The coliseum had become a hell zone. Blood spilled across the stands, corpses of both men and those horrible monstrosities scattered about in clumps of fleshy boils and oozing yellow pustules. Anyone touched by that dark rain had become like them, though they weren’t all the same.

Some grew fat, their bodies bloated into giant lumps of waddling flesh blind from the fat that engulfed their faces but able to screech and roar as their chests broke open into maws of eviscerating teeth ready to rip and tear until their despicable hunger was sated.

Others had grown, their arms and legs lengthening while their spines cracked and twisted until they were gangly spires of cracked skin with long prehensile tongues that would snap out at any moment killing their victims instantly from decapitation or through a jab to the heart.

The sight churned Katelyn’s stomach. She’d seen blood, seen viscera, seen people decapitated and dismembered and skinned and abused, but this… this was worse no doubting that. These people weren’t only tortured by the dark rain brought on by that heretic, they were fully transformed into monsters themselves. Bloodthirsty, brainwash beasts. She’d even seen a little boy, watch from a distance as his body cracked and malformed rip his mother's throat out with tears streaming down one cheek. Billy had been the one to put him out of his misery.

She glanced around the coliseum, her heart aching and her stomach churning with the urge to throw up. It was moments like this that reminded her that no matter how many years had passed, this world was not her own. This place, Marga, it was a violent, monstrous place unsuited to life from outside its sphere.

Then she looked down to the coliseum below. The bodies of the monster, the heretic lay there dead in a puddle of its vile black blood while Connor sat to the side clutching at his stump while Lin Qiu hastily used her aer to heal the wound as well as she could in the moment.

Katelyn bit her lip as she locked onto the beast in question. It had been mere minutes since hell had broken loose, even less since the others slaughtered its creations, but for a moment she could still hear its final utterance. ‘Ka…tie…’ it was too far for her to hear completely, but the way it looked at her and the way its lips moved… why could she only think of Lucca? The only one of the forty-three to have never been found since their arrival to Marga.

Katelyn pivoted and with hastened steps made her way out of the seating area and into the back halls where she swiftly descended the steps and made way through the labyrinthine innards until she could finally escape into the inner arena. She was nothing like Connor with his strong body the tens of meters fall from pew to arena floor was menial. But for her, she feared she’d break her leg or worse, twist her ankle.

The latter of which no healer would waste themselves with treating leaving her to limp around like an elderly woman with a broken hip.

“Connor!” she hastened across the field and Connor lifted his head. Sweat coloured his brow as he laid resting all his weight on his leftover left arm. Giving Lin Qiu the space and freedom she needed to heal him. There was a pain to his eyes, a blend of hatred and true agony from the missing limb.

As she drew nearer, that pain slowly fizzled and a weak smile took to his lips. “I’m okay hun.”

“You’re missing an arm.” She insisted, a glance to the side let her see the black-skinned, skeletal appendage laid across the ground like a discarded stick not ten meters away. To even say that it was an ‘arm’ was nigh impossible. The fingers were pointed like daggers and from the spaces between each finger till halfway down the arm were numerous white-toothed maws and dangling tongues. “That’s… that’s not okay.”

Collapsing to her knees beside him, she looked to Lin Qiu and met the girl onyx orbs.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, her accent more understandable now that she had been studying English for the past twenty-five years. Lin’s expression soured, gaining a sullen frown as she looked back to Connor, “but you must be careful. Losing an arm is a traumatic event so no excessive actions for a time. We must keep you under watch as well. In case that corruption may have spread elsewhere on your body.”

“Got it.” Connor sighed, spreading his remaining hand out he gazed at the crimson ink strewn across its surface then clamped his fist tight until he could feel his nails digging lines into his palm. “I’ll take it easy for a bit.” Setting the dirty hand atop the ground, Connor used it to help himself to his feet, “but we should make sure there’s no more of those monsters around and ensure the Queen is safe.”

Lin Qiu rolled her eyes and shook her head. “That is something I consider, ‘excessive’ Connor. You are better off resting somewhere while the others deal with the rest.”

He laughed in response, “no can do Lin. I wouldn’t be the leader of our ragtag bunch if I let a flesh wound keep me from doing my duties.”

“Duties?” Lin Qiu puffed and swept back over her hair the singular silver lock that had grown over her favourite fringe. “Your duties ended eight years ago when we killed Kaz-teal. Your duties now are to keep yourself healthy and safe.”

“I know, I know. And I get that,” he defended, “still. I can’t just sit by when panic is up and about.” The distant cry of a child shuddered his spine and turned his gaze to the edge of the arena, high up on one of the stands was a little girl, huddled behind one of the walls as an abominations freshly killed body lay dead at her feet.

Katelyn watched with sunken breath as sadness trekked across Connor's face then as if drawn by a magnet, turned to the heretic's corpse. Zac was stood over it, panting and cloaked in sweat and the blood of the abominations. Raising his blade, Katelyn swiftly turned away and jerked as in the next second as the blade was brought blaring down, severing through the heretics spine and decapitated it in one, soon kicking the head off to the side to ensure that any possible revival it could go through wouldn’t take.

When the noise of cracking bone dissipated to be replaced with the approach of boot falls, she opened her eyes and saw Zac approaching. Now noticing on his cheek a fresh gash that was oozing blood.

“You good the Connor?” the man bellowed with his faint Australian accent.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good here. A little lopsided but otherwise in one piece.” The two boys fell into hearty laughter. One neither Lin Qiu nor Katelyn could understand from the recent events. Boys, they supposed.

Seeing there was little else for her to do, Katelyn found herself crawling nervously towards the heretics head. A lump in the back of her throat made it difficult to breathe or even swallow her spit. ‘What if it’s him?’ her stride halted, the thought, it was a horrible one. Not one she wanted to accept or let fester in her mind.

But what if…

The head was laid with one cheek over the ground blocking her from seeing the finer details of its face. Though even then, the back of its head was made of patchy tangled strands of hair interspersed with thick burn scars that left it half bald. It looked almost like someone had poured acid over its head.

Crouching down, she reached out and—holding back the urge to vomit—turned it over so she could inspect the heretics features. As she glanced at it she could only jolt away, it… even in that single second the sight was horrible. One eye wide with a dark iris while the other was just an empty socket. Straight scars, round scars, a Glasgow smile carved into its cheeks and the way its mouth hung open… she could see areas where teeth had been ripped out and its tongue, it had been cut up and cauterized like a snakes forked tongue.

“Katie!” Connor called, “let go of that,” he rushed—though it looked more like a hobble—towards her ready to smack the disembodied head from her hands.

Before he could get near she swallowed her doubts and forced herself to inspect every detail of the head. Pleading for it not to be him. It was hard to tell anything, there was barely a section of skin that wasn’t damaged in some way but the structure, the sharp cheeks, the rounded chin, they were like Lucca’s.

Circumstantial, coincidental, it could just be her mind trying to reason her into believing it was him. And that’s when she saw it.

Turning the head onto its side so its right cheek was in her left palm, she swept back a single strand of ivory hair and reached towards the heads jagged cut ear and pulled back what she could until she saw it, that collection of three freckles put into a triangle formation just beneath it.

Her heart lurched, her eyes swayed as she blinked a mile a minute hoping that little birthmark would disappear at any given time. Yet it didn’t. They were there in full. Lucca’s triforce freckles.

‘No, no, it-it can’t be.’ Katelyn's hands jittered as finally, Connor arrived to slap the heretical head from her grasp.

With his remaining hand, he gripped her shoulder and spun, “what are you doing? You know you shouldn’t touch a heretic’s body, what if it-” seeing Katelyns’ unfocused eyes on the verge of tears and the jittering of her lips, he went still. “Katie? What’s wrong. Are you okay?”

‘No.’ She wanted to say. With a shiver, she lifted her orbs to Connor’s and with them wide, she mumbled, “I-I-I think this is Lucca?” her voice a squeak and tears tainting either side of her cheeks.

Connor’s mouth fell open and he began to process the name he hadn’t heard in two decades. When they finally seemed to kick, he shifted his view to the head and shook his own.

“No. That’s. It’s not him.” He said with solidarity and cupping Katelyn’s cheek, made her look him in the eyes. “It’s not him honey. It can’t be. We both know Lucca. He wouldn’t become a monster like this. This is just a monster. Not him.”

“But he has Lucca’s-”

“No!” Connor burst, “listen to me, Katie. It. Is. Not. Him.”

Katelyn’s jaw hung open, she wanted to retort, tell him he’s wrong but she couldn’t. He had this certainty to his voice. One that in the past had reassured her, calmed her in the nights when crying was all she could think to do.

But in this moment… That calming voice did little to help. It was nothing more than the buzz of a mosquito, so tiny and small, so insignificant that she could only relegate it to a part of her mind. In a place where she could only keep quiet and nod.

“Y-yeah. I’m… I’m sorry, I…” Katelyn buried her face into her hands and slowed her hastened breathing then she turned out of Connor’s softly holding hand. “I… I need to go rest. This, this is too much for me right now.”

Without sharing another word, Connor watched Katelyn’s back as she pressed onwards towards the gateways and bit his lip harshly and looked to the head and scowled. With a huff, he spun and turned his gaze upwards towards the highest seat of the arena, the queens stand.

Her majesty Loreia stood there, staring down like a lioness over them all. Her lips sunken into a frown but in it, he could see a hint of bemusement. Especially as her gaze landed on the heretic ‘Miki’s’ dead body.

Sensing his gaze, the Queen met Connor’s eyes then smirked and licked her lips. An action that sent his heart trembling with a sick joy. A joy Katelyn could never know about.