Gladiators in SPACE! – Part 1

Hello My Imaginary Friends!

I’m writing to you from the past. (Spooky!)

Baby Dragon was due on the 9th and Can-Con (Which I’m sure will be awesome) was the 9, 10, and 11.

That means today I’m either cuddling the little Dragon or at work compulsively checking my phone. Either way I’m in no state to write a post.

Since I’m busy, I’ve written you a story. It’s Heavily influenced by a book I just beta-read by S.M. Carrière. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is the fourth story in the Sun Speaker Universe but it’s written so that you could read it without having read the others. If you are interested in reading the rest check out my Stories Page.

Enjoy!

The cheering of the crowd shook the ground beneath my feet. I’ve had dreams of arenas filled with people chanting my name. This arena wasn’t cheering for me.

Not long ago I was in the middle of a revolution, more like instigator, and even then they didn’t chant my name.

I was standing on the edge of a wall forty feet tall that circled a large sandy oval. Above the wall were seats for the audience, roughly enough or three million. Straight above my head, hundreds of meters up, a glass dome with a view into space showed part of Jupiter.

The Mederei Alpha was the jewel of the Jupiter Protectorate’s Arena fleet. It was named after an Ancient Earth gladiator during the days of the Roman Empire. The Jupiterese loved ancient Rome, and had modeled themselves after it in every way, except for all the spaceships and laser guns. The ship wasn’t only an arena but a massive warship.

As the floor shook from the crowds’ enthusiasm, I seized up my opponent. He, or she, I couldn’t tell, was three metres tall and almost as wide. If they had a neck I couldn’t tell, maybe they were from the Trans Neptunian planets. Their left arms were as large as I was and it’s right ones were even bigger. They  held a giant club, which must have been a tree for several hundreds of years before it was uprooted and sanded down by the bones of their enemies.

I held an anodized aluminum gladius that was poorly balanced and laughably small in comparison. “So do you think we can turn this into a battle of words? I’m not a great rapper or poet but I’ll give it a go if you like.”

“No! We fight!” screamed the giant. They walked around basking in the praise of the audience.

“Ok then, big… um… giant” I wasn’t trying to be intimidating. I was just trying to survive. Launching myself at them, I dropped my sword and decided to rely on my fists. They were going to be just as effective anyway.

My trajectory had me landing on their chest, but it’s hard to aim when your target has a mind of their own. Dropping the club, they grabbed me, mid-flight, and pretended to squeeze me. I say pretended because I wasn’t jelly on the sand. They said, “What the hells. Take this serious. If we don’t give it our all, they’ll space us.”

“Don’t worry. I have everything under control,” I tried to be flirty and wink, but it’s not easy to flirt when you’re being squeezed. They tossed me across the obscenely large arena. I broke something in my leg when I fell. Suzie, my second in command and combat tutor would be disappointed. Never disappoint an assassin;they hold grudges.

I limped up and projected my voice, “Let’s finish this. You may be powerfully built but you’re nothing against the force of Sol!” I was hamming it up, the audience thought I was making a joke and they laughed. It was a nice change from the jeering.

Concentrating on my connection to Sol, the being that lives in our sun who is all knowing and people worship as a god, I pulled solar power from space. I pulled enough to seriously injure a piece of paper or maybe inconvenience a small insect and directed the blast at my, soon to be, new giant friend.

A great blast of light left my hands and hit them square in the chest. It was bright enough to dazzle, and quiet, the crowd. My opponent took a dramatic step back and howled in pain. Either I put more power in the blast than I thought or they were a pretty good actor.

They recovered quickly and ran towards me, brandishing the club in a threatening manner. “By my ancestors and the gods they worshiped, I’ll kill you for that!” They roared the traditional war cry of the Martian people. They must have been one of the small sect of Martians that had been forced into genetic and eugenic experiments. They called themselves Barsoonian or Green Martians, despite being the normal spectrum of human colours. The mad Martian Emperor Drumph, a few hundred years ago, had decided he needed better guards and instituted the experiments on the poorest citizens of Mars.

When sanity returned to the Martian rulers they banned the experiments and gave a large part of the planet to the Barsoonians; they now rarely left the planet and mostly kept to themselves.

My historical musings almost ended the fight but I managed to barely avoid the club with a lucky-timed backflip. I didn’t stick the landing however and my broken leg let me know I wasn’t going to survive much longer.

I threw myself at the Barsoonian, and as the club started eclipsing my view, I threw my voice so they could hear me and said, “It’s ok. I’ll live and I’ll get you back to your family.” What came next was blinding pain, followed by weightlessness and ending in even more pain as I landed against the wall.

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