Sneering laughter he knew too well resounded through his head. When he whirled around, he came face to face with the prince. The moonlight cast the prince’s expression into a paranormal grin. In a cheerful voice, the prince whispered. “You do not understand how much I have longed for this moment. Taking where you have taken from me.”

Res whirled around to see other black bars shoot out from the ground and separating them. In the background, Res heard the explosions of fireballs, lightning bolts, and the cries of dying people. Res tried to keep his calm. “Jason, do you have any idea what this cage is?”

“Hmmm, it seems like an artifact. It has no ghost, though. Weird. I have never seen anything like this.”

“Can you destroy it?”

“I have no idea. The only thing that I can conclude is that all the energy is transferred to that crystal above us. The only way out of it seems brute force.”

Xenia called out: “My prince, please save me from my tormenter!”

When the prince’s gaze fell on Xenia, his eyes lit up with lust. “Xenia?”

“Yes, it is me. Save me and I will reward you handsomely.”

Her tattered clothes only extenuated her curves, and the prince grinned. With a wave of his hand, the bars lowered. The prince squinted at Serafina, who was staring daggers at him. “Is that your bodyguard? I will save her too.”

Res’s heartbeat quickened. No matter the outcome, she would be … Xenia crushed his hopes when she hissed at Serafina. “She is a traitor to our house and the lover of that demon Res.”

When Res saw the violent glee in the prince’s eyes, he regretted not twisting Xenia’s neck. The prince hugged Xenia as if they were long lost companions while fondling her assets.

“Keep her out of this and we will duel!”, Res spat out, trying to get Serafina out of the game. The prince got pretty annoyed, but he calmed down.

“We will have our duel in time, I promise. The only problem is that it is boring to fight against someone without motivation. The desperation of a fight they can’t win is glorifying.”

With a wave of his hand, Serafina’s cage lifted, and she tried to escape. Like a bear hunting a rabbit, the prince was upon her in an instant. She tried to claw and bite at him, but the prince beat her unconscious with a single enormous slap. Res cried out as he saw the dislocated jaw dangling limply from her head and he pounded against the black bars. With every strike, white light would spark from the impact. It always felt like something was being sucked out of him.

The prince turned and harrumphed. “Seems like you are actually made of aether. Who would have thought? How did you manage that? Isn’t that impractical? Never mind. The artifact sucks in aether like it is the best booze. Wait … the looser of the tournament gets his entire aether pool sucked out of him. You are made of aether for some reason.”

The prince scratched his head as if he was trying to solve a hard puzzle. ”Seems like this will be my last chance to torture you a little. To start, I need your full attention on your pretty lady. Or not so pretty lady depending whether you are turned off by scars. You seem to like them so much. Why don’t we give her some more?” Jason let out a silent: ‘shit, balls, and cum’.

The prince held his hands up into the air and his sword zipped back into his hand. Res watched in horror as the prince began to playfully nick her neck. With a cry of anger, he pushed against the bars with all his might. The prince laughed at his struggle and looked at him with pity. “Come on, this is useless. Trust …”

Res blended out the inconsequential blabber and pushed his entire being into putting aether into that one bar. The entire cage vibrated, and the crystal pushed back against his aether. Jason roared: ”JUST DO IT!“

With a cry of defiance, he pushed through and felt something snap in the cage’s structure. The aether he had pushed into the cage, dispersed around him and he pulled all it back into his core. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself encompassed in a glittering rain of gem fragments. The prince didn’t look horrified that he had managed to break free, but only annoyed.

At that moment, he knew he didn’t have the power to fight with the prince one on one, so he pushed himself away. The prince recovered from his stupor and activated his shining white knight armor. Res cast about for anything that could help him defeat the prince. The terrified scream of another team trying to break through the wall gave him an idea. When he felt bad about what he was about to do, Jason reminded him: “This is fucking war.”

With a mental push that sacrificed his pinky finger, he began his bloody reaping. The prince tried to shout a warning, but it was already too late. His body shot towards the ring of elite palace guards like a homing arrow. The first impact was brutal. He barreled into a female elite guard that turned into a bloody mist in an instant.

He could feel the prick of bone shards on his skin and the slimy content of her skull on his cheek. At the thought of Serafina being violated, he pushed through the next elite guard who met the same fate. He fell into this weird killing trance where he felt like his body was shredding through thin paper.

“Humans are so frail.”

He got to experience how frail they were when he rammed into an incredibly dense mount of flesh. With an enormous boom, he came to a dead stop. He had never felt so shitty in his life. It felt like every part of his body had been pounded to mincemeat. When he rolled onto his side to look up at who had stopped him, he looked into the calm eyes of a war veteran.

The prince appeared next to the elite palace guard. “Commander, excellent work. I didn’t expect less.”

The commander saluted. “It was a pleasure to bring down the bastard who killed one hundred of my men, my majesty!”

The prince grabbed him at the neck like a kitten and dragged him away from the impact site. Seeing the perfect opportunity for a strike, he pushed his left arm into the prince’s abdomen. Then, he drew on the entire solid aether in his right arm. The prince’s body was once again flung into the air at unimaginable speeds, and Res reveled in the feeling of power. “Bro, you got him!”

That punch held the force of hundreds upon hundreds of battle rams combined. The prince was surely … Slowly but surely, the prince got up. A gem in the prince’s feet glowed red and the grinning face of the prince appeared right in front of him. The spot on the shining armor where Res’s fist had impacted was unscratched. “I see you still have some fight left in you.”

Res saw the slap coming, but he could do nothing as the prince had grabbed him by the neck. *CRACK* The sound of the slap resounded through the entire clearing. *CRACK* He lost eight teeth. *CRACK* He was now vomiting blood, but the prince didn’t seem to mind. *CRACK* The prince laughed at his expression of pure hate. Through his broken teeth, he muffled out: “I wiff kill you.”

Once again the prince drew back for another slap.

“Bro, push at the prince, but try to focus the push into a tiny pinprick. It is fucking ineffective, but that fucker can’t dodge that. We will take down that motherfucker.”

Res roared out his defiance at the world and pulled on his entire body. Jason joined in on the roaring as he drew on ludicrous amounts of energy. In an instant, he released all that aether at a tiny pinpoint behind the prince’s head. The beam of aether that left his body was like the sun in his aether sight. Ten meters in diameter, it was white terror reincarnate.

Res smiled when he saw that the beam hit the prince squarely in the chest. Behind the prince, it burrowed its way into the ground and left a hundred-meter-long trench. Yet, the only thing that seemed off about the prince was an orange glow in his throat. Res’s energy had left him. He was reduced down to only his neck and head, which were floating in the air like ghosts.

When the prince noticed Res’s desperate glance at the orange dot, he laughed: “Ahhh, that. I knew that you would release a last desperate stance. I have this handy amulet that allows the wearer to ignore one attack a year. I thought to save it for this special occasion.”

Despair welled up in Res as he thought through the implications. Suddenly, the prince gripped him like one would grab a toy and he looked at him with a wicked grin: “Wait, little Res. Don’t leave me and your young lady all alone. We have loooottttssss of stuff to do.”

Res tried to push away, to use the last parts of his neck, or to even bite the prince, but nothing worked.

“Bro, we are in deep shit.”

Serafina was still lying unconscious on the ground while bleeding out. Xenia was sitting a few meters away and glaring at Serafina’s bleeding body. With his sword, the prince cut out a piece of the ground and propped his head up onto the makeshift podium. He motioned to Xenia. “Tell me if he tries anything. ”Xenia nodded vehemently and spat on him. Res didn’t care as his entire attention rested on Serafina’s prone body.

The prince tickled her and whispered in a sweet tone: “Serafina, it is time for you to get up. Dinner is ready.” Serafina opened her eyes and cried out in pain when she tried to speak. When she saw Res’s disembodied head, she broke down and tried to crawl towards him. A silver dagger appeared in the prince’s hand and she froze at the sound of a blade being drawn. “No, my dear. I am afraid that you will need to stop right there.”

Her eyes widened when she recognized the voice. The flat of the dagger ran over the skin of her neck and she froze, but never stopped eye-contact with Res. He tried to gather aether to get that scumbag off of her. A quick deadly glance from the prince told him she could turn into dead meat in an instant.

The prince continued stroking her neck with his dagger: “Do you know how much distress you have caused me? You hunted me in my dreams. I couldn’t show myself in front of my friends because you gave me an erection, and you stole my dream wife. At that moment, I realized that I have never hated, really hated someone before.”

The prince began to trace Serafina’s veins. “I have to admit that I love necks. They present something so vulnerable. That right there is the internal jugular vein. If I were to CUT …”

Res wanted to cry out as the prince drew the dagger over her neck, but he couldn’t. Yet, no blood spurted out of Serafina’s neck who was now trembling. The prince giggled and showed that he had only cut with the dull part of the knife.

“Only if I WERE to cut, she would die within seconds. I have perfected my average time to about nine seconds. But I wouldn’t do such a thing to my best friend Res, would I?”

Violently, he cut Serafina’s hamstring. Res pushed himself off, but the prince was already next to him, holding him down. He held up his hand to his mouth as if he had made a terrible mistake. “Oooopsie. I did mean to do that.”