Chapter 158: Warm up [3]

Isabella’s expression changed.

The composed untouchable face the academy’s top Spire wore everywhere she went simply dropped away and what replaced it was something hungry and genuinely interested. She hadn’t looked like that at any point during the vine demonstration.

Alden looked up.

Thousands of wooden spears were forming in the air above the arena. They weren’t just hovering. They were positioning. Rotating slowly to point downward from every angle like the ceiling of the arena had become a floor covered in spikes and was about to fall.

Plant wasn’t flowers and leaves. Plant at Isabella’s level was nature in its most violent form. Wood harder than tempered steel, mass, and density. And right now thousands of individual killing points all aimed at one person.

’She’s done warming up,’ Alden thought.

He lifted The Living Gazer horizontally before his eyes. The dark metal pulsed like something with a heartbeat. Every eye embedded in the blade had snapped open and was rotating independently tracking the formation above. The weapon vibrated in his grip with a specific hunger.

"Bring it on Lady Isabella."

Her smile was dangerous and beautiful. "Gladly."

The air caved in.

THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP-THWIP!

The spears accelerated. Tearing down from every vector simultaneously with screeching speed and they weren’t coming straight. They curved, crisscrossed from his flanks and came up from his blind spots at angles that covered every gap a human body could move into.

Alden sank lower. Lead foot pivoting onto the ball of his heel. His mind already running the calculations.

[Concept: Breath Active]

[Concept: Electricity Active]

The purple lightning crawled out of his core and raced down both arms and wrapped the smoky black steel of the Living Gazer in crackling violent current. Every eye on the blade went wide simultaneously and the violet aura they threw out lit the arena like a second sun.

"Purple Eclipse."

BOOOOOOM.

A two hundred degree arc of hyper-pressurized purple lightning erupted from the blade in one massive sweeping crescent. The entire front wave of spears hit it and turned to sawdust. The shockwave from the swing alone cracked the marble floor beneath his feet outward in three directions.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.

But Isabella’s spell was continuous. Hundreds more spears that had been hanging wide immediately curved inward around the blast wave and converged from multiple angles at once. Too spread out to hit with another wide swing. Too fast to track individually.

[Concept: Fade Activated (Can be used multiple times)]

SHING.

His form dissolved into shadow half a second before fifty spears impaled the stone where he had been standing. He came back six meters left with his momentum already flowing into a tight spin and the blade slashing through a cluster of twenty in a clean horizontal line.

Before the severed wood could hit the floor he was gone again.

WHOOSH.

He materialized eight meters forward and thrust upward into a descending volley and the lightning on the blade detonated the cluster into a cloud of splinters.

WHOOSH. SHING. WHOOSH. SHING.

To anyone watching from the stands Alden had become something between a ghost and a lightning strike. He flickered across the arena floor in a jagged zigzag that never repeated the same angle twice. Every time he appeared his body was already moving. Pivoting his heels. Deflecting a spike off the crossguard and riding the momentum into a spin and slashing a wide arc and vanishing the exact moment counter-spears closed in from the opposite side.

BOOM.

He hit ten spears in an inverted upward arc and the purple discharge from the impact cracked the stone beneath him.

WHOOSH.

Gone again.

CRACK.

He came back mid-air twenty meters up and brought the blade down in a massive chopping strike that sent a wave of concentrated lightning ripping into the floor below and blowing a three-meter crater.

The marble of the arena was not doing well.

Spiderweb fissures spread from every impact point. Stone pulverized wherever the lightning discharge met the ground. What had been a clean combat floor was becoming a ruin of cracked rock and burnt splinters and the scattered ash of two thousand wooden spears.

Alden landed lightly and swept Living Gazer behind him in one fluid motion.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

The remaining pieces of Isabella’s spell came down as harmless burnt fragments around his feet.

The arena went quiet.

The purple electricity on the blade faded slowly. The dark smoke from the crimson steel curled upward into the still air.

A hundred thousand people and not one sound for a few seconds.

Then the whispers started moving through the stands from the lower seats upward.

"He destroyed her entire domain."

"He read every single trajectory of Lady Isabella’s magic while it was still moving."

A third-year student near the railing had his knuckles white on the stone. The cadet beside him was staring with his mouth slightly open.

It wasn’t just the display that was hitting them. It was the context that had been building underneath it for months.

They saw him break academy records in the finals and called it luck. They saw him stand as a solid shield against Prince Augustus when panic filled the academy. Alden fought and bled while the other students panicked. Because of him, not a single student died or got hurt that day.

Then he went to the Upper Academy and earned the right to become a Spire. He turned the title down simply because he did not care about it.

And now he was standing on the arena floor having just carved through a top Spire’s domain in a casual training demonstration on his way to commanding the Western Front of an actual war.

A girl near the third-year student pressed her hands together. "He really is incredible." Her voice was quiet. "I’m going to talk to him and make friends with him."

The boy beside her made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. "Forget it."

She looked at him. "Why?" She frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"Think about what we did," he said. He wasn’t angry, but spitting facts. "We called him a scumbag for the rumors about him. We treated him like he was some kind of monster. We barely even gave him a chance to speak for himself." He looked down at the arena. "And now you think he’ll just smile and become friends with us because we’ve suddenly realized he’s strong?"

The girl’s expression slowly changed.

"Even if he forgives us," the boy said, "that doesn’t mean he’ll forget."

A few students nearby had gone quiet too. One of them lowered his head.

The boy exhaled. "So don’t go bothering him. The least we can do is watch him. And cheer for him in this war."

The girl looked at her hands. Then she turned back toward the arena.

Down on the field Alden was already reading the next pattern.

’She’s still holding back,’ he thought watching Isabella through the drifting smoke. ’She hasn’t used Rai-Kin once.’

He felt the grin coming again.

’Good. This is the best reflex sharpening available.’

SHING.

He tilted his head and let a rogue spear scrape past his cheek and severed it at the base with a lazy one-handed wrist flick.

[Concept: Fade Activated]