Fred's Next Round

After cleaning himself and donning his armor anew he returned to the queu that held the fighters for the day's fights. He was given a ticket - #69 - and told to wait in the bleachers. As he waited he saw fight after fight after fight. He saw banshees and liches, saurian knights and four-armed wombats. He saw limbs torn from their sockets and flesh pierced by blades, arrows penetrating hides and claws ripping armor-plates. As the day grew long and his number that much closer, he began to worry. All he had fought was a human boy named Jake, and then his dead phantom - true, Fred did have that wyrd hallucination of oddly armoured men with swords that shot out fire, but he knew in his heart that it was he - Lord Fred of Suffex - who did best the ghost of that boy.

"Ninnies and Nincompoops!" yelled out the molten T.M. "Round Fifteen gives us Knight Potty-Pants and Nevene the Centaur!!! Alright you blockheads... up and at 'em!" With the crowd going wild, Fred -- decked out in his Allarian armour (the finest in all the land according to Armourer's Monthly and the armoursmith Fred's father had set him up with back in Caemlyn) and holding his sword gleaming in the ethereal light of the magical glowglobes -- looked out across the field and saw his opponent, a woman... sort of. Actually, yes, a woman, definitely a woman, just not human. She was standing on her four cloven hooves. Her rump was clothed in a leather armor while her torso was also wrapped in a similar protection. She had a quiver of arrows slung on her back, and a purse of throwing blades about her waist. In her hands was the bow, a mighty longbow by the looks of it.

~*(&$#!!#!~ thought Fred. ~How in tarnation am I gonna get close enough to strike her down if she can pierce me from a hundred yards away?!~

1. The fight!
2. An accident!
3. A mistake!

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