The arena was lightless, the ground was made of bodies, the goalposts were made of bodies, the ball was made of an entity that did its best to compress itself into a sphere, there were eyes everywhere, and one could not do a step without stepping into one of their eyes, peering into the lightless world only to become a sense of being stepped on.

Chaden stomped down hard, otherwise feeling the ground was not possible. How would he play without seeing? Through exposed wounds he felt a draft, hurting his skin as if flayed.

Thundering pain to his bone informed him, his opponent just scored a point.

Chaden stumbled, slipped on an exposed eye and fell onto someones face, another thunderous pain informed him of the second point scored against him. The very air, a simple movement, it began to inflict pain onto him, there was no falling unconcious here, the pain did not have a limit on how bad it could be, it flooded him and in its complexity, he knew the entire field projected into different kinds of pain. Was that how one saw, by getting inflicted upon? As soon as the last echoes of the scored point had gone by, the arena was dark, painless, only his own brokenness could be felt. Chaden attempted to get up, but at the moment he got up, a third point had been scored, he was forced to adjust in order to not fall down again. He was like a helpless young child, attempting to learn to walk, except the life before hell had already been lived. This was not a competition, this was him being ridiculed for his hubris. Would it be so bad to just give up?

Yes, yes that would be so bad, it would be so bad because he had always lived like that, he lived in order to care, he had to, because otherwise his parents would... they wouldn't like him. It had been the reason after losing the first time, love and respect.

He was losing respect, but what would cost more respect would be to give up. To give up would be final, no more suffering, no more respect, no more love.

Chaden tried to stay standing, every single time a goal was scored, he felt himself breaking, but he stood and felt the pain, felt what hurt him from the outside.

What did he prefer, the pain of there be no more love, or the absence of it? If you did not care about your pain, did you really exist? Was existence better than nonexistence?

For Chaden, who would have been a father if not for the end of the world, there was no greater thing than to exist. Was his child suffering in a far off place, like he was?

That thought made him believe, believe that existence was better than no existence, because he could not have made a child suffer the pain he was suffering if that was not what it deserved. Well that was a fuzzy thought at least, he felt angry at something other than himself, someone other than himself. He wasn't just a child, he was a player in this game, and if he was a child in this game, that was good - he would learn to cope with the pain replacing all of his senses, it was totally normal to cope, it was so meaningful he had to cope, it was perfection, it could not be better, it was - alright.

He stepped aside, almost hitting the ball and fell over as yet another goal was scored against him. He felt himself breaking apart when falling down, he felt his child breaking, his girlfriend and his parents hopes. He would have to break all of these things, over and over again, it was perfection, it could not be better. Chaden stood up again, struggling to make sense where it was just overwhelming negative.