A Shattered Spirit

The Tipping Point

"So this is how it ends?"

I stood there in the swirling sands of the arena, staring down my best friend. "After everything we've been through, this is it?" The seats were empty, the stands silent. The wind whistled eerily through the empty structure. And even though she was at the other side of the stadium, I heard her say, "It wasn't supposed to end like this. But it was meant to end, and if this is the end we have arrived at, this is the end we shall face." She took her blade from her shoulder. I left my twin swords where they were. "Why does it have to end?" 

"That is the one thing I can never tell you." And she started running towards me, blade out in front. I had about six seconds until she reached me, and whatever relationship we had had, I had no doubts that she would try and kill me. And in those six seconds, I formulated my plan. Just before she reached me, I held out my arm, and my shield shot out from my tricep, blocking her strike. I swear I saw the ghost of a smile cross her face before she made to attack again, and I raised my other arm, flicked my wrist, and my wristblade shot out, again deflecting her attack.

She continued on the offensive, but I managed to keep her at bay with relative ease. I didn't want to attack her, not unless I had no other choice. At the very inconvenient time of the middle of a fight, I thought back to why my best friend had decided to kill me. It still confused me greatly.

The day had started like any other. The town had been woken automatically at nine in the morning, as usual. Sometimes I hated the chips in our heads that kept us on the straight and narrow, but most of the time I found them useful. They gave us any and all information we could ever want, kept important dates and times recorded, they were basically the pinnacle of modern technology. Like having a second brain.

Anyway, I had selected my outfit from the wardrobe, my usual black, slightly ripped hoodie, a pair of jeans as dark as night, and a deep purple t-shirt. I found those colours most suited my implants, the technological upgrades I had been supplied when I graduated from university at 17. They had many functions, from helping out your muscles without the muscles getting lazy, to having built-in weapons, to full-body armour that changed colour to suit the surroundings. My implants had been programmed to be purple and a deep blue, two of my favourite colours, and seeing as most people went for flashy colours like gold or silver, I tended to blend in a lot more.

I got my breakfast sent up to me from the kitchens, wolfed it down, threw the bowl down the cushioned chute back to the cleaners, and left my apartment. The familiar wail of sirens and the stench of the smoke and fumes hit me, and I was glad that they had found a way to vaccinate against polluted air. If that was the correct term for it, I was no scientist. They had found a way to protect us, at least, and somehow had managed to cool the Earth down, too. Apparently they had spent hundreds of years developing a giant cooling system around the Earth.

Putting the history lesson to one side, I then made my way to work. I was employed in the Training Academy, a vague enough name, but everything inside was well-organised and very strict. I worked as one of the head trainers, being one of the best combatants the Academy had ever seen, they paid for my university course in fighting techniques and the like, and then immediately gave me a full-wage job as a trainer. But when I arrived at the Arena, the area for fighting, where I was slotted for the first half of the day, it was empty. 

I had looked at my schedule again, thinking, 'this can't be right, surely.' But no, I was supposed to be there, and so were about two hundred others. I called out some of their names. No answer. Then I noticed a red spot on the swirling sand. the sand had been clumped together by something that looked suspiciously like blood...

Now blood was not uncommon in the Arena, seeing as people fought in it all the time, but something about this unsettled me. It was early, there should have been no fights yet. So why was there blood on the ground? I looked around for an answer, and then found myself seeing more drops of blood everywhere. Now I was seriously worried. I frantically looked for any sign of life, but all I was greeted by was endless swirls of sand and blood. At the end of the Arena, a white shine caught my eye. A piece of paper, pinned to the wall.