Slave Pits of the Tyrannical God (Path of Transcendence Book 2) (2 page)

Pain greets me along with consciousness. I am naked, laying on hard stone; my favorite way to wake up in the morning, if it even is morning.

Nearby, I can hear the sound of multiple people breathing, the deep even sound of people breathing in their sleep. A few people, men from the sounds moan or grunt in their sleep. In the distance, I can hear the sounds of shouting and wood clattering on wood.

Cracking my eyes open, I carefully scan the area in my field of view. I can see three other men in front of me, all human. Like me, they are sprawled unnaturally on the reddish stone floor. There are still five or six more outside my line of sight. So, there are nine or ten of us total. We are all in a cell with a passageway in front of it. On the other side of the men in front me, a grate of thick iron bars separates us from the corridor. Looking behind me, I find six sleeping men and a wall of the reddish stone.

Ten naked men in a barred stone cell is anything but my idea of paradise. Not to mention, every man in this cell is obviously bigger and heavier than I am. These men would put the bodybuilders of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to shame, and their beards are almost long and thick enough to make Dvergar appreciate them. I wonder where they are all from.

I do not remember anything after that DokkAlfar cunt told me she would use me. Whatever happened, it must have rendered me instantly unconscious.

As I try to circulate ki through my battered body, the pain that flares outward from my neck is almost enough to bring me to my knees. Stopping, I grab the collar that is still secured there, but it is too strong for me to force it open.

“Steel is pain. Steel is cruelty.”

I try to form the spell pattern to alter my vision, but the same kind of pain as I had trying to use ki tears through my body.

My Power is being hijacked and turned against me by this collar. I do not have any clear idea on how it is being done. From what I learned in the Lands of Despair, I know a few ways to do it in theory, but I doubt any of those are related to the method being used by the collar.

With this collar on my neck, I am virtually powerless. This is the price of trust. Of all the people in existence, I never would have believed that Jinmu would betray me. Looking back it is obvious. I knew he was acting differently.

There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.
I should have never forgotten that quote for a second. I burned it into my mind when I was twelve years old, and I willfully ignored it where Jinmu was concerned. I am an idiot who deserves to be exactly where I am.

Fucking Jinmu. Fucking DokkAlfar. Fucking DokkAlfar Priest-Wizard. Fucking DokkAlfar bondage cunt. I am going to kill all of them. They are going to suffer for my willful idiocy.

I cannot keep myself from laughing morbidly, as I sit with my back to the wall near the bars of the cell. Even if I cannot use my ki, I can still meditate, which will let me rest more while staying aware of my surroundings.

After a time, perhaps a few hours, the sounds of wood battering wood and shouting quiet down, and I hear the sound of footsteps drawing closer. Opening my eyes, I see five males moving down the corridor, four DokkAlfar and one human.

The DokkAlfar are wearing black leather boots, pants, and shirts with a silk-like sheen, and breastplates over their shirts. They are probably adepts, but they do not have the air of soldiers. They strike me more as security guards or jailers. Instead of swords or other weapons designed to be killing weapons, they are carrying heavy truncheons.

The human is different. That man is a killer, with oceans of blood at his feet. He has numerous scars, and several of them appear to be from wounds that should have killed him. I do not what his style might be, but he moves like a man who has lived his life submersed in martial arts. Besides his obvious level of training in his movements, the man has a herculean physique and stands half a head taller than the DokkAlfar in front of him.

Wearing a pteruges, the leather skirts worn by Roman and Greek warriors, over a loincloth, his only other clothing consists of sandals and a vest. He has a collar around his neck like all of us in this cell, but there is no telltale glow from its sigils. His Power should not be closed off to him, as mine is.

After sweeping his eyes over the others still sleeping in the cell, the man focuses his attention on me. Our stares lock together. His eyes are like cold empty obsidian pits that soak up all the life and warmth that lies before them. Even for me, the weight of his gaze is not negligible. Merely human as I am, I do not know if I could beat that man.

After several minutes, while the DokkAlfar stare angrily at the man, the man reaches into his belt pouch and takes out a key. Unlocking the cell door, he opens it and walks in, to start kicking the sleeping men awake.

The man's voice is deep and carries a menace that few can project with their voice alone. “Get up, you useless trash! On your feet! Now!”

One of the slaves tries to swing on the man but gets casually slapped to the ground. The force of the blow is enormous, compared with its offhand nature. When the slave bounces off the floor, with the audible breaking of a few bones, the DokkAlfar outside the cell laugh.

“The Throd'nahk knows how to cow the other slaves.” The one talking is closest to the cell, and has the airs of a petty bully.

Throd'nahk is a DokkAlfar word. Depending on how it is used, it can mean teacher, torturer, and executioner, often all three at the same time. The main trainer in a DokkAlfar gladiatorial stable is always referred to as a Throd'nahk, though for the main trainer to be a human slave is nearly unheard of.

The other three DokkAlfar laugh at his words. Their hunger for seeing others suppressed and dominated is obvious in how they stare at the slaves being abused. The other slaves do not give any indication of understanding the DokkAlfar's words.

Slaves that is what these men are. A slave, that is all that I am now. This cell must be in Elan'fer'sha's gladiatorial stable.

Huddling on the floor, while cradling his left shoulder, the burly slave moans in pain. The other slaves stare at the Throd'nahk with a mix of awe and fear, while inoffensively rising to their feet.

“Get up!”

The slave that was hit by the Throd'nahk rises unsteadily, with his right arm dangling from a broken collarbone. His face is marked by the fear in his heart.

“Pathetic.” The Throd'nahk sweeps his eyes across the cowed slaves standing before him. Turning to me, his stare is clearly sizing me up again.

“What are you waiting for?” The sheer menace in the Throd'nahk's voice makes several of the other slaves shiver, as they stare at his back.

Shrugging, I rise to my feet. I do not push off the floor or move in any way that uses momentum to aid my movement. Pure muscle control focuses the force generated by my body into my toes and the balls of my feet.

My action brings a frown to the Throd'nahk's face. After a moment or two, he turns back to the other slaves.

“Follow me, trash.”

The Throd'nahk walks out of the cell, his sandals not making even the slightest whisper of sound against the stone. Two of the DokkAlfar guards fall in behind him, while the other two wait for us to come out.

I let the other slaves precede me and fall in at the back of the group. The DokkAlfar stay about eight or ten feet behind me. They probably think that they will have enough time to react, if I do something, but they have nothing to worry about. I do not know where I am or how to get of here, so I will not act, at least I will not act yet.

There is also the problem of the collar. I do not know the full scope of its powers, but I am sure that it will have some deterrents to prevent attack the “Masters.” Since, I do not know how to remove it or circumvent it, I cannot risk having it used against me, until I figure out a way to deal with it.

While the corridor is wide enough for three DokkAlfar to walk abreast, only two normal sized human males can comfortably fit side by side in it. The slaves in front of me can barely squeeze next to one another without scraping their shoulders against stone, and the Throd'nahk is another story altogether. That man is not even the smallest fraction of an inch under seven feet tall, and a DokkAlfar would have trouble squeezing into the corridor next to him.

Even though it is inactive, the Throd'nahk is still wearing a collar, but the DokkAlfar guards seem to be following his orders. That collar means the Throd'nahk is a slave, and a DokkAlfar following the orders of a slave is unheard of as a human slave being a Throd'nahk. While Talon's memories have become thoroughly fragmented since my murder, I am still fairly certain that Talon never heard of, let alone encountered, a Throd'nahk who was a slave, when he was slave of the DokkAlfar.

This corridor has three more cells between ours and its end, and appears to have ten or so in the other direction, before reaching a T intersection. One is on the same wall as ours, and two are on the opposite side. All of the other cells we pass are currently empty. This corridor seems to contain nothing but simple holding cells.

The gate at the end is open and leads to a room about twice the size of the holding cells. Wooden benches line the walls, with chains affixed to the walls by metal staples. In the wall opposite the one we entered through, another gate stands open, showing an expanse of illuminated white sand. However, the light has an odd yellowish cast to it.

The Throd'nahk continues on through the room, leading us out into a small arena. Apparently carved out of the surrounding rock, the walls turn into a dome of stone overhead, with a large crystal in the center radiating the slightly yellowish light. The roughly hundred and fifty foot long oval of sand is surrounded by thirty-odd foot high walls, with carved bench seating behind them and the outer wall. On one side instead of bench seating, there are seven box-seating areas with tables and chairs made from wood.

The stands are filled with several thousand howling DokkAlfar. Many of them are naked or nearly naked, as they lick, suck, and fuck one another, while I fight for my life in the arena. Some of the DokkAlfar have bound slaves near them, that they are casually torturing, while eating, drinking, doing drugs, or masturbating.

I do not have time to pay attention to the DokkAlfar. If I take my attention off my enemy, it could easily kill me. The troll is a giant of its species, more than twice my own height and powerfully built. Its thick hide and natural healing would make it hard enough to kill, but the DokkAlfar shits have clad it in enough plate armor to outfit a company of orcs.

The abrupt onslaught of the memory causes me to miss a step, and I stumble slightly.

“Ha! He's so overawed by this little arena, he can't even walk straight. Where did the Mistress find this worm?” The DokkAlfar's contempt is palpable in his tone of voice.

I take a careful look around the arena, to make sure that I am not mistaken. The pells and weapons racks set up on one side do nothing to conceal it. This is definitely the arena in that flash of memory. I have lost many of Talon's memories, but he definitely fought here at least once. His memories were never really my memories, and seem to have been tied to his physical body. I only had access to those memories, because of The Nameless' manipulations. Now, I only have fragmentary pieces remaining.

Did Talon have some connection to Elan'fer'sha? I have no memory of her at all, but with only bits and pieces of Talon's memory, I cannot know if Talon had contact with her. Elan'fer'sha looks to be in her early twenties in human terms, but since Alfar will retain that appearance for centuries, it means nothing.

“Gladiators! Present yourselves!” The Throd'nahk's voice echoes in the arena.

The Throd'nahk led us into the arena on one narrow ends of the oval, and on the other narrow end, there is another archway with an open gate. From inside that gate, a line of men enters the arena. Unlike us, they at least have loincloths on. Forty-two of them, in a variety of sizes and builds, file out one after the next.

Swaggering like a schoolyard bully, the last one to enter the arena is different from the rest. A slave like all of us, this man is about 6'6” tall, with a solid but extremely well proportioned build. Not having a single visible scar, with long blonde hair and bronzed skin, his hairless face and body are almost the ideal of borderline androgynous good looks that has been pushed by Earth's movie industry for decades. His easy movements speak of his high level of physical training, but he does not have the aura of pure lethality that the Throd'nahk does.

The blonde-haired gladiator moves to the center, while the rest of the pack spreads to either side of him as they advance to the center of the arena.

I do not need the remaining fragmentary memories of Talon to know that these are gladiators. In my time, playing Taereun: Battleground of the Damned and fighting for survival in the Lands of Despair, after the Great Fuck Over, I saw my share of gladiators and fought in a few arenas myself.

While glaring at us, the Throd'nahk gestures at the line of gladiators. “Look well, trash. These are REAL MEN! These are WARRIORS! THESE ARE GLADIATORS!”