Look at them go, heavyweights, all of them, and the weight was already showing. After a period of rest, a large portion of the food had been consumed. Thirty kilograms gained. Fifty. The bodies at the table were heavier than the bodies that had walked in, movements slowing without the contestants fully realizing it yet.
After some time, it started getting boring.
The noise in the stands dropped to a low murmur. Alpha felt the shift. He let it stretch just long enough, then made his move. A timer appeared above the arena floor. Ten minutes.
"That will get them going," he said.
He was right. Backs straightened. Hands moved faster. Food spilled as portions were grabbed and forced down with new urgency. Alpha watched them scramble and screamed at them, everything should be eaten, even the food that falls on the ground. The crowd erupted. The contestants ate harder.
The timer ran out. Nobody had beaten it. Alpha smiled and moved on.
Six to seven minutes after the timer was started. Loud. Not the way a shout is loud, the way a thunderclap is loud, a sound that arrived all at once and filled every corner of the arena. The murmur in the stands vanished. The boredom vanished with it. Everyone knew what the drum meant: someone had finished. Someone could now fight.
The Red Caveman stood up.
First to enter, first named, first finished. He rose slowly, balance unsteady, breathing heavy, steps pressing deep into the ground. But he was standing, and he was done.
He moved toward the One-Eye Woman.
She was still eating. Both hands wrapped around her bowl, working through it with focused speed, not desperate but determined. She had heard the drum. She knew what it meant. She kept her head down and kept eating, because eating was the only protection she had left.
The Red Caveman stopped close to her. Close enough that she could hear his breathing, heavy and slow, over the sound of her own chewing. He smiled a little. She didn't look up. She didn't notice the dark grain sitting in the middle of her spoon, smaller than everything around it, denser, obvious to anyone who had been told what to look for.
She swallowed.
She died on the spot.
The Red Caveman looked down at the empty seat. "You have lost," he said. " Everyone should make it easier on me as well."
Around the table, some of the remaining contestants were crying. Not loudly, just tears running freely, mixing with the food still in their hands, some of them drinking their own tears and snot along with the meal because the meal still had to be finished. They kept eating. They had no other choice.
The Red Caveman watched them. "Well, well," he said. "I guess not."
He turned toward the nearest contestant still seated and raised one hand. The skin along his fingers began to redden, not from heat, not yet, but from what was building underneath it. Brighter and brighter, the color deepening as he condensed the fire inward, pulling it tight, making it small and pressurized and terrible. Then he threw it. The contestant who had been eating died on the spot. There was no time for anything else.
The Red Caveman was unsteady on his feet. Each step forward was a negotiation with his own weight, his balance shifting dangerously with every movement. He was close to falling. He could feel it. It agitated him.
"I'll end it quickly," he said.
Multiple fireballs rose from his palms and climbed into the air above the arena. He closed his eyes. He held them there, patient, focused, condensing each one tighter and tighter, feeding them until they were as strong as he could make them. Some of the remaining contestants tried to run. They abandoned the food, abandoned any remaining strategy, and simply ran, not caring about the audience or the rules or anything else.
Alpha raised one hand. "No, no," he said pleasantly. "Come back here."
Chains of magic erupted from the arena floor and dragged the fleeing contestants back. The fireballs came down. One after another, then all at once, crushing into the arena floor with finality. When it was over, the Red Caveman breathed out and raised both hands. Alpha walked down to the center of the arena floor.
Alpha descended to meet him, coat settling as he moved. "Well, well," he said. "I think anyone with an eye could tell you would win. Quite the big boy, aren't you?"
Then the drum sounded again.
Both of them stopped. Alpha and the Red Caveman turned at the same moment, scanning the arena. The Red Caveman's expression shifted, confusion, then disbelief, then something closer to anger. "What's that?" he said. "I killed everyone."
He looked harder. And then he saw him.
One of the contestants was still near the table. His stomach had been blown out completely, not burned, not torn, but erased, a clean absence where his midsection had been. He was still eating. Lying on his back on the floor, one arm reaching up to the table's edge, bringing the food to his mouth, chewing slowly and without urgency, as though the missing portion of his body was not relevant to the task at hand.
He finished.
Then he placed both hands on the ground and stood up. Slowly. The wound in his stomach began to close, not like healing, just like correction, the absence filling itself back in without drama. He grew taller. And taller. He kept growing until he reached ten feet and stopped. There was no sign of the wound. There was no sign he had eaten at all.
Alpha started laughing. He turned to the crowd, arms wide, the sound of genuine delight in his voice for the first time all evening.
"Looks like we still have a fight, looks can be truly deceiving."
He looked at the ten-foot figure standing in the ruins of the arena floor.
"Shorty wasn't human."
He was an Adiphytes.