Free Web NovelChapter 25: Hundred wins, Freedom.
"That’s the third guard of the sixth elder’s household."
Hela kept her voice low, just loud enough to reach Ethan and no further.
A middle-aged man stood near the bonfire holding an iron sword loosely at his side, his stance held firm that from decades of actual combat rather than drills. Hela watched him without blinking.
She wasn’t guessing.
The White Tower trained its people to read structures of power the same way scholars read texts, and Hela had spent her time in the stronghold doing exactly that with the Algar clan’s internal hierarchy. Names, faces, household affiliations, who answered to whom. It wasn’t a passion project.
It was standard preparation for an organization that operated across the kingdom and needed to know who held what at all times.
"The other one is just an adventurer."
She said it flatly, no weight behind it beyond the fact itself.
The two men were already being pushed toward each other by riders circling the open ground, weapons gestured forward, voices raised in encouragement that had nothing encouraging in it.
Forcing captives to fight each other for entertainment was a universal Demi-human practice. It was specific. cruelty that required someone to actively decide it was worth doing, repeatedly, as a fixture of how these transports passed the time.
"Fall!"
The guard moved first.
His body cut through the firelight at a speed that blurred his outline, closing the gap before the adventurer had finished settling into a stance.
The bonfire threw uneven shadows across the open ground, distorting distance and depth, and the adventurer was already struggling to track the incoming threat through the flicker.
The gap in strength wasn’t subtle.
"Wind Shuffle!!"
The adventurer triggered a movement spell on instinct, his body displacing out of the strike’s path in a blink, reappearing several feet to the side.
It bought him nothing.
The guard rotated mid-swing, the iron sword tracking the displacement without losing momentum, closing the new distance before the adventurer had fully reoriented.
This was not his first fight against a human opponent. The economy in his movements said as much, no wasted motion, every strike chained into the next without a gap for counter.
The adventurer turned his back into the blow, taking it across the shoulder in a desperate bid to absorb and recover.
But The guard didn’t slow.
He pressed forward, blow after blow landing without pause, never giving the adventurer the half second he needed to find his footing or his breath.
The crowd’s noise rose with each impact, ugly and eager, feeding on something that had stopped being a fight several exchanges ago.
It ended the way it had been heading since the first strike.
The adventurer’s body hit the dirt and didn’t move again. What had been a person was now simply a corpse laid out in front of a fire, stripped of everything but the shape it had died in.
"Haha, good!!"
An older Demi-human stepped forward behind him a troop of fully fitted warriors, his hair was the same shade as the one who had captured Ethan and Hela, his eyes sweeping the gathered crowd with open satisfaction.
"You get one request within the camp. Food, a spell, materials. Name it."
Watching humans destroy each other was, to him, simple entertainment. The kind that reminded him of better days, when humans were nothing but toys to be played with by them.
"Can I ask for freedom?" frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
The guard’s voice came out tight, his grip still locked around the sword hilt, knuckles pale against the metal.
"After a hundred wins," the green-haired leader said, waving a hand like the number cost him nothing to offer, "you can request freedom with your accumulated points."
The camp went quiet.
Across the cages, hundreds of captive eyes turned toward the conversation, something flickering through them that hadn’t been there a moment before. Hope, raw and immediate, the kind that arrived without permission and without much logic behind it.
One hundred fights. One hundred wins.
It sounded absurd on its face. But cornered the way these people were, with nothing else on offer, absurd didn’t disqualify it from being worth chasing.
"He’s lying."
Hela’s voice came from the back of the carriage, pitched low, meant only for Ethan.
The White Tower had intercepted and dismantled caravans like this more times than she could list off the top of her head. The pattern repeated with a consistency that bordered on ritual.
The promise of freedom through accumulated victories. Humans tearing each other apart chasing a number that kept moving further away the closer they got to it.
The freedom never arrived.
What arrived instead, for the ones who actually managed to claim some kind of standing through this brutal arithmetic, was a transfer. Special holding, separated from the general cargo, sold individually and at a premium to families who valued proven combat aptitude in their acquisitions.
"We need to get away from the main group first."
Hela’s whisper barely disturbed the air between them.
There was one path out of this that her mother had described to her in detail, more than once, drawn from real case histories the White Tower had documented. It required isolating themselves from the larger caravan body and overpowering whatever smaller guard contingent held an offshoot position. Fewer numbers. Less coordination. A gap that could actually be exploited.
It had worked before. That was the only reason she was willing to bet on it now.
"I understand."
Ethan nodded once. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
As the daughter of the High Regent, Hela’s training in exactly this kind of extraction wasn’t something he needed explained to him twice.
Staying close to her plan made sense. She knew the shape of this situation better than he did.
But if her plan failed, he had his own answer waiting.
He still had one trick left.
As the thought settled, a faint thread of mana gathered in his palm, quiet, deliberate, and then it was gone, folded back into nothing before anyone nearby could have noticed it was ever there.
