“Dad! Dad! Do you think someone is gonna give you another name today?” A boy with messy black hair asks his stone-faced father as he does every morning.

“It doesn’t matter, go wash up. We need to leave soon,” the child’s father curtly responds, not interested in having the same discussion over again.

The man had explained to his son many times why neither of them has a real name. It’s an old philosophy that if you become important enough to another person, then whatever they call you will become your name.

The child would always question this by pointing out that he should be important to his father, to which the man would respond by calling him, son. The boy was content with the name son for now but he knew it wouldn’t be his real one.

His father, on the other hand, was called many things, champion of the Pits, legend of the arena, or the island’s strongest fighter. The boy had always wanted one of these names for himself but never had an opportunity like his father did, many years ago when he escaped God’s arena known as the Pits.

“Hey, don’t focus on me today. Look at others. You aren’t going to learn much more from me. People here are strong, I can feel it, so try and learn from them this time,” the man advises his child before the two of them exit their home.

They leave the crudely constructed wooden shack behind them as they make their way into the more populated area of the island towards the arena.

“Do you think you’ll win today?” The boy asks as they make their way there.

“It’s not about winning, just surviving,” the man explains, knowing he will only have to finish in the top eight to move onto the rounds where they will fight one on one.

“Do you think you’ll survive?” The boy asks, not thinking about what that really means.

“Yes,” the man confidently states as he spots the area where the other warriors have gathered along the outside of the arena.

“Hey, leave. You can watch me from the stands. I’ll find you when this is done,” the man tells his son as he rubs his head, messing up his hair a little.

“Okay, I’ll be watching you,” the kid smiles.

“No, others,” his father reminds him, hoping the kid can learn from the different fighting styles he will witness today.

“Right,” the boy responds with a thumbs up before running off.

As the boy heads towards where the rest of the crowd is starting to file in, he notices a stand set up near the entrance. Manning it is a bald man with a thick mustache, weapons lining the tables as he haggles with men who will be participating in the tournament.

The boy’s father had taught him how to recognize a finely crafted weapon and these were of the highest quality the boy has ever seen. His eyes carefully watch the men bargaining, waiting until the mustachioed man looks elsewhere.

The boy gets close to a smaller sized sword and the second the man with the mustache looks away he grabs it.

“Excuse me,” the man running the stall tells the other as he faces the boy.

“You will put down that sword right now unless you intend to buy it,” the man addresses the boy in a haughty tone.

“Dammit,” the kid complains as he puts the sword down.

“Sorry, your weapons are the best. I wanted one,” the boy tells the man earnestly.

“I can see you have an eye for these sorts of things if my wares caught your attention. I’ll tell you what, keep the sword, it is one of my cheaper works. Just tell everyone you see here today that Jean the Blacksmith of Aconblasam is here and that he has the finest weapons anyone could ever find,” Jean the Blacksmith tells the child.

“Okay,” the boy picks up the sword happily and settles it on his hip.

“I’ll tell everyone,” he says excitedly as he runs off. The boy makes his way into the stands, God’s booming voice is what fills the arena while the last few members of the crowd arrive.

The boy doesn’t pay particularly close attention to what God is saying, instead his eyes lock onto an intriguing sight, a wolf sitting amongst the crowd. The boy scampers over to the wolf, unable to suppress his urge to pet it.

As he reaches out his hand he notices a short bespectacled woman with messy black curls and an oddly dressed man holding some sort of instrument looking down at him.

He hesitates as he looks back up at them, that is until the woman tells him, “Go ahead, you can pet him, his name is Fore”. The boy’s normal smile gets wider as he excitedly runs his fingers through the wolf’s thick grey fur.

Suddenly his attention is ripped away from the wolf with the soft fur as the crowd starts to roar. The child stands up looking down to see what is happening. He smiles as he sees his father, among others; enter the arena known as the Pits.

Before he runs off, the boy remembers what he promised the odd blacksmith that gifted him his new sword on his hip. He turns to the two people with the wolf and tells them, “Hey, this blacksmith… he’s Jean the Blacksmith… he’s good. You should buy his stuff”.

“Did you just say his name was Jean the Blacksmith? He’s here?” The woman asks.

“Yes! He is at the entrance, tell him I sent you,” the boy responds as he runs off to the edge of the arena, unable to hear the woman ask for his name.

The kid makes it to the edge just as the fighting starts; he immediately begins to watch his father, who is calmly waiting on the less crowded side of the arena. His son watches as two men start to approach him, working together to take down the clearly stronger foe.

Even the boy can tell that their blade work is sloppy, easily parried by his father before swiftly beheading the first. The sight of his friend’s head hitting the floor causes the second to flee, realizing the man they sought to take down together is too formidable for the two of them to handle.

The boy watches as the man runs away, easily cut down by some other opportunist with a sword at the ready. As the kid realizes how sparse this side of the arena is compared to the side further away, causing him to remember what his father told him, to observe others.

His eyes shoot to his left where he finds three people near the center of a mob. He recognizes one of the three, a man that had recently gained fame the same way his father did, by escaping the Pits.

The boy resented this man as his increasing renown had caused his father’s to diminish. Still, he can’t deny the man’s strength, watching in awe as he easily overwhelms whatever challenger comes at him next, with more raw power than the child has ever witnessed.

But of the three, the powerful man is not the one that catches his eye most. The woman next to him, with a similar complexion, is unbelievably captivating, the way she moves within the fray, her sword always finding its mark with what seems like no effort wasted, makes it so the child is unable to look away. This is what his father must have meant when he told the boy to learn from others.

As soon as he realizes this, he starts to focus harder on the woman’s movements, trying to learn how she is so efficient with her blade. He wastes no time, drawing his newly-obtained sword and beginning to mimic her as best he can.

“Hey, kid, put that thing away! Unless you want to be down there too,” an older looking man laughs as he scolds him.

“Right, sorry,” the boy apologizes, realizing that others could get scared if they see a warrior like him in the audience.

The old man’s yelling, having helped drop the boy’s focus on the woman, allows him to look back over to see how his father is fairing. It doesn’t take long for his eyes to settle on his father, his blade marred in blood as he easily fells the many men around him.

The display is so impressive that those around the boy, who are watching, are starting to take note.

“Who is that man? He seems to be older than most of the guys in there,” a young woman behind the boy questions.

“Just because he is old, doesn’t mean he is weaker than these kids,” the same old man from before boasts.

“Isn’t he the man who escaped the Pits all those years ago? They called him the Legend or something,” another man informs them, causing the boy to beam as he continues to watch his father fight while gaining praise from those around him.

The realization starts to spread around the audience, whispers grow into cheers, rooting on the legend they used to watch all those years ago.

“GO DAD!” The boy screams along with him, hoping that his father can hear him.

As the fight goes on, the boy realizes that the group is much smaller than it was even minutes ago, particularly around the three people that have been fighting off the giant mob. Corpses of slain men and those trying to crawl their way to safety litter the sand around the arena, creating a strong smell of blood that is making their way to the crowd’s noses. But they don’t focus on the pungent odor, the sights and sounds of battle being the more overwhelming sensation.

For the first time, the boy takes note of the third part of the trio who has been fighting off those targeting his father’s rival. His baggy cloak much different attire than those around him… still, this oddity almost causes him to stand out less.

Initially, the kid dismisses this man, not finding anything about him particularly impressive. But as he watches the cloaked man further something his father once told him comes back to him.

“Don’t react so much to what you are seeing. You can’t always trust your eyes,” the stern old man’s words echo in his head.

“What do you mean? I can only see with my eyes. I can see it so I know it's there,” the boy once argued, not truly understanding his father’s words.

It’s as he watches this man fight does he finally understand what his father meant… on the surface, every duel the man enters he should lose but he finds himself victorious each time; his lack of physique causes all of his opponents to underestimate him.

As the man swings his sword, beheading a challenger who approached his group, the boy notices what he suspected, underneath the cloak is a toned body, one none of the other men in the arena would suspect him to have with that outfit.

“He’s tricking them,” the boy mouths to himself, putting everything together. His father shouldn’t have told him not to trust his eyes but instead to never underestimate an opponent.

His eyes follow this strange man, watching as he leaves his comrades now that the arena only has around twenty people left. The boy starts to look down over the wall as the man walks over directly towards him.

The angle he is looking at for the first time gives him a view of a different man, one who must have been standing down at the edge the entire time. This man is the only one in the arena that is not currently engaged in a fight.

The boy becomes confused as the cloaked man sheaths his sword, if he intends to fight this man why would he stow his weapon?

“You shouldn’t sheath your sword on the battlefield,” the boy hears the other man comment from below him.

The cloaked man pulls back his hood revealing his face; the boy takes note of the man’s odd purple eye color, noticing it only for a second as it changes to a light shade of blue. The child watches as the other man draws his sword and quickly slashes at the cloaked man with all his might.

The boy thinks the cloaked man is done for, until suddenly, the sword just stops, caught by the cloaked man’s hand. A blade swung at that velocity couldn’t be stopped by just a hand, the boy thinks, until he notices the gauntlet from the attacking man on the cloaked man’s hand.

How did he do that? The boy thinks to himself just before he hears the other man yell, “Just because you caught my sword doesn’t mean you are stronger than I am. You remember what happened last time right?”

The man tries to twist his blade free but it does not budge, stuck in the cloaked man’s hand. Instead of responding with words, the boy watches as the cloaked man snaps the blade, the excess clattering to the ground.

The man whose sword had just been broken starts to back up, the confidence visually having been drained from him.

He starts to back up, defensively insulting the much stronger man, “You just can’t get over that she was mine first!”

“I don’t care, she’s with me now,” the cloaked man shows the craven man something on his finger before continuing,

“Besides, how could I be jealous of a man cowering in the dirt?” The cloaked man punctuates his statement by throwing the man’s bloodied gauntlet at his face before walking off.

The boy watches as this man scurries from the arena to escape the chaos, now knowing there is no way he will survive if he continues on. As the cloaked man rejoins his friends, the kid realizes that no one is fighting anymore. There are only ten people left, each of them watching the others, gauging their chances to make it into the top eight and onto the next round.

The crowd is just as silent as they are, realizing what getting down to his number means and the stakes behind it.

The boy’s eyes get wide as his father is the one to break the silence across the arena, “What are we waiting for? We’ve all seen battle before, why stop now?”

His father punctuates this statement by lifting his blade, closing the distance between himself and the man beside him, his sword swiftly finding the one exposed part of the armored man, causing a stream of blood to flow out of him.

This action of bringing it down to only nine people causes small fights to break out, every fighter just trying to eliminate one other person so they can make it through. The large man, who escaped the Pits like the boy's father, finds himself in a fight with a woman with fiery hair who wields an equally impressive axe.

A man with bright blonde hair, almost white in the sun, starts fighting against the woman that was fighting in that group of three. The boy takes note of fights quickly as he focuses back on his father, making sure that if nothing else, he survives these final moments so he can find himself in the further rounds.

Out of the corner of his eye, the child notices the cloaked man is not fighting anyone. He doesn’t think much of it before he notices the cloaked man suddenly appear behind his father.

The boy watches in horror as blood starts to come from his father’s neck, his mind not fully comprehending what he sees as his dad falls lifelessly to the ground with the cloaked man standing over him.

The boy doesn’t hear God stop the fighting, he just stares at his dead father hoping his eyes are playing a trick on him once again… but this is not the case, his father is very much dead, the man who fell just short of making it past the first round.

Tears start to fall from the boy’s eyes as he weeps, others in the audience stop their own cheering for the end of the excitement as they hear the child’s cries.

“What’s wrong, boy?” The elderly man asks him as he kneels down next to the kid.

He gets nothing in response, only a distraught child who just watched the only person who mattered in his life slaughtered before him.

“Come on kid, at least tell me your name?” The old man asks, trying to maybe calm him down by asking him a simple question… but there is no answer, for this boy had no name to give the man.