Resting, taking the time to check his wounds, watching as they healed. The noise and bustle of the fighting pits were nothing kind to his ears, nor easy on anyone's mind. That this would be their means for discerning a leader by champion didn’t bode well for the future. Looking around, gauging the strength and weakness of what could be competition, Mettion, so assured and reassured in his potential and capabilities, saw nothing that seemed to pose too significant or insurmountable a threat.
A being he had seen earlier, easily triumphing over his opponent as well, was approaching with obvious intent and urgency. Unlike the other cruelly wretched beasts there in appearance and movement, he had an easy way with speech and gesture that seemed out of place given his horrific overall tone. Speaking so clearly and with such nuance, so similar yet so different. So many centaur-like creatures in one place was more than unusual. It was obvious they had a love for them. A need born from the form, he supposed—strength, speed, maneuverability, endurance, multiple limbs. One could make a much worse choice.
Makerus was his name, if memory served him correctly. A strange amalgamation of beast, even stranger than most they had slain. A Gorgon-like, snakeish creature for his top half. Grays and black, scaly, large, crude, and monstrous-clawed hands. Muscular forearms, large, rounded shoulders, intentional movements underlying casual grace. The head and the face, though, were the most unsettling. A somewhat human face, the eyebrows being so unappealingly prominent—like a viper's, that horn-like crusted smear jutted forward over its eyes.
Pale yellow, bloodshot, and gooey-looking orbs of insanity and chaos. The vertical, snake-like slits, dark and wide, only made it all that much worse. The strange combination of rounded zebra ears with their black-and-white stripes poking out from underneath a writhing head of snakes where his hair should have been. Smaller than most Gorgons, but having the coral snake-like quality of their leadership and elite classes, these nasty little serpents hissed and bit each other in their crowded torment. It was all just too contrasting and bizarre to seem a reality. His lower body was almost exactly that of a plain or common zebra, but the stripes seemed to be reversed in pattern—meaning white where there should have been black, and vice versa.
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Mettion’s instinct was to back away, fade into the crowd, and try to avoid interacting with this… this thing. He shuffled his panther-like lower half through the dense crowd, crouching down, trying to show through body language that he wasn’t interested in conversing. But at once, Makerus was upon him.
He said, nonchalantly and without preamble, “Well, would you look at that? He’s gonna try to use a whip.”
That did get Mettion’s attention. “What, did you say a whip? You can’t be serious—almost everyone here has at least light mail or boiled leather. You got me. I must see this.”
Makerus continued, “Well, you can see he does have confidence in his ability.”
“True, yes, but a whip here, in all of this?”
Other creatures moved out of his way as he turned about with his arm extended, moving his fingers from towards his chest outward in a gesture that said all of this and everyone here.
They sidled up next to one another, looking down upon the fighting pits. The dirt and patches of hard-packed sand gouged with small puddles of blood drying in the sun. A light breeze. No shade.
There stood a bizarre, multi-armed scaly creature, and sure enough, in one of his hands—a whip.
“Well, he’s either the most foolish thing to think he would stand a chance, or he’s the greatest whip man the world has ever seen. Let us chance a wager.”
The Naga's sinewy, scaled body twisted like a coiled spring, his three-fingered hands gripping a long, cruel slaver’s whip, which he snapped once for show. Confidence radiated from him, perhaps more than the situation warranted.
Across from him, the young and spry Minotaur took a single step back, his dilapidated shield raised just enough for the whip’s crack to glance off harmlessly. The Naga hissed, snapping the whip again, but the Minotaur moved swiftly, closing the gap with terrifying speed.
The Naga’s eyes widened as his free hand darted to a curved dagger at his belt, but the short sword was already slicing through the base of the leather whip and continuing upward, cleaving into the Naga’s long neck and out through the other side of his fanged jaw.
The crowd fell silent for a beat, then erupted in cheers as the Minotaur stepped back, blood dripping from his blade. The fight was over in seconds, a brutal testament to substance over spectacle.
“Oh, never mind—he’s already dead.”
They both laughed a little at the sheer stupidity of a whip in such a deadly, high-stakes environment. Makerus quipped, “See now, had he even a single friend like me, someone to challenge him with a simple question like, ‘Are you sure that’s the best choice?’…”
