As exciting as the sport was to watch in the regular season, the finals of the National Hunt Association—NHA for short—had been dull, one-sided routs for the better part of a decade now. The Supersonics were simply undefeatable. Their team was too balanced, too freakishly athletic. Last year’s match in particular comes to mind – they’d given the preds such a runaround that not one of them had gotten within twenty meters of any of the Supersonics’ players.

Nevertheless, yesterday’s final had been billed as a titanic clash between two once-in-a-generation squads. My team, The Pack—uncreative for a group of all wolves and coyotes, I know—had dominated all season and posed the best challenge to their reign ever since they’d first claimed the title. And, as it turned out, it had been an historic match, although for an entirely different reason.

For the first time ever, someone had gotten killed.

I know what you’re thinking, but despite its trappings, the Hunt is actually one of the safer sports out there. A glorified game of tag at heart, two five-member teams, one composed of predator species and the other prey, are released into a large, forested arena and run around for one sixty-minute period. If the preds manage to snag the flag each of the preys are wearing somewhere on their person, they win.

Though preds aren’t outright banned from contacting preys, the rules surrounding which kinds of hits are legal are so strict that most teams focused on capturing flags without touching the opposing team at all. The vast majority of injuries, infrequent though they are, tend to be non-contact-related – sprained ankles and broken toes and the like.

It’s supposed to be merely an homage to the life-and-death chases our feral kin engage in daily. A defanged, declawed facsimile of the real thing, broadly popular not because it satisfies some biological drive to chase and be chased, but rather that it’s one of the few sports that allows such a diversity of mixed-species teams. Every one has its niche, a unique advantage to offer. And, after all, at no point in recorded history had sapients really hunted each other.

No, what happened yesterday was a much more mundane case of murder. A particularly stupid one at that, because it happened in front of tens of millions of spectators.

To what I’m sure was the relief of the higher-ups in the NHA, though, the live broadcast hadn’t actually caught my teammate, a timber wolf named Dawes, killing Mattison in all its gruesome detail. The arena might be well-covered by cameras both hidden and not, but they’re mostly good for viewing replays rather than showing the action in real time. Too many of them to keep track of simultaneously. Not to mention that blind spots in such a large wooded space were inevitable – and in this case, it hadn’t showed up in any of the footage either.

How was Dawes apprehended within minutes of the match’s unceremonious ending, then? Well, the easiest way to view the Hunt—and in fact what spectators primarily watch—is a map of the arena where each player is represented by a labeled dot. We all have these RFID bracelets with unique identifiers, you see. His blip had been right on top of Mattison’s before the squirrel’s had stopped moving for good.

Motive wasn’t hard to establish, either. Mattison had always been a real prick, never missing an opportunity to run his mouth off in public about how incompetent us preds were, and in private about his sexual exploits with our partners. Ego a mile freaking wide. And, Dawes was known to be a bit of a hothead, someone who’d regularly get into fights both on and off the field. Not the sort of guy you’d want to say the wrong thing to. The two of them had even been taking pot shots at each other in the press conferences leading up to the match.

So, there it was, a crime of passion. The squirrel’s taunts had finally caught up with him – getting his vocal cords ripped out had made sure of that, and fittingly too. An open and shut case.

Dawes denied it, obviously. Who wouldn’t? His lawyer was putting up a valiant effort, too, going on all the talk shows that’d book her to detail the most minor of inconsistencies, as if they mattered. The claw marks were too narrowly spaced to have been made by a wolf – the coroner had merely been equivocal on that point. There was no fur or skin under his nails – he could have washed his paws off in the stream not ten feet from the body. The squirrel had been the best Arborealist in the game – climbing trees wasn’t so hard with a little practice. Mattison’s flag had never been recovered – irrelevant, pure obfuscation.

At the end of the day, no matter how many times Dawes insisted that he was halfway across the arena at the time of the murder, it’s simply an incontrovertible fact that the person wearing his wristband wasn’t. No one could possibly be in two places at once.

Unless, of course, someone had tampered with the bracelets. They were all identical, down to the RFID chips themselves. You wouldn’t even have to touch them – if you could just get access to the computer that tracked which name went with which identifier, it’d take barely a minute to switch whose was whose, once before the match and once after.

You see, that piece of shit had mouthed off to the wrong guy. He had fucked the wrong guy’s woman. Marcy… Well, Marcy’s ‘indiscretion’ would be dealt with in due time. For now, I’m content knowing that Mattison’s flag, covered in dark brown stains that will never come out, is safely tucked away in my closet.