“Look at that one’s face. He must be constipated.”

“She obviously hasn’t had sex in ages.”

“Yeah, he’s about to lose it. Ten credits he goes barmy.”

“You’re on! How about that one? He still thinks wearing blood is stylish, and he has an ear fetish.”

“Nowhere near as stylish as an insignia fetish, I agree.” We patted our hair with at least fifteen adornments all around.

“Arrogant pricks and are still afraid to come over here. I wonder why.”

“They can’t play with the big girls, that’s why, and they never will.”

We had just the right amount of Hag in all our words, and they cut really, really deep, shrill and harsh and making them wince as they had no choice but to listen to us. Start messing with subsonics and ki, and taunts can really, really grind on you.

Especially when you are emotionally unstable emovore emo demon-wannabes with sanity issues. La!

One coven of bladewitches couldn’t take it and came over screaming for us. A minute or two later we fed their corpses to the shoggoth, one to the treemother, and one to the Kundi Queen.

Finally having time to watch us personally, the scattered drow gladiators were a bit shocked at the way we manhandled them... and were more than competent enough to realize just how bloody dangerous we were.

Of course, group fights weren’t nearly as fun as one on one duels, but that wasn’t required until the last thousand. They were fully capable of working together, but, oh, there was A Problem with Stupid.

Trying to out-teamwork a bunch of Ranthas in melee combat was an exercise in frustration.

Four carapace-armored Warlocks came trundling up with their Dire Finessed versions of sane weaponry, moving with the confidence and cooperation of having fought together (and one another) for maybe centuries.

It still wasn’t the same as literally starting out as the same person, with the same Stats, same original personality, same understanding... and most importantly, the same absolute trust.

The resulting fight looked like a choreographed sketch of WTF Is This. Jensa deciphered all their weak points, Keva hyperanalyzed their style, Celestia scared them despite themselves, and I went right into the middle of them and took them all on at once, generating myself about twelve AoO’s in the bargain.

None of us killed the ones we were facing. Shattered fractal blades went flying, carapace armor protested to uncaring adamantine, and Chill took off the head of Keva’s opponent, Flair spit Jensa’s opponent through the throat, Hawk went and plunged through the armpit of my facing opponent and tickled his heart; and I reached over, grabbed the head of Celestia’s opponent, and twisted my hand. His head turned 270 degrees, and then I did a nice spin, knocked all the stunned dead Warlocks off their feet with his corpse, and dropped him down.

“No style.”

“Trash footwork.”

“You see how yours was ready to stab the other one if you dodged! Mwahahaha!”

“Ohhhhh, such glorious armor. It really helped them a lot.”

More insignias went into our hair, and the drow grit their teeth. This time the ones who were looking a little barmy were coming for us, so we sort of drifted together, while the other drow woke up and decided that killing the other survivors was something a bit more viable.

To their immense consternation, since we were getting chased and they were coming at us to keep us busy, we felt obligated to go wander over and kill off the ones that were trying to avoid us in their trepidation... which the surviving contestants didn’t mind at all, for some strange reason.

The mothers kind of wandered around us. The Kundi Queen was just a lethal mass occupying a lot of real estate; the Mothertree’s lethal root field was like a walking mine zone, and she covered even more area with her psi-enhanced thorned limbs; and the shuggoth was eating things and spitting out new oozes. It was rather entertaining when a few hundred pounds of biovorous goo landed on a drow that wasn’t paying attention and began to digest them.

Being the hardest to hurt and maybe-probably having a more aggressive mindset with my Exemplar Lite status, I took the lead in butchering the drow trying to butcher survivors, while the queens kind of funneled the drow in our direction. The girls played with the ones coming in to challenge us, and watched very carefully for a Master trying to slip into the mix and surprise us, not that they were going to escape Jensa or our Rantha eyes.

One did try, using optical camouflage and some very sophisticated stealth tech that even thwarted tremblesense. However, Devasight makes one immune to light-bending, and his advanced holography was just that. He was real surprised when Jensa saw him coming the whole way, and to the immense intellectual appreciation of that Eleven, he got to find out what it was like to attempt a 43 or so Death save, and failed utterly with Hawk in his ear as he moved to cut at Keva.

Too bad, so sad. Fortunately, he wasn’t surprised for too long.

The girls took them down murderously, moving with a harmony and absolute trust and confidence that the drow simply couldn’t emulate: setting one another’s kill-strikes up, analyzing one another’s opponents, not even needing to be looking at a drow gladiator to kill them. Throats opened, hearts were poked, skulls were cloven, heads and limbs went flying, and twice they kicked drow right into flying oozes, to their great discomfort.

-They should have boned up on acid immunity!-, I /smirked, as I considered my own rampage.

-10 pts!- Keva /agreed.

-20 minimum!- /corrected Jensa.

I was deliberately more brutal than the girls, because I could get away with it. I had more DR and I healed faster, and I was a bit stronger. I was moving along the circle of drow without stopping even as they were killing the survivors, and their numbers were dropping rapidly. Those survivors who could and were smart began to sweep with me, hemming in and pinning the drow so I could hack through their not-so-elusive selves, and it became almost a rolling horde as the spread-out drow trying to drop their enemies suddenly found a surge of nasty-minded survivors raging over at them.

I cut off one duelist’s arm and threw him into the center of Chief Urgob’s breastplate. His power claws slammed together, grabbed, and ripped nicely. Another I fed into Rune Reptoid’s jaws with a backhand that spun him all the way around and left him in exactly the wrong place to be as said jaws demonstrated tons of p/si. I crashed a head onto a cyber-scythe from one of the ‘borgs, left it there for him to take off, swept another off his feet and punted him rolling so a half-ton of metal spike-leg could drive down on his chestplate and make it a Bad Day for Crimson-Skinned Git.

All without end, flowing from one movement to the next, reading everything, tossing masterful drow gladiators into the grips of their enemies, where all their finessy-fun wouldn’t work against all that muscle they despised, and they were ganged up on and murdered messily... especially if they were missing a hand or two, and the other one was in something’s fanged jaws for a late-night arena snack. Holding them in a ‘borg’s power-field to twitch and dance and kick before rotary blades trisected them was always good, too.

And just to make it stick, I made sure to give them a Hag’s laugh, with every bit of sinister expectation, merry bloodlust, and old, knowing savagery for these pitiful bitches and bastards who had nothing redeeming left in them.

Intimidation checks. Bardsong morale bonuses. Fearlessness, joy, and a satisfaction in the killing that these poor little leeches would never be able to understand or enjoy.

Whoops, here was a senior Warlock trying to sneak into the drow retreating as I came in, give me a surprise. Silly little boy. I parried his blizzard of strikes and moved ahead faster than he could retreat, Valus’ Rule came into play as his idiotic dire Weapon hooked on the guard of Chalice’s humming Blade, and as he was trying to ply his Knife, I hauled him in, gently nudged his Dagger over, and he buried it nicely in his own gut. Man, pulling out that hooked, barbed thing was gonna hurt and be reeeeeally messy.

I swatted him sideways, and he lurched right into the sizzling gauntlet of a grim human in power armor, bouncing him back at me as I hooked an ankle, and as he tried to roll without even thinking about it, he laid himself out perfectly in midair, still clutching his Sword hooked on mine. I grabbed his head in midfall, and brought it right back up into that power fist again.

The gladiator and I grinned together, and he hammered in as fast as he could move his arm, which was pretty fast. I introduced the drow’s face to it, and his fancy Psychic Armor protested, cracked, splintered, shattered, and then the flattened face of the drow behind it shattered messily, too.

I kicked the second drow off Chalice’s point after she tried to come in behind me, and she stumbled back, spine kinda not working too well suddenly, was snatched up by the urgob, and twisted savagely. Apart, that is.

A horn blew up high out of nowhere. Combatants leapt apart, heads turning up cautiously, up to where the survivor count was blinking in bloody red.

One thousand left... not counting the oozes, who were getting hacked apart by the drow using poisons that could kill even them, or discharges of fell energies that reduced them to sludge.

“Awww, shucks, I was just getting on a roll.” I cracked my neck left, right, and turned slowly around to look at just over four hundred survivors, a number greater than any arena fight in our purloined memories.

Yeah, there’d never been a celebration quite like this before.

“I strongly suggest every one of you who wants to live to kneel and return to whence you came.”

With groans, gasps, hisses, and rasps, the aliens behind me clanked and clunked down to a knee. The drow there started to sneer, and those sneers faded as they looked over their shoulders at the Masters starting to come forwards... and then looked back to where I and my daughters were smiling widely.

And not kneeling.

Watching a treemother and Kundi queen kneeling, and even a shoggoth curling on itself, before they turned and started walking away, was quite a sight. The gasping survivors, some of whom might still bleed out, limped, walked, crawled, rolled, and clattered away.

The urgob and the hobgob had survived, the latter barely and being carried away by the urgob over his shoulder. The drow merc and one of his company had survived. The rest was a motley assortment of sapients who would be able to brag to nobody’s belief that they had survived the Heart of Blood.

----

The survivors left, all of them. Some of them sent last looks our way as they did, but we told them to get going, and they did. They had no chance in what was to come, even the three queens. They were perceptive enough to see some of the drow coming in and realize how dangerous they were... and to know that there was no way they were going to be allowed to go free, anyways.

The queens did snaffle up quite a few drow corpses on the way out, however. Nyar-nyar.

The drums sounded like a great heart as they beat, and the four of us faced down over three hundred-some drow with great bemusement... and dark hair full of insignias of butchered drow gladiators. Mine was almost a veil at this point, or hanging armor, heh-heh.

Our Swords were all droning in harmony, just right to send drow teeth on edge and hackles rise on hairless sleek skin of red, purple, or black.

The drow began to edge away from one another. No teamwork, everything was one-on-one duels. You could not withdraw until the top hundred, and then again until the top ten.

Once you engaged someone, you fought to the death, ignoring everyone else, and everyone ignored you.

I watched as the drow parted, and Madame Liloth came stalking through, her scarlet eyes locked on me with almost sexual thirst for what was to come.