Chapter 84: Funny Thing
The three hired blades moved first, and Aidan almost felt bad for them.
Almost.
The nearest one came in fast, twin daggers slicked with something that hissed where it dripped onto leaves, poison worked into the metal itself. Aidan let the first slash pass a hair from his ribs, caught the man’s wrist with a burst of electromagnetism, and simply squeezed until the daggers clattered uselessly to the forest floor.
"Nice knives," Aidan said. "Terrible grip."
He put the man down with an elbow that folded him over a root, unconscious before he finished falling.
The second blade unfurled a talisman mid-charge, paper burning gold as it summoned a spirit-hawk of shrieking wind, and Aidan simply reached out with Silence, the Duskrend Scythe’s mute current swallowing every sound the construct needed to hold its shape. The hawk guttered and died mid-shriek, and its summoner had exactly enough time to look betrayed before Aidan’s fist ended his part in the conversation.
"Should’ve paid extra for the version that doesn’t need noise," Aidan said, stepping over him.
The third came in heavy, armored, an enchanted gauntlet crackling with stored force, and Aidan let Gravity answer that one specifically, dragging the man’s own charging weight down half a step at the exact wrong moment. The gauntlet’s discharge went into the dirt instead of Aidan’s face, and Aidan’s return strike sent him skidding into a tree hard enough to shake loose leaves for a full ten meters around.
Three down. Neither Nevelrot had lifted a finger yet.
"Hired help," Aidan said, rolling his neck. "Really wasn’t worth the coin, was it."
The taller Nevelrot’s composure cracked at the edges. "Pop the pills," he snapped at his cousin. "Now."
Both of them crushed small, glowing capsules between their teeth, and power flooded through them in visible waves, veins lighting faint violet under their skin, Legendary-rank auras swelling denser and meaner.
"Ooh." Aidan tilted his head, genuinely curious. "Fancy. What’s in those, family discount?"
Neither answered. They came at him together instead, coordinated in the way only people raised alongside each other could manage, thorned vines erupting from the taller one’s palms while the shorter unleashed a spray of crystallized venom needles that hung glittering in the dim forest light.
Aidan wove through the vines on a thread of wind, let the needles shatter harmlessly against a shell of Frost that formed and reformed faster than they could adjust their aim, and answered with the scythe itself, a wide, patient arc that clipped one set of vines clean through and sent the taller Nevelrot stumbling.
"You know," Aidan said, conversational, parrying a venom-slick strike with the flat of his blade, "for a family this obsessed with honor, you cheat an awful lot."
"Shut UP," the shorter one snarled, and drove a fistful of thorns at Aidan’s throat.
Shadowfrost answered that one. The strike connected with a shell of dark, creeping cold instead of flesh, and the thorns froze mid-growth, brittle and useless, before Aidan’s counter sent their owner sprawling into the underbrush, gasping and numb from the shoulder down.
Only the taller cousin remained standing, breathing hard, pills burned through, every visible advantage spent for nothing.
"This isn’t over," he spat, backing away, eyes darting toward his fallen cousin.
"It kind of is," Aidan said. "But go ahead, if you’ve got more coming."
He did.
Both cousins twisted matching rings on their fingers at the same instant, violet stones flaring bright, and the forest around them shuddered under a pressure that had no business belonging to anything Legendary-rank.
[Warning: Unregistered power signature detected.]
A dome of distorted, violet-black light snapped shut around all three of them, sealing the clearing away from the rest of the tournament, muffling and blinding anything outside from seeing what happened within.
"Grandfather’s parting gift," the taller Nevelrot said, something feverish and desperate in his eyes now. "A domain that hides everything inside it. No one will ever know what we used out here." He raised both hands, violet light gathering into a spear of raw, compressed force. "Or what happened to you."
The attack came fast, and it came with real weight behind it, a genuine sliver of Divine-rank violence crammed into a single desperate strike.
Aidan’s eyes went cold.
He didn’t dodge. He didn’t need to.
A single scale tore free from his summoning space before the thought had finished forming, small and blue and burning without heat, and it met the spear of violet light head-on and simply ended it, axiom overwriting intent, the attack unraveling into harmless motes an inch from Aidan’s chest.
The two cousins stared at the drifting light, uncomprehending, and Aidan’s voice came out very quiet.
"You wanted somewhere private to cheat in." He rolled his shoulders. "That’s funny. So did I."
Lapisblaze Domain unfolded around all three of them, blue fire and living water folding seamlessly over the Nevelrot’s own hiding dome, swallowing it whole from the outside in without disturbing so much as the light leaking through. Their concealment, built to keep the world from seeing their crime, became a sealed box with no door and no witnesses at all, and both cousins felt it close around them like a held breath finally releasing.
"No," the taller one whispered, spinning in place, finding wall after wall of the same seamless, patient blue fire everywhere he turned. "No, no, this isn’t, you can’t, we’re a Divine-rank family, you can’t just..."
"Yeah, yeah. I’ll make enemies out of some people. The consequences are a funny thing," Aidan said, walking toward them, unhurried. "Right?"
Real terror finally arrived on both their faces, the particular horror of realizing the safety they’d trusted their whole lives had just been turned into a cage built specifically to hold them.
"I could be a bigger man and let you live," Aidan smiled indifferently. "But you came to kill me just because what? He got talked back?"
Shaking his head, Aidan suppressed his anger rising through this as he had seen this too many times in his billion years of lifetimes.
Then he yawned, settling the boredom in while the two cousins begged for their lives.
It was over quickly after that.
The Lapisblaze Domain folded shut and vanished, and the Great Zil Forest stood exactly as it had a minute before, quiet and dim and patient, nothing left behind to suggest anything had happened there at all.
Aidan rolled his neck, checked the scythe on his back, and glanced down at the three unconscious hired blades still scattered around the clearing.
"You three can keep breathing," he said to nobody in particular, already turning back toward the mountain. "Free lesson. Pick better employers."
He broke back into a run, wind carrying him low and fast through the ancient trees, exerting all of his arsenal of powers to speed up.