A sword cut through the air, another answered, and the two blades locked together in a dance of sparks and flashing steel, echoing through the same massive hall where Atlas had brought down the mutant dog. Ten days had passed since he'd started training here. He had stopped fighting bare handed a while ago already, having grown to genuinely enjoy the weapon in his hand.
Atlas was learning at a monstrous pace, an effect he attributed to his Qualia without knowing exactly how it worked. That was precisely why he had convinced himself he needed to impress Isaac. The man alone would have answers. He had to do everything in his power to secure another meeting, one where, this time, he would be the one asking the questions.
He still didn't know when his next arena fight would take place. From what he'd managed to gather from the others, no one really knew. There was no logical pattern to it, one day, out of nowhere, you'd be told, a few days in advance, that you'd be fighting in this arena or that one. Not everyone was called up at the same time, and it all depended on a variety of events, in this arena or another.
Apparently, Isaac left for some arena down south with a few gladiators. That's why there are fewer of us around right now. The south... how many of them will actually come back?
Which meant, in practical terms, that he'd probably have to wait even longer before he got any real chance to ask his questions. That thought alone managed to frustrate him more than any blow he'd taken during training.
The opposing sword feinted, then came slashing at his knees in a vicious strike. Atlas avoided it without even thinking, his body moving a fraction of a second before his mind had finished registering the motion, as though someone else, lodged somewhere behind his own eyes, had made the decision for him. He leapt backward, driving his sword down from above, catching his sparring partner off guard, the rusted, dulled blade grazing dangerously close to the other gladiator's neck.
"I yield," the other man breathed, desperate.
"How the hell did you get this good? A few days ago, you could barely hold the damn thing."
The other gladiator was the young man with the bandaged arms, the one who'd asked him a question during their last shared meal.
Atlas glanced down at his own hand, still gripping the sword's handle, almost expecting to see it shake, or flush red from the effort, or betray some sign, any sign, that this body still fully belonged to him.
It wasn't shaking.
"No idea," he answered finally.
"I know."
The voice cut through the training hall with an authority that didn't even need to try. Both gladiators froze, then turned toward its source, where a giant of a man already stood, arms crossed, as though he'd been watching the whole exchange for some time without either of them noticing.
"Hercles..." the bandaged gladiator murmured, his voice betraying something close to fear.
Atlas, for his part, simply raised an eyebrow, curious rather than intimidated. Isaac had, curiously, not taken his champion south with him, which probably explained why the giant was standing here, alone, in the middle of the communal training hall, the one place where, as a rule, no one ever dared train alongside him.
"Then tell me. Why?" Atlas answered, already abandoning any consideration for his sparring partner.
"The Qualia," Hercles answered, an amused smile drifting across his face, without a trace of the roughness one might expect from a man his size.
"The Qualia...?" the bandaged gladiator repeated, lost. "What's that?"
Atlas, by contrast, felt his own curiosity sharpen at once, already guessing where Hercles was going with this. The other gladiator's confusion only confirmed what he'd started suspecting for a while now.
Looks like that particular knowledge isn't as widespread as I thought.
"Tell me more, then. Hercles, right?" Atlas said, almost as a friendly provocation, knowing perfectly well that here, absolutely everyone knew the name Hercles, and that the man had never once needed to remind anyone of it.
"I could," Hercles answered, his smile widening. "But first."
He stepped forward, and for a moment, Atlas thought he was about to repeat the obvious move, shove the other gladiator aside without ceremony to make his point. Instead, Hercles placed a hand, almost gentle for a man his size, on the bandaged young man's shoulder.
"You mind?" he asked, and it wasn't a rhetorical question.
The gladiator, clearly too startled to do anything else, nodded and stepped aside on his own, no shove required.
"First, a little fun," Hercles continued, finally turning to face Atlas, his eyes sparkling with an almost childlike excitement. "One round, you and me. And then, I'll tell you everything you want to know. As thanks."
Hercles didn't pick up a weapon.
"Bare handed," he said simply, in answer to Atlas's questioning glance at the sword he still held. "That a problem?"
Atlas slowly set the blade against the wall without answering, and dropped into the stance he'd been taught a hundred times over these past days, weight balanced, knees slightly bent.
The first exchange was almost joyful. Atlas threw a quick series of strikes, testing the giant's reflexes, and every time, Hercles simply shifted his weight by an inch, just enough that Atlas's fist or foot met nothing but air. It wasn't calculated slowness. It was an ease that bordered on insulting, the kind of fluidity that only comes from surviving more fights than one could possibly count.
"Not bad," Hercles said, an amused smile on his lips, dodging for the tenth time a strike that, in theory, should have been impossible to anticipate. "For someone who's only been fighting bare handed for two weeks."
Atlas didn't answer. He kept attacking.
The minutes passed, and Atlas's smile, present at first out of pure sporting excitement, began imperceptibly to harden. Every missed strike left behind a frustration that built, layer upon layer, like a rising tide he didn't notice yet. Hercles, for his part, kept dodging, again and again, never once striking back, which somehow made the whole thing more unbearable than if he had.
"You're not going to attack at all?" Atlas finally spat, his voice more strained than he would have liked.
"Why would I?" Hercles tilted his head, his smile still in place, but his eyes had started watching Atlas with a new kind of attention. "You're doing just fine on your own."
It was those words, more than any blow, that made something crack open in Atlas's chest.
He never managed to identify the exact moment the sporting irritation turned into something else. There was simply one more missed strike, and the world seemed to shrink around him until it contained nothing but that stupid, insulting ease with which Hercles kept slipping away from every attack.
Somewhere off to the side, the bandaged gladiator took a step back, without quite knowing why.
Atlas's eyes began to flicker, barely perceptible at first, a royal blue shot through with flashes of red, like an ember someone had just blown on without meaning to.
Hercles stopped smiling immediately.
It wasn't fear that crossed his face. Atlas, in the little clear consciousness still left to him, would have been unable to name it as anything other than sudden recognition, the kind of look a man gives a fire that has just leapt past a wall it was never supposed to cross.
Everything that followed happened in a fraction of a second.
Atlas felt his own rage shift into motion, that same nameless thing that had once made a mutant's ribs implode in the snow, already spreading through his limbs like a river breaking its banks. He wasn't thinking anymore. There was no thought left to speak of, only this raw, visceral certainty that this smile needed to stop existing.
He never saw the fist coming.
Hercles had simply vanished from where he'd been standing a heartbeat earlier and reappeared, with no perceptible transition, right in front of him, his fist already buried in Atlas's stomach with a force that belonged to no ordinary human anatomy.
The air left Atlas's lungs in one violent burst. He left the ground, crossing most of the training hall before slamming into the far wall, the pain exploding through his entire body half a second late, as though even his own suffering had needed a moment to catch up to the speed of what had just happened.
The fight was over.
Atlas lay there, breathless, the world spinning slowly around him. The rage that had filled every fiber of his being moments earlier had evaporated as suddenly as it had come, leaving him hollow, disoriented, unable to piece together with any precision what had happened between the instant he'd felt the anger rise and the moment the stone ceiling had started spinning above his head.
Footsteps approached. Slow, heavy, stripped of every trace of the amusement that had carried them only moments before.
Hercles leaned over him, and for the first time since Atlas had known him, his face carried nothing that resembled, even remotely, lightness.
"Are you out of your mind?" he said simply, his voice low, almost hoarse, carrying something that looked like genuine concern.
Atlas tried to answer. No words would come.
"I don't..." he managed at last, his own voice sounding foreign to him. "I don't know what happened."
Hercles studied him for a long moment, his gaze searching for something on Atlas's face, something he didn't seem to find, or perhaps he found exactly what he'd been dreading.
"Yeah," he said finally, quietly, almost to himself. "That's exactly what worries me."