Both Choose to Fight;

I thought about all of the things that this man would do to me and all the things that he would make me do. My mind drifted back to thoughts of Mom and Kylie. You cannot save them if you are stuck in this place. I thought to myself. So as Gravner Fidanfitus Kurozora approached me and reached out his hand to toy with my hair like he had done with so many of the **** boys before me, I took a step back and raised my hand. "I will take my chances in the arena." I said as resolutely as I could muster. "Master." I added out of **** Code induced impulse.

"Me too." Sam said defiantly before adding a humble. "Master. That is to say. I would also like to try to become a gladiator."

"Such a waste." Kurozora-dom said as he gestured for his orc guards to take us away.

They led us both over to another truck. Unlike before, bags were tied over our heads before we were directed up the loading ramp. I heard one more person's feet shuffling into the truck before the back hatch sealed and we were off.

The bags on our heads were tied on with a knot that I could not undue. No one talked. I do not know what the others were thinking about. I was trying to see if I could get that alien voice that was in my head to talk to me, maybe answer some of my questions. It ignored me no matter how much I directed my thoughts towards it. I could feel it, like a parasite crawling between the folds of my brain matter. I could hear it incessantly like tinnitus, an endless stream of rules, procedures, and platitudes that would raise in volume whenever the curse felt the need to assert its power over my body, mind, and soul.

***

The truck came to a smooth stop and before long I felt a hand around my forearm leading me with a series of twists and turns towards what I imagined was an elevator by the way that we stopped for a few seconds before turning around and going back the way we came. It was then that they pulled my hood off. This was not much of an improvement since the room I was in had no lights. "Let's get you cleaned up." A heard the voice of a woman say before two different pairs of hands led me down into a warm bath. Four hands lathered and scrubbed me before I was instructed to "stand very still." Then I felt the cold edge of a razor scraping my privates before moving upwards to my chest and face.
"Are you a virgin?" the woman asked me. I wanted to lie, but the **** codes would not allow for it. Feeling the prickly sensation of shame, I told nodded that I was a virgin.
"Shame." The other woman said. "Would have been nice to have you knock us up here and now all nice and private, stock work is bad enough, the nobles watching just makes it that much harder."

"Hush, would you rather be in the fields with the verdas?" The first voice said. "Besides, this young'un does not care about your problems. He woke up this morning on Earth and tomorrow he is probably going to die."

"You know about Earth? Is there a way to get back there?" I asked.

The two girls laughed. "yeah, a lot of isekais come from some rendition of Earth. But there are a lot of Earths in the multiverse, and your original self is still there living your old life like nothing happened."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, sounding more nervous that I would have wanted.

"You are a copy. The light that you saw, it was not a teleportation spell, it was a duplication spell. If you tried to go back to your old life, you would find that someone else is living it." The woman said. "But hey, you are probably going to die tomorrow anyway, so try not to worry about it. Just relax, enjoy yourself, and take comfort in the knowledge that no matter what happens, your bloodline will live on."

I got quiet after that, and it was not long before the two women led me out of the water and toweled me off before dressing me in a loin cloth. They led me to a beaded curtain and told me that the door was directly in front of me and that I need only push. "You are probably going to die tomorrow." The woman said. "But, I am told that, the ones who survive, did so because they believed that they could win."

I pushed through the beads, the two women retreated back into the darkness. I found the door and pushed through and found myself...