The behemoth of a creature didn’t care about Grey’s insults and couldn’t seem to hear them talking at all. It just dragged them all forward and up a set of stairs until the howl of a crowd threatened to shatter their ear drums.
It seemed they now knew just what was causing the distant noise. But that didn’t really change much about their current situation.
The familiar feel of sand crunching beneath his feet overloaded what little was left of Grey’s sensory bandwidth. He was starting to understand why his gramp’s always turned down the music when he was looking for an address. It was damn hard to focus when everything was so fucking loud.
The group was dragged to a central location where their chains were tied to pillars. Between them, there was an even larger pillar, a cedar block that went up probably 25 or 30 meters high. Dangling from them were a set of keys Grey presumed were supposed to unlock their chains.
There was just enough slack to get them up that high. Their original chain links had been tied to a new linkage of chains bolted down to the stumps in front of them. The problem was that it looped around in a not so straightforward clump that would probably be a nightmare to untangle.
Grey looked up from the situation in front of him.
Was this Instance really just about surviving to the end?
Well, Baron Giyoto had said that the armor under Globb’s shop had only needed one more item to finish it off. So there was definitely a possibility that the reward for reaching the end of these death matches was that.
Grey’s eyes landed on a throne. In a cut-off and elevated section of the coliseum, a man with the pelt of a white lion drawn across his shoulders sat with what had to be the most pristine facial hair Grey had ever seen. Grey would have sworn it was cut out of blocks of crushed metal if there wasn’t just the faintest shift every time the man breathed or the wind passed by.
The man perfectly radiated the form of a king, right down to the blue eye he sported that seemingly pierced through everything.
The gaze of the king shifted and landed on Grey.
"You have all waited long and hard!" a voice boomed. If Grey had been paying attention to anyone but the king, he would have noticed that the speaker was yet another floating mask of green, one with very different tribal etchings and tattoos than The Great Udon, but someone who was surely of an identical race nonetheless.
The king’s gaze was the greatest threat to Grey right now. As such, to him, everyone else might as well have been background noise.
"BEGIN!"
Grey’s pupils constricted and he turned back to the situation at hand.
The other group was already moving. They moved around the pole in relation to one another, sometimes jumping over each other’s chains and sometimes ducking under.
The faster they moved, the more their chains unraveled.
Grey raised an eyebrow and looked at the chains in front of him, wondering how he should do this.
This situation was too odd. He could think of three ways to get out of these chains without doing any of that nonsense immediately. But whether he should was another matter entirely.
It seemed like the only enemies in this place were whoever they put right in front of you, but was that true?
Grey wasn’t exactly a fan of following rules as they were in the first place, but considering there were literally thousands of people in the crowd and at least several dozen actual warriors under the king, there was no way he was cutting his way out of here.
"Move! Move! Move!" the mohawk man roared at his teammates. They weren’t paying attention to Grey at all, and that focus paid off.
In just half a minute, they had untangled all of the chains.
"I’ll throw Megan!" the second in the group spoke. But he and the mohawk man yanked on their chains, choking it up until their hands were practically tied right to the stump.
This gave Megan’s chain the most slack.
The second man laid his back on the stump and put his feet into the air. It would have almost been funny had their expressions not been so serious.
Megan jumped up and the soles of her feet met the man’s. But their knees bent together.
BANG.
A subtle pulse of wind sent Megan shooting up like a rocket. She was past the peak of the pillar in an instant, but that seemed to be part of their plans.
Megan’s wrists shook and her arms moved in a wide circle, causing the chain link to wrap around the body of the tall cedar pillar.
BANG.
Her arms yanked and her feet slammed into the pillar in unison, both forming leverage points that kept her tied tight to the body of the pillar.
Without missing a beat, she yanked the keys off the pillar and began her slide down, all the potential splinters and wood burns being taken on by the chain links.
Before she had even hit the ground, she threw the keys down to her two teammates. By the time she had hit the ground, the two of them were free and already rushing over to unchain her.
Grey had to admit, the teamwork was seamless. He had seen teamwork like that before with Sabrina and that Russian guy, whatever his name was. He guessed that life and death made pretty good teachers.
The teams that managed to make it this far, by default, were good at working together. The dysfunctional ones had probably already died in the tutorial.
He bet the amped up brains all these abilities were giving them definitely helped too.
Megan and her two teammates all turned to Grey at once. There was a flash of pity in their eyes for a short moment before they burst forward, the roar of the crowd thirsting for blood.