Chapter 2 – Goodbye Gorelion
The thing about growing up on Seraphim was that it positioned itself as being against the rest of the universe.
Our forebears left Earth because it was wicked.
They pointed themselves at some distant stars that looked likely and matched some scripture – I had tried to make myself forget as much of it as possible, which meant I pretended I couldn't recite the chapter and verse backwards and while drunk – and then, when they arrived and realized that this corner of the universe was very much occupied, they decided that they'd been sent all the way over here to minister to the alien heathens.
And when those heathens turned out to be made up of dozens of species and hundreds of cultures with, I don't know, probably thousands of religious traditions of their own, the powers-that-be at Seraphim decided that the best thing to do was close ourselves off and basically ignore everyone and everything else, except for the occasional trader.
They set up off a moon that was uninhabited, unfolded the station, did some light terraforming, and called it a day. Or manifest destiny.
So when I had escaped, even though I'd lived my whole life in this corner of the universe, even though these stars were the ones I'd grown up with, even though I'd been siphoning media from the datasphere from the moment I realized I could hack, I had these giant holes in my cultural literacy.
So when people were gossiping in the den about this tournament and were thrilled at its return, they never included the pertinent details – and there was generally so much going on in my life that I didn't think to stop and search for details on every reference that went over my head.
Which means that when Alet Trident outlined the whole thing, I will admit that I thought it sounded – well, fake as shit, and incredibly stupid, and like it should definitely be illegal.
The Galactic Tournament of Superiority, like its pompous name suggested, was an initiative of a ketaar media conglomerate whose name I didn't have a hope of pronouncing, loosely based on ancient, blood-drenched tournaments that used to take place on the voltaar and ketaar homeworlds millennia ago.
Realizing that they were sitting on a media goldmine, the media conglomerate had revamped the concepts for modern viewing (and gambling) audiences.
The premise was simple enough: contestants were shoved into an arena for an hour a day where they battled each other until there was only one person left standing.
It was an absolute media circus, with the contestants living together in the week or so leading up to the Tournament's official commencement, and I couldn't decide if that was brilliant – there was a lot of footage of terse conversations and sparring and death glares across the training ring – or an incredibly vapid way to fill dead space while waiting for contestants to be eliminated.
But it seemed like the lead-up was almost as important to viewers as the actual bloodbath.
There were already viewing parties scheduled around station, which would basically involved hunkering down and living in a club for two weeks – honestly, it sounded like my idea of hell.
Well, after the hell that I expected I'd get to experience actually being in the fucking thing.
But there was a reason it might be a hell worth enduring: whoever made it all the way through the Tournament got their pick of some ridiculous prizes, like an entire asteroid, a palace on Alessia-IV, a brand new battle cruiser with three (three!) on-board arcades, and other things that seemed almost offensively over-the-top.
Or, of course, the most popular prize: a staggeringly massive amount of credits.
It might be easy to gloss over the battle until there's only one left standing part.
And admittedly, when I saw the absolutely ludicrous sum total of credits on offer for the victor, I didn't fully register what battling might entail.
Alet Trident agreed to front me the entrance fee – after all, in for a penny, in for a pound; if I owed Seraphim more than I'd made in a decade, what was another few years' worth of wages owed to my eyestalk-y patron?
– and we submitted my application, which involved signing a whole lot of lines and putting my thumbprint on a whole lot of dense paragraphs, and then when I returned to the privacy of my own bunk, I started my research in earnest.
It took me about ten minutes of poking around videos of old tournaments to realize that battling until the last person standing meant, well, a lot of death and dismemberment.
I don't know what I'd been expecting. Tapping out?
Yielding, like knights on a battlefield?
Some contestants tried; they were often decapitated, which was a very cool and normal thing to watch before I tried to fall asleep.
I made it another 20 minutes down my rabbit hole before I'd had my gut-churning fill of watching different contestants being stabbed, torn apart, or bludgeoned to death while the live arena audience screamed in a violent cacophony.
I slapped my hand hard on my wrist, the hovering video feed vanishing immediately. My heart pounded as I stared blankly at the bunk above mine, my mouth scraped dry. Wedged into my narrow bed, I allowed myself one moment of sheer, desperate panic, heart stuttering frantically against my chest.
I heaved in a long, rattling breath, cold sweat gathering in the small of my back. And then I did what I always did when things got too bad, what had gotten me through years of misery on Seraphim, and what had given me enough courage to make a break for it into the wide dark unknown.
I counted down from five.
Five.
So I might die.
Four.
What was the alternative? Going back to Seraphim? Fuck off, that wasn't happening.
Three.
I could make a run for it, but now that the notice of debt was imminent, I couldn't make it to any port. It was coming, and my name would be out there, and Seraphim would collect.
Two.
Maybe I'd die on the arena sands. Just a blip in the universe. There, and then gone. And what would it matter? Genuinely, why would I care? No one else would.
One.
Besides, what it if worked out? Better to be moving toward something than resigned to nothing. The nothing got us all in the end, no matter what. I could at least try; oblivion would be waiting for me if I failed.
Okay.
I considered the Tournament. It wasn't held often – every six years or so, in cycle with some ketaar lunar eclipse or something because they were nothing if not melodramatic.
This one was set to be especially splashy as the last scheduled Tournament had been cancelled after some sort of political unrest in the region had made a slew of sponsors pull out.
They'd aired a dating show instead with the same contestants, which had been nothing short of disastrous.
The contestants had come for blood; they definitely hadn't been interested in making out instead.
Someone had gotten their tongue bitten off.
So the public was particularly hungry for a Tournament this time around.
The fact that there had also never been a human contestant would only fuel the audience's blood lust: we were known for many things, and being durable and fun to hit were pretty high up there on the list. There were reasons why almost every human who made it off Seraphim ended up as a pit fighter, and it wasn't because our calisthenics classes made us good at fighting.
But we could take hits, bleed dramatically, and get back up and keep going.
I pulled the feed back up and started poking around statistics instead of getting lost in the blood-soaked depths of video compilations.
I knew better than getting all my information from vids.
And the statistics were… well, they weren't promising, but they were slightly better than the endless stream of beheading videos (why were there so many?) led me to believe.
A lot of contestants did yield and they sometimes left with their heads still anchored to their shoulders.
The deaths were memorable, sure, and seemed to make up the whole of the video compilations of Most Epic Moments of the 3.
063 Galactic Tournament of Superiority, NO ADS.
But not everyone died, and it wasn't like that many people entered.
You had to be desperate, or insane, to enter.
Most of the prizes were absurd and not worth risking your life for – unless your life was already on the line.
And mine was. So if I didn't win, if I didn't get those credits, I might as well be dead, because I would throw myself out an airlock before being flown back to Seraphim and stuffed into one of their re-education centres.
I had the element of surprise – so many members of Primus still thought humans were terrifying (see aforementioned dramatic bleeding!) – and I was good with my swords.
Sure, I mostly used them for ceremonial dances that were meant to be sexy instead of deadly, but I could probably figure out how to stab someone instead of seduce them. I was scrappy like that.
It looked like the contestants all ate well, at least; there weren't scanners in the kitchens in the footage from previous Tournaments, so they could probably eat whatever they wanted.
And the accommodations were pretty plush, judging by the footage of the contestants inside of their housing, wandering through bright hallways, sleeping on soft beds, and doing lengths in a pool.
Maybe I'd float in some water before dying. It had been a long fucking time. All that, and free food? Come on.