Darker scenes from bygone times were playing out before her eyes. She didn’t wonder, she wasn’t moved to care, her eyes simply followed the man knowingly as he walked towards the table. Piled upon its worn surface were tools befitting of an executioner’s pit, and some distance away was a human ox, conversing with his fellows at ease on a stage that bore promises of death. With his strong features that looked as if they were cast from solid bronze, the brute was easily twice as tall and several times wider than the man handing him a familiar piece of equipment. 

Nairi’s fists tightened instinctively as he walked the line between them and his kin. The more she watched, the easier it became to anticipate his next move, having seen and experienced similar acts firsthand. But no degree of recollection could truly prepare her for the thunderous snap that arrived inches away from her nose. Her exterior barely registered a change, in spite of the fact that her insides leapt into the space her heart used to occupy. She swallowed hard to settle the throbbing in her throat, leaning forward again into those vacant inches the reaction jerked her out of. She truly despised that weapon.

Self-taught to understand the basic sounds of Western tongues, she knew enough to decipher the brute’s barrage of cussing and threats, although one only needed to feel the booming delivery to know their intent. She stood straighter than what was comfortable, unmoving, every lean muscle held taut as she endured his harrowing address. From it she learned that escape was fraught with danger, the walls reaching high on all sides save one, where the world seemingly ended in a plunging drop. She also discovered that this place - this ‘Ludus’ - offered a third option if the aforementioned or death didn’t claim them. To be tossed into the bowels of a foreign land did not appeal to her wild want, however. She dreamed of greater things, of the unseen half of the horizon, and of an unwritten future, where she was free to feel the sunrise on her face as it rose over territories untouched by the crusading Westerners.

“Well… Begin.” The call was clear and absolute.

Three men dared to test their mettle against that of their supposed masters, hungering for battle and wanting nothing less than the decimation of their enemy. In this place, their little world, the enemy was not the Empire; it was the Gods and Goddesses that reigned over all atop this new Olympus. In their eyes she could see the same wanton desires that presided over many a warrior’s instincts. In her gut, she felt something similar, strong feelings of anger and determination wrestling for dominance. Nairi couldn’t boldly claim to have had anything as ostentatious as a military career, but what she lacked in finesse and pedigree, she more than made up for in spirit. Lifting her chin, the woman let out a short breath and stepped forward. “Wait,” she called out, oddly calm. “Let me fight.”