So far as experience, she had plenty. Not that Aibhilin could read the mind of her opponent, but she could see his eyes gravitate over the more battered aspects of her person. Not with the eyes of a casual onlooker, or else they’d have almost certainly have fixated on her more visually pleasing features. She wasn’t unattractive, had a large bust and shapely figure assuming you didn’t mind that she was more heavily muscles than your average male athlete. She even had a pretty face considering her occupation. The beast was looking at her hands, her arms, the long, biting scar poking out from her clavicle to her right shoulder visible despite the pauldron as she wore no sleeves. He might have figured from its angle that it likely protruded far down in a diagonal cut to her torso despite the pixane and coat of plates which obstructed a clear view of said area. He would have been correct to assume as much. She couldn’t get as firm a read on his experience, though she didn’t doubt that he had not gotten to this point by skill at arms alone. He had bled along the way and learned through example, probably in a pit deep beneath the earth and known for the brutality of its people in the unending quest for dominance over those that were not you. 

They weren’t all that different, she and the man standing some handful of yards in front of her. Almost certainly had more in common than she and the emperor and gleaming throng of uppity heirs to the laurels of their ancestor’s conquests viewing the pair as they met to fight and kill or die. This was nothing new to her, nor did it bother her. All pit fighters dream of that one match in which they agree with the opponent across from them to turn their weapons together upon those in the stands who deigned to think themselves the betters of these all too similar champions of death through extended contest of blood and metal upon the sand, these well-tuned and completely optimized machines of the killing game who could pulverize their skulls bare handed without the slightest of resistance on the part of the lofty viewer. This was a dream that was never to be realized, not by her nor him, or likely by any alive today. In this world those people watching them dance what would be the final dance for one of them commanded legions, and there was no number of pit fighters who could withstand the destruction wrought by even one of those well-tuned and completely optimized machines of death in the other game, the game of mass slaughter through strategic warfare. 

In this world what mattered was taking as much as the wealthy would allow you to take, and if that meant risking your neck it was accepted as a simple bargain. Far better to live and die this way than working in a mine for a bronze shard a week and too few rations to send you to your slumber without first experiencing grueling hunger pains, listening to the cries of your children as they took to their sleep even hungrier than you. The ones who gave their children enough to eat themselves starved and rotted away under their own greater demand in expenditure of energy to continue at your work and bring home the food and pay necessary for any to eat at all, and in the end left their family to starve without their employment to provide for them after being put at long last in a shallow grave or made in body to provide a few final meals at the expense of your own flesh. In this world it was better to kill than be killed, and it didn’t matter who the opponent you faced was, regardless of if their story and your own shared similarity greater than that of the ones making you do the killing for their amusement.  

All that mattered was the law of blood and sand. She would be the executor of that law once more for the amusement of the crowd, and this opponent was as good as any to provide her next pair of ears. She raised her left hand and flicked the band of snakeskin that had been tied to her sword belt over her coat of plates, laced horizontally and parallel to the belt so as not to be used as any extra leverage as the belt already offered an opponent against her in a grapple. She had to have the sword belt here, it would be unbefitting a pit fighter to enter combat without her blade regardless of whether or not she intended on using the thing, but the necklace had no particular reason to be worn about her neck, not here. Upon the necklace were sixteen pairs of ears, right to the right side of her torso and left to their own, each shrunken and shriveled intentionally as to preserve them as best as possible without chemical agents. Many were clearly just barely held together, some even seemed to have taken damage in successive fights after having been removed and tanned only to be sewn back together after being severed or smashed, but they were plainly human. 

Whether or not he understood that they were trophies from fights in an arena such as this one or not, and whether he assumed she wore the number she did because that was the total of her victories or because wearing any more on a belt would simply require a second belt to be worn, they were packed together as is and another belt would add an entirely new place to potentially use as leverage against her in an extended bout, it didn’t matter. The drums had begun sounding, and horns of bone and metal were crooning out their phantom wails. She would fall back with her right leg and extend her left, bending slightly at the knee and easing the halberd into a two handed grip with the spear point trained upon her opponent should he allow her to do as such. It was time, and no amount of thinking or fancy speech was going to change what was going to happen next. This was axe time, and she’d never known anyone to outthink an axe to the head. “Fight well, friend,” her lips extended outward across her face in a devilish smile which threatened to split her head in twain, teeth bared and eyes gleaming in the distant firelight. She lived for this.