Shadow Slave

The runes Hope had used were not small, intricate, and elaborate. Instead, they were giant, spanning the whole width of the blood-soaked arena, and guided torrential floods of soul energy instead of thin streams of it to create the unimaginably powerful enchantments.

Once Sunny knew where to look, it didn't take him long to start noticing a pattern and meaning in the placement and direction of the grooves cut in the ancient stone. The problem was, their scope was too great to be perceived from the floor of the arena. He would have been able to see the entirety of the runes, perhaps, from the very top of the amphitheater.

But fighters were never allowed to leave the battlefield, unless it was to return to the dungeon.

…In the absence of an aerial view, all he could do was to try and compile the disjointed pieces of the puzzle in his mind. By now, Sunny had fought in most of the killing boxes in the arena, except for a few.

After defeating another group of Warmongers and being thrown back into the cage, he spent the entire night trying to remember each of the stages he had shed blood on, and the pattern of the grooves on their floor. It was like assembling a complicated puzzle, only instead of the actual pieces, all he had were fragmented memories of them.

Luckily, his memory had always been good. In fact, after becoming an Awakened and having the opportunity to interact with a lot of different people, many of whom were very smart and educated, Sunny realized that his ability to instantly memorize things were somewhat unnatural even among them. Before, he had just assumed that everyone could do the same.

Still, he had to have paid attention to a thing in order to remember it, which was not the case with all of the grooves — only those that had happened to appear in his way. Plus, he was also having trouble determining how the irregularly shaped killing boxes were situated in relation to each other, since that wasn't something he had thought about before.

The task of creating a perfect three-dimensional replica of the entire arena in his mind was not an easy one.

Over the next few days, he was somewhat distracted while fighting the Nightmare Creatures in the Red Colosseum. Confounded by the fact that their enemies were growing stronger and stronger as all the weaker slaves were being slowly slaughtered, his performance suffered.

And that meant more injuries, more pain, and more torment.

Sometimes, he felt utterly beaten, broken, and hopeless. Sunny was familiar with suffering and hardship, and had experienced a fair share of horrific anguish in his life… but the Trial of the Red Colosseum had turned out to be a hell so dire that even he was having difficulty enduring its burden. It was simply too cruel, too odious, too vile…

And that harrowing torture was not going to end until he gave up.

But he didn't. The strange task of peering into the secrets of the Demon of Desire kept him going, no matter how wounded his body and how broken his spirit became. It was almost like an obsession. Sunny continued to fight, and kill, and suffer… and study the ancient stones.

His mental condition deteriorated so much that even Elyas, who was going through his own terrible ordeal, noticed that something was very wrong with his taciturn demonic partner. The young man tried to encourage the shadow creature as well as he could, but what could he say to soothe the soul-crushing despair of their situation?

They were enslaved, locked in cages, and forced to fight for their lives against a swarm of deadly monsters, only to be thrown back behind the iron bars, fed the raw flesh of the abominations they had just killed, and go through the whole nightmare again the next day, with no hope of ever escaping except for through death… through being killed and eaten by the other prisoners of the Red Colosseum.

Even their captors seemed to be trapped by the Colosseum, chained in the same vicious cycle, and doomed to eventually share the same fate as their slaves. Inside this ancient theater, only bloodshed and madness reigned.

…And yet, all of it was not for nothing. Eventually, after Sunny had lost count of the days they had spent in the colosseum, he finally managed to create a complete image of it in his head. With it came the understanding of the shapes of the giant runes that were cut in the bloodsoaked stone.

And with that understanding came the ability to peer into their purpose.

After learning the shape and position of the runes, Sunny found himself able to peer beneath the surface of the stone and see their function. The ability had always been within him, hiding in the depths of his changed eyes… he just had not known where and how to look, like he had not been aware of his ability to see the soul cores of creatures before clashing with Mordret within the Soul Sea.

Armed with the new knowledge, Sunny was able to perceive vast rivers of soul essence flowing beneath the arena and through its walls, following intricate paths carved for it by the immense runes.

In the end, that was what sorcery was — the ability to guide and shape hidden energies, most often that of souls, to express one's will upon the world… the enchantments were simply expressions of the enchanter's will, and the runes were the building blocks with which the enchanter manipulated the movement of energy to achieve their goal.

But where was all this soul energy coming from?

At first, Sunny assumed that the Red Colosseum was similar to the Crimson Labyrinth, and fed on the souls of creatures slain within it.

Slaves slaughtering each other in the arena must have been empowering the sorcery enslaving them by the very act of slaughter… but after observing the flow of soul essence through the ancient structure for a while, he realized that his initial theory was wrong.

Instead of the fighters... it was the crowd of spectators that fueled the enchantments. It was their jubilation, their elation, their sincere excitement that were the source of all the power flowing through the ancient theater. Of course… why would the Demon of Desire base her sorcery on death?

Her domain was built upon dreams, emotions, and passion. It was only after the followers of War God had usurped the colosseum that the subject of all this passion became battle, bloodshed, and murder. The current state of the arena was not how it had been supposed to be... it was stolen, perverted, and made into something utterly different.

...Corrupted.

More than a month had already passed after Sunny entered the Second Nightmare. The dungeon was growing less and less crowded, most of the prisoners long killed on the bloody stones of the arena. The end of the hateful Trials — whatever it was supposed to be — was approaching.

Now, he knew the basic principle of how the enchantments keeping him tied to the Red Colosseum functioned…

So, the question was, how was he supposed to use that knowledge to escape?