The Serpent's Coil (Tsukkiyama)

Into Battle, Unarmed

It took three weeks for the effects of the synergy sedative to lose its effectiveness, and what a miserable two weeks they were. The days and nights were much the same and would have blended together fully were it not for the consistency with which the snakes forced him to fight. Once a day, at noon, to Yamaguchi's best guess, he would be drawn into the arena and set upon a host of other war prisoners and feral animals.

He had, midway through the second week of his captivity, begun to wholly lose hope. There seemed to be an endless supply of fresh faces with which to litter the arena, and Mika's taunting chatter did nothing to secure Yamaguchi's faith in the resistance. The first time Yamaguchi spotted a prisoner who he recognized from the resistance, he nearly dropped to his knees and cried. That, of course, would have resulted in his imminent death, but the matter still stood.

Luckily, or perhaps, unluckily, the fighting field was not the only place Yamaguchi spotted his former comrades. During one particularly brutal fight, where the snakes had sicced an entire pack of hungry wolves on him, Yamaguchi saw a familiar face in the arena crowd. As he ran from the pack, stopping to occasionally slash at the nearest wolf, he saw one of the reconnaissance officers in the stands. He was up high and in the far back, the cheapest seats there were, and he watched the match with concern masked by intense loathing. Yamaguchi could not for the life of him remember the man's name, but he knew the face well as one of the people near constantly at Shirofuku's side. Not long after, still running from the wolves, dwindling in number as they were, he noticed two other vaguely familiar faces at various places in the crowd.

On the second day, he noticed the reconnaissance team; he was locked in battle with another war prisoner. The snakes had, evidently, grown tired of Yamaguchi's refusal to harm other people, and so they endeavoured to send him men with increasing levels of depravity and desperation. Those who he faced in the arena now could hardly be called human, minds so broken and twisted as they were. There was no means to reason with them, and they were not all so clumsy as to fall and impale themselves, so Yamaguchi was forced to end their torment. He prayed, with a newfound spirituality brought on by the lonely and bloody days in the colosseum underbelly, that their souls would ascend to a better place in the Goddess's hands.

Yamaguchi only noticed his allies the second time because they had so nearly jumped into the arena to try and help him. Daishou's men had, on that occasion, sent out not one, but almost a half-dozen of the maddened war prisoners. They, much like the first man he had fought, were gaunt, frothing at the mouth, and lustful for bloodshed. They would not turn on each other, and so gave Yamaguchi much trouble. The reconnaissance team, there had been three of them that day, looked greatly disturbed by Yamaguchi's predicament. The one closest to him, a tall woman only three rows away from the arena centre, lept out of her seat and leaned halfway over the rail to try and aide him. Yamaguchi had to, as subtly as possible, signal to her to remain seated. Surely, if she or anyone else, were to offer him any form of help, they would be captured and sorely punished, if not killed outright. She had, as per Yamaguchi's quiet but desperate insistence, returned to her seat, and he could see her associates had been equally as tense.

As much as he was loathe to do so, Yamaguchi had very few options, and so ventured to kill his crazed pursuers. The first one was fairly easy; he was the largest of the five, somewhat more nourished than the rest, but was blind in one eye. To isolate him from the others and catch him from his bad side took very little effort, as little effort as killing a man could take. The second and third, perhaps once a married pair for they bore matching rings, died just as fast. Yamaguchi had snagged a mostly functional bow, as well as two arrows, and from the top of the rotting corpse of an elephant, he shot them down. The fourth was the first to cause injury to Yamaguchi that day; he, too, scrambled atop the carrion pile and attempted to wrestle Yamaguchi down. The northerner was, by his own admittance, rather poor in hand-to-hand, and the man pinned him easily. Yamaguchi rolled, however, and the fall was just enough to snap the other's neck, although the landing had bent back Yamaguchi's wrist and broken it with a sickening crunch. He would have to be left-handed until Mika saw it fit to heal him. The fifth proved to be a formidable opponent; she was fast and clever enough to stay out of range of the axe Yamaguchi had picked up. She saw weakness in his injury, though, and that was her downfall. She darted in to strike just as Yamaguchi stopped for a breath, and on reflex, he swung the axe. She had landed a good blow on him, her knife dug deeply into his hip, but the axe did far more damage. Her sunken in stomach had been sliced clean open, and she gaped as a mix of scarlet blood and pinkish-grey entrails spilt out onto the dusty ground. Yamaguchi dealt the final blow so as to not make her suffer.