Celestia’s fist pounded into the gut of the armored Warlock opposite her, totally surprising the idiot at just how hard she could hit him as she yelled, “Incoming!”

All of these drow were equipped with gravity-benders, giving them impossible agility jumping and moving, even in midair. Unfortunately for this Warlock, her Interdiction was up, and transferring his center of gravity just wasn’t going to work.

The cellulocust mother tree was being harried by three drow trying to get past the incredible reach of its thorned branches and the ripping grasp of the roots that dominated the ground about it. Naturally it had multiple eyes, and it could hear her.

As the Warlock tried to move and zigzag impossibly in the air, he failed. Two of the treemother’s arms came around with amazing speed, and crashed together. He had some good armor and a personal force field, but Celestia had already sheared away most of his Soak, even if he hadn’t known it, so bones cracked and blood sprayed.

The two arms then shoved him right down onto a root driving up from below, right through his neck.

Celestia moved into the tree’s killing area as the drow was still twitching, chopped off the drow’s disbelieving head, burning corpse and soul in shadowfire, and punting the head towards the treemother. The plant shifted a minor branch and impaled it precisely, even as it was still flailing with emotionless skill at the three drow taunting it.

Without batting an eye, Celestia jumped off a protruding root, one, two, three, and as the nearest drow Reaper gawked at the sight of her moving through the killing root-field, her eyes were filled with death. His blood went cold to see his fate coming for him; cold, serene, irresistible. His muscles weakened, his resolve faltered, and his focus quivered as he raised his blades to parry her incoming Blade, which was the very wrong move to make in the face of a Heavy Warsword backed by enough power.

------

The Bladewitch tried to flurry her, her hands exploding into invisible blurs, attack patterns executed so many thousands of times they didn’t require any thought.

Jensa preferred to be a One-Strike Specialist, and naturally looked down on rabid Fire-style flurry specialists as a result.

Crazy Flame, Hotfoot, Crystal Shield, and Rule of Valus were all designed to counter Finesse fighters who relied on overwhelming attacks and unearthly precision to do what they did.

The fact was, their style of fighting was immensely vulnerable to disruption. It was incredibly reliant on precise execution of moves, getting exactly the right angle, hitting exactly the right spot... and so you actually didn’t have to dodge them much, you had to dodge them just enough to throw things off.

When you were ten times stronger than them, and at the very least as fast, that wasn’t actually all that hard, if you knew what you were doing, and weren’t afraid of incidental contact from their blades.

Crashing against Hawk was numbing the Bladewitch’s hands, her blades were not meeting Jensa’s body right, the angles were subtly off, and it seemed like her own Blades were interfering with her as she crashed against that wall of a Sword swirling about so smoothly, forcing her back and forth. Her balance wasn’t where she wanted it to be, she was being herded, she could feel it, and she couldn’t do anything about it except try to get around the longer Weapon, wielded by a stronger, equally fast foe, and ask why her Blades weren’t cutting in like they should be to her unarmored enemy...

A ruby Rune on Hawk’s length flared, and Jensa slammed Hawk forwards with brutal precision and a whole lot of power. The Knives snapping up to block only deflected the point up precisely where it was intended to go, and Hawk crashed through the partial chestplate showing alluring purple cleavage, right out the back, and insta-killed her in one Death Attack.

Assassins in the service of Good were called Holy Slayers, and Jensa’s One Strike style was based on her Talent giving her a +8 to Spot Checks... which let her Find the Weakness process an opponent’s fighting style, find their weak point, and act on it. That attack eliminated Dex and Dodge bonuses, triggering the conditions for a Sneak Attack, which also, after enough study, dovetailed with a Death Attack.

The DC of that attack would normally be 10 + Assassin Level + Dex bonus, so something like 30, and so reallllly hard for most humanoids to survive unless they were playing weird anatomy games. Just in case, the Ruby Enchantment added the Enhancement bonus of the Weapon to that save, a tidy +XIII at the moment, and so this Bladewitch had just tried to survive an unparryable One Strike hitting at her Dodgeless AC with -6 to her Deflection bonus and Armor, and yeah, her full HP could’ve taken the 200+ damage coming down the pike, sure enough, but that 43 Fortitude Save was something Greater Demons would quail at.

She died to the Ruby Strike instantly, banefire and shadowfire shaking hands and starting the Gloom-feeding process with merry speed. Jensa tore the Coven Insignia off her with her claw and tossed it into her hair, kicking the burning corpse away with all the respect a drow entertainment murderer deserved, and in doing so sliding twelve paces back over the churned ground suddenly and precisely.

The Champion there was a little banged-up after trying to evade the Kundi Queen’s attacks. The huge sentient bug was very big, very fast, and very strong, her pedipalps and pincers moving with savage speed and power, glowing with psychic force that could carve into adamantine like cheese. His only advantage was his ability to turn faster than her, which certainly wasn’t saving him, but he had scored her purple-black carapace several times, and glowing ichor was dripping out of one of the cuts. He was feeling very confident of himself as he evaded the spear-like plunges and swipes of the stabbing pedipalps, and the slicing, scything strikes of her side pincers.

Then he abruptly slammed into something behind him, which bounced him forwards. His reflexes were more than enhanced enough to realize what a disaster that was.

The first pincer came down, and he barely twisted away, feeling the ridged razors tearing down his side. The claw scythed high and low, and he had to bend horizontally, leaping and spinning between them as they ghosted past his flesh...

The second pedipalp came around like a train and impaled him right through like a sack of beans, lifting his corpse into the air like a prize, before dropping it down and, quite ignoring the artistry of his armor, pincers and claws shredded him into multiple pieces.

Jensa had no intention of letting the Kundi Queen die easily. If it could make it to the thousand, the drow would naturally spare it, and then have her breed them another whole army.

An army that could become a complete disaster for the drow if it was freed by certain parties.

The soulless eyes of the Queen marked her and the gladiators dying behind her as not-food for the moment, and then moved on to another drow that was killing the last of her soldier drones...

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Flair was darting in a dance of death with a Champion. Yes, his Dire Rapier was as much a whip as a blade. He was also using a chain in his off-hand, which she had to be wary of. He had fine armor, lots of experience, very fast.

She was backing him up and around the battlefield, and he couldn’t retreat fast enough to avoid her sword.

Her Talent was Natural Fencer. It gave her a +8 bonus at Ten to Sense Motive Checks and Bluff Checks in combat. The combination made it nigh impossible to pull off fancy combat maneuvers on her, especially Feints. On the other hand, it made it very easy for her to pull them off on others.

Naturally, she had devoted her style to Feinting fast, frequently, and hard. She had the whole line of Feint Feats, she had driven her Sneak Attack damage to ten dice, could take Opportunity Attacks off the Dex loss the Feint caused, Riposte when an opponent missed, and all the fun stuff that happened in too-rapid exchanges of that flexisword against a Warsword that simply shouldn’t be moving as fast and elusively as it was, shredding his finesse style and actually using it against him.

Armor screamed, and scrapes opened with 80-point hits ripping at his HP on his neck, arm, knee, and lastly his armpit, which drew real blood. The drow was panicking at the blurringly fast exchange as his swipe with his chain actually opened him up for the lunge. Her Blade seemed to be in three places at once, his parry actually seemed to go through it at one point, and then Flair inserted itself smoothly in his disbelieving crimson eye, and the black-skinned drow faltered and hung there on her point for a moment.

She reached up, tore off his insignia for a trophy, then grabbed his cuirass and heaved with a major lack of respect for the dead.

The shoggoth’s many eyes sixty feet away missed nothing, and it reached up with a tentacle to grab the corpse in midair, sucking it down into a momentary mouth to start a very quick digestion process.

Less than a minute later, a new mustard-covered slime was belched in the direction of one of the drow trying to harry the immense ooze around its massive reach, damage reduction, and fast healing. The abnormally quick jellylike thing immediately began chasing the drow around, and when he chopped it in two, both halves simply continued with the task, much to his annoyance...

The drow were getting killed, but not near as quickly as the contestants were. Ranthas couldn’t kill them all; the outlanders had to fight by themselves, and if they didn’t have to fear the person next to them, that still didn’t mean they were good enough to kill a master gladiator of the drow.

Teamwork sure helped, however.

-----------

The fact the contestants were working together, even some of the monsters, was an unprecedented bonanza for the audience, who treated the surprising deaths of the gladiators and teamwork of the contestants as some of the best entertainment they’d had in the past millennium.

Each of my girls and I now had multiple devoted screens, and there were a lot of very interested eyes watching us as we hacked, hewed, cut, thrust, sliced, chopped, lunged, bashed, crushed, slammed, punched, kicked, and otherwise abused our way through any drow that came within reach of us.

We moved too fast. The Bladewitches, Champions, Reavers, Corsairs, Warlocks, spider-borgs, and necrochymists couldn’t dance fast enough to escape us.

Spider-borgs were the primary cybernetic styles of the drow. Their actual name was some poetic nonsense of giving up your soul for the purity of the hunter, but it really meant they were losing their minds to biomachinery, descending into uncaring bloodthirst as a result, and were unleashed on the battlefield or arena to kill the enemies of the drow, making use of them for one final time.

They were effectively speed borgs, and used time and spatial effects to move faster and abuse the dimensions in a way non-psis normally couldn’t, moving with the precision, control, and painless power of most cyborgs.

Their messing with dimensions didn’t work against us, of course, which put a crimp in their combat speed and style, as they were used to having an absolute speed advantage on all of us. They couldn’t power-calculate our fighting styles effectively with Crazy Flame and Beyond Law and Chaos obviating a lot of that nonsense... and they weren’t stronger than us, either.

Sunder Format took care of their extra limbs without fail, and we weren’t fighting on the side of a wall, anyways. Sure, they could bounce and spring around... and then we’d hack through their limbs and down they’d come.

We’d killed three of them, and since they were rare among the gladiators, it was a fairly impressive feat.

I was currently engaging one of their necrochymists, who was certainly an overconfident arsehole to come out here in the first place...