Vaelira hadn’t touched her food.
The sandwich sat on the plate in front of her, untouched, growing cold while the rest of the room ate and talked and existed like people who belonged here. She kept her eyes down, but her peripheral vision was doing overti.
Alice tore a piece of crust off Kaiden’s sandwich, popped it into her own mouth, then tore another piece and held it up to him with the expectation of a priestess offering sacrant. Kaiden opened his mouth. Chewed. Didn’t blink. As if being hand-fed by the daughter of the Shadow Monarch was just how Tuesdays worked.
Vaelira’s stomach turned.
"Alright," Kaiden said, and the room sharpened. "eting ti."
His gaze swept the room. Landed on faces. Moved on. Then stopped on her.
Clearly, she was asked to speak up.
"..." Her wrist moved on reflex, fingers tapping the slim artifact band below her sleeve. A holographic display blood above the table, featuring numbers, rankings, guild nas - the competition standings updated in real ti.
New Dawn – 88,420 P
Iron Halo – 81,300 P
Ashbound – 78,960 P ⬆
Silver Talon – 65,110 P ⬇
Black ridian – 59,880 P ⬇
Ember Line – 51,200 P
Frostwake – 46,740 P
Riftward – 38,600 P ⬆
Dawnfall – 31,980 P ⬆
Runewoven – 24,140 P ⬇
Stonewake – — (exited competition)
Verdant Coil – — (exited competition)
Hollow Crest – — (exited competition)
Night Bastion – — (exited competition)
Pale Covenant – — (exited competition)
She straightened in her seat. This, at least, she could do.
"Fifteen guilds entered the competition," she began.
"Five have already withdrawn. Stonewake, Verdant Coil, Hollow Crest, Night Bastion, Pale Covenant. All pulled out after losing too many mbers. The death penalty is brutal, with ten thousand points per mber lost. At a certain point, the math stops working for guilds led by incompetent losers. They’re grinding level fifty monsters for fifty points a kill while one bad encounter erases two hundred kills’ worth of progress. This was clearly put in place to penalize guilds who were ready to toss young rookies into the grinder to win."
She flicked her fingers, and the withdrawn guilds greyed out on the display. "They cut their losses."
The bitchy blonde then expanded the display with a pinch of her fingers. The top three nas glowed brighter than the rest.
"New Dawn leads. No surprise there."
Her finger traced down to the second na. "Iron Halo... They’re a subsidiary of Crimson Dominion. It’s expected they do well."
Crimson Dominion was one of the big three U.S. guilds, alongside New Dawn and The Radiant Order. Iron Halo served as their proving ground, where they sent their rising talent to earn credentials without being killed due to the extrely dangerous missions the guild tends to take under its leader, Lazarus’ guidance.
She moved to the third na, and her mouth ford the word before her brain could intervene.
"The guild of hubris and incest... Ashbound."
The syllable hit different this ti.
Ash. Bound.
Her eyes flicked to Kaiden. Then to Alice, who was licking crumbs off her thumb with zero awareness of Vaelira’s internal crisis.
Ashborn.
Two Ashborns. Sitting right there. One of them letting his little sister feed him like a hatchling, the other debating the structural integrity of sandwich bread. And the guild nipping at the heels of the two most powerful organizations in the competition was nad Ashbound. Cheap knockoffs wearing a bastardized version of the na belonging to the family whose son was currently sitting four feet away from her with egg on his lip.
The air left her lungs in a sharp, involuntary gasp.
Everyone looked at her.
Vaelira forced her eyes back to the display.
"Ashbound," she repeated, and her voice only cracked a little. "They’ve surged recently. Led by their captain, S-tier awakened, Ash, surrounded by the three A-tier wenches, Brittany, Stacy, and Trisha, they’ve been pushing aggressively into higher-tier zones, and it’s paying off. Their trajectory puts them on pace to overtake Iron Halo within a day if not hours, and if New Dawn’s montum stalls for any reason, Ashbound could challenge for first."
She let that sit for a mont, then swiped the display, dimming everything below third place.
"As far as strategic relevance goes, everything below the top three is noise. Silver Talon, Black ridian, and below... They don’t have the resources to surpass the first three guilds."
Her eyes moved to the bottom of the active list. To the guild na she’d been avoiding.
Runewoven — 24,140 P ⬇
The arrow pointed down. The number was pathetic. Dead last among active participants, trailing the ninth-place guild by nearly eight thousand points, sitting in a position so far from first that the gap might as well have been asured in light-years.
She didn’t say it out loud. Didn’t need to. The number was right there, glowing in pale blue for everyone in the room to see.
Vaelira closed her mouth and waited.
Silence.
Vaelira braced for it. The tension, the frustration, the barely concealed panic that should have followed a number like twenty-four thousand when first place sat at eighty-eight.
It didn’t co.
Kaiden glanced at the display, nodded once, and took another bite of his sandwich. Alice leaned over his shoulder to squint at the hologram, wrinkled her nose as if the number had mildly inconvenienced her, then went back to picking sesa seeds off her bread and eating them individually.
Aria sipped from her glass.
Luna tilted her head at the standings for about two seconds, then returned to her eggs.
Nyx yawned.
Bastet and Calypso didn’t even honor the hologram with a single look.
That was it. That was the entire collective reaction to being dead last in a competition where the gap to first was over sixty thousand points - the equivalent of 6,000 levels 26-50 monster kills or 1,200 levels 51-75 kills.
An astronomical amount.
Vaelira stared at them. Then at Kaiden. Then back at them.
’Are they insane?’
She’d briefed the notable leaders of the Nova Circuit - Runewoven alliance before, standing in the conference room as the leader of the group, excluding Kaiden’s misfits. Those people were experienced, decorated combatants. She’d watched grown n slam tables over a two-thousand-point deficit. Seen strategists fired on the spot for presenting numbers half as ugly as these.
And this group just... kept eating.
Kaiden chewed. Swallowed. Wiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb.
"Okay. Rock bottom. Got it."
He said it the way soone might comnt on the weather. Overcast today. Bit chilly.
"We’ve been playing it safe. Targeting lower zones, avoiding unnecessary risk. That was the right call at the ti." The casual energy in his posture didn’t change, but sothing behind his eyes did. "It’s not the right call anymore. We’re ready to push, and we’re pushing to the top. So let’s discuss how we make that happen."
His gaze landed on Vaelira.
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