Chapter 333: Shadow Trials[16]

The glass doors shattered violently inward as Cassius Wulfric burst through the entry.

The sound was like a small charge detonating—a jagged, explosive crack that instantly filled the quiet air of the lower arcade with millions of crystalline shards.

The flying glass caught the artificial luminescence of the sector, sparkling briefly in mid-air before raining down over the polished mosaic flooring.

Cassius impacted it like a falling meteor, his body swollen with raw physical power, his A-2 Biological Talent turning his skin into a dense, bronze-like hide that ignored the freezing blizzard effortlessly.

?"ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POINTS IS MINE!"

Cassius roared, his voice vibrating off the high glass ceiling. He launched his massive frame thirty feet through the air, his heavy fist cocked back with enough force to shatter a reinforced bank vault.

?Edmund’s eyes widened.

?The reality of his situation closed in around him like an inescapable vise.

He was trapped in a narrow glass corridor, his escape routes cut off by rising drifts of razor-sharp frost, surrounded by three separate contestants who viewed him merely as a walking scoreboard.

And now, the single most physically destructive combatant in the entire trial was diving directly onto his head—all because his ancestral bloodline made him the ultimate walking objective.

?"This trial..." Edmund bit out through chattering teeth, swirling his arms to collapse his Glacial Palisade into a defensive dome, "...is an absolute farce!"

?A hundred yards away, on the roof of a adjacent commercial building overlooking the library arcade, three figures stood watching the chaos unfold through the glass ceiling.

?Xander sat casually on the crumbling concrete ledge, swinging his legs back and forth over the vertical drop.

He popped another synthetic roasted nut into his mouth, chewing slowly as he observed the violence below.

?"Well," Xander said, pointing a nut at the shattering glass and swirling snowstorm inside the arcade.

"There goes Edmund’s calm, aristocratic demeanor. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him yell like that."

?Samantha stood beside him, her dark spear resting against her shoulder. Her eyes followed the swirling vortex of frost and kinetic shockwaves tearing through the library interior.

The bitter chill radiating from the from below brushed against the hem of her jacket, but she remained entirely still.

?"He genuinely didn’t know," Samantha said softly, her voice carrying a trace of quiet irony. "The system manipulated his own intellectual arrogance. It knew he would construct a logical defense that exempted himself from being the objective."

?Lucian stood a few paces back from the edge, his analytical lenses held lightly between his fingers.

He wasn’t watching the brute-force contest between Edmund, Kaelen, and Cassius.

His dark eyes were fixed on the perimeter access roads on the far side of the sector, where several other high-ranked contestants were rapidly closing in on the library’s coordinates.

?"The third clue made it too obvious," Lucian observed cleanly. "Within three minutes, every contestant in Sector Seven will be inside that arcade. It’s turning into a chaotic battle of attrition."

?"So," Xander grinned, looking up at Lucian. "What’s the play, first place? Do we dive into the pile and try to claim the hundred and fifty points ourselves? Or do we let Cassius and Kaelen beat each other to death while Edmund freezes them into popsicles?"

?Lucian slid his analytical lenses back into his pocket. His face remained completely impassive, his dark eyes cold and calculated.

?"Neither," Lucian said.

?Samantha glanced at him. "Explain."

?"Look at the wording of the system rules again," Lucian pointed out, his voice sharp and precise.

?[VALUE: 150 POINTS (UPON CORRECT IDENTIFICATION AND SECURE)]

?"It says secure," Lucian continued. "It does not say eliminate. It does not say defeat. To secure a designated contestant objective in a Shadow Trial, you don’t need to knock them out. You need to apply a lockdown or hold them within a containment perimeter for ten seconds."

?Xander stopped swinging his legs. His eyes narrowed slightly as he processed Lucian’s words.

"Wait... you mean..."

?"Edmund is currently using maximum Talent output to defend himself," Lucian explained, his gaze dropping back down through the glass ceiling. "His physical stamina will hit a critical trough very shortly due to the severe thermal strain of maintaining a large-scale frost domain against Cassius’s brutal, repeated impacts."

?Lucian stepped toward the edge of the roof, looking down through the cracked glass roof at Edmund, who was currently barely holding off a combined assault from Cassius’s crushing fists and Kaelen’s wind blades.

?"We don’t need to fight Edmund," Lucian said cleanly.

"We just need to extract him from the mob, isolate him while he’s too exhausted to resist."

?Samantha looked at Lucian, a tiny, almost imperceptible trace of respect appearing in her quiet gaze.

"You’re using the mob as his stamina drain."

?"The mob is doing the heavy lifting for us," Lucian replied. "We simply harvest the objective when the fruit is ripe."

?Xander let out a quiet, delighted laugh, sliding his stylus back into his pocket and standing up on the ledge.

"God, Lucian, you are a cold, calculating monster. I love it. Count me in."

?Down inside the library arcade, a massive explosion of blue ice and shattered glass erupted into the sky as Cassius’s fist finally smashed through Edmund’s ice dome.

?Edmund stumbled backward onto the frosted floor, his breathing ragged, white frost clinging to his fingers, his chest heaving as he stared up at the closing ring of hungry contestants.

?His terminal vibrated in his hand.

?He looked down at the screen through blurring vision.

?A single system prompt had finally appeared on his interface, glowing with harsh, unfeeling red light:

?[PHANTOM TARGET STATUS: ENGAGED]

[CURRENT CONTAINMENT TIME: 00:00 / 00:10]

[ALERT: YOU ARE THE OBJECTIVE. SURVIVE.]

?Edmund let out a bitter, freezing breath.

?"Now..." he whispered, his jaw setting like iron as he raised his trembling hands once more.

"...now you give me the notification."

?High above on the rooftop, Lucian drew a single dagger from his belt, his shadow stretching long and dark across the concrete under the artificial sector lights.

?"Position yourselves," Lucian ordered quietly.

"The harvest begins in thirty seconds."

******

The glowing holographic projection hovering above the central console in the commentators’ box in the VIP section cast a cool, sapphire wash across the observation deck.

Below them, Sector Seven of the artificial trial district looked like a miniature model of a modern city caught in the teeth of an earthquake.

Through the multi-layered visual feeds, Jax watched the shattered glass of the library arcade spray outward as Cassius Wulfric’s bronze fist smashed through Edmund Brewer’s Glacial Palisade.

?"Well, now," Jax drawled, a dry, amused lilt in his voice as he pointed toward the flickering red warning banner flashing across the library’s perimeter feed.

"If you’re going to announce to twenty-four competitive assassins and Talented that one of them is worth a hundred and fifty points, I suppose the polite thing to do is shatter every window in a three-block radius first. Truly, Cassius understands how to make an entrance!"

"Cassius isn’t making an entrance. He’s operating on pure, unadulterated adrenaline," Nadia replied, her tone pragmatic and entirely devoid of amusement.

"He spent the first twenty minutes of this trial blowing up phone booths and picking fights with decoys. He’s behind on the board, his point deficit is bleeding him dry, and now someone has handed him a target he can punch. Of course he’s swinging like a sledgehammer."

"Oh, come on, Nadia. Give the boy some credit," Jax grinned, leaning closer to the console as the secondary camera feed zoomed in on Edmund’s pale, frost-covered face down in the arcade.

"Look at that irony! The entire district spent the last twenty minutes staring daggers at Samantha’s spooky dark spear because the first clue said ’ancient legacy untouched by modern forges.’ "

"Everyone thought: Aha! An ancient relic! Meanwhile, the actual relic was standing right there in Sector 7-C."

"The trial system weaponized the contestants’ assumptions. Samantha’s spear was the perfect decoy because it looked impossible to ignore. It drew every pair of eyes away from the obvious structural reality,"Nadia said, her silver-grey eyes narrowing as she tracked the dwindling energy signatures radiating from Edmund’s defensive posture.

"And poor Edmund took it right on the chin," Jax chuckled softly.

"He spent half his morning lecturing Sorel on logical fallacies, entirely convinced that Samantha was the target and that he was the cleverest boy in the class for figuring it out. Then the third clue drops—passed through Talented blood—and bam. Instant regret."

He made a tactical error common to intellectuals under pressure," Nadia noted, her gaze shifting to a different screen displaying Lucian Ash’s quiet, methodical movement through the upper arcade catwalks.

"He treated the clue as an external puzzle to be solved instead of considering whether he might be the variable the puzzle was describing. In high-stakes operations, that kind of intellectual detachment gets you cornered."

?Down in the arcade, the situation was rapidly deteriorating for the Brewer heir.