Free Web NovelChapter 26: Bonfire fights
After the announcements, the humans in their various cages made up their minds the way cornered animals always did, eyes narrowing toward whoever stood closest, calculating who could be torn through first.
Freedom mattered more than anything to a human. More than safety, more than the people standing beside them. So they prepared. Clamoring, each one hoping to be the name called next, voices overlapping in the dark until the guards barked them quiet.
By the end of the first night, the fighting stage had split into two divisions.
Tier 9 fighters and ordinary fighters in one. Tier 8 in the tier 7s in the other.
Anyone stronger than that was banned outright. The Demi-humans had no interest in watching something they couldn’t control burn through their cargo before it reached the market.
Inside the cage, Ethan held a medallion in his palm, turning it once between his fingers. The metal was cold and plain, nothing about it suggesting what it actually represented.
It marked his entry into that night’s battles. All he had needed to do was demonstrate he was capable, and the Demi-humans had handed it over without much ceremony, the way you’d hand a tool to someone who’d already proven they knew how to use it.
"Kid, this isn’t the best idea right now."
Zack spoke from the side, his eyes moving between Ethan and Hela as they made their preparations.
"The White Tower is surely on our trail. Risking your life here isn’t necessary."
Not everyone in the cages shared Ethan’s appetite for risk. Plenty still clung to the belief that rescue was coming, that the kingdom would send people to face the Demi-humans head-on and pull them out before any of this excalated. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
It was an easier thought to hold onto than the alternative. Waiting cost nothing. Fighting cost everything if it went wrong.
Hela could only exhale at that.
It was the expected response, the one she’d have given the same weight a few days ago. But her mother had spent months raising alarms about the horde, documenting it, pushing it through every formal channel available, and the response had been silence. Not delay. Silence.
She had watched that silence sit there long enough to understand what it meant. She couldn’t make herself believe rescue was coming. Not anymore.
"It’s fine. I need the practice."
Ethan offered Zack a small smile, the kind that didn’t reach much past the mouth.
The two of them had been introduced properly back in the cage, so Ethan knew who he was. A teacher who had become a soldier somewhere along the way, the transition visible in the way he carried himself, careful where a soldier would be blunt.
The kind of man whose principles stayed consistent regardless of the room he was standing in.
Unfortunately, principles carried no weight out here.
"Sigh."
Zack shook his head once and let it go. He’d said his piece. Pushing further wouldn’t change anything, and he seemed to understand that as clearly as Ethan did.
Actually, he couldn’t have entered the fights even if he’d wanted to. His strength sat firmly at rank 6, and that fact alone was part of the reason he’d ended up in this particular cage to begin with. A teacher of his caliber had only ever been recruited by the Algar family because of that rank.
It had meant something, once. It had opened doors, secured a position, given him a reason to matter inside the stronghold’s structure.
Now he could feel the shape of things shifting around him, the old measures of worth losing relevance by the hour. Out here, rank didn’t buy safety. It barely bought attention.
"I’ll just sit here and hope for the best."
He turned away as the sky darkened fully and the caravan rolled to a stop for the night, the wheels grinding against dry ground before finally going still.
When it did, Ethan and Hela stepped out from the cage under the watchful eyes of the guards stationed along the perimeter, falling into the loose crowd of humans who had volunteered for the night’s fights.
The crowd moved without much order, fear and hope tangled together in equal measure, nobody quite looking at anybody else directly.
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"I’m officially tier 8, but I don’t have a second summon yet."
Ethan stood in front of a Demi-human representative, the badge gripped tight in his hand, his voice level despite the noise pressing in from every side of the staging area.
The representative didn’t look up from his ledger right away. He finished whatever line he was writing first.
"Tier 8 is tier 8." He said it without inflection. "Not our problem you’re short a summon."
To him, Ethan was a number on a list. If that number could win against whatever opponent it was matched against using a single summon, the math worked out fine either way.
There was no sympathy in the assessment and no malice either. Just indifference, the kind that came from processing too many of these names to hold any of them individually.
"I want to put together a list of materials for my next summoning ritual," Ethan said. "I’ll fill it as I win."
Every fighter held the right to convert their wins into materials. Done properly, it could push someone’s combat strength forward fast, which in turn improved their odds of actually surviving long enough for the freedom promise to mean anything, however unlikely that promise was to hold.
"Write them here."
The representative tapped a sheet of paper tied to the cord hanging from Ethan’s badge, then went back to his ledger without waiting to see what would be written.
Ethan took the offered pen and began writing, the tip scratching softly against the rough paper.
One White Dovan Quill.
Two claws from a reptilian of fire.
A stone bathed in curse magic.
The blood of a witch filled with malice.
The representative leaned in slightly as the list grew, his brow creasing at the specificity of it. Each item sat further from anything he’d typically seen requested in these camps, stranger in combination than most fighters bothered to be.
Most requests were simple. Weapons, healing draughts, raw materials that any blacksmith could work with. This was something else.
But he wasn’t human. Summoning rituals, the logic behind what made one ingredient necessary over another, none of that belonged to his frame of reference in the first place.
He shrugged the confusion off without much investment in resolving it, the gesture small and automatic, and waved Ethan toward the staging area.
"First match. Go."
Ethan folded the list once and tucked it into his file one the table before walking off toward where the night’s fighting would begin, the noise of the crowd rising to meet him as he crossed the open ground.
