Day Three: Early Morning

[Zangya]

How she ended up back in the city she would never be able to tell you. It simply happened—she walked solemnly across the island, somehow entangling herself in the massive maze of skyscrapers and cemented roads. However she’d gotten here didn’t matter now, though—now, she was here, and she had to make the best of her situation. Her wounds pained her, and she reached down to caress the bullet hole in her knee with her good arm.

She collapsed, lying up against the nearest building—she used her good arm to hold her wounded knee in place, and let the arm that Kirano had shot up fall limp to her side, and then let her head hang back. She gazed into the sky, wondering why this was happening to her—why she was the one in so much pain. She was not fit to be in this competition anyways, so why was she always the one cursed with immense torture instead of death?

Death. That made her ears perk up—from what she could see, the moon was nearly at the middle point in the sky—which meant that sometime soon, Karl Jak’s flamboyantly homosexual voice would come on over the megaphones, and reveal to her and the remaining competitors who had died yesterday. She had to know. The only two people whose names she were certain wouldn’t be on that list were hers and Kirano’s—she had to know if Aero and Celipa were okay.

“Hello everybody!” he said. There it was: the day’s announcements were beginning, so Zangya looked up towards the nearest megaphones, her nerves jumping at the sound of his voice. “It’s a brand new day and more lives have been claimed. The game is drawing to a close, and here is the latest batch of victims: number-nine, Celipa; number-twenty-two, Uno; and number-twenty-eight, Bubb Rubb.”

Celipa. The Saiyan woman’s name was recited so calmly, so nonchalantly, over the intercom—as if it meant nothing to the man who was reciting it. She had died. Well, it may not have meant much to Karl Jak, but Zangya became speechless the moment the woman’s name came from the lips of Karl Jak. Celipa was dead; and she knew it was probably her fault. If she hadn’t killed Bojack, if she hadn’t been so impulsive… maybe she could’ve been there to die instead.

Uno. Uno was a different case—the green-skinned girl’s feelings over his death were drastically different than the ones she held for Celipa. She actually felt a feeling which related much to joy rise up in her stomach the moment that ‘number-twenty-two, Uno’ was recited over the intercom. She was just sad that he had taken Celipa with him when he died. Aero must’ve killed him, because she couldn’t see Aero killing Celipa. Celipa’s murderer had been Uno.

The Ader sighed. Fifteen people left—Zangya had made it halfway through this game, but at the cost of an enemy and at the cost of a friend. She hadn’t made friends last year, she hadn’t felt any feelings like this; loss was something so unfamiliar to her, so foreign. She would have to learn to deal with it, she guessed. She couldn’t stand. Not only from her wounds, but from the emotional baggage that had just been dropped on her—she merely sat there, weeping, for hours.