Defiance

Sloth, a mountain momentarily stunned, was still swaying when Nico saw his opening. He lunged forward, aiming a precise, focused blow at the giant's solar plexus. 

But Sloth was faster than he looked. A massive hand, a claw of hardened flesh, shot out and clamped onto Nico's left wrist with an unbreakable grip. A sadistic grin stretched across Sloth's face as he effortlessly swung Nico and flung him to the ground. 

Nico felt his breath rush out in a painful whoosh as he landed with a thud, his body momentarily stunned. Sloth, not satisfied, was already pulling him up for a second throw, but Nico, fueled by instinct, used the momentum of the pull to break out of the grip. 

He spun and landed a quick, jarring blow to Sloth's face. He didn't stop there. As Sloth recoiled, Nico followed through with a high, snapping overhead kick, the heel of his boot connecting squarely with Sloth's jaw with a sickening thwack. 

Nico scrambled backward, creating space between himself and his monstrous opponent. From a safe distance, he could see it — a thin smear of blood at the corner of Sloth's mouth.

Nico had just done the impossible. He had wounded the unstoppable.

"I can see that you're more confident now," Sloth said, a wide, bloody grin stretching across his face as Nico approached him slowly.

Just as Nico closed the distance, Sloth lunged forward, and in Nico's mind, a wave of disappointment washed over him. The movement was the same as the last — predictable, a heavy-handed attempt at overwhelming force. 

Sloth's massive arms opened wide, going for a devastating bear hug. But Nico wasn't there. With an instinct honed from his days in the wasteland, he measured the precise distance between his left arm and the side of Sloth's head, and in a flash, delivered a sharp, focused elbow strike to the giant's jaw. 

Sloth spat out a mix of blood and a broken tooth, but the momentum of Nico's strike, delivered with desperate power, made him lose his balance. 

Sloth took advantage of the brief opening, his arm swinging back in a retaliatory strike. Nico managed to barely block the blow, his arms raised to defend his head, but the impact was like being hit by a slab of concrete. He was sent stumbling backward several meters, his body shaking from the sheer, raw power of the hit.

'If I let him get a clean strike on me, it could be the end of me,' Nico thought. 

As Nico let his guard down for a single, desperate moment to catch his breath, the terrifying face of Sloth appeared right in front of him, as if out of thin air. 

Nico instinctively tried to raise his arms to defend himself, but Sloth was too fast. A massive, iron-like hand shot out and clamped around his throat, a vice that stole the air from his lungs.

With a sadistic roar, Sloth began to viciously smash Nico's body into the frozen, unforgiving ground. The first impact was a dull thud, the second a sickening crunch, and the crowd, once jeering, fell into a stunned silence.

With one final, inhumanly powerful slam, Sloth didn't just smash Nico down —he bounced him. Nico's body was flung a full meter into the air, a human toy suspended for a moment against the chilling sky, completely vulnerable. 

Sloth grinned, a flash of teeth in a mask of rage, and he met Nico's body on its descent with a strike that sent him hurtling to the ground. 

Nico's body hit the ground with a sickening thud, but he didn't stay down. He attempted to rise, his arms shaking, but Sloth was already there, a massive boot slamming into his side and sending him back to the frozen ground.

He tried again, a desperate, gasping struggle to get to his feet, and was met with another crushing blow, a brutal punch to his stomach that stole the air from his lungs. 

The crowd was a silent, stunned audience, watching a human being get methodically dismantled. But on his third attempt, something changed. Nico's mind, pushed to its breaking point, moved faster than his body. He narrowly avoided the incoming strike, ducking just enough for the blow to whistle over his head. 

In the same motion, he pushed off the ground, a powerful, snapping kick aimed at Sloth's ribcage. But Sloth was prepared. He parried the blow with an immense forearm, the force of the block turning Nico's attack into a simple shove. 

Sloth then retaliated with a quick, brutal strike of his own, a swift punch to Nico's nose that was all too accurate. A sharp, sickening crack echoed in the cold air, and a gush of old blood, already clotted and dried from earlier blows, erupted from his nostrils. He stumbled back, his body a trembling wreck, but he was still on his feet.

Sloth, now enraged by Nico's refusal to fall, began to deliver a series of methodical, crushing blows. The fight was no longer a dance of strikes and parries, but a brutal, one-sided assault. 

Sloth's fists, like pistons, slammed into Nico's head over and over, with sickening thuds that echoed across the silent courtyard. Yet, against all logic, Nico did not fall. 

He simply stood there, a broken statue, absorbing the punishing blows with a chilling stillness. His body swayed, but his feet remained rooted to the frozen ground, taking every hit. 

By the time Sloth finished, Nico's face was a grotesque, bloody pulp, unrecognizable beneath a mask of crimson and swelling bruises. His eyes were now rolled back into his head, completely white, with no pupils or iris in sight. 

It was a horrifying sight, an almost inhuman state of being. 

Leoill, watching from the edge of the crowd, felt his knees threaten to give way. A cold terror seized him. In his mind, all he could do was repeat a single, desperate mantra, a helpless plea to a world that could no longer hear him:

"Stop... please stop... don't continue this anymore."

A fellow prisoner, a scarred veteran with a weary look in his eyes, laid a heavy hand on Leoill's shoulder. The touch was not one of comfort, but of shared experience. 

"Tough luck, kid," he said, his gaze fixed on Nico's motionless body. "Fights like these end up getting someone killed. Your friend over there... he's a goner." 

The words landed with the finality of a death sentence. Leoill didn't reply. His body was frozen, his mind numb with shock and terror. His eyes, already wide with horror, seemed to dilate further as he looked back at Nico. 

The scene was a grotesque tableau of defeat: Sloth, panting but victorious, the crowd now a murmuring, unsettling audience, and in the center of it all, a broken body that no longer resembled the boy he had reluctantly come to trust. 

In Leoill's mind, a single, agonizing question screamed for an answer: why? 

His eyes, wide with a quiet, terrified desperation, were still fixed on Nico's motionless body. The raw, sickening brutality of the match was a constant loop in his head. 

It wasn't about Darsion versus Ilbaria; this was a fight between two countrymen. They were both here in the same miserable cage, broken by the same war, yet they had just fought like rabid animals. 

The senselessness of it all was more horrifying than the violence itself. There was no patriotic reason for this, no grand war for territory or pride. They were just two boys, thrown into a meat grinder, and now they had turned on each other. 

The memory of Sloth's taunting — "slave" — rang in his ears, and for a fleeting moment, Leoill understood that this was a fight for something more than just status. It was a desperate refusal to be broken, to be completely stripped of all dignity.

But even that realization did little to stop the bitter thought: they were already so broken that they had to destroy each other just to feel something.