…Before her right arm instantly passes through the gauntlet, pushing away his arm with her palm before kneeing him in the stomach, stunning him.

“Do better,” she mockingly says before reforming her gauntlet and punching Seth dead-on, sending him sliding, still on his feet somehow, backward toward the wall behind him. He crouches down and places his hands in front of him, sliding against his fingertips and shoes as he slowly comes to a stop. Heaving, he holds his chest and falls limp on one knee, obviously injured from the attack.

Kat begins slowly walking up to him, holding her gauntlet up.

“Hey… hey… why aren’t you taking this seriously?” she asks, cocking her head in curiosity. “Maybe… you want to die?”

Something about her was different, the glow of her eyes, her satisfied grin that Seth refused to acknowledge before… was she… enjoying this? It seemed like it.

And the thought of that terrified Seth, as she sadistically tapped her heel against the floor, conjuring yet another tombstone. He didn’t have the energy, nor the strength to dodge it. As she brought the gauntlet back, she comically slipped and punched against it at too sharp of an angle, as it crashed into the wall behind Seth’s right.

By the look in her eyes, as he glanced back from it to her, he could tell.

She was toying with him.

Screw “extreme conditions”... is she enjoying this? Is this an act, or… is this really who she is?

Another tap of her heel against the floor.

Another summoned gravestone.

Yet another miss.

It repeated itself another time after, until she had gotten bored and laughed sadistically to herself. She hadn’t said anything the entire time, it was just smiles, chuckles, cackling…

…As if she were a real-life witch.

Seth had just sat and crawled away, inching back to the wall out of fear. That’s the only thing he could do, as most of his body was either paralyzed in fear or shut down from exhaustion. It’s not like he slept well enough to fight like this, with those nightmares repeating almost every night.

Still, this situation pissed him off.

Why am I here? Why am I almost writhing on the ground in front of this girl? Why does my body hurt so bad… and why is my brain on fire?

He slowly began to stand up, forcing his body to do what it thought it couldn’t.

I didn’t ask for any of this. Do they think I wanted this? That I WANT to die?! All I wanted was a normal life, I never asked for more than food, water, maybe a few magazines…

He pushed against the floor with more and more strength pulled from the anger that was rising inside him, as his legs kept attempting to buckle, but he wouldn’t let himself fall again.

…Do I deserve to go to Hell for that? To suffer for such a pathetic, small dream? Ever since I was born, it’s just been loss after loss…

And now what?

I’m supposed to sit and die, a pathetic stain on the floor?

Screw that. Screw you. You want to kill me?
He fully stands up, heaving painfully. She stands there in front of him, mockingly impressed as she taps her heel against the floor once more. He raises his head to glare at her, his demeanor completely different than what she had come to expect.

As one will find with most living creatures…

…When backed into a corner, they cast away their inhibitions.

“Oho…” she says, still mocking his efforts, “...so you’ve finally reached your breaking point.”

And so, he sprinted toward her, though he felt like his legs would tear from his pelvis and he’d bleed to death then and there. Every step was heavy, more heavy than his entire weight, but he pushed forward.

The only thing that existed in front of him, at that moment, was a threat.

If she didn’t die, she would kill him.

And, if he was going to die anyway, then…

He raises his fist up behind his right shoulder, yelling while running at her desperately, with a completely animalistic urge to kill. Slamming it forward into her right cheek, Seth believes he finally did damage to her.

Then, she just stares at him. The piercing, angry gaze from behind his fist. He barely tilted her neck back, let alone causing her to lose her balance. She brought her gauntlet back all the way behind her as he was processing this, and slammed it into his chest as hard as she could, sending him flying backward head first.

His head tunnels into the side wall behind him, breaking past the panel, as his body goes limp. Kat watches as blood leaks from the edges of the crater, down his neck, across his chest, finally hitting the floor with a constant, repetitive dripping. The dripping soon turns into a plopping sound, and then into a pour, as more blood comes from the entrance of the crater.

Kat, initially, had a thrilled look in her eyes.

A crazed smile.

It vanished a few short moments later when she realized that Seth’s body was not going to move again. That it couldn’t move again.

That she killed yet another person she thought she would get along with.

She stared solemnly with a disgusted frown at the newly made corpse, but couldn’t bring herself to shed a tear or to hold her head in her hands, reflecting the chaos and turmoil of her inner thoughts.

After all, it’d be pretentious, wouldn’t it? To kill a man she barely knew, and then act as if she truly cared that he was gone.

That it was anything but another part of her job.

“Anticlimactic, huh?” Yasu’s unsympathetic, emotionless comment rings across the arena, highlighting the brutality of the event. “Well, that’s that. I’ll have someone clean up his body and—”

Just then, a piece of rubble fell and hit the ground. It didn’t interrupt him or stop him from talking, but Kat heard it.

Her pupils opened wide in fear as her brain introduced the possibility to her nerves faster than it did as a conscious thought.

Then, as she looked downward, she saw the once lifeless corpse’s fingers begin to sporadically move, as if they were spider legs.

The sound of her bated breath filled her mind, bouncing around it over and over again, unable to hear anything else. Yasu kept talking, but she didn’t hear it.

She just stared as the hand moved.

And then, it was the other.

Then, it was the legs.

Seth was alive.

But whatever this was?

It was not Seth.

No, even then, whatever was manipulating his body like a puppet learning how to move with its own strings…

…It couldn’t be human.