Chapter 368: What Only I Can Do
On the second floor of the arena, the men of the Black Wolf Brigade howled and cheered for their commander and his brother as they faced off against opponents who seemed to directly counter them. Blood flowed from wounds on both the vampires’ bodies and the gladiators alike. More than once, Savis had been thwarted in his attempts to kill one of the remaining man when his lunch stopped short and the chains binding him to Tausau pulled taut, allowing his prey to slip away.
"We won’t win like this, Brother," the white furred vampire snarled. His voice was low and barely audible but the ears of a vampire had no difficulty understanding his words, even over the din of the crowd and the clank of chains as they moved.
"I can buy you an opportunity," Tausau said in an equally quiet tone. His arm ached from repeated heavy blows rained down on the shield he carried and the leather-wrapped wooden shield itself had cracked and splintered in more than one place. "Polearm or spear?"
"Polearm," Savis said decisively. The thrusts of the serpentine gladiator wielding the spear were powerful and swift but the halbered weilded by the Glass Eyed warrior was several times more difficult to deal with, hooking his chains and always landing its blows more precisely than he would have thought possible for someone without an extraordinary gift like the one he had received from Hamdi.
"Now," Savis roared, lunging toward the spear wielding gladiator.
"Raaaarrrr!" Tausau roared, using his stunted arms to flip the failing shield through the air and sending it careening at the face of a bearish swordsman with enough force to knocke the man off his feet. The move looked desperate at best, foolish at worse, but it created half an opening for the Clanless vampire to lunge at the halberd wielding gladiator.
But even as Tausau lunged toward his target and Savis rushed beside him, aiming for the serpentine spearman, the final remaining swordsman was left completely unimpeded. With a roar of his own, his heavy two-handed sword came down in a brutal arc, slicing across Tausau’s back from one shoulder to the opposite hip, spilling vampire blood across the sands to the excited roar of the crowd.
On the first level of the arena, in a pocket of growing darkness surrounding Nyrielle, however, everyone had ceased paying attention to the battle below as the negotiation between the terrifying Harbinger of Death and the humble purveyer of luxury goods took a turn for the worse that no one had imagined.
"Perhaps I should cleanse this floor of the vultures who would only pick at her flesh until there was nothing left of the woman I love!"
Nyrielle’s words sliced through the idle chatter and even the people who had begun to speculate about Beilan’s impending fall from grace felt their blood go cold. Just what was it that this careless merchant had said to doom not only himself but all of them who gathered here today for the opportunity to befriend the woman who conquered the Tangled Wood in a day? Didn’t he know that such powerful lords could never be offended?