It was time to step into the arena once again. His blood was boiling. His scarred, muscular body tightened, pulsing ready for the carnage awaiting him just on the other side of the bloodied grates above. He knew he had something to prove – after all, his Lanista had just acquired him and he had others to compete with for intra-team dominance. This was all he’d been waiting for his entire life. Well, his entire life since first hearing talk about it. The spilled guts, the potential glory, the cheering crowds; the notion of being a part of that whole experience bellowed a sweet, hot fire within him. What could possibly be better in this sad, finite existence?
The first time he’d outright seen what a Nexus bout was all about, he’d caught a random glimpse of it on the marketplace’s holoboard. The only holoboard in the only marketplace on his native rock of Hogyk. From that moment on, it was all he could think of. He’d stalk that glitchy board, waiting for the spectacular snaps to drift across it again, memorising every last moment they depicted – from the start of combat to the post-bout cleanup. It mesmerised him. Gaining access to the circuit soon became his sole purpose. He started judiciously amassing information on precisely what Nexus meant. The crumbs of knowledge he’d gained on the subject terrified an excited him at the same time.
It seemed borderline impossible to break through to the Nexus big leagues, mainly because he wasn’t a product of the Meat Gardens. Moreso, it was the case of the vicious pre-screening system set up by the INC. He had less than a figment of a hope of even making it through the application process, which ended in smashed skulls and severed appendices more often than not. It seemed that waiting in any long lines drove everyone insane. And the lines at the at the sanctioned info-loading ports for aspiring applicants were longer than most. While contemplating being crushed underfoot by somebody – or some thing – much bigger than him even before he got a chance to submit his credentials, he remembered what his great uncle Berr had told him during one of their many adventures high up in the mountains. Among tips on living off the land, exploiting each creature’s innate weaknesses, and drinking your own bodily fluids to survive – or just because you could – three words had always stuck with him. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
With the lawful avenue firmly off limits, there was always the unsanctioned way of doing things…
Eventually, when he would finally take his first step into an arena, a moniker would be needed, something to stand out and tell a story. His parents had always said he sucked the life out of them more with every day gone by, which was one of the reasons he’d gladly ran away from home in the first place. In the various misadventures that had required him to source a weapon to stay alive since that day, he’d chanced upon a buzzsaw. It had become his favourite violence-inflicting tool, bar none. Thus, the pieces of his alias had naturally fallen into place. He thought this was a good omen. Had he always been destined to be a part of Nexus? Wait, that was the wrong way to think about it… He had always been destined to be a part of Nexus!
He’d spent the next few TIRDS roaming the land. He’d cross mountain ranges, delve through deep valleys, brave dark forests, then do it all again. The livable area wasn’t that expansive on his rock, there was only so much you could learn while traversing its limited, perpetually-twilit wilderness. A random piece of ejected creation junk from the verse’s dawn, what would eventually be known as Hogyk somehow gathered enough dust and organic matter to sustain an atmosphere. And various shades of living things. Aeons back, it got caught in the gravitational pull of a red dwarf. With the resulting orbit, and its perpetually lit and unlit hemispheres, it was a one in a trillion chance anyone and anything had managed to live there in the first place. The first colonists unlucky enough to make landfall were just that – unlucky. A couple survive-a-shuttles from a stricken Moon Class barge on a TransVerse relocation mission had crash landed there. Someone’s lucky stars were shining on them, so they made it onto the dark side of the rock instead of the scorched half. With the distress beacons lit, but help all but certain to never arrive, the survivors had had to make do with what they found. They set up some humble abodes within the rock’s terminator belt. They waited. They foraged and hunted. They built. Eventually, they in-bred.
Surviving through sheer will and sometimes dumb luck, it would take a few generations for Hogyk to become anything other than a layover station on the way to better things. Generations borne from the same limited gene-pool. Weird fuckers, on all counts. Those generations hadn’t passed yet, so the layover status was still firmly all Hogyk could currently aspire to, but a small settlement had been established. A rickety marketplace peddling mostly useless, local junk, and a sightseeing guide agency advertised as being the most dangerous thing this side of swimming naked with Cozzfish were the only attempts at above the board business you could find on Hogyk. The only ones to actually bring in any bits were the trappers in the mountains who made sure the sightseeing tour retained its very real aura of danger, thus attracting intrepid adventurers. It was within one of these cutthroat groups that the likes of Buzzkill had been born and nurtured.
Resourceful and cold-blooded, he’d taken to searching for discarded – but mostly already scavenged – tourist remains for building up a stack of valuables. Slowly but surely, he was scraping enough together to book passage on whatever passed for verseworthy and had the bad luck to land on Hogyk. Then, something much better came along. Something that solidified the notion that he was, indeed, slated for greatness.
A blistering light shone in from the dwarf-ward hemisphere. Buzzkil watched the bulbous, miniature sun approaching, thinking it a meteor of some kind. He was considering taking shelter when the form passed into Hogyk’s terminator, quickly closing in, while the flames around it suddenly died down. Slack-jawed and frozen in place, Buzzkill recognised the Gnoem scouting ship. In his Nexus-adjacent queries, he’d learned enough about these wondrous recon vessels to know their ungainly hull and gold-hot generators in an instant. It was time to make destiny manifest. Only a small step remained to be taken for him, but it was to be a giant status leap for Gyk-kind. Provided he made it, and made it big, of course.
He still remembered what had happened, and quite vividly.
The ship came in at a shallow angle, looking for a good landing spot. When it could find none, the pilot flipped the ungainly thing on its ass, and afterburned a clearing. The forest was still on fire when Buzzkill finally got there, considerable burn marks to show for his troubles. He could feel blisters forming and popping on his soles with every step he took across the charred landing zone, but it was all worth it. His time had come. He wasn’t aiming to gain any favour with the Gnoems, but wherever the ship’s itinerary took them next, there was bound to be a place where he could further his aims.
He saw the crew disembarking and made straight for them with no regard for safety or ceremony. Thankfully, nothing about his size or appearance was deemed a threat by either the crew or the ship’s automated defenses who picked up his signature and slapped him with a “misc native critter – ” signifier.
‘Who’s this runt?’ inquired a bulky enforcer with a crooked fez jammed down the back of too many rows of head-fat.
‘I’m Buzzkill,’ the young aspirant replied, ‘and I’m coming with you!’ he continued, arms crossed on his chest, feet firmly planted. He was sporting a self-assured grin, heavily undermined by a pair of stunted legs and an unhealthy complexion. The singed remnants of hair on his scalp and the distinct odour of cooked meat about him surely didn’t help, either.
The rest of the scouting squad approached, looking Buzzkill up and down. It didn’t take long to do so. An uproarious fit of laughter took hold of them.
‘You what?’ the fez-ed one bleeted.
‘Look at the shit-nugget thinking he can just hop a ride!’ another one put in.
‘What are you, like four foot?’ a third scout squinted.
‘Yeah, he is!’ the fez put in, wiping a tear, ‘Like four foot too short!’
It carried on like that for a good while. They left him there and moved on in search of better material for the Gnoems’ ever-increasing DNA banks. The echoes of their laughter trailed after them and Buzzkill watched them disappear among the smoldering woods. When they returned, he was nowhere to be seen. Stowed away in the very back end of the ship’s hold, nestled in among some discarded specimen crates, his heart both raced and sank as the engines rumbled to life and pushed them away from Hogyk. This was it. He was pursuing his dream.
To his great luck and surprise, he managed to hop himself off at the nearest port that qualified as civilised in the greater scheme of things. From there, armed with his innate wit and persistence, he made ends meet until he could start making connections. He greased a few palms and also bit a few that fed him the wrong way, or the wrong thing. Slowly but surely, he managed to wiggle his way into a recruitment pool for Lanistas that were either too poor to try for sanctioned, or too smart to attempt it in the first place.
The murmur of the crowd brought him back to the present, and the platform trembled slightly as it was being raised. He’d worked towards his current opportunity for what seemed like ages, and was already on his third Lanista, the first two having had ill-fated accidents befall them, none of them his fault. Not entirely.
Clutching his knotty paws around a rusty, gunked up buzzsaw, he braved the blinding lights and lunged upwards and forwards even before the platform came to a halt at arena level. Limbs, puss, jagged bits of armour, and still twitching organs and bits of flesh lined the hard ground around him. He breathed in the oh-so-familiar scent of fresh death and took a few more steps forward. There, directly opposite, stood the enemy. His job was clear, there was no need for any input from the Lanista’s aerie.
After all, it didn’t take much to do a proper spleen team cleaning job.
The rest of his Lanista’s crew fell in beside Buzzkill and then quickly dispersed with clear-set goals as their counterparts did the same at the other end of the arena. It was always a race between the two crews to finish gathering up any useable organic material from their own Helot and then try and pinch something off the opposing one, and Buzzkill took great pride in being a lightning-fast sweeper and collector himself.
Today was no different. Sweep, pinch, collect or discard based on the smell/taste test. Repeat ad nauseam. In the crowd’s dull, bored murmur during their wait for a new fight, his crew had gathered plenty of the closeby viable matter and were just about to lunge over to the other side of the field when a shiny reflection caught Buzzkill’s eye: their Helot’s helmet, crushed and bent, with about a ladle’s worth of brain matter puddling inside of it. Today had been the end of poor Gilga-Smash, and Buzzkill realised he could barely remember what the giant People’s Champ looked like.
He made for the helmet, but one of the opposing crew’s members suddenly slid in, right beside it. A grubby, bulbous, little thing the colour of cattle refuse dipped in stagnant marsh water was now reaching its dirty tendrils for the precious remains, gaining Buzzkill’s ire in the process.
‘Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing, shit-nugget?’ he snarled as both crews closed in, brandishing their collectors and recipients in as threatening a manner possible.
The crowd was beginning to take interest in the miniature stand-off, and the odd cheer rose from the stands. Suddenly, the giant Blood.Stream displays hanging above the arena switched from sponsor shilling to a zoomed-in shot of the crews, spotlights trained on them, causing the noise levels to rise among the crowd: an opportunity for free, unscheduled entertainment had arisen.
And Buzzkill was all revved up for it…