Chapter 112: Plan C in Motion

Uriel sank back into his seat and sat frozen. The announcer's last call still rang in his ears.

His thoughts tumbled in circles, desperately searching for the culprit who had registered his name. Seraphina had a sharp tongue, but she was disciplined enough not to play practical jokes with an official tournament. His mother asked about his socks every morning. She couldn't have kept his registration secret for three sentences. As for Kira, that deeply neurotic shut-in worshipped him so pathologically that she would agonize over ordering him a fruit juice without prior authorization.

None of this makes sense. The inability to pinpoint the architect behind this move made any sudden action exceedingly dangerous. Once he stepped onto the field, the array would measure his strength and summon a Heroic Spirit to match. If he fought with his true strength, his cover as an ordinary student would shatter instantly. If he held back and got ground into the sand by a phantom specter, his reputation would be permanently ruined in the Holy City.

Cold sweat trickled down the nape of his neck as nearby spectators began to whisper among themselves. Beside him, Tian tilted her head, her eyes carrying a mixture of innocent bewilderment and faint maternal worry.

The announcer's amplified voice crackled as he delivered the third and final call, his tone marked by obvious hesitation. After a brief pause, the voice echoed across the stadium, declaring contestant Uriel disqualified by forfeit.

Uriel released a long, shaky breath, letting his slumped shoulders ease. Then the broadcast chimed again.

"Next contestant—Tian!"

Uriel stiffened as if shocked, then slowly turned his head. Tian sat with her head cocked to one side, pointing a single index finger directly at the tip of her own nose. Her mouth formed a startled little circle as she blinked twice in mild surprise.

"Tian? Me?"

A thunderbolt could not have struck Uriel with greater force. Both names had been called in direct sequence. He had forfeited, and his disguised companion had been summoned immediately after.

This is no bureaucratic error. Someone has identified us, seen straight through our disguises, and is using the arena’s broadcast system to smoke us out before tens of thousands of witnesses.

Uriel lunged forward and seized Tian's wrist, his fingers clamping down until his knuckles turned white. Tian looked down at his grip, instantly reading the raw tension and vigilance radiating through his skin.

"It's a trap."

Before she could answer, the announcer repeated the call for contestant Tian. A ripple of restlessness spread through the stands, and several high-ranking nobles in the front-tier boxes leaned over their railings to peer toward the common seating. Everyone was beginning to wonder if a second contestant would forfeit as well.

Uriel felt a sharp throb building behind his temples. If Tian forfeits too, whoever arranged this will know something is wrong with us. If she takes the sand in her male student persona, even a glimpse of her real abilities in combat will blow our cover into orbit anyway.

She can't take the field. But staying seated is just as disastrous.

Only Plan C left. Before the third call could chime, Uriel leaned in close, whispering a barrage of instructions directly into Tian's ear at breakneck speed.

Tian listened with profound gravity, nodding slowly as if receiving a decisive imperial command. When the final syllable left his lips, he released his white-knuckled grip on her wrist. Her bewildered expression shifted in an instant, locking into an obedient, razor-sharp resolve.

"Little—I mean, understood. Leave it to me."

She stood up, darting down the aisle stairs before the murmuring crowd could register her movements, vanishing cleanly into the participant staging tunnel. Uriel melted back into his seat, his entire frame going limp like a deflated sack of flour.

It was an excessively crude gamble, but only an overwhelming spectacle could simultaneously erase their suspicious absence from everyone's minds. After all, what headline in this entire world could eclipse the sudden, unannounced arrival of the Holy Sword Witch?

A faint, crystalline snap echoed across the upper atmosphere, resembling a severed bowstring. A howl of wind followed, then a low roll of thunder. A few spectators glanced upward, and within seconds, thousands of faces turned toward the open sky.

The firmament directly above the arena tore wide open as a searing pillar of violet light cleaved through the clouds. From the heart of that celestial breach, a silhouette plummeted like a lightning bolt, crashing violently into the center of the sand.

Dust and shockwaves erupted outward in a thunderous gale, heralding the arrival of the Holy Sword Witch. She stood at the center of the field, pristine and untouched by the swirling dust. She lifted her slender right hand, and a decorative rapier whistled from its scabbard, tracing an elegant orbit through the howling wind before snapping securely into her palm.

Every trace of maternal warmth had vanished from her features, replaced by a visage carved from ancient, merciless glacial ice. She cast a chilling, dispassionate gaze across the grandstands, unrecognizable from the gentle student who had been munching skewers and handing out fruit juice five minutes earlier.

Shrill screams erupted across the stone tiers. Members of the Papal Guard surged forward along the base of the perimeter walls, while the announcer's voice shook violently over the magical speakers as he tried to report an unidentified combatant.

The Witch paid them no heed. As she slowly raised her rapier toward the sky, an unfathomable tempest of mana detonated from her frame, warping the surrounding air into shimmering, suffocating heat hazes. Her cold voice carried across the arena.

"Is there an opponent here worthy of facing my blade?"

The transparent protective wards maintained by master mages along the front-row barriers groaned under the sheer atmospheric pressure. Web-like fractures spread across the transparent ward, as though invisible glass had cracked.

Under normal tournament protocols, a display of this magnitude would activate the testing array and summon a translucent blue Heroic Spirit. Yet no spirit materialized.

Instead, a grotesque chain reaction rippled through the earth. The yellow sand across the arena floor turned a bruised, putrid violet, while hundreds of jagged, alien runes clawed their way out of the dirt, slithering outward like living parasites. Above their heads, the midday sky curdled, turning the suffocating color of clotted blood.

Uriel’s heart skipped a terrifying beat. This isn't in the script. The array is supposed to spit out an overpowered phantom or simply overload and explode from mana excess.

Pandemonium seized the stadium. Thousands of terrified spectators collided in stampedes toward the arched exits, trampling over discarded banners and overturned snack carts. A squad of Papal Guard knights charged the perimeter of the sands, only to hit an invisible kinetic barrier and bounce backward into the dirt. The air reeked of scorched metal and rotting spices.

Uriel rose to his feet, his mind reeling as he stared down at the pit. The Witch remained at the epicenter of the pulsing array, though her rapier had drooped toward the sand.

She was glancing nervously between the slithering purple glyphs on the ground and the blood-red sky above, fidgeting in a manner completely unbecoming of an enigmatic conqueror. Her lips twitched faintly, and Uriel easily caught the silent, familiar shape of her habitual oh dear me. She cast a guilty, sideways peek toward his section of the stands, her eyes wide with remorse, terrified that she had broken something expensive and ruined her little Uri's plans.

Uriel drew breath to scream for her to run, but a low, vibrating drone drowned out his voice. The sound pierced every ear in the colosseum, cutting through the panicking crowd like a physical blade.

Blinding white radiance surged from the center of the corrupted array, rushing outward in an absolute tidal wave that swallowed the arena whole. The bleachers, the stone arches, the sky, and the ground before his eyes dissolved into the tide of searing light.

Uriel felt his consciousness get snatched by the collar, yanked ruthlessly into the blinding void. The white brilliance faded, leaving behind an impenetrable, pitch-black silence.

Uriel had the vague sensation of lying flat on his back, though he couldn't be sure. He remained conscious, fully aware of who he was and what had just occurred at the arena, yet his physical body refused to respond.

It felt precisely like sleep paralysis. He fought to twitch a finger, but could not awaken a single muscle fiber, nor force a whisper past his locked teeth.

Moments later, or perhaps hours later, the ground vanished, sending him into a violent free-fall through the darkness. During the descent, fragmented reflections of himself flickered past his vision.

In one, he stood clad in polished mithril plate atop the carcass of an ancient dragon, fresh blood dripping from his blade. In another, he turned his back on a roaring, burning metropolis, cradling the severed skull of a Demon Lord in his hands. A third showed him kneeling outside an orphanage in a patched apron, patiently peeling an apple for a smiling little girl. In yet another, he sat behind an ornate desk buried in paperwork, an unfamiliar crest pinned to his chest, signing documents with a look of bone-deep exhaustion.

He could not tell if these were dying hallucinations or echoes of alternate lives. The endless fall terminated with a dull, concussive impact as the back of his skull struck solid ground.

Real, sharp pain shot through his neck. He had landed.

Uriel opened his eyes, blinking repeatedly until the blur resolved into a canopy of vivid, surreal blue dotted with lazy white clouds. He lay amidst an endless sea of knee-high grass, shifting in lush green waves beneath a gentle breeze, bordered by the hazy silhouettes of distant mountains. His limbs felt heavy and alien, buzzing with a dull ache, as if his mind had been stuffed into borrowed skin.

Pushing himself upright with a groan, he looked down at his own torso. He was dressed in bottom-tier novice adventurer attire—scuffed gray leather, frayed straps, and rusted iron buckles. Beside him lay a deflated waterskin and a brick of black bread hard enough to serve as a bludgeoning weapon.

Uriel raised his hands, inspecting the palms and flexing his fingers one by one. The hands belonged to him, but the clothes certainly did not.

Suspecting he was trapped in a lingering nightmare, he drew back his right palm and cracked himself firmly across the cheek. The stinging heat was immediate and entirely real.

A fresh gust swept across the open plains, carrying the sweet scent of wildflowers and warm sunlight. Uriel looked left and right across the empty landscape, completely bewildered.

"What the hell is this place? And what's with the clothes?"