Chapter 191

◈ Chapter 191:

The kobold only had a moment to stare and wonder at the strange leveler who had spared her only to be killed when Ravoure caught sight of them from nearby.

"Bastial!"

He rushed forward and fell to his knees, fumbling for her, rolling her onto her back. But she was as dead as any of the monsters scattered on the sands.

"There was a guarantee! This isn't supposed to happen," he snapped.

He suddenly reached out and grabbed the blue kobold's wrist, dragging her close, putting his face close to hers.

"Tell me what happened, tell me!"

The kobold looked at him, stunned.

"The— The one with the wolf armour…"

Ravoure rose to his feet and touched one of his rings. Then he lifted the ring and pressed it against his throat and spoke.

Rain winced as an unbelievably loud voice bellowed out, booming off the walls of the arena and echoing back at a painfully loud volume.

"STOP!"

The sound was so loud that it caused even the monsters to stumble to a halt in their panicked flight. It was a thick heavy sound that came down over the arena and all within it like a weighted blanket, demanding their attention, as though Ravoure had stepped onto a great golden pedestal and was giving the most interesting speech they had heard in their entire lives.

"All of you stop! Bastial is dead! The guarantee is a lie, it's all a Lie!!"

A murmur went around the audience at this, and Quistis broke from her overwatch, a look of white hot fury on her face.

"You force a stop for this!?"

"Bastial is dead. You promised none of us would die down here."

He bent down and pulled Bastial back from the bear monster's body so that all could see her pale faced corpse. The front of her blouse was red with blood, blooming outward from where she had been run through.

Quistis pursed her lips.

"From monsters Ravoure. Protected from monsters. If you fight amongst yourselves that is none of our concern. Bastial started a feud with someone stronger than herself and then wasn't capable of handling it, she failed to be careful. The consequences for that are the same down here as they would be on the surface."

Ravoure gawped at her.

"She died down here in your bloody Abattoir! Like some monster! If she died then any one of us could die!"

"Are you not listening to what I am saying? I watched her die Ravoure and I did nothing. I could have saved her with ease, but I did not. Feuds are not my problem."

"Y-You could have saved her…? You- You- Asshole!"

Quistis snarled, fingers forming claws as she gripped the bell's scaffolding and leaned over the pit, a strand of sweaty hair falling across her face.

"I am not your fucking frie—

Triskian suddenly stepped up beside her and grabbed her hand, lowering his voice.

"Quis. Don't make an enemy of a guest."

Quistis seemed to wrestle with her anger for a moment, but then blew out a breath.

"Perhaps, this is enough of the Buffet for today. Dragging out killing the surviving dregs is a little… tedious. If everyone would kindly return to their boxes, we will be beginning the main event soon, bidding on the monster that I'm sure many of you are just dying to kill."

She flicked out a hand and the walls of the arena rippled, partially smoking and forming near three dozen stairs back up to each box that belonged to a leveller who had fought.

A few moments later and the levellers were making their way back up. Quite a number of them were injured, many of them had sprained or fractured ankles from tripping. A couple of them were just straight up missing a foot and had to be helped back up, already yelling for potions and painkillers. The lapine missing his foot had gained a staff from somewhere and limped up the steps. He had a bucket full of something red held in his other paw.

Ravoure made his way up last, although he paused part way and turned to stare as the elf Aolis and his family returned to their box. His eyes flicked over to Bastial's corpse. Rain noted to his surprise that he seemed to genuinely dislike what had been done to her, this despite clashing with her previously. There was real anger there.

The stairs vanished and then there were only monsters left in the pit, just a few dozen of the nearly three hundred small monsters left looking around warily at the mass of monster bodies that near carpeted the sand with dead.

At one end of the arena a tunnel formed in one of the walls, smoke billowing away as stone blocks shaped to form the arch. An exit. Waiting at the end of the tunnel were dozens of men carrying spears.

Quistis then focused on the middle of the arena and after a moment the sands began to move, rippling out from a central point. At first Rain thought she was somehow manipulating the sands directly, but then he realised she was forming and disintegrating rows of stone blocks beneath the sand, pushing up the sands above before collapsing them back down into smoke over and over.

He quickly buried his predation deeper to avoid this as the ripples spread and became more like waves, powerful waves lifting several feet into the air and flowing outward. The ground became a great moving mass, and in that way a conveyor of mass. Corpses began to shift and move, being pushed along by the rippling ground.

With the flow of flotsam came the surviving monsters who looked on the verge of panic, clinging to giant monster corpses to avoid the untrustworthy sands below.

Bit by bit everything in the centre of the arena was pushed out toward the walls, until every last body big or small was shoved up against the stone. It was a vast circle of death and dismemberment, piles of heaped up gore in a ring, smaller monsters clinging to the peaks.

There were many more of the smaller monsters left alive than Rain had first thought, either they had been hiding below bodies, or playing dead in the sands. The motions had forced them to move revealing their deception.

As the arena became a flat circle of freshly unearthed and clean sand once more the spear wielders entered and approached the still living small monsters, jabbing at them if they refused to move.

In that way they were chased from the dead and gathered in the center of the arena. For the most part the monsters seemed too exhausted to resist, and those who did only had to be stabbed a little before they submitted.

In total there were perhaps a hundred, roughly a third of the original number had survived the slaughter.

The heavily injured blue kobold was amongst the remaining living, clutching at her broken arm. She was looking up at Quistis in a very murderous way, clearly imagining doing something violent to the lamia.

Behind her was the fanged goblin and the harpy, both injured, but somehow still alive.

Quistis glanced down at the cluster of blood covered monsters, exhausted, hunched over, and vulnerable.

"Mmmm. Stick them back in the pens. They'll do as a fine enough starting point for building up the next Buffet."

The men lowered their spears and began herding the monsters toward the tunnel.

"In the meantime…"

She glanced at Triskian.

"Ah, I am completely certain I do not want my Peirene to go absolutely anywhere near that damn thing Quis. You'll just have to walk it out."

Quistis rolled her eyes but then turned and slithered up to Rain's cage. She dipped a hand in a pocket and produced a small vial. A healing potion.

To Rain's surprise she tossed it to him through the bars, the thing falling in his lap.

"For your mouth. Use it or I will shred one of your lungs in such a way that it will heal back permanently crippled."

Rain blinked. She wanted to heal him? Ah. She wanted to avoid the level share since she had injured him.

He reluctantly picked up the thing and tossed it into his mouth, crushing the glass to powder with his teeth and letting the wonderfully soothing fluid wash across his tongue and gums and the roof of his mouth, the holes her magic had punctured healing over, no longer injured, normalised.

As he did so the bars of his cage started to disintegrate, wisping away to nothing. He stood, rising until he was looking down at the lamia.

"Good doggy. Now go down there and sit like the obedient mutt you are."

Rain gave her a silent look, but then moved past, stepping up to the edge and then dropping down, feet landing in a puddle of blood with a heavy thud, gore covered feet meeting blood drenched sand.

He determinedly strode toward the center of the arena and then stood and looked around at the curious faces of the audience.

Was this how that panthara had felt? Unable to do a thing to truly fight back? Pointless defiance?

Triskian stepped up to the edge of the pit and his voice boomed out.

"Honoured Guests, we have for you today a creature I believe that will capture both your imagination and your attention, a thing that crawled out of the bottom of the very darkest and most nightmarish depths of the dungeon, a thing that gives even panthara pause."

Quistis stood beside him, voice equally loud.

"As I am sure you can all tell by the blood it is covered in, this is a creature of violence and bloodshed, a monster that has killed countless other monsters, a monster that kills like it drinks and breathes. We acquired it like this, captured amongst a cavern filled with countless dead, sleeping after doing such primal violence, a monster like no other monster we had seen before, and we here at the abattoir have seen oh so many."

Triskian continued.

"We saved the very best until last for a reason folks. The beast of beasts, the monster of monsters, all who lay eyes should fear the wolf you see before you… And covet the power it promises on killing it. This feast of power you can obtain over your peers, this lavish wealth of levels. You all know you want it, you all know you need it. Now is your one and only chance. Good luck."

They may have just been hyping him to squeeze as much money out of the crowd as they could, but there was a thread of ice that ran through those words, the lie was only partial, everyone could tell this monster was different. It was an instinct as a leveler, a sense that told them a monster was worth killing. This one outshone all other monsters so far, even the great panthara, and with that value came danger.

A valuable item.

A desirable item.

Hammer hit bell and the bronze rang out.

"Thirty thousand gold coins!"

"Thirty five!"

"Thirty eight five hundred!"

Rain waited patiently as the bidding went on, his gaze eventually finding the elf family in their box. All three of them were standing at the railing and looking down at him, all three with their wolf helms raised overhead. He could tell what they were thinking. Wouldn't it be great if it were any of they who killed such a monster? The family with the wolf crest slays the great wolf beast. It was the kind of thing that would build their reputation, taking home his head on a spike and mounting it on the wall, turning him into a coat or rug, he could see it in their eyes, the greedy need to boast of such a feat. He could see the elf Aolis looking at him and he couldn't help but grin, lip rising and showing carnivorous teeth. It wasn't just him as a monster who wanted to kill and eat the elf, but the little of him that was human and—

"ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND."

Rain blinked, turning in as much surprise as the elf family to find the enormous centaur with his paddle raised. He'd healed himself of his injury, only bloody stains on his bare chest marking the spear wound.

There was silence in the arena as the audience took in this utterly galling and ridiculous jump in bid, in fact it seemed to startle so much that nobody thought to bid higher and a moment later the bell was struck by a rather pleased looking Triskian. The elf family nor anyone else got a look in.

"And there we have it. Thademus the centaur, apparently keeping the bulk of his coin in reserve right until the end."

That had… ended a bit more suddenly than Rain had expected. Clobbering everyone else over the head with unbelievable amounts of money was certainly one way to win…

He watched in silence as the centaur gathered his equipment, this time picking up a much longer leather wrap along with his spears.

He stepped on the railing and then leapt down, hooves thudding onto the sands just as when he had fought the panthara, although this time he didn't almost immediately die.

The centaur stepped forward and began unrolling the carefully tied leather wrap.

Rain waited, watching.

Eventually the leather came apart and was tossed aside revealing a rather ancient looking bronze lance, the kind with a needle point that flared back into a broad base. The lance was verdigris green with age except at the very tip where it was polished silver. It was covered from top to bottom in angular engraved runes and little dotted holes.

The centaur checked the thing over and then experimentally swiped it at the air, doing a few jabbing motions, trotted side steps, and experimental stabs.

Rain was thoroughly sick of being part of the audience, watching fight after fight and just sitting twiddling his thumbs, sometimes tripping a leveler with his Trapping Skill here and there, but without actually physically doing anything.

It was all so so maddening.

There was a monstrous urge to bloody his teeth running through him.

The centaur paused as he noticed Rain's intense yellow eyed stare.

"Does it bother you monster? Watching me warm up?"

Rain tilted his head and spoke aloud to a leveler for the first time since arriving at the Abattoir.

"My patience isn't unlimited. Unlike my hunger."