Chapter 159: Warm up [4]

Alden vanished and reappeared eight meters right and shattered three incoming spikes before they could group into a volley.

But as he landed his eyes moved across the arena floor out of habit.

And he stopped.

Leon was standing frozen twenty meters away. And standing directly in front of Leon wearing that warm unbothered smile was Arvendis.

The playful energy on Alden’s face went out like someone had cut the power to it.

Arvendis was leaning slightly closer. "How about it Leon." His voice carried that gentle patronizing warmth that sounded like kindness and wasn’t. "Just a friendly spar between Spires."

Leon wasn’t answering. His hands were at his sides.

"We haven’t properly exchanged blows in such a long time." The golden mana around Arvendis was already condensing. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful to show the kingdom how much we’ve both grown?"

ROOOOOAAAR.

A Dragon Spirit materialized behind Arvendis. Colossal and translucent and golden with a presence that hit the arena floor like a wave of compressed lead. The massive ancient head towered above the battlefield and the mana pressure from it alone was enough to crack the stone nearby.

Leon looked up at it.

His pupils went small.

"The winner is Arvendis."

Leon’s teeth found his bottom lip and pressed until blood came.

’Stop... I buried this. I moved past this... Stop dragging it back.’

His legs weren’t listening to him. His mana wasn’t flowing. His body had gone somewhere his mind couldn’t reach.

Arvendis raised one gloved hand. "Let’s begin—"

SHING.

The sound was clean and impossibly fast and it came from across the entire arena.

A dark-red line cut through the center of the Dragon Spirit so quickly the eye couldn’t follow the source.

BOOOOOOM.

The golden dragon exploded. The entire construct blew apart into a shower of harmless mana particles before it could react and the debris scattered across the arena floor like gold dust.

Arvendis’s smile stopped moving.

THUD.

Alden landed between them. His boots carved two short grooves into the cracked marble from the impact. He straightened slowly and rested the flat of The Living Gazer against his shoulder. The blood-red eyes across the blade were all pointing at Arvendis now.

"My apologies Spire Arvendis," Alden said. His voice was flat and cold and there was nothing polite happening underneath it. His eyes were locked onto Arvendis’s face the way you look at something you’re absolutely pissed. "I suddenly felt like fighting you first."

He raised the blade and pointed the dark tip at Arvendis’s throat. Every eye on the Living Gazer sharpened its focus at the same moment. Dozens of blood-red irises all staring at the golden Spire from three meters away.

"Right here. Right now."

Behind him Leon snapped back into the arena and stared at Alden’s back. "...Alden?"

Arvendis stood still.

The warmth drained off his face one layer at a time. What was left underneath wasn’t anger exactly. It was quieter than anger and considerably more dangerous. His jaw was tight and his eyes had gone to the specific cold shade of something that had been insulted in a way it intended to do something about.

’This persistent little...’ he thought. ’Every time I try to get to that trash, he’s always standing right in my way.’

Slowly the smile came back. But it was a different smile now. Thinner and sharper and nothing behind it at all. "Fine."

He stepped forward. "Then let us warm up properly."

The temperature in the colosseum dropped.

The golden mana around Arvendis simply disappeared. And what replaced it was some familiar energy. A dense suffocating pressure arrived and it sat on everything in the immediate area like a physical weight. Not mana in the normal sense but something denser than that. More fundamental than that.

At the same moment the energy inside Alden’s core answered it. The Rai he had spent a week grinding into his body surged through his blood vessels and flooded into the Living Gazer all at once. The blade trembled in his grip. Every eye on the steel opened to maximum and the glow from them went from red to something closer to violet.

BOOM.

An invisible shockwave detonated between them before either of them had moved. The pure collision of their energy fields expanding at the same time hit the arena like an artillery round.

In the stands the reaction was immediate and bad.

Students grabbed the railings. First-years dropped to their knees. Citizens who had never trained a day in their lives found themselves unable to draw a full breath and didn’t understand why. Several people in the lower seats simply sat down because their legs had made that choice for them.

"I can’t breathe—"

"What is this? I’m unable to stand"

"Someone stop them! People are going to get hurt just from the pressure!"

Up in the VIP box Darius had gone very still. His grip on the stone balustrade tightened until the stone crumbled out from between his fingers.

’Those absolute idiots,’ he thought through gritted teeth. ’Half this audience is ordinary citizens. Low-tier cadets. People who have never been conditioned for raw Rai-Kin discharge in an enclosed space. If these two go full domain in here they won’t need to fight each other. The crowd will already be casualties.’

The vein on his forehead was doing something alarming.

On the arena floor neither of them looked at the stands. Neither of them looked at the crowd or the crumbling stone or the people struggling to stay upright in the galleries above.

Alden had the blade raised. His body coiled. Everything he had learned in the Windsky Skyland flowing into his limbs and the steel in his hand.

Arvendis had his pristine Dragon’s spirit drawn. The dense suffocating energy concentrated down the edge of the blade into something sharp and quiet and final-feeling.

Their eyes were locked and the rest of the world wasn’t part of this.

Both their lips moved at exactly the same moment.

"Rai-Kin."