Back in the viewing stands...
The inscription board above the eastern part had been running for a while now, nas and kill counts updating in real ti with the satisfying regularity of a competition going exactly as designed.
The crowd had found its rhythm, reacting to significant jumps in ranking, groaning when favorites dropped positions, the ambient noise of several thousand people watching sothing they were invested in.
Gray was watching the board, focused on the rankings.
’...Mhm.’
Lyra was sitting at thirty-first, her kill count climbing at a pace that was pretty consistent, aning that she might have found a good spot.
Seraph was at fourth.
Had been at fourth for the past several minutes, her count climbing faster than almost anyone else on the board, the gaps between her updates shorter than most participants, which ant she was moving quickly and not wasting ti between kills.
Gray watched her number.
It ticked up once more, and then... it suddenly halted.
’...She’s probably resting now,’ he noted inwardly, switching back to see Lyra’s ranking before then looking at the projections.
All the participants seed to be at ease killing the beasts, and none of them didn’t seem to encounter a strong one yet.
’It seems that this first phase was a little dependent in luck,’ Gray stretched his arms above his head before rolling his neck lightly.
"...Bored?" Maelis asked with a small smile.
She was still clinging to his arm since the mont he sat there. Gray smiled back, and nodded before suddenly pushing Maelis’s head onto his shoulder.
"A-ah...?" Maelis let out a strange sound, bewildered by his actions.
Gray gently leaned his head on top of hers, and let out a faint sigh.
"Stay like this for a mont," he closed his eyes.
He was simply using Maelis’s body to get into a comfortable position to rest his eyes since he was sure that she wouldn’t mind.
"Mhm..." Maelis humd lightly, and also closed her eyes.
They spent a few minutes like this, until suddenly...
"What’s happening with the Eldest Princess?"
"Her score hasn’t changed yet!"
Hearing the whispers around, Gray’s senses tingled intensely, causing him to instantly snap his eyes open and look at the scoreboard.
The board updated around her entry, nas above and below changing as their counts climbed, but Seraph’s number sat exactly where it was, unchanged, as if the person attached to it had simply stopped doing anything.
He frowned at this.
He waited a few more minutes, and still nothing.
Around him the crowd continued its noise, reacting to a sudden surge from a Wild Academy student who had jumped fifteen positions in under a minute, the kind of dramatic movent that pulled collective attention imdiately.
’...Fuck.’
He sat forward slightly.
Then the projection above the field, which had been cycling through various dungeon sections showing highlight monts for the crowd, flickered.
Seraph’s section of the forest appeared briefly in the projection feed, the inscription system attempting to locate and display her position for the audience the way it had been displaying other participants throughout the phase.
It showed trees.
Just trees.
The projection held for two seconds, found nothing worth displaying, and moved on to another participant’s feed automatically.
Gray’s frown deepened.
The projection system tracked participants through their soul seal registration.
For it to display an empty location ant it had found her registered coordinates but had nothing to show at them, which ant either she had moved faster than the tracking system could follow or...
He stood up.
Maelis looked up at him imdiately.
"Gray?"
He was already looking at the instructor’s observation platform to the left of the main stage, where Ellen stood with two other faculty mbers monitoring the competition’s administrative feed.
Ellen was frowning at sothing in front of her.
That was enough information for him.
"Gray, what—" Maelis started, but was interrupted almost imdiately.
"—Sothing’s happening with Seraph."
His eyes narrowed sharply.
"[✧Swap✧]"
Gray appeared beside Ellen instantly, but Ellen didn’t flinch at all, as she had seen enough in her life that sudden appearances beside her registered as information rather than shock.
She looked at him sideways.
"Gray...?"
"What happened to Seraph?" he asked directly without a single mont of hesitation.
Ellen’s frown, which had been directed at the administrative feed in front of her, deepened by a fraction.
"Her locator seal went dark approximately six minutes ago," she spoke solemnly.
"...Literally dark as as if sothing cut the connection entirely."
"Sothing or soone."
Ellen said nothing to that, which was its own answer.
Gray looked at the administrative feed.
It was considerably more detailed than the public board, showing participant positions as moving points of light across a mapped overlay of the dungeon’s interior.
Every other point was visible, so clustered, so spread across the forest’s wider sections.
Seraph’s point was clearly absent.
"Can you pull her out?" he asked.
"To do that I would need to halt the extraction array and redirect it to a specific coordinate." Ellen’s voice was even.
"Which ans stopping the festival."
"Then stop it."
"Gray." Ellen looked at him properly now. "Four hundred and seventy participants. Three other academies. Contracts, agreents, reputations." She held his gaze.
"I cannot stop the festival on the basis of a locator seal going dark. Not without confirmation of an actual incident."
"Her seal going dark is confirmation enough."
"Not institutionally."
Gray looked at the empty point on the map where Seraph’s marker should have been.
His jaw was tight.
"Then send soone in after her," he said.
"Everyone I can send is either managing the festival infrastructure or monitoring the other participants." She paused.
"And frankly, Gray, whoever I send—"
She stopped herself, and didn’t finish the sentence as she knew that Gray would understand what she ant by saying those words.
Gray was quiet for a mont, still looking at the map.
Then he looked up.
"Does the festival accept late participants?"
Ellen turned to look at him fully.
For exactly two seconds her expression did sothing that was neither her classroom composure nor her combat coldness but sothing that lived briefly between the two before her lips curved upward at one corner.
"...They do."
Gray reached into his dinsional storage.
The rapier ca out and sat in his hand with the familiar weight of sothing that had been there before and knew how to be there again.
He looked at the arena field below the platform, and found specific point.
A small error in the stone near the portal’s outer ring, a faint grain of displaced dust sitting in the gap between two inscription lines.
"[✧Swap✧]"
He appeared on the arena field between one mont and the next, the platform where Ellen stood now empty of him, the field now containing him, the portal’s light catching his rapier and throwing it across the stone in a long bright line.
The arena went silent for exactly one second.
Then it didn’t.
The noise that followed was not the polite, curious response of a crowd encountering sothing unexpected.
It was imdiate and enormous and recognition-shaped, the specific sound of several thousand people identifying soone simultaneously and responding to that identification with everything they had.
"IS THAT—"
"THAT’S GRAY VIREUX!!!"
"THAT MONSTROUS GENIUS WHO REGAINED HIS TALENT?!"
"HE’S ENTERING?! NOW?!"
The Clentine section was loudesT... obviously.
Several students were on their feet before the noise had fully built, pointing with the uninhibited enthusiasm of people who had watched him in the dungeon practical and had been waiting, without knowing they were waiting, for exactly this.
Gray walked toward the portal without acknowledging any of it.
His expression was the sa as it always was.
The announcer, to his credit, recovered quickly.
"WELL—" His voice hit the inscription amplification and filled the arena with the delighted energy of soone who had not planned for this and was genuinely thrilled by the deviation.
"IT APPEARS WE HAVE ONE FINAL PARTICIPANT JOINING THE FIELD—"
The crowd responded.
"GRAY D’AURÉLION OF THE CLENTINE ACADEMY’S EXCHANGE PROGRAM—"
Louder.
"ENTERING THE FIRST PHASE AS THE FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FOURTH PARTICIPANT—"
The noise peaked into sothing that stopped being identifiable as individual sounds and beca a single collective presence filling the enclosed space from floor to ceiling.
Gray reached the portal’s threshold.
He looked at it for exactly one second.
Sowhere in there, Seraph was backed against sothing with considerably more than she should have been dealing with alone, and the festival’s tracking system had lost her, and Ellen couldn’t stop the clock, and no one else was going in.
’...Phew. Let’s hope it’s not a mid-tier demon or sothing higher than that. At least... be human, I’m more skilled at killing those.’
His eyes narrowed slighly as he took a step forward and stepped through, feeling a strange energy wash over his body as the portal swallowed him whole.
"HE’S ENTERRRINGGGGGGGGG!!!"
But even as he disappeared from their view, the arena continued its noise behind him, enormous and warm and entirely irrelevant to where he was going.
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