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As soon as my mind finally let go of everything, and peace filled me, I was blinded by a flash of light. "GAH!" I cried out involuntarily.

"Good, you're awAKE," a deep, savage voice thundered, a massive blow smashing into my ribs towards the end of the sentence. "Get up, you piss-ant!" The voice barked while I held curled into a ball and clutched my ribs. Before I could even form a coherent thought, I was lifted into the air by a vise-like grip on the back of my neck and unceremoniously tossed like a disobedient puppy before skipping across the hard, sandy ground like a rock on a river. When I landed, I was finally in a bit of shade where I could open my eyes instead of being blinded.

The sight that greeted me was something completely bizarre: I was lying on sunbaked reddish clay, dusted with rusty ocher sand, in an adobe arena. The sun was glaring down on the empty tiers of seats from a cloudless, pale cyan sky. The shade I was lying under was just the shadow of the arena wall, which was nearly thirty feet high, with rows of sinister looking barbed spikes on the uppermost ten feet. Almost directly above me, a half-rotted, desiccated corpse was grotesquely impaled on some of them, it's lower half entirely gone. I retched, though not even stomach acid would come out- I seemed to be half-starved and severely dehydrated.

"GET UP BOY," the same voice rumbled, and this time, I could see its owner. It was a bald man larger than any I had ever seen. Body-wise, he looked like a slate-grey, nine feet tall version of Gregory Kovacs, with markings similar to Celtic war paint all over his torso. The designs were obviously tattoos since a multitude of scars crisscrossed all over him, disrupting the designs- some of which looked like a circular Yggdrasil design, a traditional Mjolnir design, and a great deal of knotwork and "strangled animal" designs. If the designs were any indicator, then this man had defeated an ungodly number of opponents, both man and beast.

[A/N: He Gregory Kovacs was a Canadian IFBB Pro bodybuilder from 1996 to 2005. He is widely regarded as the biggest bodybuilder ever. Look up images of him, and you'll easilly see how big this man is/was. I think he died, not sure.]

Dumbstruck, I just lay there, half sitting, for a moment- until I noticed him walking toward me looking like fucking Escanor when he went up to start fighting Estarossa. My body instinctively shot up out of fear, and I bolted. I got about two steps before this giant poped up in front of me like a goddamn ninja. Things went black again after that, only for me to come to with my ears ringing, and my mouth tasting of cottonballs, and the gigantic man staring down at me with dusty rafters above his head. Apparently we were inside.

"So, you're finally awake..."