Jas’s uncle chose that mont to step into the center of the room.
He had stayed back during the confrontation, letting it run, and he ca forward now with his expression arranged into sothing that looked like a father’s disappointnt for the benefit of every important guest watching.
"This is not what tonight was ant to be," he said while his voice carried the practiced regret of a man who had decided in advance exactly how concerned he wanted to appear. He turned toward Cormac with a slow shake of his head. "You have embarrassed this family in front of our guests. This was a celebration, and you turned it into a spectacle."
The words sounded like a reprimand, but there was nothing underneath them. He did not order Cormac to withdraw. He did not apologize to Jas or to his mother. He perford disappointnt at the volu the room needed to hear it, and the performance let Ganner Corp stand above the ss rather than inside it. To the investors and TRB officials and foreign buyers watching, the family head was a reasonable man caught managing two young n who had let emotion ruin a good evening.
Across the room, Adrian had not moved.
He stood near the sa column he had stood beside all night, and he had not celebrated, had not stepped forward, had not said a single word during any of it. He watched Jas sign and he watched Jas’s face while he signed, and his expression held the sa quiet attention he gave to a guest list. He was not thinking about the punch or the insult or the spectacle his brother had made.
He was thinking about what the room would look like in three months, and what it would an for the family if Jas walked out of that duel alive.
Finn reached Jas while the official was still confirming the record.
"What the hell was that," he said, low and tight, the anger in his voice running alongside sothing closer to worry. "You let him bait you into a Blood Writ."
"He insulted my mother," Jas said. "Twice."
"I know. I heard." Finn’s jaw worked while he glanced toward Cormac and back. "That’s exactly what he wanted, Jas. He took a punch on purpose so he’d have the opening to call the writ. You walked straight into it."
"I know what he did."
"Then why—"
"Because the second one wasn’t about baiting ," Jas said quietly. "It was about her. And I’m not going to stand in a room full of people and let that sit."
Finn did not have an answer for that, because there wasn’t a clean one.
Marcus arrived a mont later, and where Finn had co as a friend, Marcus ca as soone already calculating the shape of the problem. He looked at Jas with none of Finn’s heat.
"A Blood Writ isn’t a guild dispute," Marcus said. "It isn’t sothing Erald Spire can make quiet calls about and erase. Once it’s recorded with TRB oversight, the only people who can end it are the two who signed it. Influence doesn’t touch this."
"I’m not asking Erald Spire to touch it," Jas said.
"Good. Because it can’t." Marcus held his gaze for a mont longer. "You understand what you signed. Most people who sign these are angrier than they are ready."
"I understand it."
Finn looked between the two of them, caught between his father’s flat practicality and his own worry, and the gap between the two reactions left him standing there with nowhere useful to put any of it. Marcus was already treating the duel like a fixed condition to be managed. Finn was still standing in the part where his friend had just agreed to a fight to the death.
Jas saw it on him and spoke before Finn could. "We’ll talk later. Not here."
Finn held his eyes for a second, then nodded, because there was nothing else to do in a room full of caras.
Jas walked out of the ballroom with his mother and Nyra a few minutes later.
The crowd parted to let them through, but nobody looked away. So faces held shock, so held the bright awful interest of people who had just watched sothing they would be talking about for weeks, and a few already had the distant calculating look of people working out what a Ganner-versus-Necromancer death duel would an for the market, the guilds, and the value of every na attached to it.
His mother did not say anything while they moved through the room. She held Nyra’s hand on one side and stayed close to Jas on the other, and she kept her face composed until they were past the doors, but the composure was the kind that cost sothing to hold.
Nyra looked up at her, then at Jas, and tugged lightly at his sleeve. "Daddy, is the bad man coming?"
"No," Jas said. "We’re going ho."
"Are you hurt?"
"No." He kept his voice even for her. "I’m fine. We’re just leaving."
She accepted that the way she accepted most things, by holding on a little tighter and staying close, and the three of them walked out through the entrance where the press had been waiting all night.
Outside, the noise of the hall dropped away behind the closing doors, but the quiet did not make any of it less real. The writ was signed. The date was set. Three months was the whole of it, and Jas already knew the next three months would not look like the last one.
By the ti Jas got his mother and Nyra ho, the ball was already on every screen in the country.
The clips spread the way these things spread, fast and out of order and stripped of context. One video showed only Jas crossing the floor and putting Cormac down with a single punch, the CRACK of it clear over the gasps, with no audio of what had been said before it. Another caught Cormac’s insults but cut off before the punch, framing Jas as the one who escalated. A third showed O’Shea catching the ice fist in one open hand and held on that mont because it looked impossible. A fourth focused entirely on the writ itself, on the two nas being recorded and the quiet, flat way Jas had said I accept.
The public split before the night was over.
So people watched the full sequence and said plainly that Jas had been provoked, that any son would have swung after hearing his mother spoken about that way. Others watched the cut that started with the punch and said the Necromancer of Team Zero had finally shown what he really was under the broadcast-friendly image. Ganner-friendly accounts moved quickly to fra Cormac as a grieving brother demanding answers about a missing sibling, a man pushed past his limit by the person he believed responsible. Challenger forums skipped the morality of it entirely and went straight to the odds, arguing about class matchups and level estimates and whether a Legendary Necromancer at Level 17 could take a Ganner heir in a straight fight to the death.
Soti after midnight, TRB released a short official statent. It confird that a Challenger Blood Writ had been invoked and accepted under recognized witnesses, that the terms had been formally recorded, and that TRB oversight had been scheduled for three months from the date of the challenge. It offered no opinion and took no side, which sohow made the whole thing feel more serious rather than less.
By midnight, the duel was no longer a family matter.
It was national news.
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