Alex took another step.
And with that step, Soren's confidence began to collapse in earnest.
Because what was he supposed to do here?
Throw another rough spell at the chosen hero while time itself dragged around him?
Kick him?
Swing his axe again and pretend that mattered?
His whole style, all the desperate little things that made him dangerous in real fights, depended on forcing disorder, on creating messy moments, on making stronger opponents deal with problems they did not want.
But Alex was not dealing with disorder now.
He was walking through it.
By the time Alex reached striking range, Soren's arm felt leaden.
He could still move, probably.
He could probably force something.
A clumsy [Breeze].
A panic-cast [Ignition].
One last ugly lunge with the axe.
But for the first time since the duel had begun, he couldn't make himself believe in any of it.
"I'm sorry," Alex said softly. "But I need to win."
His eyes flicked briefly to the side as he said it, and Soren understood at once that the apology wasn't really for him.
That, somehow, made the bitterness curdle hotter.
Soren looked at the half-made spell in his palm.
Then… let it go.
The light died without resistance.
Alex's sword moved.
It was not theatrical or savage, just clean.
The slash cut across Soren's body with the terrible certainty of something performed perfectly by trained hands, and because the world was still thickened by [Divinity], the pain stretched with it, every fraction of injury dragged long enough to become impossible to ignore.
Agony tore through him.
His body understood the damage before his mind did.
A hot line opened through flesh, then deepened, then kept deepening, his nerves screaming in a long, merciless thread that seemed to have no end.
It was not just the pain of being wounded.
It was the humiliation folded inside it, the brutal clarity of having stood here, fought with everything messy and hard-earned he had, only to end up exactly where his fear had always told him he would.
Not enough.
Never enough.
He could not even scream properly in that slowed world.
Then Alex drove his sword into the arena floor.
The golden pressure shattered.
The world snapped back all at once.
Sound crashed in like a wave.
The crowd's roar, the scrape of movement, someone gasping, the violent return of ordinary time, all of it hit in a single overwhelming instant.
Soren was thrown backwards.
Blood scattered through the air behind him before he hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs.
He rolled once and stopped, his body curling in on itself on instinct as pain finally became fully his again instead of something stretched thin and distant.
He coughed and tasted iron at once.
Blood spilt from his mouth, hot and metallic, and for one ragged second all he could do was lie there and shake around the wound.
'Fuck… It hurts so much.'
His vision blurred at the edges.
No one came to stop the duel immediately.
Of course they didn't.
This was still within the bounds of a mock duel, still acceptable, still spectacular enough that half the arena was probably thrilled rather than horrified.
Soren forced his hand to the wound.
Divine power trembled weakly through his fingers.
"Stitch thy flesh, I end thy agony, 「Heal」."
Purplish-silver light spread beneath his palm, uneven but functional.
The bleeding slowed.
The worst of the pain dulled from blinding to merely vicious.
Yet the cut remained, deep and angry beneath torn cloth, a reality he would be feeling for days, even if the incantation kept it from becoming immediately dangerous.
His hand shook.
The headache pounding behind his eye returned with fresh cruelty, as if his body had only been waiting for the chance to remember everything that hurt at once.
He dragged in a breath and made himself look up.
The audience was staring.
Some faces were pale.
Some were delighted.
Some looked half out of their minds with excitement, the way crowds always did when something crossed the line from impressive into frightening.
At the centre of it all, Alex stood with his sword planted in the ground, shoulders rising and falling with heavier breaths than before, sweat darkening his hair at the temples.
He looked strained now that the gold was gone.
Human again.
Tired, even.
And on his face was that same awkward, sheepish expression that never seemed to fit the amount of damage he had just done.
Soren's mouth tightened.
'What the fuck was that?'
That was not the [Divinity] he knew.
Or rather, it was and it was not.
The game's version had been monstrous enough already, but this... this distortion, this slowing, this sense of the world itself yielding to Alex's presence, that had not been how Soren remembered it.
There should not have been any way for a first-year Alex to do something like that.
There should not have been any reason for time to drag around him like the arena had become some private dominion.
Unless the story was shifting again.
Unless Alex had already become something more dangerous than he was supposed to be at this point.
The thought sank claws into Soren's chest.
Because if that was true, then what else had changed?
What else had he touched without realising how far the ripples would go?
Pain and frustration tangled together so tightly he couldn't separate them.
He had thought, stupidly perhaps, that he could at least make this duel mean something.
Even if he lost, he had wanted to lose with shape, with resistance, with proof that all the ugly scrambling he had done to survive in this world had built into something real.
He had managed that for a while.
He had adapted.
He had landed a hit.
He had forced Alex into discomfort.
He had pushed far enough that [Divinity] had come out.
But now that felt less like achievement and more like being shown the true ceiling of his own insignificance.
Alex finally looked back towards him fully.
"Thank goodness," he said, and the relief in his voice sounded genuine enough to make Soren want to bite through his own tongue. "I was worried I'd hit you too hard."
He scratched lightly at his cheek, awkward and earnest and completely unbearable in that moment.
Then, with obvious uncertainty rather than aggression, he asked:
"Are we still going to fight, though?"
Soren stared at him.
Alex was sweating.
Alex was tired.
Alex had taken damage.
Any objective part of Soren's mind could see that if he paid even a modicum of attention.
Nonetheless, it did not matter.
Not now.
Not after what had just taken place.
Not after the feeling of standing in front of something that made all his own effort feel narrow and shabby and painfully human.
His lips trembled before he could stop them.
For a brief, ugly instant, he wanted to get up anyway.
Not because he believed he could win.
He didn't.
Not anymore.
But because something furious and wounded in him wanted to refuse the shape of this ending, wanted to throw himself forward one more time even if it only made him look pathetic, wanted to reject Alex and that apology and that awful golden wall with his whole body if he had to.
He could imagine it.
Rising unsteadily.
Gripping the axe again.
Forcing himself into one last exchange.
Then what?
Another clean defeat?
Another reminder?
Another moment for the crowd to watch Soren Arden struggle against the Hero before being put back in his place?
The anger drained as quickly as it had risen.
Exhaustion replaced it.
Not the simple physical kind, though there was plenty of that, but something deeper, heavier.
The exhaustion of running into a truth he had already feared and finding it just as cruel as expected.
He was tired.
Tired of reaching.
Tired of clawing forward one inch at a time and wondering whether the distance in front of him was secretly endless.
Tired of standing near people who shone too brightly and pretending he would not eventually be burned by it.
His grip loosened on the handaxe.
"...I forfeit," he said.
The words came out quiet, flat, and far more defeated than he would have liked.
The announcement followed almost immediately.
Then the arena erupted.
Cheers rolled through the stands in a wave so loud it rattled through his skull, and none of them were for him.
Of course they weren't.
Why would they be?
The Hero had won.
The spectacle had delivered.
The story, as far as everyone else in this building was concerned, had gone exactly as it should.
Soren pushed himself upright.
His legs almost failed on the first attempt.
He steadied, jaw clenched, and ignored the way his body swayed.
Alex said something, maybe his name.
Someone else called out too, higher and thinner and more strained.
Olivia, perhaps.
Or it could've been Amelia.
But he didn't look.
He couldn't bear to.
Not because he was afraid of seeing pity.
That would have been bad enough.
Worse was the thought of seeing concern from people he actually cared about while he was still full of this helpless, sour humiliation, still hearing the echo of the crowd cheering for the person he had never once truly wanted to stand opposite.
So he turned and walked.
Every step hurt.
The half-healed cut pulled beneath his clothes.
His head pounded.
His breath came unsteadily.
The arena floor felt too wide, the distance to the exit too long, and the noise behind him too large, like the building itself wanted to keep him inside this moment and make him live in it properly.
He kept going.
No one stopped him.
Or if they tried, he ignored it.
By the time he stepped out of the arena building, the air beyond it felt colder than before, thin and sharp in his lungs.
It should have helped, but it didn't.
His hands were shaking.
He looked down at them for only a second, then curled them into fists.
What had he expected?
Really?
That he would fight the protagonist and somehow come away intact, proud, and satisfied?
That all the small gains he had scraped together would be enough to bridge the gap between the protagonist and some no-name extra that didn't even appear in the original story?
He knew better.
He had always known better.
Yet some part of him had still hoped, and now that hope sat in his chest like a wound almost worse than the physical one.
Because it was not only about losing.
It was about what the loss had shown him.
Alex fought like someone shaped carefully from the beginning, polished by instructors, protected by structure, sharpened by formal discipline and whatever invisible favour the world itself had decided to lay at his feet.
Even his awkwardness felt clean.
Even his apology had room to exist.
Soren fought like someone who had survived.
That was all.
Not beautifully.
Not properly.
He improvised, cheated angles, tossed spells strangely, threw himself into gaps, relied on [Pain Tolerance] and bad habits and the certainty that if he didn't keep moving he would die.
In a real fight, against the kind of ugliness the world liked to spring on people in alleys and dungeons and disasters, that had meaning.
Here, against the Hero standing in gold, it had looked small.
The thought dug in so deep it made him feel briefly sick.
Because the people he cared about, the ones orbiting around him in ways he still didn't know how to handle, belonged on brighter stages than this.
Amelia.
Lilliana.
Even Olivia, foolish and earnest as she was.
And Alex, most of all, because the world had already built the stage for him.
Soren was not made for that kind of place.
He was the sort of person who slipped in through side paths, took what he could, survived what should have killed him, and mistook that for becoming someone who could stand beside people meant for more.
His pace slowed for a second.
Then he forced it steady again.
His jaw was tight, his shoulders were tense, and his blood was still tacky beneath his clothes.
Yet despite all of that, he kept walking without looking back once.
Because he knew, with a clarity, that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many scraps of strength he tore from this world with his own hands, he could not stand on the same stage as the people he now cared about.
And he likely never would.
————「❤︎」————