"Face me, Butcher!" screamed the lieutenant. Kamahl could hear the soldier running up behind him. Without even glancing back, Kamahl whipped his sword up over his head, bringing it straight down behind him in a fast arc. The tip of the sword met the top of the lieutenant's helmet, and Kamahl's biceps bulged as he drove the sword down through the officer's skull, chest, and abdomen, never once touching the enchanted armor or sword. With a screech, Kamahl's sword drove down into the floor, giving the lieutenant a third leg.

Kamahl released his sword, which stayed perfectly still holding up the frame of the dead lieutenant, and stared at the two remaining soldiers, privates both.

"Leave. Now," he stated, simply. Glancing first at each other and then briefly at the barbarian and the carnage behind him, the two privates turned and fled back down the corridor.

Kamahl turned back to the Order lieutenant, who now resembled a scarecrow more than a soldier. Grasping the hilt of his sword with both hands, the barbarian heaved the sword out of the stone floor and high up over his head once again, allowing the limp body to crumple to the floor beside his dead soldiers.

"You never told me your name. 1 guess I won't be able to add you to that list after all," muttered Kamahl as he wiped the blood from his blade on the lieutenant's pants.

Kamahl sheathed his sword, no longer glowing with the power of the orb, slung the sheath over his shoulders, and trotted down the hallway looking for an exit.

The pit was dark and silent. A single ray of light penetrated the gloom from the hole Kamahl had blasted in the wall during the battle Chainer had started just an hour earlier. That contest was to decide the fate of the Mirari but had instead sealed the fate of both Chainer and the Cabal. Picking his way through the dead bodies and pools of blood, Kamahl glanced one last time at the box where Chainer had presided over the pit for the first and last time.

"Goodbye my friend," said the barbarian.

The chaotic scene outside the pit was dramatically different from the deathly calm inside. Looters smashed windows and grabbed goods. Gangs of thugs roamed the streets picking fights. Children stood by ruined homes and tossed bricks, shards of glass, or broken chunks of mortar at Order patrols, dogs, and any adult who came too close.

While technically a city of thieves and cutthroats, Cabal City had been, until an hour ago, an orderly town governed by the power of greed-governed by the Cabal. But then Chainer had used the Mirari to try to destroy the city, to wipe the Cabal clean so he could rebuild it in his own visage. The Cabal was no longer here. Orderly greed had been replaced with wanton avarice.

Twice before, Kamahl had seen the power of the Mirari manifested with disastrous results. The first time was in the Citadel, capital city of the Order, when Lieutenant Kirtar brought a final and irrevocable order to the city, freezing all within the orb's extensive radius in the perfection of icy crystals. The second use Kamahl had only seen from afar but had been able to piece enough information together to know that the Emperor of the Mer Empire had set off the Mirari for some unknown reason, flooding much of northern Otaria and destroying the Mer capital in the backwash.

Today, his friend Chainer had succumbed to the power of the Mirari and unleashed the demented terrors inside his mind upon Cabal City. The blue sky had tuned a mustard color, and the landscape of the city had been replaced with a kind of hell. Now, the sky was blue once more, the streets were again made of stone, and the hellish creatures that had spewed forth from Chainer's mind were entombed inside Chainer's crypt for all time.

But the Cabal was no more, and Cabal City was quickly destroying itself without the control that the Cabal had given its citizens over their own demons.

"I swear I will not succumb to your seductive power," Kamahl muttered as much to himself as to the Mirari. "Either I will control you, or I will bury you deep beneath Otaria if I have to. But I will not allow you to destroy lives again."

Kamahl stood for a moment surveying the riots raging through the streets, watching the ebb and flow of the chaos swirling around him, looking for an opening that would allow him to discretely leave the pit and make his way out of the city. Unlike the natural chaos of fire, which obeyed certain rules he had learned early in his life, human chaos offered too many variables to discern a meaningful pattern.

I could wait for nightfall and slip out amongst the deepening shadows, thought Kamahl, or I could just try the direct approach. He strode out into the street, keeping a wary eye on the looters, gangs, and unwanted urchins of Cabal City.

As Kamahl walked down the street, the rioters parted before him as waves part before the prow of a ship. And like a ship cutting through the waves, Kamahl built up and make of people behind him, as the citizens of Cabal City, who moments before had no purpose left in their lives but to finish destroying their own city, found purpose once again in the object that had destroyed their lives.

Kamahl could hear the calls and murmurs coming from his wake.

"He has the orb."

"Challenge him for it."

"I challenge you, barbarian!"

"No, I do!"

The challenges multiplied as more people joined the wake, but Kamahl looked closely at each new member of his entourage as he passed and felt safe. They were all shop workers, kids, and students. None of them had the air of a jack, a pit fighter, and none seemed willing to attack.

Order patrols held back as well while the procession moved through the streets. Whether the two privates Kamahl spared earlier had spread the word of his newfound power, or whether they merely didn't like their odds against the growing band of angry citizens, Kamahl didn't know and didn't care. He would much prefer to leave the city without having to wield his orb-empowered sword again.

That hope faded as Kamahl came to the hill leading up to the gate. At the top stood Bullock, a burly dementia summoner Kamahl had seen in the pits but had never faced.

"Hail, Bullock," called Kamahl as he began up the hill.

"Stop where you are, barbarian," called Bullock. "The orb belongs to us. I challenge you in the name of the Cabal for the orb."

"But the Cabal is no longer here," replied Kamahl, continuing his ascent up the hill.

"I am here," said Bullock. "That is all you need care about." With that, the cabalist clapped his gauntleted fists together in front of his face and began murmuring his dementia summons.

Kamahl stopped halfway up the hill and reluctantly drew his sword. He had hoped to get closer to Bullock before the summoning began, but that couldn't be helped now. Bullock was a devotee of Chainer's style in the pit. He used his dementia monsters to soften up and distract an opponent, then moved into melee for the win. But where Chainer manifested chains that he whipped around and flung with deadly accuracy, Bullock used his fists, with the nasty addition of spikes that grew out of the gauntlets he wore.

Kamahl was more than a match for Bullock on any normal day, but he was exhausted from the fight with Chainer and couldn't afford to let the large jack wrestle him to the ground. Better to stay at range for now, thought Kamahl, setting his feet on the incline and holding the massive sword, glowing red-hot again, in front of him.

Bullock spread his forearms apart in front of his face, creating a dark, roiling cloud of energy. From that cloud sprung three large, black lions with long tentacles where their manes should be. The monstrous felines advanced on Kamahl, spreading out to either side, their tentacles whipping back and forth.

Kamahl had seen this ploy before. The cats would encircle the jack and wrap their tentacles around his limbs, immobilizing the fighter so Bullock could enter the fray unmolested. What Kamahl didn't know was how long those tentacles were, a fact he learned as the first creature flung several tentacles toward Kamahl's hands from nearly twenty feet away.