Chapter 136: Tournament [4]

Alden had two options. He looked at the second one.

’A weapon forged from a Soul and Concepts.’

He started selecting.

Dragon’s soul as the base. Breath from Dragon in Concept. Electricity from the Thunder Ape. Strength from the concept he had just equipped. He had no precise prediction of what those three fused would produce, but that uncertainty was exactly why he wanted to find out.

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◆ SOUL EVOLUTION ◆

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[Selected Soul: Dragon]

[Selected Concepts]

◆ Breath

◆ Electricity

◆ Strength

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[What form would you like the weapon to take?]

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’Maybe a blade?’

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Weapon Type: Blade

Required Materials:

Dragon Soul Fragment ×10

Thunder Ape Soul Fragment ×10

The available Soul Fragments will be consumed.

Do you wish to proceed?

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Alden stared at the cost.

’Ten Dragon fragments...’ He had been hunting those for months. ’And ten Thunder Ape?’

His eye twitched.

’Fine! Take it.’

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[Confirmation Received.]

[Beginning Soul Evolution...]

[Combining Soul and Concepts.]

[Reshaping Soul Structure...]

[Forging Weapon...]

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A concentrated pool of white light gathered in his right palm. Faint at first, just a glow, and then it expanded rapidly into something blinding. A spectral silhouette formed around his hand, twisting in place as energy strands wrapped around each other. Crimson. Void-black. Ocean-blue. Crackling yellow.

The light condensed.

First a hilt, then a guard and finally a blade.

The glow cut out.

Alden was holding something.

The silence in the arena had gone to a different place entirely.

The blade was a dark crimson so deep it was almost black, with red light pulsing from somewhere inside the metal itself. Thin tendrils of black smoke curled around the steel like the sword was breathing. The length of the blade was covered in eyes. Dozens of them. Small and crimson, embedded in the dark metal, moving independently of each other. Some looking sideways, some blinking slowly, some fixed on specific points in the spectator stands.

Looking back at the people watching.

The pulse came up through the hilt into Alden’s palm.

’It has a heartbeat?’

Cecilia leaned forward from the spectator section with her face pale. "Is a sword supposed to look like that?"

Nobody answered her.

Even the Primordials on the upper balcony were quiet.

Alden raised the blade.

CRACK.

The marble floor beneath his boots fractured outward in thin lines from the pressure of the weapon in the air. He felt the density of it immediately, far beyond what the physical weight suggested. The Dragon’s Soul, Breath, Electricity, and Strength had merged into something that was expressing all four of them simultaneously and was not calm about it.

’This is insane.’

He brought the sword back, and then his Rai moved.

The Rai-Kin coating formed over the blade. Orange-red energy wrapped around the living dark steel in layers, settling over the surface. Thicker and more refined than anything he had produced in training sessions. The blade’s eyes tracked the energy as it covered them.

From the terrace above, Alarion’s eyes narrowed. ’Advanced Rai. Already.’

Ulvakor’s chest had expanded approximately two inches from pride. "Not bad? That’s my student."

Alarion didn’t respond to this.

In the arena, Adrian had stopped moving. The sword was lowered slightly, his breathing audible. The pressure coming off the Rai-coated living blade had changed the air around them.

"I’d recommend dodging this one," Alden said.

Adrian looked at him. Then at the sword. Then back. "What?"

Alden dropped into his stance. Black smoke was already beginning to seep from the edges of the Rai-Kin coating. He shifted his weight to swing with everything available to him.

Then his swing stopped.

Something wrong had entered the room.

Every hair on his body responded to it before his eyes found the source. He looked up.

Aurora.

The Celestial Supreme Lord was seated in her throne exactly as she had been for the entire tournament. Her three orbiting spheres moved in their usual patterns around her. Her expression was composed.

But her eyes were somewhere else entirely.

She was looking at Alden with killing intent so absolute and so directionless that it felt like weather rather than intention. The way a storm doesn’t select targets.

"What is she—?

One of the three spheres stopped its orbit.

Just stopped, mid-arc, suspended.

BOOM.

It came straight down.

Alden abandoned the swing at Adrian and brought the living sword up in the opposite direction.

BOOOOOOM.

The collision hit the marble with the sound of something geological. The force drove Alden’s boots into the floor, scraping backward, two steps and three and five, his heels carving trenches into the polished stone as the kinetic weight pressed down through the blade into his arms. The Rai-Kin on the sword trembled under it. His muscles went to their absolute limit and then past that.

’This is...’ His mind realized the terrifying truth. Stage VIII Arcanaeum. The absolute pinnacle of power. Aurora’s strength operated on a dimension far beyond anything he had ever comprehended.

Panic broke through the spectator section.

"What?!"

Ulvakor leaped to his feet. "Lady Aurora?!"

Alarion’s face had closed into something without any ambient expression at all, which was somehow more alarming than if he had reacted dramatically. "What are you doing, Lady Aurora?"

Aurora remained seated. Her face was blank in the specific way of someone whose mind is somewhere the body isn’t.

Alden’s arms were shaking. Not from the weight alone. From the weight and the Rai and the physical limitation of a body that had improved dramatically in one week but was still measured in human terms against something measured in something else entirely.

’I’m getting crushed.’

Then it started.

The familiar black smoke appeared from his skin. Thin strands at first, from his forearms and his shoulders, and then spreading, crossing his chest, curling up around his neck. The sword’s crimson eyes all turned to look at it simultaneously.

His body felt different.

Heavier in the bones, but that heaviness was energy rather than weight. Dense, raw, something that was not Rai and was not mana and did not have a name he could reach for.

The black smoke concentrated in his sword arm.

He swung upward.

"GET OUT OF MY WAY."

BOOOOOOM.

The living blade connected with the orb at an angle that was not meant to stop it but to redirect it. The Rai-Kin on the blade screamed with the force. Alden’s heels left the floor for one second.

The orb deflected.

It went up.

Straight up, through the air, faster than it had come down, and hit the ceiling of the arena.

CRAAACK.

The marble ceiling exploded outward in fragments and dust while the orb continued through the hole and kept going, rising into the open sky above the Windsky Skyland until the light from it was just a point and then nothing.

Dust rained down through the massive gap.

Alden stood beneath it with his chest heaving.

The living sword was still in his hand. The black smoke was still moving across his body. The eyes on the blade were all looking upward through the hole in the ceiling.

The hall was completely silent.

Roselle’s eyes moved from the ceiling to Alden’s back. "Isn’t that—" Her voice came out quiet. "Isn’t that the same form he had when he fought Augustus?"

Leon stared.

Nicholas had his eyes on Alden with an expression that was past surprise and into something more serious.

Seris had not moved from her seat. Her eyes were on him. Her expression was composed in the way it was composed when she was making a deliberate decision to keep it that way. Underneath the composure, deep in the crimson of her eyes, was something that looked like concern that had not quite decided what to do with itself yet.

Alden stood in the arena beneath the open sky and looked down at his own hands.

’This again?’

The black smoke was still curling across his skin.