From across the Colosseum orb, I swallowed all data of my opponent raging back at me. Its myriad sensors, crystalline eyes, high-entropy wings and antennae glimmered in the blade of light skimming its own half-iris door. Though I had not survived my first two combats, my defeats had not brought codedeath either. In the downtime, my manufacturer had kept busy. I was learning more quickly, iterating death scenarios with greater clarity. Indeed, my manufacturer had been good to me. Some insects were designed to love their manufacturers; mine had not crippled my system so.

“Three … Two … One …”

Gates sprang full-iris. I leapt into the Colosseum, swilling the pulse of my opponent’s blitz. I flapped up against the ether, plummeting toward the orb’s base. The opponent collided against the perimeter behind me. That was good. My response dynamics were more tuned than its.

Flapping more fiercely, I rose into the upper hemisphere while maintaining visible-spectrum fix on the opponent. The imagination iterated death scenarios for myriad alternate paths in which the opponent would attack my wings. Just such an attack had crippled me in my first two combats. But now, I understood how such attacks sounded in the noise of the Colosseum.

Wings beat, teasing it, salivating its recursive algorithms of rage. It darted, pincers akimbo. But just as it would land me, I folded wings into exoshell. Its claws raked, found hold at the base of my abdomen. Plummeting under the vermin’s mass, I raised my pincer-tail to pluck its head from its thorax. I twisted as we fell, nanotalons plunging in and out of the vermin-body, wrenching its abdomen asunder. As its corpse shrilled against the Colosseum floor, my wings released to catch rising wind. I perched at the holding gate, surprised to find my shell free of all pain except the rippling twinges of my kill lust.