The Language of Violence
Her evolution into an orc had made her something more than what she once was—more muscle, more rage, more survival instinct—but in the arena, it meant almost nothing. The pit did not bow to orcish strength. It devoured it.
Fangs and fury were common currency here, cheap and spent quickly.
What reigned in the arena was something colder, crueler. Precision masked in savagery. Brilliance buried beneath butchery.
The monsters that fought here weren't brawlers—they were scholars of destruction, engineers of agony. Every movement was calculated, every scream a chord in their symphony of carnage. They had studied pain like others studied magic. Learned its shape, its weight, its pressure points. They had turned killing into an art form, and Eliana? She was a child staring at a cathedral of gore, unable to read the scripture etched in sinew and broken bone.
She watched from the shadows as a bipedal creature—part goblin, part something fouler—dislocated its own shoulder to escape a grapple, only to twist behind its opponent and rip out its throat with rusted iron claws. The crowd howled, not because they were shocked, but because they had expected it. Demanded it. Eliana barely breathed.
The ground beneath her had soaked in so much blood it was more rot than stone, a sponge of flesh-memories. It stank of sweat, decay, and the breath of corpses too stubborn to lie still. The air was thick with screams, but none of them were new. They echoed like the whispers of ghosts, long dead but still watching.
She felt them. Felt them watching her.
Every time someone died in that pit, the crowd did not mourn—they fed. Not on meat or marrow, but on fear. On humiliation. On the slow, clumsy deaths of those who still believed violence was just a means to survive.
But survival was not enough.
Survival was for prey.
The ones who rose here, who ruled here, weren't those who clung to life with desperation—they were those who danced with death, who seduced it and strangled it in the dark. The arena didn't crown survivors. It crowned monsters.
Eliana knew now: she was not strong enough.
Not yet.
She had come to the end of the world as she knew it—where hunger, fear, and cunning had brought her this far—but the path forward required more than instinct. It required education. Discipline. Cruelty.
It required a new language.
She didn't just need power. She needed to understand it. Not as an emotion, not as a feeling of superiority, but as a structure—a living thing with limbs of strategy and teeth made of horror.
She remembered the Hobgoblin with the ruined jaw who had strangled an ogre with his own entrails. She remembered the eyeless brute who fought with silence, never once making a sound even as he bit out a goblin's throat. She remembered the crowd—how they didn't cheer for strength, but for cleverness. For theater. For the ones who made death into a spectacle.
She had the bones. The rage. The hunger.
What she lacked was fluency.
She needed a teacher. Someone who would not coddle, who would not hesitate to break her if it made her stronger. Someone who had spent years bleeding in this pit and come out the other side as a god of gore.
She needed a monster.
And the arena had plenty of them.
Days passed like dying breaths. Filthy and slow. Eliana slept in a nest of bones and torn cloth, if she slept at all. Hunger gnawed at her from the inside, more savage than ever, as if her evolving body craved more than just sustenance—it craved carnage. The shadows around her whispered, and the air stank of wet metal and despair. Time lost meaning.
Then they came for her.
Two malformed goblins dragged her from her corner, silent and sharp-toothed, their eyes fogged by whatever fungus or madness ruled their minds. They said nothing as they pulled her through the stone corridors of the under-arena, past barred cells and meat hooks, past a mound of chewed bones still slick with marrow. The walls pulsed. She could swear they breathed.
And then, she was thrown to her knees before him.
Gorruk.
He didn't sit. He loomed.
A tower of scars and sinew, stitched together by battle and bound with the weight of slaughter. His armor was a patchwork of rot and ruin—troll hide, dwarven steel, goblin skulls lashed together with barbed wire and black hair. The iron cleaver at his side was too grotesque to be a weapon and too personal to be a tool. It was a statement. A legacy. A promise.
He stared at her without blinking. His face was a mask of brutality—jaw cracked and re-healed wrong, tusks filed down to serrated points, one eye milky white with a vertical scar running through it like a split fruit. He didn't look at her like a person. He looked at her like a carcass with potential.
"You want power?" he asked. No, grated. His voice was rusted metal being torn apart by bare hands.
Eliana didn't answer. Not yet.
He stepped forward, and the ground beneath him shuddered. There was a silence in the chamber now, thick and deliberate, the kind of silence that follows a funeral pyre. It knew it was about to be broken.
Gorruk's shadow swallowed hers as he leaned in, nostrils flaring.
"I've gutted things with more fight than you," he rasped. "But you've got the look. The look of someone who lost everything and came back wrong."
He pointed a clawed, broken finger toward the pit entrance behind her. Beyond it, faintly, the sounds of the arena still echoed—shouts, metal, pain.
"You want to evolve?" he continued. "Then evolve. You'll fight. You'll bleed. You'll kill. You'll die—and if you're lucky, you'll crawl back."
Eliana swallowed bile and fear and pain. She said nothing. She couldn't. Her tongue felt sewn to the roof of her mouth. Her mind screamed, Run. Her body whispered, Submit. But something deeper… something lower… hungrier… rose instead.
It was the part of her that had tasted blood and not spit it out. The part that wanted to tear off its own name and wear a new one like a crown of thorns.
She forced herself to stand.
Her legs trembled like newborn things. Her nails had punctured her palms. Her vision blurred. But still she stood. Still she looked him in the eye.
"I won't run," she said, voice low, cracked. "Not again."
Gorruk grinned.
It wasn't a smile. It was an autopsy scar stretching across his face.
"Good," he said. "Then let's carve the coward out of you."
Baptism in Blood
They threw her into the pit like an offering to some unholy god.
It was an insult. A desecration. And the ground beneath her feet felt alive, as though it could taste the blood that would soon soak it. Her body, bruised and trembling, hit the stone floor with a sickening thud. She barely had time to rise before the weight of her opponent's presence pressed down on her. The air felt thick with the stench of death. Of rot.
Her opponent stood across the pit. Lean. Scarred. The silhouette of something older than goblins—something that had lived far too long in this pit of madness. His skin was a mottled gray, his eyes bloodshot, flickering with the kind of feral hunger that only the arena could breed. His teeth were filed into jagged fangs, and his blade—twisted, blackened, and glinting like the promise of pain—dangled loosely in his hands.
The crowd's murmur swelled into an eager crescendo, like the clamor of vultures anticipating their feast.
The goblin smiled.
It was not a grin of joy. It was a grin of hunger. Of certainty.
The bell rang. A slow, deliberate toll that echoed through her skull, marking the death of her former self.
The goblin moved in a blur—quicker than she expected. A flash of silver. And then pain. A slash, deep and cruel, across her side. The jagged edge of the blade opened her flesh like a canvas for the blood to spill.
The crowd erupted into screeches. Laughter. Mockery. They wanted to see her fall. They wanted to see the failure, the weakness.
Eliana staggered back, her vision swimming, the edges of her consciousness fraying. Her blood pooled beneath her, dark and hot. But it wasn't fear that consumed her. It wasn't even pain. It was something far darker. A storm, rising deep within her. A hunger she'd never known.
Her eyes locked onto the goblin as it darted back, its grin widening. The crowd's laughter rang in her ears, but it was a distant, muffled thing now. Far away.
She screamed—not in fear, not in pain—but in rage. A guttural, primal thing that reverberated through the pit's walls.
Her body surged forward. Raw. Animal. Her claws slashed through the air, a blur of fury. She didn't care about form. She didn't care about finesse. Only violence. Only survival.
The goblin tried to dodge, but she was faster now. Her muscles burned with a new kind of strength. She anticipated its feints, turned into its blows, and absorbed them like a punishment she no longer feared. She felt it—the rhythm of the fight, the dance of death—and she was beginning to understand its language. It wasn't grace. It wasn't skill.
It was brutality.
She reached him. One quick motion. A clawed hand wrapped around his throat, squeezing the life from him.
The goblin's eyes bulged, his mouth working to scream, to beg. But it was too late. She slammed him into the ground with a sickening crack.
The crowd inhaled as one, sensing the end. The anticipation was suffocating.
"End it!" someone howled, their voice rising above the rest like a beast calling for its kill.
Eliana didn't hesitate. Her fist came down in one swift motion, a final, crushing blow to the goblin's skull. The sickening crunch of bone beneath her knuckles sent a thrill down her spine, the vibrations of his skull breaking echoing in the pit.
For a moment, the arena fell silent. The sound of her breath, ragged and broken, was all that remained.
Then, the crowd erupted.
They screamed. They howled. They clapped and stomped, their frenzied applause ringing in her ears. They wanted this. They wanted more.
But all Eliana felt was the burning rage coursing through her veins, the aftertaste of violence lingering like acid on her tongue.
She had done it. She had survived.
But she had crossed a line now. She wasn't the girl who had been thrown into the underworld. She wasn't the exile clinging to scraps of hope. She was something else. Something darker.
Something hungrier.
She looked down at her bloodied hands, the remnants of the goblin's skull still clinging to her fingers. Her claws trembled, not from fear, but from something deeper. A twisted kind of satisfaction.
And as the crowd roared, she knew one thing for certain.
She was no longer Eliana. She was something far worse. Something that could never go back.
Becoming the Beast
Silence. Just for a breath. A heartbeat.
And then, the roar came. A tidal wave of approval. Of bloodlust. Of glee. The sound thundered through the pit, a cacophony of screams and howls from the crowd that felt like claws digging into her skin, ripping through her body. But she didn't flinch. She couldn't. Not now.
She stood above the corpse, her blood soaked into the dirt, mingling with the dark stain of her enemy's. Her chest heaved as she breathed, the rhythm of her pulse deafening in her ears. Her hands were shaking—not from fear. No. She wasn't afraid.
It was something darker. Something that made her stomach twist with an awful pleasure. Excitement. A rush. A high she'd never known. The scent of blood, the taste of death on her lips. The savage thrill of it all. She had chosen this. Every slash. Every strike. Every drop of blood spilled was by her hand.
And it felt good.
Gods, it felt good.
Her eyes swept across the bloodied arena, the roars of the crowd washing over her like a tidal wave. She didn't see them. Not anymore. She didn't see the faces or the twisted eyes of the goblins. The creatures in the stands who cheered for her like she was some circus freak. All she saw was the body at her feet. A shattered thing. A broken vessel. And a reminder of what she was now. A predator.
Gorruk's eyes met hers from across the pit. His face was as hard as stone, but there was a flicker of something in his gaze. Something like recognition.
He nodded once. Not approval. Not praise. Just recognition.
She had begun to understand the language.
And with that simple gesture, something shifted inside her. Something that had been soft, that had been human, snapped and broke. It was like watching a vine strangle a flower. The delicate threads of who she had been—Eliana, the exiled daughter of Lord Theron, the goblin who had once sought vengeance for her fallen kin—died, shriveled up, and disappeared into the dust of the arena.
In its place, something far darker, far colder, began to stir.
A creature of vengeance and fire. A beast with claws coated in blood. It wasn't a goddess. It wasn't a warrior.
It was a predator.
The pit had taken so much from her—her innocence, her morality, her doubts—but it had also given her something else. A fire. A hunger that burned deeper than anything she'd ever known. The same fire that now raged in her chest, lighting the way forward. This wasn't survival anymore.
This was ascension.
Her hands clenched, and she felt the bones of the dead goblin still crackling beneath her fingers. She could hear them. Not the crowd. Not the roars. No, it was the sound of something else. Whispers. Dark, echoing voices that slipped into her ears like poison. Words she could not understand yet, but she could feel them wrapping around her heart.
Kill. Consume. Rise.
The beast inside her shifted again, pressing harder against her ribs, pushing its way out. It could already taste the power, and the taste was more intoxicating than anything she had ever known.
The bell rang again. But this time, it was different. It wasn't the slow toll of her first fight. It wasn't the call to arms.
It was the ringing of a sword. A call to war.
She didn't wait for Gorruk's command. She didn't wait for anything. With a growl low in her throat, she stepped forward, feeling the ground tremble beneath her feet, feeling the weight of the crowd's anticipation press against her back like a hand urging her forward.
The pit had given her more than just power—it had given her purpose. And as her eyes scanned the next group of enemies thrown into the arena, she felt the final strands of her humanity snap.
She was ready to become the beast.
And the world would kneel at her feet.