Chapter 137: Tournament [5]

The ceiling was gone.

In its place, a massive open gap let sunlight pour straight down through the tournament hall onto the marble floor below, and the scattered debris that had been the ceiling lay across the arena in chunks.

Nobody spoke for several long seconds.

Aetherion turned his head toward Aurora. His voice was deep and measured but it carried clearly through the quiet hall. "What was that for, Aurora?"

Aurora hadn’t moved from her throne. Her expression was the same distant blankness it had carried when the orb launched, as though she had been watching something nobody else could see and had only just now found her way back to the room.

Then Aetherion’s voice reached her.

She blinked.

Her eyes dropped to the battlefield below. To the dust, to the fragments of the ceiling scattered across the floor, to Alden standing in the middle of it with black smoke still curling off his skin.

She cleared her throat quietly and composed herself. "Pardon me." Her voice had returned to its usual cool elegance. Her eyes found Alden directly. "I lost my composure for a moment. I hope I did not hurt you too much, Cadet Alden."

Before Alden could say anything, the orb came back.

It dropped through the hole in the ceiling at the same speed it had launched and settled back into its original orbit around Aurora alongside the other two, spinning again as though the last thirty seconds hadn’t happened. Not a scratch on its surface. Not a crack. Nothing.

[Concept: Dragon’s Blood Activated!]

Meanwhile, Alden looked somewhere else. He watched it resume its path, his brow furrowing.

’It hit the ceiling with enough force to blow through reinforced divine marble. And it has no damage.’

He filed that away somewhere cold.

On the high terrace, Leonidas had not said a word through any of it. His golden-fissured arms remained at his sides, his eyes moving from Aurora to the open ceiling in a quiet, calculating sweep that landed on no particular thing.

Then Constantine raised one finger.

"Rai-Kin." A pause. "Twenty-Eight."

The words were quiet enough that they should not have carried through the large hall. They carried anyway.

And then the world moved backward.

The marble chunks scattered across the arena floor lifted. The dust rose. The cracks in the surrounding walls sealed themselves and vanished. The shattered pieces of the ceiling rose through the gap and reconnected, stone finding stone, fracture lines closed, the entire structure reassembling itself as if time moved backward.

In approximately ten seconds, the tournament hall was completely restored.

Every crack was gone. Every fragment was back. The ceiling sat overhead as though it had never been touched.

Alden looked up at it. Then at his own hands, where the black smoke was still retreating into his skin in slow wisps.

’Twenty-Eight?’ He turned the number over. ’Does that mean Rai-Kin has numbered forms? Grades? Specific numbered applications?’

He watched the last of the smoke disappear beneath his knuckles and clenched his fist.

’And what’s with this black thing? It came again just like before when I was in battle with Augustus.’

He had no answers to either question. He added them to the growing pile of things in this world he was supposed to find out later.

Up on the thrones, the four Supreme Lords had gone quiet in a specific way. None of them looked at each other directly. But something was happening between them, the kind of communication that doesn’t require mouths.

Aetherion glanced at Aurora. She met his look with a blank, composed expression. Leonidas observed. Constantine simply watched.

After a few moments, all four of them gave slow, slight nods, and the exchange was over.

Alden had been watching the whole thing.

’Telepathy? They’re deciding on something.’

His eyes moved to Aurora and stayed there.

She had fired a lethal strike at him. Not a test, not an accidental pressure leak like Alarion in the hallway. Her killing intent had been real, full, and pointed directly at him. The look in her eyes before the orb launched had been completely wrong, like a person looking at something that had personally wronged them.

’Why?’

He didn’t know her. He had created her name in a document and given her three orbiting spheres and called her the leader of the Celestial Assembly. He had never actually given her a reason to hate him, at least not in this life.

His eyes moved to Constantine. Then Aetherion. Then Leonidas.

’They all knew my name before I introduced myself. They’ve been deciding what I’m allowed to know and when. One of them just tried to kill me. And none of them have offered a single explanation, just delaying it by saying—’

His jaw tightened.

’"Not yet." "When the time comes." "You don’t need to know." All that shit.’

The irony sat in his chest like something acidic. He used to write these exact scenes himself to his readers. He would create mysterious mentors who kept secrets just to make the story dramatic, leaving the main character completely in the dark. It had been easy to write those moments from behind a safe keyboard.

’Being on the receiving end is significantly less enjoyable...’

Alarion floated down to the center of the arena, his robes settling as he landed. The hall responded immediately, all other conversations and reactions quieting as he took position in the open space.

He looked across the assembled cadets.

"The match between Alden and Adrian ends here, based on their performance and who held the upper hand." His voice filled the hall cleanly. "The results have been calculated. After reviewing the performance of every cadet throughout the week of training and the tournament itself, the Supreme Lords have reached their decision regarding the position of Spire."

Quiet through the hall. Even the spectators who had been reacting to the destruction of the ceiling had gone still.

Alarion looked toward a cadet in the arena. He smiled, and it was genuinely warm.

"The cadet who demonstrated the greatest overall improvement throughout this week, and the strongest combined performance, is Alden."