A deep sense of melancholy infected Zeke’s mind as he realized that yet another warrior had fallen away. She was the last of the fighters he’d bothered to get to know. The others were just faceless bodies, entirely devoid of any identity.

  Certainly, he knew that wasn’t the case. If he allowed himself to see past his own sorrow, he would have seen them as the individuals they were. But he couldn’t do that. He didn’t dare. Not after he’d already lost so many.

  Would he be next?

  It eventually happened to everyone. One battle, they’d be fighting right alongside all the others, and with all the fervor they could muster. And the next, they would fall into a listlessness from which there was no recovery. After that, it was only a matter of time before they disappeared.

  Maybe it was even the point, he reasoned. Perhaps they simply wanted it to end.

  For his part, Zeke could understand that feeling, even if he refused to let it infect him. The way he saw it, that was just another obstacle to overcome, no different from all the other problems he’d faced along the way.

  So, he fought.

  Sometimes, he died.

  But mostly, he found himself the last remaining survivor after each battle. There were even instances where he didn’t take a single injury. In fact, for a while, that became something of an obsession. Somehow, he’d convinced himself that if he performed well enough, he might overcome the challenge before him. No matter how well he did, nothing changed, though.

  It was almost enough to sap his motivation like it had with so many others. It would have been different if he could see a endpoint, if he had some sort of goal. Was it like a video game where he needed to earn a certain number of points? If so, how close was he to passing through the Circle of Violence?

  Of course, trying to fight the battles unscathed wasn’t the only plan he’d tried. Far from it. He’d tried to run away only to somehow end up blundering into the battle. He had tried to stave off the reset as well, forcing himself to remain perfectly aware. That had helped a little, but the second the old woman appeared, she banished him back to the stone slab.

  He'd even forced himself to take an early death, then rush back as soon as he had returned to consciousness. However, that only earned him two deaths – one at the hands of his fellow warriors and another when the old woman appeared at the doorway, snapped her fingers, and exploded him.

  Zeke had felt it, too. For a single, agonizing second, he’d felt the worst pain he could imagine as his body was ripped apart, then scattered across the long hall. When he awoke what felt like an instant later and returned to the door, there was no evidence of what had just happened.

  It was a chilling reminder that he was not in charge.

  By all rights, he should have simply given them the eternal cycle of battles they so clearly wanted. He did, for a while. He lost count of how many times he slid off that slab of stone and headed off to fight the rest of the damned. Eventually, the sheer monotony of it had broken him.

  He simply didn’t care anymore.

  If that meant his existence would be over, then so be it. Anything was better than his current existence.

  “Brother,” said one of the men, trying to get his attention.

  Zeke looked up from the table. “What?”

  “I recognize that look.”

  “Do you?”

  “Aye,” the man answered, reaching out to grip Zeke’s shoulder. “That is the look of a man who has lost hope.”

  Zeke shrugged, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t even know any of his fellow warriors’ names. Not anymore. Unlike when he’d first arrived, there were men and woman alike gathered around the table, though to Zeke, none of them seemed markedly different from one another. They were just warriors. Nothing more, and certainly no less.

  “Do you have a point?”

  “This is Valhalla, brother!” the man exclaimed, slamming his half-full pewter mug onto the table. “We are the chosen few! The elite warriors who will rise again when Ragnarok arrives!”

  “Here, here!” came a chorus from the other warriors gathered around the table. Some shook haunches of meat, while others raised mugs high into the air.

  “You really think this is Valhalla?”

  “What else could it be?” the man asked, obviously confused.

  “Hell. We’re all in Hell. That food you’re eating, does it really have taste? The beer, does it satisfy you? It is all in illusion meant to keep us rushing headlong into battle in search of glory none of us will ever achieve,” Zeke said, his tone monotonous. “You have been here for what? Fifty cycles? A hundred? I’ve endured tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I’ve emerged victorious without a scratch on me. I’ve fought a bloody battle against my equal, only to lose at the last second. I have killed each and every one of you multiple times over. And that’s not even counting how many times I’ve fought the others.”

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  Zeke stared the man in the eye. He clearly wanted to look away, but he couldn’t manage it. “Do you know what I’ve found?” he asked.

  The man shook his head.

  “That it means nothing. There is no glory. There is no winning this battle. The sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be. But you know what the worst part is? I’ve given this little speech – or some variation of it – a hundred other times,” he revealed. “None of you were there the last time I did it. Your predecessors are all gone now. I’m the only one left. And I don’t even have bodies to bury. No pieces to pick up. Only an endless battle none of us can win. So, don’t tell me about losing hope. That fled my life long, long ago. I don’t even remember what hope tastes like.”

  With that, he stood and headed toward the door. By rote, he undressed and stepped outside. The drums had yet to sound, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t stomach the hollow feast inside.

  For long minutes, he stood in the sun, feeling nothing until, at last, the drums once again beat, and the old woman appeared on the horizon. She didn’t move quickly, but she covered more ground that she should have. Zeke had long since recognized that nothing worked the way it was supposed to, so he scarcely noticed.

  Soon enough, she’d painted the whorls on his body, and he set off before the others were even undressed. He didn’t even take a weapon.

  When he arrived at the battle site, he slowed and waited. From experience, he knew that doing anything would only result in him wake up on that slab again. Oh, how he’d grown to hate it. More than anything else, it was a symbol of the unchanging nature of so-called Valhalla.

  Eventually, the rest of the fighters joined him. They scarcely noticed him, they were driven so far into their lust for battle. However, Zeke found that he had no stomach for it. The drumbeat no longer quickened his pulse, and the upcoming fight didn’t distract him. Without, he could see things so clearly.

  The men and women were not proud warriors.

  They were the condemned. Mere caricatures of what they’d been in life. And he was no different. His body was as perfect as it had ever been, but in the absence of the battle frenzy that gripped everyone else, there was nothing. No hopes. No dreams. No future. Just an endless eternity of meaningless drudgery disguised as battle.

  And he no longer cared.

  The second the drumbeat reached its crescendo and everyone charged, Zeke stepped forward. He made no attempts to defend himself as a man rammed a sword into his gut. That was far from sufficient to bring him down, and it took a second blow to the neck to bring about his death.

  In the aftermath, Zeke lay on the grass, his blood puddling beneath him. And he hoped it would be the last such death before he’d be awarded the dignity of a permanent end.

  It was not.

  He awoke on that same slab only an instant after he let the darkness overtake him. Stiffly, he rose. He didn’t bother dressing. He didn’t stop at the table to eat or drink. Instead, he simply stepped out of the longhouse and waited to once again march to his death.

  While he waited, his mind wandered.

  He knew he was missing something. He could feel it in his bones. But whatever it was, the monotony of constant death had worn it down to nothing.

  When the next battle came, he again refused to fight back. And the next after that.

  For ten more battles, he repeated those same actions, hoping against hope that each death would be the last he was forced to endure. But then, like a bolt of lightning, Zeke remembered something important.

  Divine energy.

  He’d once felt it in another warrior. He couldn’t remember that man’s name, even though he’d called him brother. How long had it been since Zeke had watched him fall? Tens of thousands of cycles, certainly. Perhaps more. Since then, Zeke had forgotten all about that brief surge of divine energy.

  But he remembered it now.

  So, standing outside the longhouse, he searched inwardly, and to his immense disappointment, he found nothing there. It was as if that caged ball of power had suddenly disappeared.

  That couldn’t be right though. It didn’t make sense. From what he understood, divine energy was the realm of gods. Nothing could destroy it.

  That begged the question that he most urgently needed to answer – where was it?

  He was so deep in thought that he didn’t even notice the rising drumbeat. Nor did he see the old woman approaching. However, when she reached out with her brush, he reacted on instinct, clasping his hand around her thin wrist. Before she could even move, his hand crashed into her face.

  She hit the ground a second later, her cheek disfigured and her jaw dislocated.

  Zeke didn’t hesitate to keep going, and his foot found her neck only a second later. The sound of cracking bone filled the air, followed quickly by her last, rattling gasps of breath.

  The drums ceased.

  And the warriors went insane. Before Zeke knew what was happening, someone had buried an axe in his ribcage.

  Or that was what they’d intended. Instead, the blade bounced off his torso, rebounding so violently that it ended up splitting another person in two. It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so surprising.

  More distractingly, Zeke felt something surging in his chest. Something he didn’t even realized he’d missed so terribly. The roiling ball of divine energy was no longer obscured, and though the cage remained, another bar had cracked, allowing the once-trickle to become a steady flow.

  Zeke felt it pulse through him, and he suddenly remembered something he’d forgotten. Or perhaps it had been taken from him, given what had just happened. Regardless, until that moment, he hadn’t even realized what was missing. His attributes – the stats that he’d worked so hard to accumulate – came back to him in an instant.

  No longer was he a talented warrior.

  Once again, he had become the man who had singlehandedly defeated armies and wounded dragons. He felt more himself in that moment than he had in tens of thousands of cycles.

  What’s more, it gave him the perspective he so very much needed. They had robbed him of his identity. They had imprisoned him for longer than he cared to contemplate. And now that he was freed from their shackles, Zeke was ready to make them regret it.

  However, before he could do that, he needed to deal with a few so-called warriors. He turned his attention to the people attacking him. They were innocent in it all. Probably. But that didn’t matter. It couldn’t. So, he didn’t hesitate to attack.

  A single punch was all it took to burst one of the warriors like a balloon. The same was true of the rest. Zeke didn’t even need to try. He just laid into them with ruthless disdain until there was nothing left but blood-soaked grass.

  Then, thunder rolled as dense, black clouds appeared in the sky. Lightning forked down only a few feet away, but Zeke didn’t move.

  That’s when he once again heard the drumbeat. It sounded more insistent but further away. Only a few moments later, Zeke saw a man appear on the horizon. Then another.

  And another after that.

  They kept coming until there were hundreds of them up there. Thousands. Tens of thousands. By that point, Zeke had completely lost count – especially considering that he could feel that their shackles had been removed. He even recognized one of the men – a prominent red-bearded man whose name he finally remembered.

  Ragnar.

  Lightning struck again, signaling the beginning of the last battle Zeke would fight within the Circle of Violence. One way or another, he intended to end it.