For the first time since I entered the room, he really smiles. Not the performer’s grin from yesterday, but something more genuine. It hits me low and warm. It’s unfair, really, that a smile can disarm me faster than any weapon.
“Your books, they tell you what we carried, how we stood, what armor we wore. But they do not tell you why we survived.”
“Because you were skilled fighters?”
“Some of us.” He shrugs. “But skill alone? Gets you dead fast if the crowd does not like you.”
His language toggles back and forth—broken English for simple answers, then a rush of Latin when the explanation deepens. It’s not inconsistency; it’s bandwidth. English slows him down. Latin lets him think.
I lean forward despite myself. “But the sources make it sound more… systematic. Like crowd influence was just about final mercy decisions, not ongoing strategy throughout the fight.”
“Everythingwas for crowd,” he says simply. “Not to win. But to make them happy. Big difference.”
The casual way he says it, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, sends a chill down my spine. “But surely the goal was still to defeat your opponent?”
“Sometimes. If that is what the crowd wants to see.” His fingers resume their quiet sweeping movements—not restless exactly.Calibrating. “Sometimes mercy. Sometimes blood. Sometimes both men live. Fight again.”
The textbooks mention crowd psychology, but only as an afterthought to combat skill. What Flavius is describing flips that entirely. Crowd management wasn’t secondary; it was the whole strategy. The fighting was just the delivery system.
“How could you tell what they wanted?”
“Practice. Listen to how they breathe, how they shout, when they get quiet.” His eyes focus on something beyond my shoulder, like he’s seeing ancient crowds instead of the Missouri countryside outside the window. “I learned to feel their mood like… like weather changing.”
I’m scribbling notes frantically now, trying to capture not just his words but the implications. “So combat strategy had to adapt constantly based on crowd reaction?”
“Always about survival,” he corrects gently. “Strategy was… a luxury for men who live long enough to have many fights.”
“How many fights did you have?”
The question slips out before I consider whether it’s too personal. He goes very still, and I realize I might have crossed some invisible line.
He doesn’t look at me. “Forty-three.”
“Forty-three?” The number rocks me so hard it feels like a physical pain in my gut. It’s not raw data anymore—it’s a man’s life measured in near-deaths. “In how long?”
“Five years.” His voice is even quieter now.
Forty-three times, this man faced potential death for other people’s entertainment. Forty-three times, he had to read a crowd’s bloodlust and give them exactly what they wanted.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Is okay.” But his voice is too even, too carefully neutral, to mean it’s really okay. “That’s why I am here, yes? To answer questions about fighting.”
Chapter Four
Sophia
We sit in uncomfortable silence for a moment. He withdraws—shoulders tightening, expression closing—retreating behind whatever walls protect him from this kind of clinical interrogation.
“Tell me about the crowd psychology,” I say finally. “Not the techniques—how you learned to read people.”
His posture eases a fraction. “You really want to know this?”
“I want to understand how it worked.”
For the first time since we started talking, some of the tension leaves his shoulders.
“Crowds… they are like a big animal, yes? Have moods, have needs. In my time, fighters say the crowd’s mood is Fortuna’s mood. That her wheel turns above the sand, lifting one man and crushing another. Before our last voyage, a priestess of her temple gave all fourteen of us a blessing drink—said it would bind our fates together. Many of us believe it did. Believe it’s why we lived when we should have died. So when I read a crowd, I also think of her… the way fortune shifts, the way fate breathes. Sometimes they come angry—”
