Ch 32

I was tired after having spent several hours of the previous night using the magick to rapidly heal myself. The injury had been pretty clean and so had healed up well, but it had still taken me hours before I was done. Now, having slept for a couple of hours I dragged myself out of the cot and towards the training room where I would meet with Lilly and begin learning the skills necessary to entice Gikats's mysterious buyer to liberate me from being the property of the racist elf Silvan.

Lilly was wearing her trademark dark leather pants and bustier which would have accentuated the curves of most women but did little for her as there were simply no curves to accentuate. She like many other slaves, seemed to be rather slender due to malnutrition, otherwise she might have been rather pretty. I was idly wondering if the malnutrition also had something to do with how short she was when she asked me something and noticed that instead of paying attention I was spacing out. “Pay Attention!” she yelled while waving the point of one of her daggers under my nose.

I jerked myself back to focus. I really needed to get more sleep in the coming nights, or I wasn’t going to be able to learn much at all. Over the next several hours Lilly tutored me in the arts of tumbling, which is to say that she flipped me and made me fall over and over again until she was satisfied that I knew how to fall properly. I had a fresh collection of bruises by the time we were done but she said that now when I was in a fight, I was less likely to injure myself while falling down or dodging blows. This in and of itself would be beneficial even though its usefulness would likely go down if I simply got better and killing them before they could attack me.

Not satisfied with the day’s efforts but deciding that my body had taken enough of a beating Lilly set up some targets and had me practice throwing my daggers at them. I had asked if it wouldn’t be better to use practice daggers so that mine wouldn’t get damaged, but she had scoffed at me. “Puh, if an amateur like you practices with practice daggers then when it comes time to throw one in a fight you’ll miss by a mile! This way, at least if you can learn to hit the target most of the time with your own you can hit a person who is standing still.” Properly shamed for asking questions I lowered my head and went back to throwing my daggers. One, two, walk to the target and retrieve them. One, two, walk to the target and yank them out again. Left arm, right arm, back again to the target. If nothing else I’m going to get my cardio in walking back and forth across the room.

“Back up!” Lilly yelled, giving me a harsh tone. “You keep edging closer to the target, what are you tired? Can’t manage to throw those little daggers far enough?” She was heckling me like a drill sergeant. First about my form and then to use both arms interchangeably as I threw my daggers so that I did not get in the bad habit of having a dominant throwing arm. Her rough tone and loud voice were at odds with the short and slender woman that the sounds were coming out of and the playful nature that she had exhibited when she spoke to me before. I was thinking that I may have been conned, Grelf may seem rough but between flipping me onto my ass and back a few dozen times and now keeping up a constant barrage of criticism on how I was throwing my daggers I was beginning to think of Grelf as a saint of patience and curtesy.

Finally, the sun was setting, and it was time for me to go back to my cot. I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to both heal my bruises and sore muscles as well as get plenty of sleep to make up for the sleep I had missed the night before. I did not want to be going into the arena on half a tank as we used to say in my old world.

As I lay in my cot and started to draw upon the energy I would need to cast the spell that would improve my rate of healing by twenty one times the normal rate I was suddenly filled with nostalgia thinking about the world I had inhabited before being reincarnated directly into the freshly dead body of a slave about to be sold at auction. In the world I had left behind there had always been plenty of food, even if it wasn’t very tasty it was better than the gruel slaves were given in this world. Even the bread and cheese of those who fought in the arena grew quite boring compared to the variety always available before.

More so than the food, the thing I truly missed the most would be the United Nations ban on slavery and human trafficking. I never really cared when I heard stories about people being bought and sold like cattle to be used for sex or cheap labor and often ending up dead. I had never cared because it had never affected me or my life directly, it was always a story about something that happened in distant corners of the world, not in the developed part of it.

Now in my new life in this new world, not only was slavery legal, once you became a slave that was it. No rights, no opinion, one’s treatment dependent solely on the nature of the master that buys them. Not only was it an accepted practice for people to own slaves but I was one of them, and now forced to fight for my life in an arena surrounded by blood hungry spectators.

I lay back and try to relax, closing my eyes and emptying my mind into the empty void of nothingness that comes before sleep. As I drifted off, I vaguely recall dreaming of looking down at myself and idly observing the healing magick that was working on my body in a disinterested fashion as if seeing what happened to somebody I didn’t know. Then everything went dark as sleep overtook me fully and when next I was awake it was morning.