“You’re dead meat, wildcard,” a guttural voice snarled through the chain link.
Raaze didn’t bother to turn his head and look. The brawler was a distraction. Nothing more than noise.
The lightweight impact-armor he’d fabricated on the H4-RPY was locked around his ribs. It wasn’t as robust as his old kit, but that didn’t matter. As a wildcard, he needed to be lighter on his feet anyway. He turned his head, settling the neck plate in place as the shoulder guards pressed down. Reaching up, he tightened the bicep straps until they felt just right.
The kit wasn’t custom-fitted. There were no internal micro-weave sections to stop weapon penetration and no cooling mesh, but it didn’t matter.
He glanced down at the mask resting in his lap. The black visor stared back. It was a cheap piece of trall from a station vendor, completely devoid of team colors or any of his former sponsorships. A blank face for a male who didn’t exist.
Under the layers of armor and the tight leather of his jacket, the data chip bit into his side. It was snug inside a zip pocket of his compression shirt, pressed right up against his ribs. A tiny, hard rectangle, it dug a corner into his flesh every single time he breathed deeply.
Good.
He needed the pain… the physical anchor. Needed something sharp and real to keep him grounded here, in this place, because his brain was currently still in a small cargo ship burning fuel in the opposite direction.
Cait was gone.
The thought sat in his chest like a lead weight. It wasn’t sharp; sharp would’ve been easier. Sharp meant he could push back against it and use the anger during the game.
This was just… heavy. A dull, grinding weight against his ribs every time he inhaled.
She was gone. She’d left the chip on the desk and walked away from him without looking back. And the worst part, the part that kept circling through his brain like a draanthing vulture, was that he couldn’t even blame her.
He deserved this and everything that had happened.
He’d told her the truth, told her exactly why he’d picked her on that slabcrete landing pad. He’d thought she was weak, an easy target… Just a desperate little human female, who’d be happy to do anything he wanted, just because he asked.
But she wasn’t. He realized that now.
He’d thought she was plain and uninteresting, and he’d assumed that meant weak.
He closed his eyes and groaned. But his little Cait was anything but weak. She was probably the strongest person he’d ever met.
She hadn’t yelled. Hadn’t pleaded or begged. Instead, she’d just made a decision, set the data chip on the console, and ordered him off her ship. She’d cut him out of her life between one heartbeat and the next, and given him ten minutes to clear out.
He hadn’t even needed three.
He’d thought he was walking into this arena for himself. Thought today was the day he ripped the mask off on the center dial, held up the stolen data, and loudly cleared his name.
He’d wanted his life back. Wanted the multi-million credit contracts under the stadium floodlights. Wanted to look Vikrav R’Tev in the eye and watch the arrogant draanthic realize he couldn’t bury the best striker in the league.
No, it was more than that. He’d wanted to hear the crowd roaring his name; he’d wanted to feel like a god again.
And it was all trall.
That life belonged to a dead male, not him. The celebrity who smiled for endorsement holos, and lived in penthouses had died the second the heavy doors of the prison transport locked him in. He just hadn’t realized it. He wasn’t getting that male back. He didn’t want to be that male anymore.
All he wanted was to be back in that small cabin on a human ship, wrapped around the most beautiful female he’d ever met.
He took a deep breath, and the chip stabbed him gleefully in the ribs again.
Cait was gone. And without her, the victory felt hollow before he’d even earned it.
So make it mean something else, the voice in the back of his head murmured. For once in your life, do something for someone else, not yourself.
He pressed his hand over his ribs, over the chip. The players who’d died on the pitch, who’d had ‘accidents’, and the ones who had disappeared… they’d never get to stand on a pitch again. He looked up, his gaze focusing on the door to the cage and the ramp up to the pitch.
Someone had to speak for them. He would speak for them.
