They Were Born Upon Ashes Read Online Free

skull.
    “Freeze its feet first, then kill him quickly,” said Tyler. “There’s no reason to make the hog suffer and suffocate in a block of ice, Nick.”
    Nick scratched his head.
    Could’ve told me that before hand.
    Nick looked over at Jeffrey with his eyes wide open. “You are a supreme Reza, Jeffrey,” said Nick. “I could have guessed that you were one.”
    “I am indeed, Nick,” said Jeffrey. “You should have called it while you had the chance.”
    “Overall grade I give you, Nick, is a six out of ten,” said Tyler. “Jeffrey gets a nine out of ten. And your returning and still undefeated champion, Tyler, with an astounding ten out of ten.”
    The three men walked over the bush to collect their kills. They placed the dead hogs over their backs and headed back towards the camp.
    “Won’t we need a lot more hogs to feed the thousands of people with us?” asked Nick.
    “Of course, we will,” said Jeffrey. “There’s about a dozen teams hunting at this very moment. We are just one team that has been successful.”
    “Nick, tell us how you ended up in the Vincot Arena,” said Tyler.
    “It’s a bit of a story,” said Nick.
    “Please tell us, said Tyler. ”Our king briefed us on you a few nights ago. However, I’d like to hear the story from the man himself, and not from a file folder with pages of who you are, Nick Bint.”
    “Well, one night my father and I went for dinner at a local tavern in Vincot. We sat at an empty table in the back corner where nobody else was sitting. We liked our privacy, and on that night my father had important matters he wanted to discuss. Out of nowhere a man who appeared to be drunk came to our table. After a few minutes of him annoying us my father asked him to leave. He said my father’s name. He knew him somehow. After that he stabbed my father and slit his throat. I reacted and stabbed the man, over and over.”
    Nick felt chills creep up his back as he remembered the horrific scene.
    “Someone saw and you got tried for murder?” asked Tyler.
    “Yes, sentenced to two years in the arena.”
    “A sad story,” said Tyler. “Sad indeed. Now tell me, Nick; how did you like the arena?”
    “When I first got there I hated it. I was terrified. I was sure I was going to die. I nearly did a few times in my first few matches. I still hated the idea of killing someone for a crowd like it was a sport. Everything changed, though, when they discovered that I was a Hetha. I was on cloud nine. I was unbeatable and the crowd adored me. I convinced myself sometimes that I was doing the world a good deed by ridding it of horrible people. But deep down I always knew that these people who I fought to the death with weren’t all terrible people. Surely some of them were and they deserved to die, but others just made a few horrible choices that didn’t equal the punishment of death.”
    “It is known that everyone in the arena system does not deserve to die but that fact is supposed to scare off the public and prevent others from making a horrible mistake,” said Jeffrey.
    “I understand that,” said Nick. “For a few weeks I was happy with where I was in the world. The feeling I got in the arena while the crowd cheered me on was incomparable. Though the living situation was always terrible. The food was bad, the sleep was even worse, I was malnourished, and mentally it was terribly depressing. But when I stepped on those sands as a Hetha, I had never felt so alive.”
    He paused for a moment as he pictured the grand spectacle of the arena. If there was one small thing he missed about the arena it was being adored by thousands of fans. Even if it came at the expense of killing others. He snapped out of his daydream and looked back towards the king’s men.
    “However, everything changed when I met Poloski,” said Nick. “He used his powers against me and I was put in my place. He threatened the king and spoke of a new era born of darkness. That is why I did