Ryan lay flat on his back, the cool black sand stinging against the raw cuts on his face. His lungs burned, gasping for air that felt entirely compressed by the weight of the noble’s strike. The entire world was spinning, the thunderous roaring of the high-blood spectators blurring into a dull, sickening drone in his ears.
Instructor Cross slowly stepped toward the edge of his elevated marble platform, his sharp grey eyes locked onto the motionless blonde youth. He raised the dark fabric starting flag, his arm tightening as he prepared to drop it and officially call the match to an end. To the veteran proctor, the lesser-blood had reached his absolute limit.
But through the haze of agony and the heavy copper taste of blood pooling in his mouth, Ryan’s fingers twitched. He gripped the dark sand, his knuckles turning white as his farm-born stubbornness completely refused to let him go down this easily.
I can’t... fail here, Ryan thought, his teeth grinding together so hard they threatened to crack. Not in front of the whole kingdom. Not after everything Tom did.
With a ragged, agonizing gasp, Ryan forced his trembling arms under his chest. His muscles screamed in protest, his shoulders shaking violently as he dragged his battered body upward. He stumbled, his knees buckling twice, but through sheer, unadulterated willpower, he forced himself back up onto his feet. He stood swaying unsteadily, wiping the dark line of blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, his hazel eyes burning with defiance as he faced the center of the sand.
The heavy cloud of grey dust finally began to settle, revealing Baldur standing completely unbothered at the center of the ring. His impenetrable granite armor didn’t have a single scratch le ft on it. Seeing the low-born commoner actually stand back up, the massive noble didn’t rush to strike again. Instead, he simply let out a loud, booming laugh that dripped with utter supremacy.
"Look at you, lesser scum," Baldur jeered, his gravelly voice echoing off the vaulted stone walls as he took slow, heavy steps forward. "You can barely even balance on your feet, yet you’re still standing there like you have a choice. Do you truly think that miserable breeze of yours can move an empire?"
He paused, opening his massive, rock-encrusted arms wide to showcase his absolute invulnerability.
"You and your pathetic little squad got lucky in the first few rounds," Baldur taunted, his narrow eyes flashing behind his stone visor as he glared up toward the back benches where Thomas sat. "That freak called Thomas managed to surprise Marcus, and your little girl caught Roy off guard. But tricks don’t change your bloodlines, lesser-blood. You are born to be broken under our heels. Surrender now, crawl and save me the trouble of burying you completely."
Up in the premium High- rows far above, Julian leaned back smoothly in his seat, a cold, indifferent glint reflecting behind his spectacles. He didn’t care about Baldur’s grandstanding; he was simply waiting to see if his class still had anything left to offer.
Ryan didn’t answer the heavy taunts. He slowly dropped his gaze to the sand, his breathing ragged as his hand drifted back to his side, his mind desperately calculating his final, desperate gambit while the entire stadium waited for his collapse.
Baldur grew entirely tired of his own grandstanding. Seeing that the bloody, swaying commoner refused to fall to his knees and beg for mercy, the massive Earth Mage let out a low, irritated snort. The muddy brown mana swirling through his granite-encrusted frame spiked violently, heavy stone shards grinding together along his shoulders as he shifted his weight.
"If you won’t crawl, then fall," Baldur hissed, his voice dropping into a lethal, heavy octave.
Utilizing his Earth Mage talent to its absolute maximum capacity, Baldur charged forward. His massive, rock-heavy body accelerated across the Crimson Arena like an unstoppable avalanche, his heavy granite boots shattering the black sand beneath him with every single stride. He wound his massive, boulder-sized right fist back, intending to deliver a crushing, definitive finishing blow that would cave in Ryan’s chest cavity and end the preliminary rounds once and for all. He was completely, recklessly wide open, trusting his impenetrable armor to absorb any pathetic counter-attack the dying low-born could muster.
Ryan didn’t move. He stood perfectly still in the path of the oncoming mountain, his head lowered and his eyes shadowed by his messy blonde hair. The wind around him had completely stopped.
The whistling shriek of his Gale Edge was entirely gone, leaving him looking completely defenseless.
But as Baldur closed the final ten meters, Ryan suddenly raised his head. His hazel eyes weren’t filled with fear they were burning with a blinding, emerald-green light.
He didn’t grab his fallen training blade. Instead, he raised his bare right hand into the air, his fingers closing around an invisible hilt as he channeled every remaining drop of his life force, his soul, and his mana into a single strike.
"Wind God: Shu’s Scepter!" Ryan roared, his voice cracking with immense power.
The entire wind-swept summit of the academy tower violently erupted.
It wasn’t a standard gust or a simple blade of compressed air. The moment the words left Ryan’s lips, a colossal, swirling vortex of hyper-compressed, jade-green hurricane wind descended from the high clouds like the hand of a deity. The localized air pressure dropped so rapidly that the ears of thousands of spectators in the vaulted benches simultaneously popped.
The invisible, absolute weapon materialized directly in Ryan’s grip a towering, five-meter spear of pure, raging vacuum pressure that hummed with a sound like a tearing fabric.
Baldur’s eyes widened in sudden, primordial terror behind his stone visor. He tried to halt his momentum, tried to throw his granite arms up to reinforce his impenetrable fort, but he was moving too fast. He was already caught in the vacuum pull.
Ryan brought his arm down, driving the invisible scepter straight into the center of the oncoming noble’s chest.
THOOM!!!
The collision didn’t cause an explosion of sand; it caused an absolute annihilation of force. The hyper-compressed vacuum of Shu’s Scepter detonated directly against Baldur’s impenetrable granite breastplate. For a fraction of a second, the ancient stone armor held. But the sheer, law-defying rotation of the wind god’s weapon began to drill through the rock at a cellular level, turning the dense granite into a fine, sparkling dust.
CRACK! CRACK! SHATTER!
The impenetrable armor that had shrugged off dozens of slashes violently exploded into a million tiny fragments, blown away by the roaring hurricane. The sheer kinetic and atmospheric feedback blasted right through Baldur’s unprotected torso, tearing his clothes and completely cutting off his connection to the bedrock beneath his feet.
The massive Earth Mage was violently launched into the air, spinning like a leaf in a tempest as the vortex carried him fifty meters backward across Sector 1.
He slammed brutally into the heavy stone barrier walls of the arena, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as he collapsed face-first into the sand, completely unconscious, his pristine noble uniform shredded to pieces.
The massive jade-green vortex slowly dissolved, leaving the entire Crimson Arena in a state of absolute, dead silence.
The hundreds of High-bloods who had been cheering for a lesser’s execution froze mid-breath, their minds completely failing to process the peak sequence they had just witnessed. A Grade B lesser-blood had just unleashed a skill capable of shattering a Grade A fortress.
Ryan stood perfectly rigid for a single, final second, his hand still shaped around the invisible scepter. Then, his mana completely flatlined, his eyes closed, and he collapsed backward onto the black sand, completely unconscious from total energy depletion.
Instructor Cross stood frozen on his platform for a long, grueling moment before he finally managed to violently drop his dark starting flag.
"Winner: Ryan of Class 1-A! Preliminary Rounds are officially concluded!"
The lesser-blood benches exploded into a roaring, deafening wave of cheers, but Thomas remained perfectly still in the back row. He looked down at his fallen roommate, then slowly tilted his head upward, looking across the vast stadium toward the elevated platform.
Julian was standing at the stone railing, his fingers digging into the ancient rock with such force that cracks were beginning to form beneath his palms. His silver-rimmed glasses reflected the harsh morning sun, but his striking ebony eyes were fixed entirely on the back row.
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