The blue flas hit the sky.
Not the coliseum ceiling. The open sky above it, reaching high enough that the nearest sponsor clouds scattered sideways to avoid the heat. The crowd noise cut off for one clean second before it ca back twice as loud.
"WHAT IS THIS! ELIAS IGNION SUDDENLY SHOWCASING A HIDDEN POWER! WHERE DID THIS CO FROM!"
Kreasial was ten ters from the nearest fla and still had to raise one arm. "Ah shit! It’s hot!"
Auros was closer. The blisters had already started on his wrist, the back of his hand, the side of his neck. He was pulling air in through his teeth and not managing to hold his ground, one foot sliding back across the stone.
"WHAT A TURN OF EVENTS! CLASS A REMAINS THE LEADING PARTICIPANTS BUT BOTH CLASS B AND CLASS F ARE DOWN TO ONE REPRESENTATIVE EACH!"
Auros, eyes on Elias. "What’s happening to him?"
Xavier didn’t answer.
He was watching the red vein patterns spreading from Elias’s temples. The bloodshot eyes. The drool at the corner of his mouth that Elias hadn’t noticed. The way his hands were shaking even while holding the output.
"YOU!" Elias’s voice ca out scraped raw, like sothing inside his throat was cooking. His eyes had been on Xavier since before the flas started and they hadn’t moved. "People will not look down on anymore! Not disrespect ! I am more competent! MORE POWERFUL!"
Xavier’s left eye squinted against the heat.
This didn’t happen.
Every version of this tiline he’d walked through from mory had Elias in the second format with standard fire output, a loss to Auros, an early forfeit. This stat,whatever this was, had never appeared. Not here. Not in this year.
His eyes moved sideways.
At the platform’s edge, the healers had a stretcher out. A figure with gold hair lay flat on it, the pink bellus at his collar working with both front paws, green light spreading and retreating and spreading again.
Is this because of him.
The calculation ran and ran behind his eyes and kept arriving at nothing solid.
Krishka. Is this your doing.
"YOU’RE LOOKING AWAY AGAIN!"
The fireball left Elias’s palms at carriage size, orange at the core and blue at the edges, rotating inward on itself. The platform stones beneath Elias’s feet cracked from the heat of his own output.
"WATCH OUT—" Auros lurched back.
Xavier moved.
Both palms ca together hard and he pulled them apart and the white sphere between them grew with the distance — light filling the space in a continuous smooth pull, not generated, just gathered from everything around it.
"Extinguish."
He fired it forward.
The sphere hit the fireball center and the crowd saw the fireball disappear. Gone in a blink, swallowed completely, like a candle snuffed in a closed fist.
That was what it looked like.
Xavier clapped his hands together.
High above the coliseum, in the open sky, a glow appeared. Small at first. Then not.
Then it moved.
The fireball fell back down. Sa fire. Sa rotation. Sa heat. Just aid sowhere different now.
Aid directly at Elias.
Elias looked up.
"YOU DARE USE MY OWN MAGIC AGAINST—"
Xavier was already running.
"Yes," he said.
The fireball hit the platform between them and the shockwave reached every corner of the coliseum floor at once. A two-ter crater blew open in the stone, edges glowing red. Elias had moved and the edge of the flas still caught his shoulder and he scread and the fire in his palms doubled.
Xavier had a new sphere in his left hand, building while his feet moved.
He turned his head once. Found Auros across the smoke.
Auros’s eyes were already on him.
One nod. That was all.
Auros turned away from Elias, raised both closed fists above his head, and drove them straight into the platform floor.
The shockwave rolled outward from his knuckles in a visible wave, stone cracking in a radial burst, the tremor severe enough to reach every part of the platform at once. On the far end, Kreasial’s footing went.
"AH— FUCK!" She hit the ground on one knee, smacked her palm on the stone, and pushed herself back up.
Elias scread. His nose split open, blood rushing over his lips. The fire surged hotter, a full shade bluer. He didn’t dodge the spikes, he burned through them, blue fla dissolving the stone in the air three ters before it reached him, and the temperature across the entire platform climbed another step.
Dust and smoke filled the coliseum. Xavier raised both arms to cover his eyes and kept moving through it.
"FOLKS, I AM GENUINELY AS CONFUSED AS ALL OF YOU! WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH ELIAS IGNION!"
In the sponsor section, Mareth pointed down at the platform. "Velion. You seeing this? What’s wrong with that kid?"
Velion’s drink hadn’t moved from the table. He was leaning forward with both elbows on the railing, eyes narrow. "Elven Tears."
"The what?"
"A drug. Elven blood combined with fragnted rupture cores." His voice was the sa flat tone he used for quarterly reports. "Elven trafficking offense. It floods the body with aetheric blood artificially. Bloodshot eyes, extre aetheric surge, emotional amplification — whatever the person already feels, it becos a hundred tis larger and louder."
Mareth stared at him. "How are you that sure?"
Velion pointed at Elias’s forearms. At the red vein lines raised through the skin like sothing trying to push out from underneath. "The symptoms."
In the family section, a woman in a red dress was already on her feet. Black hair, both hands white-knuckled on the railing, eyes on the platform.
"MY SON! What is happening to my son!"
"Ma’am, please calm—"
"THAT IS NOT MY SON! STOP THIS! CALL THIS OFF RIGHT NOW!"
The murmurs spread in a wave through the nearest rows first and then further. The people beside her pulled back. The people two rows up leaned forward. Soone in the foreign observer section had stopped watching the platform entirely and was watching the family section instead. The council representative from Draknil’s family sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes gone from spectator-sharp to sothing colder and more specific.
Xavier watched Elias through the dust and smoke.
Elven Tears.
The first ti he’d encountered those symptoms was after the Vanishing Incident — two full years from now, when the supply chains had been running long enough that half the underground market stocked it. Before the Vanishing Incident it hadn’t existed. That was what he’d known. That was what his mory said.
He dodged right. A blast of blue fire passed through where he’d been and left a black scorch mark across the stone two ters long.
Ball of light in his right palm, building.
The main variable he couldn’t account for was on a stretcher at the edge of the platform. The one thing that hadn’t been in this tiline the last ti he’d run it. The deviation that had been sitting at the edge of every calculation since the first week of the sester.
Vexis Lestilaut.
Who are you really.
"XAVIER!" Auros’s voice cut through the smoke from across the platform. "He’s past our range threshold! We end this now!"
Xavier stopped moving.
He closed his eyes.
The light in his palms changed. White first — clean photon output, the sa thing he’d been running all format. Then it shifted. Golden. Transparent. Warm rather than bright. And inside the sphere a faint thread of red-orange started circling, moving faster with each revolution, tightening inward.
He brought both hands around it and held it between his palms in the air.
The aetheric blood ca rushing all at once — from his chest, his shoulders, down through his forearms to his fingers — and the golden light spread up his wrists and across the backs of his hands. The veins there lit white.
He breathed out.
"Illumination."
The sphere disappeared.
It appeared on Elias’s abdon.
The entire coliseum went gold.
Not bright. Beyond bright. A warm, total saturation that swallowed every other light in the venue simultaneously, printed itself behind the eyes, removed shadows from the stone and the stands and the sky all at once. The crowd went from chaos to absolute silence.
Two full seconds.
The light released.
Elias was standing.
His uniform was gone from the waist up, burned away and gone. His eyes were white and open. Blood ran from both eyes in thin lines, down from his nose, and welled at the corner of his mouth in a slow gather.
He fell hard.
The platform didn’t shake. He just went straight down and the stone t him and it was done.
The silence held for a mont longer.
The announcer found his voice the way soone finds a light switch in the dark — by feel, slowly.
"So... um." A pause. "Class B has been eliminated. Class A and Class F will advance to the final format."
Nothing happened for one more second.
Then the entire coliseum ca apart.
"WHAT DID I JUST WATCH—"
"ARE THESE REALLY SECOND-YEAR MAGES—"
"WHAT WAS THAT LIGHT—"
Xavier lowered his palms. Breathed in once through his nose. His forearms were still warm where the aetheric blood had surged.
His eyes found the stretcher at the platform’s edge.
Gold hair. Pink bellus still working at the collar. The red-haired woman from the family section had gotten to the floor sohow and was already there with both hands on the stretcher railing, talking fast at the healer. A man with wine he still hadn’t drunk stood two steps behind her. A younger woman with a fist closed at her side stood one step behind him.
Xavier looked at the figure on the stretcher for a long mont.
Vexis Lestilaut.
I need to know who you are.
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