This chapter (173) originally had such a high word count that It was almost a book by itself. Due to that being hard for people I'm splitting it into more manageable parts for readers. Thanks for your patience during house cleaning.

  Chapter 173 Part B

  But can they do it in time?

  Slowly my feet start to hurt as the day moves on from walking around on that hard stone floor. We also need to try to figure out how to not end up fighting some guy that is too strong if we go ahead with the arena idea.

  After another hour the kids confirm it. There’s not a good system of spotting who you will end up fighting other than watching for who recognizes who. It’s a poor system and unpredictable, but some would call that fairness.

  “I wonder if match fixing also happens here? They must have a way right?” Sunghee says while leaning next to me with both of us against a massive ceiling pilr.

  “It could,” I shrug.

  Occasionally she’ll panic when she loses sight of one of the boys. Despite being roudy and annoying we don’t want anything to happen to them. Then we hear her muttering stuff while moving back and forth. Somehow she’s able to keep track of them.

  Then a few minutes ter we’re comparing notes with them.

  At length one of the boys comes up to me. “OK, so its like this I think there is a system to it,” he said.

  “There is?!” Sunghee and I gasped.

  “Yeah, it seems that most of the tough fighters avoid paying the high betting fees. So if you put down a lot of money you are more likely to attract a really tough opponent. But it’s cleverly done and made to look as if its purely lottery. There’s a bookie guy that sits behind the desk taking bets. And all he does is scan and look for amounts of money coming in that are abnormally big. That then tells them, ‘something is up here’, and that that might be a big pyer in the fighting world. So they then decide further how to achieve an advantage. That’s the pattern,” he said.

  “Is that true?” I asked Sunghee.

  She scratches her head. “I’m not sure? He might be right though. The money coming in would tell them something is up.”

  “Isn’t that just supply and demand?” another kid suggested.

  “No. Its maniputing supply and demand to your gain. Not the same as natural supply and demand. They are perverting it to how they want things to be,” I thought aloud.

  The others are interested more after I said that.

  “So that means, knowing they are doing that. Someone could even mimic that or do their own pys,” Sunghee is looking at me with more regard now.

  “Dude people use supply and demand to justify anything,” one of the other kids said.

  “I agree with you on that,” Sunghee said to him.

  “So kid, how’d you figure that out?” I asked, bending down on one knee to the one in particur that figured this out.

  He looks mischievous. Also unlike the other kids, this guy is somehow in threadbare clothes and no shoes, but his eyes and face suggest a bit of intelligence and keen mind. I kind of feel bad for him, because he’s obviously smarter than the other two. He avoided the question. So I can’t get more info from him.

  One of the other kids we paid, is only watching fights but not working.

  And it doesn’t seem like the city guards have any truancy system in this world for making them go to school if their parents can’t afford it. It’s kind of sad. I guess its partly reted to public school doesn’t really exist here in many of the human countries, or are confined to elementary school only for dwarves and others, depending on which country you live in. After that from what I can tell they are pushed into doing family trades and family businesses pretty early on. Plus, dwarves age and grow up more slowly than humans do so they finish schools early on while still youngsters.

  Occasionally the guards do chase off kids that they think are noisy. It’s a messed up system.

  The arena is big enough that at any given time there are at least two fights going on at once in what looks like medieval boxing rings except that instead of ropes they have wooden fences around a square. That and the rings are much bigger, like a hundred feet across at least. Each ring has different types of officials moving about, with guards.

  Supposedly we have to prove our worth by doing this in order to meet the demonologist. The goal is to win three times in the arena. But this is way more dangerous than I thought it would be. I might only do one match or non at all today, rather than trying to do all three in one shot. All around me I can feel magic auras and see veteran top css fighters from all around waiting for their turns. Some of them even have pretty expensive equipment.

  I don’t like it.

  The fights are sometimes fatal, and that’s putting it nicely.

  Between rounds there are dwarven maids that mop up the gore with brooms that are stained with blood both fresh and old.

  The kid continued to expin it to us. “OK, so the top ring there, that one you put 5 gold down. But everyone that goes in that ring is pretty much scarred up. Notice how they also all have really good armor and weapons? That was the first clue that they were the really tough guys. Normal people can’t afford armor and every kid knows that, but those guys somehow still got it despite regutions. So those are obviously the guys to avoid.”

  We nodded as we listened. “And that first ring you can put down any amount. As long as it matches up with what the other side asks for then you can fight them and winner keeps all.”

  “That sounds unpredictable,” Sunghee said quickly to me nervously.

  She’s right.

  “So there’s no restrictions on that one?” I asked.

  The kid shook his head, “you can’t purposefully maim or kill in any of the matches but that happens anyway. The problem is that there’s no way to prove it wasn’t an accident, and if you just say it was an accident they don’t care as long as they are making money.”

  “That’s…wow,” I said.

  “I don’t like this. This is blood money,” Sunghee said to me.

  “So one of them is a no minimum fee except for matching the other guy, and the other is 5 gold. What about the other one, the one in the middle?” I asked.

  He pointed to it. “That one costs 1 gold for both sides and is a team fight system.”

  “Ah crap. I didn’t think it might be something like that,” I said grinding my teeth.

  “Is that really so bad?” Sunghee wondered.

  “If we’re both wounded, we’re vulnerable if someone tries to capture or kidnap Sunghee while we’re trying to recover or rest. Then also no one can keep an eye on the rug rats,” I countered.

  She nodded.

  “How do you know someone won’t purposefully be a strong guy and go to the lowest tier fighting ring just to make sure he had a 100% investment payout?” I asked him.

  “Oh man, this is seriously risky,” Sunghee said as she thought about it.

  The kid scratched his head. “I don’t know let me check.”

  He ran off and then I can see him asking some old guys at various pces around the arena about it. Somehow the old guys open up more to the little kids that look innocent. In about fifteen minutes of gathering opinions he comes back. It was also noticeable that a lot of old guys were willing to talk to him since he was a kid and even patted his head.

  He’s out of breath and pants for a few minutes after running around. We let him rest a bit until he’s ready to talk.

  “Well the first old guy said it didn’t matter,” he shrugged.

  “Hmm,” Sunghee looked skeptical.

  But the kid continued, “but the second, and fourth old uncles said that a lot of strong guys actually purposefully hurt people in the lowest level ring so that they can come here a lot and get easy money. The sixth uncle said it’s better to bet on the monster versus warrior fights if you want to be sure it’s a fair fight.”

  “Eh?” both of us are surprised.

  Rina is still running around keeping the other two out of mischief while we talk.

  “I don’t see any monster fights,” I said.

  “I don’t either,” Sunghee said.

  Admittedly it’s hard to see though because of how crowded it is. There are literally hundreds of spectators all around. Some of them are people that are bettering. Others are just supporting friends, and some are coaches. But others are soldiers trying to learn techniques from watching others I find out. In short, the pce almost looks like the medieval version of an Olympic sports arena.

  “Um Shun, there’s a small problem,” Sunghee said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Do you even know they’ll let mages participate?” she asked.

  Damn it. That’s another variable to consider. It could wreck our trying to ‘fix a fight’ for money. Because its outside normal prediction parameters.

  So we had to send two of the boys to go find that out. It took another half hour of them gathering information because they kept getting conflicting opinions. In the end, 7 guys said mages couldn’t participate, but 8 people said they could. Then we had to have them go ask people again why there was such a difference.

  It turns out that mages can fight but aren’t allowed to fight to the death since a lot of a nation’s military is based on being able to field mages. There’s another rule that we also discover. You are only allowed one fight per day, no matter which ring you go to. They do this to supposedly have time for more money to pile up and increase the anticipation, and advertise the major fights with good sponsors. It would also mean managing the deaths easier.

  By only allowing one fight per day they are cutting down on people being able to monopolize the system and just kill competitors with other people having the chance to win.

  Then we also spotted that they have life leach healers standing by each rink to prevent deaths whenever possible. We were puzzled by how it worked but watched it closely so we could figure it out. The life leach healers use goblin sves to transfer the wounds from the competitors onto the goblins that often are killed in the process and are obviously sve fodder with their hands and legs tied up so they can’t run away, some of them crying but unable to even make a sound while gagged. In this way the goblin popution is also culled in the surrounding area too. Part of the reason why it was done this way was that the life leach healers trying to heal a dozen people in a day meant that they would be exhausted and overcome without goblin sves to leach the wounds to transfer over to, since traditional healing magic appears to be gone from most of the world if not extinct.

  It’s kind of an effective but painful system of a work around heal…

  Then we discover there are actually five fighting rinks, not just the three everyone else sees. The other two are hidden from the public view.

  There are stairs that go underground, on the long ends of the arena, to an additional basement. When you go down a level one of the rings is for betting on goblin pup fights of goblin versus goblin with their young pups. This surprised me the most. But because goblins are vile demonic creatures nobody really cares about their civil rights. So somebody pays adventurers to go out and kidnap baby goblins that are freshly born. Then they are brought here in cages and people bet on them killing each other.

  It’s kind of pathetic in a way, but they are goblins which have no capacity for good or doing right. Their spiritual nature is made from within the womb to be killers, thieves, and murderers and you can still see it in the pups sometimes. Yet again we see that goblins are children of evil with no redeeming qualities.

  I suppose it’s the dwarves’ way of recovering from goblin wars economically? It’s a bit weird to see, but the way it works is there are two cages in the rink opposite each other in the rink, each with a baby goblin pup. At the same time the other corners kitty corner to those in the squares each have a club in them. When the fight starts a bell will ring and the cages will open. Then the goblins will run out to each try to grab a cheap weapon on the ground and kill each other. They could also try to intercept one another at any point in the process while trying to get the cheap weapons if they wanted. The runner ups on deck for the next fight are also forced to watch the fight going on before them so they know how it works, and that if they won’t win they die. There’s a lot of urine stains obviously in the runner up cages from goblin pups that discovered their fate.

  The dwarven kids had an eerie fascination in goblin pup fights for some reason that is a bit strange and hard to describe. I had to drag all three of them away from it. But yet somehow they are begging to watch this particur ring with enthusiasm on a level that’s way more than all of the others combined.

  When we got to the fifth rink it wasn’t technically a rink at all but a set of massive illusion machines.

  This one is the weirdest of all. But strangely the most popur because it’s non-lethal…

  How come nobody mentioned this one?

  It’s a sign that other worlders have been here and that not only that they are the ones that created this pce. In the first pce it looks like two big linked video game machines linked to each other, though their architecture looks a bit more steampunk in some ways than digital. The two machines do have blue screens on them but have virtually all of their other parts made from steel caging with odd iron, steel, and copper pipes and tubes mixed and matched together with coils and wiring all over in a tall pedestal like design. Still there is what looks like video game controls in front of the screen that betrays what this is, in a way. When we finally see it in action we see that there are actually four sets of two video game machines linked to each other powered by massive mana crystals which are guarded by soldiers.

  At the moment one set of them is closed and says out of order, but the other three are going non-stop with mages being paid to periodically inject mana through their hands into the giant mana crystals powering each set of machines.

  These are also popur enough that there’s a line for each machine setup that is at least a dozen people long. And even more interesting, it’s not just mages that like these machines but there are plenty of non-mages here as well.

  We watch closely while waiting in line. This one also seems the least risky.

  Could it be the dwarves didn’t tell us about this one because with less risk there is less payout and they were afraid of not getting rich quick?

  If we get to the front of the line and don’t yet get how it works then we can let someone in front of us. Others are also doing that, but for the reason of trying to end up with someone weak.

  Basically the so called big ‘arcade style video game boxes’ are illusion machines powered by the mana crystals and using the real life stats and abilities of the person on each console that duel each other using the boxes we find out from a few people we questioned. When you go to use a box, the illusion then projects a ‘fake but real you’ onto the mat to fight the other guy’s image coming from his illusion box. Both of which look like old school big arcade video game boxes from arcades from Earth before X-boxes came out. They first insert a certain amount of money, which from the look of it, appears to be 1 gold coin and then the illusion machine reads produces a realistic illusion of the person that put his hand on the magic square where the contestants pce their hands.

  And they fight using your real stats. According to what we’re told, you can’t get lucky. The system uses your real combat data so it turns out how a real fight would be between the both of you… just that people don’t get dead or injured in the process. In a way its a cool system.

  On the screen observers can see the fight on the real mat and ring where the illusion bodies are. And they see blood and getting bruised also though its not real. But the person pying feels like they are sucked into the machine and as if its real even though to others it looks like they are sitting at the video game controls.

  It’s very obvious this came from some otherworlder that was put in this world because there’s no way an illusion box this complex could possibly resemble a video game system from Earth so closely. It’s made us very curious.

  Who came up with this? Maybe if I find the owner or designer I can find out something to survive and level up in this world more?

  And using real money does that mean that you can make money full time on these machines? You could make a lot of money with this sytem because, when the fight is over it seems everyone is back to full health. Only their illusion clone took damage.

  But if you lose you could lose everything. That would be really expensive too.

  Sunghee is probably thinking the same thing but she has a funny look on her face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t like video games,” she whispered.

  I shrugged. “It only matters if we get stronger. We’re here to make some cash not get entertained anyway.”

  “Ah that’s true,” she admitted.

  “Watch out that can get expensive,” one of the dwarven janitors told us in passing.

  We also periodically check to make sure Rina and the three dwarven brats are OK. Somehow she’d gotten them to sit on a bench with her while they are watching things.

  But we were watching so close that I didn’t notice until it was too te that it was our turn.

  The staff employee gestures to me. “Hey, it’s your turn. You’re up.”

  I got a bit nervous. There wasn’t helping it. I took a deep breathe, and then approached the ptform where the enchanted machines were.

  “OK, this is my first time. How does it work?” I said.