The arena fell silent. Not the anticipatory hush of a crowd holding its breath, but the dead quiet that follows a scream cut short. Grand's voice sliced through the stillness without ceremony, without pause, without mercy.
"The third stage begins. Now."
Rhett's stomach dropped like a stone through black water. No cooldown. No break. The survivors around him swayed on their feet, hollow-eyed and blood-caked from two rounds of systematic slaughter. Some could barely stand. Others stared at nothing, their minds already broken.
This wasn't a tournament anymore—it was a meat grinder with rules.
Rhett ran the grim mathematics in his head while corpses were dragged from the sand. Five hundred to start. Two hundred after the first stage. Eighty survivors now stumbling toward the third round of elimination. If the exponential decay held, they'd whittle down to maybe twenty by stage four.
Five stages total, he realized. Five stages to turn five hundred people into paste.
