Warhammer: Start with a dog.

Chapter 378 Lucius

Lucius was running freely on the sand under the spotlight, the pair of exquisite but superficial ritual daggers already left in the bodies of his second and third opponents respectively.

Now he was holding the alien scimitar he had just snatched from the mercenary in the fourth game who thought he could defeat him without a weapon - a very rough and poorly balanced iron bar. On normal days, he would never let his fingers touch such a crude iron bar. But now, it seemed that if he wanted to get the weapon, he could only snatch it himself from the hands of his opponents who were upgrading in one game after another.

His limbs stretched out like some kind of lightning spirit in the atmosphere, and his secret bloodthirstiness was no longer concealed here. Now that he was here, he just had to enjoy this big stage built for him. The servoskulls circled Lucius above him and flew up and down, showing everyone the lethality, danger and death contained in his beauty, and he was generous and unsparing about it.

The idea of ​​the female lord wanting to use him as the main course for her and the bloodthirsty audience was certainly a beautiful one, but the largest arena that could be built on an Ignis-class heavy cruiser was limited by its hull size. It was only large enough, dangerous, and challenging enough in the cognition of mortals.

For example, this arena did not require him to jump around on various shattered planetary debris, agricultural platforms spraying chemicals, or huge branches. There were no overly vicious traps hidden under the ground or pools of corrosive solutions that would kill people directly. There were not even some large carnivorous flying creatures or giant spiders that would carry out a long and painful predatory death sentence on the "blood food" thrown into it. In most cases, Lucius felt that the battle process was much easier because he did not have to guard against attacks from the air or in the air.

It was an arena that did not exceed the most vicious human imagination. It was in the shape of a giant bowl, with fences, a proper moat, proper lighting and a proper sandy ground. Well - the bunkers that served to create the atmosphere, some old weapon boxes from the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy boarding teams, vehicle wreckage and sandbags dotted the venue, but they were useless except for causing inconvenience in movement for a giant of Lucius' height in most cases.

"If you can survive until the sixth challenge," the lady said to him, "I will allow you to come forward and kiss my hand, and choose another weapon; and if you complete all eight challenges - a feat that has never been seen at my banquet before, then as a reward, I can fulfill one of your requests."

"Any requests?"

The Gorda female leader raised her finely trimmed and long eyebrows. "Normally, yes, do you want to ask for freedom? If you are willing to accept some surgical implants, it is not impossible-"

Lucius smiled and raised the bloody remains of his blade towards her. "No, I want to know in which lovely jewel box you have hidden my not-so-beautiful cousins."

The woman's facial lines tightened sharply and she stared at him sternly, but Lucius responded with a perfectly angled smile that he had practiced countless times in front of the mirror, which caused small screams and praise from the audience around him.

"Okay." She nodded proudly, "As long as you fight all eight fights and win."

------

Apparently from that time on, the enemy behind was temporarily replaced with a more difficult one.

The team of gladiators originally on the elevator was evacuated, and his Lyman's Ear captured the movements of more dangerous carnivorous beasts.

Sure enough, the fifth one was an alien six-legged lizard-like creature. Although it was called a lizard, this thing was as big as a dragon and as cunning as the most cunning human. But in the end, Lucius cut off its head. Just as he stepped on the monster's blue head, he didn't give him much time to breathe. The sixth one was a cunning death spider. The venom of this thing was also deadly to Space Marines. After it appeared in the shadow of the entrance, the audience in the stands let out a burst of gasps and exclamations, and then turned into high-pitched shouts of ecstasy.

The fanatical atmosphere and the smell of blood intertwined into a sea of ​​joy and color.

Lucius shook his head: Here it comes again, why does he feel that everyone sitting in the stands are... aliens with pointy ears?

But this does not affect his attack.

The beast roared and bit towards him. He grabbed its bony facial spikes and, while dodging its sharp teeth with traces of rotten flesh hanging on them, he grinned and spat a large mouthful of acidic saliva into its dense eyes, which were still considered normal creatures.

Things will be much easier from now on.

----

"The sixth match doesn't seem to be difficult for you. Come here, beautiful little wildcat, kiss my hand and choose your weapon." He didn't like the first part, but he really needed to get a sword that was as suitable as possible.

The death spider in the sixth scene failed to actually bite him, but the venom still splashed near the wound and caused trouble - he felt slightly paralyzed, so he urgently needed a sword. As long as he had a sharp sword in his hand, Lucius could work miracles.

At the moment when the swordsman's lips brushed the cold pale skin of the female lord, Lucius saw a place that looked like a stasis cell or a huge human preservation bag. The transparent plastic materials suspended in the air wrapped various creatures: humans, aliens, complete, and incomplete. Among them, there were some particularly broad and thick bodies that he could not mistake. Various cables and hoses were inserted into each liquid bag here. Obviously, in addition to nutrition or breathing gas, there must be sedative ingredients added, because every body here looked pale and lifeless, but there was no doubt that they were alive. The chest was still slightly rising and falling.

This kind of hanging facility is undoubtedly very convenient for the classified storage of "goods". It can be seen that the female lord is a person who likes to organize things clearly at a glance - it is simply like some kind of flesh and blood grape vine rack...

Suddenly, another strange howl came toward him from behind the curtain of the High Heaven, mixed with the increasingly intense vision or scene display that had been intensifying since the beginning -

Lucius found himself with his feet dangling in the air, his hands pulled apart by some unnatural, obviously artificially bred, curled tentacles, hanging above a huge pit of corpses. The screams of countless victims kept ringing behind his eyeballs, making his head hurt, and he caught a glimpse of the living, howling faces on his armor from the corner of his eye - were there more Astartes hanging around here? Their colorful and overly bright paint jobs all had the same symbol - that symbol was - his head hurt even more - blood-red -

Some strange Gothic accent spoke to him through the voice of an alien female that hissed like a venomous snake.

"Do you like my hanging garden?"

"Do you like what I prepared for you?" The woman's voice overlapped with the alien female's voice, pulling the dazed Lucius into another picture.

----

There it was again, that dizziness, he saw it again.

Under this strange and alien arena, in the darkest, spider-web-like tunnels, he saw his own face with a shudder: the face that he once was proud of but once disliked for overshadowing was now covered with scars and distorted, looking at him from the other side of the operating table or torture rack where he was tied, with a smug and indifferent smile.

His trembling eyelids lifted, and then he saw the face of the man who was being performed an irreversible and horrific operation on his body by two aliens who were obviously protecting him rather than monitoring him.

He was a comrade he was very familiar with.

-----

The orcs would have almost achieved victory in the seventh match if Lucius had not been suddenly awakened from his dazed state.

The silver-haired court swordsman gritted his teeth.

"no way!"

He yelled, "Don't ever try to turn me into that out-of-control, ugly person!!"

The gamblers behind the curtain became noisy, and the quarrel began to develop into a fight. Limbs and blood splattered everywhere, like some kind of fireworks, which made the Demon Prince sitting high above smile sweetly.

(End of this chapter)