In the reserved stands of the high nobility, three figures observed with radically different expressions.
Kassian Goldcrest narrowed his eyes with disdain. "Pathetic," he murmured. "The mushroom boy sends his lizard to die and runs behind like an idiot. The commoner doesn't even know the basics of beast combat... The spy I have following him is a waste of ti."
His fingers drumd rhythmically on the armrest of his seat. The ineptitude he was witnessing from the commoner with noble aspirations was personally offensive to him.
It was a waste that such a subject had a second beast. The fungus in the first place didn't count as a beast, so he was practically just a common tar...
'What nonsense!'
Several seats away, Sirius Starweaver observed with an indecipherable expression. Unlike the other noble who openly showed his disdain, Luna's father seed intrigued. He rembered the child with an unusual beast being interrogated that day, but his expectations had been betrayed...
"Terrible tactical choice," he finally comnted, his tone neutral but his eyes intensely fixed on the small tar. "I wonder if I expected too much."
Finally, Selphira Ashenway showed an enigmatic smile. Unlike her companions, she didn't seem surprised or annoyed. Her eyes, sharp as a hawk's, followed Ren's every movent with interest.
"The boy has guts and heroic desires," she said softly, almost to herself. "Or knowledge that we don't possess."
Her long fingers interlaced over her lap as she leaned slightly forward.
"Either way," she added with a spark of amusent in her eyes, "this will be... revealing."
♢♢♢♢
Ren ran after his beast, spear in hand, prepared to attack...
The enormous stone monster, detecting the small creature approaching, activated its attack chanism. Using elental control over earth and the brute force of its hind legs, it launched itself into the air, diving directly toward the small hydra.
"It's finished!" soone exclaid from the stands. "The Lurker is going to bite that lizard!"
Ren adjusted his position, preparing the spear. Many assud he would try to throw it when the monster opened its mouth, but those who knew the Stone Lurker's anatomy knew that would be useless; the beast palate was reinforced with a structure as hard as the external rock itself.
Yet at that critical mont, Ren did sothing unexpected.
With a quick gesture, he retracted his hydra, which transford into a beam of light returning to his body and rging with him. Instantly, the transformation began: reptilian scales appeared on his skin, his muscles grew slightly, and the characteristic translucent armor materialized over his chest.
But the most surprising thing was happening with the Stone Lurker in mid-air. Its trajectory changed abruptly, as if an invisible force was pulling it. Its head was thrown back, its mouth opened wider than normal, and...
Its belly was completely exposed in front of Ren!
"What the hell is happening?" Confusion was widespread among the spectators.
The answer ca an instant later, when the effort to hold onto the beetle broke the invisibility of Min's amphibian. The translucent beast suddenly appeared on the shoulder of the Living Tunnel, Taro's enormous beetle that had been waiting behind the Big Stone Lurker the entire ti, invisible thanks to the amphibian's ability.
The beetle was pulling the monster's head back forcefully, having reached its back during those initial five seconds of apparent immobility.
"They were there the whole ti!"
"The amphibian made them invisible!"
Now Ren had a direct shot at the Stone Lurker's cloaca, the most vulnerable point of its anatomy that connected directly to one of its vital organs.
With gritted teeth, he concentrated all his energy.
The veins of light glowed intensely throughout his body, channeling maximum power to his muscles already reinforced by the hydra.
With an explosive movent, Ren launched the modified proboscis. The projectile shot out with devastating force, cleanly piercing the Stone Lurker's cloaca and boring all the way to its brain, which retained the sa basic anatomy as its lower-rank counterpart.
The Stone Lurker froze in mid-air, its body tensing completely before collapsing heavily. The lost glow in its eyes and the limpness of its legs signaled its total defeat.
The silence that followed was absolute. The tikeepers verified their devices with incredulity.
"Victory for Team Eight of Group B," Yang finally announced, his voice betraying a hint of amazent. "Ti: fifteen seconds."
For an instant, no one reacted. Then, a senior year student stood up.
"Fifteen seconds?" The question resonated in a completely stunned stadium. "FIFTEEN SECONDS?"
Chaos erupted in the stands. Shouts, exclamations of disbelief, amazed applause, all mixed in a cacophony of reactions to what they had just witnessed.
Ren's team had pulverized the previous record. They hadn't matched it, they hadn't surpassed it by a small margin...
They had reduced it to an eighth.
Min was the first to break composure. With a shout of pure joy, he jumped on Ren, nearly knocking him down. "WE DID IT! DAMN, WE DID IT!"
Taro, normally the shyest of the trio, ran in circles with arms outstretched, his face illuminated by a smile so wide it threatened to split his face in two. "FIFTEEN SECONDS! FIFTEEN! TAKE THAT, SNOBS!"
Even Ren, always the most controlled, couldn't avoid an explosion of childish euphoria. He raised the spear over his head like a trophy, his armor shining with almost blinding intensity.
"THAT WAS AMAZING!" shouted Min, hugging Ren and Taro simultaneously. "DID YOU SEE THEIR FACES?! EVERYONE THOUGHT YOU WERE CRAZY!"
"PERFECT!" responded Taro, punching the air with his fist. "ABSOLUTELY PERFECT! IT WORKED EXACTLY AS YOU SAID, REN!"
Ren, with his cheeks flushed with excitent, nodded between laughs. "PERFECT TEAMWORK!"
In the first-year section, reactions were clearly divided between those who knew Ren and those who didn't.
Liora applauded with barely contained enthusiasm, her eyes shining with pride.
Larissa, normally refined even in her most expressive monts, had abandoned all pretense of decorum. Standing, she cheered like a fan at a gladiator tournant. "THAT'S IT, REN! SHOW THEM HOW IT'S DONE!"
And perhaps... Just perhaps... The girls' reaction was greater than expected because they had been a little upset when Klein surpassed their team's record...
Luna, always more controlled, observed with intensity, her shadow wolf partially manifesting as a reflection of her surprise at a greater defeat than expected.
But despite this, she had a contained but genuine smile, her eyes revealing a mixture of admiration and calculation. "Impressive," she comnted softly. "Truly impressive."
Han, from his seat, nodded once.
"I suspected it," he murmured, more to himself than to those around him. "He really is different."
Roran and the others practically jumped in their seats, shouting congratulations that were lost in the general tumult. Mira had conjured small flowers that she threw into the air in celebration, while Jun applauded with fire in his eyes.
The contrast couldn't be more marked with another sector of the stands.
Jin was pale, his fists so tight his fingers had turned white. "Impossible," he repeated chanically. "It's impossible. It has to be a trick. A deception."
Kai, beside him, shook his head in disbelief.
Cass, perhaps the most pragmatic of the trio, simply observed in silence, recalculating every assumption she had made about Ren Patinder and his useless spore. Perhaps that hydra was...
But the most violent reaction ca from Klein. The Goldcrest heir seed to have been physically struck. His breathing was irregular, his face contorted into a mask of fury and humiliation. The record he had worked so hard to establish, that ant so much to his family, had been pulverized in an instant.
And not by Luna, the Dravenholm or the Ashenway, that would have been understandable, maybe even acceptable... But by a nobody, a boy from the Gray Wing with a beast universally considered useless.
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