Chapter 77: The Eye of the Storm and the Forest of Thorns
The desert sun began to lean slightly toward the west, tingeing the clouds crowning Skull Rock with orange and purple hues. The main arena, which had already witnessed brutal physical clashes, alchemical asphyxiation, sonic speed, and lethal mathematics, seemed to breathe with anticipation. The squads of healers and builders had sprinkled neutralizing powders over the remains of mercury and burns from previous fights, smoothing the fractured jade for the upcoming contenders.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian remained motionless. The Special Envoy of the Star Ice Empire no longer underestimated the high numbers in this legion's ranks. His daughter Saira, standing beside him, played nervously with the edge of her frost-blue tunic.
"Father, the fights are becoming more... abstract. Rank 20 and Rank 4 barely exchanged direct blows. It was a war of mental attrition and positioning."
Lord Varian nodded, his gaze fixed on the arena doors. "It is the mark of a mature army. Rookies clash fists; masters manipulate the terrain."
On the main balcony, the atmosphere was diametrically opposed. Tension did not exist among the ruling family.
Samael Morningstar, the Patriarch whose mere presence dictated the laws of gravity around him, held little Celeste in his arms. The dark-haired baby, surrounded by her characteristic blue-violet mist, played with one of the obsidian buttons on her father's tunic, laughing with a tinkling sound that absurdly contrasted with the roars of the crowd. Samael looked at her with a softness that was more terrifying than his tyranny, making it clear that whoever threatened that laugh would know the end of the world.
Seraphina, standing beside him, rested her head gracefully against her husband's shoulder. Her silver-blue hair and translucent eyes watched the arena.
"The legion is proving its worth," commented Seraphina, her voice an elegant melody.
"They are sharpening their fangs," corrected Samael, adjusting Celeste. "But we haven't yet seen the true brutality of the ranged hunt."
Great Elder Lilith, with her imposing and maternal presence, crossed her arms. Her white hair with silver and reddish streaks and her intense dark red eyes scrutinized the access tunnels.
"The perfect sniper against the sadistic girl of the stone forest. A classic duel: the hunter who needs distance versus the prey who turns the terrain into her fortress."
The herald, after ensuring the arena was clear, raised the immense bone horn.
BOOOOOMMM!
The deep sound vibrated the fortress's foundations.
"Sixth match!" bellowed the herald. "The mastery of the horizon against the fury of the earth! Sequence 21, Varian Morningstar, against Sequence 9, Aylin Morningstar!"
The south doors opened in complete silence.
Varian Morningstar walked into the light. His lean, sinewy build did not inspire the same terror as Draven's muscle mass, but every single one of his movements was calculated and perfect, without wasting a single millimeter of energy. His dark green hair was disheveled by the constant wind surrounding him. In his left hand, he carried a compound bow made of a matte black material that did not reflect the sunlight.
But the most unsettling thing about Varian were his eyes. Brilliant emerald green, his pupils were not round, but contracted and dilated with mechanical precision, resembling the lens of a high-tech camera. Varian was a perfectionist, introverted and silent. To him, the arena wasn't a place of honor or fury; it was a geometric equation, a Cartesian plane where he only had to draw the straight line between the tension of his string and the enemy's heart.
At the north end, the doors opened with the sound of stone scraping against stone.
Aylin Morningstar entered with small, playful skips. She looked completely out of place in a gladiatorial arena. Standing one meter sixty tall, with short golden hair shining in the sun and large amber eyes with hints of green, she looked like a harmless porcelain doll. She carried a halberd with a petrified wood shaft and a polished black stone blade, which she dragged along the ground with apparent carelessness.
"Hello, Varian!" greeted Aylin, waving her free hand with childish enthusiasm. "I hope you don't run too much! My roots get dizzy if they spin too fast!"
But those who knew her knew that this childish attitude was a deadly trap. Behind the facade of a sweet girl beat the heart of a battlefield psychopath. Aylin enjoyed the pain of others with disturbing sadism; she feigned innocence to make the enemy hesitate, only to impale them and smile while listening to their bones crunch.
Varian did not return the cheerful greeting. He didn't even smile.
The moment he stopped forty meters away from her, Varian closed his eyes for a second. Upon opening them, he activated his passive state of [Eagle Vision].
The world around him lost its color. The sky, the sand, the stands... everything turned into a cold, analytical grayscale. But in the midst of that monochromatic world, the wind currents shone in neon blue, marking the ideal trajectories. And forty meters away, Aylin's figure and her halberd lit up in a deep, bloody red, revealing the exact flow of her Qi and the position of her heart.
Varian raised the black bow, his body in profile, perfect as a statue.
The wind flows from east to west at seven knots. The distance is forty meters. Eighty-two degrees of relative elevation, the sniper calculated in milliseconds.
DOOONG!
The echo of the gong had barely begun to resonate when Varian had already released the string.
There was no charge time. He didn't pull an arrow from a quiver. By drawing the bow, he had molded a projectile made of compressed wind and pure energy from his Origin Realm Stage 4.
[Radiant Void Arrow].
The shot broke the sound barrier with a dull sonic boom at the point of origin. The arrow wasn't a piece of wood, it was a translucent beam of light wrapped in emerald green wind. It spun on its own axis at supersonic speeds, creating a miniature drill that ignored air friction and gravity. It traveled in a perfect straight line, a lethal laser aimed exactly at the center of the seemingly innocent Aylin's forehead.
Aylin didn't stop smiling. In fact, her smile widened into a sinister grimace.
In the last microsecond before the arrow pierced her skull, Aylin didn't dodge. Nor did she raise her halberd to block. She simply stomped the ground with the heel of her right boot.
[Thousand Stone Flowers Technique].
The jade floor exploded beneath her. Hundreds of sharp pebbles and pieces of obsidian, torn from the bowels of the arena, rose and hung suspended in the air thanks to micro-currents of wind channeled by the girl. Glowing with an ochre aura, the stones grouped together at lightning speed into a floating geometric shield right in front of her face.
The Radiant Void Arrow struck the swarm of floating rocks.
The sound was like hail falling on a metal roof, deafening and chaotic. The unstable energy of the arrow burned dozens of stones, and the wind drill pulverized dozens more, but Aylin's technique wasn't a solid shield; it was a kinetic barrier. The stones absorbed the inertia, fragmenting the photonic projectile into thousands of green sparks that fell harmlessly around her.
"What pretty lights!" laughed Aylin, her eyes wide, her amber gaze shining with malice. "My turn!"
Aylin gripped the halberd with both hands and spun it over her head in a fluid, wild motion.
[Cyclone of Roots Dance].
She injected her Earth, Wind, and Root Qi simultaneously. The arena floor convulsed as if a subterranean beast had awakened. A green and brown hurricane five meters in diameter engulfed the girl. From the shattered ground, dozens of thick, flexible roots, like dragons of reinforced wood, sprouted and joined the rotation of the halberd, following the flow of the wind.
The cyclone roared, sucking up the loose debris of the arena. Aylin, in the eye of the hurricane, did not stay still. She advanced toward Varian. Her speed wasn't Rowan's, but the cyclone surrounding her turned her into a mobile meat grinder that covered five meters of absolute lethality. Anything that entered that radius would be flayed by wood and wind.
Varian didn't retreat. His mind calculated the advance speed of the root cyclone. Distance: thirty-two meters. Her frontal coverage is absolute. The wind sucks up normal projectiles. I need to nullify the biological shield.
Varian drew the cyan-white energy string. This time, he deliberately aimed above Aylin's cyclone, toward the clouds that Xylia had partially dispersed.
He injected a massive amount of energy into the arrow, forcing the tension of the string of light until his own fingers began to smoke.
[Green Meteor Shower].
He fired toward the sky. The massive projectile cut through the air and, at thirty meters high, detonated.
The sky above the arena was tinged with a vibrant, toxic neon green. Hundreds of emerald energy darts and compressed wind began to rain down on the arena like a storm of lethal shooting stars.
The area saturation was massive. The meteors fell everywhere, and many struck directly against Aylin's Cyclone of Roots Dance.
The impact was spectacular. The green meteors clashed against the spinning roots. Each dart not only pierced the wood but detonated in a shockwave that launched Qi shrapnel and shattered the structure of the thick roots. Aylin's hurricane groaned, wood flying in splinters all over the arena.
The constant rain forced Aylin to halt her advance to concentrate on maintaining the density of her rotating roots so as not to be riddled by the emerald energy from above.
Varian had achieved his tactical objective: he had forced her to anchor herself in one position.
Without giving her a second to breathe, while the green rain still fell around her, Varian drew his bow again. His emerald eyes, with the vertical pupils of eagle vision, locked onto Aylin's red silhouette through the spinning wood.
The sniper channeled a very specific, dark, and piercing Qi vibration.
[Predator's Mark].
He fired the pure arrow. The projectile didn't seek to pierce the physical barrier. It was a conceptual arrow. It slipped through the wind of Aylin's cyclone and lodged itself incorporeally in her chest.
Aylin felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind. She looked at her chest. A blinking cyan aura in the shape of an eagle's eye shone over her tunic.
Varian exhaled slowly. In his monochromatic vision, Aylin's red target now glowed with a cyan magnetic aura. It no longer mattered how much wood or stone she hid behind. From this moment on, any projectile he fired would seek out that mark like a starving wolf following a trail of blood.
"You are locked on," murmured Varian, drawing the bow again.
He fired a rapid burst of three [Radiant Void Arrows] at completely random angles: one to the left, one to the right, and the last toward the sky.
Aylin laughed from inside her cyclone, watching the sniper shoot into the air.
"You have bad aim, Varian! I think the sun blinded you!"
But her sadistic smile froze.
The three arrows, instead of continuing their erratic trajectories, curved violently in the air, defying any known physical law. The magnetic effect of the Predator's Mark attracted them.
They attacked Aylin's Cyclone of Roots simultaneously from three blind flanks.
The first arrow drilled through a rear root, destroying its rotation. The second pierced the right side of the defensive wind, tearing the girl's tunic. The third arrow, falling from the sky, struck the base of her halberd, pushing it violently and completely breaking her stance.
The Cyclone of Roots collapsed, scattering into dust and splinters.
Aylin was left exposed, coughing from the shockwave. Her childish smile disappeared, replaced by a look of cold, sadistic fury. Her amber eyes locked onto the sniper.
"I don't like being a target, Varian," said Aylin, her voice losing its feigned sweetness, becoming hoarse and threatening. "If you want to hunt, let's get dirty in the mud."
Aylin slammed the base of her petrified wood halberd against the ground and concentrated all the fury of the earth into her Stage 4 core.
[Whirlwind of Telluric Thorns].
This time she didn't spin the halberd to create a shield. She raised her free hand with her fingers in the shape of a claw. The jade floor beneath Varian's feet imploded without warning.
Massive rock fragments, combined with thick, knotty roots covered in thorns, emerged from the earth like the jaws of a subterranean dragon, surrounding the archer in a dark brown and green whirlwind. The earth acted as heavy shrapnel, and the updraft caused the debris and thorns to rotate at high speed, like circular saws trying to flay Varian alive.
Varian reacted with the speed of a feline. He jumped backward the instant the ground cracked, evading the center of the whirlwind. However, the wind currents and stone shrapnel caught him. His tunic tore in multiple places, and blood began to dye the floor as the telluric thorns superficially cut his arms and legs.
The sniper landed rolling, his breathing slightly ragged. The eagle vision flickered from the pain of the cuts.
She's a trapper. She doesn't need line of sight. If I stay on the ground, she'll devour me from below.
Varian didn't hesitate. He injected wind Qi into his boots and ran toward the north containment wall of the arena. With superhuman agility, he ran two steps up the vertical stone wall and, using a burst of compressed air beneath his feet, propelled himself into the open sky, rising twenty meters above the coliseum.
From that height, far from the immediate reach of the subterranean roots, Varian drew his bow to the maximum. His emerald eyes shone with lethal resolve.
He was going to execute her with an orbital shot.
Aylin looked up and saw the archer suspended in the air, silhouetted against the evening sky.
Instead of protecting herself with more rocks, Aylin dropped her halberd. She brought both hands together in a channeling mudra, her face disfigured by the massive effort of handling large amounts of mass and air simultaneously. She was going to respond with the force of a siege.
[Volatile Quake Spear].
Aylin concentrated an immense mass of earth and roots in front of her chest, compressing it into a colossal, rough spear of petrified wood. The tip of the spear was glowing obsidian. She wrapped the gigantic projectile in a spiral of compressed air.
Varian, in a controlled free fall, released his bowstring.
[Arrow of Inevitable Judgment].
Aylin, on the ground, thrust both palms toward the sky.
The volatile quake spear shot upward with a sonic shockwave that kicked up a massive curtain of dust on the ground.
Both projectiles, the beam of pure light from the sniper and the colossal battering ram of rock and wood from the earth huntress, crossed the air of the arena, heading straight for each other.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian stood up, his hands gripping the ice balcony.
"A duel of heavy artillery. If the girl's spear hits the archer, the physical mass will snap him in half in mid-air. If the boy's arrow hits, the energy will pierce her core."
Saira Varian held her breath.
"The arrow's magnetic mark guarantees a hit on the girl, father. But the archer is in the air; he can't dodge that siege spear. It's a guaranteed double kill."
Samael, with Celeste still oblivious to the danger, did not look away. There would be no double kill. One of them possessed the sharper will.
In the middle of the arena sky, Varian's tiny Arrow of Inevitable Judgment and Aylin's immense Volatile Quake Spear collided.
The clash was absurd. The immense mass of the wood and stone spear should have crushed the small arrow of photonic energy.
But Varian's technique did not obey the laws of common physics. The arrow of judgment ignored solid obstacles.
The instant of impact, Varian's arrow, propelled by his wind core and wrapped in unstable energy, pierced the obsidian tip of Aylin's battering ram. It acted like an atomic drill, burning through the magical barrier and traveling through the entire length of the immense siege spear from tip to base, splitting it in half from the inside.
Aylin's colossal projectile burst in the air into thousands of pieces of petrified wood and burning rocks, without even touching Varian.
And the sniper's arrow continued its path, intact, guided by the magnetic thread of the Predator's Mark.
Aylin, down in the arena, panting from the effort of launching the technique, watched her ultimate weapon be disintegrated, and pure death descend toward her like a white lightning bolt.
The Rank 9's animal survival instinct took over. Knowing that rock shields were useless against that penetration, Aylin threw herself to the ground, trying to sink into the earth using her Qi.
The arrow struck.
There was no explosion of fire. There was a dry crack, like armored glass shattering.
Aylin screamed, a howl of genuine pain, devoid of all childishness.
The arrow of wind and energy pierced her right shoulder with surgical precision, pinning her to the jade floor of the arena, completely immobilizing her. The heat and speed of the arrow melted the stone beneath her, fusing her own blood with the slab.
Varian landed nimbly twenty meters away. His breathing was ragged, and his eyes blinked, suffering from eye fatigue and the numbness in his fingers from releasing so much pure tension. The green dots in his visual field told him he was on the verge of fainting, but he maintained his posture, raising the bow again and aiming directly at Aylin's head.
Aylin tried to use her left arm to pull out the energy arrow keeping her pinned, but the nerve damage and the heat of the wound nullified her strength. She looked at the sniper, her amber eyes full of tears of pain and frustration. The sadism had been burned away by the reality of defeat.
Varian didn't say a word. He simply drew the string a millimeter more.
"I yield!" cried Aylin, dropping her head against the burning jade. "I yield, I yield, it hurts too much!"
Varian lowered the bow. The white thread of his string disappeared. His vision returned to normal, losing the electric color. The equation was solved. The straight line had handed down the sentence.
In the VIP box, Lord Varian exhaled loudly. He dropped back into his ice throne, wiping an imperceptible drop of cold sweat from his temple.
"He pierced a five-ton projectile with a needle of light, calculated the orbital angle, and nullified a field master..." The Emperor looked at Saira. "Saira. Look at me."
The princess of Star Ice turned toward her father, her face paler than snow.
"That sniper. Sequence 21," Lord Varian continued, his tone that of a commander in war, not a father. "If you ever face this legion in an open field, I demand that you kill that boy first. It doesn't matter how many ice or fire giants surround you. Kill him first. Because if you give him three seconds and fifty meters of distance, he will put an arrow through your eye before you can summon your magic."
Saira nodded slowly, the arrogance wiped from her spirit.
The herald, recovering from the brutal speed of the finale, raised the horn.
BOOOOOMMM!
"The winner of the sixth match!" the herald's voice resonated. "Sequence 21, Varian Morningstar, dictates the line of death and advances in the Final Rank Tournament!"
The stands roared in a mix of euphoria and respect. Varian Morningstar, the lowest in rank, had annihilated one of the Top 10 beasts, proving that at Skull Rock, low numbers were only an illusion.
While the healers came in to carefully extract Aylin from the molten slab and Varian walked toward the tunnels rubbing his tired eyes, Samael Morningstar allowed himself a very slight, almost imperceptible smile of satisfaction as Celeste laughed again in his arms.
The legion was ready. And the show was far from over.