The signal fell, and Tra's champion wasted no time.
He crossed the sand circle with the quiet confidence of a man who had survived more fights than anyone in that arena could count, his two short axes tracing crossed arcs that would have left a less experienced opponent no chance at all. Hercles dodged the first, let the second cut into his shoulder, a red line opening without him seeming to care in the slightest.
"Not bad. But not enough," he said, a smile already spreading across his lips.
The champion didn't answer. He pressed on, trying to capitalize on the opening he thought he'd created, a low double strike followed by a backhand that should have caught Hercles across the throat. Every blow carried the mark of years spent perfecting one single style, economical, brutal, without the slightest wasted flourish. This was the fighting of a man who'd never needed to impress anyone, only to survive, over and over, until survival itself became a kind of art.
For a while, it almost looked like an even fight.
The champion kept multiplying angles, forcing Hercles to retreat, to dodge, to block with his forearms rather than the calm will he usually displayed. An axe caught his thigh. Another barely missed his eye, finding only air where his head had been a fraction of a second before. The crowd, which had started the fight almost subdued, still shaken by what they'd seen the day before, found itself rediscovering some of its usual fervor, chanting the champion's name every time a blow seemed to land.
Hercles ended up smiling even wider, a smile that turned almost inhuman, as if shedding every last superficial constraint, as if the resistance itself delighted him.
"Having fun yet?" he said, wiping away a thread of blood running down his jaw. "Really. Most people, in your position, would have already given up trying to touch me."
"I never give up," the champion answered, his voice rough, carrying a pride decades in the arena had never managed to wear down.
"Good," Hercles said. "Then let's see what that's actually worth."
It was at that moment that something changed in the air itself.
A golden hue, almost regal, began running under his skin, climbing up his forearms with every breath, as if gold now flowed through his veins in place of blood. It wasn't light, not exactly. It was closer to weight, a pressure spreading out from him across the whole sand circle, thickening the air itself until every spectator, down to the very last rows, felt their own breath grow shorter without understanding why.
Tra's champion felt it first, of course. His next strike, which should have landed with the same force as the ones before it, slowed by the barest fraction of a second, as if his own arm had suddenly forgotten how strong it was.
Hercles dodged it without any visible effort.
"Can you feel that?" he asked, his voice taking on that same low register Atlas knew well by now, that slide toward someone vaster than the man he ran into every day in their cell. "That's your own will starting to doubt itself. It's nothing I'm doing to you. It's just what happens, in a room, when someone decides there's no space left for any will but one. You can feel the fear rising."
"Tch. Bullshit."
The champion clenched his jaw and charged, refusing to yield to something he couldn't name. His axes struck again, and again, but each blow seemed to carry a little less than the one before, each step a little less certain, as if the very confidence that had made him a champion were eroding, second by second, under that growing golden weight.
The crowd, this time, wasn't roaring.
Unlike the chaotic, hysterical silence that had accompanied Atlas's fight, this one settled in gradually, almost reverent, thousands of people holding their breath without any coordination, as if something in the scene itself commanded their silence. Even the children in the stands had stopped fidgeting.
The champion dropped to his knees before Hercles had even landed a decisive blow.
He stayed like that a moment, both axes still in hand, his whole body trembling with the effort of simply staying conscious under whatever was crushing him. He looked up at Hercles, and there was nothing of a fighter left in his eyes. It was the same expression Atlas had seen on the crowd's faces during Renn's forced ovation, that same silent obligation that left no room for choice.
"Get up," Hercles said.
The champion tried. His legs refused.
"Get up," Hercles repeated, and this time there was something in his voice that resembled disappointment.
It took a visible effort, almost painful to watch, but the champion pulled himself upright, swaying, his axes falling from his hands without him seeming to notice.
Hercles stepped closer, placed a hand on his shoulder, a gesture that could have passed for camaraderie if it hadn't made the man buckle a little further under his own weight.
"You fought well," he said, loud enough for the front rows to hear, almost with mercy. "Better than most who carry that title in other cities. It's not your fault you're going to die, you know. I forgive you."
He withdrew his hand and took the man's head off with a single stroke of his sword, a motion so clean it could almost have gone unnoticed. The champion collapsed, emptied, his head no longer able to sit on his shoulders for even one more second.
A heavy, disbelieving silence spread across the entire arena.
The only sound to break it was Hercles giving his blade a single shake to clear the blood from it.
Then, slowly, the applause began, less hysterical than what had greeted Atlas, but deeper, more lived in, the kind of ovation reserved for something people had just understood rather than something that had simply overwhelmed them.
On his golden tribune, Renn stood, applauding himself, a smile on his lips unlike anything Atlas had seen from him so far, something almost peaceful.
"Two." He said it to the man posted behind him, without taking his eyes off Hercles. "Isaac sends me two Awakened phenomena in a single shipment. I'm starting to understand how he became what he became. Remind me to send the device back to you, old friend."
Atlas, from the gladiators' stands, watched Hercles make his way back, that golden hue fading gradually beneath his skin, until nothing remained but a man, not even out of breath, a smile still hanging on his lips.
"That was it," Atlas said, less a question than a statement. "Your Qualia."
"A fragment," Hercles answered, sitting down heavily beside him. "I never let it go further than that. Otherwise I lose the wheel entirely. I've never wanted to find out what would happen if I did."
He chooses, Atlas thought, the remark settling against his own hole in his memory with a weight he hadn't expected. Whether to spare or to kill, he chooses. He feels the same thing rising in him that I do, that same hunger, and he knows exactly where it leads. I don't even know where mine begins.
The difference suddenly felt immense to him, vaster than the simple difference in their Qualias. Hercles had made a man kneel almost artfully, and hadn't hesitated for a second to take his head off, and he would carry every second of it in memory, to judge himself by, to do differently next time if needed. Atlas had only the void, and the cold certainty that he hadn't chosen anything at all.
I want that, he thought, the resolve he'd glimpsed the day before hardening further still. That moment where you can still choose.
Dran, on the other side, stayed silent, his eyes moving from Hercles to Atlas with something that looked more like exhaustion than fear, as if his own body had decided it no longer had enough terror in reserve to spare any for what he'd just watched.
Tête Brûlée joined them soon after, his burned face unreadable, but something in his gait betrayed an excitement he wasn't particularly trying to hide, his mood far lighter than usual.
"Isaac is going to be pleased," he said, more to himself than to the two men sitting in front of him. "Two good fights in three days, and Renn is over the moon. I won't even need to lie in my reports, for once."
"That wasn't for Isaac," Hercles said, without hostility, almost in passing.
"I know," Tête Brûlée answered, a fleeting smile crossing his scars. "That's exactly why it worked."
He walked off without adding anything more, leaving the three gladiators alone with the crowd's noise, which had already begun reorganizing itself for what was to come.
The sun began to dip soon after, and no one dared leave. The arena stayed just as packed as before, worse even, it kept filling up, people crowding against each other all the way into the aisles. All of Tra seemed to want to witness what was coming, and the entire arena transformed before their eyes.
Servants flooded the sand, still stained with the day's fights, covering every trace of violence under red carpets unrolled with an almost choreographed speed. Braziers lit up around the stands, one by one, until the whole arena bathed in an amber light that softened every face, blurred every edge, as if the city itself were trying to forget what had just played out there moments earlier.
A choir, gathered on a platform Atlas hadn't noticed until now, began to sing, deep, low voices carrying a melody he didn't recognize, something ancient, ceremonial, that seemed to belong to Tra far longer than its new Sceau ever had.
Renn stood again, now dressed in a robe someone had just brought him, a red so dark it looked almost black under the braziers' light, embroidered with the same sigil Atlas had seen all over the city, two swords, one broken, crossed over a purple heart.
"People of Tra," he said, his voice carrying without effort to the very last rows, just as it had three days before. "Today, you have seen what this continent has to offer at its finest. You have seen strength, mastery, sacrifice." He paused, letting his gaze sweep slowly across the whole arena. "Now let me show you what I intend to do with all of it."
A man stepped toward him, carrying on a velvet cushion what could only be the crown itself, a circle of dark metal set with red stones Atlas couldn't identify from this distance.
Six other men followed, each carrying a different object, a sword laid flat on a second cushion, a silver cup already filled with a dark liquid, a scroll of parchment sealed with red wax. Each object was presented to Renn in a precise order, a ritual that seemed to reach back far further than Tra's own existence, and each time, the choir shifted key, a different verse for every stage, as if the entire ceremony had been composed note by note centuries before.
An old man, his white robe standing out sharply against the city's ever present red, stepped forward in turn, a black staff in hand which he raised toward the sky before pointing it at Renn.
"By the blood that founded this city," he recited, his voice trembling but still carrying to the last rows, "by the swords that defended it, and by the heart that still keeps it beating. Renn, son of Held, you are the new Sceau of Tra. May this glory be yours, and may Tra prosper in your name."
Renn stayed on one knee, head bowed, a total silence having fallen over the entire arena. Even the braziers seemed to burn more softly, as if the city itself were holding its breath.
"I swear that I, Renn, will bring the world to its knees if Tra asks it of me." His voice rang through that silence with an almost unsettling clarity. "I swear to defend Tra against anything that would threaten its color, its blood, and its name. I swear to serve the Capitol with the loyalty every state on this continent owes it." He paused, barely perceptibly, but Atlas noticed it all the same, one beat too long before he continued. "And I swear never to forget what this throne cost the one who sat on it before me."
A murmur ran through the nearest rows, too low for Atlas to make out the words, but noticeable enough that he guessed he'd just missed something important.
The old man in white set the crown on Renn's head, and a roar rose from the entire crowd, different from anything Atlas had heard so far in that arena, neither the fury that had greeted his own victory, nor the reverence that had accompanied Hercles's, but something more complex, relief mixed with a still hesitant excitement, as if the city itself didn't yet know what it had just welcomed.
Atlas felt his gaze drift, without quite knowing why, once more toward the raised section where the Capitol's representatives sat, that same strange sensation climbing his neck, sharper this time, almost insistent, as if something up there had, in turn, noticed it was being watched. The young woman he'd spotted earlier hadn't moved, but something in her posture had changed, a tension he couldn't name but recognized, in some way, as a distant echo of his own.
He didn't get the chance to dwell on it. Renn rose to his feet, the crown resting on his brow, and raised both arms to the crowd chanting his name.
The ceremony had truly begun.