Ahead of them, the final veils sat across the horizon like they owned the place.
Each one was different. Each one hit the senses from a distance, colors moving slowly and strangely across their surfaces, pressure rolling off them in waves that made it very clear these weren’t just doors into the next stage. These were sothing closer to a verdict.
Almond didn’t rush. No reason to.
"Final round," Natalia said, already rolling her shoulders out, looking over the options like she was browsing a nu. "Now this looks interesting."
"Interesting," Ainen repeated, scanning the veil line. "Sure. That’s one word for it."
Clovelle was quiet for a second, the kind of quiet that ant she was already three steps ahead. "The Pulse distortion is significantly denser here. This isn’t just another combat stage. The system’s doing sothing more layered."
Lily wasn’t looking at the veils.
She was looking at the other participants.
"We go with the one that gives the most control," she said quietly.
"Or the one where control isn’t even a factor," Almond said.
Lily nodded.
Saffa’s grin showed up imdiately. "Yeah, that one."
Gopu had already stopped walking. He was staring at a specific veil, head tilted slightly, like he could hear sothing in it the others hadn’t tuned into yet. "That one," he said.
They all followed his line of sight.
Deep crimson-violet. Where the other veils pulsed with restless, almost irritable energy, this one moved slowly, rhythmic, steady, like a heartbeat scaled up to the size of a building. The air around its edges warped faintly. And even from a distance, there was sothing sitting behind it. Not just threat level or difficulty rating. Sothing that felt present.
A system panel flickered into existence as they drew closer.
> [Final Veil: Bloodpoint Dominion]
> All participants will be assigned 100 Life Points upon entry.
> Life Points can be gained by killing monsters or other participants.
> Life Points required to exit: 1,000
> Death Condition: Life Points reduced to 0
> Maximum Threat Level: Tier-16
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Natalia smiled, slow, genuine, the kind that only showed up when sothing actually had her interest. "Oh, I like this one."
Ainen cracked his neck. Left, then right. "Clean rules. No gimmicks."
"Yep."
Lily’s expression didn’t shift much, but sothing settled behind it. "Perfect for us."
Almond was already moving toward the veil. "Then we’re done talking."
All nine of them walked straight into the crimson-violet light and let it take them.
---
The transition wasn’t dramatic.
No flash of light. No cinematic dissolve. Just a sudden, total shift in pressure, like reality had decided to update without warning, and then they were sowhere else entirely.
Specifically: suspended in mid-air, a few hundred ters above the most aggressively chaotic battlefield any of them had ever seen.
The arena was massive. Not stadium-massive, continent-massive. Huge chunks of terrain floated at different heights across an enormous open space, connected by nothing, drifting in slow, irregular patterns. Broken towers jutted off the edges of so platforms. Bridges led to nowhere. Entire structures had been split cleanly down the middle, each half still floating independently like they hadn’t gotten the ssage yet. Everything was bathed in a dim, red-bruised light that ca from no visible source and made the shadows sit strangely.
And moving through all of it, monsters.
Not a few. Not a pack. Thousands. Every size and configuration imaginable, spread across every visible surface and the open air between them, hunting or being hunted or just existing in a way that made clear they belonged here, and everything else was trespassing.
Scattered among them, falling from the sa entry point, were other slaves. Already working. Already moving with direction and purpose, because everybody who made it to this stage knew exactly what the ga was.
The system text hit clean and simple.
> [Life Points Assigned: 100]
> [Begin]
Almond said one word.
"Spread."
And then everyone was gone.
---
Almond fell like he’d been aid at sothing.
The Exalted Grimblade ford in his grip on the way down, Edge of Ruin already active, not because he needed the warmup, but because the first platform he was landing on was already occupied by a winged beast the size of a small house, chest armored in overlapping layers, eyes locked on him the mont he entered its range.
He let it close the gap.
Then moved.
The strike didn’t just cut through; it cracked the space around it, a visible pressure wave rolling out from the blade’s path and splintering the platform surface beneath the beast’s feet before it even registered being hit. The impact launched it backward, which was fine, because that just put it in range for the second swing.
Imprint. The mark was set into it like a brand.
Third strike. Detonation.
The explosion punched outward clean and caught three nearby monsters in the spread. Two went off the platform edge, one slamd into a broken wall, and stopped moving. Almond was already walking toward the next cluster before the dust settled.
> [Life Points: 128]
He didn’t check the number. He already knew the math.
---
Natalia landed on a wide, drifting platform, looked around at the wall of monsters heading toward her from multiple directions, and said, "Alright, let’s roll" in the sa tone soone would use to start a card ga.
Her deck opened.
Infinite Fortune Ballistics.
Golden weapons materialized in lazy orbit around her, pistols, rifles, things that blurred the line between the two, floating in loose formation and waiting. She raised a hand.
The first shot curved in mid-air. Not a little. Dramatically, arcing wide around a piece of floating debris and coming at its target from the completely wrong direction. Another shot split into three at the peak of its arc, each fragnt tracking independently. A third blinked out of existence entirely and reappeared three ters behind a charging monster, which promptly stopped charging.
A full pack crested the platform edge at once. Wide spread. Clearly banking on volu.
Natalia didn’t move.
The guns adjusted their orbit, tracked, fired, and the entire pack dropped before the fastest one made it halfway across the platform.
> [Life Points: 142]
She tilted her head, watching the last one fall. "Yeah," she said. "This works."
---
Ainen landed on a tilted rock shelf, balanced on its high edge like it was perfectly level, which it was not, and spent about three seconds assessing the multiple groups of monsters converging on him from different angles.
Then he smiled.
"Kitchen’s open."
Flas rose from his hands, and they were imdiately not normal flas. Three different fires, side by side: a heavy, slow amber that moved through the air like it weighed sothing, a sharp white flicker that spat and snapped restlessly at the edges, and a deep pulsing red that breathed, actually breathed, in and out like it was alive and mildly annoyed about it.
He held them close together. Let them interact. Pushed them inward.
They rged, not cleanly, the way fire tends not to when you force three different personalities into one body, and condensed into sothing that didn’t have a na because it probably hadn’t existed before this mont. He shaped it anyway. Guns ford. Loaded themselves, sohow.
He fired once.
The bullet hit the lead monster in the chest and detonated inward, not outward, and the layered burn effects spread out from the impact point in a chain, jumping from monster to monster through the pack, each one carrying slightly different properties. The last one caught a residue of the amber, which kept eating at it quietly and thoroughly long after everything else was done.
Three more packs ca over the edges.
He didn’t move.
He just kept cooking. Combining new things. Firing. Every shot was a different configuration, every result sohow worse than the previous one for whatever was on the receiving end.
> [Life Points: 167]
He loaded the next round, glanced at the fresh wave coming, and exhaled easily. "Yeah," he said. "Fun."
---
Saffa did not land so much as she arrived.
She dropped straight through a monster cluster, no announcent, no warning, just sudden presence, and swung Gearbreaker on the way down, before her feet even found the platform. The hamr expanded mid-swing. The impact didn’t scatter them. It erased the space they were standing in, cracking the platform surface in a starburst from the point of contact and launching everything within ten ters like they’d been hit by sothing much larger than one person with a hamr, which arguably they had been.
Three went off the edge. Two more hit a drifting rock wall hard enough to leave outlines.
Saffa landed, checked the wreckage around her, and laughed. Loud and genuine.
"Finally," she said, already moving. "Sothing that hits back."
---
Kayla found a stable platform, elevated, wide, good sight lines, and settled in.
She closed her eyes for exactly one second.
Roots tore out of the stone beneath her and spread. Fast, faster than anything with mass had any right to move, threading across adjacent platforms, weaving down through the gaps between them, establishing coverage across every natural approach to her position without asking permission from the terrain. They didn’t hunt. They just waited, patient and absolute, a living grid that knew what it was for.
Monsters ca in from three directions.
None of them ca out the other side.
Her count climbed in a steady, almost tronomic rhythm. No spikes. No gaps. Just control running exactly as intended.
---
Lily was visible for about thirty seconds after entry.
Then her Dreadlings flooded outward, and she was just one more shadow moving through a field full of them.
The swarm didn’t just hunt, it fard. Spreading across platforms in coordinated sweeps, cycling through weaker monster clusters with chanical efficiency, maximizing kill rate per second with the kind of precision that suggested this had been thought about well before anyone stepped into a veil. While they handled volu, Lily personally handled everything worth handling, appearing and vanishing between engagents, no wasted movent, no unnecessary contact.
Her count climbed faster than almost anyone else on the field.
She looked like she was barely paying attention.
---
Fraisea turned her section of the battlefield into a very quiet place.
Not safe. Just quiet.
Everything that entered her range slowed: movent, reaction, thought. The monsters that ca at her didn’t understand what was happening until the cold had already gotten into them, until they were already locking up at the joints, already cracking apart without drama or noise.
thodical. Precise. The kind of violence that didn’t need to announce itself to be the most effective thing in the room.
---
Gopu went the opposite direction in every possible sense.
Lightning split across the sky the second he got moving, carving jagged paths between the floating platforms and leaving afterimages that took a full second to fade. He hit monsters head-on at full speed, no positioning, no economy of movent, just raw force building into more force, each collision adding to a montum that turned him less into a fighter and more into a direction that things were about to get destroyed in.
It was not elegant.
It worked completely.
---
Clovelle was the easiest to underestimate, right up until you understood what you were looking at.
She stood still for a mont after landing, just a mont, barely noticeable, with the calm expression of soone reading a problem they’ve mostly already solved. Her deck activated, and the space around her shifted. Not visibly, not at first. But the projectiles she launched traveled faster than they should have. Her movent covered a distance with slightly less ti between the start and end of it. Every impact landed harder because montum had no room to bleed off before the next strike was stacked on top.
She didn’t look like soone fighting.
She looked like soone running a process.
Everything she touched launched. Nothing she engaged stayed standing long enough to beco a problem.
---
Ti in the Dominion wasn’t slow or fast. It was just relentless, chewing through the clock and spitting it out behind them while nine people turned a Tier-16 battlefield into a logistics exercise.
Thirty minutes. Everyone crossed 300.
One hour. They passed 600.
By then, the other slaves had taken notice. Smart ones adjusted their routes and gave the group a wide, quiet berth. Others, fewer and less smart, tried to hunt them. It didn’t go anywhere. The ones who got close enough to commit to it got added to soone’s count and subtracted from the field.
---
Two hours in, and the Dominion had a different character.
Thinned. Not empty, the platform density was still significant, but the volu of easy kills was gone. What remained were the monsters that had survived this long because they deserved to, and the slaves who’d been careful enough, or desperate enough, to still be standing. Everything left on the field knew what it was doing.
The noise was lower. More deliberate.
This was the closing stretch, and everyone still moving could feel it.
---
Almond stood at the edge of a cracked platform and checked his count.
> [Life Points: 982]
He exhaled once. Rolled his wrist.
Three targets in range, different sizes, nothing complicated. He moved through them in sequence, clean and unhurried, and was done before the last one fully understood the situation it was in.
> [Life Points: 1,000]
White light wrapped around him, warm and total and final.
Exit condition t.
---
Across the battlefield, the sa light appeared eight more tis.
One by one.
Not scrambled, not barely-made-it. Just done.
Natalia. Ainen. Lily. Saffa. Kayla. Clovelle. Fraisea. Gopu.
"h, the Tier-16 here are not that good."
"Likely because most of them must have lost so cards or a deck or two, or they wouldn’t be here as slaves despite being Tier-16."
"Indeed."
---
They ca back into the open field together, the Dominion’s pressure cutting off the instant they crossed back out, like stepping out of a thunderstorm into still air. The survivors already outside were scattered across the ground in various states of sitting, lying down, or staring blankly at nothing with the specific expression of people who’d made it through sothing enormous and hadn’t finished understanding it yet.
A few looked up when the nine appeared.
Then looked back down. Nothing to say to that.
---
The system ssage ca through quietly.
> [Final Veil Cleared]
> [Ranking Calculated]
> [Top 100 Participants Confird]
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