Chapter 15
The staging area reeked of recycled oxygen and industrial floor cleaner overlaid with the sharp, metallic tang of raw adrenaline.
Raaze leaned his head back and breathed in deeply. It was the exact same smell in every warball stadium across the galaxy, from the glittering orbital platforms of Lathar Prime to the dirt and metal arenas on Tarviisa.
He sat motionless on the metal bench. The temporary staging box was a narrow cage of reinforced mesh paneling designed to keep the teams separated before the bloodbath began. The wire rattled violently as a brawler in the adjacent team cage slammed his massive shoulders into the divider.
“You’re dead meat, wildcard,” a guttural voice snarled through the chain link.
Raaze didn’t bother to turn his head and look. The brawler was a distraction. Nothing more than noise.
The lightweight impact-armor he’d fabricated on the H4-RPY was locked around his ribs.
It wasn’t as robust as his old kit, but that didn’t matter.
As a wildcard, he needed to be lighter on his feet anyway.
He turned his head, settling the neck plate in place as the shoulder guards pressed down.
Reaching up, he tightened the bicep straps until they felt just right.
The kit wasn’t custom-fitted. There were no internal micro-weave sections to stop weapon penetration and no cooling mesh, but it didn’t matter.
He glanced down at the mask resting in his lap. The black visor stared back. It was a cheap piece of trall from a station vendor, completely devoid of team colors or any of his former sponsorships. A blank face for a male who didn’t exist.
Under the layers of armor and the tight leather of his jacket, the data chip bit into his side. It was snug inside a zip pocket of his compression shirt, pressed right up against his ribs. A tiny, hard rectangle, it dug a corner into his flesh every single time he breathed deeply.
Good.
He needed the pain… the physical anchor. Needed something sharp and real to keep him grounded here, in this place, because his brain was currently still in a small cargo ship burning fuel in the opposite direction.
Cait was gone.
The thought sat in his chest like a lead weight. It wasn’t sharp; sharp would’ve been easier. Sharp meant he could push back against it and use the anger during the game.
This was just… heavy. A dull, grinding weight against his ribs every time he inhaled.
She was gone. She’d left the chip on the desk and walked away from him without looking back. And the worst part, the part that kept circling through his brain like a draanthing vulture, was that he couldn’t even blame her.
He deserved this and everything that had happened.
He’d told her the truth, told her exactly why he’d picked her on that slabcrete landing pad. He’d thought she was weak, an easy target… Just a desperate little human female, who’d be happy to do anything he wanted, just because he asked.
But she wasn’t. He realized that now.
He’d thought she was plain and uninteresting, and he’d assumed that meant weak.
He closed his eyes and groaned. But his little Cait was anything but weak. She was probably the strongest person he’d ever met.
She hadn’t yelled. Hadn’t pleaded or begged. Instead, she’d just made a decision, set the data chip on the console, and ordered him off her ship. She’d cut him out of her life between one heartbeat and the next, and given him ten minutes to clear out.
He hadn’t even needed three.
He’d thought he was walking into this arena for himself. Thought today was the day he ripped the mask off on the center dial, held up the stolen data, and loudly cleared his name.
He’d wanted his life back. Wanted the multi-million credit contracts under the stadium floodlights. Wanted to look Vikrav R’Tev in the eye and watch the arrogant draanthic realize he couldn’t bury the best striker in the league.
No, it was more than that. He’d wanted to hear the crowd roaring his name; he’d wanted to feel like a god again.
And it was all trall.
That life belonged to a dead male, not him. The celebrity who smiled for endorsement holos, and lived in penthouses had died the second the heavy doors of the prison transport locked him in. He just hadn’t realized it. He wasn’t getting that male back. He didn’t want to be that male anymore.
All he wanted was to be back in that small cabin on a human ship, wrapped around the most beautiful female he’d ever met.
He took a deep breath, and the chip stabbed him gleefully in the ribs again.
Cait was gone. And without her, the victory felt hollow before he’d even earned it.
So make it mean something else, the voice in the back of his head murmured. For once in your life, do something for someone else, not yourself.
He pressed his hand over his ribs, over the chip. The players who’d died on the pitch, who’d had ‘accidents’, and the ones who had disappeared… they’d never get to stand on a pitch again. He looked up, his gaze focusing on the door to the cage and the ramp up to the pitch.
Someone had to speak for them. He would speak for them.
And that was enough. It would have to be. If he couldn’t have his kelarris, then he would spend what was left of his life trying to get justice for those who had had everything ripped from them.
Grabbing the roll of athletic tape off the bench, he wound it around his wrist in tight, overlapping strips. Three wraps, then four, then a tuck and pull that locked it in place. His fingers moved without thought, muscle memory taking over while his mind drifted somewhere far away.
He flexed his wrists, testing the limits of the restriction. Perfect.
Bending, he reached for the heavy combat boots. The laces were thick, woven synthetics meant to withstand plasma burns and friction shearing on the pitch. Left foot first. Cross the laces and double-knot. Tuck the slack in the upper housing to prevent grabbing, and then tape everything down.
The ritual never changed. His body knew the steps even when his head was an utter, draanthing mess.
He dragged in a deep, slow breath. His quad muscles twitched, tight and coiled, primed and ready. He was a warball player. No falsified medical file or exile could take that away from him.
Straightening up, he held his taped hands out in the harsh overhead glare and stared at the white gauze binding his knuckles.
Before he could stop it, memory blindsided him.
The defiant line of her chin in that cleaning closet…
the frantic thud of her heart, and the softness of her mouth under his.
Her red hair tangled through his fingers…
her back arching on the narrow bunk mattress and the sharp little gasps she made right before she came apart in his arms. But it was the look in her eyes—wide, dark, and full of trust—that almost brought him to his knees.
His throat seized as a hard, jagged knot choked off his air. Clenching his jaw, he ground his teeth into his bottom lip until he tasted the hot copper snap of his own blood.
He couldn’t take her onto the pitch. If he did, if he let his mind stay in that heaven of a cramped bunk on a freighter light-years from here, he was a dead male.
Warball didn’t tolerate split focus. The game punished distraction with broken bones and ruptured organs.
He squeezed his eyes shut and locked it all down.
He’d had a lot of practice at that. Compartmentalization wasn’t just a skill on Parac’Norr, it was survival.
You learned to box up the things that hurt and shove them into a corner of your mind where they couldn’t reach you. Otherwise, they would eat you alive.
The entrance music started. Low at first…
just a rumbling bass note that vibrated through the floor and up into his bones.
Then the drums kicked in, a driving rhythm that matched the acceleration of his pulse.
The other instruments layered over it, building and building toward the moment when the tunnel doors would open, and the crowd would see the players for the first time.
Opening his eyes, he picked up the mask.
He was ready.
The stadium lights were blinding.
Not the welcoming brightness he remembered, but interrogation-room bright… a harsh white glare designed to expose every flaw and magnify every failure.
The noise of the crowd rolled down from the tiered seating in waves, a physical pressure against his eardrums, and the painted field stretched out before him like a green ocean he’d once commanded.
Raaze stepped out of the tunnel, and the laughter started straight away. It rippled through the nearest sections, the cheap seats where the die-hard fans sat close enough to see the players sweat.
He knew what they saw: a wildcard. Some nobody in borrowed armor and a plain mask, walking onto the pitch as if he belonged there.
“Look at this draanthic!” someone bellowed from the front row, voice cracking with glee. “Thinks he’s hot trall in hand-me-down plates!”
Laughter exploded, feeding on itself until the whole section shook with it. Ignoring it, Raaze kept his shoulders loose and his chin high, the way he’d done a thousand times before when the roar had been for him instead of against him.
“Hey, Mask-boy! Where’s your real kit?” another voice jeered. “Or did they pull you from the draanthing trash heap?”
He didn’t flinch. Not with every set of eyes in the stadium locked on him as he headed across the turf.
“Wildcard, my ass!” A fat male in the third row stood up, waving his drink so it sloshed over the rim. “This is what they send us? Some draanthing scrub who couldn’t hack it on the practice squad?”
The insults piled on, faster and uglier, each one sharper than the last. They called him fraud. Pretender. Washed-up nobody. Someone even shouted that he looked like the kind of male who’d draanth his own sister for a taste of fame.
Raaze’s jaw tightened behind the mask. Keep laughing, you pieces of trall.