Novel Full Chapter 616: Tools...? Who
Chapter 616: Tools…? Who
“So what do you want us to do?” Almond asked.
The five princes were not subtle about what they wanted.
They laid it out cleanly, without ceremony or pretence, the way people do when they have never needed to soften anything in their lives. They wanted fighters. Not just any fighters, but fighters who could perform, who could read a crowd, who could execute with enough style and enough brutality to reflect glory back onto the kingdom they represented. The Slave Mayhem Game was held once every month, and in it, all one thousand kingdoms of the bottom realm’s third layer sent their best slaves to compete across a vast, purpose-built battlefield that stretched one hundred kilometers in radius. The kingdoms watched. The upper floors watched. Bets were placed in numbers that could buy cities, and the prestige earned by the top-performing kingdoms lasted through the entire following month like a crown worn in public. The five princes, each representing a different kingdom among the thousand, wanted that crown. More specifically, they wanted Almond and his group to hand it to them.
Almond listened to all of it without expression.
When they finished, he asked one question.
“What do we get?”
The fox beastfolk prince tilted his head slightly, his red tattoos catching the ambient light. He had the look of someone who found the question amusing, not because it was foolish, but because it was exactly what he had expected. “The top one hundred slaves to clear the final stage of the game walk out of here with their slave status removed,” he said. “New titles. New positions. Offered by the kingdom they represented.” He paused, letting that settle. “That’s the rule. Has been for centuries. Not our rule, so don’t bother trying to negotiate around it.”
“Then we’re in,” Almond said.
No hesitation.
No consultation with the others.
He didn’t need to. The thought had already moved between them the way it always did, quiet and efficient, reaching everyone before he even opened his mouth. They had all arrived at the same conclusion without a word spoken aloud. These princes were convinced they were acquiring useful tools. Expensive ones, perhaps, with more personality than most, but tools nonetheless. The kind of thinking that came from growing up at the top of a system so old and so layered that the people inside it had stopped questioning whether the structure was real or simply inherited arrogance dressed in architecture. Five crown princes, each powerful in their own right, each with resources, connections, and reach that extended far beyond this floor. They were exactly the kind of ladder that a group of people trying to move upward without drawing the wrong kind of attention needed to step on first.
’Perfect morons,’ Natalia thought again, and the sentiment passed around the group like a shared joke at a private table.
The octopus-headed man, whose name turned out to be Verath, handled the logistics. He was the kind of functionary that powerful people kept close because he was capable enough to be useful and restrained enough not to become a threat, a combination rarer than it sounded. He explained the structure of the game with the practiced ease of someone who had described it many times. The bottom realm of the third layer was known, not with any particular affection, as the Playground of Losers. One thousand kingdoms divided it, each one sitting above a collection of slave cities and arenas, all of them feeding into a system that had been running so long it had started to feel like geography rather than design. Every slave on the third layer lived somewhere in this bottom realm. That was the rule. Work, fight, perform, and if you were exceptional enough to reach the top of the monthly game, you earned your way out.
The game itself was not complicated in structure, only in execution.
All participating slaves started from one end of the hundred-kilometer battlefield. The first five kilometers were a safe zone, flat and open, giving everyone time to spread out, assess, and make choices before anything began in earnest. After that came the dimensional veils. Colored barriers stretched across the field at intervals, each one marking the entrance to a different game hidden inside a pocket of altered space. The slaves could choose which veil to enter. No one was forced. But every veil past the first safe zone was a small world of its own, governed by its own rules, its own terrain, and its own violence, and inside those worlds, death was real. No revival. No exceptions. Slaves were permitted to fight each other only within the game spaces, not in the open rest zones, which created a strange kind of enforced civility in the corridors between danger, the sort of peace that existed only because everyone was saving their worst for the right moment.
After the first line of veils, another five-kilometer resting zone waited.
Then a second line of veils, different games, different odds.
Another resting zone.
Then the third and final line.
The first one hundred slaves to break through the far end of the final veil line were the winners. It did not matter how they got there, only that they did, and that they were still breathing when they arrived. The game rewarded efficiency, adaptability, raw power, and the willingness to make ruthless decisions quickly. It was, as Verath described it with a small measure of understated appreciation, comprehensive.
The game was in one day.
“You’ll be registered under the joint banner of our five kingdoms,” the prince with the crystal horn said, his voice even and precise. “We’ve coordinated before. The others do it as well. There’s no rule against coalition representation.”
“Convenient,” Ainen said lightly.
“Practical,” the prince replied without missing a beat. “Let other underestimate you, and grab the victory for yourselves, and us.”
The day that followed passed in a controlled kind of motion. The princes provided quarters that were a significant improvement over anything the slave designation would normally permit, a fact none of them acknowledged openly, but all of them noticed.