Kill Team XIV.

Chapter 7.

The next morning, they woke up to a message from the voice being loudly repeated over and over.

"All kill teams to the arena. Kill teams to the arena."

They eyed each other warily, three now when they were seven, that very first day. The door slid open and they cast a last look around the room, their room; dark, humid, smelly and closed off, a prison and a haven.

There were three knives waiting for them when they got to the waiting room. They each took one and settled in to anxiously wait. Soon after, the door slid open and they entered the arena, for the first time not knowing where to go.

"We should take cover and figure out a plan," Wras said.

"If we're targets, they'll know where we've been already," Praid noted.

Sleus nodded then started walking without waiting for them, hands in his pockets as ever, knife at his waistband; the others jog to catch up.

"Where are we going?"

"Nowhere." He said. Wras nodded, seemingly alright with that answer. Praid lifted his hands up and away from his torso, incredulous.

"And where is that exactly?"

"Did you seriously not read the briefing packets?" Wras askes, annoyed.

"I did! It didn't say "nowhere" anywhere!" he defended himself.

"It's not a place, it's literally nowhere. A spot on the map with nothing on it," she explained.

"If there's nothing, where will we hide?"

"The only places in the city that aren't on the map are the undergrounds, you can see tiny air vents along the ground that keep the tunnels ventilated, but no access from the buildings or the street; nowhere is the access to the undergrounds," Sleus said, coming to a stop at a clearing in the middle of all the buildings.

"So how do we get in?" Wras asked.

"We dig"

Sleus walked to the middle of the clearing, drawing his knife, and stabbed the ground with it, hard, again and again. After a second, the others joined in.

"So why didn't we ever come here before?" Praid asked, breathless.

"Wasn't part of the missions."

"Yeah but maybe we could escape through there," he pointed out.

"Do you really think they'd leave a way out of here so accessible to us?" Wras asked.

"Maybe they want to toy with us, because they know we'd never try," he said.

"Or maybe they have killers waiting at the end of the tunnel," she said, stabbing hard with the knife.

"That wouldn't be worse than staying here," he muttered bitterly. She didn't answer.

Finally, they'd broken off enough dry, hard packed dirt to see an old wooden plank underneath. They lifted it in a cloud of dust, put it down nearby, then went in. Praid, the last one in, slid the plank back on. With the earth turned over messily, it wouldn't hide their presence, but at least they weren't immediately visible.

"So, what now?"

"We don't know who is there, how many, how strong, what weapons they have, or who they're after. But we can't just hide out here forever. We should set a trap, do our best not to die, and maybe play cards when we get back," Sleus said.

*

They went back to the first building they'd been in, in the arena, back to that room they all waited in before their first kill. They started a fire with pieces of the walls, planks, papers and strikes of their knives on metal, making sure the smoke escaped through the window in a thick, dark cloud, and then they waited.