Celestia resisted the urge to feed the grinning, disdainful drow his teeth with her usual impassiveness. She grabbed up the four registration tokens and walked back to us... and the experienced drow gladiators gave us careful berth despite themselves.

“They’ve stuck us in among the outlanders,” she informed us, tossing us our badges. We inspected the mustering address on the things, turned together in that direction, and shrugged together. Of course we wouldn’t be settled among the Bladewitch covens and Warlock sects, or even the lower order mercs or something, as long as they were drow. To drow, breshkt were as foreign a species as the humans they were mixed with.

The big celebration and slaughter wasn’t until tomorrow, but naturally the teams and individuals had to register and be allocated ahead of time. Massive numbers of slaves, sacrifices, convicts, conscripts, and aliens were being shuffled into holding pens to be released tomorrow, while the professionals were allocated their stalls and positions for the big event.

According to the terms of the contract, the last thousand surviving beings could opt to leave the arena and earn their rewards, which could be any manner of things, from information to mere cash to rare goods to bioengineering, or maybe even asking a favor that wasn’t too much of an imposition.

The last hundred beings would get greater rewards, jacked up again for the last ten, and graduating for the last five.

The likelihood of that happening for an outsider was slim to none. The long-established pros would join in once the mass slaughter was done, looking for up-and-comers to kill and further their own legends, while eliminating potential future rivals after they did all the boring and tedious slaughter. They had to join before the last ten thousand were set, but that was hardly an imposition. The killing would continue until then.

The smart fighters would survive to the last thousand, and then immediately vacate the arena before the pros killed them. Then the pros would clash, a few would kill one another, most would simply withdraw before that happened, leaving only the last few to contest one another for the highest slots.

Our bikini and blood donors had witnessed more than a few of these grand celebrations, and even fought in two of them, making it to the last thousand before leaving the arena to the truly adept. The impressions they had of the master gladiators left no doubt that they wouldn’t survive any sparring that occurred.

That wasn’t our impressions, of course.

Keva had analyzed the styles of the various covens and bands for all of us, Jensa had pointed out style weaknesses, and we had gotten a lot of practice in fighting elvar of all kinds on our way here. Our Courtiers of Death were in full force, and oh, were they not going to like fighting against us.

We hadn’t even pulled out our Shields in a proper duel yet, only mass combat outside the arenas. Of course, we were obviously all wearing bucklers, but we hadn’t actually equipped them. Naturally, we hadn’t needed to, so a lot of the drow were wondering how arrogant we were, not using them against combatants... because we didn’t need to? Wouldn’t that mean that equipping them meant we were finally facing something serious?

That was exactly what it meant, and honestly, simply by making the shield a Profound Weapon and so usable with Wisdom or Intellect bonuses to AC, which they normally weren’t, they would shoot our AC into the stratosphere and make us nigh-unhittable by our opponents. When we actually bothered to use them, ouch, the drow were going to be in for a rough time.

We wanted to stop just below the top ten. Arena rules forbid the top hundred from tag-teaming one another, all duels had to be resolved between individuals with no outside help. That said, engaging, disengaging, and moving from one opponent to the next while only wounding or blooding was all perfectly permissible, as was jumping on someone just wounded from a fight with somebody else.

“Hello...” All our eyes turned on a party moving through the press. While the majority of people were wealthy drow, there were plenty of aliens of all types in specific areas, drawing the intrigued, arrogant eyes of many of the dark elvar here. Aberrant races, fringe players, criminals, corrupt lordlings, vassal races, emotionless sapients, and lots of Warped of various kinds.

Seeing some overly ostentatious yet obviously competent humans among them was not a surprise, but it was something we were looking for.

From Markspace to the Quanta to downloaded to the Umbran databanks wasn’t too long. The Umbrans naturally didn’t know everyone in the galaxy, but they did know everyone who was prominent. Anyone who could walk into Gloomheart and not feel out of place was definitely not a nobody.

The hit came back in seconds, along with his personal history from seventeen years ago... because he came from the other side of the Rift.

The Marquis de Krov. He was a Marquis because he had a Writ of Marque, making him one of the nobles of the Empire; a free-willed, star-crossing freebooter with his own ships and fleet, empowered by the Empire to wage war, conscript troops, and explore beyond the edge of the Empire’s borders in humanity’s name basically as they saw fit.

Such men weren’t the same as Dukes, who were even older hereditary dynasties, with rights to planets and even systems that came with their Writ of Nobility. A Marquis could also end up claiming planets and territory, but their title was from a Writ of Marque, and so of lesser status.

Most such men were aggressive, ambitious bastards fully willing to use the Writ, and the ship and fleets that came with it, in unscrupulous and bloody ways to enhance their own wealth, power, and prestige. Buccaneers was a polite term for most of them; rogues, scoundrels, and profiteers described most of them, and those it didn’t were usually fanatics or warmongers taking the edicts of the Empire to their deadliest extreme, or out-and-out pirates and raiders preying on aliens ruthlessly, and humans if they thought they could get away with it.

Selling humans off to aliens for personal profit was one of those actions which would earn a Marquis a gyro in the head for themselves and their entire family line. The fact we had seen him here was a death sentence as soon as we confirmed what his dealings with the drow were. Duke Rimval was already writing out his death warrant.

The Marquis should have sent one of his sons. At least then he would have survived...

He wasn’t the only unWarped human here, but he was the first we’d seen from the other side of the Rift, which meant he came from a Portal on that side, and had a ship from there.

-He probably delivered a load of cyber-enhanced murderers for the games, given his history,- Jensa /murmured. -About as good as you are going to get, Mom.- The reports indicated that he had a long-established history of emptying the prisons of civilized worlds of murderers and other violent convicts, bringing them onboard his ship, outfitting them with brainbombs and cybernetics, and then selling them off to any interested parties desiring powerful and eminently disposable combat troops. One of his ships was basically nothing more then a butcher shop and cyberfitting processor that would make any Mekker proud to see.

If he couldn’t find anyone to buy his clockwork butchers, he went and unleashed them somewhere to earn his money back from plunder, if nothing else.

-I agree. Shall we split up and find out where he came from?- Needless to say, in a society like this, the number of people dealing in information was not small, and the gossip on their Boole wasn’t small. You just had to be careful to never actually search for exactly what you were looking for, or someone would notice and sell the fact you were looking to the other party.

-Oh, that would mean we should get to kill at least three assassins each before tomorrow, right?- Celestia /remarked coolly.

-I plan on sampling at least a dozen new poisons,- I /agreed, and everyone smiled dangerously in unison, prompting the sapients passing us to suddenly veer away in alarm.

Someone had finally wigged onto a nickname for us that was at once a good summation and insulting at the same time. They were calling us the Four Fatales, since with only a slight twist of an accent, it sounded the exact same as the Four Futiles, four idiots reaching hopelessly beyond their stations and potential. The breshkt population had picked it up and run with it, and suddenly we were crystallized as the hope of the half-breed bastards of the drow world.

It was kind of funny, but what it meant is that the breshkt information network opened up to us... as long as there was no risk to them, of course. We had fans who would do things for us, and if they subtly steered us jobs that furthered their goals and ambitions, and happened to kill a lot of drow who looked down on them, or preyed on them, well, it was a thing.

------

We split up to get information, something we rarely did, and of course the people hunting us took it as a golden opportunity to start moving in. There were a lot of very combative, battle-happy individuals around, and duels were breaking out and resolving very quickly all over the place, sometimes lethal, sometimes merely crippling, and it was all in good fun.

The ones who were currently trailing us from every vector and split to follow us had the unfortunate experience of each somehow getting picked off by another of us who wasn’t the target, in a very circular fashion. One got shoved in front of a razor-prowed jet bike zooming past; one was pushed off a perch into a pack of carnosaurs getting herded into place; another accidentally slipped and fell on both of his short blades; and a fourth was wrapped up in tentacles and sucked into an open sewer grating so fast the surrounding crowd all jumped. Said sewer grating was rapidly sealed up while some curious drow considered going down and capturing whatever was down there, and how much they would charge to do it.

All in good fun. If a specific building’s gaudy and overdone ornamentation blew out and the rubble fell down and crushed a passing luxury flitter of a crime lord with a penchant for out-species rape, along with his entourage, well, that just made us some more money.

Having the temerity to execute an assassination with such aplomb and thoroughness at such short notice, and with so many other killers around, did garner us some attention, and in between random knifing attempts some of the actual Noctus, the shadow-stalking elite assassins dispatched to kill only the best targets, decided to use us as whetstones to keep their edges sharp.

Pointed objects were inserted into dark places, and they burned in shadowfire. By the time their noctus shadow-walking tech finally gave way and materialized into the real world, there was nothing left of them to tell what had become of them, and the delicate tech was reduced to dust that gave no indication of their fates. Their souls wouldn’t be coming back to the homunculus Vats where the elite continually reincarnated themselves trying to evade the Warp, so they would simply disappear, and people would wonder...

But Gloom was eating them, and happy, so what did we have to bother about?

--------

I did make my goal of ingesting a dozen new poisons, making it to fourteen before I hooked back up with the girls. Celestia only made it to eight, probably because she gutted six of the poisoners before they could get away, and we all mocked her for not expanding her repertoire appropriately. She promised to do better in the future, and we toasted with a molecular-level flesh-dissolving poison inserted into our drinks by a murder-team whose slimy remnants were bubbling on the floor beneath our boots. Some very impressed goblins were already bringing out the buckets and mops to clean up after us...

There were two other squad attacks as we headed off to the Heart of Blood, one by swooping jetbikes, and the other by snipers trying to pick us off.

Swooping jetbikes naturally used anti-grav, had razored prows for ramming through hapless targets, and moved really fast.

Putting a foot down and putting up an Interdiction was a little bit faster, and the six swoops suddenly dropped right to the ground at high speed, went crashing and tumbling wildly, and took out a number of not-so-innocent bystanders.

True to their boosted reflexes, four of the riders managed to jump free in time, and were all shot in the head in mid-air, much to their dismay.