Chapter 13: Albius!
Chapter 13: Albius!
The sand was wet, and red. Bathed in the blood of fallen men.
The air within the arena was thick and heavy, with the metallic stench of blood.
Alex, and the remaining gladiators stepped out into the arena, under the roars of fifty thousand spectators.
Spectators who watched as two men who were supposed to write history, die like it meant nothing.
’None of this makes any sense...’ Alex shook his head, as he walked ’this isn’t the history I remember.’
Just then, he shifted his focus to the system UI in the corner of his vision, and it came into full display. ’Did you do this?’ He queried, but got no response. ’Or... did I–’ Alex shook his head even more. The men around him looked at him like he had lost his mind.
"Albius." Oseka called from behind. "Are you okay?"
"Yea. I’m fine." Alex snapped out of his thoughts.
Oseka held his gaze for a brief moment, before nodding.
Alex let out a forced smile, and nodded back.
’Okay.’ He sighed. ’I need to focus on right now, and survive.’
"We’ll see what comes after." He whispered to himself.
Alex glanced at the System UI, and willed it to come into full display.
’I haven’t checked my stats in days’ He thought. ’Let’s see.’
Sands of Fate System
Host: Human
Name: Alex Norman
Skill(s): Temporal Dilatation (lv 2) 3/5 Charges Left
Status:
"What!" Alex blurted out.
The men around him threw another weary glance at him, but he ignored them.
’How the hell do I have only three charges left, when I clearly upgraded?’ He asked internally.
’Ping!’
’A notification? What’s this abou–’
Alex was about to read the notification, when the blood hit his face.
Warm. Sudden. A fine spray across his left cheek that he didn’t understand for a full second.
He turned.
The man who had been standing beside him a moment ago was still standing. Technically. From the shoulders down. His sword was still in his hand. His feet were still planted in the sand. But his head was not there anymore.
The body stood for one impossible moment. Then the knees hit the sand, and everything else followed.
The crowd detonated. Roars erupted.
Alex couldn’t move. His brain was trying to process something it had no framework for and failing completely. Blood was dripping off his chin. He could feel it. Warm and wrong and already cooling in the heat.
The man standing in front of the body turned.
He was big. Broader than Alex by half. His sword was dripping with the blood of the headless man. His eyes found Alex’s immediately with the flat calm of someone who had already decided. His lips curled up to a sickening grin.
"S– Stay back." Alex’s voice cracked.
He scrambled backward.
His heel caught something — he didn’t look down to find out what — and he stumbled, but caught himself, and kept moving.
Around him the arena had become a different place entirely.
The eight men had become a storm. Blades swinging. Bodies moving. Sand kicking up in bursts. It was chaos. All around him, the gladiators were hacking into each other. Their blood drenching the already soaked sands.
"ALBIUS—"
Oseka.
Alex spun. Found him. Oseka was backing away from two men who had broken off from the main fight and decided that smaller targets were smarter targets.
They moved together without discussing it. Back to back. Feet moving. They both had wicked smirks on their faces, that mirrored their intentions.
One of the men lunged at Oseka.
Alex didn’t think.
’Ping!’
The world went grey. The lunge froze mid air. The blade hanging inches from Oseka’s side.
Alex grabbed Oseka’s shoulder and shoved him sideways. Hard. Out of the line of the blade. Then he stepped back himself and—
Time returned.
The blade cut through empty air. The man stumbled forward with the momentum of a strike that hit nothing. He had a confused look in his eyes as he looked at Oseka. Then at Alex.
"Run." Alex said.
They ran.
The sand was treacherous. Wet patches that grabbed at feet. Things on the ground that Alex was not going to look at. Oseka was just ahead of him, moving fast despite everything, and Alex kept pace and kept his sword up and kept not thinking about the notification he’d half read before the blood hit his face.
Three charges. Not five.
He’d used one.
Two left.
They ran until they hit the curved, stoned walls of the arena’s edge. Nowhere left to go.
Alex turned.
Five men left. Including him and Oseka.
The other three had stopped fighting each other. They were looking at Alex and Oseka against the wall. The math was simple and they’d all done it simultaneously.
They came at once.
Three men. Three swords. Launching fast at them.
"Shit. I don’t wanna do this." Alex winced.
’Ping!’
Grey world. Frozen sand. Three men suspended mid stride like statues.
...4...
Alex moved left. Found the nearest man. Drove his sword in. Felt the resistance and pushed through it and hated that he knew exactly what that resistance was now. "I’m sorry." He whispered, shutting his eyes.
He moved to the second man. Did it again. His hands weren’t shaking. He didn’t know if that was good or bad.
1...
Time came back.
The second man made a sound Alex felt in his chest. Grabbed at Alex’s arm as his legs stopped working. His weight came forward and Alex caught him without deciding to. They went down together. The man’s face was very close. His eyes were confused for a second, then they weren’t anything.
Alex let him down slowly.
He stayed crouched over the body for a moment, ignoring the wild crowd of spectators.
His sword hand was shaking now.
’Get a grip, Alex. He would’ve killed you.’
Just then, the gate at the far end of the arena ground opened.
And something on the other side roared.
The Colosseum went silent, like all fifty thousand spectators held their breath at the same time.
They all looked at the direction the sound came from.
The gate finished grinding open.
Nothing came through immediately.
Just darkness. And a smell that rolled out ahead of whatever was inside. Something wild and ancient, and completely wrong for an arena that smelled of blood and sand and human fear.
The silence across the arena stretched.
Not the silence of anticipation. Something worse than that. Something that happened in the body before the brain caught up.
Then it stepped out.
"The Lion of Judah."
The whispers started somewhere in the upper seats and moved downward like a wave.
"The Lion of Judah."
"The Lion of Judah."
Alex heard it without fully processing it. Because he was looking at the lion and his brain had temporarily stopped doing anything useful.
It was wrong. That was his first thought. Not dangerous. Not scary... yet. Just... wrong. The way a thing is wrong when it exists outside what you deemed logical.
"What the fuck." Alex said softly.
What he was looking at was huge. The size of a horse. The shoulder height alone was level with Alex’s chest and it hadn’t finished stepping out of the gate yet. The paws that hit the sands were the size of a man’s head, each one pressing deep into the ground with a weight that shouldn’t have been possible. The mane was enormous — dark at the center, fading to amber at the edges, so thick it looked like armor. Like something that had decided to grow its own protection.
Its head turned slowly.
Taking in the arena. Taking in the bodies. Taking in the now three people still standing on the sand. It licked its nose like it was salivating over a meal.
Its eyes were yellow. Pale yellow. Almost gold. And completely unhurried.
The crowd had gone from whispers to silence.
Fifty thousand people holding their breath simultaneously.
"Now, the fun begins." Akosa chuckled from behind one of the iron gates, as he saw the look on the faces of the remaining men.
The last gladiator standing — the big one, thick neck, scar from ear to chin, the one who had started all of this with one sword swing — made a decision. Alex watched him make it. Watched him grip his sword. Watched him set his jaw with the particular stubbornness of a man who had survived this long by being the most dangerous thing in any room he entered.
He charged.
He swung his sword at the lion’s shoulder. A good swing. A hard swing. The kind that had taken a man’s head off twenty minutes ago.
The blade connected.
And snapped.
The sound of it was almost delicate. A sharp clean crack that carried across the silent arena like a finger snap in a cathedral.
The gladiator stood there holding half a sword and staring at it.
The lion turned its head toward him.
One paw came up.
The swipe was almost lazy, ripping the man across the belly. His innards turned outward.
The gladiator looked like he was about to say something, then fell to the sand, and didn’t move again.
The lion went on to devour the body. It ripped the man apart, sending blood and meat everywhere.
After it was done, what was left of the gladiator was something Alex didn’t want to look at directly.
The crowd made a sound. Not a cheer. Something more complicated than that.
The lion lowered its head. Sniffed at what it had done. Then its yellow eyes came up.
Found Alex and Oseka.
"W – What do we do?" Oseka’s shaky voice asked.
He was already moving backwards.
"Don’t run—" Alex said, looking back at the already retreating Oseka.
Then looked back at the lion. It let out a deep growl that vibrated across the arena.
"Fuck this!"
Alex ran, and Oseka followed behind.
The sand grabbed at their feet. Wet patches. Scattered limbs. Things they were jumping over without looking at. The roar that came from behind them was physical — Alex felt it in his sternum, in his back teeth, in the base of his spine. It moved through him like a wave and came out the other side as pure animal terror.
He ran faster.
The ground shook with each impact behind them. Heavy. Rhythmic. Getting closer.
"ALBIUS—"
He turned just in time to see Oseka go down.
A wet patch. His foot sliding. His body hitting the sand at speed and rolling and coming to a stop face down.
The lion was already in the air.
Everything happened at the same time.
Alex reached for the system.
’Ping.’
5... 4...
Grey world. Silence. The lion suspended above Oseka like a painting of something terrible. Four paws extended. Claws the length of fingers spread wide. Its shadow covering Oseka completely.
Alex didn’t stop moving.
He grabbed Oseka’s arm and dragged him sideways across the frozen sand with one hand, and held a sword with the other. Oseka’s dead weight in stopped time was like moving furniture. Alex’s arm screamed. He pulled anyway. Pulled until Oseka was clear of the shadow.
Then he looked up.
The lion hung above him now instead.
He had maybe a second left.
As he was about to step out of the way he slipped, at the last second.
He lay down in the sand where Oseka had been. On his back. The lion directly above him. His sword in hand. He instinctively pointed it upward at the soft center of the lion’s exposed belly, and closed his eyes.
’What a pathetic way to go.’
1...
Time came back.
The weight was incomprehensible.
It hit him like a building falling. All of it at once — the sand driving into his back, the breath crushed out of him, something in his chest that made a sound he felt rather than heard.
’Ping! + 2 vitality.’ He felt a small rush of relief, that left him in an instant under the sheer weight of the lion.
The sword shook in his hands as he held it. He held it as if letting go meant dying, and he was not ready to be another smudge on this sand.
Then the weight shifted.
The lion made a sound he had never heard before and hoped never to hear again. Low. Deep. Something between a roar and something else entirely. Its legs scrambled against the sand on either side of him. Hot breath on his face. The smell of it overwhelming.
Then blood. Dark and immediate, drenching him.
The weight shifted again.
And then it rolled.
Alex lay on the sand and looked at the sky and tried to remember how to breathe. His chest wasn’t working properly. His hands were still wrapped around, in the shape of the hilt of his sword which was no longer in his hands, but buried in the lion’s guts.
He could hear the lion nearby. The sound of it breathing. Wet and heavy, and slowing.
He turned his head.
The Lion of Judah lay on its side in the sand three feet away. Its flank rising and falling. Slower. Slower.
Its yellow eyes found his.
They looked at each other for a moment.
Then the eyes went still.
The arena was completely silent.
Alex stared at the sky.
His chest was doing something wrong. He couldn’t sit up. He tried and couldn’t and stopped trying and lay there instead and stared at the sky and listened to fifty thousand people make absolutely no sound whatsoever.
’Ping! +2 vitality.’
A warm wave of relief washed over him for a split second.
"Albius!"
Oseka’s voice rang. Then hands on his shoulders. Shaking him. "Albius. Albius look at me. Albius—"
Alex tried to respond. Something came out. A croaking sound.
"ALBIUS." Louder now. Oseka’s face appearing above him. Eyes wide. Hands on his face. "Stay with me. Albius. ALBIUS—"
Alex’s chest lurched.
He gasped.
Air. Actual air. Flooding in all at once like a door being thrown open. He grabbed Oseka’s arm with both hands and held on and breathed and kept breathing until the sky stopped tilting.
Oseka exhaled. Long and shaking. His forehead dropped to Alex’s shoulder for one second. A sigh left his mouth.
Then he straightened. Grabbed Alex’s arm. Pulled.
Alex got one knee under him. Then the other. Then somehow he was standing. Barely. Oseka’s hand under his arm the only reason he stayed there.
He looked at the lion.
At the sword buried to the hilt in its belly.
At the sand dark in every direction.
At fifty thousand people who had not made a single sound since the lion fell.
One person clapped.
Then another.
Then the whole arena came apart.
"ALBIUS! ALBIUS! ALBIUS!"
The name bouncing off stone. Off sky. Coming from every direction simultaneously until it wasn’t a word anymore. Just sound. Just pressure. Just fifty thousand people agreeing on one thing.
Alex stood in the middle of it and held onto Oseka’s arm and tried to keep his legs from giving out.
He was still shaking.
He didn’t think that was going to stop for a while.
’Ping! +10 points for tenacity.’
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