Abid continued, his chest heaving. "No... no, that isn't enough. You have to have power."
He took a breath so deep his ribs seemed to strain against his skin. Suddenly, a shimmering, ethereal light ignited behind his back, casting long, dancing shadows across the blood-soaked sand.
"This... huff... this is the power you need."
The crowd gasped. A ripple of muttering broke out—fear mixed with a desperate, thirsty curiosity. Some were reminded of the boy with the mist, the one who had made his enemies choke on the very air they inhaled. Everyone was thinking something different, questioning what the light was and what it could do, but in the dark corners of every mind, only one question mattered: How can I get that power?
They were drunk on his words. They were intoxicated by the hope of being more than meat.
As Abid walked off the stage, the humans split like waves before a ship, letting him pass in a hushed, reverent awe. But as the rhythmic sound of his footsteps faded, a new silence took hold—a lucid, terrifying silence. In their collective trance, they had only heard human voices. They had forgotten where they were.
Slowly, thousands of heads tilted upward.
They saw them. Thousands of red, unblinking eyes were locked onto only two things: the mangled corpse of their kin and the humans who had dared to cheer for its death.
The sound that had been igniting the humans, that roar of defiance, was instantly stilled.
Everyone waited.
Everyone looked to see who would make the first move. The world held its breath.
"KU JU KI JU!"
The command didn't just vibrate in the air; it broke the human heart. In that instant, memory flooded back—the faces of people whose heads had been eaten alive, the sight of those who tried to run only to have their flesh stripped like bark from a tree, and the girls whose bodies were used as hollow vessels for Orcish life.
The Goblins and Orcs had witnessed one of their "gods" killed. Now, they reacted with the only logic they knew. It was a wave of green-skinned water, but within that water were leeches ready to devour everything.
They didn't just descend; they erupted. Hundreds, then thousands, poured from the columns. Some jumped from the high stands, the sheer force of their landing crashing the stone beneath them into powder.
Others climbed over each other's backs in a frantic, squirming ladder of muscle and hate, desperate to reach human flesh.
They didn't want a battle. They wanted to tear the meat off human bones like lollipops.
BOOM.
In the middle of the human side, a heavy, wet thud was followed by a guttural grunt.
My eyes darted through the chaos, trying to find the source of the noise. I was astonished by the sheer momentum of the charge. I looked through the gaps of moving heads, through the frantic shuffle of feet.
Then, I saw it.
The lead Orc—the one who had herded us here like cattle—was hunched over, his jaw working rhythmically. People began to scream and scatter, a blind, panicked stampede that blocked my sight.
Just... one... glance...
There. An Orc covered in crimson held the small, pale fingers of a little girl in his massive hand.
He was popping them into his mouth like berries. Below him, the girl was still pinned. She screamed, a sound that bypassed the ears and went straight into the marrow.
She wasn't begging for her life—she knew that was gone. She was begging for someone to save her, or at least for someone to watch.
She didn't want to disappear into a monster's stomach in the dark, unnoticed.
Her screams were shoved aside by the roar of the thousands running from certain death. As the Orc opened its maw above her head, her shrieks increased a hundredfold. She watched the black gullet get closer and closer. No one helped.
RIP.
And then, her soul was gone. The girl who only wanted to be seen had been disassembled and discarded.
Huff... huff... huff... My breath began to quicken. For some reason, the sound vanished. A heavy, ringing silence filled my skull. I couldn't hear the screaming or the tearing of flesh; my eyes simply pierced everything around me like a camera. I wasn't strong-willed like the Martyr.
I wasn't a hero like Abid. I wanted to cower in a hole. I wanted to vanish.
"AHHHHHH!"
I started to scream. It was utter madness. As I shrieked, the sound of the world finally slammed back into me. But my screams, which I thought the whole world could hear, were pushed straight into the dirt by the thunder of the crowd.
That was when I realized: my pleas meant absolutely nothing.
Every person who ran past me was trying to find a save-haven that didn't exist. Why would the cries of a twelve-year-old boy matter? Huff... huff... Legs whipped past my vision over and over. My breathing matched the frantic pace of the feet. Through the gaps in the legs, I saw the slaughter. People were being cut in half by rusted blades.
Heads were stomped into the stone because they had tripped. Goblins were taking literal bites out of living, running people.
Huff... huff... this can't happen to me. If it does, I'll be feasted on forever. I have to run. I have to—
"Who did I think I was?" I whispered, hot tears finally breaking through the grit on my face. I began clawing at the ground, my fingernails breaking against the stone as I tried to scramble away.
"Who did I think I was? A savior? I thought I was the savior?"
I laughed, a jagged, broken sound. CRUNCH. A foot slammed down on my hand, crushing my fingers into the rock.
"ARK!"
The pain was a white-hot explosion. It stopped me in my tracks. It shouldn't have been that painful, but in this world, every sensation was magnified by the fear.
"Haha... who did I think I was? Become a monster? Become a savior?" I clenched my teeth so hard I tasted copper. "I can't even save myself!"
The humans around me didn't care. They were unaware of who they knocked down or whose limbs they snapped as they fled. If their neighbor fell and was ripped limb from limb, it was just one less person in their way.
It was the only way humans could survive in a world like this. If you weren't strong, you were weak. Weak followed the strong, but the moment the "strong" met something stronger, the so-called strong are the weak again.
It was a never-ending cycle of disappointment. In the end, you were always weak.
I forced myself up, ignoring the throbbing ruin of my hand. I followed the pack. I became one of them. I pushed passed people. I watched as they fell and didn't reach back.
I watched as they were dragged into the shadows of the Orcs and I didn't look twice. I became exactly like everyone else. I only cared about the air in my own lungs.
The screams and the pleas for suffering to end filled the coliseum like a toxic fog. Some escaped into the tunnels; many more died. Some were killed by Orcs, but many were killed by the "hubris" of other humans. The pressure of the stampede, the weight of a thousand people trampling those who tripped, turned the floor into a layer of crushed bone and flattened flesh.
Those on the ground could only watch the next footfall. And then, it took their lives.
I didn't look back. I just ran.