Chapter 16 The Cage
The world beneath Helgard smelled like iron and desperation.
Ren followed Kael down stone steps that grew steeper with every turn, the walls faintly glimmering with cheap mana crystals stuck on at random — their light yellowish, flickering unevenly like a dying pulse. This old mining tunnel had been abandoned by licensed miners long ago, but someone had turned it into something else. Something alive.
The sound of the crowd reached them before the sight did. Echoes of screaming, clapping, and the occasional thud of flesh meeting flesh bouncing off the stone walls. Then the tunnel widened, and The Cage spread out before them.
The arena was bigger than Ren had imagined. The main mining chamber had been hollowed out into a rough amphitheater — tiered stone platforms surrounding a circular arena at its center, ringed by rusted iron bars that gave the place its name. Hundreds of people packed the stands. Awakeners with hungry eyes and scars that never quite healed right. Brokers clutching betting boards. Black-market weapons dealers hawking their wares in dark corners.
This was Helgard's mirror — more honest, more brutal, stripped of the mask of guild bureaucracy and Sentinel regulation.
"You can still back out," Kael said quietly.
Ren didn't answer. His eyes swept the arena, counting, assessing. Up above, Aela waited at the tunnel entrance — Commander Voss's daughter's face was too well known, and a single Sentinel informant could bring everything crashing down. Her decision to stay topside wasn't weakness. It was pragmatism, and Ren respected it.
The registration desk was a rotting plank of wood with a bald man sitting behind it. No forms. No identification. Just one question.
"Name?"
Ren felt Kael's stare from beside him. Heavy. Waiting.
"Null."
Kael said nothing for a full three seconds. Then, softly: "You sure?"
Ren smiled. Thin. Not his usual warm one — this was sharper, more bitter, like a freshly honed edge. "The world already decided I was Null. Let me be the one who decides what it means."
The bald man couldn't have cared less about their drama. He jotted the name down, tossed Ren a cheap iron wristband. "Base tier. Win three in a row to move up. You die in the arena, that's your problem."
Simple. Brutal. Honest.
The first fight was over in forty seconds.
His opponent was D-Rank — a Brawler with heavy fists but slow feet. Ren read the pattern within the first two strikes, dodged the third, and dropped him with a leg sweep followed by an elbow to the temple. Clean. Efficient.
Too efficient.
Kael was waiting for him in the corner designated for support — Healers tasked with patching up fighters between rounds. He mended a small scrape on Ren's knuckles while whispering, "You were too fast. People noticed."
"Let them."
"It's not the crowd I'm worried about." Kael tilted his chin subtly toward the upper stands. "There are people up there who aren't watching for entertainment. They're taking notes."
Ren followed his gaze. Among the screaming, betting masses, there were a handful of figures who were far too still. Sitting with posture that was far too controlled. Watching not with excitement, but with precision.
"Data brokers?"
"Or worse." Kael finished the healing. "Next fight — look more human."
The second fight nearly killed him. Not because his opponent was stronger — but because Ren was too focused on looking weak.
This D-Rank+ Brawler was different. An arena veteran, his body covered in scars that each told the story of a fight won. His movements weren't as fast as Ren's, but his instincts were razor-sharp — he could read feints, could anticipate attacks that followed too clean a pattern.
Ren held back. Didn't use his real footwork. Didn't let his full speed out. And it nearly cost him.
A straight punch caught him in the ribs. Ren felt a small crack, pain spreading like fire. He stumbled back, staggered — not an act, genuinely losing his balance. The crowd roared.
Too much restraint.For a split second, the Void stirred inside his chest, offering power that could end this in a single move. Ren shoved it down. Not here. Not now.
Instead, he shifted strategy. Stopped trying to look like a D-Rank and started fighting like a D-Rank who was exceptionally talented — still within explainable limits, but enough to win. He let his opponent attack, read the rhythm, then caught the opening when the Brawler overextended on a left hook. One punch to the solar plexus. One elbow to the jaw. Down.
The arena erupted. People in the lower stands started chanting his name.
"Null! Null!"Kael healed his ribs with an expression that said I-told-you-so. But he saw something else in Ren's eyes too — not exhaustion, not pain.
Relief. As though fighting without hiding — even just halfway — was fresh air after months of suffocating.
In the darkness of the upper stands, a pair of red eyes blinked once.
Nyx hadn't moved from her position through both fights. Her cloak blended with the shadows — a skill that wasn't magic, just the habit of years spent making darkness her home. Twin daggers sat at her waist, their black handles bare of ornament. Weapons built to kill, not to impress.
She studied the fighter calling himself Null with a surgeon's precision.
Footwork deliberately slowed down. Reactions a half-second faster than any D-Rank had a right to be. The way his eyes swept the arena before each fight began — not looking for his opponent, but looking for exits. The habit of someone trained to always be ready to run.
Or always be ready to survive.
Nyx pulled a small slip of paper from a pocket inside her cloak. A contract. Received two hours ago from an anonymous intermediary in district six. The target: a new Cage fighter going by the ring name "Null." Suspected anomalous Awakener. Payment: triple the standard rate.
Triple. For a D-Rank.
She folded the paper back up and tucked it away. Below, Null was sitting in the corner of the arena while his Healer worked on his ribs. There was something in the way he breathed — controlled, too controlled, as if his body was used to holding back something far greater than physical pain.
Nyx had killed enough people to recognize the pattern.
This one's hiding something.Her lips pressed into a thin line that could almost be called a smile. Almost.
"Triple rate for a D-Rank?" she whispered into the dark. "Either your client's a fool, or your target's dangerous."
She stood. Her cloak moved without a sound.
"I'm hoping it's the second — it's been a long time since I've felt challenged."
And the shadows swallowed her back whole.