3-2 Mercy General — Multi-species Obstetrics Unit Guidance Sheet
Tokh labor can be a traumatic experience for nursing staff. This sheet is to help human staff with the fundamentals.
Do not offer to hold the mother’s hand. Grip strength can and will crush skeletal structures.
Do not stand behind the mother. Tail movement during labor is required; tail-related trauma incidents are the leading cause of staff injury in this unit.
DO NOT STAND BENEATH THE MOTHER.
Do not comment on egg size.
Do not attempt to catch an egg. Eggs are structurally robust and present a serious risk of injury.
Offers of hydrating beverages are customary and appreciated.
You could hear and feel the crowd from well outside the immediate area of the arena. Vael and I were waiting in a fairly long line to enter. I glanced up at the front of the building, where an old sign hung. The paint was heavily faded and barely legible in places, but I could make out VITABLEND.
It wasn’t anything I’d ever heard of.
A new sign of sorts had been hung over and slightly above the old sign, which served as nothing more than a backdrop now. Letters were crudely cut out of sheet steel with the rounded and uneven edges left behind from a cutting torch still visible. The building was now labeled BLOODSANDS, and the letters were wreathed in open flames supplied by what I assumed to be gas burners.
“A bit overdramatic, don’t you think?” I asked Vael, who was holding my hand and pressed in close by my side.
“Oh, well–hmm. I guess it was before your time. You never heard about this place?”
I shook my head. “I mean, I’ve heard of battle arenas, of course, I was just never really interested. You know I preferred my entertainment to be virtual.”
She slipped her hand from mine and brought it up to embrace my shoulder. She leaned down a bit and pointed out the old sign.
“I saw that,” I said, nodding.
“So that used to be a big corporation operating in the agricultural sector, who was heavily invested in running most of the agri-stacks at the time. Working conditions were especially bad under their management. Rumor had it that they were leveraging local street-level muscle to incentivize their workers to pull longer hours through excessive gang taxation. VitaBlend got higher production numbers, and it only cost them a relatively small slice of the pie to buy continued productivity gains.”
“Psh. Typical. I was lucky enough to not have to work for one of the corps, but you hear the horror stories anywhere you go.”
“Mhm,” Vael agreed. “Your mom worked the stacks, right? So you know how they have to wear goggles?”
Mom always came home with her pair worn around her neck, the lens nearly as dark as a welder’s hood. She’d explained to kid-me that she and the other farm workers had to wear them or they’d go blind. The stacks were always so bright that you could see just fine with them on inside. I’d never been inside one. I had this mental image of towering, open vertical spaces that were incandescent, with walkways the width of your hand between rows and rows of plants in hydro feeders. Strong breezes always blowing; partly to strengthen the plants, partly to make sure that pockets of CO2 didn’t form and kill the workers.
“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure where she was going with the goggles bit.
“Well, the stack workers tried to unionize, and things turned violent extremely quickly. Things here in 4-3 started getting so chaotic–near-open warfare between the unionists and the corporation–that the CDA was considering deploying the military down here.”
I frowned. “That would have been–I can only imagine. A disaster. They didn’t, I hope?”
“No, they didn’t. What wound up happening is that the workers conceded to VitaBlend and went back to work. But it was a ploy. Instead of fighting the corporation directly, they decided to gather their strength and address the problem at the local level first. So they formed their own gang and mercilessly crushed the outfit that had been working with VitaBlend. They called themselves the Shades, after the goggles they wore.”
The line was moving along. We were getting closer to the entrance.
“So what happened with VitaBlend after that?” I asked her.
“Once the Shades had control of the streets, they assaulted the main storage, shipping and distribution warehouse in the sector. VitaBlend was expecting something of the sort to happen, and they'd hardened the facility and built up a small army of corpsec inside. The Shades stormed it, and after a day and a half of fighting, killed the entire corpsec team and took the building. The facility was extremely damaged in the process, and VitaBlend wound up writing off the entire location as a loss.”
I looked back up at the two signs from almost directly below them. “I guess it makes sense now why they kept the name up.”
“Mhm! The warehouse was empty for a couple of years, and then the Navazi started using it to settle differences that couldn't be resolved through arbitration. Nobody’s entirely sure where the sand came from originally. Best guess is the sheer amount of bullet impacts and explosions inside caused the polycrete to crumble, and it accumulated. They just kept it there; it soaks up the blood.”
The Navazi. I’d heard the name. Everyone had, in the same way you’d heard of a hab block collapse three sectors over. Present tense awareness, past tense relevance, nothing you needed to think about directly, unless you were unlucky. Out of the three outfits that operated at that scale in Ark 3, the Navazi were the ones people actually named above a whisper, which told you everything about the other two.
Vael handed our tickets to someone behind a multiple-centimeter-thick sheet of polymer, then she and I stepped forward into a checkpoint scanner. I wasn’t sure if that was stolen from an actual checkpoint, or it just happened to be the same make and model. It buzzed angrily.
A gruff voice called out from behind bars on the side. “Ey, you. Shortstack! Put the banger in the chute with your ticket. No guns inside!”
Vael giggled at my side, and I sighed. I slipped the gun out from the waistband holster I’d had it tucked in and placed it into the indicated chute. What looked like at least ten layers of brightly-colored paint sat in various states of being chipped away from impacts–an eye-catching display. A buff, squat guy pulled my gun out, stuck it under a scanner, inserted my ticket into a separate machine, and after a beat, both devices beeped loudly. My ticket was handed back to me through the bars, and my gun went into a box and was loaded into a wall filled with similar boxes of various shapes and volumes.
“Lose the ticket, and we can’t guarantee you get your piece back. So don’t lose it!” the guy shouted the last part for extra emphasis.
Vael tugged my hand, and we left what appeared to be the primary bottleneck slowing admission to a crawl.
We walked a few steps at a time through a line packed to the gills with people of all sorts — a surprisingly large percentage of them Tokh. Fortunately, the hall through the outer walls of the structure was both tall and wide.
Vael leaned over and spoke into my ear, as whispering wasn’t an option with the sheer level of racket. Between the crowds chanting and cheering and the people stomping the floors in time, it sounded like the world's biggest drum. Even I had to grudgingly admit that the place had an infectious energy.
“They say that people started showing up to watch these grudges get settled. It wasn’t pretty; people were dismembering and murdering one another to settle differences between themselves or their organizations. Having witnesses was already an expectation, so they weren't thrown out. Word spread, and more people started turning up every time. With people came vendors, and before too long, it became something resembling what we have today.”
Someone behind us surged forward and compressed the line, and Vael steadied me with a hand on my shoulder before continuing. I was glad I had my tail mostly wrapped around my lower half. I was worried someone would step on it or worse, trip..
Reality is stranger than fiction. Who would have thought crime outfits holding blood court would turn into mass entertainment?
Lights nearly as harsh as actual sunlight washed over us when we exited the tunnel and followed signage to our seating section. We apparently had very good seats, because we were at one of the ends of the oval arena and down close to the action.
The inside of the place was–frankly, insane.
What had once been a truly massive multi-story facility could only be seen if you looked for it. The warehouse it once was had been built like a tank to support thousands of tons of grains and produce awaiting shipment on the city’s lev network. The interior of the floors had been cut away to form a big bowl-shaped coliseum. Each floor of the old building was ten or more meters tall, and each had stadium seating crammed into every available space.
Vendors were walking around, hawking Blast! and Tube Jammers, along with beers and krillers. We got ourselves seated, and my stomach started snarling and demanding tribute. I waved for what felt like a couple of minutes to get the attention of one of the nearby vendors, who made their way over.
I was just going to get a pair of krillers on a stick with some dipping sauce and a soda. Vael urged me to try the ginger beer, so I relented and bought myself a pint to go with hers. She got a red bean ice cream sandwich and a foil-wrapped char-potato.
I tore into my first kriller. The stick version was dipped in batter and fried rather than served in a bun, and I had a generous squirt of ketchup and spicy mustard on my paper tray-bowl, which they came in. I was in deep-fried crustacean protein heaven and probably eating like a complete barbarian. I couldn’t give two shits, it was fresh and amazing and nearly worth the trip alone. Vael had an amused look on her face as she watched me savage one, then the other. I licked some mustard off my lips and looked up to see Vael finishing off her ice cream sandwich. She had a glob of melted cream on the corner of her mouth and part of her cheek.
“You’ve got a uh–” I pointed, and she blinked, then licked the corners of her mouth in a distracting manner.
“There’s still some left, further out,” I told her.
“Get it for me, please?”
I nodded quickly and wiped at her cheek with my index finger until I was pretty sure I’d gotten all of it. I was in the middle of pulling my finger back when she glommed onto it, and I could feel her teeth teasing at my skin while she licked my fingertip clean.
Mischievously smirking eyes watched my reaction. I was probably close to beet red. She threw her head back and laughed, and I nearly spilled my beer, which I still hadn’t touched.
“Messing with you is so easy, shortstack,” she teased.
“I will actually kill you if you keep calling me that,” I told her in no uncertain terms.
Her smile only grew.
“Just eat your fucking potato before I stuff it in your smirking face.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?” She waggled the foil-wrapped lump in my direction, then peeled back the foil to take a bite.
I just sighed, loudly, and turned away from the crimson-skinned troublemaker to look over the arena. There was some kind of preshow running—people on motorcycles, covered in body armor, beating the shit out of one another with padded bats as they crossed paths. It looked like it could be fun, so long as you were the one doing the hitting. Padded or not, you could hear the impacts even over the crowd. The people who got dismounted tended to crash pretty hard into the sand.
Tall walls ringed the sand-floored arena, bare polycrete, and with no small amount of damage in the form of scratches, scorches, pits, and craters. They were maybe ten meters tall and had spiked rebar curled inward to prevent people from climbing out. Fencing made from thick cable woven into diamond patterns, bolted at every junction, hung from the ceiling multiple stories overhead and arced down to meet the top of the wall. It looked like a cargo truck or an AV could crash straight into it and not make it through to the crowds. Interestingly, between the huge floodlights, the arena's ceiling was mirrored. It gave an interesting perspective to watch.
Vael caught me with my head craned back and staring upwards. “There are private booths up there for high-end clients who pay top creds for it. The old corpsec landing pads on the roof were revitalized and expanded. If you were to look up there now, you’d see no small amount of the kinds of vehicles Veris used to transport us to the arcology.”
I grunted. “Must be very entertaining, watching us murder one another.”
She was half-whispering, half-shouting into my ear to be audible over the crowd. “You’d be surprised, it's not just threecits who participate. Corporations field their own teams and players here as much as they do in the UBL. If you think the crowd is excited now, you should see them when it’s corporates fighting amongst themselves on the sands.”
I nodded and looked back down at the spectacle. I didn’t really want to think about corpos right now. I took a sip of my ginger beer, which was still close to ice-cold.
Oh. Wow. She wasn’t kidding!
A sip turned into several, and Vael elbowed me with a knowing smirk. I just rolled my eyes at her.
Loudspeakers blared to life after the last pair of bikers bashed one another, and one emerged victorious.
A male voice addressed the warehouse-turned-stadium. “Bloodsands! Tonight's card opens on two years of bad blood come due! Some say they’re jilted lovers! Some say they’re mortal enemies! Are they both? Who knows! On the red side: THE CRIMSON HOOKER!”
I winced at the name. The crowd was fairly equally divided between cheers and boos. A person wearing a bright red exo frame with a matching bucket helmet with curled metal horns walked out of one of the grated entrances to the sands. They threw one arm up and the other out to the side, and—
Oh. I get it now.
They held some kind of weaponized hooked sword over their head and deployed a multi-threaded whip from their other arm. The ends of the whip lashed around with small explosions of sand. Some kind of electrical discharge, I guessed.
“On the blue side: THE SMOKE DANCER!”
My eyes tracked over to the half of the arena that had the blue lights topping the barrier wall.
A female figure stepped out, wearing black layers that my brain immediately identified as ninja gear. She had a sword strapped to her hip and a bandolier loaded with a mix of throwing weapons and grenades. She swung a cable around her upper body using both hands, like some kind of acrobatic show. There was a weight at one end, and just going off how fast it was whipping around, I judged it was probably not something you wanted to get hit by.
A crowd chant of “FIGHT!” picked up until it was the only thing you could hear.
Vael and I were seated near a large section of Tokh saddles, nearly filled. They were clapping and stomping along with the crowd. Looking around the arena, I saw more and more sections designated for Tokh, all of which were full or nearly full.
I leaned over to Vael as the fighters squared off and took probing swipes at one another from range.
“Is pit fighting extra popular with Tokh, or is this just a Bloodsands thing?”
The side of her head bumped against mine when she answered back. “Public battles like these are a common practice in their cultures. It’s very popular with most Tokh.”
“As watchers, or as fighters?” I asked.
“Both!” she said with a laugh.
The chanting settled down, and it became relatively quiet in the coliseum. There had been a momentary break in the fighting; each of the two fighters had gotten a hit or two in. Sparks were spraying from the hook sword guy’s shoulder joint servos. Ninja girl was bleeding from her leg, sliced by the end of the electrical whip. It didn’t seem to impair her mobility too much.
She reeled the cable in, hooked a grenade from her bandolier to one end, and spun it over her head. A moment later, it was belching out thick black smoke in wide elliptical paths around her. Very devious. I had to assume she had some means of seeing through the smoke. Maybe wide-spectrum optics, or echolocation cybernetics.
Hell, maybe she’s just used to fighting blind.
Despite the smoke obscuring much of the view of the fight–something the crowd didn’t respond to positively–you could still tell it was going on from the flashes of electrical discharges and sudden disruptions in the smoke as the fighters darted in and out of the cover.
There were a few loud, percussive explosions, and the fight seemed to come to an end. Atmos systems kicked in, and the smoke was sucked out through the sides of the arena.
Hook sword was lying in the sand with the handle of a blade sticking out of his temple. The ninja had won, but wasn’t looking great. She'd unwrapped one of the lengths of fabric from her arms and was pressing it against her abdomen. Her left arm was lying in the sand, along with her sword.
Cheering started up in the crowd while people rushed out from either end of the arena to gather up the fighters.
“Are they all to the death?” I asked Vael.
She shook her head. “No, it’s usually a fight to submission, although what constitutes submission can be rather loose. It also depends on the type of fight. It's hard to beat captured portal wildlife into submission without killing it in the process.”
“Monsters? Here? Really!?”
She gave me side-eye. “Yes, of course. It’s big business, Kiera. Extremely profitable. And it brings in people who you normally wouldn’t get any interest from.”
I went to ask her if she was involved in that sort of thing, but thought twice about it. Even though the noise gave us functional privacy, it still wasn’t smart to talk about illegal Diving out in the open. Furthermore, I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to know the answer to that question.
“Up next, we have a fight between the Death’s Door Crew and…” The announcer dragged it out until people were howling. “THE SLITHERING!”
The crowd went berserk, and the jumping and stomping of feet could be felt through the structure itself.
I looked over at Vael, totally lost. She rubbed two fingers together, the hand sign for money that transcended layer and class politics.
Money? Is it a popular wager target? Or maybe, wait, a bounty, or prize cup?
Gates came up on one side of the arena, and out walked a full Dive team, four of the five were Users, the fifth was a bot or a borg. One person up front was dressed like a knight in plate and chain, carrying a kite shield and a longsword. The other was a Tokh carrying a truly massive double-headed battleaxe, wearing a mix of chain and leather webbing. A human woman wielded a pair of swords, clad in tight leather that accentuated her figure. The robot was hazard-tape yellow with black stripes, one arm a chain blade, the other a massive cannon barrel with a bulky, boxy mechanism at the back. The muzzle was large enough that I could probably fit my entire head into it. The last member was a caster of some sort, in what amounted to lightly armored baggy clothing.
“What the hell is the Slithering if it's fighting an entire Dive team in full gear?”
Vael winked at me and held a clawed finger to her lips.
I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
The announcer came over the PA once more, asking, “DDC! Are you ready?”
They were near the middle of the arena and held their weapons up; the crowd reacted with cheers and shouts. A rumbling came from the other end of the arena, audible below the pitch of the crowd. Heavy machinery, industrial in scale. A loud clang sounded from the far end of the arena from the Dive team, and a big red light lit over the gate. The only thing visible through the bars was pitch blackness.
I swallowed. Sudden anxiety filled me.
I could feel what was behind that gate.
An oppressive pressure pushing down on me from above.
What the fuck!? There’s no way!
“THREE! TWO! ONE!” The announcer whipped the audience into a frenzy. A horribly loud buzzer sounded, the light at the gate went green, and the grate dropped into the floor.
The Slithering didn’t come out so much as it erupted, launched out of the tunnel with the force that only something that had a hundred legs could muster. It had an exoskeleton and several legs per segment, like a centipede. Unlike a centipede, it was easily two meters wide, nearly a meter tall, and seemingly endless. It just kept pouring out of the tunnel.
They have a real, live portal guardian here, in captivity, somehow.
I pulled my eyes away from the arena for a brief moment, glancing around near the upper levels and ceiling of the building.
There!
A quartet of very large multi-barreled autoguns tracked the creature in perfect harmony as it moved. Probably a VI manning them, ready to turn it into insect paste if it tried to escape or reach the crowd.
The crowd was frantic everywhere I looked.
“How did they capture a portal guardian?!” I shouted over to Vael.
“It isn’t! It’s a mid-tier, captured from the Wildlands!”
I wasn’t sure how the two front-liners were supposed to fight something that large, mobile, and downright mean. The thing had mandibles that'd take your leg off in one chomp.
Turns out that you don’t try to square up with something like that. Not directly. The guy with the shield was using it to press closer to the body than the others. The creature had hard, beady eyes running down both sides of its body, and the legs were never idle, even when the thing wasn't moving, they struck out like serrated spears.
As impressive as it was to watch the two sword Users and the axe User, my attention was drawn by the borg. From what I knew about real Diving, borgs and mechanized Divers weren't unusual at lower tiers, but they fell off hard into the mids. You could get suits and exos made from portal materials like anything else, but economics was the problem. Powered exos and borgs were massive forces right from the start, but Users at comparable levels didn't carry the added weight of deep maintenance cycles, mandatory downtime, and expensive manufacturing from materials that were difficult to mill.
I’d seen more than my fair share of more traditional Divers in World of Divers, so it had my focus.
It’s not really… it doesn’t look like one of the military or corporate security borgs at all. Those tend to be sleek, sloped, and angled armor, with wedge-shaped bodies and limbs. This thing looks like…
The word was on the tip of my tongue as I watched it send multiple legs flying with its chainblade.
Some kind of industrial machine?
The Slithering raced around the arena, its body crossing over itself and forming hazardous enclosures that snapped shut and opened unexpectedly as the opposite end zipped out from under other parts of itself. It was boxing in the backline when able, keeping its distance from the dual-sword and axe Divers.
The caster-type was assisting the shield Diver with ranged fire support. They were water-aspected and doing pretty interesting things with it. I’d seen people use water aspects defensively to make these shields that flowed or locked hard as steel on command. Offensively: whips, battering rams, crashing waves. This User was forming floating spheres overhead that drifted and harassed the creature. When they got in range, they struck out spikes almost faster than the eye could track, punching clean holes through the carapace.
They were also forming fist-sized balls between their hands and lobbing them at the creature. When they hit body sections, they stuck like glue and fizzled like crazy. I didn’t get it.
The caster had gotten distracted with supporting the shield User and became fully surrounded by body sections on every side. She was wobbling in a tiny envelope of safe space the legs couldn't quite reach, but took several shallow stabs to her arms and legs.
The borg came to her rescue as soon as they saw their teammate trapped. It turned from the section it was fighting, took several steps toward the trapped caster, then sections around its armpits and shoulders uncurled into two rear-facing bracing limbs that planted broad plates into the sand.
An extremely loud explosion, a cone of smoke that disappeared almost immediately. The borg had fired its cannon, punching tunnels through two body sections. The cannonball threw sand well over the arena walls when it hit the ground, showering the crowd. The crowd threw their hands up and bounced, screaming. A heavy metal chain was attached to the cannonball and ran back through the monster's body to the borg. White smoke–steam–jetted from the back of the cannon, and the chain snapped taut and retracted with serious force. The links looked bladed or serrated, but it was hard to tell. The weapon was causing absolute carnage as it tore out chitin in big chunks, green slime pouring from the wounds.
“I wish I had one of those with the pig bears!” I shouted to Vael. She threw her head back and laughed, but I couldn’t hear it over the tremendous racket.
The Slithering reacted to the assault with one of its own. The head had been fighting the axe User, but the entire thing abruptly reversed direction, and the tail end, bristling with its own claws and barbs, shot out from under a different part of its body and hit the mech like a speeding truck. The mech was sent flying through the air, ball and chain still being slurped back into the barrel of its cannon. It crashed into one of the arena walls with what looked like a brutal impact, but it didn’t slow the clunky-looking thing one bit. It hopped right back up, aimed its gun arm at the tail end, and fired. No time to brace, the foot actuators dug furrows through the sand from the recoil.
The enormous mass of claws, limbs, and armor was surprisingly fast and nimble with it. It ducked and swerved around the shot and came in for another ramming blow. The borg blew more steam from the back end of its cannon, and the cannonball slowed mid-flight. Planting its feet, the borg's body rotated on the hips, and the cannonball became the world's longest flail. The Slithering was forced to retreat to avoid being splattered. The repositioning gave the caster room to break free and fall back to a teammate.
The battle at the other end seemed to be getting desperate. The sword and shield User was down and out, the Tokh's battleaxe had gotten lodged in a body section and was lost, and now the big saurian was fighting with their downed teammate's sword. It looked like a toy in their hand. The dual sword User and the Tokh flashed hand signs back and forth faster than I could track, and some kind of agreement was made. The dual sword User ran at their Tokh teammate, who hooked a tail around their waist, spun, and flung them up and through the air.
I wasn’t sure what aspect the dual Sword user was. We had seats close to the walls, but the fighting was so energetic and chaotic that standing still for even a moment meant mortal danger. They tucked into a flip midair and extended back out to stick a landing on the back of the centipede monster. From there, they ran up the back toward the head. I knew how risky and challenging mounting a big monster like that was from my own experience with my first guardian battle. They had mechanical claw grippers built into the footwear that drove metal spikes into the carapace on demand to anchor them in place. They had to use them often to avoid being thrown, but made rapid progress toward the head regardless.
I was sitting on the edge of my seat, leaning forward to try and get a better look at the details when they got to the head. They used some kind of mana technique to coat or imbue their blades. The blade of each sword became fuzzy-looking – the central body still visible, but the edges indistinct. I could feel their mana output spike when they did it, staying elevated across the whole area.
A body enhancement technique as well, maybe?
The swordsman wove their blades through an intricate kata at lightning speed, and the thick armor on the back of the head was being systematically carved away in a crosshatch pattern. The monster reared up like a cobra, trying to buck off the sword User. The caster manifested bands of water that wrapped around the body below the head and anchored to the walls at half a dozen points. The Tokh picked up their downed teammate, slung them over one shoulder, and kept moving while the monster writhed and flailed.
The borg braced, fired a shot off to one side, and started spinning the flail in a widening circle as it reeled out more chain. The crowd went mostly still in anticipation. When the chain was spinning seemingly as fast as it could go, the borg crouched and dashed forward. The arcing path of the cannonball extended past the body of the centipede, and when it came around, it caught on the shell and immediately tightened into a spiral, accelerating as it went. When the chain ran out, and the cannonball hit the shell, it punched a meter-wide crater into the shell, and green-tinted translucent slime erupted like a geyser into the crowd.
The sword User seemed satisfied with the ablation and crouched to drive both blades through the top of the head to the hilt. At roughly the same time, the borg blew steam from its cannon and deployed bracing limbs, retracting the chain and winding it around its round torso at the same time. It snapped taut, the monster held in place by the water cable manifestations. My previous assumptions were correct–the chain links were bladed and spiked along their outer edges. The borg whistled. Sparks shot off its body where the chain scraped against itself. A loud crack, followed by a rapid-fire staccato of crunches, and the chain garroted through the Slithering and took its head off. The dual-sword user jumped free and used a roll to bleed off some of the energy of their landing.
The audience of the arena went ballistic, shouting and stomping. The entire building shook with the commotion in a slightly concerning way. Probably fine. Hopefully.
I saw people clamoring around locations strewn around the seating. I fought to look past the crowd standing and cheering around me–being short really sucked for things like this–and caught a glimpse of what was going on.
There were big conical chutes marked by brightly-colored repair tape, and people were dropping and/or flinging chits into them. I'd assumed they were trash chutes, but apparently they were some kind of tip jar system.
Since I couldn’t see shit over the crowd in a few rows of seating in front of us, I polished off the rest of my ginger beer. I leaned in to Vael and asked, “Which one of that team was open to joining us? Would they have to split their time? ”
Vael shook her head some and leaned down, as the crowd was still going wild with chanting and cheering. “No, not that team, our guy is in the next fight! Last of the arranged fights for the night, before they open the pits to unranked fighters!”
I frowned a little at the news. If they were the last fight of the night, did that mean they were the main attraction? I doubted our ability to attract someone at the peak of their career. Maybe Diving was less dangerous than this, or better paid? I couldn't imagine the benefits were better — you got to spend every night in your own bed instead of carving up alien wildlife.