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While the nudity seemed mundanely accepted though, there's a growing current of excitement amongst the audience you notice. People are too polite or formal to stand up and start cheering or anything like that, but there's definitely wide and eager eyes around you as folks are sitting forward on the edge of their seats, and murmuring amongst themselves. Even your pair of hosts chat back and forth past you, about their expectations for who will win and how they apparently are familiar with the two men?
And for what it's worth, they definitely put on an impressive physical display. As much as you can try to look past their nakedness, the two men are clearly in peak physical form but they also appear to know how to fight, whatever martial arts it is that they're employing. Like watching a more risque MMA match on a stage rather than in a fighting ring. Between the engaging fight and the eagerness of the audience, you eventually find yourself swept up in the excitement as well, even if you start to notice two concerning things the longer the fight goes. Firstly that... well you're not familiar with men or fighters in this physical capacity, but they seem to be managing immense physical feats. When their bodies and blows connect you can <span class="mu-i">feel</span> the echoing force, and at a certain point one of the man slams into the other so hard that the floor of the stage smashes open, to everyone's audible delight. The second matter, is that it seems they're not holding anything back? In as much as two men, or two people in general wouldn't hold back anyway, but the brutality of their combat is shocking to you. More and more the slight of blood on their bodies and across the stage is distressing to you, until eventually their savage duel reaches a conclusion, and one man is left triumphant over the other yet even the victor is quite brutally beaten and maimed.
<span class="mu-b">"-is... is no one going to st-stop it?!"</span>
<span class="mu-g">"Shhh, it's all part of the initiation!"</span>
<span class="mu-g">"It's alright Cat, don't worry!"</span>
The one man kneeling over the other, he seems to be waiting for something that you're unaware of until you glance about the audience to see if anyone else is concerned as you are. Instead you see the same eager faces, with their hands raised to show either approval or disapproval of... something. Whichever side has the majority you can't tell but you assume the ones running the show know, because some tacit approval is given before the victor clenches his bloody fists with a yell and pounds into the chest of the defeated.
