Displaced

Chapter 110

A chorus of hisses and jeers showered down from the stands towards a woman standing just steps away from very center of the stadium, only to be cut short by the announcer.

"And now, her opponent!" A loud cheer rose up immediately from the massive audience surrounding the arena. There had to be at least a hundred thousand people packed into the stands. "The leader of this great nation, she is the bane of beasts, the slayer of sharp-ears!" The MC's volume quintupled as the cheering rose into a roar, his words thundering over the crowd's excitement. "People of Stragma! I give you: the one, the only, Akhustal Palebane-chos!"

The crowd exploded with noise, the thousands upon thousands of Stragmans hollering and stomping their feet, sending tremors that shook the very earth itself. Standing opposite her opponent with a lopsided grin, the giant woman raised her warclub high and soaked in the adulation.

Sitting in his cell, Rudra Kapadia gazed out through the slits in his cell and wondered how he had ended up in this situation. Though he had perhaps the best seat in the house for what was to come, he would have given almost anything to be anywhere else.

The stadium resembled cricket stadiums back home, with an oval-shaped arena in the middle surrounded by enough long stone benches to seat a small city. The only real differences were the size of the central oval—about seventy meters across and sixty meters wide by his best guess—and the massive stone platform in the center. At least fifty meters long and wide, the platform rose a little more than a meter from the ground, with large stone pillars jutting skyward every twelve meters or so in each direction.

And there, pushed flush with the side of the stone platform with the slatted end facing the center of the arena so he could see out of the top two-thirds, sat Rudra's cell. He could see the entire platform and half of the stadium, but little else. Since his cell had only one wall with any openings whatsoever—the door on the left side of the wall and the vertical bars running down the right side from the top to the bottom—he could not see if anybody else was around him.

Apparently, the Chos had come up with a new way to utilize his abilities. With him around, she and her opponent could go all-out with truly deadly attacks without the fear of death or permanent disability. Needless to say, Rudra was not a fan of any of this.

Looking at the woman announced as "Gabriela", he could see that she wasn't a fan either. Everything about her, from her slightly slumped shoulders to the dispassionate gaze coming from her tired, bag-lined eyes, screamed that she was not so much looking forward to what was to come as much as she was resigned to get it over with.

Rudra had no real idea what to make of the woman. She sure didn't look like some impossibly powerful warrior. Around average height for a woman—on Earth at least; he still wasn't sure what counted as average in Scyria—with a modest frame, she paled in comparison to the immense bearwoman standing ten meters away. A simple ponytail of long black hair encrusted with sweat and dirt hung down her back. She wore an unimpressive outfit of light leather padded armor over a simple, thin brown shirt and equally uninteresting grey pants. Outside of the armor, the huge black crystalline sword in her grip—taller than she and about as wide—and the lean muscles on her arms, she more resembled a regular housewife than somebody with nicknames that contained words like "monster" and "reaper".

The Chos, on the other hand, very much looked like how he would imagine a "strongest person in a country of over ten million people" to look. Towering over her opponent, Akhustal Palebane rolled her broad, brawny shoulders, looking down at Gabriela the way a starving man would look at an exquisite meal. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation in a way Rudra hadn't seen since... well, since the day he'd declared himself a pacifist to the nation.