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I was very disappointed in this story. It was poorly written and did not match the standard of content I have come to expect from a company that prides itself on creative excellence. Parts of it made me wonder if it had been edited at all. There are basic errors that took me out of the story and reminded me I was reading something on the internet rather than experiencing the narrative. A couple of examples:

Darux had been a champion Spiker for four years' Slaughter Games, though the games aren't annual, so he had actually been a winner through seven Slaughter Games, until last year when he was dethroned by an upstart from Massacre Girl's ring: Vildika. A tall and tightly corded female human, who got the killing blow on a particularly agile victim that had dodged Darux's deadly swing of the hammer, only to be caught by one of Vildika's bladed boots in a graceful spinning kick. Darux found himself defeated and Vildika crowned champion for the year's games.

The first sentence changes tense halfway through. 'The games aren't annual' is flavour text, not part of a narrative. It's also a rather nasty run-on sentence with four clauses. The second sentence has no main verb, and the last clause refers to Darux rather than Vildikam, making it seem as if she was caught by her own bladed boots. 'Vildika' is the subject of the last sentence's main verb and again makes her sound as if she's doing something peculiar, in this case crowning the champion (instead of being crowned).

Darux nodded, he had felt the same way for many years, completely confident in his victory. And even last time he had been confident in his victory, at least until Vildika surprised everyone.

'Darux nodded' should be a separate sentence. Instead it's tacked onto the front of the next one with a comma. The phrase 'confident in his victory' is repeated in consecutive sentences.

The story as a whole is very lopsided. It starts talking about Maritta, who given that she's the first person mentioned looks like she's going to be the main character, or at least important somehow. But we never learn anything about her, and she is never mentioned again except to mention that Darux is walking past her front door. Why is she in the story? Even if the story is the first part of many, and Maritta's going to turn up again, either she needs to be a part of this one or be left out altogether.

The fact that Vildika floats Daruk's boat gets a total of one clause in a single sentence. Isn't this the point of the story, to show what's going on in these Rakdos people's heads? It's a throwaway mention of something that is important. It could give the whole story a strong emotional tinge. Daruk loves Vildika, but Rakdos demands that she be put in mortal danger all the time. That's a pretty strong conflict and a story could easily stem from that, but instead it's left to wither away and be forgotten.

I am aware this is a bit of a rant but I was genuinely surprised by the low quality of this article. I find myself put off reading any other story content because of it – I'll give further such articles a chance but if they're going to be like this then I won't have much patience with them.