I--- Ararza Vol 29 Young Female Fighter 314 Apr 2026

I wiped the blood from my eyes and looked up at the viewing pods. Somewhere behind that one-way glass, the Oligarch was deciding my fate. Would I be promoted to Vol 30? Scrapped for parts? Or sold to a mining colony as a broken toy?

I landed on its back just as gravity flipped again, now pressing us both into the ceiling. Its four arms flailed. My twitchy left arm locked up—perfect timing. It made my grip unbreakable. I drove the dagger into the fracture.

The arena that day was the Shattered Geode, a hollowed-out asteroid with gravity plates that flickered unpredictably. My opponent: a Vol 41 Warform, serial 892, a hulking thing with four arms and a core temperature that melted the floor beneath its feet. The crowd—wealthy patrons in private viewing pods—chanted for my death. They always did. Young Female Fighter was a genre to them, not a person.

And survivors don't stay in cages forever. i--- Ararza Vol 29 Young Female Fighter 314

Survivor.

The announcer's voice crackled: "Winner: i--- Ararza Vol 29 Young Female Fighter 314. Status: Combat Effective."

Most fighters in the Ararza Volumes are born in vats, fed combat data through neural drips, and thrown into the arenas of the Oligarch's Crucible by their tenth cycle. I was different. I was Vol 29—the "salvage series," stitched together from the broken remnants of earlier volumes. My left arm is a Vol 12 prototype (too twitchy, prone to locking mid-swing). My eyes are Vol 8 (excellent low-light, but they bleed when I process too fast). And my name, 314, means nothing except that three hundred and thirteen others before me failed. I wiped the blood from my eyes and

I kicked off a floating chunk of debris, drew the ion dagger hidden in my thigh sheath (not regulation, but Vol 29 didn't follow rules—we followed survival), and let my bleeding eyes do the math. 892’s reactor casing had a hairline fracture from a previous bout. The Oligarch's maintenance was sloppy for Warforms they considered unbeatable.

I had three minutes of survival data on 892. It was arrogant. It led with its upper-left arm every time. It overheated after thirty seconds of sustained output. And it had never fought someone who bled from her eyes when she calculated trajectories.

The bell didn't ring. In the Crucible, a light flashed—deep red—and then the gravity shifted sideways. I was suddenly running up a wall that had become the floor. 892 stumbled, its mass working against it. I didn't have mass. I had momentum and desperation. Scrapped for parts

The explosion was small but surgical. 892’s core vented plasma in a single, directed burst that melted through its own spine. It went limp. I rode the corpse down when gravity switched off entirely, floating in the sudden zero-G, surrounded by the silent, stunned crowd.

The designation was "i--- Ararza Vol 29 Young Female Fighter 314." The stutter in the identifier wasn't a glitch; it was a scar. It meant I had almost been decommissioned twice.

It didn't matter. I had a new designation now, one I gave myself.