Am I a bad person?
I'm not sure; it never occurred to me.
I claim to want revenge on the gods that destroyed my life. Yet I ended an innocent life, and it wasn't the first.
Who am I?
You are Eve, who else?
That name sounds so... foreign.
I'm nothing more than a flesh puppet driven by a mad obsession.
Good, that's your purpose. Everything you did and will do just brings suffering to innocents. People treat you like a monster because that's what you are. It doesn't matter if you change; you will remain the same, a plague on this earth.
Eve sighs and begins to pace her room, her body visibly shaking. Her teeth almost turn to dust from all the gritting.
For once, Nightfall isn't whispering in her ear, yet she misses its whispers because her mind is much harsher.
After the fight with Galbert, she remained deep in thought in her cell.
The sight of the clown just giving up and waiting for his death is burned into her mind.
Eve heads to the mirror and looks at her reflection.
Pitiful creature.
She readies her fist to punch the mirror, yet her hand begins to tremble.
Something the matter? Can't even dare to face yourself without lashing out? I'm kidding, Eve, you are innocent. You didn't mean to cause all of this suffering; it just happened.
"Huh? You mean it?" Her voice quivers.
She almost hears it clearly, her mind starts laughing at her. Mocking her for being so foolish.
"SHUT UP!" Her hand connects to the mirror, and shards fall into the murky water beneath it.
Her fist remains buried in the shattered glass, and rivulets of blood fall alongside the shards into the water.
She sinks to her knees, the cold floor bites into her knees, and a few tears start to leave her eyes and trail down her cheeks.
"Shut up...shut up....shut up....shut...up" Every word coming out quieter than the other one.
Eve retrieves her hand from the broken mirror and then she covers her face with both hands. The right side of her face is smeared with blood. Tears and blood mix like poison.
"Get a grip...Eve," she starts to laugh, yet the tears don't stop.
"You are a calamity dressed in human clothes. And here you are, crying your eyes out because of a clown. You killed innocent people, yet you didn't bat an eye at their deaths. What's wrong, dear? Feeling sorry for once?"
"That was different...I only killed those people to survive."
"Ah...the old saying of self-preservation. And maybe that goes for the clown's death as well, huh? You did it to survive, right? Poor you. Yet you wanted to join this tournament to grow stronger, and you became the reason for the clown's death. In this world, there are no ifs, Eve. This whole ordeal with the fool is just the same as the death of your mothe..."
Her knuckles connect with her jaw. The moment she punched herself, she lost her footing and fell flat on the floor.
"I get it"
She slowly starts to get back up, yet the tears keep falling from her eyes.
"I get it now", Eve speaks in a silent sob.
Standing at her full height, her face smeared with blood and the dark bags under her eyes.
"I'm a bad person." Her hand keeps trembling, but after a moment, it stops; her blood keeps on dripping on the cold concrete floor.
After a while, one of the guards walks up to her cell.
"Rat, wake up-"
The guard thought that she was sleeping, but Eve was standing in her cell, looking at him with a cold stare.
He tries to fake a cough.
"Anyway, uhm, prepare for your next fight. Your opponent is a big dumb guy. From what I was told, he was a failed human experiment from Scholars' Keep. His name is Slackjaw, and he doesn't have any weapons and just bites people to death with his iron teeth. So, uh, good luck, but I don't think you need it."
The guard scans Eve before leaving. He wants to see something from her. But unsurprisingly, he doesn't. Her gaze is still focused on the wall behind the bars, where he was.
She looks just like a statue. The man thinks to himself.
After the guard left, some minutes go by, then a group of other guards appeared in her view.
"Wrists!" one of them shouts.
Yet Eve remains rooted in place.
The man who shouted looks confused and turns to one of the other guards. The other man gestures for him to try again.
"Wrists!"
Yet nothing.
"We have to enter, damnit"
The man who shouted unlocks the door and enters her cell.
"Be ready to strike if something happens-"
Before he can finish the sentence, Eve is in front of him.
He yelps in surprise, but before the other guards can draw their swords.
She just offers him her wrists.
The guard just looks at her for a bit, confused, then he decides to lock her wrists with the same handcuff. The guard doesn't try to antagonise her any further; he has a feeling that if he does that, it would be the last thing he does.
They walk her out of her cell, and after a while, they reach the gate to the arena. The guards open her shackles, then the gate slowly ascends, and Eve walks inside.
The guards sighed in relief. And the gate closes behind her.
The smell remains the same: death and dreams.
She glances over to where Galbert's corpse was, yet he isn't there. Only bits and pieces of his scattered brain are left.
"Well, everyone, there's no need to introduce the participants this time, because all of them won their first fight," Calliopius tells the crowd.
Eve bends down and picks up Nightfall, then her gaze falls over the other gate, where a big man with deformed limbs is on all fours. He is bald, and his teeth are too big for his mouth; scars split his lips from all the biting. Spit falls from his mouth onto the sand.
He is hungry.
"Let's hope this time, Eve will put more effort into her fight with Slackjaw. Let the second round start."
Nightfall trembles slightly in her hand.