Fight! Kill!

Even before the gladiatorial matches had properly begun, the crowd was already seething with excitement, like a hornet's nest that someone had prodded with a stick.

Beasts in heat, the lot of them.

Eusilif let out a dry chuckle through his ruined body.

He lay collapsed inside a coffin of a room — one meter square, narrow, and pitch-dark. Three months had already passed since his life as a slave began, a fate he'd never imagined for himself. When he thought about how he'd failed even to escape from that wretched princess and was now locked away in a place like this, laughter was all that came out of the sheer absurdity of it.

Who do you think you are, acting so high and mighty? A slave with nothing to his name but a pretty face.

Lately, Regita had taken to shutting herself in her palace and amusing herself with the attentions of handsome young slaves. Eusilif had been one of the gifts given to her for exactly that purpose.

Delighted by his looks, the princess had ordered him to attend her in her bedchamber from his very first day. But it was not only his first taste of slave life — he had no intention whatsoever of becoming that arrogant woman's plaything.

When he flatly refused to get into her bed, Regita — who had been waiting for him half-naked — flew into a rage and raged around the room in the nude. She had ordered his head cut off on the spot, but at the last moment she changed her mind. It seemed she couldn't bring herself to waste that excessively handsome face.

What she came up with instead was to throw him into the gladiatorial matches that had recently taken the capital by storm. Once he'd been thoroughly humbled among those rough-and-tumble gladiators, surely even someone as stiff-necked as him would learn to behave.

The results, however, were unexpected. Not only did Eusilif fell his opponent in just a few exchanges during his very first match, he went on racking up victory after victory, rising as the arena's newest star. The halo effect of his rare looks compounded everything, and he became a household name almost overnight — an unforeseen outcome that elevated the standing of his owner, Princess Regita, right along with him.

Regita was quietly pleased, yet at the same time she remained dissatisfied with Eusilif's insufferably insolent attitude. In the end, three days before the semifinals, she had him locked away in here.

'A beast that won't submit belongs in a cage, starved until it learns its place. Endure it. Learn to behave yourself properly, and I'll love you again like before.'

This room, barely a meter across, had originally been a staging area where gladiators waited briefly before entering the arena. A space with not a single ray of light leaking in — for all intents and purposes, a coffin. Determined to break him in once and for all, the princess had him confined here for three days straight, allowing him nothing but water.

Unable even to lie down, he had spent three days sleeping in a huddle, curled up. But harder to bear than the discomfort was the hunger. Only today, just before the match, was he finally given a single bowl of soup for breakfast.

He devoured it ravenously in one go, but of course it did nothing to quell the gnawing emptiness. If anything, eating too fast on a starved stomach had upset it, and he spent the whole morning retching. It left him, already malnourished, completely spent.

If I go out to fight in this state, it'll disgrace the princess's honor too. What on earth is she thinking?

He had lost count of how many times he'd drifted off while staring into the darkness, struggling to hold onto his clouding mind.

Tap-tap-tap.

Mixed in with the shuffling footsteps of the familiar gatekeeper came a small, light set of footsteps from somewhere. Shortly after, the breathless voice of a young woman drifted in as well.

"Can't you hurry? The match is about to start. You've already taken your fee, so surely you're not dawdling on purpose?"

"Goodness, madam, you're already gasping for breath — please stop rushing me. Here we are."

Eusilif tilted his head, alone in the dark.

That voice sounds strangely familiar. Who is it?

Eusilif was sharp; once he had seen or heard something, he rarely forgot it. And yet, though the woman's voice was undeniably familiar, he couldn't place her at all.

Clunk, clunk.

His eyes narrowed to slits as the lock on the door of his cell began to rattle.

The match already? It's earlier than usual. And that woman —?

The moment a crack of pain lanced through his aching eyes, he heard a key slide into the lock and turn with a click, and a heartbeat later the door swung wide open.

Flinch.

Having grown used to the dark, Eusilif reflexively screwed his eyes shut and turned his head away.

"Ah, Eusilif. Your condition is... far worse than I imagined. Oh dear."

Listening to the pity-laden woman's voice, Eusilif was suddenly seized by an uncanny feeling.

There she stood in the pale light spilling in from beyond the door. An unfamiliar face — no, to put it more accurately, a face impossible to forget. That woman was Arabella Miona, the very person who had taken his already wretched life and shoved it into an even more nightmarish pit.

Three months ago, Eusilif had been caught up in an unexpected catastrophe and sold to a slaver along with his sister, Allin. On the day they were put up for auction at the slave market, he had smeared dirt all over their faces and hair. He knew all too well that slaves with beautiful faces almost invariably ended up with the worst possible masters.

'Choose him. And the woman beside him too.'

Yet Arabella Miona — that woman — had dismissed all their efforts as if they meant nothing, singling them out with a single gesture of her hand. As though she had come to that market with precisely them in mind.

He could still picture it clearly: the listless, blue-gray eyes that had raked over him from head to toe.

'Please let me stay with my sister. I'll do whatever you command.'

'How amusing. A slave who calls obeying orders a favor, as if he's doing me a kindness.'

That pale, expressionless face, snapping with irritation. The woman who had turned her head away with perfect indifference, as if she had no patience whatsoever to spare for slaves — she had been like a porcelain doll devoid of all emotion.

When Eusilif resisted, she had even dispatched soldiers to beat Allin into submission. In the end, he'd had no choice but to abandon his defiance for the sake of his sister's safety. After that, she had sent Eusilif to Princess Regita, and Allin to Duke Amethica, master of the Magic Tower.

Allin is probably being treated worse than I am.

Whenever he thought of what his silent, upright sister might be suffering in the Magic Tower, his insides burned. He shot a furious glare at the woman before him. The woman, in true villainess fashion, boasted a gorgeous appearance.

Silky black hair that gleamed like stained glass, skin white as jade, a willowy figure in a torn dress — wait. A torn dress?

Washed over by a wave of wrongness, Eusilif narrowed his eyes.

The silk gown embroidered with silver thread was every bit as lavish as what Arabella usually wore, but the hem and the area around her knees were caked with dust and grime, and the lace of her bodice had been clawed at, unraveling thread by thread.

But the most baffling thing of all was her face.

...What? Is that really Lady Miona?

Her normally sharp features had swollen grotesquely out of all recognition, blotchy with red welts. She looked wretched enough to make even Eusilif, who had been through hell and back, recoil.

Am I hallucinating from exhaustion?

Then Arabella spoke — and asked a question he never could have predicted.

"Have you ever thought about breaking out of here?"

"...What did you say?"

"With your skills, smashing this place to pieces and escaping wouldn't be beyond you."

At her distracted murmur, Eusilif's brow twisted into a scowl.

Did this woman come all the way here just to mock me?

Then Arabella gave a bitter smile, as if answering her own question.

"But you won't do it."

"...?"

"Because if you ran, your sister might be in even greater danger."

"......"

"Foolish. But noble."

Murmuring this nonsense, she abruptly fixed him with a piercing stare. Eusilif found himself, inexplicably, at a loss for words. Through those absurdly puffed-up eyelids, the blue-gray eyes seemed to be scouring him with relentless intensity.

"Well, even setting that aside... you're clearly better suited to that position than Sota. He's a genuine piece of trash."

Eusilif doubted his own ears. Had that woman just said 'Sota'? What was the name of the crown prince of the empire doing coming out of her mouth, here of all places?

"What in the world are you talking about—"

Eusilif finally opened his mouth, unable to hold back — but Arabella, paying him no heed, declared it as though she had just made some great resolution.

"So I'm going to save you, Eusilif Natayel Mohan. Never forget it. The one saving you from this place, right now — is me."

"......"

It was so absurd that no reply would come. Only after several seconds did he slowly rise to his feet.

When he stood, his head came within a hair's breadth of the ceiling — he possessed a frame far larger and more powerful than any ordinary man's. The fact that he'd become the star of an arena that drew the empire's toughest fighters in a mere four months was no accident at all.

The woman standing before him, by contrast, barely reached his chest. And yet, small as a rabbit before a beast, she showed not the slightest trace of fear.

He looked down at Arabella in silence.

The distance between them was a mere few dozen centimeters. All he had to do was reach out, and snapping this fragile woman's neck would be no trouble at all. And with that, that arrogant mouth spouting its nonsense would never speak again.

With the desire to crush the noblewoman who had wrecked his life in a single stroke, his fingers twitched, quivering faintly like something in spasm.