The Blue Diamond | JJK 🔞

1 The Arena

When the sun comes down darkness takes its charge. It is said that the night is made for dark creatures. Mothers tell stories of monsters who wakes up in the night to haunt the city to their children just to make them fall asleep. But they forget to mention that these monsters aren’t any of those with floating tentacles or sharp teeth or long nails and fingers, those monsters are humans who take cover of the night just so that they could live. Those are the real monsters those mothers should fear. And I take account of those monsters.

Elisabeth Markel, mononymously known by Eli. I am a kind of monster who lives for thrill and rage. My father used to run an underground fighting arena downtown in the Lower West Side of Chicago, apparently the heart of Chicago. The arena is a place where you are free to practice any illegal stuff except those of assault and rape, but drugs, fighting, smuggling of expensive and rare shits, and whatnot are a common bird of the arena. Police? They wouldn’t dare to come down here, if they come; either they come to ask help or to gamble.

The underground arena is spread on a radius of three miles, connected with tunnels and loops finally giving away to a giant stadium in between of the radius. That’s the stadium, where people bid their lives. The fighting that happens here is about death and life. The winner wins and takes all the money with him after banking the promised percent of the win to me, the loser dies. Simple as that. But there are few cases, where I decide who wins or who dies. Why? That’s a long story to tell. For now, just know that my father is dead, and I run the arena.

“Why did you cancel the fight tonight?” Jennie asks while we walk through the tunnels. I don’t know why, but I love the tunnels, dark and scary, just exactly how I like with tone of graffiti around the place. I love to make graffiti.

“Because I have more important shit than that.” I mumble and open the door of an underground room. Call it mafia or gangsters, but illegal stuffs are on the loose down here. It is like; we have a different world down here. Arena opens on every Friday night and each Friday night, one or two lives get lost in the damp walls of this place. Not only by the fighting show, well… what else could you expect from a giant estate filled with only crazy psychopaths. I am not that, I don’t fight, neither am I a drug addict nor a crazy ass; I just like to see two sane people become insane and fight for life. Call it whatever you want.

“What could that be?” Jennie asks back and I slump down on the wooden chair.

“You’ll see.” I send her a smirk while she huffs out and sits across me. Jennie is my best friend, more like a sister. Her father and my father were best friends too, and when my father died, Jennie’s father took care of me and my younger sister. My life outside this arena is just like of a simple college student who loves her sister a lot and who is creative enough to be an artist. Jennie and I were friends even before we knew how to speak. Our fathers made sure to let us hang out with each other frequently and now, we are even closer than blood sisters. I am two years younger to Jennie, but she always makes sure to act like a perfect best friend I could ever ask for.

“What’s with the suspense, Eli? Just tell me already.” She whines and I laugh at her. And just when I was about to reveal the reason, the door of the tunnel opens wide. The more excited I was, it all drown away when I see the face of Derry. I groan and Jennie snickers. “Derry was your suspense I see.”

“Good evening ladies.” The tall masculine man greets us and pulls the chair out and sits next to me. I groan again and scoot far away from him.

The lights around this small room is dimmed, the only thing that fills this room is the table and chairs around it in the middle of the room, and a bureau at the corner of the room that has three sets of computer on it and some papers sprawled around. This is my room where all the data and secrets are stashed. This is the only room around the whole radius which is heavily guarded and the door opens only with my fingerprint. The door is made of a fine heavy metal which is prone to any kind of external break out. Just to deceive any intruder, my dad made sure to make four rooms exactly like this one respectively in each tunnels out of six. This room is stashed with data worth of two hundred million dollars. But thanks to this arena where every single person is a loyal dog to me.