She wouldn’t feel better until she’d scoured this whole place and confirmed that Max wasn’t here. That he wasn’t the student climber who had been killed earlier.

She entered a smaller arena from the main one. There were a group of police climbers standing in the ring over the corpse of a sixteen-year-old boy.

She hurried over to them.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“They put this student climber up against a D-rank thunder spider,” said the police climber.

A student climber against a D-rank thunder spider!?

What were the arena organizer’s thinking?

“They knew there was no way this kid was going to survive against it,” said the police climber. “They weren’t even betting on whether he’d win or lose. Just how quickly he’d lose. They put him up here with the sole purpose to watch him die.”

Sakura shook her head.

She felt horrible for feeling a sense of relief that the boy on the ground wasn’t Max. The sense of relief didn’t last long when she thought about how the boy was someone else’s Max, someone with a family who cared about him.

“Were there any other student climber casualties?” asked Sakura.

“There was one other death,” said the police climber. “One survivor. A boy named Harold. He said it was his idea to bring his two friends here to train.”

Sakura sighed. So Max wasn’t here after all. Thank god.

A police climber yelled down from the top of the room. “Found another arena here. Looks like another student climber.”

Sakura’s heart started racing again and she rushed out of the arena and towards the other room.

She entered the other smaller fighting room and saw Max standing in the center of the ring, covered in dirt and scrapes.

She rushed over to him and grabbed him by the wrist.

“What the heck do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.

The boy blinked at her, confused.

“Are you a fool?”

“Sakura,” he said. “But I won...”

“Yeah, two out of four students climbers who came here today didn’t. Guess what happened to them? They’re dead.”

Max gulped. “I didn’t know. That’s horrible. I figured if they were coming here they were pretty confident with their abilities.”

“You think all these rules in place are to make your life difficult,” said Sakura. “But they aren’t. There in place to protect you. To protect everyone. I thought you were smarter than that to come to a place like this, Max. Seriously. I’m relieved—no, I’m bloody happy—to see you’re alive, but I also can’t look at you. I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

With that the woman walked away from the boy and continued her duties in cleaning up the now-defunct arena following the police raid.

* * *

Max felt horrible.