CHAPTER 8
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Icrouched in a corner, my back pressing against barbed-wire fences that were over fifty feet high.
Only through Loki’s connections had I gotten this corner instead of being dumped in the center of the pit where the slaughter had unfolded.
The pit was enormous, hot, and bloody.
Ares and Lucifer sat in the royal balcony at the top center of the spectator seats, sipping demon brew or Olympian wine and enjoying the best view.
Realizing Hell’s Lord was watching the battle, the contenders grew more excited and bloodthirsty. Overhearing the whispers of guards outside the fences, I’d learned that Lucifer had never attended the trials for the initiates before.
But today both he and Ares had come—to watch me. If I survived to be in the top one hundred, I’d be enrolled in Hell’s Academy as their champion, but if I lost, they’d toss my body away like trash.
I wasn’t sure if the savages here would end me. But if they decapitated me, it was possible that I wouldn’t have the power to grow my head back.
I darted another hateful glance in Lucifer and Ares’s direction. Cold fury burned in me.
My immortal enemies were here.
For a second, all I could think about was finding a way to charge up to the balcony and kill the motherfuckers. But rage wouldn’t help me achieve my goal. It would cripple me. As a “baby Titan,” even if Lucifer and Ares hadn’t bound my power, I wouldn’t be able to take down the god or the devil, let alone the two of them together.
I dug my lower back deep into the sharp fence, letting the spikes cut into my flesh, letting the throbbing pain remind me where I was and to cool my head.
The fences caged me in.
“No initiate has ever fled the pit,” Leviathan had warned me after the dinner last night. “Right outside the fences is a force field. Anyone who touches it dies right away.”
I leashed my rage and forced myself not to look into the royal seats. With cold detachment, I observed the bloodbath in front of me.
Blood flew and spritzed the air as dozens of candidates were stabbed, then killed and dropped in a heap, their parts littering the pit. Hell barely had daylight, but the blood moon overhead shone on the arena, illuminating every detail.
A fight happened to be so close to me that a stream of blood almost reached me. I shifted left and avoided the gray matter that exploded from a witch’s open skull. I didn’t aid anyone. I had no allies here.
All were my enemies.
Within five minutes of being dropped into the arena, five hundred contestants had been cut down to four hundred. Only when one hundred strong remained would a gong toll to signal the end of the culling, and the battle-to-the-death trial would end.
Until then, I hoped I’d be safe here in my corner. But I doubted it.
Several groups led by demon alphas constantly darted their crimson, bloodlust gazes my way. All of them were over seven feet tall with long horns. Most of them carried axes and chainsaws.
It took me a second to figure out why they hadn’t come for me yet. They wanted to spare me for later, allowing me to watch them tear the weaker combatants limb from limb in such a brutal, grotesque manner.