This post is part of an ongoing story set in the pulp-era world of Hollow Earth Expedition. If you are new to this series, I suggest starting at the beginning.

The pair of impossibly large scorpions scuttled out through their gate in a confusion of legs and claws. They moved rapidly for creatures of their size, their many limbs flashing dusky yellow beneath the bright Hollow Earth sun. In the spectator seats above, the Nazi soldiers and their chosen slaves cheered on the deadly creatures.

Jack darted across the arena floor, back towards his cage. The motion seemed to catch the attention of the scorpions, prompting both to pivot towards him and then rushed forward. For a brief, panicked second he wondered if he shouldn’t just crawl back into his cage, hold the door shut, and hope that the scorpions filled up their bellies by feasting on the other three unfortunates in the arena with him. But that wasn’t Jack’s style: he would rather become arachnid food than leave someone else to do his fighting for him.

The bars of Jack’s cage had been cut from a wood that felt as hard as iron, but Jack had been wearing away at the thin rope that tied it all together. He had been intending to use this weakness a means to escape, but now he had more pressing needs. With a swift kick to the corner of the cage, he burst the seams of the enclosure and scattered a small pile of deadly-hard sticks before him.

Jack scooped up several and tossed one to the Spartan, who caught it in one hand and whirled it expertly to face the beasts. He tossed a second stick to the giant called Trotsky. Trotsky was not nearly so deft: he watched it coming towards him and watched it bounce off his chest and settle to the sandy floor. At least the giant now had some kind of weapon within reach. Jack looked around for the third combatant, the panther-woman, but he didn’t have time to see where she had gone before he needed to parry the thrust of a claw with his own stick.

The crowd howled in anger from the stands. The games-makers had wanted a slaughter, but Jack had turned it into a fight.

A slave boy went from cage to cage, undoing the locks and collecting the chains. Although Jack now had almost completely sliced through one of the ropes that held his cage together, he burst through the opened door and made a grab for the chain as soon as the slave-boy had removed it. If this was an arena, Jack wanted a weapon, and a solid iron chain would do for a start.

“Halt!”

His hand tight around the chain, Jack turned to see a line of Nazi soldiers with their rifles steadied against the arena’s stone wall. It was clear that they didn’t want him to have that chain, and he couldn’t argue with a firing squad. Begrudgingly, he allowed the links to slip from his fingers so that the wide-eyed slave boy could scamper off through a small doorway that sealed with a resounding clank behind him.

“Why don’t you just shoot me now and get it over with?” Jack shouted to the Nazis.

Sergeant Schmidt stood up and smiled wide enough to show off his missing tooth.

“Because,” Schmidt said. “Shootink iz more paperwerk. Also: less amusink.”

Schmidt made a motion with his hand and a portcullis at the far side of the arena cranked open. Beyond it was a large shadowy cell. Something was moving inside—something big and dangerous. Through the shadows, Jack could just barely make out the flash of a yellow chitinous shell, silhouettes of long, spider-like legs that moved chaotically, and the glint of a stinger slick with venom.

Jack kept his eyes on the darkened doorway, as he called over his shoulder to Schmidt: “Is it too late to get you to shoot me?”

Although the bars of his cage were made from a strange wood that was as hard as iron, the thickly-woven rope that bound those bars together was not. Jack had slipped his belt off and worked at sawing against the ropes whenever he thought his guards’ backs were turned. His belt buckle was not especially sharp, but he made good headway by jabbing the prong into the fibers and tugging them outward. If they had left him unsupervised for another few minutes, he might have been able to fray his way to freedom.

However, the Nazis were not about to make anything easy. They wheeled him out to the center of a dirt floor beneath a wide, domed ceiling. On the outskirts of the area, a stone wall rose straight up to protect rows upon rows of benches. As the Nazis soldiers gathered in one quadrant of the seats and their chosen slaves gathered in a smaller section of benches to the back, it became clear that this would serve as an arena and Jack was meant to be part of the main event.

Three other cages were wheeled in, and Jack recognized some of the captives within. The first was the mysterious Spartan who had ambushed the Nazi slave train earlier that day. His thick wolf-skin cloak and bronze helmet covered his entire body, so Jack couldn’t see his features any better here than he had out in the jungle.

The second cage was perhaps twice the size of Jack’s, and yet its captive could barely fit inside. This was the titan of a man that had been pulling the same slave-cage that the Spartan had ambushed, and although the giant hugged his knees tightly to himself and bent his head down low, his shaggy black hair and his fayed clothing pressed out through the bars.

The third cage contained what at first appeared to be a wild animal. It was feline, with sleek black fur, a lean body, and a swishing tail. Yet it wore the clothing of a native woman, and when it ceased its nervous pacing, it sat down, cross legged, and gripped the bars with very human fingers. For a moment the yellow cat-eyes met Jack’s and he saw that the face was a perfect blend of a cat’s and a woman’s. This was not an animal, he realized with a jolt: this was a half-panther, half-person hybrid the likes of which Jack had never seen in all his years of exploring the globe.