Day 6
At first, everyone trusted Decathlon.
How could they not? She was ten events braided into one long ribbon of effort. Ten starts. Ten finishes. Ten chances to prove that endurance was not a single moment, but a relentless accumulation.
Running. Jumping. Throwing. Running again. The rhythm of it felt pure.
When she arrived, people spoke of balance. Of how ten disciplines mirrored ten fingers, ten careful steps across the line between strength and grace. They admired the way she gathered so many different motions and made them belong together.
Decathlon carried them lightly. She was not loud about it. She did not brag about the distances she covered or the bars she cleared or the arcs her throws traced through the air. If anything, she seemed smaller than the reputation that followed her.
“I’m smol,” she said once with a shrug, when someone praised the enormity of what she represented. The group laughed warmly.
Of course she was small. The charm of Decathlon had always been that she stitched greatness out of modest pieces. A sprint here. A leap there. A throw that spun through open sky.
Ten simple efforts.
Together they made something impressive.
At first, every event looked beautiful.
The dash across the track - pure speed.
The long jump - flight.
The shot put - strength in action.
The hurdles - rhythm and coordination.
Each movement looked like the natural expression of an honest body moving through honest space.
But time changes the way people watch. And the deaths had begun to accumulate.
2x5 had vanished. The jersey with the proud 10 had been folded into a box. Capricornus had fallen on a ridge. The Ten Commandments had collapsed beneath a sky that had screamed for her end.
At first, none of it touched Decathlon. She kept moving through her ten events, calm and steady, as if the rhythm itself might hold the world together. But patterns are powerful things.
And ten appeared everywhere she went.
Ten lanes.
Ten marks in the sand.
Ten points awarded here, subtracted there.
The group began to notice.
“Strange,” someone said one evening, watching her move from one event to the next. “Everything around her turns into ten.”
At first it sounded like admiration. Later it sounded like suspicion.
The hundred meters, once admired for its clean burst of motion, began to feel like a sprint away from something.
The long jump, once a symbol of freedom, looked like a leap across a gap no one else could see.
The javelin’s arc, once pure geometry in the sky, suddenly seemed a weapon searching for a target.
Even the hurdles changed in their minds. Once they had admired how gracefully she cleared them.
Now they wondered why there were so many obstacles wherever she went.
Ten events.
Ten opportunities.
Ten shadows trailing behind her.
“You’re always there when things happen,” someone finally said.
Decathlon blinked.
“I’m just competing,” she replied.
But suspicion has a way of rearranging memory. What once looked like discipline now looked like calculation. What once looked like endurance now looked like persistence in the wrong direction.
“You’re the only constant,” another voice added.
Constant.
The word hovered uncomfortably in a world where constancy had begun to look dangerous.
Decathlon spread her hands helplessly.
“I’m smol,” she said again, softer this time, as if reminding them that she was only a collection of small efforts stitched together.
But the group had begun to believe that small things could hide very large consequences.
Ten events.
Ten chances to be present.
Ten reasons to wonder.
Eventually the decision arrived, not as a shout but as a quiet conclusion.
If death followed the path of ten…
Then perhaps ten itself was the problem.
They did not accuse her loudly.
They simply stepped away from the track.
The sand pit went undisturbed.
The hurdles stood alone.
The throwing field fell silent.
Decathlon looked around at the empty stadium, confusion slowly settling into understanding.
Ten events cannot exist without witnesses.
Without the group, the ribbon of effort unraveled.
One by one, the events lost their meaning.
Running without a race.
Jumping without a measure.
Throwing without a mark.
And so Decathlon - tenfold, patient, persistent - was quietly discarded.
The stadium returned to stillness.
But long after she was gone, people sometimes noticed something unsettling.
Whenever they counted the empty lanes,
there were always
ten.
Dead is...