Given that the average baseline life expectancy for a healthy mortal under the Erdtree exceeded eighty-five winters, the thirty-five-year-old Bosares was sitting at his absolute physical apex. A decade of continuous violence on the sands of the capital had tempered his instincts into iron, yielding a combat efficiency that completely outclassed his peers.
Since the conclusion of the crowded sumr leagues, his ledger had soared. In less than three months, over fifty combatants had been broken beneath his Octagonal War Hamr, including several celebrated veterans of the Purple Steel brackets.
As his coin purse and reputation multiplied, his public standing climbed exponentially. The galleries regarded him as the premier rising star of the Mithril tier. He required a single, definitive victory—a bout that could scarcely be labeled an actual confrontation—to breach the inner circle of elite fighters, transforming his na into a prized instrunt coveted by the high court Dukes.
Glancing across the hundred-pace marker at the slender youth whose posture seed entirely un-intimidating, Bosares let out a faint, heavily muffled sigh behind his masterwork visor.
He had broken countless boys of this mold during his early years; they were green, fragile, and utterly blinded by the glittering temptation of coin and na, driving them to commit to a fatal, reckless offensive. Though the administrators strictly prohibited slaughter in the sands, the vast majority of contestants who left the Serante pits paralyzed or dying were precisely these desperate youngsters.
To his veteran eyes, the disparity between their capabilities was a vast, un-bridgeable chasm. He resolved to regulate his output, striking with enough asured restraint to break the boy's guard without splintering his limbs, forcing a clean, bloodless concession. It was a noble, calculated sentint—right up until the iron opening bell rang.
"Pardon ," the youth muttered, his tone entirely devoid of fear.
In the next microsecond, Bosares's field of vision went entirely blank. The boy's silhouette dissolved into thin air, replaced an instant later by an explosive wall of atmospheric wind pressure that sent the veteran staggering backward. His head jerked up, his eyes widening in sudden terror as a blurred streak of silver-gray light closed the distance with terrifying velocity.
The initial hundred-pace boundary had been engineered by the architects to grant crossbown and hidden-weapon skirmishers adequate operational space. Yet, at this exact mont, that precise distance was the only reason Bosares possessed the fractional heartbeat required to react.
The deep muscle mory honed across thousands of hours of sand-combat overrode his shock. Without a conscious thought, he shifted his weight, driving his massive war hamr upward in a desperate, diagonal parry to intercept what he assud was a heavy downward cleave.
CRASH—
The iron collision detonated across the arena like a sudden localized thunderclap. To Bosares's horror, the impact didn't carry the weight of a human blade—it delivered an unimaginable, torrential kinetic force that felt as though a mountain had dropped from the heavens.
The heavy iron teeth of his Octagonal Hamr sheared completely off, fracturing into shards. A violent, agonizing shockwave rippled through Bosares's wrists, shattering the alignnt of his forearms; his knees buckled instantly against the sheer weight, slamming him face-down onto the sand on both knees.
Is this... the Storm Swordsmanship?
The raw agony left him no ti for analytical deduction. Bosares choked back a scream, throwing his weight into a desperate lateral roll across the sand. As he opened the distance, his wrist flicked with practiced precision; the head of his war hamr detached from the shaft with a heavy tallic click, trailing a heavy, concealed chain that whipped through the air directly toward Lucia's eyes.
The weapon that had built his legend was a specialized flail. Across ten years of public matches, the trick was no secret, but Bosares had mastered the fluid transition between hamr and chain, routinely forcing his targets into a clumsy defensive scramble that left their flanks exposed.
But his calculation had failed him entirely.
Against the preternatural reaction matrix Lucia had forged across weeks of dodging Miquella's high-tier incantations, the whipping chain looked agonizingly sluggish. He didn't even require half the kinetic potential of his Dragon King's Body to tilt his fra, effortlessly slipping the iron head by a matter of inches.
Concurrently, his sword-arm coiled and snapped. His mundane steel blade cleaved the compressed air with a high-pitched, piercing whistle, unleashing a faint, shimring crescent of pressurized vacuum that roared from the tip of the steel with the wailing screech of an approaching gale.
[Storm Swordsmanship: Vacuum Slash!]
It was a legendary technique born in the long-dead foundries of the ancient Storm Dynasty—a pinnacle execution among the secret arts of the gale. Even in the current era, where the traditional lineages had stagnated, only a handful of master knights who had spent half their lives refining their physical explosive potential could call forth such a blade.
But Lucia possessed the biological architecture of an Ancient Dragon Demigod. Backed by the raw vitality of the Dragon King's Body and perfected through hundreds of repetitions against Samuel in the void, his casual execution carried a structural violence that surpassed any mortal master.
The invisible crescent sheared through the air. The incoming iron flail chain was instantly cut into segnted links, dropping like dead weight into the sand. The residual vacuum wave drove forward without slowing, tearing two deep, jagged gouges across Bosares's enchanted steel breastplate and lifting his entire fra off the earth, launching him a dozen paces backward before he crashed heavily into the sand.
The roaring, bloodthirsty Colosseum went completely dead silent. Thousands of spectators, including Old Hart in the premium box, stared down at pit four with their mouths open. The stillness was so total that one could hear the dry hiss of the sand settling against the barriers.
Bosares coughed violently, a thick spray of dark blood painting his visor as he struggled to plant his hands. But the internal concussive shock had overridden his nervous system. After two desperate, trembling attempts to rise, his arms collapsed beneath him, and he lay still.
He looked down at the severed steel on his chest. The boy had deliberately held back; the pressurized air had rely grazed his flesh after piercing his heavy plate, and his internal organs remained intact. Once he cleared the congested blood from his throat, the injury was nominal.
"I concede..." he whispered into the sand, his eyes vacant and hollow. The entire sequence felt completely illusory—a fever-dream born of a dead-drunk brawler.
The referee at the edge of the pit remained paralyzed for seven full seconds before his hand snapped to the iron cord, violently ringing the closing bell to terminate the match.
The galleries had lost their fortunes on the betting lines, but the sheer, blinding brilliance of the execution instantly smothered their frustration. Watching a naless, god-tier prodigy tear through a Purple Steel veteran was the exact brand of high-octane drug they craved.
The stadium erupted, chanting the unfamiliar na "Lucifer" until the listone rafters shook. A rain of fresh flower petals and gold-leaf tokens fluttered down onto the sand, and the venue's magical pyrotechnics flared once more, painting the stone arches in brilliant crimson fla.
"Advance his fighter log by a full tier and bring his registry papers this instant!" Old Hart roared over the din, slamming his fist against the box railing. "Have the vanguards escort him directly to my private quarters! I want him signed to represent Serante in the solstice grand championships!"
"Manager... the boy is already gone," an assistant muttered, his face pale and awkward.
"What?"
Hart lunged forward, his eyes scanning the pit. The youth who had just executed the greatest upset of the autumn brackets hadn't remained to absorb the adoration or collect his tokens. He had cleanly vaulted the iron security barrier, moving toward the fighter tunnels with a swift, elusive gait that allowed him to dissolve into the exiting crowds within seconds.
The old manager blurted out a raw, archaic gutter curse. By the ti his enforcers reached the registry floor to intercept the boy's companion, the desk clerk could only report that "Lance" had already collected the winnings from the actuaries and vanished into the lower markets.
Beyond the listone gates of the Serante periter, Lucia's arms dropped as a massive canvas sack was unceremoniously dropped into his chest by a cloaked figure. The unexpected weight nearly threw off his balance.
"This much hard coin?"
"Twenty-to-one arbitrage," Lansseax chuckled behind her silk veil, her shoulders shrugging casually. "I restricted the wager to three thousand Runes to ensure we didn't physically bankrupt the venue. If we drained their entire vault, old Duke Duolis would deploy his personal assassins out of pure financial despair. Toss in the one-thousand-Rune purse for the victory marker, and that's your ledger. All settled in Gold Pupil Runes."
Lucia weighed the heavy leather bag, a profound sense of material accomplishnt warming his blood. "It's a tragedy we can't run this engine every afternoon. If I logged a hundred bouts a day, I could purchase the Upper District by the winter solstice."
"Keep dreaming, Little Dragon," Lansseax scoffed, delivering a sharp rap to his steel helm with her knuckles. "The Serante network will spend the next week tearing the Lower District apart to unearth 'Lucifer.' Before we return to the pits, I'll have our logistics priests forge a bulletproof fake identity under that handle."
"My thanks, Sister."
"Words are cheap. Let's discuss the split. How are we dividing the haul?"
"A clean fifty-fifty?" Lucia offered smoothly.
"And who claims the larger half?"
"Wait, what?"
The pair navigated the cobblestone thoroughfares, their banter cutting through the afternoon heat. Because the journey back to the northern gates was massive and their limbs were heavy from the exertion, they bypassed the footpaths to lease a common covered hackney carriage from a comrcial stable, intending to return to the eastern plaza first.
Not long after the wooden wheels began to roll, a foul, heavy stench wove through the carriage window, carrying the unmistakable tallic taint of fresh blood. Lucia's brow furrowed. He slid the wooden blind aside, peering out into the narrow alleyway.
The carriage had entered a remote, un-paved comrcial lane. At the center of the clearing sat an extraordinarily wide, stone-lined ground well, its depths lost in shadow.
Five or six heavy flatbed freight wagons were currently converging on the stone rim. The human drivers were swinging long leather whips, lashing the mules to accelerate the pace. The storage beds behind them were draped in thick canvas cloths so choked with black mud and grease that the original color had long since vanished. The fabric was bulging heavily, stuffed to the absolute limit with a massive, irregular cargo.
"Those are Corpse Carriages," Lansseax's voice cut through the silence, her tone suddenly dropping into a cold, flat register that held no trace of humor.
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